The Red Business: PTSD and The Poet

    The representation of “real war” is more naturally expected in epics or novels than in a lyric poem or even a sequence of poems. But Walt Whitman is a rare hybrid, a lyric-narrative poet, and is necessarily aware that a war poem must visibly exhibit its primal archetype in realistic battle. His war poems can be read as a series urgently entering the war through different portals, each attempting to fill a different gap in the imagined panorama, each therefore reflecting the assumed partial inadequacy of the others, and the need for more. To read Drum-Taps, his collection of 1865, is to recognize how quickly Whitman realized the banality of his early jingoistic battle-cries and flag-wavings, not to speak of the suppression, in those early war poems, of what he called, with deadly accuracy, “the red business.” In 1861, when the Civil War began, Whitman was a man in his forties, a non-combatant who had never himself even been wounded. His most natural lyric genre was a poem spoken in the first person. Could he, should he, ethically assume the voice of an active soldier? Nor was he sure of the stance that he should take toward weapons and their wielders. Was he obliged to portray actual killing? He found comparably troubling questions everywhere in the composition of his war poetry.

     

    In addition to such moral questions, formal questions came thronging, arising inevitably in the perplexities of representing battle. At what point should the poem enter the battle, and how much had the poem to accomplish before it could find an ending? What kind of battle should it present, in what large or small setting? Should it be seen in close-up or from a distance? Who will populate the battle, with what weapons, and in what choreography? How specific must the poem be: should the armies be named, should the cause of the war be articulated? What decorum should a war poem observe: should dead bodies be exposed to view? In a personal lyric such perplexities are more easily solved by ear, eye, and instinct, but when the topic arises from a contemporary war, known in its historical circumstances (from newspapers and military bulletins), how shall the poet enter his nation’s current history? And how are his claims to be authenticated? Such questions would arise interiorly in anyone writing a group of war poems. 

     

    Whitman made the most active claim to the authenticity of his reportage in the first poem of Leaves of Grass: “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.” Those words bring to a close an anecdote in which the poet learns of the actions of a heroic sea-captain: how he risked following a sinking ship through three stormy days, and how, when the storm abated, the brave captain rescued the traumatized passengers from what would have been their sure death: 

    How he saved the drifting company at last,

    How the lank loose-gown’d women look’d when boated from the side of their prepared graves,

    How the silent old-faced infants and the lifted sick, and the sharp-lipp’d unshaved men;

    — but at that very moment, within the very same sentence, the narrated story of the captain’s acts begins to move, with almost biological caution, step by step, into first-person speech. The poet gradually feels himself mutating into one of the rescued passengers:

    All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine,

    I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there. 

    His new identity, which at first appears (quite peculiarly) as a present-tense testing of sense-experience — of ingestion, of swallowing, of tasting — comes to life as a complete present-tense being (“I am the man”). The poet then recapitulates the process in the past tense: the poet insists that he is the same man as he was before the assumption of his added identity — that of one saved from death: “I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.” The three “I’s”, present and past, fuse into a new immaterial oneness.

     

    Are you the man? Did you suffer? Were you there? How can the reader be persuaded of this extraordinary declaration? And if this is the poet’s suffering during a purely “natural” catastrophe — a storm — can he expect the reader to believe him when he takes on the hideous suffering — caused by arbitrary human evil — of “the hounded slave”?

    I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,

    Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,

    I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my skin,

    I fall on the weeds and stones.

    Whitman, often pondering the empathetic possibility of union, implicitly authenticated his claim by the accuracy of his vocabulary — his imagination alone was responsible for his convincing portrayal of the population awaiting rescue: the women of the shipwreck, their “lank” “loose-gown’d” selves, and the sad infants, surprisingly “silent” and “old-faced,” the sick needing to be “lifted,” the “unshaved” men with their three-days’ beards. We can even see what the drifting doomed are thinking as they fear “their prepared graves.” 

     

    In a postwar poem, “Sparkles from a Wheel,” Whitman clarifies this imagined participatory process, naming it “effusion.” As the poet-speaker casually notices a knife-grinder in the street, his impersonal first glance narrows to a directed focus. The focusing awakens in the eager eye an arterial imagination, recreating the material presence of the poet’s physical body as an invisible immaterial one:

    Myself effusing and fluid, a phantom curiously floating, now here absorb’d and arrested.

    Absorbing, he is absorbed; arrested by the scene, he is arrested into it. Only after his casual physical eyesight fixes on the individual detail of the organ-grinder does his spirit effuse itself (Latin: “pour itself out into a receptacle”). In “I am the hounded slave,” the poet’s self-doubling flushes nouns and verbs alike into physicality: hounded, wince, despair, crack, clutch, gore, ooze, fall. The poet’s language also plays with the directional possibilities (right to left, left to right) of his fused identities: not only does the physical body arise to become the floating phantom, but the phantom’s agonies (its immaterial woundings) can reverse into material furnishings (the garments he wears): 

    Agonies are one of my changes of garments;

    I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person,

    My hurts turn livid upon me as I lean on a cane and observe. 

    In simultaneous actions, the wounded body bleeds as the phantom bleeds, immaterially, invisibly, while the immaterial body, livid with hidden hurts, issues from the apparently unharmed observer leaning on his cane. Standing in the street, the supposed “observer” absents himself into a “fluid” new state of feeling. Whitman’s most eloquent and indubitable testimony to the mysterious process by which self-effusion generates an immaterial identity appears in a sublime moment of the prose Preface to Leaves of Grass. There effusion is described in almost biblical cadences, because even to the poet himself the invisible (but entirely real) psychological “effusing” seems an almost miraculous phenomenon: 

    From the eyesight proceeds another eyesight and from the hearing proceeds another hearing and from the voice proceeds another voice eternally curious of the harmony of things with man. 

    Owing to his interest in others, and because he could “effuse” himself into almost anyone, in “The Artilleryman’s Vision” Whitman invents, so far as I know, the first American poem of PTSD. Gradually, in his involuntary effusion of linguistic sympathy into the mind of the Artilleryman, Whitman diagnoses the soldier’s affliction as a form of mental illness with a tragic prognosis: the soldier cannot (in the world of the poem) awaken from his postwar “vision” and rejoin his sleeping family. The poem is not the history of a single flashback (defined as “a reawakened memory”). On the contrary, through its bizarre structures and disorganized suites of perceptions, it becomes a surreal portrait of the grim alterations of a disturbed mind.

     

    It also incarnates Wordsworth’s aphoristic but less familiar definition of poetry in his note to “The Thorn” (in the 1800 addition of Lyrical Ballads): “Poetry is passion; it is the history or science of feelings.” The poem’s irregular narrative “plot” furnishes the history of the Artillery Man’s heightened senses and hypervigilant feelings, while the incoherent orientations of his “vision” bring to light Whitman’s science of the feelings aroused by the distress of reliving — not merely remembering — the trauma of witnessing or participating in death-threatening events. I am not the first to see the poem as a description of PTSD, but critics, in their abbreviated mention of the plot, tend to treat the “vision” as a flashback to an actual memory of a single event, a literal transcription of real sights seen by day. But the Artilleryman calls the “sight” that shocks him awake not a memory or a nightmare, but a “vision” — a sacred word, denoting a transcendent and involuntary revelation.

     

    Whitman must bring his readers to recognize the Artilleryman’s “vision” not as a realistic transcript of the seen but rather as a record of the motions of a suffering mind — as a form of mental illness. How do we come to judge the Artilleryman’s “vision” as a form of mental disease inducing distortion and distraction? The poem’s disorder matches, I believe, one variety of the psychological disorders now medically defined (not least in the DSM) under the term “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” as a response to having experienced or witnessed actual or threatened death. Unafraid of diagnosing the Artilleryman’s symptoms as indicators of a mental illness, Whitman establishes a tragic prognosis by violating the presumptive “happy ending” of such a poem. Normally an opening frame is matched by a closing frame, and since the soldier was asleep before being awakened by his “vision” we expect him to make a successful return from the vision-journey to his domestic bedroom. This he does not do. By amputating the expected exit-frame, Whitman traps his soldier in permanent trauma. 

     

    There are, I would say, three plots to “The Artilleryman’s Vision.” The first is the external, asymmetrical, and tragic plot of the frame-lacking-its-end-frame, which consigns the Artilleryman to everlasting torment. From his night-watches in hospital wards, Whitman would have known that post-traumatic stress could give rise to a recurrent disorder, warranting a hopeless closure of his poem. The second plot, the one of external narrative, tracks the battle’s sights and sounds as the Artilleryman’s mind renders them, while silently, by various manipulations of language, it unveils the effects of trauma on his perceptions, exhibiting the full terror and zest of war before the “vision” arrives at its increasingly chaotic and dangerous close. And the third plot — initially invisible and most inventive — is that of the gradual dehumanization of the Artilleryman by the hellish elements of the “vision” pressing upon him. 

     

    In World War I, the link between unendurable battles and the nervous collapse of some soldiers seemed self-evident, requiring for healing only a period of sustained rest, after which the soldier was to be sent back to the front. (Success in “healing” was erratic.) Physicians attempting, at Craiglockart Hospital, to treat Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and other sufferers laid a groundwork for the scientific study of the disease. More recently, the internal and therefore invisible psychic injuries common in PTSD, such as “derealization” (in which the external world appears unreal) and “dissociation” (in which the sufferer watches himself from a numbed distance), have been added to the more evident behavioral symptoms (agitation, tremor, insomnia, self-isolation, hostility, and sudden flashbacks). “The Artilleryman’s Vision” is Whitman’s early — and astonishingly accurate — example of the variety of PTSD that, as an internal mental disease, is harbored invisibly by a physically uninjured veteran.

     

    We notice immediately a disjunctive feature of “The Artilleryman’s Vision”: a hidden third-person “external” narrator gives the poem its title, thereby introducing his human subject not by a personal name but by a military title establishing the soldier’s battle-function: he is the Artilleryman. (We soon discover that all the active soldiers in the poem are identified solely by their military functions.) The title-announcer does not call the poem “I, the Artilleryman”; rather, he is himself a military officer categorizing his men by their assigned mission. After the title, the Artilleryman immediately “takes over” the poem in his deceptively serene first-person opening lines, which serve to frame the central “vision” of battle. As the narrative proper arrives, the ex-soldier (at home) suddenly wakes explosively into a “vacant” midnight which is involuntarily and immediately “filled” by battle-scenes (“I see”) and sounds (“I hear”). The poem then tracks the soldier’s increasingly violent responses to his battle-vision. At first the Artilleryman strives to retain a frail residual sanity, recognizing his vision as a “fantasy unreal”; in a second phase (the battle) he strives to organize his perceptions by several means, for instance by connecting weapons and their wielders, but is defeated by the battle’s overwhelming number of details pressing to be classified; in the third, noise and chaos mount as he undergoes a form of exhilarating madness, bearing out Whitman’s most penetrating insight — that it is “the old mad joy” of killing that floods the heart of the now dehumanized soldier. 

     

    Whitman is of course not the first lyric poet brave enough to give a poetic journey an unhappy ending. George Herbert dared, in “The Pilgrimage,” to thwart the devoted traveler’s arrival at his sacred destination. When the pilgrim finds, as he ends his journey, not the promised “gladsome hill” but only “a lake of brackish waters,” he cries out,

    Alas my King;

    Can both the way and end be tears? 

    It is a beautiful and resentful line, and as the deceived pilgrim journeys on, he observes that any rest, even that of death, would be preferable to this dangerous and unjust form of life:

    After so foul a journey death is fair,

    And but a chair.

    Although Herbert’s pilgrim is allowed at least that closing complaint, Whitman’s Artilleryman at the end disappears completely unable to depart from the horrors by which he is still surrounded. Robbed of his personal functions, he is fixed forever in his military one. 

    Whitman was troubled as he sought for a truthful conclusion to “The Artilleryman’s Vision.” We know this because he left a draft of the poem from 1862 called “A Battle.” There the Artilleryman addresses an anonymous comrade, narrating the events that he sees. In the immediate aftermath of mass-killing, however, he cannot continue his “objective” description of the battle, whereupon his recital falls apart in his hands. Mid-line, his second-person narration leaps into first-person testimony, sliding from fact into personal outcry: 

    The chief gunner ranges and sights his piece, and selects a fuse of the right time, 

    After a shot see how he leans aside and looks eagerly off, to see the effect! 

    Then after the battle, what a scene! O my sick soul, how the dead lie.

    The first-person draft-lament accelerates into an uncontrolled tautology of melodrama:

     O the hideous hell, the damned hell of war

    Were the preachers preaching of hell? 

    O there is no hell more damned than this hell of war.

    O what is here? O my beautiful young men! O the beautiful hair,   clotted! The faces! 

    But almost immediately Whitman rejected the draft: apparently he could not feel at home in his own sedulously inserted but emotionally arid intrusions (“see how he leans aside and looks eagerly off!”), nor could he accept the unravelling of his lament into incoherent repetition. In 1865, when the abandoned draft was revised into first-person enunciation, the poet found a chillingly fitting form of closure, as we shall see.

     

    Whitman had been asking himself whether he, as a non-combatant, has a right to speak in a soldier’s voice. In the draft he had hoped that addressing a “you” would insert some second-person drama into the poem while wondering why he was unable to animate a third-person narrative. As the finished poem reveals, he solved the problem of voice by capitulating altogether to a first-person voice emanating from an active soldier. In this capitulation he is obeying the injunctions of poetic law in preference to personal fact. Speaking always, now, as the Artilleryman, Whitman will “become” a combatant, and his feelings (as well as his observations) will, as Wordsworth prescribed, govern his language.

     

    Manifestations of feelings throughout the battle-scenes in the finished poem are multiple. The soldier uses gerunds (nouns made from verbs, and therefore more stable than verbs) in performing his inventory of weapons: he hears not bombs buzzing or muskets rattling, but rather abstractions: “the hum and buzz of the great shells… the rattle of musketry.” Such a conversion establishes the passage of time and gives distinct attention to each weapon. But finally the Artilleryman gives up on his inventory, despairing of precision and falling into vaguely generalized groups (“the sounds of the different missiles”) such as haunt his “vision.” Forsaking words, he valiantly attempts phonetic mimicry (“the short s-s-t! s-s-t! of the rifled ball”), falling back on such aural transcription once more in the penultimate line. Hoping to find a vein by which he may be able to “effuse” and empower himself, the Artilleryman internally undergoes the impact of his vision, unprepared for its outcome. At first a sliver of sanity remains, as the soldier characterizes his vision as a “fantasy unreal” and can adopt an “objective” view: “the skirmishers begin,” “tumultuous now the battle rages.” But such distanced perception disappears as the Artilleryman re-enters the battle, flaunting his imaginative power with hyperbole: “all the scenes at the batteries” return again. 

     

    But in what manner do all the scenes arise? The Artilleryman’s view must now be a panoramic one (a form of divine omniscience) in sound as well as sight: the orchestral noise-level rises ominously. Whitman must conjure up — and represent — how the “vision” of a PTSD sufferer differs from the “same” events as seen in ordinary life or in transcriptive memory. He continues to imagine and to recreate the world as it lies inside the oppressed Artilleryman’s brain — distorted, arbitrarily condensed, irrationally contracted or expanded in the fantasy of the “vision.” To the startled Artilleryman, his “fantasy unreal” has become altogether real. The “vision” dictates even his cognition, what the soldier sees and where he directs his glance. 

     

    We perceive, as the soldier sketches his scenes, the flagrant reductiveness of war. The soldiers are nothing but their functions: stripped of their personal names and their domestic roles, they become faceless individuals, unranked, without identifying uniforms, socially naked until they are given their guns and uniforms and their assignments or rank — “the chief-gunner”, “the colonel.” When the Artillery man sees a group of nameless “men” not yet engaged in battle, proudly exhibiting their guns, he offers no details of their position, rank, or duties; they participate in the facelessness of “the ranks.” The new recruits remain nameless until they acquire, along with their uniforms and their guns, a military identity, an identifiable place in the army’s implacable hierarchy. Thus does the Artilleryman’s “vision” become “unreal,” deleting from its soldiers all identifications but the external ones that they acquire when they join the army, becoming replaceable cogs in the military machine. If one artilleryman falls, another can be called to take his place. 

     

    I must mention, because it clarifies the unexpected closure of the revised “Artilleryman’s Vision,” another draft (immediately following the draft of “Battle”), which will evolve into “A March in the Woods Hard-Prest and the Road Unknown.” In it, Whitman finds a plausible way to insert a first-person soliloquy into a third-person poem: one soldier, detaching himself from troops briefly resting from their “hard-prest” march fleeing their defeat, enters a field-hospital full of wounded and dying soldiers. Sharp-eyed, the soldier details all that he observes, arriving finally at the most desperate sight, a death-spasm. A reader may be baffled by the very strange end to the soldier’s soliloquy: after he turns back to rejoin the ranks, the last sight that he records from his time in the field-hospital has nothing expressly to do with the wounded and dying. Rather, he notes a purely eye-catching aesthetic detail, “the glisten of the little steel instruments catching the flash of the torches.” In the finished poem “flash” was removed and the line was revised to emphasize by alliteration the reciprocity of light from scale to scale, from “glisten” to “glint.” The alliteration further magnetizes the two halves of the moving light-gestalt, creating in effect a fascinating “reverberation” of light in chiaroscuro across differences in scale, from great flashing torches to little steel instruments. I mention this involuntary distraction from pain — enabled by a diversion of the eye to an impersonal aesthetic notation — because such a diversion becomes indispensable to the unexpected conclusion of “The Artilleryman’s Vision.” 

     

    An old, reminiscing “artillerist” had turned up in the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855, but at that time Whitman had never seen war. By 1862, he evidently understood, from his work in the Washington hospitals, the intense suffering of men who appear uninjured but who in fact bear invisible mental torments generated by what they and others had witnessed and done on the field. In Whitman’s images of PTSD, the soldiers are not recovering “a” memory; rather, they are exposed to a kind of living film-mosaic of horrors accreted during their months or years of service. Their internal “film” has neither logic nor rational sequence, as Whitman is at pains to show in his “matching” of scenes to language.

     

    When Whitman converts “The Artilleryman’s Vision” into an autobiographical account, he makes sure, by its introductory peaceful domestic frame, that it is not a war poem but emphatically a postwar poem. It was first published under the title “The Veteran’s Vision,” but in 1871 the poet, realizing that it would be better understood as a poem about the psychic trauma of lethal battle, made his protagonist not merely a “veteran” but rather a soldier tasked to operate a large front-line cannon, and therefore inevitably responsible for many enemy deaths. Though the Artilleryman’s initial battle details may sound “natural,” the poet’s language, by separating the sounds from each other and distributing them among distinct weapons, ensures the ongoing passage of time during his compelled and exhausting inventory. And by framing the Artilleryman’s experience of battle not as a remembered past moment of war but as the “now” of private midnight after-effects, Whitman has decided on a tragic prognosis for his wounded soldier. 

     

    The main verb of the Artilleryman’s opening frame-narrative is in the present tense (“I wake”), and the apparently uninjured soldier alarmingly becomes a combatant again, filling the “vacant midnight” with his threatening “vision” as it unrolls through its “scenes” and “sounds”, interspersed with early “objective” glimpses of the battle itself: “the skirmishers begin, they crawl cautiously ahead.” These brief remarks reflect the soldier’s attempt at the “objectivity” of a third-person observer. Soon enough, however, the aspiration to dispassionate reportage is crushed by the relentless vision that “presses upon” him, and he finds himself in the midst of a literally mimetic battle, where sounds substitute for words, and the soldier — still sane — comments parenthetically from the sidelines: “tumultuous now the contest rages.” The first-person voice will not, however, submit itself further to the impartial voice of detached observation. As the Artilleryman re-enters the battle, he flaunts hyperbole as his banner of reprise: “all” the scenes at the batteries become present to him “again.” “Again,” is the familiar word normally introducing an imaginative reprise, except that here the alerted Artilleryman means the word literally. It is as though a curtain rises on an immense and overwhelming panorama of the entirety of his wartime experience and the vision must choose at each scene the point to which he must direct his glance.

     

    As Whitman begins to imagine and recreate the world as it exists inside the oppressed Artilleryman’s brain, experienced reality becomes distorted, arbitrarily condensed, irrationally contracted or expanded in the madness of “vision.” To the startled Artilleryman, his private and obsessive “fantasy unreal” becomes, as it overcomes his resistance, an experience entirely real and relived. The chaos and increasing uncontrollability of the scenes as the battle progresses warn us that we are following, now, not reality but the deformities of thinking that haunt the veteran of the war. Normally, a narrator would create a reasonable chronology of the battle, but Whitman’s Artilleryman produces scenes arbitrarily and at random: here a close-up, there a distance-view; here a sound, there an action; here a limited capacity, there a panoramic display. These scenes are not produced by the soldier but rather are “pressed” upon him like an incubus, as he lies passive under its rising undermining of rationality. 

     

    The poem’s ever-unstated underplot is, as I say, that of the dehumanization of soldiers. The process, begun when the soldier was dislocated from his family and civilian life and reduced from being a named person to being a named function, can end only when the recruit returns home — but the Artilleryman can never return to “a normal life.” The dense battle in his “vision,” is similarly reduced, since it is “populated” by only two groups: soldiers and weapons. The weapons-as-independent-agents, “shrieking” and “buzzing,” dominate the Artilleryman’s initial battle-scenes, and the killing power of those weapons excites their wielders. To the dehumanized “chief-gunner,” his success in killing is a matter of skill, part of an athletic contest and not part of the shedding of blood. At various points in the vision, soldiers become caught up in their own success, and are “cheering” as though war were a sport, giving a “shout of applause” as if the battlefield were a theater. Slowly their dehumanization becomes undeniable. As fantasy becomes reality, the soldiers numb themselves against the realization of what they are actually doing. 

     

    War has so dehumanized the Artilleryman, so effaced human distinctions, that he enumerates fallen comrades only as “gaps cut by the enemy’s volleys.” The “gaps” (boasts the Artilleryman) are visually “quickly fill’d up, no delay.” At first the Artilleryman was relatively remote from the center of the battle, dependent on the senses that can operate at a distance, on sight and hearing, but as the battle closes in on him, a nearer sense is activated as his nostrils must admit “the suffocating smoke.” After the respite of a deceptive “lull,” the Artilleryman — earlier the active listener to what he was hearing but now an assaulted victim — quails before “the chaos louder than ever.” The density of the population on the field increases: close by, he hears “eager calls and orders of officers,” who are, we suppose, as “eager” as the chief-gunner to see the effect of their weapons. And all of these scenes have a soundtrack: “And ever the sound of the cannon far or near.” Enemy cannon like his own now approach the Artilleryman; he cannot escape their menace. 

     

    At this desperate point Whitman’s genius comes most fully into play: the last word we expect to hear from the Artilleryman is “joy.” Yet here it is, as Whitman penetrates to the ultimate heart of war: it is a primitive tribal savagery, permitted nowhere else in “civilized” life. Not only is it a “joy,” but it is also a madness — an “old” madness recognized from some previous undefined violence perpetrated by the Artilleryman himself on some victim. Whitman’s boldest insight is the frighteningly intimate response of “joy” to violence. In the depths of his soul the Artilleryman feels “a devilish exultation and all the old mad joy.” The Artilleryman still has a conscience, he still knows his joy to be “devilish,” but in the grip of his vision he is immune to shame and guilt. From the indifference of the soldier to the bodies that fill the gap in the line, from the dehumanization of the soldier until he is nothing but a weapon of war, feeling wild joy as his cannon leaps into action, Whitman depicts the Artilleryman’s moral dissolution as he ignores his own companions, wounded unto death, as they flee the front. Indeed, self-numbed against the truth, he boasts of his own insensibility: “The falling, dying, I heed not, the wounded dripping and red I heed not, some to the rear are hobbling.”

     

    “And ever the sound of the cannon…And ever the hastening infantry shifting positions.” “Ever” is the summary word of the vision; the Artilleryman is powerless to expel his incubus. How is it, then, that the Artilleryman turns his eyes skyward at the end? He is still in his “vision,” but he is deflecting guilt and shame by two methods: he sophistically displays his “patriotism” by quoting from Francis Scott Key’s poem “The Star-Spangled Banner” (later set to the music of an “English tavern-song” on its way to becoming our national anthem), and he resorts to an aesthetic language to support his evasion, resembling the soldier in “A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest” who could no longer bear to focus on comrades dying and focused instead on “glints” picked up by small steel instruments from the “glisten” of the great torches. Since the artist’s eye seeks out from childhood what is beautiful, there is always the temptation (especially in youth) to obscure the unacceptable and to mask it by some version of the beautiful. The most courageous artists, like Whitman in “The Artilleryman’s Vision,” hope to refuse the temptation to aestheticize, and therein to falsify, the truth.

    The Artilleryman’s vision never releases him: Whitman refuses to return him to the slumbering wife and the breathing infant of the opening frame. In the last moment of his vision, he is still trapped in the hell of war; there is no homecoming from derangement. The soldier attempts to sanitize his vision by abstracting it, in its last words, into a purely visual epiphenomenon: “And at night the vari-colored rockets.” Yet he does not succeed, by these self-exculpations, in escaping his vision; it is still in power, still “pressing upon” its victim, enabling the Artilleryman to excuse his violent joy in war by concluding on an “innocent” and unrepentant note, pleased by the distance from himself in Key’s poetic bombs and colored rockets in the sky. It is a self-defensive conclusion that should shock every reader, the Artilleryman’s  flight, by means of an appeal to isolated beauty, from the deaths inflicted on others by his cannon. 

     

    To confine a battle to a short lyric is to court trouble. It is natural in a war poem to cite a casus belli, but in the published poem Whitman does not. The implications are evident. What are the two sides fighting about? Who knows, who cares; war is a constant in every culture; men, weapons, deaths. What permits war? The dehumanization of the soldiers on both sides. And what motivates war, generation after generation? Exhilaration: men find it exhilarating, a unique, irresponsible thrill, and can forget, in its spell, the humanity not only of their opponents but of their fellow-soldiers, even of themselves.

     

    Only after rereading “The Artilleryman’s Vision” do we recognize its analytic ambition: to diagnose, silently, by the apparently incoherent reportage of the postwar mentality of a flailing soldier, a disordered mind helpless against the midnight assaults of its alternately frightful and (secretly) zestful vision. And it is only after seeing the poem as a case history that we recognize the implicit prognosis in its abrupt end. Within his own stricken account, the Artilleryman cannot diagnose his case nor admit its prognosis. Every conclusion drawn by the reader must be hinted at by Whitman’s pen — whether by a structural feature (the absence of a closing “frame”); a fall into mimetic sound to suggest the impossibility of intelligible renditions of battle; an unnerving descent into a suddenly religious vocabulary — “the depths of my soul” — when the Artilleryman is appalled by his own appetite for killing, his “devilish exultation and all the old mad joy.” And the more frenzied revelation — “I heed them not” — allows us to see him indeed as a damned soul, further damned by his affected distance as he contemplates not death nor dehumanization nor self-numbing but instead the pleasing liveliness of the skyward spectacle. And by the time he fuses, at the end, an illogical list of unregulated entities — “grime, heat, aide-de camps galloping by” — we perceive that his mind has broken down into a distorting chaos from which he will never recover, a recurrent mental illness not yet given a name.  

     

    Reason, Treason, and Palestine

    The Palestinian refugee camp Dheisheh is buckling beneath poverty and inherited hopelessness. The despair is palpable even in the pictures that my friend and co-worker Ali sends me from inside the camp. I have never been there — even before October 7 it was not simple or prudent for a Jewish woman to visit Palestinian refugee camps, but now passage has become impossible. Since I began working with Ali to restart the after-school program for children which he used to run in his camp, my view into Dheisheh has been dependent on Ali’s glitchy WiFi. Ali grew up in Dheisheh, which has no parks, no playgrounds, no art museums, no movie theaters. The streets are marked by potholes and littered with the detritus of a population which lives on memories. There is nothing beautiful there. A life without beauty binds the mind as ropes bind hands and feet. 

     

    “Return” is the echo that haunts places like Dheisheh. There, tomorrow is an unfriendly specter, and the embers of a past worth remembering require much effort to keep from flickering to ash. The camp is located south of Bethlehem, the ancient town between Hebron and Jerusalem on the west bank of the Jordan River. It was built in 1949 as a temporary shelter for Palestinian refugees from both those cities. They had fled their homes during the war that would become known to Palestinians as the Nakba and to Israelis as the War of Independence. That war ended in an armistice on July 22, 1949. For the past seventy-six years, the Palestinians of Dheisheh have remained stalled in its aftermath.

     

    Dheisheh was built to be provisional. The displaced Palestinians are bound together by the siren call of their former homes. Many of them carry keys to the buildings from which their grandparents or great-grandparents were evicted. Yet even if the people of Dheisheh could leave the camp and find somewhere else to live, starting a new life is considered a dereliction of duty, a treason toward their past. They are, in this sense (and more largely in their politics), complicit in their own misery — to leave Dheisheh, to eschew the refugee status in search of a fresh start, would be tantamount to conceding Israeli ownership of the homes from which their families were forced. They are bound to, and by, the past. To be Palestinian is in some essential way to live in longing for those lost homes. In this regard they are not unlike the Jews who for two thousand years prayed for a return to Zion. President Biden enjoys recounting the moment, just before the Yom Kippur war in 1973, when he and then-Israeli premier Golda Meir were standing shoulder to shoulder for a photo op. The two of them knew that Israel was about to be invaded by Egypt and Syria, and neither were confident the still-young, puny country could repel those forces. “Why do you look so worried, Senator Biden?” Meir whispered. “We Israelis have a secret weapon: we have nowhere else to go.” 

     

    It’s true. In all the centuries Jews wandered in the diaspora they were never permitted a sense of belonging or a sense of true safety. The vast majority of the Jewish tradition was written in exile. The entirety of it is tinctured with nationalist yearnings. Just as Palestinian identity been shaped by displacement, for most of the time that Jews have existed they have existed in exile. A marrow-deep sense of vulnerability is another trait that Jews and Palestinians have in common. Jews as good as kept their keys when the Romans forced us from Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE. In prayers three times a day for the subsequent millennia, we vowed that we would come back, that we would be restored to the territory that was taken from us and that is rightfully ours. If Israel fell today, there would be nowhere for the seven million Jews who now live there to flee, nowhere that such a population could find rights and safety. 

     

    And nowhere is precisely where Palestinians are now. Today, to be Palestinian is to be suspended in the same inhospitable dimension between the past and the present that the Jews know so well. For Palestinians, any aspiration towards permanence is impossible, legally and culturally, when permanence – by which I mean stability and self-determination – is what they most need. The Israelis will not allow it, and neither will the Palestinian ghosts, who are just as present as the living. Perhaps even more so, since they seem to determine the unfortunate behavior of the Palestinian leadership. Nothing can be permanent until a will to live triumphs over the weight of all our dead. Palestinians must renounce their right to their grandparents’s olive trees if their children are to have parks and playgrounds. The price of progress is compromise, which fools confuse with treason. 

     

    Ali was born in Dheisheh in 1991. His father and mother were born there, too. His father’s father was raised in Hebron, and his father’s mother in Zakariyah, or Zechariah, an Israeli moshav west of Jerusalem where, according to legend, the body of the prophet Zechariah was found in 415 CE and buried there in what became a Christian shrine. (Zechariah was supposed to have been inside the Palestinian state that the United Nations established in its partition plan in 1947, which the Arabs rejected. In 1950 its last Arab residents were expelled by Israel.) Ali’s mother’s family was from Bethlehem originally. In 1949, after the armistice was signed, three thousand and two hundred refugees came to Dheisheh. They lived in caves or in tin-sheeted shacks, where they stayed for one year before moving into tents. In all the intervening time every step towards more habitable dwellings was made grudgingly, because these camps were not supposed to last. There is a terrible irony in this, because they have lasted. They have become permanent sites of impermanence. There was supposed to be some ending after which life begins, some political release from transient misery. It never came, at least not yet. Meanwhile, in an expression of ritualized loyalty which does not remotely resemble hope, Palestinians demand a return to the homes that were destroyed in and after 1948. Time travel is not a policy.

     

    Ali’s grandparents were among those who lived in tents until 1956. In that year UNRWA, the United Nations Relief Work Agency which was founded in 1948 by the United Nations for the purpose of aiding Palestinian refugees, built housing units in Dheisheh, with one to two rooms for each family depending on the family’s size. Basic amenities such as running water, electricity, and telephone lines were provided in fits and starts over decades, siphoned from the Bethlehem municipality, which belonged to Jordan until Israel gained control of it in 1967. Until 1988 sewage flowed in open gutters. A working sewage system is among the few things that have gotten better in Dheisheh. With every instance of Palestinian terror, starting with the frenzy of suicide bombings which started in 2000, Israel tightens the security noose, restricting Palestinian movement, commerce, and the passage of goods. There are no sidewalks in the camp. Homes open out onto narrow alleys. The highway between Jerusalem and Hebron runs alongside Dheisheh and serves as its main street. Ali learned early that a culture which lives on memories is not designed for children. Children want to live, which is not the kind of activity that Dheisheh was built to sustain. 

     

    The place teaches them to die. In January of last year, a fourteen-year-old boy named Amr Khamour was shot by Israeli soldiers after throwing stones at a military jeep in Dheisheh. After his death, his parents found a goodbye message that he had written for them on his phone: “If I come to you a martyr, God willing, don’t cry. And forgive me for every mistake I made. Don’t be sad, father, I wished for martyrdom and I received it.” Amr was killed less than two weeks after his friend Adam Ayyad was shot dead by Israeli soldiers. Before his death, his mother had found a farewell note that he had written, torn it up, and begged him not to write another one. He disobeyed her. In the back pocket of his corpse she found a slip of paper: “I wanted to do many things, but we live in a place where achieving your dreams is impossible. Martyrdom is victory. It’s true that your life ends but at least it ends in happiness.” Before his death Amr told his friends he wanted to be buried next to Adam. 

     

    Other teenage boys from Dheisheh who draft farewell messages in anticipation of an early death quote Uday al-Tamim in their letters. Tamimi was a twenty-year-old Palestinian who wrote a suicide note while on the run after killing an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint at the entrance of the Shuafat refugee camp: “I know that I will be martyred sooner or later, and I know that I did not liberate Palestine through this operation, but I carried it out with a goal in mind; for the operation to mobilize hundreds of young men to carry arms after me.” Amr and Adam are both buried in the Martyr’s Cemetery on the outskirts of Dheisheh. Their friends have chosen plots for themselves in a nearby row of empty graves.

     

    Teaching children to value their own lives is antithetical to life in Dheisheh, but that is what Ali is trying to do. His method is an after-school program for children, which he created in 2018. When there is no hope, when there is no future for your children, the question “Do you believe in a two state solution?” means nothing more than “Do you wish to prettify your own debasement?” When a people’s horizons are as high and as wide as the border fence which restricts their movement beyond their small camp, when tomorrow is only a series of yesterdays, brutality is an appealing shield against crushing despair. Ali’s little institution was established to fight this temptation. If diplomacy has failed and terrorism has failed and protests have failed and cries for aid have not lifted the misery, the only heroes left are the ones who recognize their duty in the face of each child. I believe that Ali is a hero – that is why I have seized on his program like a life raft also for a Zionist Jew who is always on the verge, and sometimes past the verge, of despair about peace. He and I found one another in the small community of Jews and Palestinians which understands our two people’s fateful bond. I confess that I need Ali, and he needs me to know that I need him. 

     

    Ali is not interested in martyrdom, but nor is he a politician or a journalist or an activist. Politics is not his concern: people are. The children in Dheisheh are not statistics for Ali. They are people who deserve more than any adult has the power to give them. Ali is not trying to solve the Middle East crisis. He is trying to run an after-school program for two dozen Palestinian adolescents. If he succeeds — and it is not at all likely that he will — his success will not secure his people a future worth living for. But it may teach these children not to die. 

     

    Palestinians may be the only people who pass their refugee condition from one generation to the next. Ali was born in the same camp as his parents, but it is not his home. He told me this in exasperation, as if the word “refugee” was itself a whip at his back depriving him forever of the nourishment of belonging. How do eternal refugees raise their children? How do they school them, when the purpose of an education is to give a child the chance to excel? Excellence is neither possible nor culturally valued. The collective tyrannizes over the self. Yet accepting the conditions of life and trying to make the best of what little possibility there is – such stoicism is a sort of capitulation. It colors also the syllabi and the teaching methods in most of the schools that are available to Palestinian children in the refugee camps in the West Bank.

     

    “Each of us refugees are like tiny human-sized versions of the whole conflict,” Ali explained to me. He was alluding to the many different sorts of Palestinians in the region, and how each type interacts differently with their inheritance. Palestinian Israeli citizens who live within the 1949 borders — that is, in Israel — are accorded the most rights of any of the Palestinians in the region. It is difficult to place the rest on a continuum, since all Palestinians suffer from different varieties of discrimination. Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, for example, are in some sense Israeli citizens, since Israel annexed East Jerusalem after the 1967 war, but they do not enjoy the rights of Jewish Israelis, or Palestinian Israelis living outside East Jerusalem. They cannot, to name just one example of the illiberalism of their status, vote in national elections. Palestinians who live in the West Bank suffer from all kinds of degradations that their Palestinian-Israeli counterparts only ever experience if they cross the checkpoints to visit them. But the West Bank is divided, by Israeli-Palestinian agreement reached in previous rounds of the peace process, into areas A, B, and C, and each poses a different set of threats for Palestinians. Each of these areas is its own political and moral territory. Area C represents sixty percent of the West Bank and is governed entirely by Israel. In area A, the Palestinian Authority controls both civil and security concerns. In area B, the Palestinian Authority oversees only civil concerns. Areas A and B are non- continuous. Google will furnish you with maps which reveal exactly how inconvenient the configuration is. Inconvenience is a feature, not a bug, for Palestinian life in the West Bank. (The hell that is life in Gaza is its own saga of misery.) 

     

     

    Within areas A and B, those who live closer to Jerusalem and those who are inside cities such as Bethlehem are safer than the farmers and the shepherds in the Jordan Valley or in the hills south of Hebron. You may recall sporadic coverage in American media of the attacks on Palestinians in those areas at the hands of settlers whom Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has been arming to the teeth. These thugs roam from village to village brandishing M16s, butcher knives, and pistols, always intoning the same threat: “You have twenty-four hours to leave. If you don’t, we’ll be back to kill all of you.” Between October and January, vigilante Jewish settlers succeeded in forcing almost a thousand Palestinians out of fifteen villages that were wholly or partly emptied. 

     

    But inside Bethlehem there is comparative stability. The “refugee” status somehow makes their condition official. It rubber-stamps their generational paralysis. Ali wants to shake his students free of this historical complacence. One of his strategies is to teach them English. The necessity of this instruction is itself revealing: his students, all of whom are enrolled at UNWRA schools within the camp, have been studying English for years but none of them have learned it, just as Ali – whose English is fluent – did not learn the language in school. That is because Ali and his students are poor, and because they live inside the camp. All residents of the camp whose families cannot afford to send them to the expensive private schools outside Dheisheh — Palestinian society in the West Bank is stratified and the class differences begin right outside the camp — must attend the UNRWA schools through the ninth grade, after which they are bussed out to public schools in Bethlehem.

     

    In both private and UNRWA schools, English language study is mandatory beginning in first grade. But the difference between the two systems in teaching methods and curricula is astonishing. In private schools, which are largely Christian and run by churches, the teachers are native English speakers. Cultural proficiency is part of the curriculum, so students are simultaneously learning about ways of life that are different from their own while they learn the language. Not so in the UNRWA schools. There the Palestinian Authority imposes a specific curriculum which focuses primarily on grammar. Students sit in chairs at their desk reciting grammatical charts in repetitive hums. They could pass all the way through the school system without once reading more than a few English sentences. In class they hardly converse in English at all. This, unsurprisingly, seeds students with a hatred for the language. They loathe English class. This is among the minor malignancies of Palestinian life which Ali is endeavoring to excise. “One of my favorite things to do with the students was play them music,” Ali recalls. “Once, while playing them a song, I suddenly realized that I had not even heard a song in English until I was in twelfth grade. No one in my English classes even spoke English except the teacher. And even the teacher doesn’t really speak it, he just reads it! And we all just repeated it, we never even wrote the charts down. Who could learn like this? Who would like it?” He shook his head. 

     

    Ali was born with a rare and priceless resource: a love for the English language. “I just loved speaking it — I don’t know why. And it was this love that really freed me. I had a job working at a restaurant in Bethlehem and I looked forward to work because there was so much opportunity for me to practice my English with the tourists who came to the city. I remember realizing for the first time in the restaurant that speaking English with native English speakers allowed me to change the way I think. The thoughts inside my head, the tone of them, changed. I was able, for the first time, to enter a different world, a world that doesn’t feel the way the camp does, that isn’t cramped and hopeless. There is no hope inside the Arabic I was raised in. The Arabic language itself that Palestinians are taught carries this hopelessness, and this colors our thoughts and our hearts. We can’t escape it, it’s part of every thought we have.” Every bilingual person knows the feeling that Ali was describing, the strange alteration in thought patterns that has the power to even change a person’s sense of possibility.

     

    “We have YouTube, we have Instagram, Ali said, but because we don’t have English our world is so limited. When you get to communicate with people outside your bubble and you see that there is a world outside the one you know, that’s when it’s possible for a voice in your head to question all you’ve been told about how the world is, and how the future must be. Contradiction gives you the opportunity to start thinking for yourself.” He gave me a concrete example: at the restaurant Ali was able to talk with English speakers about the idea of a refugee. These conversations were the first time he understood that refugee status is not an unalterable fate, that refugee crises can be resolved. Absorption, integration, self-reliance, collective dignity: all this could be included in his imagination of his people’s prospects. “I had never heard before about what happened in India and Pakistan. I didn’t know that any refugee crises had ever been solved. The idea of solving it had seemed impossible to me before these conversations. I couldn’t imagine myself without that identity. Learning English let me think of myself as something other than a refugee.” 

     

    After learning English, Ali came to his own conclusions about the political extremism and heaviness that dominated his home. In our long sessions strategizing about how to raise money to get his program started again, he and I don’t talk about politics much. When we do, it quickly becomes clear that his resentment for the Palestinian Authority rivals his distaste for the Israeli government. But neither of those antipathies are included in his syllabi. (The same cannot be said of the curricula at other educational institutions, where ideology and prejudice are taught.) It would defeat his purpose if they were: his goal is to provide his students with the tools to think independently. “My goal is not to be another dictator demanding that my students think the way I do, about peace or about anything else. I want to provide them with the tools to change just like I did, and if they come through it differently than me it will be because they thought themselves to a different place. English lets me see different perspectives. In the refugee camp there is only one perspective: the Palestinian Authority’s. I never once had the experience of reading two different analyses of the same political event and then having to work out in my own head which is right and which is wrong. The word ‘dictator’ is considered a political term mostly, but that’s not how I mean it. Sisi is a dictator, and Assad, and Abbas. But the truth is that the dictatorial mindset starts in the home. My father was a dictator. This sounds harsh, but it’s true. After my own transformation I could see how he ran our family like a dictator. We couldn’t have our own thoughts. We weren’t even given the ability to disagree with him inside our own heads, let alone contradict him out loud. He didn’t just tell us that we couldn’t argue with him, he did worse than that: he made any argument impossible. I will not do this to anyone. I don’t want to dictate to my students. My hope is that with the tools I give them they will learn how to think. Not what to think, but how.”

     

    Ali went on to remark that the study of English is essential for the capacity for independent thought and that independent thought is essential for self-respect. That is another course on the curriculum in his program. It, too, is a rare commodity in the refugee camp. The vast majority of Palestinians in the West bank work in Israel. Seventeen thousand Palestinians worked in Israel on a daily basis before the war in Gaza, most of them on construction sites. “Construction is important and it pays good money.” Ali said, heavily. “But it makes me sad that I know there are lots of people who spent twelve years in school, four years getting a BA, two or three years getting an MA, and then five or six years getting a PhD, and the best they can hope for for themselves and their families is to work in construction. I still work in a restaurant, but working as a teacher in the program for the kids, that job is dignified. When I was doing that, I felt proud.” When the funding for his program ran out, his chance at more dignified labor disappeared with it.

     

    “Every week, I and the two other teachers — both of whom went to Bethlehem University, which is one of the most prestigious in the West Bank — we used to meet on the weekend and come up with lesson plans for the whole week. Usually, we run the program every weekday for four to six hours a day. Every session begins the same way: we give the children a meal. We prepare the food and the students serve it to one another. They love this, they are not used to this kind of thing because in school there is nothing like a free lunch program like you have. Some of the kids loved this so much that they would come to the program twenty minutes early to help us make the food. After meals we always do some physical activity. Then, for an hour or an hour and a half, we help them with their homework, or if they have to study for tests we help them study. Then the rest of the program differs from day to day. Sometimes we would listen to music in English and then practice singing the words. Sometimes we would paint and draw. In the public and UNRWA schools, they are no art and music classes. This is part of the reason that the kids don’t think about school as a place where they are being nourished and taken care of. School is about studying, of course, but for most students around the world school is also a place where young people are introduced to things that can inspire them, that they can be passionate about and look forward to every day.”

     

    He continued recounting the day at his program: “The last activity of the day is also always the same: a sharing circle. We stand in a circle and pass around a ball. Whoever is holding the ball is allowed to share. Initially we set aside a half hour for this activity, but everyone wanted a chance to talk for longer, so now it takes an hour and even an hour and a half. And it’s such a useful activity because they learn so many things: how to respect others when they are speaking, what it feels like to be given the respect of having careful listeners, how to express themselves, how to feel comfortable sharing their ideas with an audience. Students often start the program shy, but after a short time doing the sharing circle they open up and they learn how to communicate proudly and sweetly.”

     

    Ali set tuition at twenty shekels, which is just under six dollars. It was only a symbolic amount. He wanted the parents to feel that they were contributing, that it wasn’t free. “If you’re given something for free, it’s easy not to take it seriously,” he explained. In addition to the payment, Ali demanded that the parents all commit to enforcing regular attendance. He needed them to know that the group was building something significant together, that they were forming a community, and that the community needed to be accorded respect in order for the students to be enriched by it. No girl ever missed a single day. The boys were a little tougher – it took a bit of time for them to develop the discipline to come regularly and on time. Eventually, though, they learned that investing in the program was a way of investing in themselves. And then something remarkable happened: students would arrive a half hour early every day because they loved the program so much. “Here in the Middle East we are always late,” Ali laughed, “but these young kids arrived so early that sometimes I would find them lined up outside the door before I had even managed to get there from work.” 

     

    Ali has shared many stories about his students with me, often with pride, sometimes with a terrible sorrow. But there is one student, Muheb, a very sweet, kind boy, who has challenged Ali more than any other. He is the sort of remarkable young person who naturally inspires intimacy and confidence. “If he were from somewhere else, he would be capable of greatness one day,”Ali muttered. Early in the program, right after they had started the sessions, Ali asked the students to take turns presenting special talents. Muheb chose to sing a song — he has a beautiful voice. To everyone’s shock, Muheb began to intone an ISIS terror ballad. Ali asked where he had heard the song, and the young boy replied that his father liked to sing it in the house, and that he also played videos of ISIS terrorists butchering people with the same song blaring in the background. Ali told him never to sing it again. It was difficult to explain to Muheb why a song that his father liked was inappropriate for class.

     

    Sometime later, two Finnish nuns who were on a yearlong mission at a church in Bethlehem began to volunteer with the students three days a week. They were an enormous help to the small staff of overworked teachers. Two days after their arrival, Muheb told Ali that he needed to talk to him privately “about something crucial, something very, very important.” Ali agreed and the two of them went into an empty classroom. When they were alone, Muheb whispered: “You must choose between me and those two Finnish ladies. If they keep coming back, then I will leave the program.” Startled, Ali asked:“Did they harm you in any way?” Muheb shook his head. “No, but my father told me that Europeans are against Muslims and they hate Islam and those Christian ladies are the enemy of Islam.” His father had shown Muheb a video of Finnish police officers violently arresting a man whom Muheb’s father said was being attacked simply because he was a Muslim and because he was black. Muheb continued: “Those women are my enemies, I refuse to even be near them. They may try and kill me!” 

     

    Ali posed a question to Muheb: “Those two women, did they make you feel that they dislike you because you are a Muslim? Did they even ask if you were a Muslim? They don’t consider you as a representative of any people, they just see you as a human being and they want to help you. These women left their home to come here to Bethlehem and help us. They know there are Muslims here!” Muheb admitted that he had not witnessed them behave badly himself, but repeated that this is what his father had told him. Ali asked if Muheb would show him the clip that his father had found. Muheb took out his old smartphone and pulled up the video which had a title in English beneath it. Ali suggested that, as an exercise, Muheb write out the English title on Google Translate so he could see for himself what the words mean. Muheb did so, and then read aloud in Arabic that the police were forcefully arresting immigrants. “It says immigrants,” Ali pointed out, “not Muslims or black people.” And then Ali explained to Muheb what an immigrant is, and told him that whereas they are discriminated against in some places, these women were in no way implicated in that discrimination. 

     

    “What if for now you continue to come to the program,” Ali said, “but if those women — or anyone else! — makes you even slightly uncomfortable, you come tell me?” Muheb accepted Ali’s terms, and after about a week he went from being slightly suspicious of these women to being the first of the students to wrap his arms around them when they arrived each day. This was precisely the kind of change that Ali had hoped the program would elicit in his students. For the first time in his young life, Muteb had encountered something foreign, something potentially dangerous, and had come to the conclusion independently that it was not a threat to him. He had learned to love something alien, something different.

     

    One day sometime later, Muheb came to class very late. Ali was concerned — unlike the other boys in the program, Muheb had always been early or exactly on time. “Where were you?” Ali asked him. Muheb explained that the Palestinian Authority had called for a day of rage to protest against the decision of the Trump administration to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Ali asked why Muheb would put himself in danger by going to one of these clashes, and Muheb confessed that his father only ever told him that he was proud of him when he went to clashes or threw stones at the Israeli soldiers who regularly raid the camp. “Why does your father pressure you to do these dangerous things?” Ali asked. “Doesn’t he know you could be killed? Isn’t your life precious to him?” Muheb replied: “Yes, of course, but he wants something special for me, he wants me to be a martyr. Martyrs have the power to save seventy family members from hell and bring them to paradise.” Later Muheb stopped coming to the program. His father would not allow it any longer. As far as Ali knows, Muheb is still alive.

     

    Bethlehem was ground zero for covid in the West Bank. The city shut down in the middle of March, 2020. That was the beginning of the end of Ali’s program. It took the parents two months before they would agree to let the students come back, and then only under strict conditions. Mahmoud Abbas, president (for life, it seems) of the Palestinian Authority, had announced that Palestinian schools would continue running from home, using Zoom like the rest of the world. In this he evinced the cynicism for which his own people despise him. Abbas knew full well that the poverty of the Palestinian population rendered online-learning impossible for the vast majority of his citizens. The wealthy families in Ramallah and elsewhere would get by just fine. They had laptops and internet connections; and when the Israelis let the vaccine in, they had it, too. Ali recalls visiting the local hospital in the camp in the early days of the pandemic and seeing nurses without masks. His students’ families barely had WiFi, let alone a laptop for every child. And so the months dragged on and the young people in Dheisheh had no schooling, no interaction with other children, and nowhere to play ball or have picnics. Abbas maintained this policy for an entire year. Every student who did not have the requisite technology missed a grade’s worth of learning.

     

    When the parents finally allowed their children to return to his program, Ali and his partners developed safety protocols. They staggered attendance from day to day and instituted social distancing. Masks and hand sanitizers were difficult to acquire. For one terrifying stretch of time there was no running water in all of Bethlehem, let alone pocket-sized Purell. The teachers tried valiantly to secure the necessary materials, but funds were dwindling fast. At about the time the money ran out, the landowner with whom Ali had signed a five-year lease found a buyer who was willing to purchase the premises outright. He insisted that the program clear out a year early. Ali had spent hundreds of hours and much of his own money to transform the apartment into a beautiful learning space. The doors shut for the last time two years ago.

     

    When politicians abandon their people, the solution is not to reject politics but to reform politics. Community leaders are not politicians and after school-programs are not school systems and no amount of paper flowers can simulate the smell of fresh rosemary, which perfumes the parks in Israel just a few hundred feet away from the restaurant where Ali works. A program such as Ali’s is no substitute for political reform. It cannot be. Ali is a hero, but he cannot bring the revolution that Muheb needs. A young, promising child whose father prays that he will one day martyr himself needs a political force that can protect him and a political culture that cherishes different dreams and ideals. In making change there is no substitute for the power of a government, especially a decent and enlightened government.

     

    The Palestinian people have been abandoned by every political authority whose duty it has been to protect them. The boot of Israel’s occupation is on their necks, and their own leaders conspire to keep it there. The only ally more precious to Israeli extremists than Mahmoud Abbas is Yahya Sinwar. Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, gave the xenophobic radicals in Netanyahu’s government the bloody gift of hardening Israeli society. We will see how long this new hardening lasts, though the atrocities of October 7 will never be forgotten. That cursed day birthed a hideous world. As Ali said to me, Hamas targeted exactly the Israelis who could have given his people hope. (The vicissitudes of Israeli political life are watched closely by Palestinians.) In the kibbutzim and moshavim just outside Gaza, Hamas butchered a community of peace activists. Benjamin Netanyahu had been busy for more than a year attempting to crush the liberal character of Israel, which had been gaining strength every Saturday evening for the entirety of 2023, when Israelis had taken to the streets to agitate for liberalism – but on the night of October 7 the streets were silent. The largest and longest protests in the history of the state had been protests against the most right-wing and openly racist government since Israel’s founding, and Hamas put an end to them. What dazzling and disgusting symbolism! The thugs who govern both peoples can be counted on to collaborate in the extinguishing of every glimmer of hope.

     

    Politics is the realm in which this hopelessness is perpetuated, and politics must be the realm in which it is obliterated. Regimes of despair cannot be contended with, they must be deposed. I look often at the pictures that Ali shared with me of the children in his program. Muheb was twelve years old when he first started attending. If he is still alive, he is sixteen now. Soon it will be his responsibility to do more for his children than was done for him. Perhaps he or someone like him, or many promising young people, will realize that hopelessness is a malignancy that must be dispelled internally – indeed, that it is not a historical inevitability but a human choice, the consequences of particular actions by particular leaders and populations. 

     

    Among the shackles which bind children like Muheb are the shackles of loyalty. These shackles, which present themselves as eternal verities, are in fact politically fabricated and manipulated. In order to envision a future worth living for, Ali and Muheb and every other Palestinian refugee must free themselves from the fatalistic grip of the past. They must believe that they owe their people more than a life lived in pained service to a time gone forever. They have been taught that such emancipation is treasonous; but there can be honor in “betraying” one’s tribe, especially if one “betrays” the tribe in order to heal and protect it. Is the perpetuation of Palestinian misery by a Palestinian culture of dogmatism and implacability and hatred not also a betrayal of the Palestinian people?  

     

     In 1878, a Zionist and bohemian Jewish poet from Poland named Nafatali Herz Imber wrote a nine-stanza Hebrew poem called Tikvatenu, or “Our Hope”, which included these words: “as long as a heart beats within a Jewish breast, and Jewish eyes gaze towards Zion, our hope is not lost – a hope which is two thousand years old: to be a free people in our own land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.” Not long afterwards the words were adapted, by a Zionist pioneer in Palestine named Samuel Cohen, to a Moldavian folk melody (made famous by Smetana in The Moldau), and the resulting song, under the title Hatikvah or “The Hope,” became a Zionist hymn and then the national anthem of the State of Israel, which actualized the yearning that the lyrics expressed. In a truly novel experience for the Jews, hope and history rhymed.

     

    But there are some among the Jewish people who remain unsatisfied. They want still more. There are some who believe, as Benjamin Netanyahu recently insisted, that the land must be under Jewish sovereignty from the river to the sea (a doubly cursed locution — Zionists rightly shudder when pro-Palestinian activists chant the same slogan and it is no less ugly when one of our own makes this irredentist threat). Some Jewish chauvinists hector that any compromise on any element — or acre — of our national birthright is a betrayal of the hope that sustained us in all the centuries when we wandered homeless. But it was this very “betrayal” that brought the Jewish state into existence, when David Ben Gurion and the Labor movement nobly and rationally decided that safety and sovereignty and self-determination and political dignity in a world of nation-states were more important than the worship of soil and scriptural promises, and agreed to accept less than the ancient dreams and maps, and brought Jewish refugees home to a state. 

     

    Not all compromises deserve to be denounced as betrayals. Compromise, too, can be a moral and even a spiritual achievement. The Jews spent two millennia in exile longing for Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish land. The Palestinians have nurtured the same longing for sovereignty in the same land for the better part of the last century. Their identity is no less real and their claim is no less justified. Palestinian eyes gaze towards Zion with no less love or loyalty than our own. In the name of prudence as well as decency, the holy land must carry two flags in two countries for two peoples. This is our, and their, only hope. 

     

    Giving and Forgiving

    Look who thinks he’s nothing.

    All these blacks and whites make existence grey. The certainties, the rectitudes, the stridencies, are like a cloud cover interdicting the light, halting it in its natural course to us, and trapping the world in a dense foggy dread. It sometimes seems as if the more people make a claim to clarity, the more unclear things become. The unsure people begin to look perversely attractive, insofar as they represent minds not yet closed. But hold on. How can anyone not be sure about the evils that we face? Are they blind or are they stupid or are they bought? It is a fair question, except for its naivete about the actual processes of opinion formation, which leave us all not only in disagreement, which is one of the sweetest features of life with other people, but also in the tragi-comic position of building an absolute view out of a partial perspective. I do not mean to hold myself above the ferocity of our absolutist mood. I, too, know that I am right. For this reason, I have been trying to lower my own temperature as history is demanding only fevers. In this new era of atrocities, some of them close to home, I strain not to become the slave of my feelings. I find myself grateful to people who maintain their composure and even hide their thoughts. I believe that interstices must be created between the emergencies, so that a man’s soul does not shrivel. Not escapism; just some escapes. Something a little tender, a little alien, a little private, a little serene; stimulation without pain; a rupture in the ambient anxiety and a break into a less bruising variety of seriousness — a kind of spiritual furlough, in the knowledge that the crises and the controversies will still be there when we return with renovated selves. People cannot serve well who are spent. 

     

    When a new life of Diogenes the Cynic arrived in the mail a few weeks ago, I saw my opportunity. Here was a swift transit to another planet, a flight from breaking news to the unbreaking stuff, a promise of mental diversification and refreshment. It was also a reason for taking Diogenes Laertius off the shelf: Lives of the Eminent Philosophers is the most mentally diversifying book I know. It is a vast compendium of biographical anecdotes about seventy-three ancient Greek seekers of wisdom; Plato gets an entire chapter, Monimus gets half a page. (“Monimus was so grave that he disdained mere opinion and sought only the truth.” Go, Monimus!) The tales are delightful, vexing, colorful, and hilarious, and somehow the panoply of the doctrines pokes through them. Diogenes Laertius, who appears to have lived in the first half of the third century CE, included among his subjects Diogenes the Cynic, who was born in Sinope on the Black Sea at the end of the fifth century BCE and died in Corinth in the second decade of the fourth century BCE, though he is best known for the years he spent in Athens. I turned to those pages. 

     

    Exiled from Sinope for a financial crime, Diogenes the Cynic lived on the streets of Athens in a ceramic jar or tub. He begged for his sustenance. In his itinerant life he carried a staff and a knapsack and a lamp lit even in daylight to guide him in his famous search “for a man.” He kept a dog. (“Cynic” means “dog-like”, and Diogenes was flattered by the epithet, because many of his ethical values were derived from his admiring observations of the behavior of dogs.) He wore only a cloak, which he folded doubly in a way that became the fashion for his disciples. He was the first to call himself a cosmopolite, a citizen of the world. He was a defiant outsider, a devastatingly candid non-conformist, a great master of impudence. He especially enjoyed tangling with Plato. When someone pointed out that the Sinopeans had sentenced him to exile, Diogenes replied: “And I sentenced them to stay at home.” When pirates captured him and put him up for sale in Crete, he was asked to describe his greatest skill. “Ruling over men,” he said, and pointing to a buyer he added: “Sell me to him; he needs a master.” He declined to leave his jar when Alexander the Great came to Corinth, so the conqueror came to the jar and asked if there was anything he could do for its indigent inhabitant. “Yes,” Diogenes replied. “You could stand a little out of my sun.” 

     

    In his teachings — his contempt for material things, his radical austerity, his tolerance for hardship, his aspiration to a virtuous life lived in harmony with nature — Diogenes was the early ancestor of the Stoics, though he was innocent of the hypocrisy that tarred many of them. He was a pioneer in the notion of philosophy as a way of life, and he fanatically practiced his conception of it. I have always treasured this particular remark: “even if I do pretend to wisdom, that in itself is philosophy.” I take this to mean that the hunger for wisdom is itself wise and the thirst for philosophy is itself philosophical. Why would one aspire to these dispensations if one were not already touched by the spiritual refinement that they promise? Aiming high is already a way of reaching high. The spiritual climate in which one chooses to toil will determine the success or the failure of one’s exertions — but if one has chosen a spiritual climate that pressures one’s powers and situates one’s struggles at a significant elevation, then total failure is no longer a possibility. Spiritual fulfillment is infrequent, and not the only kind of spiritual success. The ambition can be its own reward. The real spiritual defeat is shallowness. 

     

    What struck me in my recent reading about Diogenes was his conception of charity. Diogenes Laertius records that “when some people were praising a man who had given him alms, Diogenes said, ‘Yet you don’t praise me, who deserved to receive them.” It sounds ungrateful and impertinent. But the mendicant philosopher was speaking precisely: he had a theoretical foundation for his apparent obnoxiousness. It was not Diogenes’ custom to make his points with arguments — when he wished to refute the suggestion that motion is an illusion, he got up and walked around — but in this instance he posited a kind of syllogism. “He declared that all things belong to the wise”, Diogenes Laertius relates, “and advanced this argument: all things belong to the gods; the gods are friends of the wise; the possessions of friends are held in common; and therefore all things belong to the wise.” Diogenes’ donors were merely returning to him what was already his. Never mind the flaws in all his premises, except to note the culture-bound character of what often purports to be logical reasoning. What strikes me about Diogenes’ posture is not only the stoutness of his self-respect, so that he did not experience extreme need as humiliation; but also his further claim that charity was not his good fortune but his just deserts.

     

    The pride of a poor man is exhilarating, because it is a proof that outer circumstances may be impotent against inner resources, that the material world is not invincible. I do not mean to be sentimental about poverty, of course. Neither do I mean to be sentimental about Diogenes’ poverty. For there is no universal compassion in his theory, no natural sympathy with all the other men and women who share his adversity. Quite the contrary: he is an outcast who believes that he is the member of an elite — of the supreme elite of those who enjoy the friendship and the admiration of the gods. His jar is his palace. There is no provision in his interpretation of charity for beggars who are not philosophers. Moreover, he has voluntarily chosen a life in which he has exempted himself from common human bonds, so that he himself cannot be expected to act charitably, to give as he receives. It is not an altogether edifying picture. Plato once scolded him: “How much vanity you expose, Diogenes, by not appearing to be vain.” 

     

    Still, a few important features of the relationship between the benefactor and the beggar may be coaxed out of Diogenes’ vanity. The first is that teachers and thinkers have a claim on the support of their society. Whether or not they are friends of the gods, and whether or not they are an elite or “culture workers”, those who devote their lives to the exploration and the clarification of what we believe about our universe and our society and ourselves, who have consecrated themselves to the education of their era – they have a claim on material support. They deserve it: not charity, but recognition in the form of resources that will enable their work, because their work is at least as essential to society as the work of engineers, who these days have the temerity to regard themselves as philosophers. They should never be regarded as beggars, though there are writers and painters and composers in our society who may be forgiven for living each day with insecurity about the next. The quality of their work — they cannot all be right and beautiful and profound — matters less than their existence in our midst. We have an obligation and an interest to help pay for the jar.

     

    And there is something else, a more startling idea, that recommends Diogenes’ insolence: it is a ringing statement of the primacy of the receiver over the giver. This is especially tonic in our wealth-addled country, in which the cult of the donor deforms many institutions. Why do so many Americans believe that wealth confers knowledge? Why is the acknowledged “sage” of present-day America a stock-picker? How can a hedge-fund thug presume to judge the qualifications of a university scholar? Philanthropy was supposed to be a humble activity. Maimonides, who pondered the matter deeply, judged anonymous charity to be the most perfect charity of all. (I oppose the building of the Third Temple for many reasons, not least among them the naming opportunities. At the most numinous moment of the year, who wants the Lauder Family High Priest to enter the Miriam and Sheldon Adelson Holy of Holies?) Philanthropists deserve to be honored, by their beneficiaries and by their society, but the bowing and the scraping must stop: between the givers and the receivers, they really are not the most interesting figures in the relationship. I have always studied losers more than winners, because they know more about the world. (Which is not to say that everything that victims believe is true.) There is something so parochial about a billionaire. The insulation brings a cognitive disadvantage. The poor and the weak and the scorned, by contrast, are taxed to the core of their being every day of their lives. They live on the edge and somehow make a human life there. They have nothing, but still they have children. The resilience that they discover — when their strength does not fail them — cannot be bought. I know what I would do if I had a lot of money, but I have no idea what I would do if I had none.

     

    The satisfactions of generosity are justifiably great for the giver, and I envy the “high net-worth individuals” for their ability to transform people’s lives. I wish that I, too, had the power of rescue. But too many of them put me in mind of an ancient problem, which is the vanity of virtue. Our “donor class” likes homage and they agree to an awful lot of tributes. They are always available to the media which is always available to them. They give in a spirit of self-congratulation and even self-love. For people who claim to lose sleep over the sufferings of others, they smile too much. (Is there a more perfect emblem of complacence, a more definitive image of perpetual fabulousness, than Darren Walker’s face?) They swan around like aristocrats, but this is a democratic society. I could go on, but what I want to emphasize here is the sagacity of Diogenes’ shift of focus from the giver to the receiver. He wishes to make charity seem not just charitable, but also the acknowledgment of what we call, millennia later, a right. Or if not a right, then some intrinsic and inalienable feature of his person that makes a valid claim upon the will and the wherewithal of others. I guess we call this dignity, which defies all distinctions of class; all distinctions, period. The history of class wars and class struggles and political fights against extreme economic inequality shows that they have always referred at some point, in religious or secular terms, to the irreducibility of dignity in reduced circumstances. A broke man is not a broken man. He is a man who needs help. The moral condition of a society may be measured by its attitude toward help. Diogenes in his squalor based his concept of his own dignity on a theological belief about his closeness to the gods, and in their way monotheistic believers think similarly when they speak of being created in the image of God, so that the privilege, the claim upon others, is universal. A universal privilege, an elite of everyone: the apotheosis of inclusion.

     

    The transfer of emphasis from the giver to the receiver is itself an ethical condition of generosity, and a reminder that the primary goals of a society do not include the self-fulfillment of the rich. They are as entitled to the pursuit of happiness as the rest of us, but their failure to find it is not a social failure in the way that the unhappiness of the poor is. I have known some hugely generous benefactors whose motives plainly had nothing to do with their own aggrandizement, and their satisfaction at having given help, and ameliorated the disadvantage and the pain of others, is genuinely affecting; but it is not the essential point. The self-fulfillment of any benefactor, rich or unrich, the ratification of his or her own self-esteem by means of a good deed, the warm sensation of his or her “flourishing”, must take a back seat to the real accomplishment of their charitable acts: the overwhelming recognition of the immensity of another person, of other people, before which our presence to ourselves mysteriously gives way. 

     

    The giver is indebted to the receiver, who is the giver’s guide to the full range of human actualities. The receiver offers the giver a correction of vision, an expanded sense of reality, a new moral plane, a door. So, then, thank-yous all around! But even to say what I have just said seems to restore the sticky first-person standpoint that was put into doubt. The ego relentlessly regenerates; it is the original hydra; it survives every circumscription. The trip out of our ourselves is always a round trip. Is it too condescending, too self-regarding, for the giver to thank the receiver? (After a speech that she delivered about surviving the Holocaust, my mother was approached by a woman in the audience. “Mrs. Wieseltier,” she solemnly said, “thank you for surviving.” “You’re welcome,” Mrs. Wieseltier replied.) Surely we must not, for the sake of our own personal development, be grateful to the poor, the weak, and the scorned for being poor, weak, and scorned – and yet we need to learn.

     

    In 1991 a German-born Australian philosopher named Raimond Gaita published a profoundly humanist book called Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception. It includes an illuminating discussion of remorse, of proper and improper ways to think about a person whom one has wronged. Gaita wishes to arrive at what he calls “lucid remorse.” He gives examples, which are also a delicious satire of contemporary moral philosophy, of how people might remorsefully describe the wrong that they have perpetrated.

     

    ‘My God, what have I done? I have violated the social compact, agreed behind a veil of ignorance.’ ‘My God, what have I done? I have ruined my best chances of flourishing.’ ‘My God, what have I done? I have violated rational nature in another.’ ‘My God, what have I done? I have diminished the stock of happiness.’ ‘My God, what have I done? I have violated my freely chosen principles.’  

     

    Gaita then glosses his bit of polemical frivolity: “Even if one thinks the parodies to be to some degree unjust, they point unmistakably to the fact that the individual who has been wronged and who haunts the wrongdoer in his remorse has disappeared from sight.” 

     

    Neither the receiver or the giver must ever disappear from sight. All doctrines of disappearance must be rejected. Even in Diogenes’ revision, the receiver does not usurp the giver on the moral ground, but the giver agrees to share the moral ground with the receiver, because (as Diogenes insisted) having nothing is not being nothing. The act of begging misrepresents the moral standing of the beggar. Generosity is finally not a wish for charity, but for justice; the gift is in fact an obligation; and justice is never achieved without the detachment of the powerful from themselves, so that the authority of others, their incontrovertible and binding humanity, at last commands their deference.

     

    Diogenes’ transfer of emphasis puts me in mind of another sphere in which the same shift is sorely needed. I refer to the sphere of forgiveness. Or more precisely, of unforgivingness. We have become a disgracefully unforgiving society. There are no mistakes in our time, and certainly no innocent mistakes; there are only crimes and sins. Nothing transpires between the allegation and the punishment. The objective of the exercise is disqualification. We are a pariah-producing culture. Our collective memory is increasingly becoming a dossier of indictments and inuendoes, all of them more or less inexpiable. The moving finger writes, and having writ, moves on. Nothing is forgotten, or submitted to the test of fairness and proportionality, or allowed to fall into oblivion, in the name of ambiguity or decency or social peace. Instead imperfect people regard the guilt of other imperfect people as final, often without bothering to inquire into the grounds of their alleged guilt, which anyway becomes folklore long before a responsible inquiry can be conducted. Your vice, after all, establishes my virtue. And if, by some miracle, the guilty status is overcome, it is an event of such rarity and drama that we call it “redemption.” 

     

    The political regimentation of moral discourse leaves us incapable of honesty about contradictions and complications. When things do not add up, we resort to rhetorical violence, to slander. We must learn to accept that a man who believes in free speech may at the same time be a miscreant. For example: We must learn to accept  that a man who rightly believes in free speech may at the same time be a miscreant, and that a woman who rightly denounces the tyrannies of wokism may at the same time be a racist. Even in an environment in which false allegations flourish, true allegations may be made; and our responsibility is not, as the Marxists used to say, to work them into the analysis so that our side remains unshaken. Our responsibility is recognize human pain and human culpability wherever we find it. I remember my shock many decades ago when a friend said to me about Ariel Sharon, “he may be a fascist, but he’s our fascist.” (This was in the years when the appellation still applied to Sharon.)  Now imagine this sentence about someone: “He may be a rapist, but he’s our rapist.” Thinking like a group is hardly the most assured way of arriving at fairness and sympathy. The veracity of an allegation has nothing to with the lack of veracity of many allegations that preceded it. Even if we have grown skeptical about our culture of umbrage and trauma, and despite all that we have discovered about the mechanisms of suggestibility in our society, about cascades and contagions, all accusations are not mischievous or phony or ideologically inspired. We must secure some of our credulity against our sophistication. And whatever one’s views about forgiveness, a rush to forgive may reveal a lack of seriousness about the accusation and a lack of respect for the accuser.

     

    In my reading, and in my reflection on my own experience, I have encountered a certain notion of forgiveness, a grandiose notion, even a mystical one, that I have come to loathe. It is best captured by this sentence by Jacques Derrida: “One only ever asks forgiveness for what is unforgivable.” He made this statement in a two-year seminar on “Perjury and Pardon” that he gave in Paris in 1997-1999.  It suffers from a strange premise, which is that anything that can be forgiven can, or will be, forgiven, so that the forgivable need not detain us. This ignores the fraught psychological vicissitudes of apology; and it suffers, too, from Derrida’s tiresome love of paradox. It would have been less startling but more plausible to say that one only ever asks forgiveness for what is not easily forgivable, but such a formulation would obscure the radical and epiphanous conception of forgiveness that Derrida wants to develop. 

     

    Like almost all post-war thinking about the subject, especially in Europe and England, Derrida’s discussion begins with the war, with the barbarities that seem to have exploded any possibility of absolution. He begins, quite properly, with Jankelevitch. In 1965, amid a debate about statutory limitations on Nazi war crimes, a French-Jewish philosopher named Vladimir Jankelevitch, who had fought in the French Resistance, published a scorching essay called “Pardonner?”, which was translated into English thirty years later under the title “Should We Pardon Them?” The essay is a masterpiece of ethical fury. It begins: “Is it time to pardon, or at least to forget?” After all, he notes witheringly, it had been twenty years. Jankelevitch’s answer to his question was a sonorous no. In one of the most haunting lines in all of Holocaust writing, he declares: “Forgiveness died in the death camps.” As for reparations, “there are no reparations for the irreparable.”  There is only the everlasting horror, “because this agony will endure until the end of the world.”  

     

    Jankelevitch was not alone in the absoluteness of his refusal. Jean Amery, Andre Neher, and Elie Wiesel similarly insisted that honor — personal honor, human honor, Jewish honor — demanded unforgivingness. Especially in the decades after the extermination, this is not hard to understand, though it certainly does not settle the question. Derrida did not concur, though he made no explicit plea for pardoning Nazis and other war criminals. Instead he writes with appropriate disgust at the ease with which historical atrocities against whole peoples, modern and medieval, have become the subject of glib ceremonies of public contrition and expedient theaters of apology. Who has not been similarly disgusted? Every time a pope apologizes for the Church’s conduct during the Holocaust or for the millennia of anti-Semitic doctrine and violence that preceded it, I always think the same thought: fuhgeddaboudit! And I have always been a bit embarrassed by my reaction to the sight of Willy Brandt falling to his knees at the memorial in the Warsaw Ghetto: I was moved, but not beyond words. It was an admirable gesture by an admirable man — during the war he was active as an anti-fascist outside of Germany — but my gratitude for his decency was overrun by my blinding awareness of what occurred in that place, and I was strangely content with the myopia. And we have come a long way, fifty years later, from Brandt’s stricken sincerity to the parade of penitent politicians doing what polls tell them to do, as the stagecraft of conspicuous repentance kicks everywhere into action. Derrida called this “the globalization of forgiveness.” What is an apology for a deed that you yourself have not done, or for a crime that was committed many centuries before you were born? Can peoples apologize to peoples? (I wish they could.) It is churlish to turn away an apology, any apology, but there are apologies that make matters worse by their assumption that the injury can be this efficiently healed. Silence, shame, and solidarity would be more respectful. 

     

    In his discussion of forgiveness, Derrida formulates a concept of forgiveness that raises it to the status of a miracle. “Forgiveness is not, it should not be, normal, normative, normalizing. It should remain exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible: as if it interrupted the ordinary course of historical temporality.” And elsewhere: “forgiveness must therefore do the impossible; it must undergo the test and ordeal of its own impossibility in forgiving the unforgivable.” While it is true that real forgiveness is rare, and that its rarity is owed in part to the comfort that many people feel with unforgivingess (anger is so much less demanding than fellow-feeling), Derrida’s idea of forgiveness, by making it seem almost saintly, has the unwitting effect of sufficing with our world of sovereign grievances. 

     

    In his insistence upon something stupendous, he slides too smoothly from the exceptionality of forgiveness to its impossibility. This is in part the consequence of taking historical forgiveness as the model for all forgiveness. For the sake of the possibility of personal forgiveness, however, it must be said against Derrida that the unforgivable is also rare. Most sins are forgivable, if only the injured party is prepared to see why and to enlarge themselves to the proportions of the ideal. And even if forgivable sins are hard to forgive, as they often are, to call them unforgivable is to exaggerate their magnitude, to lie about them, in a kind of reverse cruelty. The presumption of enormity, which is what underlies the discussion of historical forgiveness, has no place in the discussion of personal forgiveness. Even the wronged must be held to standards of accuracy about what happened, and expected to calibrate in their understanding of the gravity of what has been done to them. 

     

    In sum, the ethical and emotional challenges of everyday existence render Derrida’s extremism useless. Genocide is not the archetypal misdeed. In this context, its enormity makes it less instructive. (The overheatedness of existentialism was owed partly to its transposition of the crucibles of war and resistance to the entirety of existence.) There is life to live, and we live it prosaically, at lesser levels of vice and virtue, always in its unglamorous details. These lesser levels are no less interesting for ethical analysis and no less important for spiritual progress; and even if they are small and unapocalyptic, they can be excruciating. They are replete with actions that are very wrong but forgivable, or forgivable but very wrong. In 1971, Jankelevitch published a book called Forgiveness in which he complicated his account of the subject. The infamous nay-sayer wrote this: 

     

    There is an inexcusable but there is not an unforgivable. Forgiveness is there to forgive precisely what no excuse would know how to excuse: for there is no misdeed that is so grave that we cannot in the last recourse forgive it. Nothing is impossible for all-powerful remission! Forgiveness can in this sense do everything. Where sins flows, Saint Paul said, forgiveness flows. 

     

    It cannot be that forgiveness died in the death camps, even if forgiveness for the death camps died in the death camps.

     

    We must be wary of praising forgiveness too extravagantly, so that we do not expel it from the realm of common human intercourse and make it too daunting. The rarity of true forgiveness is owed more to the hard-heartedness of people than to the preternatural scale of the task. In our relations with people, forgiveness should be — I am directly reversing Derrida here — normal, normative, and normalizing. If it is exceptional and extraordinary, that is because of the difficulty of the inner path to a forgiving will, not because it interrupts the ordinary course of historical temporality. It is indeed a historical interruption, on the plane of personal history, because it undoes the finality of the trespass, and out of a temporally irreversible event it makes a morally reversible event; but it is in no way eschatological, at least as regards wrongs committed by one individual against another. (I am borrowing a fundamental element of Judaism’s theory of forgiveness, which is the distinction between sins between man and God and sins between man and man, and not even God has power to remit the latter.) Forgiveness, if it is to become a regular feature of living together, is an instance of what might be called the banality of good. The moral life is not the same as the heroic life. There are moral heroes, but they are made by their circumstances. Of what benefit is an ethical code that is beyond the capabilities of the flawed and fragile creatures for whom it was promulgated? 

     

    A system of reward and punishment, religious or secular, can be, well, unforgiving. It is a machinery of judgment whose rigors can be oppressive and result in rebellion or despair, in the ancient feeling that if justice were done the world would perish. For this reason, every system of reward or punishment has been accompanied by a fallback, a work-around, a loophole of mercy with which to soften or even transcend justice. As far as I can understand it, and I have been wrestling with it for many years, the primary instrument of this relief has been the idea of grace. Given our sinfulness, or, in less religious language, given our capacity to do wrong, it is not hard to grasp the attraction of the idea of grace, its psychological ingenuity, because it abrogates a system that will find us wanting and it releases us from the culpability to which our weakness inevitably carries us. It is a promise of immunity from doom, and thereby rescues the wrongdoer from hopelessness. In the Christian writings on the subject that I have read, grace saves us from the consequences of our actions in two ways: before the action is done, when it preemptively inclines our will (even when it is free, as in the Augustinian tradition) to choose the good, and after the action is done, when it annuls the case in a demonstration of divine love. In both instances, it is a metaphysically based form of moral hazard — a get-out-of-hell-free card. Or as Jankelevich put it, “forgiveness of sin is a defiance of penal logic.” 

     

    And that is its beauty. Who has not dreamed of such cosmic clemency? Where is the individual who is confident that he or she can dispense with grace, or with any similar appellant rescue? Grace is the signature fantasy of the finite. It is no wonder that forgiveness would be described as a form of grace, as a gift. But there is something troubling, at least to me, in the account of forgiveness as grace, and it is the picture that it presents of the individual who stands, or kneels, in need of it. This individual is utterly without merit. Indeed, it is his complete lack of merit that makes him eligible for this exonerating intervention. In the manner of Tertullian, who espoused his faith precisely because it was absurd, the forgiven man is granted his release precisely because he is odious. 

     

    This condition that the sinner, to be worthy of salvation, must be worthless appears often in the literature of Christian forgiveness. Late in life, in the Retractations, Augustine described “the new heretics”, the Pelagians, as those “who make such claims for the free choice of the will that they leave no place for God’s grace, because they say that grace is given according to our merits…And if this divine assistance, whereby the will is freed, were granted for its merits, it would not be a ‘grace’, a gratuitous gift.” A few years earlier, in the Enchridion, he explained that

     

    this part of the human race to which God has promised pardon, and a share in His eternal kingdom, can they be restored through the merit of their own works? God forbid! For what good work can a lost man perform, except so far as he has been delivered from perdition? Can they do anything by the free determination of their own will? Again I say, God forbid! For it was by the evil use of his free will that man destroyed both it and himself.

     

    Augustine held that the free will that chooses evil forfeits its freedom and cannot therefore correct itself. A mistake — which is usually what a transgression is: most offenders are not rebels or heretics  — immediately plunges the individual into a dire crisis, a state of emergency. To be sure, Augustine was hardly insensitive to the infirmities of the flesh and the will, and he wrote eloquently and with compassion, and autobiographically, about the psychology of sin, observing that sins “happen so often by ignorance, by human weakness; many are committed by men weeping and groaning in their distress.” (In his view it was the Pelagians who were the perfectionists and the purists.) And yet his description of the aftermath of sin depicts the errant individual with a savage disrespect, as nothing but his sin, and therefore as nothing. The sin obliterates the sinner, leaving only a beggar for redemption.

     

    Nobody was ever improved by being erased, but this annihilation of the wayward person, whose misdeed costs him the entirety of his worth, lives on. It figures in Christian theology also in modernity, from Jonathan Edwards (“They must be sensible that they are not worthy that God should have mercy on them. They who truly come to God for mercy, come as beggars, and not as creditors: they come for mere mercy, for sovereign grace, and not for anything that is due.”) to Simone Weil, who in her late journals defined grace, not surprisingly, as the nullification of the self, as its “decreation.” It is distinctly odd for such an apostle of goodness to erase one of its conditions, which is selfhood. Utter selflessness, if it is at all possible, is not compatible with moral agency, with commitments to causes, with the energy required to repair the breach.

     

    I do not mean to lay this sentence of abjection exclusively at the feet of the churches. Early in every morning’s prayers the Jew plaintively declares his own worthlessness: “what are we, what are our lives, what is our righteousness, what is our salvation, what is our strength…for man’s advantage over the beast is naught, because all is vanity.” And in the Jewish religion, so renowned for the alleged severity of its law, its emphasis upon reward and punishment, there are also theological work-arounds to mitigate the desperation of the guilty: doctrines of God’s mercy and its likelihood, constant appeals to the merits of the forefathers, regular citations of the Scriptural promises of individual and collective salvation, certain constructions of the idea of chosenness.  And yet — I don’t mean to engage in apologetics, I really don’t — there is not quite the sense of sin as an ontological catastrophe. The Hebrew word for “sin” is the same word for “missing a target”, as in Biblical scenes of archery. A misfire is not the final word. When you miss a target, you reach into your quiver — your undepleted quiver — for another arrow. 

     

    Such an attitude toward a misdeed does not make of it anything casual or trivial, but it is not attended by a sea of fire, a threat of damnation. It is humbling but not self-abnegating. Moreover, the will that led you freely into sin is the will that is expected to lead you freely out of it. The misuse of freedom does not vitiate it or cancel it: a deal is a deal. The responsibilities of freedom notably include the duty of repentance, which implies the efficacy of repentance; and even though Maimonides famously defines the mark of repentance as “the brokenness of the heart”, the guilty individual is not so broken that only a miracle will restore him. (There is a doctrine of “the negation of the I” in Kabbalah that became a central idea in Habad Hasidism, but it pertains not to the consequences of human conduct but to the conditions of mystical contemplation.)  

     

    Dissolve to the jar. “When some people were praising a man who had given him alms, Diogenes said, ‘Yet you don’t praise me, who deserved to receive them.’” The idea behind the philosopher’s impudence, I suggest, pertains also to the practice of forgiveness. A person in need of forgiveness is still a person, and not a worm. The process of exculpation — the pain and fear and regret and sorrow that (hopefully) culminates in a pardon — should mend the wrongdoer, not abolish him. There is something haughty and arbitrary about the conception of a pardon as a gift. A pardon would be better construed as what all mortals who have made a mistake deserve. Even in their guilt, they deserve it. Precisely in their guilt, they deserve it. Why forgive the innocent? (Who are the innocent?) Forgiveness is not supererogatory to justice; it is just. And justice requires a clarification of guilt, not a morbid obsession with it. (I have the good fortune of not having to struggle with the notion of original sin. My idea of original sin is a sin that nobody has yet committed.) If the essential characteristic of grace is its gratuitousness, then forgiveness should not be compared to grace. It need not be anything so wondrous and epiphanous. It should be familiar, vernacular, completely terrestrial. It should occur not in the ruins of the quotidian system of reward and punishment, but as an element of it. It should leave an impression not of power but of love. 

     

    When Augustine exclaims “God forbid!” about the intactness of the sinful self, I whisper Deo volente! The guilty, too, must be spiritually strong. After all, a decimated person, a person frightened to pieces by the hysterical conception of the sinner, is incapable of introspection, and the sinner has a lot of work to do. It is internal work that the rest of us do not see. We must look for its outward signs. Forgiveness should not, as they say, come cheap: it should come after the epic effort of repentance. The candidate for forgiveness must present himself with the tracks of his tears. As is commonly said, forgiveness must be earned. Obviously we must be careful not to be played for fools. Counterfeits of repentance, facsimiles of regret, are everywhere, especially in our public life; and toughness, too, and strictness, have their justifications. Yet we must not flatter ourselves that we are always accurate and impartial in our judgements of people, or erroneously believe that stringency has a more natural relationship to truth than leniency. We must be a little suspicious of suspicion, which can serve as a mask for many indefensible and unattractive reasons to withhold forgiveness. Everyday experience abundantly shows that contrition is not always followed by absolution. 

     

    Since none of us are in a position to base our interpretation of the predicaments of others upon our own investigations, what will most likely determine the award of forgiveness is a prior inclination to forgive. If only as a response to our cognitive limitations, this is more supportable than a prior disinclination. Generosity is not only an action, it is also a disposition, a previous philosophical decision about the spirit in which one wishes to go through the world. Erring in the right direction may be the best that we can do. I was not always this way, but I would rather mistakenly forgive than mistakenly condemn. I have learned never to think about forgiveness as if I will never be in need of it.  

    The Technology of Bullshit

    Apart from being sent to bed early, the worst part about being the youngest member of my family was that everyone around me could read except me. Even if I wasn’t born into a bookish family, I could intuit the power of the written word. It allowed my mother to remember what she had to buy in the market. Notes passed between my brothers could elicit laughter. Note to self: written squiggles can tickle. I knew my father often stayed up late immersed in a novel. I remember staring at my brother for hours while he was doing homework, his eyes darting across the textbook in front of him, his pencil in hand bobbing over the notebook page, leaving mysterious symbols behind. I felt excluded from what I knew was a world of meaning. “When can I learn how to read?” I asked on my first day of school. 

    Words enable us to read minds. Through them, we can communicate with various degrees of precision our innermost thoughts and our most visceral feelings. We can travel through space and time. Words allow us to learn from the dead and convey our knowledge to those who come after us; they allow us to overcome the geographical and temporal limits of our bodies. Words are vehicles through which we can plan and coordinate with others. Sentences and paragraphs are tools through which we enhance our cognitive capacities. Written language is one of our defining skills as human beings.

    In 1950, the computer scientist Alan Turing imagined that, one day, written language might not be exclusive to human beings. In his “imitation game,” Turing imagined human judges holding five-minute text-based conversations with a computer and a person, both of which were hidden. Could judges reliably tell which was the computer just through reading its text? If they couldn’t, might that mean that the computer was thinking? This became known as the Turing Test. It was never meant to be a literal test for intelligence; it was a thought experiment. But it was suggestive enough to become a landmark. For several decades, the businessman Hugh Loebner funded an annual Turing Test event known as the Loebner Prize, which enacted the imitation game. These stopped for financial reasons after Loebner’s death only a few years before the development of large language models.

    Large language models disrupted the world in November 2022. OpenAI made ChatGPT available, and in a matter of days it was the main topic of conversation of every lunch and dinner I had, whether with friends or colleagues. What was unclear was whether much of the excitement was illusory — little more than impressionable human beings feeling dazzled by the latest tech trick — or whether it was the product of glimpsing the sprouts of a revolution that will radically alter how we work and how we interact with technology. The question remains unanswered. 

    The shiny side of large language models includes the astounding feeling that one is talking to another person, and the hope that these imitators could work for us. College students salivated at the prospect of having them write their essays, and professors felt guiltily tempted to use them to mark those essays. Lawyers figured that they could use them to draft legal briefs (it turned out to be a bad idea). Doctors hypothesized about using them to write down notes about their appointments with patients. And who wouldn’t want an AI to answer the billions of inane emails that we send one another? The main argument in favor of these systems, it seems, is the promise of greater efficiency and therefore greater productivity. In this sense, it is not different in kind from other mechanical devices that were invented to make life easier. 

    Except that it is different in kind. Delegating language to a statistical tool built by a company has its special shadows. One concern is that, by automating more of our life, we are losing skills to AI. “Use it or lose it,” my Latin teacher said every time he assigned homework. He was right: decades later I have lost it entirely.

    I’m writing these words on an airplane. It is cold and windy outside, and the pilot has mentioned the possibility of turbulence. If there is an emergency, I wonder, does the pilot have enough flying experience to know how to successfully navigate it? On Continental Connection Flight 3407 in 2009, there was no mechanical failure. The captain had been distracted talking with the first officer. As they prepared for landing, they continued chatting, forgetting to monitor the airplane’s airspeed and altitude. By the time the captain realized that they were in trouble, it was too late. No one on board survived. Similarly, on Asiana Airlines Flight 214 in 2013, a plane crashed because the pilots were not proficient in landing without the use of high-level automation. That day, part of the airport’s instrument landing system that helps guide planes to the runway was out of service for repairs.

    As flying has become more automated, pilots have been losing certain skills required to fly manually, such as navigating by reference to landmarks, calculating their speed and altitude, and being able to visualize the plane’s position. They don’t get to practice these skills enough. What’s more, with automation, they have fewer details to worry about during flights; this induces boredom and mind-wandering, which in turn causes mistakes. When automation fails or necessitates human input, distracted pilots are less able to overcome risky situations.

    Artificial intelligence is the ultimate kind of automation. The aspiration is to create a kind of intelligence that can take over as many of our tasks as possible. As we increasingly rely on AI in more spheres of life —from health and policing, finance to education, to everything in between — it is worth asking ourselves whether increased automation will lead to a loss of expertise, and to what extent that might be a problem. And the concern that technology might degrade our cognitive abilities is hardly new. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates argued that writing would cause people to rely too heavily on external sources rather than on their own memories and understanding: 

    [Writing] will atrophy people’s memories. Trust in writing will make them remember things by relying on marks made by others, from outside themselves, not on their own inner resources, and so writing will make the things they have learnt disappear from their minds. Your invention is a potion for jogging the memory, not for remembering. You provide your students with the appearance of intelligence, not real intelligence. Because your students will be widely read, though without any contact with a teacher, they will seem to be men of wide knowledge, when they will usually be ignorant.

    Socrates thought that writing could not provide the same level of understanding and dialogue that could be achieved from verbal communication, where ideas could be challenged and refined through conversation. In contrast to live dialogue, the written word lacked the ability to adapt to different contexts and therefore could be easily misinterpreted or misunderstood. Writing doesn’t talk back:

    The offspring of painting stand there as if alive, but if you ask them a question they maintain an aloof silence. It’s the same with written words: you might think they were speaking as if they had some intelligence, but if you want an explanation of any of the things they’re saying and you ask them about it, they just go on and on forever giving the same single piece of information.

    Was Socrates right to be worried about writing? The anxiety about the consequences of the transition from oral communication to written communication may be found in the early history of many cultures. But I’m torn. On the one hand, I feel fiercely defensive of the written word. Books allow you to live many lives in one, traveling to faraway places from the comfort of your couch, exploring ideas that might never have occurred to you, meeting people you would never have met. It was writing that kept Socrates alive for all these centuries. Thank you, Plato.

    Writing has made it easier to accumulate and share knowledge. Even if our ancestors, who practiced various forms of “the art of memory,” had prodigious powers of recollection, they would not have been able to memorize the whole Bodleian Library, to which I am lucky enough to have access. And sharing knowledge orally is much more inefficient. Not only does writing facilitate the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge; it also enhances thinking. The slowness of the writing process allows for paced reflection, and the possibility of editing invites fine-tuning. Having words on an external medium such as paper or a screen offloads cognitive processing, making it easier to sustain complicated arguments in one’s (somewhat external) mind. Just as it is easier to perform a long mathematical computation with pencil and paper than in one’s head, so it is easier to handle a complicated argument when you can see the premises and the conclusion in front of you. Writing is not only about expressing what is in your mind, but about figuring out what you think as you go along.

    Yet Socrates was right in that writing has almost certainly damaged our memories. Centuries ago, people used to memorize the equivalent of whole books, word for word. Not too long ago people could recite long poems by heart. If you were born in the 1980s or before, you probably remember the time when it was normal to memorize dozens of phones numbers. I still remember the phone number of my childhood home, but I have to look at my mobile phone to give someone my current phone number (which I have had for years).

    Is memory important? If my phone is always with me, why does it matter if I can’t remember my own number? One key element is reliability. The so-called extended mind theory proposes that our cognitive processes extend beyond our brain and body to include tools, technologies, and the environment we reliably interact with. If you were born before 1960, you are probably much better at arithmetic than younger generations who grew up with calculators. But younger generations don’t seem hobbled by the weakening of this fundamental skill, because calculators are so easily attainable and so reliable. There is a calculator on my phone, so not being great at arithmetic isn’t a big handicap. According to the extended mind theory, I have simply offloaded my arithmetic cognitive processes to my phone. 

    It follows that, when we come to think soberly about artificial intelligence, one important question that must be asked is whether it is reliable. If it is, then our losing some skills may not be a cause for great alarm. These new programs may be technically dazzling, but can we trust them? I can think of at least four ways in which AI can be unreliable. First, unlike calculators, AI is (currently) expensive. Running powerful systems takes a lot of computation, which in turns needs a lot of energy. And gadgets like phones and computers which use AI are likewise expensive. Chips, batteries, and devices rely on raw materials such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel, and these are finite resources that are now the stuff of geopolitical competition. They may eventually run out. 

    Moreover, most applications using AI are linked to the internet. Since AI needs considerable computing power and the capacity to store gargantuan amounts of data, it usually attaches to the cloud (to a remote server where heavy computation is carried out). Anything connected to the internet can potentially be hacked. Ransomware is an example of the risk. Two decades ago, factories, power plants, hospitals, airports and offices were operated with analog tools; these were usually more robust than our digital equivalent. Many of today’s institutions no longer have the option to operate manually, or have not maintained employees’ analog skills. When the metals and electricity company Norsk Hydro received a ransom demand, they managed to avoid shutting down by going manual, but only thanks to older employees and other workers who returned from retirement to help out. Twenty years from now, the generation that knows how to run things on analog will no longer be around. By letting pre-digital skills atrophy or disappear, we damage ourselves. 

    Third, AI can be unreliable because it is managed by a few powerful corporations. A company such as OpenAI could one day decide — it is, after all, a business — to increase their prices or to introduce exploitative terms and conditions, and if we have come to depend on their AI, we will be at their mercy. Alternatively, the company might be sold (as in the case of Twitter) and their algorithm could change for the worse without users having any control over it. Surely we have already had enough experience with the autocratic power of the tech super-corporations to be wary of being forever in a relationship of abject dependence upon them. 

    Finally, and most importantly, current AI has a profoundly unreliable relationship with the truth. The most popular kind of AI is based on machine learning. An AI such as ChatGPT works through statistically analyzing texts that it has been fed and generating convincing responses based on its training data. But it does not use logic and it is not tied to empirical evidence. It has no tools to track truth, no capabilities for verification. As a result, it often “hallucinates,” or fabricates plausible responses (based on its statistical analysis) that are nonetheless false. When I asked it to cite ten books by Carissa Véliz, it invented nine. What is most interesting, and potentially dangerous, is that it came up with plausible titles, given my specialization. Sometimes falsehoods that look closer to the truth may be more dangerous than falsehoods that are preposterous and wild.

    If Socrates was the wisest person in ancient Greece, then large language models must be the most foolish systems in the modern world. 

    In his Apology, Plato tells the story of how Socrates’ friend Chaerephon goes to visit the oracle at Delphi. Chaerephon asks the oracle whether there is anyone wiser than Socrates. The priestess responds that there is not: Socrates is the wisest of them all. At first, Socrates seems puzzled. How could he be the wisest, when there were so many other people who were well known for their knowledge and wisdom, and yet Socrates claims that he lacks both?

    He makes it his mission to solve the mystery. He goes around interrogating a series of politicians, poets, and artisans (as philosophers do). And what does he find? Socrates’ investigation reveals that those who claim to have knowledge either do not really know what they think they know, or else know far less than they proclaim to know. Socrates is the wisest, then, because he is aware of the limits of his own knowledge. He doesn’t think he knows more than he does, and he doesn’t claim to know more than he does. 

    How does that compare with large language models such as ChatGPT4? In contrast to Socrates, large language models don’t know what they don’t know. These systems are not built to be truth-tracking. As I say, they are not based on empirical evidence or logic. They make statistical guesses that are very often wrong. Worse, large language models do not inform users that they are making statistical guesses. They present incorrect guesses with the same confidence as they present facts. Whatever you ask, they will come up with a confident response, and its response is never I don’t know, even though it should be. If you ask ChatGPT about current events, it will remind you that it only has access to information up to September 2021 and it cannot browse the internet. For almost any other kind of question, it will venture a response that will often mix facts with confabulations. (Google is now trying to design its language model Bard to doubt itself, giving users the option to “double check” responses by clicking on sources or highlighting a lack of sources — a welcome add-on, but still an add on.)

    The late Harry Frankfurt famously argued that bullshit is speech that is typically persuasive but is detached from a concern with the truth. Large language models are the mothers of all bullshitters, because they are designed to be plausible (and therefore convincing) with no regard for the truth. As the philosopher pointed out, bullshit doesn’t need to be false. Sometimes bullshitters describe things as they are. The essential quality of bullshit is that it is indifferent to the question of truth. AI is being created and used with economic ambitions, not epistemological ones.

    And bullshit can be dangerous, warned Frankfurt. Bullshit is a greater threat to the truth than to lies. The person who lies thinks that she knows what the truth is, and is therefore perversely concerned with the truth. She can be challenged and held accountable; her agenda can be inferred. The truth-teller and the liar play on opposite sides of the same game, as Frankfurt puts it. The bullshitter, by contrast, pays no attention to the game. Truth is not even confronted; it is simply ignored; and so it becomes utterly irrelevant to the communication in question.

    Bullshit is more dangerous the more persuasive it is, and large language models are persuasive by design, on two counts. First, they have analyzed enormous amounts of text, which allows them to make a statistical guess as to what is a likely appropriate response to the prompt that it has been given. In other words, it mimics the patterns that it has picked up in the texts that it has rifled through. Second, these systems are refined through a process known as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The reward model has been trained directly from human feedback. Humans taught it what kinds of responses they prefer. Through numerous iterations, the system learns how to satisfy human beings’ preferences, thereby becoming more and more persuasive. 

    As the proliferation of “fake news” and “alternative facts” has taught us, human beings do not always prefer truth. Falsity is often much more attractive than bland truths. We like good, exciting stories much more than we like truth. Large language models are analogous to a nightmare student, professor, or journalist: those who, instead of acknowledging the limits of their knowledge, try to wing it by bullshitting you. Artificial intelligence is a monstrous engine of confirmation bias. We must teach ourselves, therefore, a whole new level of suspicion. 

    The unreliability of artificial intelligence should make us think twice about the skills that we are losing to it. Even if AI were more reliable — cheap, easily available, unhackable and unpluggable, not in the hands of a few powerful corporations, and trustworthy — we might have reason to worry. Recall Socrates, writing, and memory. Even if our new external memories are more reliable than our old internal ones, we might still have lost something important by offloading much of memory onto the written word.

    Memory and attention are related. The key to remembering something is being able to attend to it closely. If writing has weakened our memories, our attention spans have suffered, too—and maybe attention will be further eroded as digital tech continues to develop. As I write, my attention keeps jumping around — from the blank page to some references, from the latest news to a text message from my mom, from social media to a phone call, and half an hour later back to the blinking cursor on this page — all the while holding me back from the pleasurable state of flow that can kick in after hours of sustained concentration. It is possible that the attention span of the ancient Greeks was far superior to ours, and that with it came pleasurable experiences such as being in the moment and experiencing flow states more frequently than we do. 

    There is often an assumption that greater automation will give us the ability to focus on higher-level tasks. This seems unlikely to me. Thanks to the washing machine, I might not spend as much time washing clothes as my grandmother did, but I spend more time on email than she ever did washing clothes. And I bet she had more high-level thoughts while washing clothes than have while doing email. The experience of washing clothes — the feel of the water running through your hands, for example — is also more pleasant for our embodied experience than staring at a screen. The suppression of our physical experience, alienation from tactility, does not make us wiser about the world—nor does it make us happier. 

    Chasing productivity hacks is a trap. Inventing a contraption — a washing machine or a calculator —may save time accomplishing particular tasks— washing clothes or doing arithmetic — but if we invent bureaucratic machines in an increasingly complex world, we might not end up with more high-quality time overall. Our technological devices for saving time turn out to be very time-consuming. We might end up spending our time personalizing our AIs, doing more two-factor authentication, solving captchas, saying “no” to online tracking, and the myriad other delights that digital tech has brought us. More time with AI is hardly time well spent. We should know better by now. 

    Going back to the concern about losing our abilities, automation might weaken or wipe-out some of the critical thinking skills that we gained when we chose to ignore Socrates and bargained away our memories. If we use chatbots to write for us, in a best-case scenario, we might get an acceptable product with a fraction of the time and effort that would have been demanded by writing manually, but we will have missed out on the process. As Cavafy famously observed about Ithaca, the journey is richer than the destination. The process of writing is a cognitive enhancer. Along with reading, it may be our most effective method of supercharging our thinking. Among the abilities that writing improves, moreover, is empathy. Writing asks you to put yourself in the reader’s shoes. Will they understand what you are trying to communicate? Are you sure you aren’t boring them to death? Are you being respectful enough to their possible points of view? Social skills are some of the most valuable skills that we possess; they affect the moral quality of our society. But AI lacks them entirely, and we must be careful not to surrender them to it. 

    If students become used to relying on chatbots to write their essays, they might lose critical thinking skills, empathy, and creativity. Their essays might become (even more) full of common tropes and cliched observations. As AI retrains on the language that it produces (as opposed to human-made texts), it might become even more hallucinogenic. There is some evidence that large language models also become more sycophantic with time, telling us what we want to hear, and thereby deceiving and corrupting us in fundamental ways. 

    When we delegate speech to a machine built by a company, we might not only be losing abilities as individuals. We might be losing skills as a society, too. Democracy is a kind of ability, or at the very least it depends on a variety of skills, such as producing and consuming trustworthy information about the state of a country and the actions of its public officials. Democratic skills also include deliberation, voting, protesting, petitioning, having a rough idea of how the legal system works, and more. Democracy is a know-how much more than it is a know-that. And that know-how is largely a kind of conversation. There is no democracy if citizens do not talk to one another, and because we live in large communities in which we cannot talk to those who live in the opposite side of our country, we need radio, and TV, and writing to carry out that conversation. If we let the bots take over the conversation, we let them take over democracy.

    In 2019 an article in the Economist warned that the stock market is dominated by algorithms. According to Deutsche Bank, ninety percent of equity futures trades and eighty percent of cash-equity trades are carried out by algorithms, without any human input. That figure might be even higher now. But doesn’t trading depend on what people value? Algorithms cannot value anything. At most, they can have items on a list prioritized in a certain way according to a number that represents weightiness. But entities that do not feel — that are not sentient — cannot value. Perhaps, someone might argue, they are merely mirroring what people value, or at least what the people who designed them value. Maybe. But the crash of 2:45 on May 6, 2010, which lasted thirty-six minutes, and other flash crashes that have followed, in which billions or trillions of dollars can disappear and reappear in minutes, suggests otherwise. We are making ourselves vulnerable. 

    And what are these bots anyway? They are not disembodied angels looking out for our best interests. They are machines created by corporations that are very eager to grow and earn more money. If we delegate speech to bots, we delegate democracy to corporations, because governments are not excelling at creating AI (or even at regulating it). In April 2023, the British government announced with great fanfare that it would spend a hundred million pounds (about a hundred and twenty five million dollars) in building and adopting the next generation of safe AI. It sounds impressive to the layperson, but AI doesn’t come for cheap. Microsoft is investing ten billion into Open AI. Who do you think is going to produce the more useful AI? The corporations are winning at this enterprise, and they risk taking over speech, and therefore democracy.

    The irony here is that businesses depend on democracy to thrive — good luck having a business in an authoritarian or an anarchic context — but they are not very good at taking care of it. My sense is that the corporate culture of the 1950s allowed more leeway for corporations to think of themselves as having a duty to be good citizens. When I consult for companies, I try to remind them that, despite the corporate culture that is pressuring them to think only of the short-term interest of stockholders, it is in their long-term best interest to protect democracy. 

    And what happens when algorithms dominate not only the stock market, but also social media? Large language models are so efficient at producing speech that they could easily flood out content produced by human beings. And large language models are exceptionally good at creating misinformation. Money can continue to work as long as there are more genuine coins and bills than counterfeit ones, but the system breaks down if the fakes dominate. How will we protect truth when there is so much more untruth? How will we gauge public opinion when there are more bots than human beings? 

    Maybe algorithms will figure it out for us. They will tell us what other people think, and what’s going on in the world. They might be able to tell apart human speech from bot speech. But remember, algorithms are not neutral. They are created by corporations, and often used by bad actors such as foreign adversaries wishing to sow discord and distrust. How will policymakers and average citizens distinguish between a bot and a human being?

    Maybe we can uniquely identify human beings through biometrics, as Worldcoin is attempting to do through scanning people’s irises. That way, every human being can prove that they are not a bot. In April 2022, an article in the MIT Technology Review called attention to the revealing fact that Worldcoin tended to do its data collection on people from disadvantaged countries and communities, often without explaining the conditions to them. In May 2023, TechCrunch reported that hackers were able to steal passwords of several of Worldcoin’s operators’ devices. (Worldcoin claimed that no personal user data was stolen, this time anyway.) So far, in other words, the project seems like an ethical quagmire. 

    Even if a company were to collect that kind of personal data in a more ethical way, and managed to keep it secure, both of which are not easily done, having a company uniquely identify us is politically reckless. Companies might say that that data will only be used in very specific situations, but technology has a colonizing tendency. A few years ago, facial recognition was only used sparingly; today it is needed to unlock our phones. Social media companies, and stores, and banks, and governmental agencies of many kinds, will want to identify human beings too, and governments would love to get access to data that uniquely identifies everyone in the world. Think of how many times a machine took your picture the last time you cleared customs in any country. It is every autocrat’s dream. The possibility of anonymity was crucial for the development of liberal democracies, and we are rapidly evaporating it through mass surveillance.

    Above and beyond the problem of how to manage content produced by AI, and how to distinguish human speech from AI speech, if we allow algorithms to take over much of our systems might we be creating a world in which machines talk to one another in a language that is increasingly inaccessible to us? Already it is exceedingly difficult to audit algorithms, not least because they are millions of lines long, and so complex and self-modifying that they are largely inscrutable to computer scientists. 

    When code decides what we see online (from social media contexts to job offers and dating profiles), and when algorithms decide what treatment we receive (from medicine to the justice system and beyond), and when we are not able to understand or contest those decisions, we are being excluded from the rules of the game. For democracy to function well, rules need to be publicly accessible and verifiable. If we cannot understand the rules by which we are governed or verify how they are applied, we end up in situations that approximate Kafka’s bureaucratic nightmares, fending for ourselves in an impersonal maze that feels arbitrary and alienating. If we allow algorithms to dominate speech, we might end up feeling like my younger self, cut off from the world of language that rules our world. Writing will no longer be a way of reading minds, because there is no mind behind the text produced by large language models. Language is how we gauge other people and our social world, and how we come to have trust in others and in institutions. By building language tools that are designed to be impersonators, to mimic sentience, we are inviting confusion, misinformation, and mistrust. Artificial intelligence is no friend to democracy.

    Plato’s Apology suggests that we should build AI to be more like Socrates and less like bullshitters. We must not expect tech companies to design ethically out of their own good will. Silicon Valley is well known for its bullshitting abilities, and companies feel compelled to bullshit to stay competitive in that environment. That companies working in a corporate bullshitting environment create bullshitting products should hardly be surprising. One of the things that the past two decades have taught us is that tech needs at least as much regulation as any other industry, and history had already taught us that no industry can regulate itself. We regulate food, drugs, telecommunications, finance, transport: why would tech be the only unregulated industry in history? 

    Consider a recent cartoon by Tom Fishburne. “What will be the impact of ChatGPT on our business?” asks a woman. “There’s a lot we don’t know,” answers a man, before enumerating a long list of doubts, from security and reputational risks to loss of jobs. “What do we know for sure?” asks the woman. And he replies: “Only that we want to adopt it everywhere as fast as we can.” He is right. Here we are, eager to implement a technology for which we can think of more likely hazards than we can think of likely benefits. Is that wise? 

    Reading and Time

    Regrettably, I must begin with the quantitative — the least Proustian of all categories. The six-volume Modern Library Edition of D.J. Enright’s revision of Terrance Kilmartin’s reworking of Andreas Mayor’s and C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is 4,347 pages long. At an average speed of two hundred and fifty words, or one page, per minute, it takes approximately seventy-two hours, or three days, to read it. But seventy-two hours represents a theoretical minimum and an unattainable ideal. Thanks to a few features of Proust’s distinctive style, reading In Search of Lost Time inevitably takes at least twice or even three times as long as this. 

    There is, first of all, the famous Proustian sentence, whose syntactic cascades of independent and subordinate clauses were compared by Walter Benjamin, one of his first translators, to the flowing of the Nile. The longest of those riverine sentences, at nine-hundred and fifty-eight words in the original French, could, if printed out on a single strip of paper, be wrapped around the base of a wine bottle seventeen times. No one, except perhaps the most gifted mnemonist, can retain so much information in their short-term memory. By the time anyone else comes to the end of a sentence of this length, having meanwhile pulled into the port of more than one semicolon for a pause, its subject has been long forgotten. To understand what has been written, the reader is sent back to the point of departure and this, in turn, causes the pages not to move, or to move in the wrong direction. 

    Then there is the attention that Proust lavishes on seemingly insignificant details and physical spaces, such as the lengthy description of the steeple of Saint-Hilaire in Swann’s Way; his stubborn willingness to stay in a scene, such as the interminable dinner party in Guermantes Way or the scene where the narrator watches Albertine sleeping in The Captive, long after another author would have cut away; and his penchant for discursive digression throughout, in which he inflates each Rochefoucauldian aperçu to the length of an essay by Montaigne. As with the multiclausal sentences, these traits of style have the effect of slowing down the pace. Articulating the frustrations of innumerable future readers, an editor at one of the many publishing houses that turned down Swann’s Way is said to have remarked of the opening scene, “I fail to understand why a man needs thirty pages to describe how he tosses and turns in bed before falling asleep.”

    Most importantly, there is Proust’s mania for comparisons: for metaphors, analogies, complex conceits, and extended similes, the signature sentences that begin “just as” or “as when.” In a passage in Time Regained — we will return to it — Proust likens his book to a sort of “optical instrument” that enables the reader to read herself. The instrument works by stimulating a reader’s tendency to draw analogies between the events in the book and the events of their lives, such that, for example, one recognizes in the mediocre Bloch or the vicious Madame Verdurin the features of social climbers one has known; or in Swann’s unhappy affair with Odette, the time when one fell in love with a person not of one’s type; or in the contrarianism which topples the Baron de Charlus from the pinnacle of Parisian society, the dialectic of cant and reaction that characterize our own. Owing to this, a frequent experience while reading In Search of Lost Time is to look up half-way through a sentence and stare into the middle distance in a kind of mnemonic reverie or “epiphanic swoon” (as the scholar and translator Christopher Prendergast puts it in his recent study Living and Dying with Marcel Proust), only to find, catching sight of a clock out of the corner of one’s eye, that whole hours have passed.

    Quantitative analysis may be regrettable; unfortunately, it is necessary. For it is the sheer length of In Search of Lost Time, compared to which War and Peace is but a diplomatic incident and The Magic Mountain is little more than a hillock, that turns the phrase “reading Proust” from the designation of an ordinary activity into a cultural superlative, the literary equivalent of climbing Everest, walking the Camino de Santiago, riding the Trans-Siberian Express, or even sailing the Nile. (On behalf of our eyes, we may all be grateful to the editor at Gallimard who talked Proust out of printing the novel in a single volume, with two columns per page and no paragraph breaks.) One may note the delicious irony of treating a book which contains an utterly unsparing critique of snobbery as a “badge of bourgeois soul-distinction,” in Prendergast’s words, and at the same time sympathize with the “mid-cult pride,” in the words of Fredric Jameson, felt by those who finish it, as well as the genuine or downplayed regret expressed by those who do not. (A further irony: Proust is not infrequently cited as the classic author whom contemporary novelists have not read in modified versions of the magazine questionnaire that bears his name.) 

    It is because of its length, which Proust hoped would rival the numerical-temporal One Thousand and One Nights, that In Search of Lost Time has acquired a reputation as a difficult book. Yet Proustian difficulty is not Joycean, Steinean, or Beckettian difficulty. Unlike Finnegans Wake, The Making of Americans, or The Unnameable, In Search of Lost Time is not a book that challenges our sense of what a novel is, only our sense of what a novel can do. Although it makes not inconsiderable demands on the concentration, memory, patience, and perseverance of its readers, it is roughly continuous with the form that the novel has taken since the days of Austen and Balzac. Its ultra-complicated sentences still follow grammatical rules; and while a certain degree of prior familiarity with French literature and history is helpful, understanding them at least does not require the reader to decode neologisms or catch recondite allusions. Although there is some critical controversy over the precise relationship between the first-person narrator and the book we are reading, it can still be fairly described as a Kunstlerroman, the familiar plot of a writer discovering his vocation. The nature of time and memory are its central concerns, and while one of the things the book asks us to do is to rearrange our conception of temporality, the order of the narrative does not depart radically or unexpectedly from the order of events. One is never at a loss to say precisely what is going on in any given scene, which are set in a series of recognizable and historically specific locations — bedrooms, drawing rooms, kitchens, theaters, churches, brothels, public parks, boulevards, train carriages, the countryside — all of them more vividly realized than anywhere else in the history of the form. 

    Extreme affective and cognitive states, such as sadomasochism and pathological jealousy, are presented alongside more routine ones, such as wonder and disappointment, and are observed and analyzed according to the codes of a psychological and sociological realism notable only for its surpassing astuteness and wit. Although it is firmly anchored in a class to which none of its contemporary readers belong — the fashionable monde of the Faubourg St. Germain aristocracy — it touches on every sector of society, from the haute-bourgeoisie to which Swann belongs, to the professional middle class of the narrator’s family, the Verdurins, and the “little band” of girls at Balbec and the lower middle-class of the shopkeeper Camus and the tailor Jupien; from the demi-monde of Odette and Rachel to the art worlds of the composer Venteul, the actress Berma, the writer Bergotte, and the painter Elstir; from the memorable appearances made by the working class soldiers in Jupien’s brothel to the peasantry, such as the milkmaid seen from the train to Balbec and the former peasantry, exemplified by the narrator’s remarkable cook and nursemaid Françoise, one of the outstanding characters in twentieth century literature. In any case, as long as snobbery is a cross-class feature of social life, and possessiveness is a feature of romantic life, and the anticipation of our desires proves more pleasurable than their satisfaction, In Search of Lost Time will never lack for relevance.

    In fact, the major difficulty of reading In Search of Lost Time today is not placed there by Proust; it is placed there by the economy. If, for the novel’s narrator, “lost time” refers to the past, for its reader, one hundred years after Proust’s death, it refers to the present. Proust’s narrator searches for time lost to the past and finds it in memory and in the creation of a literary work of art; Proust’s twenty-first century reader searches for the time to read this literary work of art which is lost to a culture that is consecrated to speed and an economy at war with human-scale temporality and, more often than not, fails to find it. 

     “The primordial scarcity eradicated in the arrival of industrial modernity returns [in the twenty-first century] as the specter of time-famine,” writes Mark McGurl in Everything and Less, his incisive study of the political economy of producing and consuming fiction in what he calls the Age of Amazon, perhaps the most extreme form of market society that history has ever known. 

    Consider the average day of a member of the social fragment that until very recently constituted the demographic core of the novel’s American readership — the educated, salaried professional living in the suburbs of a large or mid-sized city — with its tripartite division of eight hours for sleep, eight hours for work, and eight hours for leisure. From that last eight hours, take away overtime; take away time for getting showered, dressed, and ready for work, and time for commuting to and from the office, and time for preparing food, eating it, and cleaning up afterward, and time for buying groceries, filling prescriptions, and picking up dry cleaning; time for household chores and repairs; time for dentist’s appointments, doctor’s appointments, appointments at the stylist, scheduling future appointments; time for waiting in line and on hold; time for catching up on emails, making phone calls, paying bills, doing taxes, filling out forms and applications — that whole panoply of activities that falls under that rather sinister classification, “life admin.” Of the original eight, perhaps only two or three hours remain, along with the parts of the weekend not devoted to sleep or other tasks such as these, the eleven public federal holidays, and the paltry eleven days of paid vacation that the average American worker receives. If one is responsible for taking care of children or someone who is ill, or if one is ill oneself, the amount of available time diminishes significantly across the board.

    It gets worse. Within this finite number of hours, time must be found to perform the hundreds of activities which are regarded by corporations as further opportunities for monetization and value-extraction and by the people who do them as essential to a meaningful and fulfilled life. This includes, but is not limited to, time for socializing with friends, family, and one’s current or potential romantic partner; time for attending weddings, funerals, and reunions; time for the maintenance and improvement of one’s physical and mental health; time for travel and hobbies; time to go to the cinema, theater, concert hall, museum, dance club, or stadium; time for religious worship, political involvement, or participating in the community organizations of which one is a member. 

    Each of these non-work activities imposes a more-or-less steep opportunity cost on the others, and that is before we get to the locust-swarm of consumption that hoovers up an astonishing eight of the average American’s waking hours, namely, non-print media: social media, digital streaming, video sharing, online news, online retail, gaming, podcasts, radio, television, and so on. Although it can be inferred from this statistic that large amounts of digital media must be consumed by Americans at the office, extra time for leisure is invariably taken from sleep, as activities that cannot be concealed from one’s boss while sitting at one’s desk start to run up against the limitations imposed by biology on the functioning of the human organism. 

    Needless to say, the psychic conditions produced by such an organization of daily life —exhaustion, burnout, stress, anxiety, fear of missing out — are hardly conducive to fostering the mental state that an appreciation of Proust’s style requires. It is challenging enough, after a day of paid and unpaid labor, to summon the concentration necessary to read passages of prose consisting of sentences several clauses long. Interruptions from other people, whether they are the ones we live with, or whether they come in the form of ring tones, text messages, push notifications, or street noise—not to mention the ambient distraction facilitated by “connectivity,” that is, by the mere knowledge that at all times there is a node for possible information transfer and communication on one’s bedstand or in one’s pocket — are positively fatal to it. As attention diminishes, reading time increases, and along with it the likelihood the book will go unfinished, especially when there are so many less-demanding forms of entertainment immediately to hand.

    Compared to “other forms of cultural consumption” such as social media or television, McGurl notes, “reading a novel is a relatively long-term commitment,” which is why, according to a  Pew survey in 2022, Americans read an average of fourteen books per year. (The typical, or median, American will read only five; and twenty-five percent of Americans will read none at all.) And no novel requires a more substantial commitment than In Search of Lost Time. Someone who diligently set aside one hour every day to do nothing but read thirty pages of it could dispatch the six volumes in little over three months—not so much time in the grand scheme of things, a mere third of one percent of a modest seventy-five-year lifespan. But because of all the things that are competing for that hour — not forgetting, finally, the desire to read any of the five hundred thousand to one million titles brought out by the American publishing industry every year—the number stretches out to the more representative thirteen months it took the biographer Phyllis Rose, author of The Year of Reading Proust: A Memoir in Real Time, to finish it; or the eighteen months it took Deidre Lynch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University, to finish it; or the thirty-six months it took Mike Shuttleworth, a bookseller and literary events coordinator in Melbourne, Australia, to finish it. It is little wonder that so many people take a break to do or read something else, and find the prospect of returning to whichever point they left off or starting again from the beginning prohibitively daunting.

    (Since few essays on Proust resist the temptation of a personal anecdote, I will add that, having over-ambitiously started the novel on three separate occasions in my teens and early twenties, in which I got no further than the aforementioned dinner party scene, my first full reading of In Search of Lost Time, according to the note I left on the last page of my copy, took place over the course of nine months when I was single, childless, largely unemployed, unable to afford other entertainment, and not on social media. What got me across the finish line was a severe depressive episode. On one particularly low January evening on the Brooklyn Bridge, I asked myself what I would be missing out on if I jumped off. The answer came to me unbidden: I would never find out how In Search of Lost Time ended. I resolved, with a self-seriousness I can only smile at fifteen years later, to finish the book and then kill myself, but just as when Proust read Ruskin, when I read Proust “the universe suddenly regained infinite value in my eyes,” and when I came to the book’s last word, “time,” on September 11, 2009, I no longer wanted to die.) 

    What, then, would be the ideal conditions for reading Proust? Spending “a month in the country” with In Search of Lost Time has become a fantasy as proverbial as it has become out-of-reach for even the relatively privileged people whose lives I have sketched above, but the pastoral setting, which recalls the bourgeois narrator’s descriptions of his own leisurely reading experiences as a child in Combray, is in any case not dispositive. History furnishes us with a number of counterexamples, starting with the cork-lined bedroom on the second floor of the five-story apartment building at 102 Boulevard Haussmann, in the heart of Paris, where, in a frantic race of the pen against the scythe, the book was written. “The sad thing is,” according to Proust’s brother Robert, “that people have to be very ill or have a broken leg in order to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time.” In a similar vein, a character from Haruki Murakami’s IQ84 quips, “Unless you’ve had…opportunities” in life such as being in jail, “you can’t read the whole of Proust.” The Kolyma gulag, for instance, where Russian journalist and short-story writer Varlam Shalamov, who had been publicly critical of Stalin, read Guermantes Way; or the NKVDs infamous Lubyanka prison in Moscow, where the Polish poet Aleksander Wat read Swann’s Way. Wat’s compatriot, the painter Jósef Czapski, followed Robert Proust’s advice and read the whole of In Search of Lost Time while bedridden during a summer spent recovering from typhus; later, as a member of the Polish officer corps during World War II, he too was captured by the NKVD, and in the forced labor camp in a former monastery in Gryazovets to which he was sent he delivered a series of lectures on the novel to his fellow inmates, now published as Lost Time: Lectures on Proust in a Soviet Prison Camp, reconstructing long passages of it orally from memory like a latter-day Scheherazade. And in a different context, Daniel Genis, surely one of the best-read persons of our time, finished it, along with just over a thousand other books, while serving out a ten-year sentence for armed robbery at the Green Haven Correctional Facility in Stormville, New York. 

    If such examples of astonishing commitment to high art under involuntary confinement seem extreme, not the sort of experiences one is ever likely to have, I encourage you to Google “reading Proust during lockdown.” Proust, who always feared that he did not live up to the expectations of his father, a well-regarded doctor specializing in infectious diseases and the author of a medical paper entitled “The Defense of Europe from the Plague,” would have relished the opportunity to do so. What is essential in all of these cases is not that they are luxurious, or even minimally comfortable or safe; it is that each amounts to total physical removal from everyday life as organized according to the logic of the market and the dictates of capital accumulation. Needless to say, it does not speak well of our society that the two spaces where free time — which Proust’s distant cousin Karl Marx defined as “idle time” as well as “time for higher activity” — is most readily available are the country house and the prison cell.

     Proust has become the unlikely grandfather of a cottage industry of popular English-language non-fiction devoted to or inspired by his life and work. His name appears in the titles of memoirs (Rose’s aforementioned Year of Reading Proust), self-help books (Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life), pop-science (Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist, Marianne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid), cookbooks (Shirley King’s Dining with Marcel Proust), books of art history (Eric Karpeles’ Paintings in Proust) and Jewish history (Benjamin Taylor’s Proust: The Search, Saul Friedländer’s Proustian Uncertainties), along with literary criticism aimed at a general audience (Malcolm Bowie’s Proust Among the Stars, Anka Muhlstein’s Monsieur Proust’s Library, Christopher Prendergast’s aforementioned Living and Dying with Marcel Proust, Jaqueline Rose’s Proust Among the Nations, Michael Wood’s Marcel Proust). The list could be easily expanded if one wanted to add short biographies such as those by Edmund White and Richard Davenport-Hines, guidebooks such as those by Roger Shattuck and Patrick Alexander, and compendia such as André Aciman’s The Proust Project, not to mention the vast academic and scholarly literature on the subject. Whatever differences these books owe to their particular genres and target audiences, each of them is haunted to a more or less explicit degree by the question, Why read Proust? And hidden beneath that question is the blunter, Why read? And hidden, in turn, under that one is the rather more disquieting: Why do anything at all? 

    The standard answer is for pleasure. Reading, as the literary critic Christian Lorentzen likes to say, is a fundamentally hedonistic pursuit. On the substance, this is not wrong, and few authors make the case more convincingly than Proust himself: if there is a scene in the whole of literature that provides more intense pleasure than the one in the Guermantes library in Time Regained, I have not read it. As a motive for reading, however, pleasure has always struck me as insufficiently persuasive, and even a kind of trap, in the context of a culture that, to this day, sees no more reason to prefer poetry to push-pin than Bentham did. To ask after the utility of works of art is not, as is generally thought, a legitimate form of philosophical skepticism; it is a form of cultural blackmail, and should probably be refused outright. In a healthy culture, the intrinsic value of works of art would be so obvious that it would never occur to anyone to need to justify their existence in terms of their usefulness. Ours, it goes without saying, is not a healthy culture, despite its obsession with physical and mental “wellness.” Yet since the utilitarian devil is already here, it seems discourteous not to ask him to dance.

    One may be tempted to invoke Mill’s distinction between higher and lower pleasures here, and declare that it ought to be a matter of perfect indifference to the person who has access to In Search of Lost Time that someone else spends their finite hours on the planet with the minimal but at least immediate gratifications of Colleen Hoover’s eleven New York Times bestsellers, with another installment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or doomscrolling Twitter. After all, Proust’s position in the culture seems secure enough to weather the negative externalities that the contractions of American reading habits and the regression of secondary and post-secondary education ruthlessly impose on the production, acquisition, and consumption of equally challenging but less-canonical works of fiction: both the Modern Library edition of In Search of Lost Time and the more recent omnibus translation edited by Prendergast for Penguin remain, for now, in print, and are slowly being supplemented by new volumes, such as James Greive’s and Brian Nelson’s new translations of Swann’s Way as the novel enters the public domain. 

    Broadening our scope beyond the individual and the particular media that she does or does not consume, however, it is worth noting that pleasure is also the legitimating principle of market society itself, which promises the satisfaction of consumer demand at every price point. This promise is offered in exchange not simply for a refusal to guarantee necessary social goods such as affordable housing, health care, and education, but also for alternate ways of conceiving of value, such as meaningfulness, sacredness, honor, duty, and which are harder to quantify and therefore trickier to price. Increasingly, the promise goes unfulfilled: culture, like other sectors of the economy, is tending toward monopolization and, to use a wonderful term coined by the journalist and science fiction author Cory Doctorow, enshittification; in the absence of competition, there is little incentive for producers to risk the pleasures of novelty and experimentation on audiences that can be counted to pay for recycling and iteration, producing boredom and reactionary gestures of protest, not fundamentally different, as Proust or Benjamin might have observed, from those that were seen in the era of Baudelaire. A society whose greatest good is pleasure, of which ours is merely the most efficient, creates a culture in which pleasure is subject, on a long enough timeline, to diminishing marginal returns. In any case, as McGurl has shown, the negative externality imposed by market society on even the most canonically secure work of literature remains temporal: “The sped-up culture that delivers that novel to your doorstep overnight is the same culture that deprives you of the time to read it.” As such, not even the most discriminating reader will fail to feel its effects.

    Why read Proust? The other answer typically given is: self-improvement. In different ways this is the claim Phyllis Rose and Alain de Botton, among others, make on behalf of In Search of Lost Time. (Even Prendergast, a more sophisticated reader, does not avoid it entirely: “Is Proust good for you? Might he even, in controlled doses, have a useful function…?”) For Rose, reading Proust is a matter of demonstrating one’s social status. A pure product of mid-century upward mobility, having progressed from the daughter of a lower-middle class shopkeeper in Long Island via Harvard, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the pre-conglomeration publishing industry to tenured faculty at Wesleyan College and via marriage to the Babar-cartoon fortune, Rose is astonishingly, even embarrassingly forthright about her identity as a consumer (“I want therefore I am. I am therefore I acquire”), her meritocratic metrics of value (“I would not have reached this level of achievement had I not made reading Proust the central business of my life”), and her extra-literary reasons for reading In Search of Lost Time. The final line of her memoir approvingly quotes her mother, who would have preferred her to have written something more commercial, coming to terms with her instead of writing about Proust: “She saw the book’s potential, if not for making money, then for asserting our family’s intellectual and educational superiority to certain of her acquaintances, about whom she confided, ‘She’s not one of our class dear. She doesn’t read Proust.’” 

    This is not simply snobbery as Benjamin defines it — “the consistent, organized, steely view of life from the chemically pure standpoint of the consumer”; it is also antiquated. Less than three decades after Rose’s Year of Reading Proust — whose frequent appearance as an epithet in her memoir never fails to remind me of the corporate-branded years in Infinite Jest—the class of persons for whom reading once functioned as a mode of social distinction no longer exists in America. That class, now operating under relatively straitened circumstances, may still read the handful of literary fiction books whose marketing campaigns have deep enough pockets to secure them buzz, but is now more likely to be found discussing so-called “prestige” television or the infotainment passed off by cable news networks as genuine civic engagement. Their economic superiors have long realized that far from being a prerequisite to enter the most rarified social circles, cultural literacy is actually an impediment to it. That reading fiction—not to speak of high literature—is simply “what one does” if one wants to consider oneself a “cultured” or “educated” member of the “elite” no longer has the same degree of motivational purchase on the aspirations and the self-fashioning of upper-middle-class Americans as it did in Rose’s generation.

    Not that a general-audience book on Proust is necessarily a barrier to commercial success, if Alain de Botton’s number one international bestseller How Proust Can Change Your Life, published the same year as Rose’s memoir, is any indication. De Botton tapped into the market for a notion of self-improvement that has proved more enduring among the upper-middle-class than cultural literacy: therapy. His short manual is divided into nine chapters, each of which begins with a how-to title (“How to Live Life Today,” “How to Be a Good Friend,” “How to Be Happy in Love,” etc.) and concludes with a “moral” or a “lesson” derived from the particular aspect of Proust’s life or work considered in it. That some of these precepts are mildly counter-intuitive — he asks, for example, how we can learn to “suffer successfully” and be “productively unhappy” rather than to avoid suffering altogether and achieve happiness — is a fig leaf placed on the attempt to flatter the reader into believing that they are not doing what they are in fact doing, namely, reading self-help.

    Since the Greeks, philosophy and therapy have always occupied the same spectrum, much to the discomfort and consternation of the practitioners of the former. No less than Plato or Epictetus, Proust, as we will see, has therapeutic designs on his reader. De Botton is not wrong about one thing: reading In Search of Lost Time may change your life. (It saved mine, after all.) But a book like De Botton’s is a useful illustration that the gulf between these two concepts of therapy is large enough to amount to a difference of kind. “Even the finest books deserve to be thrown aside,” De Botton writes in the last line of How Proust Can Change Your Life — a compassionate observation, perhaps, but does his book inspire readers to pick up Proust in the first place? Whereas many of the books in the Proust cottage industry are intended as supplements to the reading of In Search of Lost Time — as a map to the vast territory of the masterpiece to be consulted before visiting or as the enjoyable account of another person’s visit to the place one has just returned from — De Botton’s is clearly intended as a substitute for it. John Updike’s blurb on the back of my edition gives the game away: De Botton, he writes, “does us the service of rereading [Proust] on our behalf.” That “re” is the sign of a bad conscience; what he’s really saying is: De Botton has read Proust, so you don’t have to. 

    In this respect, How Proust Can Change Your Life belongs to the same family of books as Roger Shattuck’s, which recommends the parts of Proust that the reader can skip, or as Pierre Bayard’s amusing How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, where In Search of Lost Time is the primary example of a skimmable book. They are all book-length versions of Monty Python’s “All-England Summarize Proust Competition.” Here a self-help book functions as a kind of time-saving appliance or device: by repackaging Proust in a series of pre-digested lessons or morals, De Botton offers the “experience” of In Search of Lost Time in the time required to read 215 pages rather than 4,347. But this is time considered in its purely quantitative aspect, under the sign of market society, which treats efficiency, cost-cutting, and convenience as high virtues. As such, it is counter-productive; indeed, a waste of time. In Search of Lost Time is also, in its own way, a time-saving device, if saving is used in the sense of redemption (“saving one’s soul” rather than “saving money”) and its length is not incidental to how it functions. For Proust’s device to work, you must actually have the experience of reading it, from start to finish.    

     Proust gives his own answer to the question “why read Proust?” which incorporates the reader’s legitimate desires for both pleasure and self-improvement, without, however, reducing his novel and the time spent reading it to commodities whose potential value is interchangeable with that produced by anything else on the market. In the passage from Time Regained to which I referred in the opening, which few books on Proust neglect to quote, he writes:

    In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers the reader to enable him to discern what, without the book, he would have perhaps never experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.

    The book is both mirror and lamp. Proust’s optical instrument, as we have seen, works by inspiring the reader, through its extensive use of figurative language, to compare events in the novel to past events in her own life, which may have been forgotten; in other words, to stimulate the reader’s capacity for memory. It is crucial to mention that, for Proust, memory is not the experience of the past in the present, it is the experience of the past as the present, an impression of the “identity between the present and the past…so strong that the moment I was reliving actually seemed to be in the present.” He goes on to argue brilliantly that in the case of the mémoire involuntaire which he made famous, one is actually experiencing the putatively initial event for the first time, because it is only through memory that one comes to understand its significance in relation to all other events. “An experienced event is finite,” Benjamin writes, but “a remembered event is infinite, because it is only a key to everything that happened before it and after it.” Whereas finite time is, by definition, quantifiable, infinite time is not — and this is not because it goes on forever, but because no one but the person who experiences it can say how far into the past or the future it extends.

    For each reader, the recalled events will of necessity be personal and therefore different; yet at the same time every reader will have at least one set of recollections in common, namely, the ones the narrator describes in In Search of Lost Time: the famous sequence, for example, in which his memories are triggered by the uneven paving stones, the sound of a spoon against a plate, the feeling of a napkin, and the sight of George Sand’s François de Champi As anyone will immediately understand who consults the prologue to Proust’s Contra Sainte-Beuve — a hybrid of fiction and criticism that he wrote as he searched for the form of what would become his masterpiece — whose five pages contain in nuce many of the novel’s most famous episodes, In Search of Lost Time cannot be any shorter than it is, because in order for Proust’s optical instrument to simulate this experience of memory, enough time must have passed for the reader to forget their first encounters with the deceptively incidental details that Proust has seeded sub rosa in the earlier volumes for them finally to bloom into full significance in Time Regained. 

    The scene in which these recollections unfold — the narrator arrives late to the final party of the Princesse de Guermantes and is made to wait until a pause between the movements of the Vinteuil sonata permits her to enter the drawing room — is the fastest paced episode in the entire novel. It is not for nothing that it largely takes place in a library, since that is what the narrator compares the self to — a collection of forgotten days which memory takes from the shelf and dusts off. Crashing like wave after wave on narrator and reader alike, the series of recollections produces what can only be described as ecstasy. This is ecstasy not only in the sense of intense pleasure, but relatedly, in the original sense of the word, which was used primarily in the context of sacred or religious experience, ek-stasis, or standing outside oneself. Following Benjamin, Jameson notes that this doubly ecstatic experience is fundamentally temporal in nature: the narrator feels and the reader is made to feel along with him the rapture of standing outside time. Proust writes: “one minute freed from the order of time has recreated in us, in order to feel it, the man freed from the order of time.” 

    The order of time is biological: the always finite number of minutes afforded to each living being. To be freed from it, if only for a minute, allows one an intimation of immortality, the longing for which, Proust says, can only be removed by death itself. But the order of time is also — and at the same time — social: the temporal regime constructed by the particular political economy into which a biological self finds itself thrown. Born in 1871, in the year of the Paris Commune at the outset of the second industrial revolution, Proust belonged to one of the first generations to experience the transportation technologies, such as the railroad and the automobile, and the communications technologies, such as the telephone, about which he writes so memorably, whose abilities to compress time and space have culminated in our own vertiginous market society. From the point of view of market society, there is or ought to be no such thing as being freed from the order of time, that is, time freed from generating value for someone else, whether directly, through one’s work or one’s purchases, or indirectly, through the built environment in which one is involuntarily bombarded by advertisement or through the attentional and behavioral data that can be harvested for a profit whenever one is connected via computer, mobile phone, e-reader, or wearable to the internet.

    Just as everything about market society seems designed to get in the way of reading Proust, reading Proust gets in the way of participating in market society. As long as you buy it, Proust’s novel remains a commodity, but as long as you are reading it on paper — and reading yourself in the meantime — you are not generating further material profit. Indeed, while you are reading Proust you and your time are quite literally operating at a loss. In the grand scheme of things, regaining your time from the market may amount to a negligible act of resistance to it, but one could find a worse benchmark for what constitutes a free society. A free society will be one in which everyone, if they so choose, has the time to read In Search of Lost Time.

     

    Notes on a Dangerous Mistake

    Several groups of rightwing intellectuals hover around the Republican Party, defending a stark conservatism. But there is a very different group, definitely rightwing, that is equally disdainful of Republican conservatives and Democratic progressives — who are all at bottom, its members insist, liberals: classical free-market liberals or egalitarian liberals, it’s all the same. These ideological outliers call themselves “post-liberal,” and they aim at a radical transformation of American society. Their overweening ambition is based on a fully developed theology, Catholic integralism, but the political meaning of this theology has not yet been fully worked out or, better, not yet revealed. A small group of writers, mostly academics, constitute what they hope, and I hope not, is the vanguard of a new regime and a Christian society. They have mounted a steady assault on liberal individualism and the liberal state, but so far they haven’t had anything like enough to say about life in the post-liberal world — not enough to warrant a comprehensive critique. 

    So here, instead, is a series of critical vignettes dealing first with the style of post-liberal writing as displayed in the work of Sohrab Ahmari and then with the strange version of world history that Patrick Deneen asserts but never defends. My own defense of liberalism comes later, along with a critique of recent post-liberal writing on the Ukraine war and some worries about the cautiously reticent, but sometimes ominous, description of the post-liberal future that can be found in the books of Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule. For now, I ignore all the other post-liberals.

    Sohrab Ahmari, the leading non-academic among the post-liberals, makes his argument for “the wisdom of tradition” through stories of great men; only one woman and one married couple are included in the twelve chapters of his book The Unbroken Thread, which appeared in 2021. These are nicely told but highly contrived stories, with radical omissions and crucial questions left unanswered. Three examples will serve to show the tribulations of tradition. 

    Ahmari uses (the verb is right) Augustine to discuss the issue of God and politics. His story is focused on Augustine’s efforts to respond both to the rise of neo-paganism after the sack of Rome and to the Manichean heresy. The question that Ahmari poses is the great question of Augustinian politics: should Christians call on the secular authorities to use force against heretics and unbelievers? Augustine, with hesitation, ends by saying yes; Ahmari ends by saying…not quite yes. This is a common feature of post-liberal writing: just when Ahmari should show his hand, he covers his cards. I suppose that a defender of traditional wisdom, making his case in the United States today, can’t quite bring himself to call for religious persecution. His claim is simply that God “needs” politics — but exactly what is needed is left unspecified. Ahmari’s heart yearns for a strong Christian ruler who would set things right: “a godly servant ruler.” But his mind counsels prudence, and so he is unwilling to tell us exactly what the wisdom of tradition requires today. 

    Cardinal Newman is used by Ahmari to address the problem of critical thinking — which, from a traditional point of view, is indeed a problem. Should we think for ourselves? Should I follow my conscience? Late in his life, Newman responded to William Gladstone’s polemic against the doctrine of papal infallibility. Gladstone claimed that any Catholic who accepted the doctrine rendered himself incapable of thinking critically, unable to follow his conscience — and therefore not a useful citizen of a free state. Now remember that Newman had, after years of agonized reflection, followed his conscience and left the Church of England. Nonetheless, according to Ahmari, he now argued that conscience is not a matter for individual reflection; it is God’s truth implanted within us, and we need the help of churchly authority and Christian tradition to recognize the truth and understand what conscience requires. But then how did Newman manage to defy the authority and tradition of the Church of England? This seems an obvious question, which Ahmari doesn’t ask. Didn’t Anglicans think Newman a man of extravagant self-will? Surely he was guilty of thinking for himself. Why not, then, the rest of us? 

    Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is used by Ahmari to teach that God wants us to “take a day off.” Indeed, Heschel wrote eloquently about the importance of the Sabbath. But he wrote even more eloquently about prophetic Judaism, Hasidic spirituality (he was the scion of a great Hasidic lineage), and social justice. Ahmari has little to say about the last of these, though he does tell us that Heschel believed that “a God-centric…understanding was the only sure guarantee of social justice and human dignity.” This understanding led Heschel to a life of intense political activism in the course of which we learned, and I think he learned, that the “only” in Ahmari’s sentence doesn’t accurately describe the political world. Famously, Heschel marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., but the Jews who marched with him were not his fellow Hasidim. Reform rabbis marched with him and, in large numbers, secular Jews. The ones I knew did not have a God-centric understanding, though they were fiercely committed to social justice. And it should be noted that the fight for the forty-hour week — two days off! — was led by largely secular leftists. Of course, Heschel had, and Ahmari has, a clear view of how the day off should be spent. But only Ahmari, I suspect, would endorse the traditional wisdom that Sabbath observance should be enforced by the political authorities. Naturally, he doesn’t quite say this.

    In Why Liberalism Failed, published in 2018, Patrick Deneen provides us with a monocausal and idealist account of modern history. Liberal ideas are inevitably (a word he likes) the cause of all the achievements and all the pathologies of modernity — the pathologies most importantly. He never engages with any alternative accounts, never considers other possible histories of the troubles he describes. I want to take up just a few.

    The most remarkable omission is the Protestant Reformation, the whole of it, which is never mentioned in Deneen’s book. His standard contrast is between classical and Christian (specifically Catholic) values, on the one hand, and liberalism on the other, and this leaves no space for Protestantism, whose major leaders, Luther and Calvin, while certainly not liberals, anticipated, along with their followers, many of the liberal ideas that Deneen identifies and deplores. Consider just these three: the conscientious individual, who thinks for himself (and more dangerously, for herself); the “gathered” congregation, an entirely voluntary association; and the critique of hierarchy, the call for a “priesthood of all believers.” These three concepts are surely rooted in Christian values, though certainly not in Deneen’s values, since they lead (inevitably?) to the English revolution, the execution of the king, the proliferation of increasingly radical sects, Milton’s defense of divorce, Cromwell’s dictatorship, and the Puritans of New England who supported the American revolution — which was definitely a liberal project. Deneen could write a book, though he won’t, asking why Protestantism failed. 

    Modern science is also omitted, since Deneen recognizes no independent historical development; he seems to believe that science is the creation of presumptuous liberals and their ambition to “conquer nature.” This ambition, he insists, is radically new; he contrasts it with the classical and Christian understanding of, and “passive acquiescence” in, nature’s limits. Break with the limits and you get both natural and social disasters: climate change, pandemics, Big Pharma, genetic engineering, abortion. But has humanity ever chosen to live within nature’s limits? I don’t think that history can be read that way. The ancient Egyptians, for example, didn’t simply live with the Nile’s annual flooding; they built an elaborate irrigation system that required management and control — and produced more food, a growing population, the absolutism of the Pharaohs, the house of bondage, and the enslavement of the Israelites (not to mention locusts, darkness, waters turned to blood, etc.). The ancient Greeks were not content with the human ability to swim; they designed and built ships and conscripted rowers, which led to international trade, wars, the Athenian empire, the massacre of the men of Melos, and the foolish decision to invade Sicily. Even medieval Christians, not content with the body’s natural frailty, invented body armor and the longbow, making it possible for Christian knights to rescue maidens in distress — leading also to the brutalities of crusading warfare. None of this had anything to do with liberalism. 

    One specific form of modern science, medicine, is the cause of much of what Deneen laments. The enormous expansion of our capacity to prevent and heal disease has shifted the attention of most of us from eternity to longevity (another break with the classical and Christian sense of limits: see Ahmari on “what’s good about death”) and opened the way for a vast expansion of the earth’s population. Here is a major cause of the size and scope of the modern state — on which liberalism has been, if anything, a constraint. Deneen argues that individual freedom and the chaos that it creates leads inevitably to bureaucratic regulation and statism, but the sheer number of individuals must also be a factor. Of course, if they all knew their place, and stayed in it, died at three score and ten (or, better, long before), thought only about eternity while they were alive, and accepted the authority of the Church — well, a smaller state might suffice. But Deneen’s description of the small communities and local commitments that post-liberalism would require makes no room for our contemporary millions. In any case, localism has had a short life among the post-liberals.

    One more omission from Deneen’s history: he treats capitalism as a liberal creation. Capitalism, in Deneen’s telling, was the inevitable result of what Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan calls the individual’s unconstrained and unlimited “pursuit of power after power.” Not so fast. In truth, those words perfectly fit, and were intended by Hobbes to fit, the contending patricians of republican Rome and the feudal lords of Christian Europe. In any case, capitalism surely has a history of its own. I don’t mean to commit myself to a monocausal materialism, only to insist that material factors — class conflict, available technology, ownership of land and capital — played a part in producing the modern economic system. Max Weber thought that Protestant theology — most importantly the (definitely illiberal) doctrine of predestination — also had a lot to do with the success of capitalism. It provided a motive for hard work and profit-seeking, which liberalism does not, and a doctrine that fits the mentality of what I still think of as “the rising bourgeoisie.” Now consider Marx’s famous description of the effects of capitalist activity: “All fixed fast-frozen relations with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away…All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…” This is pretty close to Deneen’s account of what liberalism does. Marx provides a fairly plausible alternative. 

    If I were writing a different article, I would argue that many of the ills of American society derive from an unregulated and radically illiberal capitalism. Unexpectedly, Ahmari, in his newest book, Tyranny, Inc., makes exactly this argument with a series of vivid stories about capitalist predation. He is now a post-neo-liberal and even a social democrat. We are never told how all this fits with the “wisdom of tradition.” 

    Very little is said about the past in post-liberal texts. Deneen does acknowledge that the world before liberalism was a time of “extensive practices of slavery, bondage, inequality, disregard for the contributions of women, and arbitrary forms of hierarchy and the application of law.” But he has little to say about these “practices” and less to say about the euphemistic “disregard” of women’s “contributions,” which he doesn’t bother to describe. More importantly, he offers no explanation of how all these evils co-existed with “classical and Christian thought and practice,” supposedly dominant in the pre-liberal age. Again and again, post-liberals contrast a classical and Christian age of political order, strong families, communities living within natural limits, individuals who respect tradition and recognize authority — with a destructive liberalism. But then they decline to give us what we surely need if we are to accept their account, which is a concrete historical description of this lost world. 

    Consider a few key moments. I will focus on family life, since it is a central contention of all the post-liberals that liberalism has destroyed the family. Indeed, this focus is common among opponents of liberalism the world over. Thus Vladimir Putin, in a recent decree on spiritual and moral values, denounced the American and Western “destruction of the traditional family through the promotion of nontraditional sexual relations.” 

    What traditional family?

    — The family in ancient Athens was certainly strong: women were harshly subordinated and even secluded; they had no presence in the public life of the city. Men, by contrast, were out and about, politically active, sexually free. Deneen is a fierce opponent of sexual freedom (which he takes to be the inevitable product of liberal individualism), but perhaps only when it extends to women. In any case, he never tells us about the boy prostitutes and their male clients who somehow coexisted with classical philosophy.

    — The accounts of family life among patricians in the Roman republic and, later on, inside the imperial palace suggest a society in which it is your relatives who kill you. The post-liberals disapprove, I am sure, but they don’t discuss. How was this sort of thing possible given classical ideas about self-restraint? The use and abuse of male and female slaves was also, it seems, consistent with classical family values.

    — Family life in medieval Europe was shaped by the feudal hierarchy, which determined the everyday misery of the Christian men and women who lived at its lowest level. The serfs were offered eternity, but their lives were brutal and short. Their families were radically insecure. Women died in childbirth in large numbers, and men remarried, mostly younger women, girls, really, who rarely chose their husbands and were instantly pregnant, and pregnant again. The high rate of pregnancy wasn’t a sign of the pre-liberal commitment to what Adrian Vermeule calls the “traditional multi-generational family”; it followed from the even higher rate of infant death. The women certainly didn’t have time to think about divorce, which wasn’t thinkable anyway (and, according to the post-liberals, shouldn’t have been); many families were already “broken,” many children abandoned by impoverished and desperate parents. (Remember the Children’s Crusade.) It is hard to imagine these families as a happy alternative to life under liberalism. And please consider the droit de seigneur, the feudal lord’s claim on the virginity of any of his serfs’ daughters. This is a natural feature of the feudal hierarchy, and definitely an assault on family values. I am sure that Christian theologians condemned the practice, if they ever thought about it, but so far as I can tell parish priests did nothing to oppose it — they were underlings themselves in a parallel hierarchy. 

    — The family that post-liberals love is not the family of the classical age or of medieval Christendom. In fact, it is the bourgeois family, which was the creation of eighteenth and nineteenth century liberals. Consider the critique of aristocratic libertinism, the end of arranged marriage, the possibility of romantic love, the patriarchal home that was every man’s castle — all this was liberalism at work. The problem for post-liberals is that the work goes on. The stereotypical bourgeois family included an employed man and a woman at home, caring for at least two children. Actually, large numbers of women worked outside the home — on farms, for example (post-liberals like to celebrate the family farm), as secretaries and teachers, and in the sweatshops of the garment trades. And since in liberal times women are allowed to think for themselves, they began to seek wider roles, not only in the economy but also in the polity. Deluded by liberalism, Deneen writes, they sought “emancipation from their biology” — hence (inevitably) divorce, broken families, and abandoned children. I assume that men who share in the housework and sometimes look after the children have also forsaken their biological destiny. Yes, the liberal/bourgeois family was better than any of the families we know about in the age when classical and Christian values were dominant. It’s just that the post-liberal conception of “biology” is not the end of the story.

    Please note that what I have written above about classical and medieval times is a fairly generous account of the history that post-liberals ignore. I didn’t say anything about the Crusades or the Inquisition, both of which were surely the direct consequence of established Christian (Catholic) values. Nor have I tried to imagine myself in medieval Europe, a Jew expelled or murdered in the name of religion. Perhaps post-liberals would claim that all this was a radical distortion of Christian charity. But if that’s right (and I acknowledge the importance of charity in Christian thought), then why can’t liberals say that Deneen isn’t describing the consequences of liberal ideology but rather the distortions of it? (This assumes that his description is accurate, which it often isn’t.) In any case, the post-liberals owe us a frank accounting of everything — including all the ugliness — that went along with classical and Christian thought and practice. Actually, a reader of Vermeule might think that something like a religiously inquisitive state is what some of the post-liberals have in mind (see below) — though there must be liberal post-liberals who would shrink from that.

    There is something very strange about the vehemence of the post-liberal critique of liberalism. Consider these sentences from Deneen:

    Unlike the visibly authoritarian regimes that arose in dedication to advancing the ideologies of fascism and communism, liberalism is less visibly ideological and only surreptitiously remakes the world in its image. In contrast to its crueler competitor ideologies, liberalism is more insidious… 

    Let’s parse this. Liberalism is an almost, not quite, invisible ideology, less cruel than fascism and communism (but cruel enough?) that insidiously advances its authoritarian project of remaking the world. Since Deneen lives in this remade world, we can examine some of its features. The Catholic university where he teaches benefits from tax exemptions and federal grants from the insidiously liberal state. He says what he likes in his classes and publishes uncensored books with a major university press. If he lectures at another university and is shouted down by hostile students (as he might be), it is liberals like me who rush to his defense in the name of free speech and academic freedom, which are historically liberal values. He has never had to worry about the secret police knocking on his door in the middle of the night. He and all the other post-liberals write for magazines that are delivered across the country by the state-run post office. He has a passport and is free to visit Orban’s Hungary and return whenever he likes. He may be required to wear a mask in a time of pandemic, but he is free to organize a protest against this example of liberal authoritarianism. 

    Fascism and communism are indeed more cruel.

    For all that, there certainly is much that is wrong with American life today, and many of the things that the post-liberals criticize require criticism: extreme inequality, the ravaged ecosystem, high rates of drug addiction and suicide, the “left behind” communities of the Rust Belt, meritocratic arrogance, and more. All this is, according to Deneen, caused by liberalism, but Ahmari ascribes much of it to a predatory capitalism and argues for strong unions and something like a New Deal state. His new book, dedicated to Deneen and Vermeule (among others), suggests the possibility of a post-liberal alliance with union activists and green militants. But I find it hard to imagine that he and his friends could ever work closely with secular leftists, as liberation theologians and worker priests did in their time. 

    Why are they unlikely to imitate those exemplary Christians? Liberal egalitarians believe in and are fighting for a society of free and equal individuals. Post-liberals do not aim at that kind of freedom or equality. Here is their central argument: free individuals are not really free unless they freely decide to do the right things — unless, writes Ahmari, their conscience is guided by the Church. “Liberty,” Vermeule insists, “is no mere power of arbitrary choice, but the faculty of choosing the common good.” But who defines the common good? Not us, arguing among ourselves.  Ordinary men and women, you and I, won’t know or choose the common good unless we are guided from above by a new elite committed to traditional — classical and Christian — values. We have no right to get it wrong. So the hierarchies created, post-liberals claim, by liberalism must give way to a new and more simple hierarchy of the wise who know and the simple who don‘t, the few and the many, “the great and the ordinary” — a cadre of men (and women?) with the right values at the top and a mass of good-natured commoners looking up. The problem with liberal individuals, of course, is that they don’t look up for guidance and instruction. Here is a liberal tradition: not looking up. 

    In a new book published late last year called Regime Change, Deneen provides a concise description of the post-liberal future:

    What is needed is a mixing of the high and the low, the few and the many, in which the few consciously take on the role of aristoi, a class of people who, through supporting and elevating the common good that undergirds human flourishing, are worthy of emulation and, in turn, elevates the lives, aspirations, and vision of ordinary people. 

    This new elite, Deneen believes, will be brought to power by a new political force: the world-wide populist opposition to the rule of “gentry liberals and the laptop class.” He acknowledges that “this movement from below is untutored and ill led,” but it holds great political promise. Its members are the “many”; Deneen ‘23 regularly calls them the “working class,” a term that I don’t believe Deneen ‘18 ever used. They are working men, preferably self-employed, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and stay-at-home women, the embodiment of traditional values: family and faith. They have supported Donald Trump, Deneen ‘23 says, but he hopes that they are waiting for the aristoi.

    The coming aristocrats are never given proper names, but I assume they are the post-liberal intellectuals. Like any vanguard, its members are the people who understand its necessity. They will tutor the working class but also, they promise, be restrained by its common sense. Deneen sometimes sounds like a social democrat, describing the critical role of the working class; he argues for strong unions (and, a little mysteriously, strong guilds) and a decentralization of the liberal state. Ahmari is an actual social democrat and a supporter of the labor movement, but if he stands with his fellow post-liberals, he must believe that when they come to power the voice of labor will mostly be advisory — to remind the aristoi of traditional values and ordinary virtues. Deneen is amazingly patronizing toward the newly discovered workers.

    We are never told how the working class might actually exercise political power. Vermeule writes instead that the influence of the lower orders, the ordinary folk, will work through representation and consultation — it is “what one might call democracy without voting” (Vermeule’s italics). Deneen ‘23 is equally explicit about the liberal idea of government by the consent of the governed. He argues for a “preliberal” idea: “the consent of a community to govern itself through the slow accumulation and sedimentation of norms and practices over time.” This is far preferable to the actual agreement of “deracinated” men and women (like you and me) as in “the liberal social contract tradition.” Note the unintended concession that this is a tradition. Ahmari could have written about it in a chapter focusing, say, on John Locke or John Rawls. That thread is unbroken. 

    Democracy without voting doesn’t sound democratic. We can get a better idea of the post-liberal view of democracy by looking at what Ahmari and Deneen have written about the Ukraine war. Sometimes they are simple isolationists, as when Ahmari calls Ukraine “a country long acknowledged not to implicate core US interests.” But he himself is strongly engaged. He thinks Ukraine belongs, by nature or destiny, in the Russian sphere of influence. “The rights of nations,” he writes, “are circumscribed by geography, history, economics, chance. Above all, by power… Ukraine’s ‘friends’ sadly led her to believe she could escape these laws.” (I immediately thought: the rights of women are circumscribed by nature and by power. Feminists sadly led them to believe…) Ahmari signed a petition that called the Ukrainians “victims of the [Western] attempt to bog down Moscow in a long, devastating insurgency.” “Victims” is the most generous term for the Ukrainians that I have found in post-liberal tweets, articles, and interviews. For Deneen, Ukraine is a “pawn of American gnostic dynamics” (I will have to explain that). What is missing in post-liberal writing is any recognition of the Ukrainians as political agents, who have created a democratic state and are now fighting to defend it. 

    Patrick Deneen has written a long essay, inspired by one of Eric Voegelin’s books, on the role of gnosticism in the Ukraine war. Voegelin was a German-American political philosopher who died in 1985 and was interested in the ontological implications of modern ideologies. The gnostics were Christian heretics who denied Augustine’s distinction between the City of God and the City of Man and sought a messianic transformation of the earthly city. Voegelin despised Gnosticism for its pretension to a privileged and irrefutable apprehension of sacred knowledge and its impatience to act politically on this revelation, and he devoted many writings to finding its traces in modern politics. He believed that fascists and communists were modern secular gnostics. Now Deneen weirdly adds American liberals to that group. “What was once a ‘reformist left’ is today a radicalized messianic party advancing its gnostic vision amid the ruins of Christian civilization.” This messianic party is one side, the Western side, of the Ukraine war. On the other side, also described in Voegelin’s terms, stands the Russian Orthodox Church, a pagan, that is, civic or national version of Christianity, led by secular authorities, like the czar and now the president.  Deneen does not explicitly choose sides in this conflict; he would prefer an Augustinian intervention. But all his anger is directed against the alleged liberal gnostics.

    My favorite line in Deneen’s epic essay comes when he warns the Ukrainians that the American messianists will in the end discard “Ukraine’s blue and yellow for a rainbow flag.” Think about that. Surely gay Ukrainians are already flying the rainbow flag, and they would rightly deny that it is in any way incompatible with the national flag. I don’t think that Deneen is lost here or that he misunderstands. His vision, which he assumes “ordinary” Ukrainians share, is of a divinely sanctioned society of pious, right-thinking heterosexual men and women—and no visible others. A liberal democracy is more inclusive; it allows for, encourages, a pluralism of flags.

    Though the post-liberals have little to say about working class activism, they have a lot to say about the authority of the new elite. Here it is important to notice a break between the accounts of post-liberalism in Deneen ‘18 and Deneen ‘23. In the first book, Deneen offers us an escapist picture of the future that he hopes for: post-liberals will leave hegemonic liberalism and the authoritarian state behind; they will live together in small communities, in tight families, accepting nature’s limits, following the old classical and Christian traditions. This is the  “Benedict Option.” No conscientious individuals, no questing scientists, no capitalist entrepreneurs, no intrusive state bureaucrats, and also no social gospel and no Christian involvement in the larger society — a kind of backward-looking, inwardly focused, secessionist communitarianism. More recently, in his 2023 book, written perhaps under the influence of the openly statist Vermeule, Deneen brings the intrusive bureaucrats back. What matters, it turns out, is that they are now true aristocrats, men (and women?) who are committed to classical and Christian values. Given what Ahmari calls “godly servant rulers,” everything else follows.

    Deneen ‘23 argues that the “regime change” he seeks “must begin with the raw assertion of political power by a new generation of political actors inspired by an ethos of common good conservatism.” Vermeule, in his recent book Common Good Constitutionalism, gives us a pretty clear sense of what that raw assertion would look like. He provides a strong defense of the administrative state (when it is in the right hands) — which includes a list of the liberal constraints on state power that he means to leave behind. For example: the liberal axiom “that the enforcement of public morals and of public piety is foreign to our constitutional order.” For example: the libertarian assumption “that government is forbidden to judge the quality and moral worth of public speech.” For example: the liberal idea that good government should “aim at maximizing individual autonomy or minimizing the abuse of power.” Instead, he writes, the aim should be “to ensure that the ruler has both the authority and the duty to rule well” — that is, to enforce public piety and regulate public speech (and prevent abortion, ban gay marriage, encourage “traditional” families and enthusiastic reproduction). 

    What would life be like for “ordinary” people in the post-liberal age? Everyone who has written about Deneen, Vermeule, and company agrees that they are disturbingly vague about this. But even ordinary readers can make out a rough picture of what post-liberalism would mean for you and me. Looking up, accepting the guidance of the aristoi, we would lead simple, happy lives, working (for a living wage, so that women can stay at home), praying, raising lots of children. Deneen likes the Hungarian policy of giving a lifetime tax exemption to any woman with four or more children. If we ever speak in public, we would, freely, say all the right things. Our piety would have the benefit of state support. We would find only the right books in the public library (the aristoi would probably have to read more widely, for the common good). We wouldn’t have to bother to vote to remind the aristoi of our ordinary virtues. 

    We would have an associational life beyond the family, in clubs, unions, guilds, and corporations. “Subsidiarity” is an important Catholic doctrine, which defends the independence of these associations but also calls for their integration in a higher unity. Vermeule emphasizes this last point. Sometimes, he writes, these associations fail “to carry out their work in an overall social scheme that serves the common good.” This constitutes a “state of exception” (the concept comes from the fascist German philosopher Carl Schmitt) and “requires extraordinary intervention by the highest level of public authority.” So we will have to be extremely careful about what we do in the unions that Ahmari supports. Looking up, we will probably endorse the social scheme proposed by our betters.

    I wrote at the beginning that I would provide my own defense of liberalism. The description above of the post-liberal state and society — that is my defense of liberalism. Individual choice, legal and social equality, critical thinking, free speech, vigorous argument, meaningful political engagement: these are the obvious and necessary antidotes to post-liberal authoritarianism. Above all, we must treasure the right to be wrong. The post-liberals are actually exercising that right. They shouldn’t be allowed to take it away from the rest of us.

    Saudi Arabia: The Chimera of A Grand Alliance

    Even alliances between countries that share similar cultures and rich, intersecting histories can be acrimonious. France and Israel, for example, provoke vivid and contradictory sentiments for many Americans. Franco-American ties are routinely strained. No one in Washington ever believed that Charles de Gaulle’s nuclear independence, guided by the principles of tous azimuts, shoot in any direction, and dissuasion du faible au fort, deterrence of the strong by the weak, meant that France might try to intimidate the United States. But there were moments when it wasn’t crystal clear whether Paris, free from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, might harmfully diverge from Washington in a confrontation with the Soviet Union. Still, even when things have been ugly, quiet and profound military and intelligence cooperation continued with the French, almost on a par with the exchanges between Washington, London, and Canberra. It didn’t hurt that a big swath of affluent Americans have loved Paris and the sunnier parts of France for generations, and that French and American universalism essentially speak the same language. These things matter. 

    The United States has sometimes been furious at Israel — no other ally has, so far as we know, run an American agent deep inside the U.S. government hoovering up truckloads of highly classified information. Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, much disliked and denounced by various American governments, is probably permanent: setting aside the Israeli right’s revanchism, the proliferation of ever-better ballistic weaponry and drones negates any conceivable good faith that might exist in the future between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, who never seem to be able to check their own worst impulses. Geography is destiny: Israel simply lacks the physical (and maybe moral) depth to not intrude obnoxiously into the lives of Palestinians. The Gaza war has likely obliterated any lingering Israeli indulgence towards the Palestinian people — what used to be called, before the Intifadas eviscerated the Israeli left, “risks for peace.” An ever larger slice of the Democratic Party is increasingly uncomfortable with this fate: the rule of (U.S.-subsidized) Westerners over a non-Western, mostly Muslim, people. But the centripetal forces — shared democratic and egalitarian values, intimate personal ties between the American and Israeli political and commercial elites, a broader, decades-old American emotional investment in the Jewish state, a common suspicion of the Muslim Middle East, and a certain Parousian philo-Semitism among American evangelicals — have so far kept in check the sometimes intense official hostility towards Israel and the distaste among so much of the American intelligentsia. 

    None of this amalgam of culture, religion, and history, however, works to reinforce relations between the United States and Islamic lands. Senior American officials, the press, and think tanks often talk about deep relationships with Muslim Middle Eastern countries, the so-called “moderate Arab states,” of which Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia are the most favored. Presidents, congressmen, diplomats, and spooks have certainly had soft spots for Arab potentates. The Hashemites in Jordan easily win the contest for having the most friends across the Israel divide in Washington: sympathizing with the Palestinian cause, if embraced too ardently, could destroy the Hashemites, who rule over sometimes deeply disgruntled Palestinians. American concern for the Palestinian cause rarely crosses the Jordan River. (Neither does even more intense European concern for the Palestinians intrude into their relations with the Hashemite monarchy.) 

    The Hashemites are witty enough, urbane enough, and sufficiently useful to consistently generate sympathy and affection. Even when King Hussein went to war against Israel in 1967 or routinely sided with Saddam Hussein, his style and his manner (and I’m-really-your-friend conversations with CIA station chiefs and American ambassadors) always encouraged Washington to forgive him his sins. The Hashemites, like the Egyptian military junta, have routinely, if not always reliably, done our dirty work when Washington needed some terrorist or other miscreant held and roughly interrogated. Such things matter institutionally, building bonds and debts among officials. 

    But little cultural common ground binds Americans to even the most Westernized Arabs. Arabists, once feared by Israel and many Jewish Americans, always had an impossible task: they had to use realist arguments — shouldn’t American interests prefer an alliance with twenty-two Arab countries rather than with a single Jewish one? — without underlying cultural support. They had to argue dictatorship over democracy or belittle Israel’s democracy enough (“an apartheid state”) to make it seem equally objectionable. Outside of American universities, the far-left side of Congress, the pages of The Nation, Mother Jones, and the New York Review of Books, and oil-company boardrooms, it hasn’t worked — yet. Too many Americans have known Israelis and visited the Holy Land. And too many are viscerally discomfited by turbans and hijabs. Culture — the bond that rivals self-interest — just isn’t that fungible.

    Even the Turks, the most Westernized of Muslims, didn’t have a large fan club in America when the secular Kemalists reigned in Ankara — outside of the Pentagon and the Jewish-American community, which deeply appreciated Turkey’s engagement with Israel. The Turks’ democratic culture never really blossomed under the Kemalists, who couldn’t fully shake their fascist (and Islamic) roots. The American military still retains a soft spot for the Turks — they fought well in Korea, and their military, the southern flank of NATO, has a martial ethic and a level of competence far above any Arab army; and they have continuously allowed the Pentagon to do things along the Turkish littoral, openly and secretly, against the Soviets and the Russians. 

    Yet their American fan club has drastically shrunk as the Turkish government, under the guidance of the philo-Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has re-embraced its Ottoman past, enthusiastically used state power against the opposition and the press, and given sympathy and some support to Arab Islamic militants, among them Hamas. The Turks have pummeled repeatedly Washington’s Kurdish allies in Syria (who are affiliated with Ankara’s deadly foe, the terrorism-fond Kurdistan Workers Party). More damning, Erdoğan purchased Russian S-400 ground-to-air missiles, compromising its part in developing and purchasing America’s most advanced stealth fighter-bomber, the F-35. The Pentagon, always Turkey’s most reliable ally in Washington, feels less love than it used to feel.

     No great European imperial power ever really integrated Muslim states well into their realms. Great Britain and France did better than Russia and Holland; the Soviet Union did better than Russia. With imperial self-interest illuminating the way, the British did conclude defensive treaties with allied-but-subservient Muslim lands — the Trucial States and Egypt–Sudan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — that could greatly benefit the natives. The emirs in the Gulf, once they realized that they couldn’t raid Indian shipping without fierce retribution, accepted, sometimes eagerly, British protection, grafting it onto the age-old Gulf customs of dakhala and zabana — finding powerful foreign patrons. The emirates needed protection from occasionally erupting militant forces from the peninsula’s highlands — the Wahhabi warriors of the Saud family.  

    The British, however, failed to protect their most renowned clients, the Hashemites, in their native land, the Hijaz in Arabia, after wistfully suggesting during World War I that the Hashemites might inherit most of the Near East under Great Britain’s dominion. King Hussein bin Ali had proved obstinate in accepting Jews in Palestine and the French in Syria. Britain switched its patronage to the Nejd’s Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud. Backed by the formidable Ikhwan, the Brothers, the Wahhabi shock troops who had a penchant for pillaging Sunni Muslims and killing Shiite ones, Ibn Saud conquered the Hijaz, home to Mecca and Medina and the Red Sea port of Jeddah, in 1925. Checked by the Royal Air Force in Iraq and the Royal Navy in the Persian Gulf, Saudi jihadist expansion stopped. In 1929 Ibn Saud gutted the Ikhwan, who had a hard time accepting the post-World-War-I idea of nation-states and borders, and created more conventional military forces to defend his family and realm. In 1932 he declared the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The dynasty’s Hanbali jurisprudence remained severe by the standards enforced in most of the Islamic world, but common Sunni praxis and political philosophy held firm: rulers must follow the holy law, but they have discretion in how they interpret and enforce it; in practice, kings and princes could sometimes kick clerics and the sharia to the ground when exigencies required. 

    Since Britain’s initial patronage, the Saudis officially have remained wary of foreigners, even after the 1950s when the royal family started allowing thousands of them in to develop and run the kingdom. Ibn Saud put it succinctly when he said “England is of Europe, and I am a friend of the Ingliz, their ally. But I will walk with them only as far as my religion and honor will permit.” He might have added that he appreciated the power of the RAF against the Ikhwan on their horses and camels. After 1945, Ibn Saud and his sons sought American protection and investment. They saw that Britain was declining; it was also massively invested in Iran. The modern Middle East has been an incubator of ideologies toxic to monarchies. The three Arab heavyweights of yesteryear — Baathist Iraq, Baathist Syria, and Nasserite Egypt — were all, in Saudi eyes, ambitious predators. The Soviet Union lurked over the horizon, feeding these states and, as bad, Arab communists and other royalty-hating leftists who then had the intellectual high ground in the Middle East. But there was an alternative. 

    American power was vast, Americans loved oil, and America’s democratic missionary zeal didn’t initially seem to apply to the Muslim Middle East, where American intrusion more often checked, and usually undermined, European imperial powers without egging on the natives towards democracy. (George W. Bush was the only American president to egregiously violate, in Saudi eyes, this commendable disposition.) American oilmen and their families came to Saudi Arabia and happily ghettoized themselves in well-organized, autonomous, well-behaved communities. The American elite hardly produced a soul who went native: no T.E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, or Harry St. John Bridger Philby — passionate, linguistically talented, intrepid Englishmen who adopted local causes, sometimes greatly disturbing the natives and their countrymen back home. A nation of middlebrow pragmatic corporations, backed up by a very large navy, Americans seemed ideal partners for the Saudi royals, who were always willing to buy friends and “special relationships.” As Fouad Ajami put it in The Dream Palace of the Arabs, “The purchase of Boeing airliners and AT&T telephones were a wager that the cavalry of the merchant empire would turn up because it was in its interest to do so.”

    But Americans could, simply by the size of their global responsibilities and strategies, be unsettling. In Crosswinds, Ajami’s attempt to peel back the layers of Saudi society, he captures the elite’s omnipresent trepidation, the fear of weak men with vast wealth in a region defined by violence:

    “The Saudis are second-guessers,” former secretary of state George Shultz said to me in a recent discussion of Saudi affairs. He had known their ways well during his stewardship of American diplomacy (1982–1989). This was so accurately on the mark. It was as sure as anything that the Saudis lamenting American passivity in the face of Iran would find fault were America to take on the Iranians…. In a perfect world, powers beyond Saudi Arabia would not disturb the peace of the realm. The Americans would offer protection, but discreetly; they would not want Saudi Arabia to identify itself, out in the open, with major American initiatives in the Persian Gulf or on Arab–Israeli peace. The manner in which Saudi Arabia pushed for a military campaign against Saddam Hussein only to repudiate it when the war grew messy, and its consequences within Iraq unfolding in the way they did, is paradigmatic. This is second-guessing in its purest.

    Saudi Arabia has had only one brief five-year period, from 1973 to 1978, when the Middle East (Lebanon excepted) went more or less the way that the royal family wanted. They weren’t severely threatened, their oil wealth had mushroomed, internal discontent had not metastasized (or at least was not visible to the royal family) and everybody — Arabs, Iranians, Americans, Soviets, and Europeans — listened to them respectfully. In 1979, when the Iranian revolution deposed the Shah, and Sunni religious militancy put on muscle, and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the golden moment ended. Enemies multiplied. Since then, as Nadav Safran put it in Saudi Arabia, The Ceaseless Quest for Security “the Saudis did not dare cast their lot entirely with the United States in defiance of all the parties that opposed it, nor could they afford to rely exclusively on regional alliances and renounce the American connection altogether in the view of the role it might play in various contingencies…the leadership …endeavored to muddle its way through on a case-by-case basis. The net result was that the American connection ceased to be a hub of the Kingdom’s strategy and instead became merely one of several problematic relationships requiring constant careful management.” 

     Which brings us to the current Saudi crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the country — easily the most detested Saudi royal in the West since the kingdom’s birth. With the exception of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who is the most indefatigable Middle Eastern dictator since World War II, MBS is the most consequential autocrat in the region. And the prince made a proposal to America — a proposal that may survive the Gaza war, which has reanimated anti-Zionism and constrained the Gulf Arab political elite’s decade-old tendency to deal more openly with the Jewish state. To wit: he is willing to establish an unparalleled tight and lucrative relationship with Washington, and let bygones be bygones — forget the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and all the insults by Joe Biden — so long as America is willing to guarantee Saudi Arabia’s security, in ways more reliable than in the past, and provide Riyadh the means to develop its own “civilian” nuclear program. Saudi Arabia would remain a major arms-purchaser and big-ticket commercial shopper and a reliable oil producer (the prince is a bit vague on exactly what Saudi Arabia would do with its oil that it isn’t doing now or, conversely, what it might not do in the future if Riyadh were to grow angry). And the Saudis would establish diplomatic relations with Jerusalem — clearly the pièce de résistance in his entreaty with the United States. With the Gazan debacle, the appeal of MBS’ pitch will increase for Israelis and Americans, who will seek any and all diplomatic means to turn back the anti-American and anti-Zionist tide.

    MBS and the Jews is a fascinating subject. It is not atypical for Muslim rulers, even those who sometimes say unkind things about Jews, to privately solicit American, European, and Israeli Jews. Having Jews on the brain is now fairly common in the Islamic world, even among Muslims who aren’t anti-Semites. Imported European anti-Semitism greatly amped up Islam’s historic suspicions of Judaism: in the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad is clearly disappointed by the Jewish refusal to recognize the legitimacy, the religious continuity, of his calling, which led to the slaughter of an Arabian Jewish tribe, the Banu Qurayza. Dissolve to the Holocaust, the creation of Israel, the wars and their repeated Arab defeats, the centrality of Israel in American and Soviet Middle Eastern foreign policy, the prominence of Jewish success in the West, especially in Hollywood, the constant chatter among Western Christians about Jews — all came together to give Al-Yahud an unprecedented centripetal eminence in the modern Islamic Middle East. 

    When MBS came to the United States in 2018, he and his minions engaged in extensive Jewish outreach. The prince admires Jewish accomplishment. His representatives are similarly philo-Semitic. The head of the World Muslim League, Muhammad bin Abdul Karim Issa, sometimes sounds as if he could work for B’nai B’rith International. Not that long ago, before 9/11, the League, an official organ of the Saudi state, pumped a lot of money into puritanical (Salafi) missionary activity, competing with the “secular” Egyptian establishment and the clerical regime in Tehran as the most ardent and well-funded proliferators of anti-Semitism among Muslims. So it is intriguing that MBS, whose father long had the Palestinian dossier at the royal court, has developed what appears to be a sincere and, at least for now, non-malevolent interest in Jews. 

    One suspects that the prince sees a certain religious and cultural affinity with Jews: Judaism and Islam are juristically and philosophically much closer to each other than Christianity and Islam. MBS is sufficiently well-educated — he has a law degree from King Saud University — to know this; he has now traveled enough, and met enough Jews around the world, to feel it. Nearly half of the Jews in Israel came from the Middle East.  The other half — the Ashkenazi, or as Bernard Lewis more accurately described them, the Jews of Christendom — often saw themselves, before arriving in Zion, as a Middle Eastern people in exile. Here is a decent guess about MBS’ reasoning: if the Jews, a Middle Eastern people now thoroughly saturated with modern (Western) ideas, could become so accomplished, then Saudi Muslims could, too. The Jewish experience — and association with Jews — might hold the keys to success. 

    There is a very long list of Muslim rulers from the eighteenth century forward, who, recognizing the vast chasm in accomplishment between Western (and now Westernized Asian) and Islamic lands, have tried to unlock the “secrets” of foreign power and success. Oil-rich Muslim rulers have tried to buy progress with petroleum profits. MBS certainly isn’t novel in his determination to make his own country “modern.” His audacity, even when compared against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who aspired to make Iran “the Germany of the Middle East,” is impressive. There is the prospective giant metal tube in the northwest corner of the country, which, according to the prince’s NEOM vision (“neo” from the Greek and “m” from the Arabic mustaqbal, future), will one day hold upwards of nine million people in a verdant paradise where everyone has the Protestant work ethic and the air-conditioning never breaks down. This is the dreamscape of an Arab prince who is not intellectually shackled by the rhythms and the customs of his homeland. He is building a vast resort complex on the Red Sea, already under construction, which is also being funded from the sovereign wealth fund because Western and Asian bankers remain dubious about its profitability. A dozen five-star luxury resorts, dependent on visiting affluent Europeans, will have to allow topless bathers and a lot of alcohol if they have any chance of making money; thousands of lower-class Saudi men — not imported foreign labor — will in theory keep these resorts running. 

    The prince is searching for the keys to unleash Saudi Arabia’s non-oil potential — using prestigious Western consultancy firms that promise to bring greater productivity and efficiency to gross national product. He is trying to do what every significant Muslim ruler has done since Ottoman sultans realized they could no longer win on the battlefield against Christians: grow at home greater curiosity, talent, and industry. 

    Unlike the Arab elites in the lands that started seriously Westernizing in the nineteenth century and have since seen their countries racked and fractured by foreign ideologies, brutal authoritarian rulers, rebellions, and civil and sectarian wars, MBS appears to be an optimist. Under his firm guidance, he believes that Saudi Arabia can leapfrog from being the archetypal orthodox Islamic state to a self-sustaining, innovative, entrepreneurial, tech-savvy, well-educated powerhouse. Ajami, the finest chronicler of the Arab world’s misery, was deeply curious about Saudi Arabia because it was the last frontier, a land with considerable promise that had not yet embraced enough modernity, in all the wrong ways, to cock it up. The Saudi identity has been slow to nationalize — it was decades, perhaps a century, behind the cohering forces that gave Egypt and then Syria some sense of themselves. As Alexis Vassiliev, the great Russian scholar of Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism, put it: 

    The idea of a national territorial state, of a “motherland,” was new to Arabian society. The very concept of a motherland, to which individuals owe their primary loyalty, contradicts the spirit of Islam, which stresses the universal solidarity of believers as against non-Muslims. National consciousness and national feelings in Saudi Arabia were confined to a narrow group working in the modern sector of the economy and in the civil and military bureaucracy. Those who described themselves as nationalists were, rather, reformers and modernists, who wanted to create a more modern society. But their sentiments were so vague that the left wing of the “nationalists” even avoided using the name Saudi Arabia because of their attitude to the Al Saud.

    Saudi Arabia has been rapidly modernizing since the 1960s. Measured by massive concrete buildings, roads, luxury hotels with too much marble, electrification, communications, aviation, urban sprawl, rural decline, and access to higher education, Vassiliev’s observation is undoubtedly correct: “Saudi Arabia has experienced more rapid change than any other Middle Eastern country and the old social balance has been lost forever.” But spiritually, in its willingness to import Western ideas as opposed to Western gadgets, know-how, aesthetics, and organization, the kingdom changed only fitfully. Royal experiments in reform, especially under King Abdullah (2005–2015), could be ended as quickly as they began. 

    Before MBS, Saudi rulers and the vast oil-fed aristocracy were deeply conservative at home (if not in their homes), fearful of the outside world that relentlessly corroded the traditions that gave the kingdom its otherworldly, female-fearing, fun-killing, profoundly hypocritical weirdness. But this conservative status quo also offered a certain moral coherence, political stability (the royal family, thousands strong, were collectively invested), as well as a quirky governing class that was fine for decades, through the worst of the Wahhabi efflorescence that followed the Iranian revolution and the seizure of the Great Mosque in Mecca, with a gay intelligence chief. Saudis might be haughty, lacking the multilingual grace that came so easily to old-school Arabs, who retained Ottoman propriety with first-rate Western educations, but they were aware of their limitations. They gave the impression that they couldn’t compete — even at the apex of Saudi power in the mid-1970s. Most of the royal family likely didn’t want to try. When Ajami was alive (he died in 2014, a year before MBS began his rise), Saudi Arabia hadn’t taken the giant, irreversible leap forward. It has now. 

     The crown prince has been a one-man wrecking ball, transforming the country’s collective leadership, where princes — uncles, brothers, sons, and cousins — effectively shared power under the king, into a dictatorship. Whatever brakes are still on the system (King Salman is old and ailing but rumors don’t yet have him non compos mentis), they likely will not outlast Salman’s death. There has never been any clear demarcation between the nation’s treasury and the royal family’s purse; MBS appears to have greatly reduced the points of access to the country’s oil wealth to him and his minions. His great shakedown in the Ritz Hotel in Riyadh in November 2017, when nearly four hundred of the kingdom’s richest and most powerful people were forcibly held and squeezed or stripped of their assets, killed the old order. Some “guests” reportedly were physically tortured, had their families threatened, or both. Such behavior would have been unthinkable before. Traditional kingdoms always have informal rules that buttress the status quo and check arbitrary power. The crown prince’s new-age mindset — his determination to stamp out all possible opposition to his modernist vision with him alone at the helm — was vividly on display at the Ritz. 

    This autocratic thuggery earned little censure in the West, on either the left or right. Some appeared to believe that the rightly guided prince was actually stamping out corruption. Many Saudis, especially among the young, may have sincerely enjoyed the spectacle of the spoiled ancien régime getting its comeuppance. The same unchecked princely temperament, however, reappeared in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, when Jamal Khashoggi crossed the threshold. It is a near-certainty that MBS intended to kill, not to kidnap, the elite dissident. It is not at all unlikely, given the prince’s reputation for work and detail and his aversion to delegating decisions to others, that he personally approved the dissident’s dismemberment. 

    The crown prince is gambling that Saudi nationalism, which is now real even if its depth is hard to measure, will attach itself to him, as nationalisms do in their need for a leader. He is trying to downgrade Islam by upgrading the nation. He has reined in the dreaded morals police, the mutawwa, who could harass and arrest almost anyone. The urban young, especially if they come from the middle and upper-middle class, have long loathed this police force, which comes from the more marginal precincts of society, and so they find MBS’ mission civilisatrice appealing. The crown prince is essentially trying to pull an Atatürk, who created a Turkish nation-state out of a Muslim empire. Mustafa Kemal created his own cult: he was a war hero, the savior of the Turks from invading Greek Christian armies and World War I victors who were carving up the carcass of the Ottoman state. He fused himself with the idea of nationhood. His tomb in Ankara has tens of thousands of Turkish Islamists respectfully visiting it. 

    When it came to cult worship, Saudi kings and princes had been fairly low-key compared to most other Middle Eastern rulers. Yet MBS’ sentiments are, again, more modern. He has effectively established a police state — the first ever in Saudi history. His creation is certainly not as ruthless as the Orwellian nightmares of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or Assad’s Syria; it is neither as loaded with internal spies nor rife with prison camps as Abdul Fattah El-Sisi’s Egypt. But MBS’ Arabia is a work in progress. Those in America and Israel who advocate that the United States should draw closer to MBS, so as to anchor a new anti-Iran alliance in Riyadh, are in effect saying that we should endorse MBS and his vision of a more secular, female-driving, anti-Islamist Saudi Arabia without highlighting its other, darker aspects, or that we should just ignore the kingdom’s internal affairs and focus on what the crown prince gives us externally. This realist calculation usually leads first back to the negatives: without the crown prince’s support of American interests, Russia, China, and Iran, the revisionist axis that has been gaining ground as America has been retrenching, will do even better. And then the positive: Saudi recognition of Israel would permanently change the Jewish state’s standing in the Muslim world — a long-sought goal of American diplomacy. 

    The prince clearly knows how much Benjamin Netanyahu wants Saudi Arabia’s official recognition of Israel. The Israeli prime minister has loudly put it at the top of his foreign-policy agenda. (Before the Gaza war, it might have had the additional benefit of rehabilitating him at home.) The prince clearly knows how much American Jewry wants to see an Israeli embassy in Riyadh. And after some initial weariness, the Biden administration now wants to add the kingdom to the Abraham Accords. Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Sudan recognizing Israel was good, but Saudi Arabia would be better. Although the White House certainly hasn’t thought through how the United States would fit into an Israeli-Saudi-US defensive alliance, whether it would even be politically or militarily possible, the administration proffered the idea before Biden went to Saudi Arabia in 2022 — or echoed an earlier, vaguer Saudi suggestion of a defensive pact — as part of Riyadh’s official recognition of Israel. Given the importance that MBS attaches to things Jewish, he may well believe his offer of Israeli recognition gives him considerable leverage in future dealings with the United States. 

    Joe Biden paved the way for MBS’ go-big proposal by making one of the most embarrassing flips in presidential history. Biden came into office pledging to reevaluate US-Saudi ties and cast MBS permanently into the cold for the gruesome killing of Khashoggi and, a lesser sin, making a muck of the war in Yemen, which has led to the United States, given its crucial role in maintaining and supplying the Saudi Air Force, being an accomplice in a bombing campaign that has had a negligible effect on the Shiite Houthis capacity to fight but has killed thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Yemeni civilians. (In civil wars, it is hard to know who is starving whom, but the Saudi role in bringing starvation to Yemen has not been negligible.) Fearing another hike in oil prices before the midterm elections, Biden travelled to Saudi Arabia, fist-bumping MBS and getting not much in return except reestablishing what has been true in US–Saudi relations from the beginning, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt hosted two of King Ibn Saud’s sons in Washington: everything is transactional. 

    MBS’ offer to America arrived with China’s successful intervention into Saudi-Iranian relations. Beijing obtained an agreement for the restoration of diplomatic ties between the two countries, which Riyadh had severed in 2016, after King Salman executed Nimr al-Nimr, the most popular Saudi Shiite cleric in the oil-rich Eastern Province, and Iranian protestors set fire to the Saudi embassy in Tehran. Beijing also appears to have aided a Saudi-Iranian ceasefire and an understanding about Yemen. MBS, who had been eager to extricate himself and the Saudi treasury from the peninsula’s “graveyard of nations,” reduced the number of Saudi forces engaged in the conflict; Tehran appears to have convinced the Houthis, at least temporarily, not to lob Iranian-provided missiles into their northern neighbor. 

    China offers MBS something that Israel and the United States realistically no longer do: a possible long-term deterrent against Iranian aggression in a post-American Middle East. Beijing likely isn’t opposed to the Islamic Republic going nuclear, since this would further diminish the United States, which has under both Republican and Democratic presidents told the world that an Iranian nuke is “unacceptable.” Given Chinese access in Tehran and Moscow, which is developing an ever-closer military relationship with the clerical regime, the value of Chinese intercession will increase. Given Beijing’s economic interest in Saudi Arabia’s oil (it is now the kingdom’s biggest customer), MBS is certainly right to see in the Chinese a possible check on any Iranian effort to take the kingdom’s oil off-market. The Islamic Republic has never before had great-power patrons. The Chinese bring big advantages to Iran’s theocrats — much greater insulation from American sanctions, for example; but they may also corral Tehran’s freedom of action a bit. 

    In the controversial interview that MBS not long ago gave to The Atlantic, MBS clearly thought he could wait out the Biden administration, and that America’s and the West’s need for Saudi crude, and the rising power of China, gave the prince time and advantage. He has won that tug-of-war. America cannot possibly ostracize the ruler who controls the largest, most easily accessible, and highest-quality pool of oil in the world. The Gaza war will also play to MBS’ advantage as both Israel and the United States will seek Saudi intercession to counter what’s likely to become an enormous propaganda victory for Iran’s “axis of resistance.” The crown prince may well be racing his country towards the abyss, eliminating all the customs and institutions that made the Saudi monarchy resilient and not particularly brutish (not by Middle Eastern standards), but he has been tactically astute with all the greater powers maneuvering around him.

    Saudi Arabia is probably the Muslim country that American liberals hate the most. (Pakistan is a distant runner-up.) This enmity is, in part, a reaction to the oddest and oldest American “partnership” in the Middle East, and the general and quite understandable feeling that the Saudi royal family never really came clean about its dealings with Osama bin Ladin before 9/11. Not even post-Sadat Egypt, which has developed a close working relationship with the American military and the CIA, has had the kind of access that the Saudis have had in Washington. Even after 9/11, during Bush’s presidency, Saudi preferences in personnel could reach all the way into the National Security Council. The Saudi distaste for Peter Theroux, an accomplished Arabist and former journalist who wrote an entertaining, biting look into the kingdom in Sandstorms, published in 1990, got him briefly “unhired” to oversee Saudi policy on the NSC because of the fear of Riyadh’s reaction. He got rehired when either Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, or her deputy, Stephen Hadley, realized that allowing Saudi preferences to effect personnel decisions within the White House was unwise and potentially very embarrassing. Given the Gaza war’s demolition of the Biden administration’s Middle Eastern policy, it’s not unlikely that we will see Saudi access in Washington rise again, perhaps rivaling its halcyon days during the Reagan administration. That would be a sharp irony. 

     Culturally speaking, no two countries had ever been further apart: Saudi Arabia still had a vibrant slave society in 1945 when Franklin Roosevelt began America’s relationship with the desert kingdom. Outside pressure, not internal debate among legal scholars and Saudi princes about evolving religious ethics and the holy law, obliged the monarchy to ban slavery officially in 1962. (Bad Western press aside, the Saudi royals may have been truly annoyed at French officials freeing slaves traveling with their masters on vacation.) Ibn Saud had over twenty wives, allotted by the holy law to no more than four at one time, and numerous concubines. When concubines became pregnant, they would usually ascend through marriage, while a wife would be retired to a comfortable and less competitive environment. By comparison, the thirty-seven-year-old crown prince today has only one wife and, if rumors are true, many mistresses — a less uxorious, more acceptable choice for a modern, ambitious man. 

    Roosevelt’s embrace of the Saudi monarchy established the ultimate realist relationship. The Saudi royals neither cared for America’s democratizing impulse, nor for its incessant conversations about human rights, nor for its ties to Israel, nor, after 1973 and the Saudi-engineered oil embargo that briefly gave the United States sky-rocketing prices and gas lines, for the American chatter in pro-Israel corners about the need to develop plans for seizing Saudi oil fields. Yet the Saudis loved the U.S. Navy and the long, reassuring shadow that it cast in the Middle East. Donald Trump’s embrace of Arabia, however much it may have horrified American liberals and amplified their distaste for the country and its ruling family, just highlighted, in Trump’s inimitably crude way, a bipartisan fact about Saudi-American relations: we buy their oil and they buy our armaments, technology, machinery, services, and debt. Barack Obama sold the Saudis over sixty-five billion dollars in weaponry, more than any president before or since. Both sides have occasionally wanted to make it more than that, to sugarcoat the relationship in more appealing ways. The more the Saudis, including the royals, have been educated in the United States, the more they have wanted Americans to like them. Americanization, even if only superficial, introduces into its victims a yearning for acceptance. Americans have surely been the worst offenders here, however, since they are far more freighted with moral baggage in their diplomacy and trade. They want their allies to be good as well as useful. 

    Although Americans have a knack for discarding the past when it doesn’t suit them, Saudi and American histories ought to tell us a few things clearly. First, that MBS’ offer to the United States is without strategic advantages. This is true even though Iran may have green-lighted, perhaps masterminded, the attack on October 7 in part to throw a wrench into the U.S.–Israeli–Saudi negotiations over MBS’ proposal.  Iranian conspiratorial fears always define the clerical regime’s analysis.  Its desire to veto its enemies’ grand designs is certainly real irrespective of whether it thought that Saudi–Israeli normalization was arriving soon or that MBS’ quest to develop a nuclear-weapons-capable atomic infrastructure needed to be aborted sooner rather than later. Iranian planning on the Gaza war likely started long before Biden administration officials and Netanyahu’s government started leaking to the press that normalization was “imminent”; it likely started before MBS’ vague suggestions of a defensive pact between Washington and Riyadh.  Leaks about diplomatic progress surrounding a coming deal, however, might have accelerated Iran’s and Hamas’ bloody calculations.  

    Concerning the crown prince’s nuclear aspirations, which have divided Israelis, caused serious indigestion in Washington, and compelled Khamenei’s attention, they are not unreasonable given that domestic energy requirements for Saudi Arabia — especially the exponentially increasing use of air conditioning — could in the near future significantly reduce the amount of oil that Riyadh can sell. Nuclear energy would free up more petroleum for export and produce the revenue that MBS desperately needs to continue his grand plans. But it is also a damn good guess that MBS’ new attention to nuclear power plants has a lot to do with developing the capacity to build the bomb. Just across the Gulf, the Islamic Republic has effectively become a nuclear threshold state — the Supreme Leader likely has everything he needs to assemble an atomic arm; and the possibility is increasingly remote that either Biden or the Israeli prime minister (whoever that maybe on any given day) is going to strike militarily before the clerical regime officially goes nuclear. And MBS, despite his occasional bravado on Iran and his undoubtedly sincere private desire to undermine the clerical regime, probably doesn’t want to deal with such a denouement. Given how much Netanyahu and most of the Israeli political class have wanted Saudi–Israeli normalization, given how desperate the Biden administration has been to find stabilizing partners in the Middle East, which would allow the United States to continue its retrenchment, MBS could be forgiven for thinking, especially after October 7, that the sacred creed of non-proliferation might well give way to his atomic ambitions.

    The Saudis were never brave when they were focused single-mindedly on building their frangible oil industry; now they have vast installations, which the Iranians easily paralyzed in 2019 with a fairly minor drone and cruise missile attack. The same vulnerability obtains for the crown prince’s NEOM projects, which the Iranians, who have the largest ballistic- and cruise-missile force in the Middle East, could severely damage — probably even if the Saudis spend a fortune on anti-missile defense. MBS came in like a lion on the Islamic Republic, attracting the attention and the affection of Israelis and others; it’s not at all unlikely that he has already become a lamb, actually less stout-hearted than his princely predecessors who, in a roundabout way, via a motley crew of characters, using the CIA for logistical support, took on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. 

    Still, MBS would want to plan for contingencies. Having nuclear weapons is better than not having them. A Saudi bomb might check Persian predation. And the Saudis are way behind. They have neither the engineers nor the physicists nor the industrial base. And the odds are excellent that the Pakistanis, who though indebted to the Saudi royal family are quite capable of stiffing them, haven’t been forthcoming: they are not going to let the Saudis rent an atomic weapon.  And the Russians and the Chinese might not want to give the Saudis nuclear power. It would add another layer of complexity and tension to their relations with the Islamic Republic, which neither Moscow nor Beijing may want. The Europeans and the Japanese are unlikely to step into such a hot mess. Getting nuclear technology from the Americans would be vastly better. Another way, as Ajami put it, to supplement Boeing and AT&T. 

    Failing on the atomic front, MBS might intensify his dangle of an Israeli embassy in Riyadh — to see what he can get even if he has no intention of recognizing the Jewish state.  The Gaza war certainly increases his chances that he can get both the Israelis and the Americans to concede him a nuclear infrastructure with local uranium enrichment. The war makes it less likely, however, that he would want to tempt fate anytime soon by recognizing Israel.  Normalization gains him nothing internally among all those Saudis who religiously or politically may have trouble with a Saudi flag — which has the Muslim shahâda, the profession of faith, boldly printed on a green heavenly field — flying in Zion. And the Star of David in Riyadh could be needlessly provocative even to the crown prince’s much-touted young, hitherto apolitical, supporters. The Palestinian cause, which most of the Israeli political elite thought was a fading clarion call, has proven to have astonishing resonance.  

    But even if MBS is still sincere about this big pitch, neither Washington nor Jerusalem should be tempted. It gives the former nothing that it does not already have. It offers the Israelis far less than what Netanyahu thinks it does. Despite MBS’ grand visions for where his country will be in the middle of the century, Saudi Arabia is actually a far less consequential kingdom than it was in 1973, when it was at the pinnacle of its oil power, or in 1979, when it collided with the Iranian revolution and was briefly on the precipice after the Sunni religious revolutionary Juhayman al-Otaybi, his messianic partner Muhammad Abdullah al-Qahtani, and five hundred well-armed believers took Mecca’s Grand Mosque and shook the dynasty to its core. 

    Religiously, among Muslims, Saudi Arabia hasn’t been a bellwether for decades. Its generous funding for Salafi causes undoubtedly fortified harsher views across the globe, especially in Indonesia and Western Europe, where so many dangerous Islamic radicals were either born or trained. Religious students and clerics raised in the eclectic but formal traditions of the Al-Azhar seminary in Cairo, for example, would go to Saudi Arabia on well-paid fellowships and often come back to Egypt as real Hanbali-rite killjoys. Saudi Arabia helped to make the Muslim world more conservative and less tolerant of Muslim diversity. But relatively few Saudi imams were intellectually on the cutting edge, capable of influencing the radical set outside of Arabia. And it was the radical set outside of Saudi Arabia who mattered most, especially in Egypt, where the politically subservient dons of Al-Azhar lost control and relevance for Muslims who were growing uncomfortable with Egypt’s Westernization, first under the British and then, even more depressingly, under the military juntas of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat. 

    In Saudi Arabia, most of the radical Salafi imams were either in trouble with the Saudi authorities, in exile, or in jail. Saudi royals were once big fans of the Egyptian-born Muslim Brotherhood because it was hostile to all the leftist ideologies storming the Middle East. Only later did they realize that these missionaries were irreversibly populist and anti-monarchical. Saudi religious funding was like that old publishing theory — throw shit against the wall and see what sticks. The operative assumptions were that more religious Muslims were better than less religious, and that more religious Sunni Muslims would be hostile to Iran’s revolutionary call, and that more religious Sunni Muslims would be more sympathetic to Saudi Arabia. Who preached what and where was vastly less important. There were a lot of problems with every one of those assumptions, which the Saudi royal family realized long before the coming of MBS. But inertia is infamously hard to stop. 

    For most faithful Muslims today, Saudi Arabia isn’t intellectually and spiritually important. What happened to Al-Azhar in Egypt — its intellectual and jurisprudential relevance declined as it became more subservient to the Westernizing Egyptian military — has been happening in Saudi Arabia for at least thirty years. MBS is intensifying this process. Westerners may cheer him on as he tries to neuter Islam as the defining force within Saudi society, but internationally it makes Saudi Arabia a less consequential state. Saudi Arabia is not a model of internal Islamic reform; it is merely another example of a modernizing autocrat putting Islam in its place — behind the ruler and the nation. The dictatorial impact on religion can be profound: it can reform it, it can radicalize it, it can do both at the same time. 

    To keep on the Egyptian parallel: Anwar Sadat visited Jerusalem and opened an embassy in Tel Aviv. He and his military successors have slapped the hands of Al-Azhar’s rectors and teachers when they challenged the legitimacy of the Egyptian–Israeli entente. (Conversely, they haven’t stopped, and they have often subsidized, the perpetual anti-Semitism of Egyptian media, film, and universities.) The peace between Egypt and Israel has obviously been beneficial to both countries, but religiously it made little positive impact on Muslims within Egypt or abroad. When a Muslim Brother, Mohammad Morsi, won Egypt’s first — and so far only — free presidential election in 2012, Israelis and Americans were deeply concerned that he would sever relations with Israel. That didn’t happen, but the fears were understandable; Israel’s popular acceptance within Egyptian society remains in doubt. 

    If, after the Gaza war, MBS deigns to grant Israel diplomatic relations, it won’t likely make faithful Muslims, or even secular Muslims, more inclined to accept the Jewish state. It might do the opposite, especially inside Saudi Arabia. The Saudi royal family’s control over the two holiest sites in Islam — Mecca and Medina — makes little to no difference in how that question is answered. Such custodianship confers prestige and obliges the Saudi royal family, at least in the holy cities, to maintain traditional standards. In the past, before modern communications, it allowed Muslims and their ideas to mix. But it absolutely does not denote superior religious authority — no matter how much Saudi rulers and their imams may want to pretend that by proximity to the sacred spaces they gain religious bonus points. One often gets the impression from Israelis that they are in a time warp with respect to Saudi Arabia, that for them it is still the mid-1970s and Riyadh’s recognition would effectively mark an end to their Muslim travails. The Gaza war ought to inform Israelis that the profoundly emotive Islamic division between believer and non-believer and the irredentist claims of Palestinian Muslims against the Jewish state do not lessen because a Saudi crown prince wants to establish a less hostile modus vivendi with Israel and Jews in general.  

     Perhaps above all else, the Israelis should want to avoid entangling themselves too closely with MBS in the minds of Americans, especially those on the left, who are essential to bipartisan support for Jerusalem. It’s an excellent bet that MBS’ dictatorship will become more — likely much more — oppressive and contradictory in its allegiances. What Safran noted about Saudi behavior from 1945 to 1985 — “attempts to follow several contradictory courses simultaneously, willingness to make sharp tactical reversals; and limited concern with the principle of consistency, either in reality or in appearance” — has already happened with MBS. This disposition will probably get much worse. And Americans aren’t Israelis, who never really see political promise in Muslim lands (neither Islamic nor Israeli history encourages optimism). The choice, in their minds, is between this dictator or that one — and never, if possible, the worst-case scenario: Muslims freely voting and electing Islamists who by definition don’t exactly kindle to Israel or the United States. Americans are much more liberal (in the old sense of the word): for them, autocracies aren’t static, they inevitably get worse until they give way to revolution or elected government. Even realist Americans are, compared to Israelis, pretty liberal. And the principal reason that the United States has so steadfastly supported the Jewish state since 1948 is that it is a vibrant democracy, however troubled or compromised it might be by the Palestinian question or by its own internal strains of illiberalism and political religion. When Israelis and their American supporters tout MBS as a worthwhile ally, they are diminishing Israel’s democratic capital. If MBS really thought diplomatic relations were in his and Saudi Arabia’s self-interest, there would already be a fluttering Star of David in Riyadh. The wisest course for Israelis is to reverse engineer MBS’ hesitation into a studied neutrality.  

    Religion and mores aside, closer relations with Saudi Arabia will not assist America or Israel against its principal Middle Eastern concern: the Islamic Republic of Iran. In 2019, when Iran decided to fire cruise missiles and drones at Saudi Aramco processing plants in Abqaiq and Khurais, briefly taking out nearly half of the country’s oil production, MBS did nothing, except turn to the Americans plaintively. The Emirates, whose ambassador in Washington gives first-rate anti-Iran dinner parties, sent an emissary to Tehran, undoubtedly to plead neutrality and promise to continue to allow the clerical regime the use of Dubai as a U.S.-sanctions-busting entrepôt. The two Sunni kingdoms had purchased an enormous amount of Western weaponry to protect themselves against the Islamic Republic. The Saudi and Emirati air forces and navies are vastly more powerful than their Iranian counterparts. And still they would not duel. They lack what the clerical regime has in abundance: a triumphant will fueled by success and a still vibrant ideology.  

    The Saudis know, even if MBS’ public rhetoric occasionally suggests otherwise, that the Islamic Republic, even with all its crippling internal problems, is just too strong for them. Iran’s eat-the-weak clerics and Revolutionary Guards, who fought hard and victoriously in Syria’s civil war, became the kingmaker in Iraq, and successfully radicalized and armed the Shiite Houthis of Yemen, can always out-psych the Saudi and Nahyan royals. Also, Trump didn’t help. When he decided not to respond militarily to the cruise missile-and-drone attacks, plus the ones on merchant shipping in the Gulf of Oman three months earlier (he boldly tweeted that the United States was “locked and loaded”), Trump trashed whatever was left of the Carter Doctrine. Washington had assumed responsibility for protecting the Persian Gulf after the British withdrawal in 1971. There is a direct causal line from the Trump administration’s failure in 2019, through its “maximum pressure” campaign that eschewed military force in favor of sanctions, through the Biden administration’s repeated attempts to revive Barack Obama’s nuclear deal, through the White House’s current see-no-redline approach to Iran’s ever-increasing stockpile of highly-enriched uranium, to MBS’ decision to turn toward the Chinese. 

    It is brutally difficult to imagine scenarios in which the Saudis could be a military asset to the United States in the Persian Gulf or anywhere else in the Middle East. The disaster in Yemen, for which the Iranians and the Houthis are also to blame, tells us all that we need to know about Saudi capacity. Even with American airmen, sailors, and intelligence officers in Saudi command centers doing what they could to inform and direct Saudi planes, Saudi pilots routinely bombed the right targets poorly and the wrong targets (civilians) well. The Saudis mobilized tens of thousands of troops for the campaign, but it’s not clear that they actually did much south of the border. (Small special forces units appear to have fought and held their own.) The UAE’s committed forces, which once numbered around four thousand on the ground, did much more, but they quickly discovered that the coalition gathered to crush the Houthis, who had far more unity and purpose, simply didn’t work. The UAE started hiring mercenaries and pulling its troops out of combat. MBS, who was then the Saudi defense minister and a pronounced hawk, started blaming the UAE, which blamed the Saudis. 

    If we are lucky, the Yemen expedition has actually taught the crown prince a lesson: that his country, despite its plentiful armaments, is not much of a military power and can ill-afford boldness. If any future American-Iranian or Israeli-Iranian clash happens, we should not want the Saudis involved. Similarly, we should not want an entangling alliance with Riyadh — a NATO in the Persian Gulf — because it will give us little except the illusion that we have Arab partners. We also shouldn’t want it because such an alliance could harm, perhaps irretrievably, the kingdom itself if it re-animated MBS’ martial self-confidence. 

    About Saudi Arabia, the China-first crowd might actually be more right than wrong. Elbridge Colby, perhaps the brightest guru among the Trump-lite aim-towards-Beijing Republicans, thinks the United States can deploy small detachments from the Air Force and Navy to the Persian Gulf and it will be enough to forestall seriously untoward actions by a nuclear Iran, China, and Russia. Yet the Gaza war has shown that when the United States seriously misapprehends the Middle East, when it sees the Islamic Republic as a non-revolutionary power with diminished Islamist aspirations and malevolent capacity, Washington may be obliged to send two aircraft-carrier groups to the region to counter its own perennial miscalculations. Colby’s analysis has the same problem in the Middle East that it does with Taiwan: everything depends on American willingness to use force. A United States that is not scared to project power in the Middle East, and is not fearful that every military engagement will become a slippery slope to a “forever war,” would surely deter its enemies more convincingly and efficiently.  The frequent use of force can prevent larger, uglier wars that will command greater American resources.  

    If Washington’s will — or as the Iranians conceive it, haybat, the awe that comes with insuperable power — can again be made credible, then at least in the Persian Gulf Colby is right.  It doesn’t take a lot of military might to keep the oil flowing.   For the foreseeable future, no one there will be transgressing the US Air Force and Navy — unless we pull everything to the Pacific. We don’t need to pledge anything further to MBS, or to anyone else in the region, to protect the global economy.   And the global market in oil still has the power to keep MBS, or anyone else, from ratcheting the price way up to sustain grand ambitions or malevolent habits. 

    It is an amusing irony that Professor Safran, an Israeli-American who tried to help the American government craft a new approach to Saudi Arabia in the 1980s (and got into trouble for it when it was discovered that some of his work had received secret CIA funding), foresaw the correct path for Saudi Arabia today when he was assessing forty years ago its missionary Islamic conservatism, anti-Zionist reflexes, and increasing disposition to maximize oil profits regardless of the impact on Western economies. He advised that “America’s long-term aim should be to disengage its vital interests from the policy and fate of the Kingdom. Its short-term policy should be designed with an eye to achieving that goal while cooperating with the Kingdom in dealing with problems on a case-by-case basis and advancing shared interests on the basis of reciprocity.” In other words, we should treat the kingdom in the way that it has treated us. In still other words, Roosevelt was right: with the Saudis, it should be transactional. Nothing more, nothing less. Day in, day out. 

     

     

    The Logical One Remembers

    “I’m not irrational. But there’ve been times

    When I’ve experienced—uncanniness:

    I think back to those days, when, four or five,

    I dreaded going to bed, because I thought

    Sleep really was a ‘dropping off.’ At night

    Two silver children floated up from somewhere

    Into the window foiled with dark, a boy

    And girl. They never spoke. But they arose

    To pull me with them, down, into the black

    That brewed deep in the basement. I would sink

    With them to float in nothingness. Each night

    For a year, or maybe two. It was a dream

    You’ll say, just a recurring dream. It’s true.

    (And yet I was awake when they came through.)”

    The Slug

    Everything you touch

    you taste. Like moonlight you gloss

    over garden bricks,

     

    rusty chicken wire,

    glazing your trail with argent

    mucilage, wearing

     

    your eyes on slender

    fingers. I find you grazing

    in the cat food dish

     

    waving your tender

    appendages with pleasure, 

    an alien cow.

     

    Like an army, you 

    march on your stomach. Cursive,

    you drag your foot’s font.

     

    When I am salted

    with remorse, saline sorrow,

    soul gone leathery

     

    and shriveled, teach me

    how you cross the jagged world

    sans helmet, pulling

     

    the self’s nakedness

    over broken glass, and stay

    unscathed, how without

     

    haste, secretive, you

    ride on your own shining, like 

    Time, from now to now.

    The Cloud

    I used to think the Cloud was in the sky,

    Something invisible, subtle, aloft:

    We sent things up to it, or pulled things down

    On silken ribbons, on backwards lightning zaps.

    Our photographs, our songs, our avatars

    Floated with rainbows, sunbeams, snowflakes, rain.

    Thoughts crossed mid-air, and messages, all soft

    And winking, in the night, like falling stars.

     

    I know now it’s a box, and acres wide,

    A building, stories high. A parking lot

    Besets it with baked asphalt on each side.

    Within, whir tall machines, grey, running hot.

    The Cloud is windowless. It squats on soil

    Now shut to bees and clover, guzzling oil.

    Wind Farm

    I still remember the summer we were becalmed:

    No breezes rose. The dandelion clock

    Stopped mid-puff. The clouds stood in dry dock.

    Like butterflies, formaldehyde embalmed,

     

    Spring kites lay spread out on the floor, starched flat.

    Trees kept their council, grasses stood up straight

    Like straight pins in a cushion, the wonky gate

    That used to bang sometimes, shut up, like that.

     

    Our ancestors, that lassoed twisty tails

    Of wild tornadoes, teaching them to lean

    In harness round the millstone — the would weep

     

    At all the whirlwinds that we didn’t reap.

    I lost my faith in flags that year, and sails:

    The flimsy evidence of things unseen.

    The Wise Men

    Matthew, 2.7-12

    Summoned to the palace, we obeyed.

    The king was curious. He had heard tell

    Of strangers in outlandish garb, who paid

    In gold, although they had no wares to sell.

    He dabbled in astrology and dreams:

    Could we explain the genesis of a star?

    The parallax of paradox — afar

    The fragrance of the light had drawn us near.

    Deep in the dark, we heard a jackal’s screams

    Such as, at lambing time, the shepherds fear.

    Come back, he said, and tell me what you find,

    Direct me there: I’ll bow my head and pray.

    We nodded yes, a wisdom of a kind,

    But after, we slipped home by another way.