Jake Harrison, Author at Liberties

The Revolutionary Synagogue: Notes of a Grateful American

Pedro Alvares Cabral was the first human being in recorded history to have been on four continents. He set foot on each of them — Europe, Africa, America, and Asia — in a single year, 1500, which was the same year that he led the first extensive European exploration of the northeast coast of South America. He “discovered” what we know today as Brazil in April of that year, and wrote home to King Manuel I notifying him of Portugal’s brand new territory, theirs by virtue of the authority vested in him by the King and his interpretation of the divine will. Cabral sailed on from Brazil, but he left behind the seeds of what would become the first robust Jewish community on the American continent. Among Cabral’s crew was a man who went by the name João Faras. Faras was an astronomer, astrologer, physician, translator and — most importantly for our purposes — he was a member of the community of Portuguese Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity by the King of Portugal just a few years after the Spanish expulsion.

Cabral’s men had reached what would become Brazil on April 21, but Faras remained on a boat offshore for six days — he had developed an irritation which made it impossible for him to walk. On the twenty-eighth of that month, finally upright and capable of studying the stars to determine location, Faras and two assistants set up a wooden astrolabe on the beach and attempted to establish the altitude of the midday sun. After some days of study, he drafted a letter to King Manuel I, which included a sketch of the stars which make up the southern hemisphere. He explained with apologies to the king that, due to his lame leg, he could not identify the precise height of the stars, but he did identify a new constellation, which we now know as the Southern Cross.

The king to whom that letter was addressed was the very same monarch who, on December 5, 1496, demanded that all his Jewish subjects leave the country. The following year this edict was rescinded and Jews were prohibited from fleeing the country and instead forced to convert to Catholicism. These decrees were issued just four years after the Jews of Spain had been forced from their homeland due to King Ferdinand’s and Queen Isabella’s genuinely world-altering antisemitism — in fact, Manuel issued the decrees in order to satisfy the Spanish monarchs, to whose daughter Manuel was attempting to marry off his son. There were few options for relocation for Spanish Jews in 1492 — England and France had already instituted country-wide bans (in the aftermath of expulsions) against Jews in 1290 and 1306 respectively. Many countries that did not ban Jews wholesale prohibited Jews from owning land and required Christian oaths for vassals under the feudal system. The easiest place for them to go was Portugal, and many of the Jews who were tormented by Manuel’s oppression were originally from the Spanish Jewish community that had just been violently dispersed. Scholars judge from João Faras’ weak Portuguese and preference for Spanish that he was likely among these Jewish Spaniards. In the intervening years, Faras had become a “converso,” or hidden Jew — living publicly as a Christian but privately as a Jew — and so he and his descendants must have remained for as long as the Portuguese maintained control of Brazil.

Jewish responses to the inquisition differed. Some, like Faras, chose to stay in Spain or Portugal, convert to Catholicism, and brave the anti-Semitism which stalked them even after baptism. Rumors swirled that the “new Christians” practiced Judaism in secret, adulterating Catholic purity with atavistic practices. Many chose to leave the Iberian peninsula altogether, and some part of that group travelled north to the newly independent Dutch provinces, which permitted Jewish immigration and Jewish practice. In this period Jewish fate was overwhelmingly determined by the governing power’s caprice, which often swung between prejudice and avarice: prejudice because anti-Semitism is a weed that flourishes under every sun and avarice because the Jews repeatedly proved themselves lucrative residents, and in the host countries, money-lust rivaled xenophobia in ubiquity and its power. There was not a single state which granted Jews rights because it understood that Jews were owed rights. The best Jews could hope for were privileges granted by opportunistic and self-regarding leaders. Privileges could only be acquired and maintained for as long as the governing authority could be persuaded that the deal was a good one. (Authoritarian dealmakers can be like that.)

The Dutch accepted the Jews because the Jews promised wealth and they made good on that promise. The Muslim rulers of Spain had permitted Jews to participate in trade and business, and for the Jews it was a more or less benevolent period, but when the Christians came and the Jews were eventually forced to flee they carried their business acumen on the road with them and, more importantly, they brought connections to the many Jewish businessmen who had been dispersed by the Inquisition and were now scrounging for residence in port cities around the world. The Jews in exile constituted a kind of international business network owing to their relations with each other. By 1600 most of the discriminatory laws that were enforced in other European countries were either not on the books in Amsterdam or ignored there. When, in the early seventeenth century, the Dutch West India Company dispatched ships to conquer territory across the ocean, some of these prospering Jews went with them. They met the community that João Faras’ had helped found when they got to South America.

The descendants of João Faras and his community lived as crypto- Jews for generations. In the years after they first arrived in the new world, the conversos flourished financially, so much so that Adam Smith observed in The Wealth of Nations that

The Portuguese Jews, persecuted by the inquisition, stript of their fortunes, and banished to Brazil, introduced, by their example, some sort of order and industry among the transported felons and strumpets by whom that colony was originally peopled, and taught them the culture of the sugar-cane. Upon all these different occasions, it was not the wisdom and policy, but the disorder and injustice of the European governments, which peopled and cultivated America.

Note that Smith referred to them as “Portuguese Jews” — it seems those Jews who converted learned what so many have had occasion to discover: antisemites don’t want Jews to be Jews, but they don’t want them to be anything else either. Wealth did not gain the Jews toleration, and these Jews knew nothing like the religious freedom that their brothers and sisters enjoyed in Amsterdam — the conversos in Brazil would continue to live in “hiding” for one hundred and thirty years. But apparently hiding was not enough. Between 1593 and 1595 an Inquisitional Commission was established in Olinda, in the port of Recife in Brazil, where conversos were tried and arrested. When the court was dismantled, Jew-monitoring was taken over by the local bishop.

All this changed in 1630, when the Dutch West India Company wrested control of Brazil from the Spanish. They had come to

South America with a specific interest in the cultivation of sugar cane, a trade dominated by the conversos, as Adam Smith noted. The Dutch brought with them members of the powerful Jewish community in Amsterdam, and also the freedom and toleration which was the law of the land back home.

Thus began the first openly practicing Jewish community in the Americas. This is where we started. It was, for a time, the freest Jewish community in the world. Less than ten years after the Dutch arrived, Brazilian Jewry built the first American synagogue, Kahal Kadosh Zur Yisrael, in Recife, which was responsible for maintaining a school and a cemetery for the community. For twenty years it seemed that true freedom was possible as a way of life. But it was too good to last — in 1649 the Portuguese instigated a war to win control of northern Brazil, which they managed to do within six years. After victory they instructed the conquered that the Jews, like the Dutch, had three months to pack their things and go.

Most of the Jews returned to Amsterdam, some went to Curaçao, Surinam, and Barbados, and twenty-three boarded a ship called the Saint Catherine bound for New Amsterdam, a Dutch colony in North America known today as New York City. Their welcome was not warm. Peter Stuyvesant, the director general of New Netherland, began a campaign against the Jews which would last for the rest of his time in office. Stuyvesant met the twenty-three Jews at the dock and tried to prevent their disembarking. He wrote home to his superiors in Amsterdam hectoring that the Jews were “deceitful,” “very repugnant,” and “hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ,” who ought to be made to depart lest they “infect and trouble this new colony.” He also warned that granting the Jews liberty would force the Dutch Reform community to do the same for “Lutherans and Papists.” (Intolerance is paradoxically inclusive.) Perhaps Stuyvesant had in mind the revolutionary liberal colony recently founded in Rhode Island by the radical Roger Williams, who had written a charter for the city which promised that no one would be “in any wise molested, punished, disquieted, or called in question for a difference in opinion in matters of religion.” This goodwill in Rhode Island did indeed extend to Lutherans and Catholics and it would eventually include Jews. Some of the Jews living under Dutch protection in Barbados, Surinam, and Curaçao got word of the freedoms offered in a faraway place called Providence and ventured there as early as 1658.

The Dutch West India Company (which included Jews among its founders and its directors) was not especially interested in protecting its Jewish subjects, but neither was it swayed by Stuyvesant’s warnings of a pollutant Jewish mass. His superiors had more pressing concerns involving their pocketbooks: a group of Spanish-Portuguese Jewish merchants in Amsterdam had sent the company a letter outlining several reasons why the Jews should be granted entry in New Amsterdam, and prime among them was that “many of the Jewish nation are principal shareholders” of the company itself. The leadership was convinced, and instructed Stuyvesant likewise. Yet the conditions they demanded were a far cry from the freedom these Jews had grown accustomed to in Recife: they were permitted to travel, trade, live, and remain in New Netherland only so long as “the poor among them shall not become a burden to the company or to the community, but be supported by their own nation.” And they were prohibited from practicing their religion in public. These Jews had plenty of experience with precisely this form of religious practice: clandestine and implicitly shameful.

The first documents that spurred on the Enlightenment which rattled Western culture and altered the course of modern history were written in the early seventeenth century, roughly concurrent with settlement in the New World. The proto-liberalism that they espoused was in part the breakthrough accomplishment of the legacy of Amsterdam, particularly the revolutionary thinking of one of Amsterdam’s Jewish sons, Baruch Spinoza. These were the ideas that eventually culminated, almost two centuries later, in this thunderous sentence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” A rather spectacular historical irony was about to play out: whereas the Enlightenment was kindled an ocean away, it came to fruition nowhere with greater force than the country that would blossom out of Colonial America, the country whose promise was sealed in the Declaration of Independence.

A miracle in Jewish history, in sum, was about to take place. The name of the miracle was the United States of America. The attainment of American independence from Great Britain marked the creation of the only polity in human history that Jews, along with all other human beings on the planet, were considered the just recipients of rights which were owed them purely by virtue of their humanity. These rights were not a charter or a privilege, they were axiomatic.

But there was a problem. By the time of the first Jewish settlement in Colonial America, the ideas that would coagulate into the rich soil from which the possibility of political liberalism would eventually spring were only just beginning to form and were certainly in their infancy in the New World. Anti-Semitism was an early import with which Jeffersonian ideals would have to contend. Peter Stuyvestant was early in his legislation of antisemitic laws — Jews in New Amsterdam were prohibited from purchasing land, serving in the guard (they were forced to pay a tax in lieu of guard duty), voting, holding public office, engaging in retail operations, and trading with the Native Americans — but New Amsterdam was hardly an outlier in terms of codifying antisemitism in the New World. The Catholic community of Maryland instituted a ban on Jewish settlement years before any Jews ever moved there. After Roger Williams’ death, Rhode Island became an inhospitable home to its Jewish residents and the Jewish community that had flourished there shriveled. Even in Pennsylvania, which had been founded by the Quaker William Penn as a “holy experiment” of religious tolerance, Jews had no citizenship rights before the revolution — Penn’s founding charter required all voters and public office holders to profess faith in Jesus Christ. And to some of the Enlightenment thinkers who laid the groundwork for the earth-shaking intellectual revolution consecrated in the American Declaration of Independence, Jews were not obviously worthy of any rights or privileges at all. Thomas Paine — the Voltaire of America in this respect, too — violently opposed both Christianity and Judaism, but believed that Christianity could be unlearned whereas Judaism was biological, and that Jews had to be cured of their Judaism or they would endanger enlightened society.

In this social pre-Enlightenment and pre-American context, the few Jews of North America who arrived before America’s founding followed the pattern of settlement that Jews had repeated in most of their new host countries — they settled primarily in major port cities and worked within the established international, and then national, network of Jewish merchants. Newport, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Savannah became centers of Jewish life, and insofar as Jews enjoyed the hospitality of their Christian hosts; “tolerated guest” was the highest status to which Jews could aspire. And here again they relied on their financial success for their security.

The New World did not extend rights to its Jews until long after Jewish settlement first began. This, despite the fact that the idea of “rights” as such, the idea that a person could be owed anything, as a matter of right, by the state and its governing officials, was percolating in the American intellectual welter. The stirrings of egalitarian idealism were beginning to be felt. Those ideas did not come to the fore until the American Revolution. And the American Revolution was also a revolution in Jewish history.

By the time the Revolutionary War began, one hundred years after a Jewish community settled in New Amsterdam, the Jewish population in North America had swelled to about a quarter of a million people. That Jewish community, which lived through the years of war, was the first Jewry to see a country founded with the promise of a place in it for all people, and so for them, too. (I hasten to add that the new republic was, as a matter of principle and practice, kinder to them than to its black population.) Descendants of that early New Amsterdam community, Shearith Israel, were still living in New York when British fleets approached New York Bay in 1776. Half of them, led by the cantor Gershom Mendes Seixas, fled first to Connecticut and then to Philadelphia three years after the British vacated that city in 1777. Seixas managed to snatch one of the congregation’s two Torah scrolls, lovingly referred to as “the revolutionary Torah,” and took it with him to his father-in-law’s home in Stratford, Connecticut. A few years later he and his flock moved to Philadelphia at the invitation of a congregation called Mikveh Israel, which would become America’s first permanent Jewish congregation.

When the patriot Jewish refugees of New York, led by Seixas, arrived in Philadelphia, the Jewish population of the city had about tripled in size. Israelite patriots from Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, Lancaster, and Easton had already come to the city fleeing the British. These Jews had come, while other residents stayed behind, because they believed in the Revolutionary project, in the philosophical premise of freedom and democratization. As two Philadelphian Jews put it in 1782, American Jews had “fled here from different parts for refuge” and arrived there to reconstitute the fledgling Mikveh Israel congregation on March 24 of that year as a “revolutionary synagogue,” which is how that congregation is described by the contemporary congregation of Mikveh Israel. The move to the City of Brotherly Love was symptomatic of deeply held commitments to the possibility of a country founded on the ideals of the Enlightenment, a possibility that was at that point in the war far from certain to come to fruition.

Jewish American patriots understood from the first that the Enlightenment had implications for how modern Jews ought to relate to their own religion. The first recorded meeting of Mikveh Israel mimicked Jefferson in declaring independence for American Jewry. These Jews claimed that the Philadelphian Jewish community that they were replacing had enjoyed “no right or legal power,” since it was founded only according to the custom of ordinary and familiar congregations and not as a conscious group of free rights-bearing individuals. But now, the document declared, the group must “bind ourselves one to the other that we will assist to form a constitution and rules for the good government of the congregation” in order to “promote our holy religion and establish a proper congregation in this city.” This declaration formally united two traditions for the first time: Judaism and liberalism. The alchemy of that precious admixture altered the course of human history. (It became the civil religion of American Jewry for a long time, and like all civil religions it came to be taken for granted and in need of refreshment. In our time it may be gravely in crisis.)

The affecting thing about the Jewish kindling to the new American dispensation is that Jews were championing their claim to rights about which they did not yet feel completely secure. In the matter of democracy they were rather like Nahshon, the Israelite at the Red Sea whose faith was so great that he dove into its waters before Moses parted them. Before the war was over, the freedom that Jefferson described was very young and (as we would say) aspirational. The Jewish patriots were taking a great risk in throwing their lot in with the revolution: it was not at all clear in 1782 that freedom from Britain would come, or that if it did it would bring with it rights for all citizens regardless of religion. In fact, the same year that the Jews of Mikveh Israel drew up their constitution, they also bought a plot of land to build their first synagogue on a street called Sterling Alley, which happened also to house a church belonging to a German Reform Congregation. The church complained: they did not want their community polluted by Jewish proximity. The Jews had a choice: they could adjudicate the case in court, or they could placate the bigots by buying a new plot of land a safe distance away with money they hardly had to spare. They chose not to bet on the American courts and found another location. In April 1782 it was not at all clear that a Philadelphian court would honor a Jewish community’s right to erect a synagogue wherever it pleased.

The principles were sterling, but it was a struggle. Religious rights were not quite an existential certainty for American Jews, but they were prepared to fight for the American promise. The next year the patriot Jewish congregation in Philadelphia, with Seixas at its helm, petitioned the state of Pennsylvania to formally alter the religious oath required by all elected officials so that Jews would not be prohibited from running for public office; the Pennsylvania Council of Censors considered and then tabled the request, but news about the petition was printed in three newspapers at the time favorably reporting the Jewish cause — it was a salient social issue, and the Jews were on the liberalizing side of it. When the war ended, many states heeded Seixas’ plea and rescinded their test oaths of their own accord. As the Jews who had been holed up in Pennsylvania returned home after the war, the states that accepted them back all dropped their test oaths: Georgia, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New York lost their test oaths by 1792. Virginia, which had not been a Jewish center before the war, got its first synagogue shortly after victory was declared; its test oath had been abolished in 1786 in the extraordinary Virginia Stature of Religious Freedom, drafted by Thomas Jefferson and husbanded into law by the like-minded James Madison. All this was not, to put it mildly, the familiar Jewish experience of the exile.

In the last decade and a half of the eighteenth century, the laws of state constitutions, and the freedoms owed to all citizens of the newly won country, were in far greater flux than we may realize. True, the Constitution of the United States, and the amendments to it, forbade the federal government to make laws establishing religion or limiting the freedom of religious expression, and it prohibited religious tests for federal offices — but much discretion was still left up to the states. Some states enforce blue laws — laws which prohibit work on Sundays, the Christian Sabbath — to this day, and blue laws were used in the early decades of the country to coerce working class Jews to abandon Jewish practice. Blasphemy laws, always the spear point of illiberalism, were in place in many states into the nineteenth century as well. The federal Constitution of 1787 allowed all states to decide for themselves who could and could not vote — the ideas which would make up the country’s legal skeleton had not yet calcified into shape. In New Jersey, for example, the state legislature amended the state constitution in 1790 to formalize a right that had already been in practical operation. It added the phrase: “he or she” in a clause regarding enfranchisement: “. . . no person shall be entitled to vote in any other township or precinct, than that in which he or she doth actually reside at the time of the election.” It thus made explicit a property-owning woman’s right to vote, which that state had considered implicitly secured through an ambiguity in its original constitution. And seven years later, the state removed a different phrase regarding property ownership after which the number of women voters increased dramatically, as did the number of voters amongst free people of color. And so it remained in the state until 1807.

The Jews were among the scrappy minorities eager to secure for themselves the rights which were not yet clearly stipulated and honored by all. The Jews of New York immediately took advantage of that state’s decision, in 1784, to automatically recognize all religious societies that applied for incorporation. The New York congregation Shearith Israel was incorporated that very year, thus securing the same legal benefits and status as churches in the state. The same legal benefits: almost a secular salvation.

The quarter of a million Jews who benefited from the birth of political liberalism in those early years was a fraction of world Jewry. At that time the largest plurality of the Jewish population — roughly one million people — was concentrated in Eastern Europe and Russia. After the partition of Poland in the final decade of the eighteenth century, at about the time that America’s Jews were reaping the first fruits of American liberalism, Jews in Russia were restricted to a large region known as the Pale of Settlement, established in 1791, essentially an enormous ghettoized community in which Jewish life was governed by strict Russian laws. This geographical sequestration remained in force for over a hundred years (it was dissolved shortly after the abdication of Nicholas II during the Russian Revolution). In Russia there had been no Enlightenment, even if Voltaire and the “enlightened despot” Catherine the Great voluminously corresponded.

But in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, the new liberal dispensation began to make itself known to Europe’s Jews. The phenomenon known as “emancipation” was born, with all its mighty imperfections, first in Austria with a proclamation by the emperor in 1782. In France, the French Revolution and then the rule of Napoleon allowed Jews to become full citizens of the state and annulled the laws requiring that the Jews live in a ghetto and enacted other liberalizing measures, which were extended to the countries that Napoleon conquered. (There were also outbursts of anti-Semitism among the revolutionaries, and Napoleon also enacted some reactionary measures against the Jews. Progress is never unalloyed, especially for Jews.) As is well known, the phenomenon known as “emancipation” also led to the phenomenon known as “assimilation,” with its many psychological agonies and social anxieties. Liberalization came to be rightly seen as a threat to tradition; the founder of Habad Hasidism, in Russia in 1812, wrote that “should Napoleon be victorious, wealth among the Jews will be abundant and the glory of the children of Israel will be exalted, but the hearts of Israel will be separated and distanced from their father in heaven. But if our master [Czar] Alexander will triumph, though poverty will be abundant and the glory of Israel will be humbled, the heart of Israel will be bound and joined with its father in heaven.” This same plot — the joy of liberalization and the fear of liberalization — would later play out in the years of the great immigration to America, when millions of Jews who never experienced it before came to the shores of a liberal order.

And there were other liberalizing developments for the Jews — for example, the creation and distribution across borders of a Jewish press. This innovation in Jewish life created the possibility for there to exist such a thing as a global Jewish community. Jewish newspapers detailing the goings-on of local Jewish life was soon enhanced by a more ambitious Jewish journalism designed to disseminate news of Jewish communities in far-flung parts of the world. The first known Jewish newspaper produced by and for Jewish readers was the Gazeta de Amsterdam, which was printed in Spanish for the converso Dutch community in the Dutch capital. Between 1835 and 1840 eighteen Jewish newspapers were founded in five different countries. Over the following five years, their number increased by fifty-three in thirteen different countries. The circulation of news and opinions strengthened the new liberal muscles.

Scholars argue that a single event catalyzed this steep rise: the Damascus Affair. In 1840, thirteen members of the Jewish Syrian community in Damascus were accused of kidnapping and murdering a Catholic priest and his servant and draining their blood to bake matza — the blood libel that had haunted Jews throughout the medieval period, but the global Jewish community was shocked to discover that the old antisemitic trope still had currency in the modern period, and that in a city as cosmopolitan and significant as Damascus, political and religious leaders could permit — indeed, sanction — such a thing. The French Consul in Damascus, Ulysse de Ratti-Menton, supported the libel, and ordered an investigation in the Jewish quarter. Ratti-Menton swayed the governor of the city, who also happened to be the son-in-law of Muhammad Ali, the viceroy of Ottoman Egypt who governed Ottoman Syria at that time.

The accused were imprisoned and violently tortured until they confessed to the crime. Some were forced to convert to Islam on penalty of death. Others were sentenced to death. Some number of the seven prisoners who were forced to confess died during the interrogations. At the same time state authorities kidnapped sixty-three Jewish children and held them hostage until the entire Jewish community collectively confessed and also brought proof of the murder forward. Bones were unearthed somewhere in the Jewish quarter on the basis of which Ratti-Menton and Sharif Pasha declared that this was “proof” of the ritual slaughter, and more Jews were arrested on charges of abetting the murderers. Christians and Muslims in the city united to unleash violence on their Jewish neighbors. A synagogue in a suburb of the city was pillaged and desecrated.

One of the arrested was a man named Yitzchak Picciotto. His brother, Eliyahu, happened to be the Austrian consul in Aleppo. It was thanks to him that world Jewry was made aware of the catastrophe. Dissolve to American Jewry. Then numbering about fifteen thousand, the Jews of the United States protested the murders in six different cities. For the first time in American Jewish history, Jews demonstrated on behalf of their own interests and exercised influence in foreign policy — they pressured President Van Buren to protest, and the United States consul in Egypt did so at the President’s bidding. As Hasia Diner, the historian of American Judaism, put it,

For the Jews, the Damascus affair launched modern Jewish politics on an international scale, and for American Jews it represented their first effort at creating a distinctive political agenda. Just as the United States had used this affair to proclaim its presence on the global scale, so too did American Jews, in their newspapers and at mass meetings, announce to their coreligionists in France and England that they too ought to be thought of as players in global Jewish diplomacy.

At the same time, the most powerful Jews in the world — among them Moses Montefiore in England, the Rothschild family, and the lawyer Isaac-Jacob Adolph Cremieux who went on to serve as the Minister of Justice in France — questioned the integrity of the investigation. The pressure worked, and the Syrian authorities were forced to lift the death sentence for those who had not succumbed to torture.

The Jewish press came into being in part because the Damascus Affair made clear how uneven the quality of life for Jews was depending on where and under whose authority they lived. Suddenly it was possible for Jews in Cincinnati to know that a Jewish child had been secretly baptized, kidnapped, and forced to be raised as a Catholic in Rome — as happened in 1858 in the infamous Mortara Affair. And when pogroms started rolling through the Pale of Settlement at the end of the nineteenth century, Jews were aware that in a place across the ocean called America it was possible to assert one’s right to live wherever one pleased, to vote, to buy land, and to bring a violent antisemite to court with the confidence that the court was tasked to rule in a wronged Jew’s favor. And so it made sense that between 1880 and the start of World War I approximately two million Eastern European Jews came to America. By 1914, when Congress squeezed Lady Liberty’s arms shut after the start of World War I, the American Jewish population had swelled to 2,349,754 — more than all of the Jewish population in Austria-Hungary — according to the American Jewish Yearbook.

The Declaration of Independence changed Jewish history and it changed Jewish identity. Suddenly Jews possessed a sense of possibility that was not delusional and not limited to messianic redemption. Democracy promised nothing less than to sever the old equation between exile and suffering; and whereas antisemitism has never been expunged from American life, and has recently become more prominent in American life, it generally did not express itself violently. (That is why the Tree of Life massacre and the subsequent violent assaults on Jews in America were so terrifying.)

America is not the only modern revolution in Jewish history, not the only experiment in rejecting the unjust terms of Jewish existence in the violent diaspora. The same dissatisfaction with the oppressive reality that led to the emigration of millions of Jews, that awakened a new sense of historical agency in the exiled Jews, issued also in the other great experiment: the restoration of Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel, the creation of a Jewish state. You might say that America and Israel, democracy and self-determination, are the two competitors for the Jewish future. Yet it is important to be clear that there are many differences between these two dispensations, and the ways in which these respective states are different are intensely significant for their respective citizenries. The United States is blind to chosenness, or Chosenness. No people who live inside it are esteemed or despised as essentially other in the eyes of the state. Neutrality about difference, and a skepticism about historically and biologically inherited privilege, is a corollary of the American system. America was a nation founded on the principle that all people are equal: there are no exceptions in this all-encompassing proposition.

But Israel — and in this sense Jews are no different from every other ethnically defined nation — was conceived as a Jewish state, whatever the definitions and the difficulties of such a conception. As in all other nation-states, such a definition is a secularized version of Chosenness. When the Jews lost their state the first and then the second time, they were forced to reckon with the plight of every minority in an alien state, in an exile, up until the founding of America: the people who belong, the majority, are held to be historically and sometimes even ontologically better than the people who do not. The state of Israel sought to modify the ugliness of this deep distinction by introducing democracy into the bargain, and making an explicit promise of complete equality to all; but still it lives within the old European framework of a majority and a minority, which, when the minority reaches a size that frightens the majority, has always led to violence. Even as Israel promised equality, it promised favoritism. Is a liberal ethnically-based state a contradiction in terms? Whatever the situation in theory, in practice the government that presides in Jerusalem today certainly thinks so. Netanyahu and his fevered cronies have drowned the possibility of real democracy in blood. Israel promised equal rights to all citizens. In this, it has failed.

So here I am, even in these days, to praise America, and what it has done for the Jews, and why. And to implore my fellow Jewish Americans to remember what we owe American liberalism, what it cost us in life and in pain to get here, and what it will cost us if the dream of American liberalism is allowed to wither. Before the United States, no country had ever accepted liberalism as the groundwork upon which to build a polis and to justify itself. And certainly no liberal society ever made the next essential breakthrough that America did, which was to add pluralism — the recognition of the blessings of difference and of the axiomatic rights of groups as well as individuals — to its public philosophy as a corollary of liberalism.

The magnitude of the struggle that we face in America now is owed precisely to the high moral bar that a liberal order sets for itself. The practice of political liberalism is always incomplete, always asymptotic, because there will always be citizens and non-citizens. The promise of universal equality will always be denied full fruition, and so, in some sense, liberal states are hypocritical by definition. (The moral revolution that is America long ago committed a genocide on its own ground.) Yet there are worse things than stubbornly aspiring to justice, especially when one prefers it to come from below rather than from above. Not doing so is far worse. Better to fail trying to institutionalize equality than to build a political framework on the premise that like should favor like. Tribalism is a constant seduction, but that does not make it a good. And tribalism in a heterogeneous society may quickly become an evil.

The commitment of American Jews to America was well founded. We need to remember this now, as everything is shaking, and as so many of our brothers and sisters link arms with the cruel reactionaries destroying the American Revolution and offer them “antisemite” as a useful spin-word for fascism. The Declaration of Independence is indeed based on, and necessitated by, self-evident truths. It would be a terrible delinquency to shut our eyes to its promise.

The Cheeseman

A little lectionary:

Every human being, no matter how slightly gifted he is, however subordinate his position in life may be, has a natural need to formulate a life-view, a conception of the meaning of life and its purpose. — Kierkegaard

The world has become “infinite” for us all over again, inasmuch as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations. — Nietzsche

A man’s vision is the great thing about him. Who cares for Carlyle’s reasons, or Schopenhauer’s, or Spencer’s? A philosophy is the expression of a man’s intimate character, and all definitions of the universe are but the deliberatively adopted reactions of human characters upon it. — WilliamJames

The anarchy of the philosophic systems is one of the most effective reasons for continually renewed skepticism. Historical consciousness of the limitless variety of philosophic systems contradicts the claims of each of them makes to universal validity and this supports the skeptical spirit more powerfully than any systematic argument. — Dilthey

Worldviews can engage in controversy, but only rigorous knowledge can decide, and its decision bears the stamp of eternity. — Husserl

The ever more exclusive rooting of the interpretation of the world in anthropology which has set in since the eighteenth century finds expression in the fact that man’s fundamental relation to beings as a whole is defined as a worldview. It is since then that this term has entered common usage. As soon as the world becomes picture the position of man is conceived as a worldview. Within this, man fights for the position in which he can be that being who gives to every being the measure and draws up the guidelines. — Heidegger

From the father the child has a right to demand a view of life, that the father really has a view of life. — Kierkegaard

If I want to have a worldview, then I must view the world. I must establish the facts. The smallest fact from the connection between the soul and hormonal balance gives me more perspectives than an idealistic system. But the facts are not finished, they are hardly even begun. A worldview that waits for facts believes in progress. — Musil

The schoolboy believes his teacher and his schoolbooks. — Wittgenstein

The most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them. — Chesterton

Lavoisier makes experiments with substances in his laboratory and now he concludes that this and that takes place when there is burning. He does not say that it might happen otherwise another time. He has got hold of a definite world-picture — not of course one that he invented: he learned it as a child. I say world-picture and not hypothesis, because it is the matter-of-course foundation for his research and as such goes unmentioned. — Wittgenstein

Principles, guidelines, models, and limitations are storehouses of energy. — Musil

A person, to be a person, must have a worldview. — The Cheeseman

man when the cheeseman unexpectedly addressed those words to me. The setting was completely unphilosophical. The words from across the counter startled me: was it possible not to have a worldview? Certainly not where we were, where I was growing up, which was a thicket of convictions. I was raised in a neighborhood of verities, Brooklyn, New York 11235. The streets flowed with answers. I was always already in possession of a worldview and could not even picture the emptiness of the opposite condition. I never met a nihilist. The worldview that held me in its grip, sometimes too tightly, was not anything that I had chosen: I was born into it and was systematically schooled in it. We are all born into a worldview; we receive it, we do not invent it; we are not Prometheans who begin ex nihilo and operatically create the terms of our selves and our world.

The most pressing business for a thinking mind is what to do about what it already believes. Credence must be earned by more than fidelity, which is not an intellectual virtue. The intellectual melodrama of my youth was whether I could find a way to assent to what had been bequeathed to me, to accept it not only as mine but also as true. Would I want it to be mine if it was false? I have intense feelings of affection for what my ancestors believed, because they believed it and I am their son, and for what their beliefs, true or false, enabled them to achieve (a belief system need not be true to issue in beauty and goodness, or to strengthen the spirit under duress); but neither filial duty nor the stewardship of tradition requires that we adopt the errors or the illusions of those who preceded us.

The vindication of a worldview that we did not elect must be accomplished in a manner that is spiritually richer than a mere reconciliation with facts, with the accidentals of one’s birth. Decades later I came to cherish this sentence at the beginning of The Guide of the Perplexed: “certainty should not come to you by accident.” Accident had to be elevated into necessity, which could then be celebrated as luck. But I was taught to begin with the feeling of luck, which had the unpleasant implication that everyone who was unlike me was unlucky, when of course they all ardently believed in their own luck, too. Chosenness, specialness, distinctiveness, uniqueness: irony does not flourish in the hothouses of self-love. In their insistence upon our own possession of the only truth, my rabbis outwitted themselves: their confidence about truth was designed to unburden us of the obligation, or the need, for a critical examination of first principles, but instead it seduced some of us in its direction. What was it that they did not want me to know? How can one live in the kingdom of truth and not use one’s mind? What is truth if not the harvest of examination and reflection? I suppose there are two kinds of people, those whose minds are started by a claim to truth and those whose minds are stopped by a claim to truth.

So the inherited scheme that makes the world constantly meaningful is only the start of a life in beliefs. Passive assent brings no glory to what is assented to. The clarification of conviction should be a matter of personal honor for an individual; otherwise he has no bragging rights for what he believes. I do not mean that we must become a population of philosophers, but surely we must all cop to a strain of doubt, a bout of obscurity, a run of uncertainty, even if it has passed or we have mastered it. There is no shame in human finitude. The important point is that beliefs are paltry things without their reasons. A weak faith is one in which there are more beliefs than reasons. (A “heretic in the truth” is how Milton acidly described the man who holds a correct opinion without knowing why.)

The history of received intellectual frameworks, even before the legendary convulsions of modernity, has been turbulent and wounding. Do not think for a second that it was not ever thus, that people in the fourteenth century harbored no doubts and posed no objections: that is the escapist fantasy of reactionaries. Wholeness — the seamless fitting together of all that is human, and then of all that is human with the cosmos — was never for creatures such as ourselves; or to borrow the current cliché, it is, however ennoblingly, forever aspirational.

A society of perfectly contented and perfectly coherent people has never existed. I cannot believe that there ever lived a completely integrated individual; and if there did, then the thoroughgoing absence of alienation in such a person should be regarded as a flaw, as a disorder. Moreover, nothing provokes a doubting mood as much as a claim to certainty. And a culture of certainty is not only edifying, it is also asphyxiating. A final completion of the search for what is really the case is not a human option. The history of ideas and the history of religions demonstrate that all the traditions that solemnly instruct us never to change have themselves changed, to a greater and lesser degree, with greater and lesser integrity. Rabbi Akiva was one of Moses’ most illustrious successors as a teacher of the law, but there is an astonishing midrash which describes Moses visiting Rabbi Akiva’s classroom in the first century — sitting in the eighth row, the midrash adds with wanton hermeneutical imagination — and not comprehending a word that was being said. When Moses hears Akiva tell his students that what he has just taught them is the law that was given to Moses at Sinai, he is reassured. It is the very definition of a tradition to be transmitted, handed down, passed on — which is to say, to make accommodations for its survival. Every tradition that prides itself on its rigidity but has made it all the way to us is clearly deceiving itself in this regard. Traditions are inheritances that must continue to be inheritances, and this is not possible without a capacity for honorable adaptation.

The continuity of tradition demands a measure of discontinuity, carefully and knowledgeably managed, with a clear assessment of historical circumstances and intellectual flexibilities. This, the distinction between bending and breaking, between developing and dissipating, is not easy: too much discontinuity is as lethal to tradition as too little discontinuity. Going into the future with only the old is as stupid as going into the future with only the new. But if you live according to a tradition, if you love it with all your heart, but you do not pass it on, you have betrayed it. It is not fulfilled only by your own practice of it. It was not created just for your own enjoyment of it. What I cherish must not end with me; or so I must resolve.

What thou lovest well remains,

the rest is dross

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage . . . .

Here error is all in the not done,

all in the diffidence that faltered . . .

The enterprise of perpetuation is not only a matter of having children and educating them adequately. It is also a matter of building and sustaining institutions, those allegedly soulless entities without which the most poetical accomplishments of the human soul would not stand a chance against time. In a free society, certainly, there is no excuse. But in our free society an excuse is desperately needed, because here we doom traditions with ignorance and indifference; here we have more important things to do.

Precisely because the acquisition of a worldview seemed moot to me, like settled business, and precisely because I inhabited a universe of previousness, the notion that a worldview is somehow lacking, and therefore an obligation, something for which I was responsible, was odd to me. The cheeseman saw the woolen yarmulke on my head; he knew that I was not wanting in an encompassing scheme; and yet he pronounced his admonition. And thereby he shook the settledness of things. The sufficiency of the received, one of the dogmas of my upbringing, would no longer suffice. And if one must have a worldview, then which worldview? Even without a familiarity with the shock that anthropology delivered to the West in the eighteenth century, I knew that there were many pictures of the world on offer. They were everywhere. I lived not only among synagogues but also among churches, though I left the neighborhood before it included mosques. Inside those churches and mosques, no doubt, they wrestle with the same problem of the threat to the validity of belief that is posed by the multiplicity of beliefs. A church down the street from a synagogue always thickens the plot. A sense of exclusiveness invites a siege mentality.

The cheeseman made belief seem less like an inheritance — a marvelous consequence of genealogy — and more like a task. In the matter of the most profound commitments, there was suddenly the suggestion of a choice. This was a little alarming: wasn’t the purpose of a patrimony, and of loyalty to it, to relieve me of choice? Moreover, I was quite sure that I was thoroughly unequipped for such a decision. (It was not until many years later that I understood that obedience, too, is a choice. The thing about voluntarism is that you can check out but you can never leave.) Yet there I was, on Brighton Beach Avenue, experiencing the vertigo from which modern Western thought has never recovered: the recognition, vexing and then intoxicating and then vexing again, that there are many pictures of the world and that all of them are held to be true by the people and the communities who espouse them. What did the diversity of fervently championed truths say about the possibility of truth? Maybe my view is correct and your view is incorrect, and there the story ends. No, too simple. But why too simple? Somebody must be wrong! My head, loyally and disloyally, swam.

This teaching — my early induction into the arcadian anxieties of a philosophical existence — did not take place in a classroom. It took place in an appetizer, which is what we called a delicatessen that did not serve meat, so as to respect the ontology of the Jewish kitchen. And my tutor was not, professionally, a teacher. His job was to run the cheese counter in Mr. Haber’s market on Brighton Beach Avenue in Brooklyn. The cheeseman was slightly stooped, balding, soft spoken, with a heavy accent and a gentle smile. I never saw him without his white apron. He stood behind a weathered cutting board that bordered a long refrigerated counter with a glass window that displayed the rows of culinary delicacies. (The appetizer was well named.) He handled the blocks and the wheels expertly, slicing them with a ruthless wire that he manipulated with the dexterity of a craftsman. The slices fell gracefully onto a waiting sheet of wax paper, which he then folded speedily and with geometrical precision. And all the while he talked and he taught. He cautioned me about hollowness and shallowness; as I stared at the sturgeon, he worried me about nothingness.

His accent was the tell. This was not supposed to have been his fate. Like almost all the adults I knew when I was growing up, the cheeseman was a displaced and disrupted individual. He was living his second life in his second world, because his first life in his first world had been annihilated. When the Germans invaded Poland, he was a graduate student in philosophy, and a Jew, at the university in Warsaw. Those were good years for philosophy in Poland, a flourishing era of logicians and phenomenologists. He devoted himself to the advanced study of Kant. It was at the cheese counter that I first heard the word “Kant.” But it was all blown to bits by the war. He never told me how he survived it, or which of its many hells he endured, but like Mr. Haber, and like my parents, he was “a survivor” — which is to say, he had a spirit more powerful than history. His mind emerged intact from an apocalypse. He had carried philosophy with him. He never abandoned it. Did it abandon him?

Years later I wondered whether philosophy, or the philosophical attitude, had stood him in good stead during the atrocities. I prayed that it had. For philosophy can surely serve as an instrument of human perdurability, though you would not know it from the philosophy departments. I pictured him starving and thinking, hiding and thinking, running and thinking, weeping and thinking. But I wondered also about the limits of mental detachment in the face of catastrophe. Elias Canetti once remarked that during the war he did not save Goethe but Goethe saved him. It is a geistliche sentiment, but I wonder. Aren’t there circumstances in which the equilibrium of a philosophical mind is not merely impossible but also suicidal? What are abstractions in a world on fire? What is an idea compared to a crumb of bread?

Should reflection upon existence teach interest or disinterest, and in extremis which is wisdom?

In any event, he made it out alive, and Mr. Haber, a man of such bountiful kindliness he could have been mistaken for a simpleton, gave him work. When the cheeseman discovered that one of his regular customers, a young man whose mother sent him frequently to his counter with the same order was eager to hear what he had to say, he was delighted to instruct the lad. He cut the cheese and discoursed on philosophy. I had the impression that he cut the cheese more slowly in those pedagogical moments, so that we would have more time for the seminar. I developed the habit of doing my errands at hours when the store might be less crowded and he could elaborate more fully, in his heavy accent, on his themes.

O those accents! They are almost all gone now. It is a commonplace of the literature of American immigration that the children were often ashamed of how their parents sounded, but for me it was Mozart. The accents were proof that everything that we were told about a vanished world had been exactly so. Not that I doubted it, not at all; but the accents were a sensual link, the actual sound of their world audible in my world, so that I sometimes felt almost as if I could travel backward along the accents, like traversing a rope stretched over a hideous drop, to the time and the place before the extermination of my people was attempted. I love refugees: these people of the before and the after, they gave me life. Refugees are the aristocrats of human fragility. They know more than we do, even if their knowledge is not power. In shul there were moments when the sound of those accents was almost too much to withstand, as when, in the afternoon prayer on Yom Kippur, old broken-down Mr. Frost sobbed as he prayed: “Do not cast us aside in our old age, as our strength wanes do not forsake us . . .” I never saw the cheeseman in shul: a philosopher. Mr. Haber was there often.

I hope that we will one day come to see the folly of our acceptance of disruption as an ideal of life. I refer not only to the Darwinism of the technologists: owing in part to their successes, a much wider social and cultural prestige has been conferred upon a cataclysmic view of change. (Is arrogance the condition of innovation or its consequence?) The only thing that we seem to produce in larger quantities than data is disrupted lives. In our romance of shattering we have come to scorn the shattered. If you have known shattered people, then you will think twice about all the shiny advanced rubbish about the virtue of hastiness, the idolatry of the will, the worship of the macro. After all, a dissatisfaction with contemporary conditions can take many forms and have many consequences: there are myriad ways to manage necessary and justified change, and heartlessness is not a requirement of progress, even if there will always be “losers.” Cataclysmic change is always sloppy change and always cruel change. I am so sick of living in the rubble of my culture and the rubble of my politics. Isn’t destruction exciting? Cataclysmists are pathologically at peace with human costs. To the social breakdowns that preceded them they add the social breakdowns that they devise, and the population of broken people grows. A new electorate! Like all revolutionaries they are vandals, except that they enjoy the further conceit of having circuitry on their side, as if science makes a moral difference. And now we have a government that looks down from its morally moronic stratosphere and gleefully breaks people. The viciousness is not a by-product of the policy, the viciousness is the policy.

The population of broken people grows beyond our borders, too. In 2024, according to the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, the global number of international migrants was 304 million people, or 3.7 percent of the world’s populations. These immense movements of human beings are all attempts to escape varieties of horror and danger; nobody, except the rich, uproots themselves recreationally. There is an unprecedented amount of vulnerability and instability, of homelessness and statelessness, in our world — disruptedness is a dark norm, and we must therefore take the trouble, and not only in southwest Texas, to understand disrupted people, people who will never know what the Stoics called a smooth flow of life, fractured and fissured people, people who need help. They are not alien, they are hurting. All hurting people are alien, I suppose, if you are fine; but wellbeing can itself be a myopia. In their indifference to the most elementary human considerations, it is the nativists who are the aliens. Syria is an entire nation of disrupted people, and the contemporary locus classicus of the savagery of disruption is Gaza. Cleansings and expulsions are nothing other than disruption as an instrument of war. I am not ranting. I am shocked again by all this damage, which in a certain light coheres as an era. And I am recalling the cheeseman and what he represented, the sweet obscure contemplative man whom they failed to kill, who for the rest of his exiled days could aspire to nothing better than the rent and the attempted mastery of his own memories. Healing must not be confused with happiness. There is no return from disruption, there is only the arduous labor of creating yet another life. Did the cheeseman have a family? There was something isolated about him, the halting tone of the solitary. When he stood before me and talked about moral theory, I heard justice but saw injustice. You cannot pretend to be familiar with the world unless you know post-catastrophic people. The man was a living monument to the futility of the categorical imperative.

“Kant” was not the only word I first heard at the cheese counter. “Descartes” was another. As he cut through a brick of muenster one afternoon, he explained the cogito, and more generally the question of certainty. “Imagine a man suspended in space”, he said. “There is no wind, no light, no sound, no external stimulation of any kind, nothing that could be registered by his senses. How would he know that he exists?” All around me the wrinkled Jews of Brighton Beach were fussily buying herring and rye bread and seltzer. (“The plebeian bubbly,” as Irving Howe delightfully called it.) My aproned teacher continued: “He would know that he exists because he is thinking. Thinking!” The squares of muenster were piling up on the wax paper. “And not only would he know it. He would know it with certainty.” The cheeseman’s eyes were hot. For emphasis he would sometimes come out from behind the display case that separated him from his customers, wiping his hands on his apron, and give me the intellectual climax again. “Thinking!” “Certainty!” I stalked his every syllable. When he handed me the artfully packaged cheese — all those tucked-in angles, muenster made mathematical — I knew that the lesson was done. Years later I learned that the story of the floating man was Avicenna’s invention, and that Descartes’ argument was somewhat more complicated, and somewhat less persuasive, than my teacher’s version of it. Perhaps he had a more sophisticated account that he could have provided but there was another customer waiting behind me, and maybe she was getting cranky. I wouldn’t have blamed her. Still, it was he who gave me the gift of the problem of doubt. It was at the cheese counter, in a hundred afternoons of provisions, that I acquired the conviction that the stakes in matters of belief are high.

In those years, before the Russian Jews arrived, Brighton Beach was a tired place, populated largely by retired workers from the garment industries in New York. The avenue was a block away from the sea, and they had come there for the beauty and the breeze, they were not floating men, and for the boardwalk, which was a stupendous incubator of community, particularly on summer nights, when the heat in the uncooled dwellings drove them outside to the shore beneath a Yiddish moon. (Later the Russians would bring their balalaikas.) Mr. Haber’s establishment was one of a series of storefronts on the ground floor of one of the many low, glum apartment buildings that sometimes seemed as hunched and as weathered as the people who inhabited them. (The camera recently panned past Mr. Haber’s block in Anora, which was set in these homely streets.) Beyond the appetizer, a few steps past our Sunday night deli, was a movie theater called the Oceana, where I began my education in American cinematic kitsch. There was no Antonioni in my Brooklyn. And further up the avenue was the elevated subway, which regularly overwhelmed the neighborhood with its nasty screeching noise and sent sparks falling to the unignited street below. The din of the train was the soundtrack for my tutorials.

Along with “Kant” and “Descartes,” I heard “Leibniz.” Even in my undeveloped state I recognized that there was something unbearable about a survivor teaching theodicy. I do not mean that the cheeseman had found comfort in his own mind for his own suffering. I never knew him well enough to take the measure of his wounds. Had he uncovered, for his own adversity, what Leibniz called a sufficient reason? But there he was, the pounded man expatiating upon the idea of the best of all possible worlds. When he explained the Leibnizian idea of God, I was reminded of what little I knew of Maimonides. (The cheeseman never discussed Jewish philosophy.) I remember him insisting that Leibniz’s optimism was derived not inductively, as a conclusion to be drawn from experience, but rationally. The world has to be this way — reason says so; and never mind the testimony that he himself could have given that the world is not this way. The cheeseman was certainly an expert on the frustration of the rational by the real. But at the same time he was an ardent exponent of reason. He adored it. Its concepts were stations on a magical journey away from spurious magic. In the company of reason the ordinariness of his surroundings melted away and an antique grandeur was recovered. I am embarrassed to recall that I did not adequately appreciate his reverence for reason. I was an adolescent reading Nietzsche, who is very bad for adolescents, and more generally I had fallen under the spell of existentialist paperbacks. I believed that reason was the problem; I was a hormonal fool. Reason, unlike logic, is not for the young.

What did the cheeseman mean by a worldview? I cannot say for sure. He almost certainly did not have in mind the organizing apparatus of the mind, the operating systems of categories and conceptual schemes that make experience legible: the cheese did not come with a side of epistemology. He preferred to impart to me moral and metaphysical ideas. He failed to warn me that all these ideas may not go together even when the individual pieces seemed proven and right. I had the impression that he was telling me, instead, to choose among philosophical packages; and for a young man packages are more exciting than pieces. Packages can make you feel brilliant. Yet perhaps he was not at all recommending a package, as if slices of thought could be neatly joined together like slices of cheese: the skeptical and even playful tone of his little lectures belied a young man’s hope for a single answer to all the questions. He was not preaching dogma, or any variety of mental convenience. He was soft, but he was strict, as if to say: young man, there is no haven from complication. A worldview, in his account, or in my understanding of his account, was not an evasion of intellectual labor. It was an invitation to intellectual labor. He was advising me of a duty. I sometimes associate the stirrings of my mind with the smell of smoked fish and pungent cheese.

A worldview is certainly a package, because it purports to be comprehensive, and sometimes even totalistic. The advantage of its scope is that it equips you for every contingency. It anticipates every confusion and every surprise. For this reason, whatever its intellectual merits, it has an undeniable psychological utility. “A Weltanschauung,” Freud wrote in an undelivered lecture not long before he fled Vienna, “is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly and on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place.” In subsequent years such unifying and simplifying explanations came to be most commonly described as ideology, and associated with tyrannical political systems, though they may tyrannize just as easily over an individual mind in an open society as over an entire society in a closed one. When ideology is thwarted by the openness of a society, it often curdles into conspiracy theory.

Modern philosophy, mainly in Germany, includes something known as “Weltanschauung philosophy,” which was largely the creation of Wilhelm Dilthey, the heir of Vico, whose immortality is owed to his prescient and extended defense of the humanities against the natural sciences. Dilthey classified and inventoried the many types of Weltanschauungen; it was his tribute to the natural diversity of the human mind. (The term Weltanschauung was coined, but not developed, by Kant in the Critique of Judgement in 1790.) Dilthey was one of those thinkers who, after Nietzsche, the self-styled “psychologist”, was happy to collapse philosophy into psychology, and so he shrank from calling a worldview a philosophy. In an especially provocative remark, he declared that “worldviews are not products of thought.” For this reason, worldviews are felicitously “undemonstrable and indestructible.” The origin of worldviews, in his telling, was to be found in human need: “the formation of worldviews is determined by the will to stabilize the conception of the world.” Americans might describe this as the will to closure. One way to preempt spiritual crisis is to remove foundational concepts from the teeming domain of the mind — to hold them with intellectual immunity, as it were.

But where in the hierarchy of intellectual virtues does stability belong? What is the mortal terror in inconsistency? Yet it was the unphilosophical, or even anti-philosophical, character of worldviews that lent them to the purposes of culture, I mean culture defined in the anthropological sense, as the given outlook of a community or a society or a nation, the sum of its assumptions and its axioms — the spirit of an age. Indeed, all that is required to come into possession of a worldview is to speak a language. (God, said Nietzsche, is in our grammar.) Thus Karl Mannheim seized upon Dilthey’s remark to emphasize the irrelevance of “theory” to the creation of a Weltanschauung. Philosophy, he observed, is “merely one of its manifestations.” In his account, a worldview is “the basic impulse of a culture” that manifests itself in all the culture’s expressions, high and low, and represents the “global unity” that runs through the entirety of a way of life in all its material and non-material aspects and knits them together. Hegel strikes again! Mannheim’s objective was not psychology but sociology — more specifically, the sociology of knowledge, which was invented by Marx but codified by Mannheim a hundred years later.

We might even say that a worldview is a degraded form of philosophy, an intellectualization of what we now like to call a habitus, a polished collection of doctrines with no rough edges, easy to swallow, allergic to paradox, bored by variations, of no intellectual distinction, handy for the education of children and the advancement of demagogues, a social asset, perfect for nothing more ambitious than a personal identity. Foremost among the attractions of identity is that it confers intellectual invulnerability. It takes guts to keep allowing ideas in; such porousness can be mistaken for vacuity, when in fact it represents a stubborn determination to keep checking the merits of one’s ideas, because justification is the work of a lifetime. In 1938, in an essay called “The Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger declared that “all great philosophy culminates in a worldview.” He did not mean it as a compliment. He wished to secure the superiority of philosophy, especially as he construed it. Yet as a factual matter — and he was always insulted by the grubby concern (“positivism”) with facts — Heidegger was himself in the worldview business, and his statement is false: there are great philosophies that cannot be in this way reduced. Their difficulty and their depth make them impossible to package and useless to cultural and political programs — as Heidegger’s own doctrine of Being should have been, except that the phenomenologist-turned-mystagogue found a way to place Being at the service of the Führer. When a way to grovel is sought, a way to grovel is found. Is there anything more poisonous than identity made ontological? (Heidegger had a Romanian contemporary named Constantin Noica, a metaphysician who also lived in the woods and also sided with the fascists, who wrote a tome with the risible but chilling title The Romanian Sense of Being.) The closer one studies worldviews, the more facile they seem, and the more sordid their history.

Can we agree that there is no such thing as the spirit of an age? There are many spirits in any age. The impulse to dissolve and to merge, the lust for oneness and for sameness, the entire Parmenidean enterprise, has had an awful blinding effect. Monism is sublimely satisfying, but it leaves out too much. Empiricism, before it is magnified into a philosophy and enters the lists, may be just a fancy term for alertness, for the scruple about paying the requisite attention. The issue is the philosophical and even spiritual significance of the details. We have been taught, especially under the influence of the social sciences, that knowledge advances by means of subsuming the particulars, by means of generalizations, but so, too, does ignorance. Common features are not always more revealing than uncommon features, and the unification of a manifold is not always the surest method of grasping it. Enter art.

The love of one thing may be owed to the fear of many things. The rampant variability of reality must be desperately brought under control. Unfortunately the pluralists, whose fundamental intuition against the monists seems unimpeachable, get too rattled by the task and go too far. They believe that the only way to relieve the pressure of the diversity and the opacity of the world is to surrender the possibility of objectivity altogether and to confine assertions of meaning and truth to the more lenient realm of subjectivity. Philosophical claims, they rule, will henceforth be regarded as self-expressions. And how they have prospered in America! William James was so convinced that serious thought was entirely an activity of personal temperament that he concluded that philosophy consists of “a few main types” — “cynical characters take one general attitude, sympathetic characters take another,” and so on. Argument is usurped by personality. Cogito ergo sum? He would say that!

Dilthey’s conclusion that the historical multiplicity of worldviews leads inexorably to relativism is similarly overwrought and unfounded. Why, in the end, can one view out of a thousand not be the true one? Why does it matter that a true opinion is surrounded by many false ones? Why is critical reasoning helpless before a large field? Shouldn’t it, in the name of its purposes and its methods, relish the challenge? Or is the anxiety about philosophical commitment political — that the rational justification of one position among others would be disrespectful or hegemonic? But the respect that we owe other believers — though not other beliefs — must be apparent long before the exercise of criticism begins; it must always be prior. I respect many people whose views I hold to be nonsense. (Evil nonsense, however, makes cordiality much harder.) There is something immature about being scared of other people’s philosophical choices; it is like being scared of other people’s happiness. And it is even more abject to be afraid of choice itself. The wounded pride of the eighteenth century — the rudeness of its discovery that what Hamlet told Horatio was correct, there are more things — is not enough of a reason to give up on truth; the anthropological revelation demanded only an expansion of the search for it. Anyway, the Western thinkers who were so unnerved by the existence of natives and aboriginals were never going to seriously consider their views of the world. (A few lines after his remark about cynical and sympathetic philosophies, James declared that “the thought of very primitive men has hardly any tincture of philosophy.”) The plenitude of philosophies and worldviews means only that people everywhere have been contemplating difficult questions and ultimate realities, and that is not bad news. We must tread carefully here, because from the truth that nobody can believe everything the lie that nobody can believe anything may quickly follow. The history of ideas is not the meal, it is the menu.

The cheeseman’s insistence that I gain a worldview may have been his way of teaching me the belief in belief, and his successive presentations of the philosophers may have been his way of suggesting that one day I would have to make a choice. And so it may not have been a worldview after all that he was commending to my attention, if a worldview is a summary of prevalent but unexamined beliefs, an arrangement of platitudes, a perquisite of membership in a culture, a badge of belonging. Whether by means of heritage or contagion, people usually hold the picture of the world that is held by people like themselves, but the cheeseman was not prodding me to select a conformity. He wanted me to stretch, not to wallow.

I came away from the appetizer also with another treasure: a lasting impression of one man’s amor intellectualis, and therefore with the notion that thoughtfulness is an essential element of dignity. It would be hard to exaggerate the cheeseman’s dignity. His circumstances never levelled him. All of his dreams had been destroyed, except his dream of understanding; and that dream could be realized anywhere, even in a small food shop in a distant corner of the world. He had suffered, but he had not lived stupidly. The cheeseman was the first genuinely philosophical individual I ever encountered, the first one who exemplified — or modelled, as we would say — the intrinsic satisfaction of serious thought. In this way he prepared me for my low and stupid age. He gave me a course in the experience of mental independence. It is unlikely that he had many people with whom he could explore the contents of his educated and energetic mind, and it pleases me to imagine that our conversations may have relieved his loneliness. I hope I helped. All hail the solitariness of the thoughtful! And the master whose name I never knew.

Staying Decent in an Indecent Society

To grow up, as I did, in a country that had been under Nazi occupation less than a decade before I was born, was to be very sure about who had been good and who had been evil. Where I lived, in The Hague, we refused to buy candy from a local tobacconist, because the woman who worked behind the counter once had a boyfriend in the occupying German army. The butcher shop around the corner was out of bounds, because the owner was rumored to have been a Nazi collaborator. Most of our primary school teachers had been on the side of the angels, of course — or so they said. This one had been a brave resister by sending German soldiers, asking for directions, the wrong way. That one had punctured the tires of a German army vehicle.

Whatever the truth of these claims and rumors may have been, the central moral yardstick with which we grew up was the question of whether a person had been a resister or a collaborator. It took some time for us to realize that people who had willingly collaborated or actively resisted were in the minority — less than ten percent either way, and there were far more collaborators than resisters. Most people had kept their heads down and tried to survive as best they could. If unpleasantness happened to others, to Jews in particular, it was more comfortable to avert one’s eyes. That way one could pretend not to know.

For those of us born after the war it was easy to judge such behavior harshly. But it might have been wiser to heed the words of Anthony Eden, the former British prime minister, in The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Ophuls’ great film about French collaboration. He said in perfect French that he would not presume to cast moral judgment over the French treatment of former collaborators, since he had not had the misfortune of living under a brutal occupation himself.

But even if one learns to be less quick to judge others, the experiences of World War II still cast a dark shadow and moral questions cannot be dodged, especially now that we live once again in a time of increasing autocracy, persecution, and violence licensed by the world’s most powerful leaders. Whether people can be classified as heroes or villains is less interesting to me than the question whether a person can remain decent in an indecent society. Is it at all possible, apart from joining the resistance, which puts one’s own life and that of others at risk, to remain uncorrupted by a criminal regime?

What constitutes an indecent society was succinctly defined by the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit in his superb book The Decent Society. An indecent society, in his view, is one whose official institutions are designed to humiliate people, often a minority. A decent society is not quite the same thing as a civilized society. In Margalit’s words, a “civilized society is one whose members do not humiliate one another, while a decent society is one in which the institutions do not humiliate people.”

A society ruled by Nazis, or Stalinists, or Maoists, or other rulers aspiring to totalitarian control, is of course more than just indecent. As long as one can freely express one’s critical opinions without being killed or imprisoned, it is possible to remain decent. The real moral dilemmas start when one’s livelihood, or even one’s life, depends on whether one is willing to cooperate with an indecent state. Where there is no choice, there is less of a dilemma.

One choice faced by people in a dictatorship bent on humiliation, or worse, is whether to stay or to leave. Not everyone has this luxury, of course. Moving to another country is always difficult, and for many people unthinkable. Most countries will not let you in without money, documents, jobs in prospect, linguistic skills, and so forth. People who try to leave anyway often end up dead, or in holding camps under appalling conditions. And all this depends on whether you are allowed to leave in the first place. Everything was done to make it extremely hard for Jews to leave Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Once the Germans occupied most of Europe, it became utterly impossible. Less than a decade later, the Iron Curtain, which was not just a metaphor, was designed to stop people from leaving Communist states.

These are practical issues. But assuming that a person is famous, or rich, or well-connected enough to get out, there is a moral issue, too. In the case of Nazi Germany, but also the Soviet Union, China, Russia, or any country under dictatorial rule, a rift invariably opens up between those who leave and those who, for whatever reason, choose to stay. Thomas Mann, who was hostile to the Nazis and married to a Jewish woman, fled Germany as soon as Hitler came to power in 1933, first to Switzerland, later to the United States. After becoming aware of the horrifying extent of Nazi crimes, Mann said on BBC radio that “everything German, everyone that speaks German, writes German, has lived in Germany [my italics], has been implicated by this dishonorable unmasking.” He went on to claim that all books published in the Third Reich stank of “blood and shame” and should be pulped.

This did not go down well with writers who had stayed in Germany but had not been Nazis, who had tried in their own eyes to remain decent. The novelist Frank Thiess took Mann’s criticism personally. He responded by coining the phrase “inner emigration.” Living through the darkest times at home and shielding oneself from the criminal state by withdrawing into one’s private thoughts was surely more heroic, he argued, than lecturing one’s compatriots from the comfort of Californian exile.

A similar conflict emerged from the terrors of Vladimir Putin’s policies in Russia. Hundreds of thousands of Russians have left their country; some, like Thomas Mann in 1933, because they would have been arrested if they had stayed, others because they found life under Putin’s autocratic and belligerent rule intolerable, and still others to avoid being compromised by it. The film director Kirill Serebrennikov, for instance, had wanted to stay in Russia despite being continuously harassed by the government. But the attack on Ukraine was the last straw. “This war,” he said, “is being waged by a president and politicians I didn’t vote for, but in the eyes of many, I am their unwitting accomplice.”

The chess champion and political activist Gary Kasparov, who left Russia in 2013, declared that Russians who want to be “on the right side of history should pack their bags and leave the country.” Those who don’t, he said, “are part of the war machine.” And yet some who have opted to stay are indisputably decent people. The journalist Dmitry Muratov won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021 for trying to uphold freedom of expression in Russia. He has openly criticized Putin’s war. His newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, is now published online from abroad. But he refuses to leave Moscow, where some of his former colleagues on the paper continue to live: “We will work here until the cold gun barrel touches our hot foreheads.”

A figure such as Muratov would probably not have survived in Nazi Germany. He would at the very least have been forced to remain silent. Inner emigration, however, can take different forms. Some writers and artists continue to work, while managing to avoid being tools of propaganda. Very few Japanese left their country when it was run by military autocrats who were unleashing wars all over Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. Foreign exile was hard for most Japanese to imagine. Some writers, such as Nagai Kafū, refused to publish during the war. Others avoided being propagandists by concentrating on historical themes or offering harmless entertainments. In 1941 the great film director Mizoguchi Kenji made The 47 Ronin, a long film about a famous samurai legend. It could be interpreted as a patriotic work, but without endorsing the ultra-nationalistic regime.

Several famous artists who continued working in Nazi Germany claimed that classical high culture lifted them above the criminal nature of Hitler’s rule. The actor Gustav Gründgens was happy to lead the Prussian State Theater under the auspices of Hermann Göring. He performed the German classics there in the belief — he later claimed — that his theater was a kind of oasis cut off from the terrors of the Nazi state. Wilhelm Furtwängler, perhaps the greatest conductor of his time, could easily have left Germany after 1933. He refused to do so for the same reason that Thomas Mann chose exile. Mann claimed that German high culture went wherever he went. Exile was the only principled way to keep it alive. Furtwängler, too, saw himself as the guardian of high culture, but he felt that his artistry would wither outside his native country. Responding to the criticism of Arturo Toscanini, who said that “everyone who conducts in the Third Reich is a Nazi,” Furtwängler made the following statement: “Personally, I believe that for musicians there are no enslaved and free countries. Human beings are free wherever Wagner and Beethoven are played, and if they are not free at first, they are freed while listening to these works. Music transports them to regions where the Gestapo can do them no harm.”

This was astonishingly naïve, and not a little self-serving. But was it indecent? Did it compromise Furtwängler? Since it was the intention of Joseph Goebbels to showcase German high culture, and even popular entertainment, to demonstrate the civilized nature of the Third Reich, one might say that anyone who assisted him in this endeavor was complicit. Furtwängler refused to be a party member, unlike, say, Herbert von Karayan, who had an SS rank, and he protected some Jewish musicians. He remained a decent man, but he was compelled to perform for Hitler’s birthday, and his work as a conductor certainly kept up the pretense that culture under the Nazis still thrived.

The case of Erich Kästner was even more complicated. He was not only the author of Emil and His Detectives, a celebrated children’s book that appeared in 1928, but also of an anti-Nazi novel, Fabian: The Story of a Moralist, in 1931. His books were tossed into the fire during the notorious book burning in 1933. Kästner, who detested the Nazis, was banned from publishing. But he was determined to stay in Berlin; he refused to let the Nazis chase him out of his own country. And he didn’t want to leave his mother, to whom he was devoted. A good man, no doubt. Yet he needed to work. When he was asked to write a film script for the UFA studio under a pseudonym, he accepted with alacrity. Munchausen, released in 1943, is not a propaganda film, but a brilliant rendering of the tale of Baron von Münchausen, the eighteenth-century fantasist. Goebbels wanted the movie to be more lavish, more accomplished, more technically brilliant than anything produced in Hollywood. Shot in glorious Agfa color, it featured many of the major movie stars who still remained in Germany. Not only was there no sign of Nazi propaganda; Kästner even managed to slip in a few lines that anyone who paid attention could construe as barbs against the Nazis. In one scene, a wicked wizard, dripping with malice, suggests to Munchausen that invading Poland would give them untold power. When Hitler realized who had written the script, he erupted in fury and made sure that Kästner would not work again.

And yet, Kästner, like Furtwängler, had cooperated with Goebbels in his aim to burnish the image of the Third Reich with high art and entertainment. This did not make him an active Nazi collaborator. One can excuse his behavior, even if it is hard to justify. But he was still compromised.

If this was true of German artists who were decent men, and even hostile to the Nazis, what to think of the French artists and entertainers who continued working under German occupation? Sartre published books and put on plays. Dior designed dresses, Mistinguett sang songs, Henri-Georges Clouzot made (some very good) films, and so on. Their main excuse for doing so was not unlike Furtwängler’s: they wanted to demonstrate that French culture was still alive, despite the humiliation of Nazi occupation. This was actually a source of pride. Some even saw it as a tacit sign of resistance.

But not everyone. Jean Guéhenno was a teacher and a highly esteemed literary critic. Rather than submit to Nazi censorship, he decided that silence was the only decent response for a French writer. He explained his reasons in the priceless journal he kept during the occupation years, which was published as Diary of the Dark Years. He wrote (in my translation): “What to make of French writers, who, to stay on the right side of the occupation authorities, decide to write about anything but the one thing all French people are thinking about; or worse still, who, out of cowardice, bolster the occupants’ plan to make it appear as though everything in France continues as it did before?”

Guéhenno’s journal is wise, witty, and scathing about his fellow writers, including some very famous ones, such as Paul Valéry and Henry de Montherlant. “Incapable of being in hiding for long,” he writes, this type of literary figure “would sell his soul just to keep his name in print.” Valéry didn’t write propagandistic poems, to be sure, but he kept safe by sticking to mythological themes to entertain his readers. Still, writes Guéhenno, “if all you can do is amuse us, just shut up.”

Such a principled stand was harder to maintain for people who depended on their pen or their artistry to make a living. Guéhenno could still teach at a lycée. But it made sense in a country under a decidedly indecent foreign occupation. In a totalitarian state, even the choice to remain silent is not usually open to people. When Chairman Mao ruled China, everything was done to make everyone complicit in the crimes of the state. People were forced to go on murderous campaigns against “rightists,” “deviationists,” “bourgeois revisionists,” and other “class enemies.” During the Cultural Revolution, many Chinese were both perpetrators of terrible violence and victims of it, depending on the ways the winds blew. For artists, intellectuals, and writers, shutting up was not really an option: they were forced to praise Mao’s infinite wisdom and extoll the party line. Writers who still hoped to remain decent and tried hard not to be compromised often ended up murdered. One of the great twentieth-century Chinese writers, Lao She, who refused to write propaganda, was tortured to death (they called it suicide) during the Cultural Revolution as a so-called “counterrevolutionary.” To have been an Erich Kästner, let alone a Jean Guéhenno, in Mao’s China would have been impossible.

Stalin, whom Mao much admired, could be just as murderous. The deliberate humiliation of certain categories of people, including in certain periods the Jews, made the Soviet Union under Stalin a patently indecent state. There are, however, examples of public figures who remained decent nonetheless, but almost never without making some compromises, if they wished to survive.

Dmitri Shostakovich would not have been able to compose his music under Mao. (The Chinese pianist and composer Liu Shikun was imprisoned for eight years in 1967 for playing Western classical music; guards took special pleasure in beating his arms and hands.) In fact, Shostakovich could easily have disappeared into the gulag at different times in his life. He was denounced in 1936, after Stalin walked out of his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. When Pravda accused him of composing a “muddle instead of music” and betraying “Soviet art,” friends deserted him and former admirers were quick to pile on the accusations. He was hauled into the NKVD headquarters, the “Big House,” a year later, where he was interrogated and pressed to denounce a close friend. Only the lucky event that his interrogator was suddenly arrested himself saved the composer.

In 1948, Shostakovich was one of the victims of a decree against “bourgeois degeneracy.” His music was attacked for its “formalism.” Again, many former friends and colleagues, terrified of contamination, turned against him. He was forced to repent for his aesthetic and political sins. His teaching positions were cancelled and he considered committing suicide. To make amends and feed his family, he promised henceforth to compose music only for the People, and wrote music for propaganda movies and odes in praise of Stalin.

And yet, despite the threats to his life and livelihood, Shostakovich also continued to compose serious music and he remained a decent man. There are many instances of bravery and personal kindness, recorded in Elizabeth Wilson’s book, Shostakovich: A Life Remembered. A young composer named Isaac Schwartz, whose parents had been arrested as “enemies of the people,” was taken under Shostakovich’s wing. The composer even secretly paid for his education. At the height of the anti-formalist campaign, Schwartz was ordered by his conservatory to publicly denounce Shostakovich as a bad teacher. He refused to do so. When Shostakovich heard about this, he was moved, but he told Schwartz that he should never have taken such a risk; he had a wife and small children to think about. “If I am criticized, then let them criticize me — that’s my affair.” When Stalin went after Jews in public life to purge “Zionists” and “rootless cosmopolitans” in the late 1940s, Shostakovich stood up for Jewish musicians and composed a cycle of Jewish songs, entitled From Jewish Folk Poetry — which was performed in public only after Stalin’s death.

Shostakovich probably could have left the Soviet Union at some point, but he chose to stay. He knew that in order to survive and to keep composing, even pieces that could not be performed at the time, certain compromises had to be made. That is why he agreed to do some hack work to appease Stalin. In the eyes of Russian artists who had been able to live abroad, such as Igor Stravinsky, these small compromises tainted him. This came to a head in one of the most humiliating episodes of the composer’s life.

In 1949, just a year after he was denounced as a “formalist,” Shostakovich was sent by Stalin to represent the Soviet Union at the World Peace Congress in New York. Shaking with nerves, lighting one cigarette after the other, he had to read out a prepared statement criticizing such composers as Stravinsky and Schoenberg (both of whom he in fact admired) for their complicity in decadent bourgeois Western culture. He was also forced to express his gratitude to the Communist Party for correcting his own errors. This sorry performance was a punishment designed to humiliate Shostakovich in public.

But the rift between those who stayed in the Soviet Union and Russians living abroad was made painfully clear when Stravinsky was asked to sign a telegram welcoming Shostakovich and other artists to the United States. He responded that he was unable to “join welcomers of Soviet artists,” since all his ethical and aesthetic convictions opposed such a gesture. He also turned down an invitation to engage in a public debate with Shostakovich, no doubt to the latter’s relief. Stravinsky stated: “How can you talk to them? They are not free. There is no discussion in public with people who are not free.” To say that Stravinsky was right is not to say that Shostakovich was indecent. But it did point to the compromises a person had to accept if he chose (so long as there was any choice at all) to live in a brutal dictatorship.

Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China are extreme examples of oppression. There were periods in both countries, as well as in peripheral Communist states, when writers and artists could produce serious art, untainted by official propaganda, but they often had to do so in the way Erich Kästner wrote his script for Munchausen, full of subversive hints that demanded reading between the lines. During the Prague Spring in the 1960s, Czechoslovak writers and filmmakers hardly even needed to do that. But once that relative freedom was crushed under Soviet and East German tanks, the same question emerged there, too: to stay and submit to the indignities of public denunciation and censorship, or to leave.

Again, the option of leaving was only there for the few, and crossing the Iron Curtain was risky. But those that made the leap into the greater freedom of the West still had to make a living in strange and not always hospitable countries. Milan Kundera succeeded in Paris, but was resented by many who had stayed at home. Of the great Czech filmmakers, Jiří Menzel, opted to stay, but at the cost of seeing his work banned, or much reduced in quality. He never again made anything as good as his Closely Watched Trains.

Miloš Forman and Ivan Passer made it to the United States. Forman somehow managed to continue making wonderful films inside the Hollywood system. The satire of some of his American work (Taking Off, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The People vs. Larry Flynt) is as biting as his Czech films. He was a survivor on both sides of the Iron Curtain. But operating inside the American entertainment industry exacts its own compromises, which have less to do with relative decency than with the demands of the marketplace. Forman was asked about this often. His answer was always that he preferred commercial constraints to political censorship. He had left his country because in his view Communism “humiliates your pride, because it forces you voluntarily to twist your spine.” If he had stayed in Prague, he would have had to quit making films, or conform and “shit right into my mouth.” In Hollywood, he said, “financing what the ‘money men’ consider uncommercial can be a problem, not a prohibition.” He likened living in Communist society to being kept in a zoo. You get fed, but you are locked up in a cage. America was more like a jungle: “You’re free to go wherever you like, but everyone’s out there trying to kill you.” It is clear which he preferred. But there is of course a price to be paid for commercial conformity, too, expressed by Passer, who was less successful in America than Forman. Passer once said that only he could have made his Czech films of the 1960s, while his American movies could have been made by any capable studio director.

Whether an authoritarian society, Communist or rightwing, is always an indecent one is a valid question. Not all of them humiliate and persecute minorities. Forman would argue that Communist governments humiliated all their citizens by forcing them to submit, not just physically but also mentally. Vaclav Havel, in his famous essay about “living in truth,” wrote about the way people had to repeat official lies knowing full well that they were lies: “We fell morally ill because we got used to saying something different from what we thought.” The only relative advantage of living in a rightwing or military dictatorship is that a person has a better chance of remaining silent.

The humiliation of having to repeat falsehoods touches public figures, such as writers and artists, more than the average citizen. But the complicity which is often forced on people affects everyone. One of the most perverse examples of Communist oppression in Europe was the German Democratic Republic — perverse because many former refugees from Hitler’s Reich saw the GDR as the good Germany, the anti-fascist Germany. Not many German Jewish writers returned to the democratic Western half of Germany. Alfred Döblin was an unusual case, and he never felt at home there. Quite a few Jews did return to the GDR; Stephan Hermlin and Stefan Heym are the most famous examples.

But even though many former Nazis continued to thrive in the West, sometimes in high positions, the East replicated some of the oppressive methods of the Third Reich. The East German secret police, the Stasi, was more pervasive in daily life than the Gestapo had been. There were no death camps in the GDR, and the rhetoric was all about equality, brotherhood, and world peace. Overt state brutality was avoided, unless strictly necessary, for example in cases where people tried to escape over the wall. But it was common for people to be taken in for interrogation by the Stasi. The conversation might turn to a person’s children who wished to go to a decent school. This could be arranged, of course, but in return the person would be obliged to come in for regular chats to report on what his friends were saying about the state. By complying the decent person would become indecent, denouncing friends and even close family relations.

The case of Heiner Müller, the famous playwright, shows how this could happen to the best. He was born in 1929. His father was a Social Democrat, and locked up for a time by the Nazis in a concentration camp. But Müller joined the Hitler Youth, like most boys of his age. After the war, the family lived in Soviet-occupied Germany. They were socialists, but in 1951 Müller’s parents and younger brother decided to move to the greater freedom of the West, when it was still easy to do so. Müller remained in East Berlin and became a successful writer. But he often got into trouble with the party. His plays were sometimes banned. He protested against the oppression and forced emigration of dissidents. And yet he remained loyal to the GDR, as the better, the anti-fascist, Germany.

Müller was to all accounts a decent man. Then, after the fall of the Communist state in 1989, documents were found in the Stasi files suggesting that Müller had been a secret informant since 1979, and had possibly even had a hand in the denunciation of a fellow writer. Müller responded that he had never signed any documents or put anything in writing, but admitted that he had been naïve not to realize that conversations with Stasi agents would classify him as an “informal informant.” Perhaps he had been naïve. Perhaps he was coerced for personal reasons. Here, too, Anthony Eden’s refusal of unearned righteousness should be observed. But it does show at the very least how hard it is to navigate the pressures of an indecent state.

All the examples above concern the behavior of people in societies where free speech is severely impaired, or non-existent. What about an indecent state which still retains freedoms that people in liberal democracies have taken for granted, such as free elections, a free press, and a degree of judicial independence? Consider two countries in our own time. They may not be the only examples, but right now they are the most prominent: Israel and the United States. Under the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel, though still a democratic state, has taken on Avishai Margalit’s definition of indecency, in which official institutions devise policies to humiliate people and minorities. His cabinet includes men whose views on Palestinians are violently hostile. The Minister for National Security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has been convicted numerous times for inciting racial hatred. Killing more than forty-thousand people in Gaza in retaliation for the terrible violence against Jews on October 7, 2023 was less an inevitable consequence of war than an act of brutal vengeance. Palestinians living on the West Bank have been subject to institutional humiliation for many decades. To say that worse atrocities are taking place in Sudan or eastern Congo will not do, precisely because Israel still is a democracy.

Many Israelis have left their country as a result. It would be quite wrong, however, to claim, as some commentators have done, that those who stay are therefore complicit in the crimes of the state, for it is still possible to be a decent Israeli. One of them is the novelist David Grossman. His fiction and his political writings are works of great humanism. He has protested vigorously against his own government’s cruel and degrading policies against the Palestinian population. He speaks out against official abuses regularly. Yet he continues to live at home, where he feels he belongs. Despite all its flaws, he still believes that his country, founded by survivors of mass murder and persecution, has a right to exist, and to defend itself. This is not an indecent position. Nonetheless, he has been accused by certain “anti-Zionists” outside Israel of being an apologist for genocide. When citizens can still speak freely, even if they might have to suffer the wrath of their government and some of their compatriots, they should be honored for raising their critical voices, and not found guilty by association.

The American administration under Donald Trump is doing everything it can to construct an indecent state. Immigrants are insulted by the president himself and threatened with arrest and deportations. Some permanent residents have already been thrown in jail for expressing views the government disapproves of; protesting against the Israeli war in Gaza can be reason enough. Government agencies upon which large numbers of people depend for their health or even their lives are called “criminal” and destroyed. Havel’s dictum of “living in truth” is systematically undermined by demands that men and women in leading government posts repeat lies: the 2020 election was “rigged,” rioters in the Capitol were “patriots.” The independence of the judiciary is being damaged by appointing sycophants who promise to prosecute the president’s political opponents. Journalists are denounced as “enemies of the people.”

But the indecent state in the United States is not yet a dictatorship. The press is still free to report and publish critical opinions. There are still independent judges. There will be elections, unless Trump is willing to provoke a constitutional crisis. And there is a large opposition party. All this could collapse in time, of course. One way to make that more likely is to behave as though the United States already is a tyranny. Caving in to irrational and sometimes illegal demands without being forced to do so can only strengthen the indecent impulses of government leaders with authoritarian intentions. This has been called “anticipatory obedience.” Instead of resisting unreasonable attacks on their journalistic work, media companies pay large amounts of money to a hostile government to avoid getting sued. Law firms have done the same. Newspaper owners order editors to pull their punches against the president. Politicians indulge in what in Nazi Germany was called “working towards the Führer”: seeking to please the leader by anticipating his most outlandish desires — Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore, a third presidential term. Corporations, universities, and even the American military, in a fit of panic, scour through their records, communications, and academic curricula, so as to scrub anything that might attract the ire of the president and his minions. If “woke” ideology was often used in many of those same institutions to stamp on free expression before, the anti-woke crusade of the far right is even more dangerous, since it has the backing of the state. Universities are deprived of billions of dollars in federal funds if they refuse to let the government decide what should be taught, and who should do the teaching. That Harvard decided to fight back and sue the Trump administration is a welcome sign. One hopes that others will follow.

Then there is that other inevitable psychological response to any indecent state: internal emigration, the temptation to tend only to your private garden, to shut out the noise of the polis, to refuse taking note of the news. There were more demonstrations when Trump got elected in 2016. That the the far more radical nature of the second coming of Trump has met with less resistance so far could have several reasons: a sense of numbness, a punch-drunk Democratic Party, the lack of a focus that could bring people out into the streets, or a justified fear that mass rallies will provoke state violence without doing much to deter Trump’s extremism.

But if inner emigration is excusable in a dictatorship, where speaking out carries lethal dangers, there is little excuse for it when speech is still free. Anticipatory obedience is not the way to stay decent. Citizens must protest, in any way they can, against attempts to break down the institutions that protect a liberal democracy, especially when men and women leading those institutions, including the president himself, use them to humiliate people. If citizens fail to do so while they still can, without risking prison or deportation, they will deserve much harsher judgment from future generations than Anthony Eden was prepared to pass out to the French.

In Blood-Boltered Times: The Northern Poets

The late Michael Longley told of how, one Saturday morning in the middle of the 1970s, when tribal warfare in Northern Ireland was becoming bloodier by the day, and even more so by the night, he and his wife, the literary critic and academic Edna Longley, were having a weekend lie-in, when he heard from below the rattle of the letter box. He put on his dressing gown and padded downstairs — I can see him, that big soft shambling gentle man — and collected a sheaf of letters and bills, and returned to sit in bed propped against pillows, with his spectacles teetering on the end of his nose, which is how in my memory he always wore them.

On one of the envelopes he recognized the handwriting of his friend and fellow poet Derek Mahon. Accompanied by a brief covering note, Derek had sent a poem fresh from the smelter. It was “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford.” Michael read it, read it again, then in an awful silence let the sheet of paper fall from his hand. Edna asked him what was the matter. He sighed grimly and said, “I’m giving up poetry.”

This was not the first instance I had of the depth of the rivalry — friendly, sort of — that smoldered amongst the remarkable generation of Northern Ireland poets born just before the war and in the decade or so after, a generation that included Seamus Heaney, John Montague, Medbh McGuckian, Seamus Deane, Ciaran Carson, Frank Ormsby, Tom Paulin, James Simmons, Gerald Dawe, and Paul Muldoon, a list which is by no means exhaustive. Note the preponderance of men. Plus ça change.

The phenomenon of so much poetic talent erupting — and there was the sense of a volcanic event taking place — is surely remarkable, if not unprecedented. There was of course the unsettling thought that the poetry and the violence might be gushing up from the same creative depths. I put the possibility to Seamus Deane, in trepidation and not without a sense of daring — it was a question, in those troubled days, if we in the South had any right to offer our thoughts or opinions on the burgeoning Northern disaster.

Seamus was born in the Bogside — a radical republican area of Derry city which at the time was under more or less permanent siege by Protestant extremists — and therefore knew a thing or two about the subterranean forces at work in his homeplace. His theory as to the inspiration for so much literary activity on his side of the border was far simpler and far more prosaic than any of my dark speculations. According to him, the phenomenon was mainly due to the Northern Ireland Education Act of 1947, which, despite thunderous protests by the Protestant Orange Order and some Unionist politicians, provided increased support for education generally and for Catholic schools in particular — as Seamus wryly observed, “They graciously allowed us to get an education.”

Certainly the Northern poets knew their stuff. Longley was a fine classicist, Heaney and Ciaran Carson would both produce translations of Dante, Mahon knew the French poets in French, and Deane was to become one of the finest literary critics of the time; and the rest were no intellectual slouches either. While the sons and daughters of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s in the South were pinned under the yoke of the Catholic Church, which dominated the education system in the Republic, the Northerners were benefitting from the postwar British determination to provide equal opportunity at all levels of society. Needless to say, the reformers could not prevail against the rigidity of the English class system, but while the going was good they did many and very good things.

Were writers in the South shocked by the quantity and the quality of the work that suddenly started pouring out of the North? Certainly the poets were — shocked, and envious. One of them, whom I shall not name, from an earlier generation, born at the end of the 1920s, carried a bitter lifelong resentment, frequently and vociferously expressed, of Seamus Heaney’s lavish successes. But then the internecine struggle among the Northerners themselves was in some instances almost on a par with the warfare going on in the streets of Belfast. Years ago, at a literary festival somewhere abroad, we were being brought on a tour of local beauty spots, and one of the party — I shall not name him either — when he learned that Heaney was on the bus, refused to board and went off and got drunk by himself.

Anyone familiar with Derek Mahon’s work will understand Longley’s reaction that Saturday morning in what the newspapers used to refer to lip-smackingly — the hacks do like a good scrap — as “war-torn Belfast,” when he first read “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford.” It is, simply, though it is not simple, one of the finest poems, if not indeed the finest, written in Ireland since the death of Yeats.

Mahon himself came to resent the poem for what he saw as its vulgar popularity; on stage once I urged him to read it to the audience, to which he responded with a cold stare and a curt refusal. I, of course, could have kicked myself for my crassness: never ask a poet to have another go at a lollipop that long ago has been licked down to the stick. But what a marvel it is. Mahon had accompanied his friend, the novelist J.G. Farrell, on a field trip to research the latter’s novel Troubles. On a stretch of coast in County Wexford they came upon the ruins of a burnt-out hotel, the once grand Ocean View, where in a tumbledown shed

Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.

In the poem, the mushrooms become a symbol for universal suffering:

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!

There is another Mahon poem, a companion piece to “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” but not as well-known, though it is very nearly as fine, and which is one of my own favorites among the poet’s work. The central conceit of “A Garage in Co. Cork” — “Like a frontier store-front in a western / It might have nothing behind it but thin air” — is that the long-departed couple who ran the abandoned filling station have undergone a marvelous Ovidian metamorphosis:

A god who spent the night there once rewarded
Natural courtesy with eternal life —
Changing to petrol pumps, that they be spared
For ever there, an old man and his wife.

Derek’s drinking was as much a part of him as his cravats, his blazers, and the drawl which he affected mainly for comic effect. I mention the booze only in order to express my wonderment at how much he achieved despite his addiction — work universally celebrated for its poise and sure-footedness. I recall an evening in the 1990s in Paris, when I stood with him at the bar in a crowded La Coupole while we waited for a table. “Of course, I don’t drink at all any more,” he remarked casually, as the barman handed him the double Pernod he had just ordered. In a way I understood what he meant; compared to the quantities he used to put away, he was by then practically a teetotaller. In a rueful but characteristically jaunty essay, “At Aristaeus’ House,” he bemoaned the price that the drunkard pays for his drunkenness. “Insomniac, disoriented and paranoid, I made the acquaintance of a series of detox-and-rehab establishments. This . . .went on for several years: in and out, in and out, the ‘revolving door’ as they call it. (I’d have to celebrate sobering up, you see.)”

He did sober up and stayed on the wagon for years, though I heard he occasionally fell off of it towards the end. By then I had lost touch with him. He was living in Kinsale, a pretty seaside village to the south of Cork city. I hope he was happy there. He continued to write, and in 2018, two years before he died, he published one of his finest collections, Against the Clock, which I had the happy opportunity to review, and which I described as “superb, thrilling and fizzingly exuberant” — come on, allow me a bit of smarm: I was writing about one of our greatest poets at the close of his life.

I knew them all, or almost all, and a few of them were friends. Oddly, in every case I cannot remember where or in what circumstances I met them first. Ireland in the last quarter of the twentieth century was a swirl of literary goings-on: parties, book launches, raucous dinners, and festivals, festivals, festivals. I suppose it was all a little frantic and somewhat got up. Flann O’Brien used to say that Ireland had ten thousand poets — a standing army! — and five thousand readers of poetry.

I seem to have been readily accepted by the Northern crowd, or perhaps I just barged in; either way, I saw much of them. In our middle years, my wife and I used to have dinner with the Heaneys and the Deanes every three or four months, in our house or in theirs, turn and turn about, and delightful occasions they were. Seamus Deane had a wonderfully sly, dry wit. One evening, at our place, at a time when we were financially strapped and boastfully home-producing much of our food, Mrs. B. served up a splendid beef roast, at the sight of which Seamus exclaimed, “Ah, I see you do your own slaughtering, too.”

Marie’s husband was a notoriously good storyteller. When Seamus Heaney walked on to the stage to give a reading, he would have the audience in the palm of his hand within seconds — he was a natural. He read his own work beautifully, in a softly modulated baritone purr, enhanced by the richness and roundness of Ulster vowels. I can still see him, forty years ago or more, on the stage of the old Eblana Theatre in the basement of Dublin’s central bus station, working his magic.

In a break between poems he spoke of the subtle and not so subtle distinctions between formal and demotic speech in Northern Ireland, and gave us an example. A schoolteacher friend of his suspected that a little boy in his class was “copying” from his deskmate. So one day he set the class to write an essay, on the theme of “The Swallow.” Shortly after they had got started he interrupted the exercise, and separated the copier from the copied from, sending the former to sit at a desk on the far side of the room. At the end of the allotted twenty minutes he gathered up the schoolbooks. The bright boy had written, “The swallow is a migratory bird. At the end of the summer it flies south and winters in North Africa . . .” And so on, for two or three pages of peerless prose. The other, less bright boy’s effort in its entirety read: “The swallow is a migratory bird. He have a roundy head.”

Lest I give the impression that it was all fun and frolics at the expense of work, I should emphasize, if it needs emphasizing, that they were all, all of them, wholly dedicated to their art. Yes, they craved attention, they wanted adulation, they demanded fame, but the pursuit of excellence came first. Heaney led the way, others went with him, some even went further and outstripped him on occasion, but no one could hit the common note as surely and as often as he did. He was the lodestar in the poetic firmament of the time. There was something in the warmth and inclusiveness of his work that elicited, and elicits, love, not only in Ireland, where he was Our Poet, but all over the world. Wherever I went, wherever I go, Heaney was and is the one, whether in the frozen north of Finland, in the cider country of Galicia, or on the Brazilian pampas.

It could be trying, for the rest of us. One day long ago somewhere in the United States I was signing my books after a reading when a large loud man in a Stetson hat came marching up with an arm outthrust and boomed at me, “I want to shake the hand that shook the hand of Seamus Heaney!” I wish, in l’esprit d’escalier, that I had thought to say to him what Joyce said to the young man who approached him in a Paris restaurant and asked if he might kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses: “Yes, but remember, it has done a lot of other things as well.”

As I have said, the competitive drive was strong in the lot of them, including Heaney, for all his ease and his generosity of spirit. In the 1970s he and Marie and the children moved to the Republic and settled in a fine house in Sandymount on the south Dublin coast, hard by the beach where Stephen Dedalus wrestled with the ineluctable modality of the visible. They were a hospitable couple, and their parties were frequent and famous. I think it was at the very first one of them I attended — perhaps it was our initial encounter? — that Seamus spoke to me about my novel, Birchwood, which had been published recently and wellishly received; he praised the style in particular and gave me a hard look and said that if it had been poetry instead of prose, he and many others would be worried.

I remember being struck by the notion that he and I, or any of “the others” and I, should be in competition. This was a long time ago; I was young and naively puritanical in the matter of art and the making of it. Weren’t we all in it together? Yes, but the togetherness had spiky edges, and awkward and unaccommodating corners. In time, as Seamus garnered more and more fame, I joined the sullen ranks of the begrudgers who, even those who were friends with him, as I was, agreed with John Montague’s remark that “Heaney uses up all the oxygen.” I wasn’t even a poet, and could only imagine how “the others” felt. It would be many years before I found the courage and the occasion to tell him how much I regretted the jealousy and the rancor I had nursed in my treacherous heart, especially after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1995.

Yes, he was a totemic figure, always there before us, immovable, unavoidable, winning more and more accolades and, infuriatingly, producing better and better work. Was he an encouragement as well as a challenge? Did our modest skiffs rise on the tide along with his ocean-going liner?

He was always generous, always ready to lend a hand. In 1975 I was given the Irish-American Foundation Award, which came with a check for four thousand dollars, an appreciable amount of dosh in those days. I was by no means the obvious candidate, for I had as yet published only a few things; Seamus, who had won the prize two years previously, was, as we say in Ireland, “well got” with the Foundation, and I am convinced it was he who persuaded the judging panel to choose me. I never asked Seamus to confirm this, and of course he would never have mentioned it himself. He worked by quiet ways.

It may seem paradoxical to say that one source of Seamus’ strength as a poet was the fact, which he mentioned more than once, that there was a part of him that “didn’t give a damn about poetry.” He was ever on the side of life, a truism that is not true of all artists. He came from a close-knit rural family, and grew up on a small farm, Mossbawn, a name so softly evocative the future poet might have invented it. His father was a cattle dealer as well as a farmer. I was at Seamus’ house one day when he confided to me that when his publishers told him he had come in for some unexpected royalties, he had asked to be paid in cash. “Look,” he said, “here it is,” and produced from his back pocket a warm wad of folded notes curved to the shape of his hip. “This is how my father carried his money,” he said, “and now I’m doing the same.” Filial piety was strong in him, and informed much of his poetry.

I think of him as a worker-poet, bending to the task, putting his back into it, getting it done: calm, assiduous, patient. Who among us oldsters will forget the first time we read that seminal poem, “Digging,” from his first, luminous collection Death of a Naturalist in 1966? For many of us the poem had the same effect as “A Disused Shed” had on Michael Longley: how could we compete with such early mastery? In the poem the poet recalls the image of his father bending among the potato drills — “By God, the old man could handle a spade” — and closes with the announcement of his aesthetic, ringingly formulated in three short lines:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Among “the others,” Paul Muldoon was probably the most stylistically adventurous, and is still producing work of great daring, intricacy, and inventiveness. Like his playful poetry, he has himself an ageless quality, and still makes me think of those fictional tales of English public — read: private — school life in which bespectacled chaps get up to jolly japes and have midnight feasts of tinned sardines and cream buns. I believe it amuses him to maintain this persona, one of a number that includes heading up a rock band.

In fact, one of his most telling poems evokes schooldays. “Anseo” — the Irish word for “present” — from the collection Why Brownlee Left in 1980 — recalls the poet’s childhood classmate, Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward, who was regularly beaten by the Master for his many absences from the morning roll call, when

You were meant to call back Anseo
And raise your hand
As your name occurred.

Years later the poet encounters the grown-up Joe Ward, who boasts that he is now in the IRA and “had risen through the ranks / To Quartermaster, Commandant,” and tells

How every morning at parade
His volunteers would call back Anseo
And raise their hands
As their names occurred.

So much of the origins of the Northern Irish “armed struggle” is encapsulated in this superb, brief poem.

That struggle was a fearsome challenge to anyone in the North harboring poetic ambitions. A couplet from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65 that both Heaney and I often quoted pointed up the dilemma:

How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

And it was Heaney who addressed the issue most forcefully in 1975 in his collection North. He came in for some bitter criticism over that volume, in particular for daring to frame the violence of “the Troubles” by reference to ancient Norse ceremonies of blood and sacrifice, thereby, as some saw it, evading his duty to speak plainly of the here-and-now. On the other side, too, he was challenged by the “men of violence” for not expressing solidarity with their “struggle.” In the poem “The Flight Path,” in 1996, he describes, in deliberately unpoetical language, an encounter on the Belfast to Dublin train with the IRA volunteer and publicist Danny Morrison, though he does not name him in the poem:

So he enters and sits down
Opposite and goes for me head on.
“When, for fuck’s sake, are you going to write
Something for us?” “If I do write something,
Whatever it is, I’ll be writing for myself.”

In an interview later he said: “After that, I . . . wasn’t so much free to refuse as unfree to accept.”

I’m not sure why, but I associate Medbh McGuckian with Paul Muldoon. Her work, like his, often sounds more like magical incantation than poetry — mind you, some would say that poetry is magical incantation. I have only met her on a couple of occasions, and liked her for her humor and friendliness. I have never seen a photograph of her in which she is not smiling. Her poetry baffles me, in the best of ways. When I read her, I have the sense of being told things that I should understand, and that I will understand, with enough application. Here are the opening lines of “Ylang-Ylang,” which is as opaque as it is resonant.

Her skin, though there were areas of death,
Was bright compared with the darkness
Working through it. When she wore black,
That rescued it, those regions were rested
Like a town at lighting-up time.

Muldoon, along with Derek Mahon and Tom Paulin, became notable exiles, Mahon and Paulin heading off to London, and Muldoon to Princeton. Heaney and Deane chose internal exile, moving from the North to Dublin and taking up academic posts, while Longley stayed on in Belfast, and worked with the Northern Ireland Arts Council.

My wife and I spent some delightfully convivial weekends at the Longley home not far from Queen’s University, with good talk, splendid food, jorums of drink, and frequent literary disputes — Edna is a person of strong opinions trenchantly expressed, who championed her husband’s poetry, was critical of it when she thought criticism was required, and was not slow to put others straight in the matter of poetry, its origins and ends and its fit place in society. Many a thick ear I got from her, for my lazy assumptions and lazier assertions; though she was born in the South, she is in ways more Northern than the Northerners themselves.

He was so funny, Michael, so funny and mischievous and — the word has just come to me — boyish. He loved jazz, drink, amusing company, fun. One evening he told us of a peace initiative he intended to present to the governments in Belfast, London, and Dublin. He was calling for the mass manufacture of the Northern Ireland Knickers, which would have a Union Jack printed on the front, the Tricolour of the Republic on the back, and, in the gusset, the Red Hand of Ulster . . .

Longley, who died in January, wrote some of the most subtle yet provocative poems around the subject of the Troubles. In the spring of 1998, when I was books editor at the Irish Times, he submitted to me a poem called “Ceasefire.” For months negotiators had been trying to work out the terms of what would become the Good Friday Agreement, which eventually brought to an end, more or less, the three-way conflict between the IRA, the Loyalist paramilitaries, and the British army. The war had lasted for thirty years and in it more than three and a half thousand people had perished.

Michael’s poem makes no mention of the North — it is a retelling of that passage in the Iliad in which King Priam of the Trojans approaches the Greek warrior Achilles seeking the return of the corpse of his son Hector, whom Achilles had bloodily slain. It ends:

I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.

I held on to the poem through the final tense weeks of negotiations, until, at the beginning of April, word came along the back channels that a deal was very close. The poem would have to be put into the books pages on Thursday, for Saturday publication. We waited and waited. Thursday came and still we were kept in suspense. At midnight I took a deep breath and gave word to the printroom to go ahead. “Ceasefire” was set in large type and inserted prominently in a box in the center of the leading page. Next day, Good Friday, April 10, 1998, the breakthrough was announced. Phew.

Longley was one of the finest nature poets of the age, as well as an elegist for those terrible times. The poem of his which draws together the two aspects of his genius most movingly is “The Ice-Cream Man,” and I want to quote it in full.

Rum and raisin, vanilla, butter-scotch, walnut, peach:
You would rhyme off the flavours. That was before
They murdered the ice-cream man on the Lisburn Road
And you bought carnations to lay outside his shop.
I named for you all the wild flowers of the Burren
I had seen in one day: thyme, valerian, loosestrife,
Meadowsweet, tway blade, crowfoot, ling, angelica,
Herb robert, marjoram, cow parsley, sundew, vetch,
Mountain avens, wood sage, ragged robin, stitchwort,
Yarrow, lady’s bedstraw, bindweed, bog pimpernel.

Ciaran Carson worked with Longley on the Arts Council and later held a professorship at Queen’s University, where, after Seamus Heaney’s death, he headed up the Center named for him. He was something of a Puck among the poets, and would introduce his stage readings with a tune or two on the tin whistle, often accompanied on the melodeon by his wife Deirdre. Behind the impishness, or in the midst of it, he was a scholar, a linguist, and a poet of high achievement. Along with his Dante translation, he made a splendidly vigorous English version of the Irish prose-and-poetry epic Táin Bó Cúailnge. His final book of verse, Still Life, published in 2019, contains some of his most enduring and most moving work. And his study of Irish traditional music, Last Night’s Fun, is fun for any night.

I have suddenly recalled his stammer. To my ear it was not so much an impediment as a means of emphasis, and an enhancement in particular to his fund of funny stories. I know I have perhaps leaned too heavily here on the topic of humor, but it was an important component of the Northern poets’ practice and program. It kept them buoyed up in atrocious times, it kept them focused, it kept them sane. In this context, I think of Philip Larkin suggesting that one belly-laugh would have brought the entire edifice of the Ted Hughes-Sylvia Plath phantasmagoria crashing down. The Northerners laughed among themselves, at themselves, and with and at us, and were all the better for it.

Ciaran’s tone was always lovely and light. Here are the opening lines, characteristically long, of the first poem in Still Life, written after a successful medical procedure:

Today I thought I’d just take a lie-down, and drift.
So here I am
Listening to the tick of my mechanical aortic valve — overhearing, rather, the way
It flits in and out of consciousness. It’s a wonder what goes on below the threshold.

Much was going on, all of it awful. His heart was one thing, his lungs another. He died of cancer shortly after Still Life was published.

And Seamus was six years dead by then.

Paris, 2009, and I am waiting on a delayed flight at Charles de Gaulle Airport, reading an advance proof copy of Human Chain, Heaney’s final collection. I had known he was uncertain about the book. He had phoned me one day about something or other, and I could tell he was not himself. In the doldrums, he said, finding it hard to concentrate, hard to keep up. Now, from that dreary airport lounge, I think to send him a phone text: “You have nothing to worry about. Human Chain is masterly.” On the instant comes his warm but worrying reply: “You have no idea how much this means to me.”

As soon as I got home I rang him and invited him and Marie to come out to us for dinner. It was a long trek, since Sandymount, where they lived, is twelve miles or so from Howth, where we lived. But they came, and we had one of the sweetest occasions ever, the four of us together. That was the evening when I apologized to him for having been so jealous of his success, and for so long. It was childish, I said, and I’m sorry. As our wives looked on I pressed his hand, probably the first time we had touched since the day we first met, in the nearly forgotten long ago. I thought of him writing, in the sequence “Clearances,” of peeling potatoes at the sink with his mother when he was a boy: “Never closer the whole rest of our lives.” Just so.

The Northern Poets — by now in my mind they have taken on the blazon of capital letters. They flourished in a glorious time, when we were young and the world was there to be written, and now that time is gone. Yes, a few of them are still vigorously present; there is, as Ciaran Carson had it, still life, though often nowadays the life-force feels more like a flicker than a flame. But what wonders they wrought, in blood-boltered times and their aftermath.

What Russians Do Not Wish to Know

December 2024 marked the thirtieth anniversary of Russia’s first war against Chechnya, begun by President Boris Yeltsin in 1994. Chechnya had been conquered by the Russian empire in the mid-nineteenth century in a decades-long and very cruel military campaign that combined the Russian colonization of the area and the genocidal removal of the indigenous population.

Later, in 1944, the Chechens and the Ingush were collectively accused of collaboration and banditry and exiled to the Asian republics of the Soviet Union. The conditions of their deportation to the new regions were such that approximately every fourth or fifth one of them perished. Permission to return to the homeland was given only in 1956, and the Checheno-Ingush Soviet Socialist Republic was restored in 1957.

In both the Russian empire and the Soviet Union, Chechens faced a situation that was not about maintaining their statehood but about sustaining their existence. The very being of a people hung constantly in the balance. Large nations do not have such fears or such memories.

In 1994, rejecting diplomacy and bringing in troops, Russia crossed that line a third time. Encountering resistance, the Russians under Boris Yeltsin did not step back but chose once again the imperial modus operandi — violent conquest of territory accompanied by a punitive policy of subjugation. This choice changed post-Soviet Russia profoundly, blocking the emergence of a potential federalism and laying the foundation for the restoration of an authoritarian system.

Dzhokhar Dudayev, Chechnya’s first president and a former general in the Soviet Army, said in an interview in 1995 that “Ichkeria has curbed [Russia’s] appetite a little, but it has not stopped it. There will be a massacre in Crimea. Ukraine will clash with Russia on irreconcilable terms. As long as Russism exists, it will never give up its ambitions. Now they call it ‘Slavic’ — under this brand they want to subdue, as in former times, Ukraine, Belarus, to get stronger, and then . . .” At that time, anyone in the Russian democratic camp who criticized the war would nevertheless have insisted that Dudayev was exaggerating. What Russism? What massacre in Crimea? What clash with Ukraine?

Today Dudayev’s words sound prophetic. The Chechens, with their experience of colonial violence, saw in us what we, the Russians, failed to see. We did not see it because we did not want to see it.

In the final years of the Soviet Union, on winter evenings, in the dim light cast by the green shade of the table lamp, my grandmother recited poetry to me, from books or from memory. Born in 1908, a former aristocrat, she worked for the publisher of political literature at the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. She was the only editor of Lenin’s collected works who was not a member of the Party. Her work, her daily bread, was the Soviet language and Soviet words: she freelanced when she retired, doing proofreading at home, and I would peek over her shoulder, amazed.

But although she served the Soviet vocabulary professionally, when she spoke she rarely used official turns of phrase or words that smacked of newspeak. She spoke as if there was no Soviet Union outside the window. Even when forced to say “pioneer,” “maculature,” or “regcom” (regional committee), she pronounced them with an intonation that made clear that in her view the words were upstarts, invaders that she had to tolerate.

I think she feared that I would swallow those words — children put whatever comes to hand into their mouths — and would not even notice that I had been infected, poisoned by Soviet diction, which would pop up in my speech like a chickenpox rash. The poetry that she recited to me was a practice of linguistic hygiene. Nothing written after 1917, naturally — only the classics, only the unmuddied springs of the former language: Tyutchev, Annensky, Fet, Pushkin, and of course Lermontov, the gloomy Romantic. I think my grandmother had a passion for Lermontov because — she never mentioned this — her maternal great-uncles, three young lieutenants, fought at Borodino against Napoleon in 1812, and the images in Lermontov’s poem about the battle secretly stirred her ancestral memory, which she preserved along with her dangerous aristocratic heritage.

She completed the readings with a lullaby. Most frequently it was Lermontov’s “Cossack Lullaby”:

Sleep, my lovely baby,
Hush-a-bye.
The clear moon quietly
Looks into your cradle.

Languor and sleepiness followed. The darkness gathered outside, turning glassy, floating in, night with all its dangerous fairytale creatures, ghosts, and evil beings, trying to break into the house, and my grandmother’s voice came in the same waves, as if from a distance or the depths of time:

The Terek River flows over the rocks,
Dark waves splashing;
An angry Chechen crawls ashore,
Sharpening his dagger.

I knew what a dagger was, we had two at home, both war trophies from Germany. One was ornamental, with a dull chrome blade, the handle made from a roe deer leg with the hoof on top — a harmless trinket. But the other one was a bayonet-knife from a German carbine, sharpened, narrowed for trench warfare, for hand-to-hand combat, so that the blade could more easily penetrate layers of winter clothing. Its unpolished blade smelled of death and evil. It was this sinister dagger, a killer’s weapon, that I pictured in the Chechen’s hand.

The word “Chechen” meant nothing to me. Zero, as if “Chechen” came from the universe of a different language, from beyond the Terek’s existential border. That suited me. I, too, was part of a general silent conspiracy of rejection and complacency and denial. “Chechen” was an opaque ritual name for the absolute Other, the absolute foreigner coming at night with a dagger.

Grandmother, who usually liked to explain everything, clarified nothing. She just read poetry. Now, as I recall those evenings, for a moment I cannot resist that rhythm, the soundscape of her words. Grandmother put her soul into the reading, saving me from the desiccating disturbances of Soviet speech, handing down to me the ennobling high Russian language. Did she understand that even it could be poisoned by imperial chauvinism and colonialist xenophobia?

I don’t think so. She, whose parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were officers, priests, engineers, gatherers of the Empire, would simply not have understood the question.

Can ignorance be part of a culture? It certainly can, in a double intertwined role: as a consequence of a cultural superiority complex and as a taboo imposed on the memory of one’s own crimes.

Consider a small detail: enormous editions of James Fenimore Cooper and Thomas Mayne Reid were published in the Soviet Union. (Mayne Reid was a nineteenth-century British writer who came to the United States and wrote adventure tales about the American West and the American South; he has been completely forgotten by American and English readers but he remains popular in Russia.) The communists published Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reid, I think, because they could fit his tales under the rubric of “oppressed peoples.” I read every one of their books that was translated and I knew more names of the native tribes of America than of the indigenous peoples of Russia, whose stories seemed uninteresting compared to Indians, tomahawks, warpaths, tribal unions, and battles in distant lands. It is disquieting to consider now, but back then it went unnoticed; my ignorance of my own world was natural, almost physiologically natural.

Of course, in kindergarten we had to learn the names of the eponymous peoples of the Soviet republics — Armenian, Azerbaijan, Belorussian, Estonian, Georgian, Kazakh, Kirghiz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Moldavian, Russian, Tajik, Turkmen, Ukrainian, and Uzbek — whom “great Rus united forever,” according to the national anthem (which was printed on the back covers of school notebooks). But the smaller nations who did not have the status of a Union republic, the status of a fraternal people, their own pompous pavilion at the Exhibition of the Economic Achievements in Moscow, their own color on the political map of the USSR, or capitals, emblems, flags, national costumes — they were like extras in a movie who flashed by in a shot and were gone, because the action was not about them.

There were also novels that formed the colonialist canon of Soviet literature; their subject was the enlightenment of the small nations. The ethnic groups were described with the belittling optics of backwardness, insignificance, and servitude from which they were freed by Moscow’s civilizing role, the gift of “great Rus.” There were no alternative optics. It was only in the classics — in Lermontov, for example — that a different aspect appeared, from a previous era: the echo of imperial wars and conquests; but it was an echo that did not resonate with any solid knowledge, because the theme was taboo, hidden by the image of a peaceful annexation.

On a school trip in the early 1990s to a museum, I had an unpleasant reaction to Vasily Surikov’s famous painting Yermak’s Conquest of Siberia, completed in 1895. From its title I had expected it to depict the overcoming of the harsh climate. Instead it depicted a sixteenth-century battle, and the local tribesmen, clearly unhappy with the appearance of emissaries from distant Moscow, ferociously shooting arrows at the Cossacks, who eventually prevailed. It was so startling, so unpleasant to see, that my eleven-year-old brain came up with a gentler explanation: these were the bad tribes, but there were very few of them. The good tribes, the majority, who were not in the painting, had of course greeted the conquering Cossack with open arms.

This is anecdotal evidence of the intellectual atmosphere unwittingly absorbed by a child. Yet it would not be an exaggeration to say that Russia, or more precisely, its Russian majority, reached 1994 with a catastrophic misunderstanding of its history, of the long and bloody historical experience that determined Chechnya’s aspirations for independence and also the emancipatory aspirations of other republics.

What was Russia like in 1994?

I would note a characteristic feature that is important in the context of this discussion.

It was already, in my view, a society disillusioned by democracy, which was directly associated with the economic collapse, and afraid of another collapse. The late Soviet Union was a state of controlled fear and regulated violence, I would even say transparent violence. People who had gone through this socialization knew how to read and conform to written and unwritten rules, and their compliance assured them of physical and economic security from the state. I think that, subconsciously, people thought this an important achievement that allowed them to manage their lives and have clear horizons for planning.

The paradox of perestroika, or if you will, the trap of perestroika, was that people wanted change for the better without the loss of that base of security, without personal risk. But the opposite happened. I remember the early 1990s: my fifty-year-old father would bring home his wages as a pile of cash, money that had almost no value; he regarded it anxiously, like a man who had been tricked by a magician. My grandmother, who had been a teenager during the Civil War, would remark, “Oh, well. I remember my father giving me a million rubles to buy a cup of sunflower seeds at the market.” She knew that you could live through such times. But for my parents, this was a catastrophe.

Fears of the future overshadowed for them the concept of responsibility for the Soviet past, even for their own damaged family. Fears of the future forced them to isolate themselves, to expect nothing from the state, and to sacrifice any possible solidarity, trying to survive individually.

We watched television every weekend: news of the week and analytical reports. War was on the screen: standard gray apartment buildings, which looked like the ones across the street, destroyed by artillery fire, a burned trolleybus, again familiar to us. Visually this was the Soviet universe, Soviet space delineated in a familiar way. You would think that these recognitions would serve as a baseline for empathy — we lived in the same kind of house, we rode the same kind of trolleybus. But we watched the war news in silence, not grim, not anxious, just alienating. I do not remember a single discussion or a single emotional cry about what we were seeing. The only thing my parents seemed to worry about were my school grades. Now I understand that they were already thinking that I had to go to college in order to avoid the draft.

We seemed to lack the necessary repertory of human responses. Say a word, any word, and it would require a response, an opinion, a discussion; so it was better, then, to say nothing. After the news came a movie, such as The Odyssey of Jacques-Yves Cousteau. And then we would start talking.

On June 17, 1999, my eighteenth birthday, I received a draft notice from the army to appear with my bag at the recruitment office.

The notice was written on an official form of the USSR Defense Ministry. It was like being drafted into the Soviet army almost a decade after the Soviet Union collapsed. They had printed so many of these notices, in case of a big war and general conscription, that they had not run out of them eight years after the Soviet Union fell. Needless to say, I did not do as instructed.

In the big cities it would be hard to find a young man who wanted to join the army (the enlistment was for two years of service). The army was seen as a space of total unfreedom, a Soviet relic in which hazing dominated. Twice a year, in spring and fall, the recruiters hunted for young men, who hid and evaded the draft by paying bribes, getting fake medical certificates, and looking for loopholes to stay out of uniform. Draft dodging was a social norm, and people talked about it openly without shame, sharing tricks and contacts. Everyone knew that you would be nothing but a slave in the army.

The year before, in the early summer of 1997, I went on a geological expedition to the north. At the Leningrad Station several platoons of new border patrol recruits were loaded into the second-class compartment of the train. They were kids just a year older than me. But they didn’t look older. Quite the opposite. Dressed in ugly, uncomfortable, worn uniforms that had no military swagger, they looked like children — short, awkward scions of poor families who lacked the will and the money to hide or to buy their way out.

It was a base emotion, I confess, this feeling of the natural superiority of a free man traveling on his own business, who belonged only to himself. But in fact it was not the superiority of a free individual at all. It was the superiority of a stronger, more clever, and more agile creature that would never be trapped in the snares of the hunter or caught by the hounds; a feeling laced by a kind of gratitude for the chumps who were the first to fall into the recruiters’ hands, to be fed into the maw of the state.

The outskirts of Moscow were still flashing by when the lieutenant accompanying the recruits came into our compartment with a cardboard box under his arm. I had noticed the boxes on the platform; they must have contained rations for the road, hardtack and canned goods, and some of the soldiers had already been eyeing them expectantly. “Need some stew, campers?” the lieutenant asked. “I have loads, a hundred cans. And hardtack, too.” We were teenagers, the same age as his recruits. But we were free men with foreign backpacks, with money, and he was sucking up to us, trying to act as if he unexpectedly discovered an excess of those boxes of canned stew, and he wanted to make a little money.

“Fuck off, creep,” said the senior member of our expedition, experienced in the north country and a doctor of geology and mineralogy. “You’re stealing from the grunts, bastard.”

“Don’t want any? Fine,” the lieutenant said without a change in his voice or expression and moved on down the car. He came back a few minutes later — without the box.

We were silent in our car. I was struck by the ordinariness of the officer’s moral indifference, his imperviousness to offense. I promised myself that I would do whatever it took not to end up in that army.

Those recruits were lucky: it was the last call up before the Second Chechen War, and they served their two years in the north in border patrols, which were not sent to Chechnya.

I ask myself now why we didn’t resist. It was the 1990s, after all, the time of rallies, strikes, and street actions; our age — schoolboy yesterday, student today — was the age of dissent, of rebellion. It was certainly in our self-interest to protest against a war to which we might be sent, to protest against an army that was still Soviet in spirit and essence. But we did not protest, not as a generation. We had chosen the strategy of individual salvation: some went to college, any college at all, just to get the education deferment; some went into hiding for years; some got health deferments.

Why didn’t Chechnya become for Russia what Vietnam had been for the United States? Why, given the sight of all the horrors of war on the television news and all the pragmatic reasons for staying safe, didn’t Russia have a mass youth antiwar movement?

First, because we inherited the atomizing social tactics of our parents: avoid direct conflict with the state, always seek the private exit, the individual loophole, without thinking about the common fate or the possibility of solidarity. We were far below the level needed to meet the challenges of the time. We were proud — at best — of our personal non-participation in evil.

Second, we, like almost all liberals, chose the convenient view of the war against Chechnya as merely a matter of political excess, a tragic combination of circumstances, a horrible byproduct, an error of the transitional period that had no decisive significance for Russia’s future as a whole. By localizing and diminishing the significance of the war, we spared ourselves from answering the ultimate question: what was Russia historically, if the Chechens had such a hideous account to settle with it, and were prepared to resist it so stubbornly and for so long?

Third, if we thought about it, there was just one question at the heart of the war: do nations that are colonized and conquered by an empire have a right to exit? A right to recover political agency? If there had been serious peace talks, these questions could not have been bypassed. But public consciousness in Russia was dominated by the fetish of the “threat of disintegration” and the integrity of the state.

In December 1994, in his speech to the nation explaining the policy toward Chechnya, Boris Yeltsin said: “Russian soldiers and officers are fighting in Chechnya for the integrity of Russia” — as if Russia would have fallen apart with Chechnya’s exit, as if three years earlier Yeltsin had not signed the Belovezh Accords abolishing the Soviet Union, as if earlier, in January 1991, when the Union still formally existed, as chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, he had not recognized the state independence of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. But he was not ready for similar steps to be taken inside the Russian Federation. And not only because it was now his domain, the realm of his power. It was, more fundamentally, because he did not perceive the other nations as partners within the Federation with a right to vote. That is why Russia could adopt and finalize the law “On the Rehabilitation of Repressed Peoples” — it was amended in 1993 to state explicitly that these peoples, including Chechens, had been subjected to genocide — and shortly afterward prepare a terrible attack on one of these rehabilitated peoples.

With its first shot, the Chechen war opened the door to racism. The camouflage of Soviet ideology proclaiming the brotherhood of peoples vanished with the collapse of the USSR, revealing the true face of the imperial nation, confused, no longer certain of its superiority, and therefore angry.

We need to dwell on this racism a bit, because its cultural and social components make it hard to comprehend the country’s atmosphere if you are an outside observer. It is not like the racism experienced by African Americans, which comes from the long legacy of slavery and segregation. Such institutions did not exist formally in the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union. And it is not like the contemporary racism against immigrants in the West. After all, the residents of the national republics of the Russian Federation had not moved anywhere. It was Russia that came to them, and conquered them, and did away with their existing state structures, forcibly annexing them into its empire. It was the empire that migrated as it expanded.

This racism is the rather unusual racism of the conqueror who lives in the same modern state with the conquered in which they supposedly have equal rights. The presence of these conquered nations built into the state system is the source of two contradictory cultural complexes for Russians. The first is a superiority complex, expressed in the idea of Russia’s greatness and the special state-forming role of the Russian people. These conquered territories and nations are natural proof of their imperial destiny. But there is a second complex, a hidden one, which is the Russian complex of alienation and fear. The Russians seem to want to see these other nations as part of the Russian Federation, but only in a purely formal and geographical sense, for the sake of the size of their territory, for the sake of their resources, for the sake of their symbolic scale; but the Russians also do not want them to leave their territories and become free actors in the country’s social life. In other words, their role is that of movie extras, preferably attached to the land. The other complex, the other option, is total Russification, giving up their national identity based on their place of birth and their inherited traditions. The movement of citizens of other nationalities towards the notional “center” of the Russian Federation is perceived as a threat, a challenge to the Russian position as cultural hegemon.

In other words, Russians want to maintain their comfortable and dominant cultural position to which these “others” must adjust, sterilizing themselves of their ethnic identity, putting on a Russian linguistic mask, learning their masters’ social codes. Russians do not want to face the challenge, the question of responsibility for empire-building, which would rattle or undermine their accidental advantages of birth.

In this sense, the war against Chechnya, which “legalized” the alienation of Chechens and Caucasians in general and gave rise to the stigmatizing expression “person of Caucasian nationality,” has irreversibly changed the moral climate in the country. Casual racism, expressed in language and other means of communication, has become almost pervasive; Russians now have an “image of the enemy” with whom it has become habitual to exist.

Another thing that the war in Chechnya created is Vladimir Putin.

Not many remember that Putin came to the presidency with a public mandate for war, for a violent solution to the question of Chechen independence. A former KGB officer, Putin made the ultimate turn in political discourse, a turn that has become the new explanation and justification for military aggression.

It was the Soviet secret police that were responsible for suppressing the long national resistance to Soviet occupation in Western Ukraine and Lithuania during and after World War II, comparable in scale to the Chechen resistance. And the Soviet agencies invented and used a typical propaganda technique to deprive opponents of political subjectivity, to break the ideological link between resistance and national identity. Nationalist movements and formations and individuals were declared outlaws. They were nothing but bandits, criminal elements who had arrogated to themselves the right to speak in the name of the people, but in reality represented no one but themselves and used the rhetoric of the right to national self-determination only as a camouflage, a disguise for their purely self-serving goals, which were linked to the goals of the imperialist Western powers who sought to destabilize the situation in the USSR.

The description of the Chechen resistance as banditry was used even during the first Chechen war. But Putin completed this turn in the discourse by shifting the semantic emphasis from banditry to terrorism, thus joining the post-9/11 global trend. In this way, the original meaning of the struggle for Chechen independence, and the historical reckoning between Chechnya and Russia, could be elided. The Soviet model was built on the presumption that the interests of the USSR and the Western countries were immutably opposed. Putin’s model turned out to be more cunning and adaptive: it presumed the possibility of common interests and cooperation in the fight against “world terrorism.”

The numerous terrorist acts committed outside Chechnya against Russian civilians only reinforced this pattern and allowed Putin to appear not as a colonial despot but as a respectable ally in the fight against terror. It also completely blocked the possibility for the Russian liberal opposition to find solidarity with the Chechens and talk about the Chechen victims of the war. Not that this possibility was very likely.

And there is another lesson, insufficiently noted, which the Russian leadership learned from their vicious wars against Chechnya. It is the lesson of impunity.

The area of Chechnya is just over sixteen thousand square kilometers. Kosovo’s area is almost eleven thousand square kilometers. The Russian Bureau of Statistics gives an estimate of about 1.3 million inhabitants in Chechnya in 1994, on the eve of the war. Kosovo’s population in 1991 was almost two million. Chechnya has an external border with Georgia. Kosovo also has an external border, also on the southern side. Chechnya declared independence in July 1991. Kosovo declared independence in September 1991. So the two regions are similar.

Yet there is a significant difference between them. The invasion of Chechnya by the Russian army in 1994 did not provoke so much as an irritated diplomatic response from the West, even though Russia at that time was economically weak and dependent on foreign financial aid, which obviously could have been used as a lever of pressure. The West, I believe, feared a scenario of communist revenge, a replay of the Cold War finale, or a scenario of the further collapse of a nuclear power, and therefore it saw no alternative to Yeltsin. In addition, the Russian Federation guarded its nuclear sovereignty. Whereas the introduction of the Yugoslav army against Kosovo in 1998 led to a rather swift and harsh military response by NATO. (I am not considering the earlier dilatory NATO responses during the Balkan wars.)

What did the Russian leadership realize from this? That the storyline of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, for which the West punished the USSR with political isolation, sanctions, and military aid to its Afghan adversaries, would not be repeated. In two identically difficult situations — a region demanding independence and a forceful intervention by the central authorities, resulting in massive civilian casualties — two categorically different decisions were made. The general conclusion to be drawn, then, was that the West will not enter into direct confrontation with Russia. There will be human rights rhetoric, there will be calls for peace, but even at the level of the economy there will be no decisive pressure. Credit lines will continue to operate.

I believe that this is a fundamental psychological point about our geostrategic situation, the validity of which was confirmed by the Western policy of appeasement during Russia’s war against Georgia in August 2008. The West forgave Yeltsin and Putin for Chechnya, collectively hoping that this war was just an isolated episode, an excess, and that Russia would adhere to the principles of peaceful coexistence in the future. By doing so, however, an unintended but unmistakable signal was sent: what Serbia cannot do, Russia can.

The Balkan wars of disintegration happened in a relatively short period of time. They began (I am simplifying matters) with the attempt of the former federal center — Serbia — to prevent the independence of the former federal republics, which gained international recognition during the conflict, and they ended (conditionally) with Serbia’s attempt to keep Kosovo from seceding, that is, by changing the political geography of Serbia itself. The wars of the collapse of the USSR, which had a more complex national and administrative structure, had a different pace and rhythm. They began with the Transnistrian war of 1991–1992, the war between Georgia and South Ossetia in 1991–1992, the Georgian–Abkhazian war of 1992–1993, the civil war in Georgia in 1992–1993, the civil war in Tajikistan in 1992–1993, and Russia’s first war against Chechnya in 1994. These military actions took place, from a formal-legal point of view, within the boundaries of the newly formed and internationally recognized states that emerged from the former Soviet republics, and from the “breakaway” line, the line of perforation that passed along internal ethnic and linguistic borders, sometimes coinciding with the quasi-political form of the old Autonomous Republic that existed in the USSR.

Russia participated in various forms in all conflicts beyond its Soviet borders, relying on national or linguistic minorities, but it did not openly or directly try to cede territories in its favor. The mechanism of partial accession — the case of Belarus — through the creation of a loose economic and defense alliance called the Union State, which required no formal loss of sovereignty, was also used. But this relative restraint changed overnight in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and declared it a part of the Russian Federation, in open violation of international law. It also established puppet regimes in the occupied parts of eastern Ukraine. A mere twenty years after the start of the first war against Chechnya!

During this period, governments and ruling parties changed several times in the West, and technological paradigms were transformed. The collapse of the Soviet Union, a quarter of a century on, seemed very distant, irrelevant to the present, and finally resolved. But Slobodan Milosevic, with his atrocious and extreme violence, did not, in fact, try to restore the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the full sense of the word. He was trying to alienate the ethnic regions, to let the process of mutual separation take a different course, to get more and give less. And this is also what Vladimir Putin is trying to do, not to restore the USSR in the full sense. Like Milosevic in the 1990s, he is speculating on the trauma of disintegration, on the resentment of the dominant nation, which has been confronted with the linguistic and political subjectivity of its formerly subordinate peoples, with the historical reckonings presented to it. And the fact that such rhetoric is still politically valid, more than thirty years after the formation of the Russian Federation and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, and that it has not run out of steam, only testifies to the depth and the stability of the imperial complex within Russia itself, and to the archaic nature of its political structure, which is federal in name only.

Among the most disgusting, the most shameful, things that Putin has achieved are the Chechen formations killing Ukrainians today.

Going back to those last years of the USSR, to my grandmother’s reading of poetry, I remember lines that secretly bothered me and caused me bewilderment, lines from Pushkin’s narrative poem Poltava, about the battle in which Russia defeated Sweden in 1709. The Ukrainian hetman Mazeppa had joined Charles XII against Peter the Great.

Now we would like to wage war
on hated Moscow!

and

But it’s time for Ukraine
to be an independent power:
And I raise the banner of bloody liberty
against Peter.

These lines disturbed me because they seemed to be absolute nonsense: how could Moscow be hateful for Ukrainians? Why raise the “banner of bloody liberty” against Peter the Great? It was as much a mystery as the question of why the “angry Chechen” crawls along the banks of the Terek. Who is he and what have we done to him? Why is he sharpening his dagger?

When I re-read these lines today, while monuments to Pushkin are being dismantled in Ukraine, I hear some Russian liberals (as well as Western Slavophiles) comment with palpable bitterness: what does the poet have to do with it? This is cultural heritage! But it is indisputable that the numerous monuments to Pushkin in Ukraine performed a powerful role for the Soviet authorities — a symbolic representation of cultural domination, marking the territory and denoting the hierarchy of cultures and languages within the territory — the primacy of Russian. It would be good to understand this.

Such talk — the complacent denial of Russia’s continuous oppression of the smaller nations within its reach — is direct evidence that in the thirty years or so since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian culture and the Russian academy have wasted away to nothing, never having tried to engage in at least a minimum of de-colonial self-criticism, in even the slightest recognition of Russia’s historical responsibility to the once conquered or enslaved peoples. This overwhelming responsibility never became part of Russian political thought and Russian cultural development. Russia made a significant leap forward compared to the Soviet Union in terms of the market economy, but in national politics and in its understanding of history and in its attitudes toward national minorities Russia has remained stuck at the level of the USSR, where historical agency was replaced by folkloric surrogates instead of political rights.

Neither the massive casualties of the two Chechen wars, nor the ferocious destruction of Chechen towns and villages and their ethnic cleansing, nor the invasion of Ukraine have made us fully realize the enormous extent to which Russia was created by colonial violence and continues to be held together by it. I often speak and write on this issue, and my point is that Russia’s imperial and colonial history must be reflected upon, criticized, and discarded. Otherwise a potential security threat will remain for all the states that were once part of the empire.

Russia’s history offers tropes of an earlier unity and powerful images of predestined togetherness, while covertly (and sometimes not so covertly) it was busily stealing sovereignties, turning independent states and nations into satellites and vassals designed to follow Russia’s lead. This mentality of aggression can be used also for internal purposes, within the smaller polities themselves, to eliminate attempts at emancipation, and it can be directed outward, beyond Russia’s borders, as in the case of Ukraine, where it insists that this particular territory is not considered capable of self-government.

Even within the liberal sector of Russian society, Russia’s colonial past is largely terra incognita, neither carefully studied nor properly problematized. So, alas, the main lesson of Russia’s two wars against Chechnya is that Russian society, and even the Russian opposition, has not learned any lessons from them, neither lessons of humanity nor lessons of historical responsibility. Demanding punishment for the perpetrators and a restoration of justice has never become an integral part of the Russian opposition’s agenda, although before 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine the wars against Chechnya were the main crimes of the Russian regime: estimates of civilian casualties in Chechnya vary, but we are certainly talking about many tens of thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands of refugees.

And that is partly why we are now dealing with a half-mad dictator waging a bloody war of conquest in Europe: we Russians did not want to understand the nature and the scale of the evil that was growing before our eyes, because that would mean renouncing our own cultural and psychological comfort and questioning our own identity, recognizing its dark side, the ugliness of our path, and acknowledging that we have been and remain for many groups in the past and the present occupiers and invaders, destroyers of national memory, aggressors of language — in a word, villains.

Wearing Sorrow

Under the pearl-hued sky of Paris, as a welcome spring breeze ruffled the trees above, I walked with a friend through Montparnasse Cemetery to pay our respects to a long-dead artist we both admire. As we wove our way through the marble headstones, we passed a group of people convening around a grave. At first, I assumed that they, like us, had come to visit a long-buried hero or celebrity. Perhaps it was a highly cultured tour group, I thought, noting that the crowd was outfitted in brightly colored shirts and pale jeans. But as we passed by, I suddenly spotted the hearse parked around the corner. I paused, briefly—there was one, no, two men in black suits, heads bowed. The rest, though casually dressed, were similarly postured, all standing around an opening in the soft earth. This was a graveyard and we had run into a funeral.

I thought of a passage in Knausgaard’s The Morning Star, in which a man invites a stranger to a funeral. His six-year-old daughter has died and he cannot bear to go alone. The stranger hesitates: he doesn’t have appropriate attire for a funeral, he says. “ ‘For crying out loud, man,’ ” comes the indignant reply. “ ‘It’s a funeral. Everything’s over. It’s all darkness and misery. Who the hell cares about clothes?’ ” Since I read it, I have been returning to this phrase consciously and subconsciously. It contradicted one of my axioms: clothing is not only about surfaces or trivialities. It ought to reflect the seriousness of an occasion. Was I wrong? Does it actually matter? Does a grieving father really notice if the men gathered at his child’s burial are besuited or in black?

Few sartorial traditions governing ceremonies remain. An old and thick tradition of rules and customs has disappeared almost completely. Debates now abound about whether one can wear white to a wedding. The custom of funereal dress has certainly fallen out of fashion. Since the late Middle Ages, plain black has been a symbol of bereavement. By the nineteenth century, there was a sartorial etiquette that governed grief: women’s periodicals outlined the ever-evolving social codes (down to the specific textiles deemed appropriate), and shops dedicated to mourning goods abounded. Black was the ultimate visual metaphor for the despair that attends loss. One was expected to dress for the abyss.

George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke is a beacon of radiant sincerity, her faith in God and her devotion to her role as woman and wife total. Following the sudden death of her husband, she naturally clothes herself in traditional mourning attire, worn by widows for a minimum of one year. (Widow’s weeds, they used to be called.) The picture that Eliot paints is apostolic: “The widow’s cap of those times made an oval frame for the face and had a crown standing up; the dress was an experiment in the utmost laying on of crape; but this heavy solemnity of clothing made her face look all the younger, with its recovered bloom, and the sweet, inquiring candor of her eyes.”

But, as Eliot writes, the attire is not purely an expression of devotion for her late husband. Though Dorothea may not have been in love with Casaubon, she does experience genuine grief in the palpable, sudden destruction of life as she knew and expected it. Mourning dress expresses the enormity of the upheaval, and communicates that upset to the people around her. Her crown of sorrow has a palliative effect. When her sister suggests that Dorothea take it off — Celia considers it a mark of enslavement, not bereavement — Dorothea declines. “ ‘I am so used to the cap — it has become a sort of shell,’ said Dorothea, smiling. ‘I feel rather bare and exposed when it is off.’ ”

As the time since the death stretched on, widows were expected to transition from black to grey, and then from grey to a full palette. But the transition had to be instituted with the utmost delicacy. An article in the Pittsburgh Gazette Home Journal from 1904 cautioned: “The discarding of mourning should be effected gradually. It shocks persons of good taste to see a light-hearted widow at once jump into colors from deep black downing as though she had been counting the hours. If black is to be dispensed with, let it be slowly and gracefully, marked by quiet unobtrusiveness.” For the mourner there is psychological wisdom in this gradualism: the slowness of the external transition to vivacity mirrors the slowness of sorrow’s passing. Meanwhile, many nineteenth-century writers — Dickens, Balzac, Baudelaire—observed that the universal European style of black dressing for men cast a funereal spell upon all of society. About the frock-coat style known as le habit noir, Baudelaire observed: “Is it not the inevitable uniform of our suffering age, carrying on its very shoulders, black and narrow, the mark of perpetual mourning? All of us are attending some funeral or another.”

Death and mourning in the Gilded Age were fashioned by strict codes, but by the turn of the twentieth century the culture loosened. Critics argued that mourning dress trapped a woman in grief. By World War I, the practice was totally abandoned. It was impractical: there were too many dead. Since then, outside of religious communities, visual symbols of grief have by and large disappeared.

Perhaps the custom was too unforgiving — especially for women who could not afford to purchase an all-black wardrobe for the occasion, a kind of anti-trousseau — but it served a purpose, allowing us to navigate the social world sensitively thanks to such external significations. Our culture suffers for its indifference to such manners and codes, even if the proliferation of them had become unwieldy. Modern mourners live in a culture of increasing casualness and informality, in which they have been bequeathed few methods to communicate grief publicly, silently, usefully. Loved ones die, the world spins on, and people are not reminded to ask how are you? in the old, familiar octave.

Death is a difficult subject to broach. It is striking that the Victorians, considered the paramount puritans, did not shy away from mortality. Prescriptions of time for mourning allowed the depth of feeling to be explored, not ignored, and black dress, a visual reminder of the loss, invited deference and sympathy and conversation. Today we avoid these conversations, and perhaps more to the point, we avoid addressing our own feelings about grief. We need all the support we can get, including the garments we wear, to face death.

Did the father in The Morning Star notice how attendees were dressed at his daughter’s funeral? Knausgaard doesn’t say, but more than likely not. Yet we dress in black at funerals not only out of a respect for the dead, or for those still living carrying their memories, but for ourselves, a quiet moment to mark the new void in our individual universe. The casualization of our lives has come at a detriment, eroding the rituals and ceremonies that set the very foundation of society. We must hold on to this one. A moment to wrap ourselves in the blackness of grief.

Taking Liberties in Tehran

The first time I was beaten up by police I was sixteen years old. It was March 8, 2004, and more than four thousand feminists had gathered in Tehran’s Laleh Park to commemorate International Women’s Day. Hundreds of security forces were dispatched to the park to prevent our rally from going ahead. They were especially focused on driving men out of the rally. If women were celebrating “their day,” this could be cast as an ordinary community fair, just like other groups mark “their days,” but if men joined them, this would look like subversive politics. A police officer articulated precisely this “argument” after hitting me with a baton. “If it’s women’s day, what are you doing here?” he said.

I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, and not just because it was my political duty, or because of the electricity of the crowd. The crush was rife with political luminaries. Right before the police attacked, I was chatting with the feminist firebrand writer Nooshin Ahmadi Khorasani. I was a lanky sixteen-year-old in conversation with a superstar. She was running a mass feminist campaign while publishing pioneering texts in women’s studies. We debated Marxism and feminism; she urged me to read more Simone De Beauvoir. And in that same crowd, before and after the repressive batons whirled, we spoke of literature, of the latest novels we had read, of the upcoming plays at Tehran’s City Theater. All of this went together, all of it was our creed. The political theory, but also the plays.

In that rich company, I was raised to see myself as part of the cultural resistance to the Islamic regime. It represented crude ignorance and we represented sophisticated courage. All of us writers and artists had to submit our works to the censorship boards, at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, or the state broadcaster, or other censorious institutions, and their very responses gave us a sense of superiority. The censors would ask us to cut a description of a kiss in a novel or a women’s ears jutting out of her hijab in a film.

Ordinary life in Tehran was a form of resistance. Of course we were resisting when we marched in the streets for women’s rights. But we were also resisting when we immersed ourselves in the arts that we loved. There was a symbiotic relationship between these two forms of resistance. We were defending our values when standing up to the police and also when scheduling assignations with our “DVD guy,” who brought all the prohibited movies to our apartments like a drug dealer on the run. “Next week, I can get you some really good stuff,” he would whisper furtively to the salivating cinephiles. “The collected works of Michelangelo Antonioni.”

We resisted the rule of the mullahs by hosting underground film clubs in apartments all over the city. There we would stay up past midnight watching and discussing prohibited films. Resisters knew that, at the speciously “kosher” cassette shop near Tehran’s central bus station, if you knew the right passcode, the man behind the counter could supply just about any music you could dream of. But an act or an activity didn’t need to be illegal for it to count as resistance. Resistance was also a photography class or a painting class, all legal and above ground, but still a place of gathering for the cultured men and women, who, with our minds, hearts, and bodies, preserved everything that the regime detested.

The most visible annual occasion of resistance was the Tehran International Book Fair, organized by the aforementioned Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. It was a massive affair which assembled thousands of publishers from all over Iran and beyond, and it was attended by hundreds of thousands of people. It was all legal, sure, but the steady resistance which stretched the political noose in the 1990s and 2000s had forced the government to permit a bit more than it had before, and the book fair still benefited from that struggle. During the presidency of the reformist Mohammad Khatami, from 1997 to 2005, a wide variety of books were suddenly allowed to be published. One could buy Marx and Lenin and Jane Austen and Tennessee Williams. Even if she had to be censored in parts, you could certainly buy Simone de Beauvoir.

Oppression is difficult to institutionalize over a people that wants freedom, and the resisters recognize one another in the ceaseless fight against the government’s logistical crackdowns. The obscurantist mullahs and their henchmen might hold almost all the political power, but we persevered nonetheless. And there were so many of us! Despite receiving millions of dollars in subsidies, the pro-regime publishers sat alone in their booths, with few people frequenting them or touching their sumptuous bindings. They watched glumly as, a few steps away, an indie publisher with wares printed on a shoestring attended to a long line of customers. We were legion.

And this wasn’t only the case in Tehran. I remember spending time in gorgeous southern cities such as Bandar Abbas and Shiraz, and in my paternal city of Arak. Their book fairs weren’t so big, but they existed. A European friend visiting Iran told me about going to a branch of the Book City (Shahre Ketab) chain in a small city and walking in on a well-attended event in which a literary critic was discussing the French novelist Patrick Modiano — and this was before he won the Nobel Prize and the attendant global acclaim.

Our golden principle, our iron law, was that we never confused art for politics, and never justified the arts as a political tool. They were sacrosanct on their own terms. That was essential to our existence-as-resistance strategy. My generation rejected what we considered an embarrassing fusion of literature and politics which had been the hallmark of the resistance leaders who directed the revolution in 1979. Influenced by that blighted epoch, the Global 1960s, that generation often measured art simply by how “committed” it was to political principles and how “engaged” it was in political action. Maxim Gorky’s Mother was lauded not because it was a literary masterpiece but because of its transparently political agenda. Enjoyed in the same spirit were the works of the Romanian novelist Zaharia Stancu, not least his novel Descult, or Barefoot, from 1948. Of course the comrades wanted to read a novel about the downtrodden without shoes to wear!

That attitude represented a rejection of its own ancestors’ reverence of art for arts’ sake. The founders of Persianate literary modernity, such as Bozorg Alavi, Sadegh Hedayat, and Sadegh Choobak, worked in the orbit of left politics and were, at one time or another, card-carrying communists. But their most important works were not ham-fisted defenses of communism; they were delicate meditations on human life. Decades later my crowd was not blindly resuscitating that ethos, but we certainly gained a new appreciation for the likes of Hedayat and we overcame the rigid obsession with the 1960s. One of the most remarkable literary figures of my era was Reza Rezaee, a preeminent chess player who had given up the game for a life of literary translation. In the 1990s Rezaee had translated more than a dozen volumes by chess masters. In the 2000s he set out to save literary masterworks that had been condemned to oblivion because their authors did not have the sanctioned political beliefs. By 2014 he had produced two Persian Nabokov novels and six each of Jane Austen and of the Brontë sisters. Leafing through a decorous Austen novel may not sound much like resistance to you, but that is precisely what it was in Tehran in the 2010s. For decades, a stultifying concept of literature as mere political instrumentalism had dominated. Rezaee scandalized many of his peers by reviving classics of the nineteenth century, with their humane interiority. In our land, art was political not because of any explicit or implicit political content but because it showed that life did not need to be reduced to political slogans.

But in rescuing culture from politics, my generation was also rescuing politics from culture. Our indulgence in arts-as-arts didn’t mean abandoning politics-as-politics. Hence the rallies and the patient, day-to-day, strategic work of politics. Feminists who stood for the most emancipatory of visions still voted in the elections held by the Islamic Republic, even though they were severely limited and pitted one caste of regime elites against another. Voting for candidates who could open the civic space, even by just a hair’s breadth, was what had allowed us to have that rich cultural life in the first place. We knew better than to confuse prudence with “normalization,” as American progressives like to call it. Strategies and tactics were always debated — but never on abstract moral grounds and always based on their consequences in the real world.

Alas, political patience can only last so long. Gradually, many people in the subsequent generations, worn down by the regime’s ceaseless brutality, gave up on the strategic approach to politics. It is seductive to believe that retweeting political slogans somehow transforms them into reality, and this generation replaced patient politics with brazen activism. They showed remarkable bravery, abundantly on display during the street protests of 2017, 2019 and 2022–23, but they fell short of the sort of patient institution-building that had helped the previous generations achieve real gains. To make things worse, this new generation loves to make a mockery of ours, derisively called the ’80s Kids. “You read all those books just to end up voting for the reformists?” they jeer. Many have abandoned our attitude to both culture and politics.

I can hardly blame them. Who can strategize calmly and earnestly while their government shoots their friends in the street? Moreover, the cool-headed incrementalism my generation preached and practiced failed miserably. Today Iran is less prosperous and less free than it was twenty years ago. But replacing books with TikTok reels will not build a better future, either. If there is something to recover from that golden era of Iranian history, it is that political resistance is not enriched or strengthened by encroaching on culture. And art is impoverished by slapping slogans on it. I don’t insist that art must be devoid of politics, not at all, but it must be allowed its own modes of expression. Art must be art and politics must be politics, two separate but essential spheres of human life.

Istanbuls

From Istanbul, you can witness the entire changing world and see the sedimentary layers of empires upon which that world was built. On either side of the city, there are Ottoman-style mosques. In their previous lives in Byzantium, some of the city’s mosques were Orthodox churches. Beyond the graveyard of Ottoman and Byzantine imperium, there is evidence of more recent political projects, like the Art-Deco influenced modern architecture of the Turkish Republic, founded a century ago by the revolutionary statesman Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Ataturk’s face is inescapable in Turkey: printed on banners the size of buildings, tattooed on women’s breasts, staring down at you in neighborhood cafes. The modern buildings from the Ataturk period appear designed to serve as a physical attestation to Turkey’s rightful place among secular European nations. That secular European ethos, which itself conceals plenty of darkness, has been badly abraded by the country’s recent history.

On the ferry ride that connects Asia and Europe in what really is the most beautiful city in the world, I watch the big ships and write down their anthropomorphic names. With appellations like Ana Theresa, Lady Esma, and Johanna, they could be Bob Dylan muses. Later I track the ships’ positions and destinations on websites dedicated to maritime traffic. I try to identify what they are carrying between continents. Some must be transporting grain and sugar, others oil and cars, still others, weapons, contraband, and people. Up close, the ships are beautiful, vertiginous, and terrifying; I can’t look at them without thinking about disaster. From the ferry’s deck, I imagine them as the ship in James Cameron’s Titanic, a fake model vessel being swallowed by a digital sea.

In 2023, the extraordinary number of 83,892 ships passed through the Bosphorus. The narrow Istanbul Strait, which military and commercial ships traverse, is the second busiest in the world. Most of the ships sail under so-called “flags of convenience” — microstate tax havens: Panama, Liberia, the Marshall Islands. At first glance, these affiliations are confusing. Shipping used to be tied to the nation-state; the fact that ships sailed under national flags was a source of pride, particularly for the British, and their crews were comprised of well-paid unionized seafarers. Today those well-paid jobs have disappeared. Flags of convenience have made the cost of transportation much cheaper, facilitating the rise of globalization. Seafarers now overwhelmingly hail from lower income countries with scarce labor protections; the old romantic vision of the sailor on the open sea has been replaced with laborers described in the New York Times as “jail with a salary” — low-wage jobs with brutal working conditions.

The entire world converges on the Bosporus; every major conflict intersects with it. Prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, sixty million tons of Ukrainian grain were exported through it each year, transported directly across the Black Sea, through the strait, and into international waters, where it was dispersed to destinations across the Middle East and Africa. Russia’s war brought those grain shipments to a halt, until a deal brokered by Turkey and the United Nations in late 2022 allowed them to start again. Soon Ukrainian corn, wheat, and sunflower oil were once again exported from Ukraine’s southern ports through the Bosporus to the world.

Meanwhile, there are visible signs of other proximate wars. Every time I leave Kadikoy pier on the Anatolian side of Istanbul, we pass the port of Haydarpasa, where a ship called Conscience has been sitting for months. The Conscience is a “Break the Siege” ship of the Freedom Flotilla, a group that seeks to disrupt the Israeli blockade and deliver five thousand tons of humanitarian aid to Gaza.

Turkey now acts as a major geopolitical power broker — it is no wonder, given its geographical location — while at home the government invokes conservative cultural politics. In recent years Istanbul has witnessed the proliferation of new Ottoman-style mosques, an initiative of the AKP or Justice and Development Party, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Over the past decade, the AKP government has nurtured the religious sentiments of the conservative majority, in an attempt to fuse the Turkish nation with Islamic civilization in the public imagination, an effort detested by secularists who claim it is a regression from Ataturk’s vision.

The grandest and most recent of the Erdogan-era mosques is the Camlica Mosque, which was inaugurated in May 2019. It is astonishing in scale, as outsized and imposing as the palatial ships on the Bosporus. The Camlica mosque is designed to hold up to sixty-three thousand people; it has an underground parking lot that can hold up to more than three thousand cars. Inside, it is illuminated in a warm amber; the walls are painted with ornate gold motifs infused with bits of turquoise blue. The lights are arranged in concentric circles that resemble the rings of Saturn; the lights look like glass lilies. These are not merely aesthetic choices. The mosque contains almost obsessive historical details and references: the seventy-two-meter high main dome represents the seventy-two nations that live in the city of Istanbul; its six minarets represent the six articles of the Muslim faith. The minarets are exactly 107.1 metres high, a reference to the year 1071, when the Seljuk Turks defeated the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert to secure control of Anatolia.

But there are a multitude of Istanbuls. In addition to the pious city cultivated by Erdogan, there are also pockets of deviance, as seen in the derelict Tarlabasi neighborhood near Taksim Square, where brothels operate. Trans sex workers congregate in the street; there is little attempt to conceal the kinds of business anyone is getting up to. Sometimes described as “the most dangerous neighborhood in Istanbul,” Tarlabasi is often swarming with police. In their all-black riot gear and helmets, they look like giant bugs.

At a panoramic view, observed from the hill in Uskudar where the Camlica Mosque is perched, or on a ferry ride between continents, Istanbul is vast, civilizational. But up close, in its cramped neighborhoods where it leaves a more personal impression, its charm is not diminished. First, there are the cats. They are everywhere. Sitting opposite solo diners in cafes, eating silver fish on the Galata quay, sitting vigil in windowsills, stealing pieces of cheese from your Turkish breakfast: the city belongs to them.

But climbing up narrow staircases of rickety old apartment buildings, it is impossible to shake the idea that all of this is transient. Scientists predict that a major earthquake of a magnitude between 7.2 and 7.8 will hit Istanbul in the next several years, killing tens of thousands of people. The February 2023 earthquake in eastern Turkey killed nearly fifty-five thousand people, underscoring the region’s fragility and instilling earthquake anxiety in the population. Everyone has their own way of managing the background fear, but most shrug it off: If that’s our fate, then that’s our fate. There’s nothing we can do about it. If it comes, it comes. Yet the earthquake is always lurking around the edges of city residents’ consciousness. Even the Camlica Mosque has been built with disaster in mind. In the event of the geological catastrophe, the mosque can serve as an emergency shelter that can accommodate up to a hundred thousand people. Sometimes, when I’m walking down the street, I am struck by the fragility of this buckling, lapidary place, and I imagine the buildings collapsing into piles of broken concrete and dust. But the threat only makes the city more beautiful. It must be enjoyed immediately, in the present. Who knows how much longer we have?

The Complacent Admiration of Courage, or Ibsen and Us

The production opened with a stutter. Entering through the aisles of the Mitzi Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, five actors in Ibsen’s Ghosts made their way to the stage and picked up bound scripts that were waiting for them on what would become the Alving family’s dining table, as if getting ready for rehearsal. Ella Beatty and Hamish Linklater began to play the first scene as Regine, the Alvings’ socially ambitious housemaid, and her father Engstrand, a drunken carpenter whom she is doing her best to leave behind. But they spoke in a barely audible monotone, as if they were “marking,” going through the lines while sparing the voice. After a few exchanges, they started over from the beginning, now speaking quietly, conversationally. The third time was the charm: after restarting the scene yet again, Beatty and Linklater finally became Regine and Engstrand, and Ghosts was underway.

This framing device mostly left critics cold. Was it necessary to remind us that we were watching actors in a play? After the last scene, did we need to be dismissed back into real life by having the cast return with their scripts and slap them down on the table? But the warming-up makes more sense if it is understood as a reminder of the difference not between life and art, but between the present and the past. To leap over the chasm that separates 2025 from 1881, when Henrik Ibsen wrote Ghosts, it may be necessary to back up a few times and build up speed.

Starting with its title, the play itself insists that the division between past and present is an illusion. Ordinarily, a ghost is what we call a dead person who intrudes into the world of the living. But Ibsen inverts this supernatural definition. For him, it is the living who become ghosts, as they reenact the behavior of the dead and blindly follow their commandments.

The first such apparition in Ibsen’s play comes at the end of the first act, just after Mrs. Alving has finished explaining to Pastor Manders that her late husband, the locally revered Chamberlain Alving, was in fact a drunk and a womanizer. She realized this early in their marriage, when she overheard him making advances to their maid: “Oh, it still rings in my ears, so dreadful and yet so ridiculous — I heard my own housemaid whisper: ‘Let me go, Chamberlain Alving! Leave me alone.’ ” A few moments later, she overhears her son Osvald doing the same thing to Regine in the same room. “Ghosts,” Mrs. Alving shudders. “The couple in the conservatory — they walk again.”

At the Mitzi Newhouse, a small theater, there was no conservatory; the seduction took place at the lobby door, where it could be heard but not seen. It was an austere production all around, directed by Jack O’Brien, with a functional set and costumes. Only the lighting design by Japhy Weideman aimed for expressionist extravagance. In the final scene, when Osvald collapses into a syphilitic stupor and can only murmur to his mother over and over again, “Give me the sun,” the glare was dialed well past the “bright sunshine” that Mrs. Alving had promised him, as if the world was being erased along with Osvald’s mind, in the way that intense light can obliterate everything.

For Ibsen himself, writing for and about the late-nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie meant well-upholstered stages teeming with furniture and objects. His stage directions tend to be lengthy and detailed, as in Hedda Gabler: “Towards the center of the room is an oval table covered with a tablecloth and surrounded by chairs. Further forward, by the right-hand wall, are a wide porcelain wood stove, a tall armchair, a footstool with a cushion and two stools. In the right-hand corner, at the back, is a corner sofa and a small round table.” And so on.

Early in his career, Ibsen worked for a decade as a theater manager in Bergen and Kristiania (as Oslo was then called), and had his own ideas about how his plays should be produced. He left these instructions for future productions and continued to include similar descriptions in play after play, as if it were a necessary step in priming his imagination. Realism meant presenting life on stage exactly as the audience lived it at home, so that they could be confronted with the ugliness of that life, which they worked so hard to ignore.

Ibsen’s contemporaries found Ghosts the ugliest of all his plays. Two years earlier, in 1879, A Doll’s House had been a huge success, selling out a large first edition of seven thousand copies in Scandinavia. (Ibsen’s practice was to publish each new play as a book before it was produced on stage.) It went on to become a hit across Europe, turning Ibsen into one of the most important writers in the world, a position he kept until his death in 1906. The fuel of its success was controversy. Everywhere A Doll’s House was staged, audiences debated whether Nora Helmer was right to leave her husband and children, whether Ibsen was a prophet of liberation or a symptom of moral decay. The timing of his provocation in the history of European mores was perfect.

For Ghosts, the book, Ibsen’s Copenhagen publisher raised the print run to ten thousand, but this time there was no controversy: everyone agreed the play was grotesquely immoral, and almost no copies were sold. Two years had to pass before it was staged in Norway. Even many of Ibsen’s former champions were revolted by a play whose message seemed to be that marriage, family, and Christianity are wicked, while adultery and incest are admirable, as long as they are products of what the Osvald calls “the joy of life.”

“The joy of life? Can there be salvation in that?” Mrs. Alving wonders. Her own life has been spent in the service of the opposite principle: duty. Urged by her relatives to marry the wealthy Chamberlain Alving, she was so appalled by his character that after a year she ran away to Pastor Manders, the man she really loved. But the pastor overcame his own feelings, withstood temptation, and ordered her to return to her husband in the name of religious principle and wifely obedience: “It is the mark of a rebellious spirit to demand happiness here in life. What right do we mortals have to happiness? No, we must do our duty, madam!”

Mrs. Alving’s only remaining hope was for her son. Determined to protect Osvald from the influence of his father’s depravity, she sent him away to school at a young age, and as the play begins he has just returned from Paris, where he is making a career as an artist. Like the Greek tragedians, however, Ibsen believes that there is no escaping the past, and it turns out that Osvald has been doomed by his father’s debauchery after all: he has inherited syphilis, and by the end of the play it will destroy his mind.

Syphilis was widespread in nineteenth-century Europe, but it was never discussed openly, and certainly not on the stage. Even in Ghosts the name of the disease is not spoken: Osvald only says that a French doctor has told him he is “vermoulu,” or worm-eaten. This was enough of a hint for Ibsen’s audience. Today it is so oblique that theatergoers unfamiliar with the play might well be baffled about what’s wrong with Osvald and why his mother is so horrified. It doesn’t help that we now know syphilis cannot be inherited the way Ibsen imagined, ticking away in the brain for decades until it suddenly explodes.

As if that were not wicked enough, Ghosts also brings incest onto the stage. Regine turns out to be Osvald’s half-sister, the child of the dalliance that Mrs. Alving overheard long ago. Yet even when he learns this, he still considers seeking “the joy of life” with her. Meanwhile, Pastor Manders, the play’s sole exponent of conventional virtue, is exposed in the end as a weakling and a hypocrite, willing to pay off the lowly Engstrand to take the blame for a fire that he himself accidentally started.

All of this made the play a magnet for outrage. When Ghosts came to Britain in 1891, it had to be put on privately because the censor would not approve a public performance. That did not stop the critics from seeing it. William Archer, Ibsen’s first English translator, published an article titled “Ghosts and Gibberings” that collected quotations from dozens of incensed reviewers: “positively abominable,” “absolutely loathsome and fetid,” “a wicked nightmare.” Leading the pack was the Daily Telegraph, which devoted a whole editorial to Ghosts, comparing it to “an open drain,” “a loathsome sore unbandaged,” “a dirty act done publicly,” “a lazar-house with all its doors and windows open.”

What makes Ghosts a significant episode in the history of culture, however, is not that the establishment moralized against it, but that its conservative moralism provoked a tidal wave of progressive moralism, which turned out to be vastly more influential. Archer drew attention to the worst tirades printed about Ibsen because he knew that for Ibsenites the slurs were the best compliments. They proved that the playwright’s punches had landed.

Revulsion made Ibsen powerful. The Danish critic Georg Brandes — a now forgotten figure who before World War I was one of the world’s most celebrated intellectuals, as Morton Høi Jensen explained in these pages a few years ago — published long essays about Ibsen in 1867, 1882, and 1898, growing more ardent each time as the playwright’s stature continued to grow. In the last essay, Brandes observed that even at the age of seventy “his works are opposed, ridiculed, loved and worshiped as only a young or comparatively young man’s generally are,” so that “in French and English, such words as “Ibsenism” and “Ibsenite” have been coined from his name.”

George Bernard Shaw responded to the controversy over Ghosts with a pamphlet titled “The Quintessence of Ibsenism,” in which he argued that the spirit of Ibsen was the spirit of the future. “The pioneer must necessarily provoke such outcry as he repudiates duties, tramples on ideals, profanes what was sacred, sanctifies what was infamous,” Shaw wrote. “What he does it is not given to all of his generation to understand.” But the young understood it, and the young in spirit, because they recognized that many of Western civilization’s official ideas were only apparently alive. In fact they had died long ago, and could now be described as undead — zombies, we might say today, or ghosts, in Ibsen’s image. “It’s not just the things that we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that return in us,” Mrs. Alving tells Pastor Manders. “It’s all kinds of old dead opinions and all sorts of old dead doctrines and so on. They aren’t alive in us; but they are lodged in there all the same, and we can never be rid of them.”

As is often the case, never arrived ahead of schedule. When Nora Helmer slammed the door on her marriage in 1879, it echoed around the world. Thirty years later Norway legalized divorce, and today the country has more unmarried couples living together than married ones. When Pastor Manders told Mrs. Alving to go back to the husband she hated, she did as she was told, because he was a minister of God. Today, surveys show that the Scandinavian countries are among the least religious in the world.

This evolution would not have surprised Shaw, who made an ingenious diagnosis of the sources of Ibsen hatred. In any society, he writes, seventy percent of its members simply accept established institutions without thinking about them. This majority, whom Shaw (following Matthew Arnold) called Philistines, were not troubled by Ibsen’s attacks on marriage or religion because they found the status quo “quite good enough for them.” The thirty percent who did get upset by such attacks were “idealists,” actively committed to the belief that “the family [is] a beautiful and holy natural institution.”

Idealism is ordinarily thought of as a good thing, but Shaw, with his typical love of paradox, turns it into a term of opprobrium. The reason that people are idealists, Shaw argues, is not because they think their ideal is true. It is because they know it is not true, and they fear that if the truth were to be revealed, the family along with most pillars of society would collapse. That is why the idealists wrote nasty articles about Ibsen, one of the rare individuals Shaw considers “realists,” able to describe things as they really are. Idealists hate the realist because they are “terrified beyond measure at the proclamation of their hidden thought, at the presence of the traitor among the conspirators of silence.”

Ibsen is often described as a revolutionary dramatist, but Shaw’s definition makes clear that the revolutionary and the realist are quite different creatures. Both employ shock and destruction, and both claim to see what others do not. But a revolutionary makes war on powerful institutions, sometimes at the price of his own life, while a realist performs euthanasia on decrepit institutions, and sooner or later he is rewarded for it.

Nietzsche saw his own mission in similar terms. In 1882, the year after Ghosts, he published The Gay Science, which includes the famous parable of the madman who announces that God is dead. Crucially, Nietzsche’s madman does not say that God ought to die, or that he intends to kill God. Rather, he brings the news that humanity has already killed Him and doesn’t realize it yet. “This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars — and yet they have done it themselves,” the madman declares. This is what Shaw would have called realism — a report on a fact that most people do not wish to acknowledge.

Like Ghosts, The Gay Science went unread when it was first published, but by the turn of the century it had been recognized as a work of genius, due in large part to the enthusiasm of Georg Brandes, who took up Nietzsche’s cause the way he had taken up Ibsen’s. Unlike Ibsen, however, Nietzsche didn’t live to enjoy his vindication. In an eerie coincidence, he suffered the same fate as Osvald Alving, losing his mind to tertiary syphilis in 1889. At the end of Ghosts, Mrs. Alving is left with the choice of whether to fulfill her son’s last wish and end his life with an overdose of morphine, or allow him to linger on in the way he dreaded — “lying there as helpless as a little baby, incurable, lost, hopeless — beyond salvation.” Nietzsche lingered in a state of imbecility for another decade, unaware that European intellectuals had finally begun to embrace his ideas. He was only fifty-five when he died in 1900.

With Ibsen, indignation turned into acclaim even more quickly. In Ghosts, Mrs. Alving explains that she sent her son away to school early because “I felt sure my child would be poisoned just by breathing in the air of this infected home,” and Ibsen wanted to force audiences to acknowledge that their homes were equally infected — that all of bourgeois society was steeped in a toxic, decayed ideals. In response, critics insisted that he was the sick one — fetid, leprous, loathsome.

The next year he returned with An Enemy of the People, whose hero, Dr. Stockmann, informs his neighbors that the town’s spa, advertised for its curative powers, is in fact “a health hazard of the greatest magnitude,” its waters polluted by runoff from a tannery. He expects to be thanked for exposing this suppressed truth, which will enable the town to avert scandal and ruin by relocating the pipes that feed the spa. He even complacently tells friends that there is no need to organize “a parade, or a banquet, or a subscription list for a token of honor.”

But when it is revealed how much it would cost the town to close the spa and rebuild it, everyone is determined to hush things up. Dr. Stockmann isn’t too surprised when his brother, the town’s conservative mayor, turns against him, but he is shocked when the editor of the local newspaper, known as a crusader, reveals that he is equally hypocritical and corrupt. Rather than confront the truth, everyone prefers to curse the messenger. “The man who flings such offensive insinuations at his own hometown has to be society’s enemy,” the mayor tells the doctor.

In the play’s climactic scene, Dr. Stockmann decides to embrace that accusation. At a town meeting, he declares that a man of integrity must always be an enemy of the people, because “the most dangerous enemies to truth and freedom among us are the solid majority.” Ibsen does not fail to spell out the implications for democracy. If “stupid people make up a quite terrifying, overwhelming majority the world over,” as Stockmann says, then majority rule is a recipe for disaster: “Never in all eternity, damn it all, can it be right for the stupid people to rule over the intelligent ones!” The only way to raise the general level of human intelligence, he concludes, is through eugenics — a program of selective breeding like dog trainers use to turn mongrels into poodles. “Oh, there’s a quite terrifying distance between poodle-humans and mongrel-humans,” Stockmann rages.

How cathartic these lines must have been for Ibsen, so often slandered and misunderstood: at last he could pour out his bitterness on the public. In the play Dr. Stockmann pays a high price for his insults: he loses his job, he is evicted from his house, and people throw rocks at his windows. But the story is more complicated. In real life, audiences embraced An Enemy of the People as enthusiastically as they had rejected Ghosts. Contrary to his usual practice, Ibsen didn’t send the script to theaters, but “waited with amused confidence for theater directors to come and beg,” writes his biographer Hans Heiberg. “This they all did, sooner or later. . . . Successes then followed thick and fast.” The Kristiania Theater, which had paid Ibsen two thousand five hundred crowns for the right to perform A Doll’s House, shelled out four thousand for An Enemy of the People.

Why does an audience line up to buy tickets to a play written by a man who insists that “our entire civic community rests on a plague-infested ground of lies”? Did Shaw err when he estimated that out of a thousand people, seven hundred are Philistines and two hundred ninety-nine are idealists, and only one — Shaw himself, or Ibsen, or Nietzsche — is brave enough to be a realist? Not necessarily. Rather, the formula needs to take into account the speed with which the realist’s radical critique can destroy decrepit ideals — and then replace them, turning into a new kind of orthodoxy. The cultural success of realism disproves its own pessimism. Moral reform turns out to be within its powers. Realism may be another sort of revolution.

This is the paradox of progressive moralism, in our own time no less than in Ibsen’s. When Ibsenites in Norway and around the world went to see An Enemy of the People, they were sure that Dr. Stockmann’s wrath was not directed at people like them. Rather, they recognized themselves in his description of “the few, those individuals among us who have embraced all the new, vigorous truths. Such men stand at the outposts, as it were, so far ahead that the solid majority has yet to catch up with them.” At the end of the play, Stockmann famously declares that “the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone.” For more than a century, people have left performances of An Enemy of the People applauding this credo and flattering themselves that it refers to them — and thus making a mockery of it.

This irony has been unmistakable in the recent spate of Ibsen revivals on Broadway. This year’s production of Ghosts comes on the heels of An Enemy of the People last year and A Doll’s House the year before, all featuring starry casts. An Enemy of the People, whose plot can easily be assimilated to present-day environmental concerns, was especially hailed as a timely inspiration. Last year’s production used an adapted script by the playwright Amy Herzog, who invented lines for Dr. Stockmann that quiver with twenty-first-century eco-piety: “We just have to imagine that the water will be clean and safe and the truth will be valued,” he says in this version. As for the line about the strongest man being the most alone, Herzog simply cut it, telling the New York Times, “That didn’t resonate with me at all.”

Ibsen himself could not have invented a clearer fable of the way idealism curdles into cant. Sam Gold, who directed the production, said that he saw a likeness between Dr. Stockmann and Greta Thunberg: “It takes a certain kind of personality to be able to say the truth, to be able to say you’re all being nuts, and I am just going to tell you the truth, which is we’re destroying the world.” But the message of An Enemy of the People, at least as Ibsen wrote it, is not that pollution is bad. It is that people — even liberals, maybe especially liberals — get very angry when you tell them truths that they do not wish to hear. In this way, with their prior certainty of their own rectitude, the audiences who are applauding Ibsen are also domesticating him, robbing him of his original force.

Nothing makes certain liberals happier, meanwhile, than telling truths that they do want to hear, and that they believe will bother other people — the backward, the religious, the traditional, the provincial, the patriarchal. One preview performance of An Enemy of the People was disrupted by protesters from an environmental group called Extinction Rebellion, who shouted “No theater on a dead planet!” The audience didn’t get angry; many initially thought it was part of the show. Afterward Jeremy Strong, who played Dr. Stockmann, praised the protesters: “I personally felt I wouldn’t have the right to finish the play if I had tried to stifle or silence what they had to say, which I think is correct and deserved to be heard.”

The protesters were angry at someone — oil company CEOs, people who drive Range Rovers — but clearly they were not angry at the people they were actually addressing. On the contrary, the disruption was an expression of solidarity with the audience and the actors, whose agreement was taken for granted. To use Shaw’s terminology, the protesters were idealists, who announce that what everyone holds sacred really is sacred, and not realists like Ibsen, who tell us that nothing is sacred. It is Ibsen’s compulsion to dissent, not his views on the sexual mores of late-nineteenth-century Scandinavia, that makes him an enduringly modern writer.

Lionel Trilling wrote that the distinctive quality of modern literature is its aggressiveness: for the modern writer words are weapons, “and one does not describe a quinquereme or a howitzer or a tank without estimating how much damage it can do.” No writer fits this definition better than Ibsen, above all in the three plays recently revived on Broadway. A Doll’s House, Ghosts, and An Enemy of the People, written one after another, are the quintessence of Ibsenism as a dramatic genre — plays in which the moral corruption of respectable society is rudely exposed and punished, as inexorably as in a Greek tragedy. Ibsen dealt real damage in these plays because he aimed at vulnerable targets, and several generations of playwrights learned from his example — starting with his defender, Shaw, who took on prostitution in Mrs. Warren’s Profession, military honor in Arms and the Man, and the business of medicine in The Doctor’s Dilemma. Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, about a businessman who knowingly sells defective aircraft parts to the Army during World War II, borrows major plot elements from Ibsen’s Pillars of the Community and The Wild Duck.

There were plenty of social evils left for Ibsen himself to blast at, if he had wanted to keep doing so. Instead, after An Enemy of the People, he began to turn his fire on his supporters and on himself, writing a series of plays in which idealism serves as an alibi for selfishness and cruelty. In The Wild Duck, from 1884, Gregers Werle cherishes a Stockmann-like commitment to the truth, which is why he insists on telling his friend Hjalmar Ekdal that his beloved daughter Hedvig is not really his. Gregers expects this revelation to bring Hjalmar and his wife Gina closer than ever, in “a way of life, a union, in truth and without secrets.” Instead Hjalmar reacts by rejecting Hedvig, who then kills herself in what she intends as an act of redemptive sacrifice.

Hedvig’s end is as horrifying as Osvald’s in Ghosts, but this time tragedy is tinged with the ludicrous. Ibsen seems to conclude that human beings are too weak to live in the truth, after all. We would rather have a “life-lie,” a story we can tell ourselves to make our wretched existences bearable. “Take the life-lie away from your average man, and you take his happiness with it,” says Dr. Relling, the Ekdals’ cynical neighbor.

By the time of Hedda Gabler in 1889, Ibsen has reinterpreted idealism as a species of sadism. Hedda’s acts of cruelty start out small — insulting an old lady’s hat, refusing to visit a sick relative. But when Eilert Lovborg, an old admirer of hers, returns to town, they become shocking. Lovborg is a reformed alcoholic, but Hedda urges him to go to a drunken party where he is sure to fall off the wagon. She claims to be doing it for his sake, imagining him transfigured by wine into a Greek god with “vine leaves in his hair.” When Lovborg gets drunk and ends up disgraced and ruined, Hedda hands him a pistol to commit suicide with, once again out of idealistic motives. If he kills himself, she says, it will show that “there can be acts of courage born of free will in this world after all. Something imbued with a glow of impulsive beauty.”

One cannot feel indignation against Hedda Gabler, as one can against Torvald Helmer and Pastor Manders. They stand for social evils that right-thinking people, in Ibsen’s day and our own, feel good about attacking. But Hedda is too strange and unsettling to represent any institution. Marriage or the church or oil companies can be legislated against, but what kind of political movement can take on human perversity, the will to power and the refusal of self-knowledge?

If modern literature is a weapon, then the most modern writer of all is the one who turns that weapon against itself, who aggressively interrogates the sources of our aggression, showing how our claims to serve causes and ideals are actually ways of serving ourselves. Like his contemporaries Nietzsche and Freud, Ibsen is permanently modern because he achieved this kind of self-overcoming. The best tribute we can pay him is not to applaud him for having opinions so progressive that they were already being applauded a hundred and fifty years ago, but to ask what bitter things Ibsen would have to say about us — and not just about our enemies.

The Passion Not to Be Lonely

In “Songs Among The Ruins,” an essay that he published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1965, the English poet and critic Ian Hamilton wrote:

In the best works of poets like Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath one finds not just a cerebral attempt for the distinguishably United States idiom but an impassioned exploration of whatever chances the imagination still has of making sense of a civilization that is bent on self-destruction, that cruelly cannot fail to involve the poet in its manic processes but demands also that he survive as guardian of what is being killed; to these poets America is distinct from other societies in the sense that it is more efficiently dehumanizing, having abused its promise as it now prepares to abuse its power, and the best that they feel able to attempt is to oppose its abstracting pressures with the full weight of whatever in their own lives seems concretely worth saving.

Born in 1936, in Newark, New Jersey, the American poet C. K. Williams belonged to the generation after Lowell, Berryman, and Plath, but to revisit his poetry, not least on the occasion of the recent publication of Invisible Mending, a selection from the entirety of his work, is to confirm that his writing had much of the same drive behind it as that which Hamilton diagnosed in those who went immediately before him.

His is a poetry which, in its maturity at least, attempts to forge connections and to counteract loneliness — spiritual, physical, psychic — in settings which often seem to preclude any such attempts at communion. His are poems grounded in a concrete, recognizably modern, reality; urban, sensual, at times mysterious — which proceed from the self, its intimate tangles with experience, thought, and growth, its homesickness for a sort of imagined, or lapsed, purity. They are poems which acknowledge but do not unquestioningly accept a sense of dehumanization, and abuse, at all levels of society — often focusing their eye on the down-at-heel, their Baudelairean street scenes of drinkers, junkies, beggars — “Every misfit in the city, every freeloader, every blown-out druggie and glazed teenybopper” (“Flight” from Tar) — and other of thrusting advancement’s bothersome marginalia.

Williams’ early poems appear, on their surface at least, to be his most directly political, written around and out of the Vietnam War, but their often too-straightforward bombast ends up diluting, rather than sharpening, their attempts at forceful urgency. In setting out to lead with a forthright tone, they risk a pile-up of strafing, big feelings, straining for effect rather than trusting the language itself to create an ecosystem of organic meaning and sense. They tend, as in “Being Alone,” to veer into abstraction, to “drift inconspicuously / in the raw dredge of your power.” One finds, in those early works, a poet whose mind is outpacing his stride, catching hints of frustration in the syntax and, occasionally, in direct statements, such as in “Yours” from Williams’ second book, I Am The Bitter Name: “I’m working as fast as I can I can’t stop to use periods / sometimes I draw straight lines on the page because the words/are too slow.”

Rather than having to settle for drawing straight lines as his language — and his thought — gallops away from itself, Williams, between books two and three, hit on a far more effective method for letting in contemplation, plot, and diligent nuance. The poems in With Ignorance, in 1977, read like the work of an entirely different writer. Suddenly, through the use of a long clause-laden line, Williams is able to significantly bolster his poetic arsenal; no longer relying only on an abrupt, somewhat spikily Imagist approach, he has access to many of the techniques of the prose writer. Narrative can be added, character development, interior monologue, scene-setting, atmosphere, but without sacrificing the innate compression of poetry, its cinematic juxtapositions and jump-cuts offset by what Michael Hofmann has called “Bellovian fellow-feeling,” creating layered, condensed studies, rich in mood and founded on a speaking tone, rich in the felicities and warmth of the vernacular but maintaining a clarity of vision.

These poems have, at their core, a concern with silence, the experience of enduring loneliness and loneliness’ endurance — there is often an attempt at revisiting scenes from the past, dredging up memory, in order to come to an understanding of why these moments, in particular, have outlasted their occasion:

All I know about that time is that it stayed, that something, pain or the fear of it,
makes me stop the wheel and reach to the silence beyond my eyes and it’s still there:

(“Bread”)

The morning goes on, the sun burning, the earth burning, and between them, part of me lifts and starts back,
past the wash of dead music from the bar, the drinker reeling on the curb, the cars coughing alive,
and part, buried in itself, stays, forever, blinking into the glare, freezing.

(“The Shade”)

The roots of so much of what will come to characterize Williams’ best poems from this point onwards can be found in this first book of long-lined work: the seeking of common ground, the sensual search for justice and radiance in unpropitious circumstance, a constant attempt to exist somewhere in the unsettling gap between decision and resolution. Ongoing, too, is that sense Hamilton talked of in Lowell and Co., the drive towards using the weight of what most needs to be kept, and rescued, from a life and an experience as ballast against the encroaching, steamrolling forces of modernity, their attempts to degrade and debase being met with an urge to look towards radiance and longing; an accounting for simplicity and joy amid the rubble and renovations of a difficult, frequently barbaric, century.

That Bellovian empathy that Hofmann touched on can be seen not only in Williams’ poems of human connection, but in those where creatures become the focus of his attention, too; all things feel prey to the same oppressive forces as the self, and as the human, such as in “The Storm” from perhaps Williams’ finest collection, Flesh and Blood, from 1987:

Down across the roof lines, the decorative dome of Les Invalides looms, intruding on all this,
and suddenly a swallow banks around its gilded slopes, heading out but veering quickly back
as though the firmament, figured by so many volumes now, were too intimidating to row out in alone.

In fact, if one can characterize Williams’ view of life, or at least the sensual and coherent experiencing of it, it might be possible to do so with lines from The Vigil, from a decade later:

so, sometimes, in the sometimes somber halls of memory, your life as you’ve known it,
in the only way you can know it, in these disparate, unpredictable upsurges of mind,
gathers itself, gathers what seem like the minds behind mind that shimmer within mind,
and turns back on itself, suspending itself, caught in the marvel of memory and time,
and, as the child’s mind, so long ago now, engendered itself in attachment’s touch and bestowal,
life itself now seems engendered from so much enduring attachment, so much bestowal.

(“Time: 1972”)

That feeling of suspense, of “unpredictable upsurges,” is a constant in Williams’ poems of interiority, as is a feeling of “touch and bestowal” and “enduring attachment,” of a link between the sensate and the gift, the idea of grace being rendered through small physical acts, all fed by a lifelong “passion not to be lonely” (“Lonely,” from Falling Ill). Williams’ poems are often strung between twin poles, or competing impulses — the despairing, at times wrongfooting, note of “how separate we all are from one another” (“Archetypes” from Repair) which seems always in danger of creeping out from behind that hardwired fear of being cast adrift, and its counterpoint, the “soft herd-alarm, a warning signal from the species” (“Experience” from Flesh and Blood) which prevents, or precludes, an absolute resignation to the feeling of abandonment.

Williams’ poems of isolation often fight their own instincts, after a fashion, never fully being able to give in to the sort of desolation, or spiritual vagrancy, that their openings and settings hint might be their fate. It’s as if something within the poet, at times, forbids despair — that so much of his art is founded on that seesaw between opposites, between the necessity of acknowledging the damage wrought, the ugly multi-sensory incursions on simple enjoyment, and also something deep-rootedly hopeful, or at least never hopeless. Something of this can be seen at its clearest in “The Park” from Flesh and Blood and its progression towards an almost rapturous ending. It opens

In that oblivious, concentrated, fiercely fetal decontraction peculiar to the lost,
a grimy derelict is flat out on a green bench by the sandbox, gazing blankly at the children.

A narrative of childhood selfishness, a refusal to share “a lovely fire truck,” plays out until the poem veers back to the figure from the opening, now by virtue of grammar both individual but also emblematic:

The ankles of the derelict are scabbed and swollen, torn with aching varicose and cankers.
Who will come to us now? Who will solace us? Who will take us in their healing hands?

That unexpected lurch in the final line hits a tone of desperation but also of rhapsody, and the shift to the third person plural becomes an implicating one, providing not just a bit of “soft herd-alarm” but also something more generational, managing to do what those early and more confrontingly political poems never could and involve the readers’ senses in the national plight, rather than only appealing to their outrage muscles. Williams, then, never abandons his search for justice, his abhorrence of tyranny or betrayal, but rather finds a means of involving the whole self in it, and in lining up his narratives, and atmospheres, to create environments in which the many abuses and underminings of a life can be given physicality, to see where they hurt.

Just as Williams is interested, in all his mature poems, in finding and unpacking the times that have stayed, there is something else at play in his selection and rendering of these particular narratives. As he writes in the title poem from With Ignorance, there is a need to isolate the true from the false, “a single moment carved back from the lie,” as he puts it there, behind so much of his writing. The desire to look so closely at the lost and the forlorn comes in part from his unwillingness to look away from the underside of what encroaching forces of barbarism — military, political, economic — have done, in the name of progress, but it is also tied to one of the other crucial drives behind all his writing: a sense of bearing witness. In part, this becomes an artistic decision, and a line can be drawn from the early deep Imagist principles which never fully leave the poet, however his prosody and lineation shift, from his deep-rooted belief that, as per “Combat” in Tar, “one’s moral structures tended to be air unless you grounded them in real events.”

Williams’ is a world in which — whether in the realm of the intimate and carnal, or on the broader political and economic scale, “justice won’t I know be served” (“Peace,” from Flesh and Blood) but yet, in spite of — or perhaps because of — all the world’s falsehoods, and the possibility of being powerless in the face of the lie, he feels a duty to give structure and language to things as they are, to attempt to dignify and preserve “tedious normality.” The aesthetic shift towards the longer line, the narrative poem, isn’t the only reason why Williams becomes a sort of barstool Scheherazade, counteracting loneliness through a brand of optimistic loquaciousness, even in the face of many reasons not to be so. The ending of “Time: 1978” from The Vigil is a more nakedly real-time rendering of the breathlessness and panic which lies beneath his need to chronicle, and to catalogue:

. . . as I write
this, trying to get it all in, hold the moments
between the sad desolation I thought if not to avert then to diminish in writing it down,
and this, now, my pen scratching, eyes rushing to follow the line and not lose Jed’s gaze,
which dims with sleep now, wanders to the window—hills, brush, field cleft with trenches—
and begins to flutter so that I can’t keep up with it: quick, quick, before you’re asleep,
listen, how and whenever if not now, now, will I speak to you, both of you, of all this?

This sort of devoted, enrapt, attention can be turned on the intimate, on the family or the lover, in Williams’ poems, and it can act — as it does here — as a means of arresting time, capturing in amber something the poet cannot bear to have disappear. It can — alternatively — be weaponized, turned into a means of holding the past and its cast list to account. There is an urge towards a settling of accounts, a righting of wrongs, which comes in with the latter version, as can be seen in “The Cup,” from Repair, a narrative of childhood about his mother’s coffee-drinking:

that excruciating suction sound again, her gaze loosening again.
I’d be desperate, wild, my heart would pound.
There was an expression, then, “to tell on someone”; that was what I craved, to tell on her,
to have someone bear witness with me to her awful wrong.
What was I doing to myself? Or she to me?
Oh, surely she to me!

While here this childhood urge to “tell on” his mother for a perceived wrong comes with an air of levity, a knowing adult slant on the confusion of his younger self, there is a darker edge to his recounting of a different matriarchal figure, in “Dirt,” where his grandmother “is washing my mouth / out with soap.” The present tense creates an immediacy, but the poem moves through a latter-day self-awareness and runs, almost, on parallel tracks of re-experiencing and restitution. Through this, Williams is able to both “tell on” the grandmother while also using the poem as a means of achieving some sort of “justice,” or at least finding a way of forgiving her this historic wrong:

I know now her life was hard:
she lost three daughters as babies,
then her husband died, too,
leaving young sons, and no money.
She’d stand me in the sink to pee
because there was never room in the toilet.
But, oh, her soap! Might its bitter burning
have been what made me a poet?

This isn’t the only time Williams associates burning in the mouth with the urge towards speech, or poetry — the coals on Moses’ tongues perform a similar role in “Spit” from With Ignorance, another poem about oral tyranny, and the fact that “every word we said would burn forever.”

Williams doesn’t only lean on this desire to bear witness in poems of his own immediate experience, or memory. He becomes something of a chronicler of others, too, in part in that ongoing search — however unlikely — for justice, or at least an urge towards ensuring that those most put-upon or poorly served by the world will not suffer the second injustice of being ignored in the process. One of Williams’ great strengths as a narrator, and something which is enabled by his choice of the more prosaic line and clause-heavy diction, is his feeling “as though I were a portion of the story” in instances where he is more chronicler than participant. A self-implicating streak, a desire to get involved, comes further to the fore in these sorts of poems, such as “The Dirty Talker: D Line, Boston” from Flesh and Blood, or the countless other street scenes, overhearings, voyeurisms, and recountings in which the “I” of the poem is in part a camera, but in part an explicator, empathizer and occasionally inadvertent accomplice.

Indeed, Williams — in a manner akin to the omniscient narrator of a prose story — can do something like free indirect style, as Alan Shapiro highlights in his introduction to Invisible Mending, and by doing so we get the best of both arts, a poetic narrator with Williams’ gifts for incision and the clinching image, but also a disembodied generosity of perspective, a significantly bulked-up range of possibilities when it comes to the selves whose lives we might overhear, collide with, or encounter in a Williams poem. In those moments where he is less the revisitor of his own past experience and more our street guide, Williams becomes twinned with the woman at Les Deux Magots in Paris, where he lived for many years, in “Love: Intimacy” from Flesh and Blood: “not commiserating, really, just keeping record of the progress of the loss.”

Williams applies the same criteria for choosing his scenes from other lives as he does from his own, making a hierarchy of types of experience which might point to some of that warning signal of the species but also adding them to the store of items worth saving from the void, in lieu of any guarantee of intercession from a God, or the universe, to offer the same preservative benevolence.

It’s something stronger than a desire to witness or to catalogue which powers this degree of scrutiny, something more to do with a belief — however unlikely, or ultimately thwarted — that by keeping track or setting down these things they might be ripe for a second go-around, that the dead moments, and even the dead figures which populate them, might really live, and be had all over again. Something of this can be glimpsed in “Last Things” from Repair, where Williams acknowledges that he hasn’t any right, as such, in the telling of his friend’s story of photographing his child just after his death, but that “If you’re reading it, you’ll know my friend pardoned me, / that he found whatever small truth his story might embody/was worth the anguish of remembering.”

Remembering is not always — or only — anguish in Williams’ work. In “Still Life,” from Tar, we come close to seeing Williams’ desire to go back, to pin down and reinhabit, at its most bare, and fully palpable:

I don’t know then how much someday — today — I’ll need it all, how much want to hold it,
and, not knowing why, not knowing still how time can tempt us so emphatically and yet elude us,
not have it, not the way I would, not the way I want to have that day, that light,
. . . . .
even, too, her gaze, so darkly penetrating, then lifting idly past, is so much imagination,
a portion of that figured veil we cast against oblivion, then try, with little hope, to tear away.

The tension between those two urges — to have “that day” again, but also knowing that it is finally just “so much imagination,” one “with little hope” — is fundamental to Williams’ tone, to the pathos of his desiring and sometimes self-deceiving faith, never fully abandoned, which he writes of in “Gardens” in Flesh and Blood: “The ever-consoling fantasy of my early adolescence was that one day time would stop for me.”

If a poem such as “Dirt” moves through affronting experience towards something like forgiveness — “Dare I admit that after she did it / I never really loved her again? . . . I never, until now, loved her again” — it has something in common with another of the key engines of Williams’ work: a need for, and searching after, some sort of lost purity, or innocence. It’s no coincidence that Williams chooses, in poems such as this one, and “The Cup,” and his much-anthologized “My Mother’s Lips,” to return to scenes from early childhood, because — as he notes in “The Gas Station” — he remained “mad with grief for the loss of my childhood” long after it ended, and came to associate this grief, and this loss, with much of the oppressive desiring which goes on throughout his adulthood. Purity as an idea, or a lost paradise, recurs throughout Williams’ work, and never with anything less than a tug of the heart, a pining, desolate tenor.

While Williams states — severally — the sadness which accompanies his lack of faith in a God, something which takes up that part is hinted at across his work, with a number of references to “purity” in its various guises. Some of it is synonymous with innocence — not only, or even entirely, in the sense of blamelessness, but also a kind of untutored, prelapsarian one, still looking around for teachers, and for direction, as in “The Gas Station”:

I still haven’t read Augustine. I don’t understand Chomsky that well. Should I?
My friend at last comes back. Maybe the right words were there all along. Complicity. Wonder.
How pure we were then, before Rimbaud, before Blake. Grace. Love. Take care of us. Please.

This is one sense of the purity which sometimes hides behind that veil of experience, but it also has something to do with an instinct akin to the lyric lift-off, and to which Williams’ poems sometimes return, or at least reach — the “radiances / I believed passionately existed,” as he puts it in “Depths” from Repair. For all its injustice, its denial of rectitude and its potential for severing connections, or causing intimidation and despair, Williams’ universe is one in which — on occasion — some Platonic hint is offered, often in the least likely setting. “The Dance,” also from Repair, is one such moment, where a “middle-aged woman, quite plain, to be polite about it” moves “with effortless grace” and it creates “consoling implications” for the viewer, ending in something like unalloyed hopefulness:

. . . so the world,
that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.

This yearning quality is what prevents Williams’ down-at-heel flaneur persona from calcifying into tough-guy flippancy, and which ensures that the tour of thwarted ambitions and disappointments never risks becoming mere grief tourism, or vampirism. Something similar happens in a later prose poem, “The Broom” from All At Once, where the inhabitants of a Greyhound bus station suddenly find themselves thinking of “a wheat field after harvest” and “a brutal August sun none of us trapped here has beheld for centuries, only fancied, dreamed of, here in this hallowed, middle place of bland fluorescent longing.”

This need, and the capacity, to acknowledge — and hope for — glimpses of real sunlight beyond the fluorescent longing is one means by which Williams can finally counteract the ache of loneliness, the lifelong battle for connection. Another is touched on in a recognition of the upside of the loss of innocence, laid out most overtly, perhaps, in “The Foundation” from his late book Wait, where “I’m not alone in my dancing, / my being air, I’m with my poets”:

Watch me again, I haven’t landed, I’m hovering here
over the fragments, the remnants, the splinters and shards;
my poets are with me, my soarers, my skimmers, my skaters,
aloft on their song in the ruins, their jubilant song of the ruins.

From a poet for whom words were once too slow, Williams became someone who rebuilt what the poetic line might do, bringing in — as a result — many of the tools of the novelist, their possibilities for a more omniscient empathy, one in which — always — as in “The City In the Hills” — there are “humans implied so richly.” His poems became means of bringing what had most mattered along, out of the silence of the past, out of the unforgiven or troublesome disappointments of innocence-stripping adulthood, with accuracy and flair. In so many of the poems of experience one feels the need, however impossible, to re-experience things as they were, exactly, in something richer and more tactile than any kind of religious afterlife, but rather — as in “Realms” from The Vigil:

. . . it must be actually you, not my imagination of you, however real: for myself,

mind would suffice, no matter if all were one of time’s terrible toys, but I must have you,
as you are . . .

Williams’ most vital and lasting poems are those of “enduring attachment” — attachment to those he has loved, and to humanity itself, especially its would-be detritus, its otherwise unsalvaged. His brand of tensile empathy can sometimes make him part of the stories being recounted, overheard, “told on,” and there is seemingly nowhere that his voice, or his eye, cannot take him, nowhere that he is unwilling to look for those breakthroughs into unlikely, often unlooked for, loveliness, where the world wins back a little credit, for all its habits of disappointing. These are poems set against atomization, but which face up to it — to the divisions, humiliations, and affronts committed daily by those in power, or those involved in perpetuating “the lie,” against which Williams sought to carve out singular truths. They are often built from pain, fear, or loneliness — often forced to contend with the silence, the great void of indifference — but they manage, when taken whole, to ground their moral world in real events, and come as close as the genre will allow to having “that day, that light” in perpetuity. Williams’ songs among the ruins point towards a possibility for poetry as closer cousin to fiction, but with its own integrity, its own lyric potential for real-time reply, to offer its own kind of afterlife, as in “Again,” from All At Once, about his grandson:

he calls my name each time he appears, and as I stand waiting, listening, watching him materialize again, it comes to me that if that old legend of having your life flash before you as you die is true, I’ll have this all again, and again.

Can We Be Blissful on the Rack?

Consider a political dissident who defies a ruthless dictator, is captured by the regime’s henchmen, and is publicly tortured to death. Your response would likely be outrage — you might appeal to Amnesty International, call for sanctions, or demand that the dictator be tried in The Hague.

The Stoics reflected on a similar case in antiquity: Phalaris, the sixth-century BCE tyrant of the city of Akragas in Sicily and the Brazen Bull that he commissioned. Victims were locked inside the hollow bronze bull while a fire was lit underneath, slowly roasting them alive. Some accounts claim that the bull was designed to amplify and distort their screams, transforming them into eerie bellowing — a spectacle meant to amuse the tyrant and to terrify his enemies.

Were the Stoics appalled by such cruelty? Not at all. They insisted that the wise and virtuous are just as happy inside the Brazen Bull as they would be enjoying a good meal with family and friends. Shocking? Certainly. But their view challenges a core modern moral conviction: that we should strive to eradicate suffering and fight injustice. If the virtuous can flourish even in the Brazen Bull, this is no longer self-evident. The burden shifts from the torturers to the victims — what matters is not what is done to them, but how they respond, the attitude they adopt. According to the Stoics, all that we should do by way of response to injustice is cultivate virtue. But even if we ultimately reject Stoicism, engaging with its defiant perspective — and its popularization as self-help literature in recent years — forces us to confront some of our deepest assumptions and brings into view an ancient ideal of flourishing and resilience that still merits our attention.

Bending the arc of the universe

In 1853, Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister and fiery abolitionist, declared that while “the arc of the moral universe is long,” it “bends toward justice.” This wasn’t just rhetoric — he tried to bend it himself, sheltering fugitive slaves, defying the Fugitive Slave Act, and even supporting armed resistance against slavery.

The drive to make the world better has become so deeply ingrained in our moral sensibility that we rarely ask whether it is justified. On a sunny morning in 2019, my children left their schoolbooks behind and grabbed the protest signs they had drawn the night before. My son’s was taped to a hockey stick: “S.O.S.,” with a painted Earth as the “O.” My daughter had glued hers to a tennis racket: “I’m sure the dinosaurs also thought they had more time!” They were seven and ten. In the schoolyard, they joined classmates for a rally against climate change. Like many parents, my wife and I went along — partly to support them, partly to keep them safe. We felt proud. On that day half a million people marched — the largest demonstration our city had ever seen. My wife took my hand. We smiled in the middle of the surge, the shouting, the urgency.

It was a small moment in a much larger movement. Grassroots activists block pipelines, billionaire philanthropists fund vaccines, students march against war, UN peacekeepers are deployed to conflict zones. Superheroes battle injustice, celebrities launch charities, musicians call for change in anthems such as “Imagine” and “We Are the World.” We respond to wildfires, tsunamis, and pandemics with early warning systems, emergency aid, and scientific breakthroughs. The impulse behind it all is the same: the world is not as it should be, and it is up to us to fix it — through protest, policy, philanthropy, science, pop culture, and more. The arc of the moral universe will not bend on its own. We have to pull it in the right direction.

There is no arc to bend

According to the Stoics, all these efforts are pointless. We cannot improve the world because we already live in a flawless one. There is no arc to bend. If you list evils — war, crime, poverty, racism, disease, earthquakes — the Stoics acknowledge the existence of such things but deny that they are evil.

Consider Job, God’s greatest accuser. He has a loving wife, thriving children, a large estate, and a trusted circle of friends; his piety appears beyond question. “Have you considered my servant Job?” God asks Satan. “There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.” Yet Satan retorts that if you strip away all his blessings, his faith will collapse. God accepts the challenge, granting Satan free rein to make Job suffer. Enemy tribes plunder his estate and kill his servants; a fire consumes what remains; a storm destroys the house where his children gather, burying them in rubble; Job is stricken with painful sores “from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.” The only thing spared is his life.

Job’s story highlights the age-old problem of undeserved suffering. Why do bad things happen to good people? For believers, in a world governed by an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good God, there should be no unjust suffering — yet the world seems full of it. The Stoics dismiss this puzzle as based on a false assumption: that suffering is an evil needing justification. They claim the only true good is virtue and the only true evil is vice — everything else is irrelevant. Since virtue depends solely on our choices, it is within everyone’s reach. Had Job been wise, he would not have seen himself as suffering evil at all.

The Stoics are equally unmoved by the challenges posed by God’s other accusers, from Candide to Ivan Karamazov. Candide catalogs horrors — war, earthquakes, persecution, slavery, colonialism, rape — to argue that no grand cosmic plan exists. Ivan goes further, insisting that even if a divine order did exist, it could never justify the suffering of a single innocent child. Yet the Stoics stand firm: none of this is evil.

They are equally dismissive of the things we cherish — first kisses, a toddler’s smile, landing a dream job, or winning a prestigious prize. Just as vice is the only evil, virtue is the only good. In a world of true Stoic sages, there would be no longing, no tragedy, no heartbreak. Odysseus’ yearning for home, Hamlet’s existential despair, Billie Holiday’s ballads of love and loss — none of it would make sense.

Radical egalitarianism

Should we applaud the radical egalitarianism of the Stoics? They insist that virtue — the only thing that matters — is open to all, regardless of background or circumstance. Epictetus, a former slave, is just as much a Stoic sage as Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor. Success and happiness do not depend on gender, race, religion, class, wealth, or health. A black transgender woman in a wheelchair living in a shantytown can be completely happy, while an athletic white hedge-fund manager sipping champagne on his yacht can be utterly miserable. It all comes down to whether they choose virtue or vice.

But this radical view comes at a cost. The Stoics seem to remove any reason to change the world. Why fight poverty, racism, oppression, or torture if none of these truly affect our wellbeing? As Epictetus puts it:

If he [the director] casts you as one of the poor, or as a cripple, as a king or as a commoner — whatever role is assigned, the accomplished actor will . . . perform it with impartial skill.

Here lies the fundamental difference between modern activists and the Stoics. The modern approach aims to change external conditions so that everyone has a fair shot at a happy and flourishing life. The Stoics, by contrast, detach happiness and flourishing entirely from external conditions.

Sleepless nights

Imagine if nothing could upset you — not a spilled coffee, not the loss of a loved one. The Stoics propose a path to this kind of freedom — they call it ataraxia, or freedom from disturbance — a deep and unshakable peace of mind. But can virtue alone really make us invulnerable to what Hamlet calls “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”?

Consider three moments when my own equanimity unraveled. Growing up, my self-confidence was tied to academic success. I excelled in school and was rewarded with admiration. As class valedictorian, I was nominated for a prestigious scholarship. I burst with pride. After the selection process, I couldn’t sleep. Every morning I waited anxiously for the postman, my heart pounding. When the letter finally arrived, my hands trembled. “We regret to inform you . . .” was as far as I got before my world collapsed. For a year, I was consumed by shame.

Vastly more terrifying is the thought of death. I don’t believe in an immortal soul — when my body dies, my mind goes with it. No afterlife, no second act, just vanishing into eternal nothingness. So I catch myself fantasizing: Could I upload my consciousness into a computer? Could science stop my body from aging? Could I merge with machines and live on as a cyborg?

But the most visceral fear came when doctors discovered a growth in my six-year-old son’s brain — a rapidly expanding perivascular space, ominously labeled “giant” on the MRI. It was extremely rare, and all my wife and I could do was wait and watch. If it didn’t stabilize, it could lead to brain damage, surgery, or worse. There was no cure, no action to take — only the unbearable prospect of seeing our son’s life change in ways we couldn’t control. The helplessness was crushing.

What tools do the Stoics offer to restore my peace of mind? First, they would remind me that the things I sought (recognition) and the things I feared (death, harm to my son) were not fully in my control. No matter how much effort I put in, uncertainty remains — a constant source of worry that, when hopes are dashed, turns into grief.

The only thing I fully control, the Stoics argue, is my value judgments — whether I see success as good and failure as bad, health as good and sickness as bad, and so on. Desire and aversion simply follow judgment. First, I see the chocolate; then, I assess it. If I judge it to be good, the craving that draws me to it follows. Wisdom and virtue are nothing more than correct judgments, aligning our desires and fears with what is truly good and truly bad. Conversely, false judgments lead to misguided attachments and anxieties. I cannot control whether I see the chocolate or whether I will get to eat it — but I can control how I assess its value. For the Stoics, everything hinges on that.

My desire for acclaim, my fear of death, and my worry about my son’s condition all stemmed from value judgments — that acclaim is good and that death and harm to a loved one are bad. In all three cases, the Stoics say, I was mistaken.

So what is the cure? Philosophical therapy! Change your beliefs about good and bad, Epictetus instructs:

It is not events that disturb people, it is their judgements concerning them. . . . So when we are frustrated, angry or unhappy, never hold anyone except ourselves — that is, our judgements — accountable.

Once I replace false beliefs with true ones, I will achieve ataraxia. But where did I go wrong? According to the Stoics, acclaim, death, and harm to loved ones are “indifferents” — they neither add to nor take away from our wellbeing. Remember: the only thing to pursue is virtue, the only thing to avoid is vice.

The Stoics know that this is easier said than done. That is why Epictetus recommends many exercises to rein in misguided desires and fears. A sample:

In the case of things that delight or benefit you, remind yourself what they are. Start small. If it’s china you like, say, “I am fond of a piece of china.” When it breaks, you won’t be as disconcerted. When giving your wife or child a kiss, repeat to yourself, “I am kissing a mortal.” Then you won’t be so distraught if they are taken from you. . . . Sickness is a problem for the body, not the mind — unless the mind decides that it is. Lameness, too, is the body’s problem, not the mind’s. Say this to yourself and you’ll find the problem pertains to something else, not to you.

The goal is to gradually detach from what we cannot fully control — from possessions to people we love. It begins with reframing our judgments: we stop seeing their presence as good and their absence as bad. As desire and fear fade, we no longer cling or dread. Eventually, their presence brings no elation, and their absence, no distress. The result is peace of mind: nothing can sway us, either positively or negatively.

Thumbs up to everything?

At first glance the Stoic proposal seems absurd. Sure, the things that fill us with hope and fear, joy and grief, are not fully under our control. But how does detaching from them make life better? Isn’t this just Aesop’s fox declaring the unreachable grapes sour? The alternative to life’s ups and downs looks like a big, bleak void.

The Stoics, however, double down. “Welcome events however they happen — this is the path to peace,” writes Epictetus. The shattered teacup, the maimed limb, the death of your child — not only are these not bad; they are good and should be welcomed. The Stoics want us not merely to endure losses, but to reverse our negative judgments about them.

How can they justify an attitude that seems to run against every human instinct? To begin with, they are determinists: everything unfolds necessarily in a system of causes and effects. Say your child’s death from leukemia was inevitable — how does recognizing that help? For one, it frees you from guilt or resentment toward others for not preventing it. But even so, wouldn’t it still feel like a terrible loss?

This is where the Stoics appeal to God. The system of causes and effects, Epictetus insists, is not a blind mechanical chain but one governed by divine intelligence:

The chief duty we owe the gods is to hold the correct beliefs about them: that they exist, that they govern the world justly and well, and that they have put you here for one purpose — to obey them and welcome whatever happens, in the conviction that it is a product of the highest intelligence. . . . And this cannot happen unless you stop applying “good” and “bad” to externals. . . . Because, if you regard any external as good or bad, and fail to get what you want or get what you don’t want instead, you will blame the gods . . . for being the cause of your trouble.

If we embrace Stoic theology and fulfill our “chief duty,” how would it affect our judgments? We would no longer see the shattered teacup, the maimed limb, or the death of a child as misfortunes, but as parts of God’s plan — products of “the highest intelligence” — through which he governs the world “justly and well.” That, for the Stoics, is what makes the world flawless: it is perfectly ordered by divine reason.

Think of a child whose toy is taken away. He sees the loss as bad and cries. But the parents may have good reasons for making him cry: disciplining him, removing a health hazard, donating the toy to a refugee family. If the child fully grasped their motives, the loss might no longer seem bad but something to be accepted, even welcomed.

Yet even if the parents’ decision is justified, they still cause pain by removing something their child cherishes. Likewise, God appears to inflict harm on parents who lose a child, even if it is part of a larger plan where the benefits outweigh the costs. But in a flawless world any harm is too much. The Stoics handle this problem by denying that harm exists at all. External and bodily goods make no difference to our well-being. The only true goods are those of the soul — wisdom and virtue.

Follow nature!

Virtue, the Stoics argue, means “living in agreement with nature.” But don’t turn to physicists or biologists for guidance. The Stoics want us to align our lives with God’s plan as revealed in the natural order. Since God’s plan ensures that everything turns out for the best, the only rational course is to follow it.

But how do we know what God prescribes for us? By looking at human nature in its purest form — before socialization distorts it. The answer, according to the Stoics, lies in the cradle. A newborn’s instincts reveal nature’s design. Breastfeeding? Thumbs up! Hunger? Thumbs down! Warmth? Thumbs up! Cold? Thumbs down! Walking? Thumbs up! Falling? Thumbs down! Epictetus puts it this way:

Babies seek what is good for them and avoid the opposite . . . This would not happen unless they valued their own constitution and feared destruction . . . So one must realize that it is self-love which provides the primary motivation.

Why did God implant self-love in us, making us naturally drawn to what preserves us and repelled by what harms us? Because our existence has metaphysical value: we are part of God’s plan. Just as a watchmaker wants every gear to exist so that the watch can function, God wants us to exist as part of the universe he has perfectly ordered.

If self-preservation is our divinely decreed duty, then the Stoic’s life will often look like everyone else’s — as Cicero explains in On Moral Ends:

For some [things] there is good reason to prefer them, . . . as is the case with health, well-functioning senses, freedom from pain, honour, wealth and so on. Likewise, . . . some offer good reason to reject them — for example pain, illness, loss of a sense, poverty, ignominy and so forth.

The difference is that Stoics do not cherish what they pursue for its own sake. They don’t eat scrambled eggs because they are delicious, but because God wants them to eat them. If the eggs slip to the floor, they embrace the mess with equal joy — because that, too, is a part of God’s plan. They diligently care for their children, but if a child dies of leukemia, they will not shed a tear. They pursue careers, protect reputations, and invest in health care and pension plans, but if they are burned alive in the Brazen Bull they accept it with complete equanimity.

To capture this paradox — that some things should be pursued even though they hold no true value — the Stoics invented the notion of “preferred indifferents.” These are things to which we are naturally drawn because of the self-love that God implanted in us, yet they ultimately do not affect our well-being. The Stoic sage is like an archer who does everything to hit the target — but whether he actually hits it does not matter. What matters is living in agreement with nature, that is, with God’s plan, which dictates both to aim at our goals and to welcome whatever outcome follows.

Virtue eclipses everything

But isn’t there a contradiction? If God implanted self-love in us and a natural desire for what preserves us, how can he also expect us to welcome what destroys us?

The Stoics would reply that aligning our life with God’s plan is a higher-level form of self-preservation — not of the body but of the mind, which is the divine spark in us. We perfect this spark through wisdom, which means holding true beliefs about the value of things.

Preserving the body and the mind often go hand in hand — we seek food, avoid danger. But if they come into conflict, we would be fools to complain — whether about broken eggs, a child’s death, or a house destroyed by an earthquake. Why? Because mourning the loss of these things means making false value judgments — believing that having them is good and losing them is bad, when in truth they are indifferent. And by making false judgments, we destroy the only thing that truly matters: virtue, our bond with God.

Being attached to indifferent things is always a terrible trade-off — even when misfortune never strikes. It does not matter if the eggs get cooked, the child thrives, and the house stands. The moment we mistake these for genuine goods, we fall into false judgments — and lose virtue.

To show how irrational that trade-off is, the Stoics use a series of striking metaphors:

It is like the light of a lamp eclipsed and obliterated by the rays of the sun; like a drop of honey lost in the vastness of the Aegean Sea; a penny added to the riches of Croesus. . . . Such is the value of [external and] bodily goods that it is unavoidably eclipsed, overwhelmed, and destroyed by the splendor and grandeur of virtue.

As a rule, ancient philosophers are ethical egoists, and the Stoics are no exception. Everything we do is driven by self-love — the desire for what is advantageous to us. But wise self-love is directed at the goods of the soul: wisdom and virtue, which consist in correct judgments. Chasing external goods is like trading the light of the sun for the glow of a candle or the wealth of Croesus for a penny — choosing something worthless over the one thing worthwhile. What could be more self-destructive?

Stoicism stands or falls on the claim that virtue eclipses everything. If that is true, then nothing can shake a virtuous person’s equanimity. Once we have virtue, there is nothing left to gain or lose.

We can now revisit the three moments when I lost my peace of mind. Had I been a Stoic, I would not have been upset by the scholarship rejection, the prospect of dying, or the perivascular space growing in my son’s brain. I would have seen them as part of God’s flawless plan and made the right judgments — not only accepting them but endorsing them. Eclipsed by the “splendor and grandeur of virtue,” my losses should hardly have registered at all.

Fortune’s rollercoaster

Few rode the wheel of fortune more wildly than the Seneca.

At the top: the Stoic philosopher was born into a prominent Roman family and built an impressive career, rising to high office and serving as mentor to the emperor.

At the bottom: Emperor Caligula, envious of Seneca’s brilliance, orders him to commit suicide — only sparing him because he is gravely ill and expected to die soon anyway.

Back at the top: under Emperor Claudius, Seneca becomes a trusted advisor.

And down again: Claudius, angered by Seneca’s criticisms of autocracy, exiles him to Corsica. He loses his status, his property, and his homeland, spending eight years in exile, where he writes a letter of consolation to his mother, Helvia.

Another rise: Agrippina, mother of the future emperor Nero, brings Seneca back to court. He becomes Nero’s tutor and later his advisor.

The final fall: Nero, determined to rule without interference, murders his mother and commands Seneca to commit suicide. Seneca complies with equanimity, calmly having his veins cut while dictating his final thoughts as his life drains away.

We can now explain Seneca’s trajectory in Stoic terms. Why pursue wealth, honor, and a political career? Because God implanted self-love in human nature, and these things help us preserve ourselves. And why not mourn the losses that came with exile and death? Because wise self-love preserves the goods of the soul through correct value judgments.

That is exactly how Seneca consoles Helvia. The things taken from him — property, status, homeland — have no true value, he argues. And the things that have true value can never be taken away:

This universe, the greatest and most splendidly furnished of Nature’s creations, and the most magnificent part of it, the mind of man, that surveys and marvels at the universe, are our own possessions in perpetuity.

Whether at home or in exile, in a villa or a prison cell, we are always in the flawless universe. And a beautiful mind is an internal good, not an external one — something no tyrant can take away. So, Seneca reassures Helvia, she has nothing to worry about.

Are the Stoics hypocrites?

Among all the ancient schools, Stoicism enjoys by far the biggest modern revival. Today thousands of self-described Stoics pursue a sleek self-help version of the philosophical life. Athletes, military officers, executives, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are especially drawn to it — and not by accident. Repackaged by best-selling authors such as Ryan Holiday, Stoicism has become a toolkit for personal success, mental toughness, and peak productivity — less a path to wisdom than a strategy for winning: morning routines, journaling hacks, and motivational quotes from Marcus Aurelius, cherry-picked to fire up a CEO on a treadmill. But is this just a caricature of the ancient doctrine, as some maintain — or does it, in some way, capture its spirit?

Stoicism can easily slide into a license for ruthless selfishness. The concept of “preferred indifferents” lets you chase wealth, power, and a sculpted physique — whatever enhances your resilience. And if divine providence governs all, then the misfortunes of others are not unjust — they are ordained. Virtue may be the only true good, but it turns out you can have that and the yacht. What begins with a bow to Socrates ends in a TED Talk on hustle culture.

To be fair, one can give Stoic ethics a social-democratic twist. As a Stoic, you believe God has implanted self-love in you, drawing you toward health, status, and wealth. But you also recognize that same self-love in every other person — and that God wants their self-preservation as much as yours. Helping to create conditions in which others can flourish, then, becomes an extension of your own duty — and a part of aligning your life with God’s plan and assisting in its realization.

This social-democratic Stoic might support progressive taxation. He may even look like a modern activist, working to reduce suffering and improve society. But beneath the surface lies a deep moral divide. The activist fights to fix a world he sees as unjust. The Stoic believes justice already permeates the universe. For him, activism is not about mending a broken world — it’s about playing one’s part in a perfect one. And whether he succeeds or fails makes no difference: the world remains flawless either way.

If, like me, you don’t believe in divine providence, that version of Stoicism is no more persuasive than the self-help one.

Is Stoicism obsolete?

Imagine you are the director of a UN refugee camp. The people in the makeshift tents have survived a brutal war and lost nearly everything. Would you hand them a brochure of Stoic consolation — telling them that everything unfolds according to a flawless rational plan, that nothing of true value has been taken from them, that their suffering is simply a matter of mistaken judgments? Or would you focus on protecting what they have left and creating conditions so future generations are spared what they endured?

At first glance, Stoic consolation seems cruel — not only rationalizing away the refugees’ suffering, but adding insult to injury by blaming them for it. It is also based on a view of God and the universe that few moderns accept.

Should we then give up on virtue and return to bending the arc of the universe? The liberal vision of justice looks roughly like this: securing for everyone the freedom to live as they please, ensuring a fair distribution of resources so that all have the means to pursue their life-choices, and guaranteeing equal opportunities, free from discrimination. Whether or not one embraces Stoic virtue is a personal matter — it has no bearing on this conception of justice. Virtue does play a role in modern liberal thought, but it is largely confined to civic responsibility: respecting others’ rights, upholding fair institutions, and participating in democratic life. That’s no small feat, to be sure. Still, on the liberal view, justice depends on the right arrangement of external conditions, with civic virtues as a means to that end; on the Stoic view, justice consists entirely in the virtuous choices of individuals.

As I have said, I do not believe in the flawless, providentially ordered universe of the Stoics. But I am interested in the power of virtue — and have come to experience first-hand the resilience that the “goods of the soul” can provide. During my contentious divorce, several pillars of my world collapsed at once. It wasn’t just the marriage or the family structure that I had built my life around. Almost overnight, I lost access to the beautiful city and the country houses where our children had spent their happiest years — both houses owned by my wife. Parts of the social networks that had shaped our shared life unraveled. Much of what was familiar and stable was suddenly gone.

And yet my life was not shattered. One of the things I most looked forward to during that time was teaching my university classes. For those hours, my mind was immersed in philosophical ideas, engaged in lively discussions with students. Reading, teaching, and writing offered not just reprieve, but moments of bliss. I grew close to a colleague who was also going through a divorce. We commiserated a little — but we were far happier talking about Plato.

Another source of stability was moral action: I poured my energy into shielding my children from the upheaval, doing everything I could to keep their world as intact as possible.

Of course I felt the losses. Of course I grieved. The goods of the soul — exercising my intellectual, creative, and moral capacities — did not “eclipse and overwhelm” everything, as the Stoics would have it. But they did offer some protection. They gave me something to hold onto when much else had slipped away.

I reject the Stoic claim that virtue alone is sufficient for happiness — that we can be just as happy in the Bull of Phalaris as at a dinner party. But their radical position serves a crucial purpose — it throws into sharp relief an insight central to ancient philosophy from Socrates onward: the importance of the “goods of the soul” as a cornerstone of both flourishing and resilience.

Stoic egalitarianism likewise goes too far. A flourishing life isn’t available to all just by making the right choices. Still, the goods of the soul are remarkably inclusive: they do not depend on race, gender, religion, or sexual orientation, on good looks or perfect health, on great wealth, power, or prestige. They are, in short, very widely available.

Aristotle or the Stoics?

My conception of virtue is far closer to Aristotle’s than to the Stoics’. And the difference is significant. Aristotle scoffs at the idea that a virtuous person could be happy in the Brazen Bull: “People who claim that the person being tortured, or the person who has fallen on very bad times, is happy if he is good are . . . talking nonsense.” For Aristotle, the good life depends on external conditions from the moment we are born. Our upbringing, he insists, “makes all the difference.” Raised in a virtuous family and community, we are on the path to flourishing; raised in a corrupting environment, we are on the path to ruin.

His world is flawed: crime, war, and earthquakes are genuinely bad. The wise may be less vulnerable than the foolish thanks to foresight and prudence (they won’t sail during hurricane season or build where wildfires rage). But they are not invulnerable.

While Aristotle ranks the “goods of the soul” highest, he makes room for external goods. You cannot achieve scientific breakthroughs, just laws, or great works of art under just any conditions — say, if you are enslaved on a sugar plantation, trapped in an assembly line job, or growing up in a Mumbai slum. Aristotle’s flawed world is also one we can improve — unlike the flawless one of the Stoics. He holds the active life — a life devoted to justice and the common good — in high esteem. His Nicomachean Ethics is, above all, a guide for lawmakers — a manual for how to build a society in which all citizens can flourish. Moreover, a flourishing life means something different to Aristotle: realizing our moral, creative, and intellectual potential. With no all-encompassing providential plan, virtue cannot consist in giving the thumbs up to everything.

Even if we attain the goods of the soul, we remain vulnerable to “torture” or “very bad times.” Yet in Aristotle’s view even the gravest misfortunes cannot destroy the virtuous person entirely:

The noble shines through, when a person calmly bears many great misfortunes, not through insensibility, but by being well bred and great-souled. . . . The truly good and wise person . . . bears all the fortunes of life with dignity and always does the noblest thing in the circumstances, as a good . . . shoemaker makes the noblest shoe out of the leather he is given. . . . If this is so, the happy person could never become wretched, though he will not be blessed if he meets with luck like that of Priam.

The Aristotelian would not emerge happy from Seneca’s rollercoaster, but he would not be crushed either. In the refugee camp, he would not collapse in grief or preach consolation. He would set about organizing food, shelter, and opportunities for creativity, learning, and conversation.

Should we all become Aristotelians?

The Aristotelian, it seems, gets to have it both ways. He works to improve the external conditions for flourishing — justice, peace, education, vaccines — while also cultivating the internal ones: art, friendship, moral character, wisdom. He acknowledges the role of luck yet strives to make us less vulnerable to its blows. He both bends the arc of the universe and invests in inner transformation. Unlike the Stoic, he does not deny the value of external goods; unlike the modern activist, he doesn’t limit his mission to distributing these goods fairly.

Yet there are problems with Aristotle’s flawed universe — problems the Stoic and the activist would be quick to point out. They lie in his metaphysics, which the Stoic sees as incoherent and the activist as obsolete. Though flawed, Aristotle’s universe is still a far cry from the “disenchanted” one posited by modern science. Like the Stoic cosmos, it is ordered by a Divine Mind — “the first principle of heaven and nature.” But then where do the flaws come from, the Stoic wants to know. Meanwhile the activist sees no evidence for a divine order in the first place.

Consider a table, Aristotle would tell the Stoic. It consists of matter — the wood — and form — the table’s shape. The wood has the potential to become a table; the form, imposed by the carpenter, actualizes that potential. All physical things, he argues, are made up of matter and form. At the most basic level lies prime matter: completely passive, featureless, and able to receive any form. But where there is potential, there is also failure. An acorn becomes an oak if it falls on fertile soil; it withers if the ground is barren. A gifted child’s potential is wasted if there is no school in town. Even Phalaris had the potential for virtue. His failure reflects the contingencies of embodied existence — nature, habit, and society. So Aristotle gets the Divine Mind off the hook: the universe’s flaws stem not from God, but from matter’s instability. The Divine Mind is all-good but not all-powerful. The rational order it grounds is compromised by the imperfection of the material in which it is realized.

The Stoics reject this answer. If matter is completely passive and contributes only potentiality, then all outcomes must ultimately derive from the active principle — the Divine Mind. A flawed world would mean a flawed plan. For the Stoics, that is unthinkable. If the Divine Mind governs all things, flaws simply cannot exist. Metaphysically speaking, they have a point — and they are willing to bite the bullet for consistency, embracing claims that fly in the face of lived experience: You can be happy in the Brazen Bull! No reason to shed a tear over the death of a loved one! The suffering of the innocent is not evil!

We moderns are tempted to dismiss the entire debate. We are not troubled by whether matter limits the power of the Divine Mind. Our problem is that we see no compelling evidence for a Divine Mind to begin with. What we observe is a vast, dark, mostly empty universe that burst into existence some fourteen billion years ago. In it, we spend a brief moment on a small planet in one of countless galaxies, living lives of no cosmic consequence. And these lives emerged from a primordial soup, shaped not by rational design, Stoic or Aristotelian, but by the random mutations of evolution and countless chance encounters across generations.

Secular virtue?

Can we still be Aristotelians in an indifferent universe? Does it still have an arc for us to bend? Aristotle, like the Stoics, believes that the moral order is inscribed in the structure of the world. The key difference is that for Aristotle we must work to actualize it — the potential for virtue in ourselves and for justice in our communities. Everything, in Aristotle’s world, has a telos — an end it naturally strives toward. Acorns aim to become oaks; human beings aim to develop their creative, moral, and intellectual capacities. Flourishing — eudaimonia — is not just a feeling, but the objective fulfillment of what we are meant to be. That telos is determined by nature’s rational order, whose ultimate cause is the Divine Mind. In an indifferent universe, however, there is no built-in purpose. Our capacities remain — but whether we ought to develop them is anything but obvious.

Contemporary virtue ethicists have tried to preserve Aristotle’s ideal of human excellence without a divine order. In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that without a conception of the human good — without a telos — moral talk about rules, duties, and virtues becomes hollow. He offers a stark choice: Aristotle or Nietzsche, teleology or nihilism. To avoid metaphysics, MacIntyre turns to culture: our telos, he says, is shaped by the traditions and narratives of our community. But that opens the door to relativism. What if you grew up in Nazi Germany and found your purpose in annihilating Jews and ensuring Aryan supremacy? Plenty of cultures promote ideals we find abhorrent — racist, misogynistic, homophobic, inegalitarian. Macntyre replies that only cultures that let us flourish as rational, social beings count. But in that case, isn’t he appealing to natural teleology — the very thing he set out to avoid?

Philippa Foot does embrace natural teleology, but without the theology. If we can objectively assess what it means for an oak or an elephant to flourish, why not do the same for humans? But her answer begs a question: why should we want to flourish in this way? If Van Gogh or Kafka had flourished like vigorous elephants, we might have been deprived of some of the greatest works of modern art. And does flourishing entail moral virtue? The wild lion tearing into a gazelle may flourish more fully than the tame one in a zoo. But is it more virtuous? Can nature, purged of the divine, really provide an ethical model for us?

In the end, neither MacIntyre nor Foot succeeds in detaching teleology from metaphysics. Of course, secular atheists are free to develop whatever capacities they please, and to fight for peace and justice. But if we seek a reason — if we want a coherent account of why we should strive to flourish and help others do the same — we need something like the Aristotelian framework: a universe that is both rational and flawed, a human good that is both objective and vulnerable, a moral arc that does not bend on its own but still gives us reason to try.

Otherwise, we are left with two extremes: the flawless universe of the Stoics, where justice already reigns, or the indifferent universe of the atheist, where flourishing and justice lack a deeper foundation. We may think that we are secular, but when we take our children to piano class, or nudge them to read, or encourage them to sell lemonade for a good cause; when we find comfort in books, art, conversation, or volunteering; when we do our part to make justice prevail — we unwittingly affirm the ethics and metaphysics of virtue.

My Identity

All my life, reading has made me feel on the verge of something,
like a bird turning in the wind to lay itself bare
before going higher — with feet stretched out behind —
higher than the indifferent trees and noisy earth.
I’m grateful to my teachers who nurtured this experience,
education being our first need after food,
for this created calm within the mutilated bower,
where I lay — still a nascent thing —
muttering language with its two beats
speaking the music of my heart, and with three my mind.
Many experience separateness as exhaustion,
but I didn’t; instead, I felt so unified and whole,
as when sunshine lights up the hut and all
the ground about it is warm and dry again.