The cleric’s position was more precarious. The colonists might be hanged, as one of their number famously warned, but at least that misfortune, should it come about, lay in the future. The bearded, black-haired, black-eyed priest was surrounded by dozens of agitated warriors. He might not survive the hour.

Fr. Francisco Garcés’s Indian friends had begged him not to go to Oraibi, Arizona. The Hopis would kill him, they said. But Garcés had been undaunted. For months he had been traveling through the wilderness. Unarmed and hundreds of miles from the nearest Spanish soldier, he might be murdered at any moment. Still, by going to the Hopis’ principal village, he was courting even more danger than usual. Garcés was a Franciscan friar, and the history of his order’s interactions with the Hopis was not a happy one. In 1653, for example, one friar had taken a converted Hopi as his mistress. When a Hopi man began to rally the community against this transgression, the priest had him killed by two native officials. Fearing they would reveal his crimes, he then had those officials hanged. Some years later, another Franciscan drenched several Hopi men with turpentine and set them on fire. As one of his victims ran for a spring to douse the flames, the priest rode him down and killed him. In light of such crimes, it is not surprising that during the region-wide Pueblo Revolt of August 1680 the churches built by the Franciscans on the Hopi mesas were destroyed, and the four friars who served them slain.

Twenty years later, the Franciscans returned to the Hopi village of Awat’ovi. Surprisingly, dozens of the village’s residents accepted baptism and began incorporating Christian devotions into their sacred practices. This was not a development welcomed by their Hopi kin. Warriors from neighboring villages slaughtered Awat’ovi’s residents and laid waste their village. (The ruins can be visited today.) Since that tragedy, at least nine Franciscan priests had visited the Hopis’ homeland. None had succeeded in gaining a foothold for the church.

Francisco Garcés knew this history. But neither the prospect of failure nor that of physical danger had ever deterred him from action. During the previous eight years he had wandered on muleback and foot, often alone, two or three thousand miles through the deserts, highlands, meadows, and mountains of New Spain’s far-northern, unmapped frontier—today’s Sonora, Arizona, Nevada, and California. He had been the first European to enter what became Nevada; the first to descend to the village of Supai in the Grand Canyon; the first to cross the treacherous Colorado desert west of Yuma, Arizona; the first to describe the San Joaquin Valley and its inhabitants; the first to make contact with several Native American peoples; and now the first to enter Hopi territory from the west. In his travels he had unceasingly preached the gospel. He had just as unceasingly sought to serve the interests of his Spanish sovereign. To him, as to every Spaniard he knew, crown and cross were two sides of the same coin.

It was as a man in the service of both his earthly and eternal kings that Fr. Garcés thought his going to Moqui—as the Spanish called the region where the Hopis then lived, and still live—vitally important. It lay along the route from Santa Fe, the long-established Spanish capital of the province of New Mexico, to Monterey, soon to become the capital of the Californias. By July 1776, new Franciscan missions dangled southward from Monterey like a string of rosary beads.

Actually, a route from Santa Fe to Monterey did not yet exist; Garcés was in the midst of an arduous attempt to trace it. He knew that to establish a road from Alta California to New Mexico would be to expand upon the major strategic victory he had recently helped win for King Carlos III. Over the previous eighteen months, Garcés had provided crucial assistance in the finding of an overland trail across the uncharted, all but waterless desert from Sonora to California. He had then helped lead the first expedition of Spanish settlers across the same path. Those families were now beginning to settle a place the Spanish called San Francisco. Drawing a more direct line between that and other new settlements in California and the old ones in New Mexico would serve to expand New Spain’s northwestern frontier and solidify Mexico City’s always tenuous hold on this far-flung area.

To make the Spaniards’ use of this road feasible, Garcés first needed to win the friendship of the powerful Hopis, as he had done so far with every people with whom he had come into contact, not infrequently as the first European they had ever seen. But the Hopis rejected his overtures, refusing him food, shelter, and conversation. Garcés had spent two tense nights among them when, as the sun began to rise on the morning of July 4, flutes began to whistle, drums began to beat, warriors began to dance. Garcés was uneasy but not defeated. Summoning his resolve, he remained where he was and waited. Finally, seeing that he was indisposed to leave, four warriors approached him. “Why have you come here?” they asked. “Don’t stay. Go back to your own land.” Through signs, Spanish, and scraps of indigenous languages, Garcés communicated as best he could where he had come from, all the peoples he had seen, and how welcoming and open all had been. He told his audience, now growing large, that he cherished the Hopis, and for that reason had come to tell them about God and his crucifixion in the form of his son, the God-Man Jesus Christ.

An old man scowled. “No, no,” he thundered, his face displaying contempt for all the priest had said. It was the first time the friar’s narrative had ever been so decisively and disdainfully rejected. Perhaps the Hopis had not understood him. Or perhaps, he reflected, success would require a more holy messenger. In any case, it was obvious that if he valued his life, it was time to go. The Hopis’ evangelization would have to wait for another day. So too would Garcés’s martyrdom.

For their labors, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and their conspirators have received, at least until recent years, the pious reverence of succeeding generations. The primary monument to Francisco Garcés consists of a statue in a grimy Bakersfield traffic circle. Few people outside the specialized field of borderlands studies have heard of him. Yet Garcés’s multiple months-long treks into the unknown and dangerous wilderness make him one of the greatest pathfinders in American history. Scholars continue to unpack the anthropological and ethnological data Garcés gathered on his travels. His explorations facilitated the settling of California. If not for the friar’s exploits, San Francisco and Los Angeles might not have been established for many years, and a Spanish society might have failed to take root before the onslaught of the American Gold Rush, depriving California of a major component of its religious and cultural heritage.

Herbert E. Bolton (1870–1953), the pioneering scholar of Spanish-American history, longed to undertake, but never found time for, a biography of Francisco Garcés. To Bolton, as to nearly everyone else who has made Garcés’s acquaintance, the Franciscan priest was a particularly attractive figure. Bolton’s favorite adjective for Garcés, whom he called “the prince of lonely wanderers,” was “intrepid.” The Spanish military men, explorers, and missionaries who were Garcés’s contemporaries were hardly blushing violets, and even among them the priest stood out for his fearlessness. “No one,” wrote Bolton, “could surpass him in courage.”

The unintellectual but streetwise friar was as likable, tireless, and hardy as anyone who ever took on the American wild. Garcés built a rapport with the Indians of the Southwest more quickly than his peers. He intuited how important it was to eat what they ate, sit how they sat, converse in the way they wished to converse. He thereby came to exceed his Spanish compatriots in his sympathetic tolerance for and love of the peoples he encountered. The Hopis notwithstanding, his bravery, openness, and peaceable nature won him Indian affection and respect.

One still gets glimpses of Garcés in mainstream treatments of the history of the Southwest, but today, colonial-era missionaries—and the scholars like Bolton who admired them—generally command low esteem in scholarly circles. At best, Garcés emerges from the contemporary literature as a fascinating supporting actor. Often he is misportrayed as a maverick priest who bucked expectations and authority to serve the socially marginalized—a very Vatican II kind of friar. At worst, he is depicted as a participant in the genocide of which the Spanish empire is now commonly held to be guilty. The truth, of course, is more interesting.

Born in 1738 to a peasant family in Morata de Jalón, a tiny village near Zaragoza, Garcés entered the Order of Friars Minor at the age of fifteen. Eight years later, shortly after he was ordained to the priesthood, he was persuaded to come to New Spain by a recruiter from the Colegio de Santa Cruz in Querétaro, one of twenty-seven such Franciscan institutions to be established in the Americas.

These colleges were elite missionary-training centers. They prepared their friars to wage and win spiritual battle, whether in urban centers, in outlying villages, or on distant frontiers. On the frontiers, winning did not come easily. When Garcés arrived, Santa Cruz was struggling to make headway among the Apaches and Comanches of Texas. King Carlos III’s expulsion of the Jesuits from his dominions in 1767 cleared the way for the colegio to try its hand in northwestern New Spain by replacing the exiled Jesuits there.

Garcés was one of fifteen missionaries selected for this effort. He was assigned to the most isolated outpost possible: San Xavier del Bac, located a few miles south of the Pima village we now know as Tucson. Founded by the Jesuit Eusebio Kino in 1692, San Xavier was situated—to use a phrase coined by one of the few missionaries to have lived there—at the rim of Christendom. There were no Spanish settlers, and the nearest Spanish presidio, the one theoretically responsible for San Xavier del Bac’s protection, lay forty miles to the south in Tubac. Only two or three soldiers resided at the mission itself, which had few possessions, a leaky mud-roofed church (the beautiful structure that stands there now was not built until the 1780s), hostile Apache neighbors, and a few dozen genial Pima families who were almost completely ignorant of Christian doctrine.

Garcés took their measure, built friendly relations, and largely decided to leave them alone. In theory he could force the baptized to attend Mass and other devotions, but the sternness required to do so was not in him. In Querétaro he had been called the “children’s padre” because of the affection that arose between him and the city’s urchins. He decided therefore to concentrate on the aspect of his instructions that appealed to him most: to explore and evangelize the unknown, unmapped desert that lay all around him.

Within a few weeks of his arrival, he gladly accepted an invitation to visit the O’odham—as the Indians whom the Spanish knew as Papagos and Pimas called themselves—who lived between San Xavier and the Gila River to its north. Already this was to stretch the boundaries of Spanish knowledge, for very few Spaniards had traveled as far as the Gila. Fascinated by the people he met, all of whom treated the solitary friar with great friendliness, Garcés made a longer entrada to, and down, the Gila River in 1770. On this trip he not only gathered precious ethnographical data but became interested in finding a land route from San Xavier to California and New Mexico, thereby linking these highly isolated frontier regions. This project became Garcés’s life’s work. If successful, it would mean new missions, expansion of the Spanish empire, and thousands of souls won for heaven.

The next year, traveling in the Sonoran Desert’s searing August heat, Garcés picked his way from San Xavier to Yuma along the parched, arduous trail that would later be known, with good reason, as El Camino del Diablo—The Devil’s Road. At Yuma he befriended an impressive Quechan headman known as Salvador Palma, explored the lower Colorado River, and crossed the forbidding desert that lay to the river’s west. A land route to California had been found, he reported to the Spanish authorities. An expedition could secure it.

On none of these journeys did Garcés travel with another European or with arms of any kind. He often rode without food, relying on the generosity of those he met along the way. His guilelessness and simplicity never failed to charm his indigenous hosts. He was amused when, confused by his habit, they asked him whether he was a man or a woman; he was surprised when, out of compassion, they carried his worn-out mule to a water hole; he was dismayed, but not offended, when they offered him women for a night’s companionship. For hours, Garcés would sit with them around a fire, patiently preaching as well as he could about God and answering his audience’s many questions about the king and about seemingly magical objects like his compass. In his diaries he rarely complains about or criticizes the Indians he meets. Among his contemporaries this was unusual; they often candidly described their disgust at native habits, customs, and smells. Garcés, by contrast, as his friend Fr. Pedro Font wrote, “is so well suited to getting along with the Indians and going among them that he seems to be very much like an Indian himself.”

Thanks in part to Garcés’s acquaintance Junípero Serra, the authorities finally got around to approving an overland expedition to California in late 1773. In early 1774, Captain Juan Bautista de Anza, Garcés, and a couple dozen others successfully traveled El Camino del Diablo to the Gila–Colorado junction, barely survived the treacherous desert lying west of that junction, and finally stumbled into the impoverished San Gabriel mission just east of modern Los Angeles. Serra and his California co-laborers were thrilled. They could now more easily be supplied with food, tools, and settlers. Garcés had served his two majesties well.

He wasn’t done. In autumn 1775 he accompanied a much larger Anza expedition as far as Yuma. This was the expedition that led to the founding of San Francisco. Garcés parted from it at the Colorado River, seeking to link the California missions with Sonora by a better road—and with New Mexico by a reasonably direct one. He needed also to discern which native groups were well disposed to receive missionaries, and which were not. Once again, he set out on his own.

This 1775–76 journey was truly epic—no other adjective will do. Wandering down the Colorado River to its mouth, upriver to where Laughlin, Nevada, is today; across the Mojave Desert to the Pacific coast; across the Tehachapi into California’s Central Valley; back across the Mojave to the Colorado; and eastward from there to Oraibi, Garcés traveled nearly two thousand miles over a ten-month period. For only a few weeks was he present at even the most ragged outpost of European civilization. After he left the main body of the Anza expedition in December 1775, he never traveled again with another Spaniard. Usually, he was accompanied only by two or three Indian guides. Sometimes he was completely alone. His supplies were limited to what he could carry on his mule.

There are few comparable achievements in the annals of American exploration. Lewis and Clark had with them forty-five comparatively well-supplied members. The journey of Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet down the Mississippi included seven Europeans. The famed mountain men and trappers operating in the American interior made impressive solo journeys. But they had guns, and unlike Garcés, they did not add much by their travels to our ethnological understanding.

Once he reached the Hopis, Garcés knew he had accomplished his end. The road from there to New Mexico was well-known, and he now knew how to get from there to the central California coast. His report on his travels, as well as a map made for him by Fr. Font, impressed the authorities, who decided to found new missions on the Colorado at Yuma. But partly because Spain was in cost-saving mode, and partly because Enlightened reformers wished to reduce missionary influence, the temporal authority of these missions was restricted. With the Quechans having become restless, Garcés had misgivings. But he had argued for similar reforms himself, so he agreed to take charge of the new missions in late 1779.

Things went badly from the start. The Quechans and their neighbors, among whom Garcés had previously brokered peace deals, began to fight again. Many of the natives living near the missions, upset that they had not received promised food and gifts, were surly and uncooperative. Supplies soon became as short as tempers. Garcés, who believed wholeheartedly in the missionary effort and had met with nothing but success in his own relations with Indians, struggled to understand how things had taken such a bad turn. Characteristically, he blamed himself.

When a large group of Spanish settlers arrived and their animals began to destroy the natives’ fields, the dam broke. On July 17, 1781, the Quechans attacked the two missions, killing all the men they could and taking women and children captive. Garcés and his companion Fr. Juan Antonio de Barreneche were saying Mass when the battle started. After helping the people within the church escape, the priests were taken in by a Christian native before being discovered by the rebels. One of the group’s leaders stepped into the hut to find the friars sipping hot chocolate. “Stop drinking that,” he demanded. “We’re going to kill you.” Garcés was not often witty or wry, but on this occasion, he found within himself a vein of black humor. “We’d like to finish our chocolate first,” he replied. “Just leave it!” was the warrior’s irritated response. The two priests rose, commended themselves to God, and followed him out the door. As soon as they stepped outside, they were viciously clubbed to death. A captive named María Gertrudis Cantú watched the horrible scene unfold. She could hear the friars’ “piteous moans as they lay dying.”

Conventional wisdom holds that the Franciscan missionary effort in northern Sonora and today’s Arizona failed. Garcés and his companions performed fewer than one thousand baptisms between 1768 and 1795. The Franciscans’ presence introduced more disease than it did effective medicine, and the friars’ efforts led to no lasting strategic victories for their country. The last friar who maintained a connection to the Spanish missionary effort left the region in 1843. For more than fifty years, no Catholic missionaries worked among those O’odham who lived north of the international boundary. With the exception, at times, of San Xavier del Bac, there were no established churches at which regular services were held.

If Christianity exerted no attraction for the O’odham, it should have died among them. But it didn’t. The O’odham themselves kept the friars’ faith alive. They built chapels in many of their villages, in which they practiced a kind of folk Catholicism called santo himdag—the saint way. They kept in memory the prayers taught to them by long-gone friars. They even held in safekeeping many of their sacred vessels.

Such surprises greeted the Franciscans upon their order’s return to Arizona in 1895. As they filtered into the desert from their base in Phoenix, they found themselves welcomed by many Papagos and Pimas. In some of their villages, Catholic chapels had been erected. In others, the friars worked with the O’odham to build them. By 1976, thirty-six of these tiny, brilliantly whitewashed churches had been erected. The vast majority remain standing and are in use today.

This flowering of Catholic culture was accomplished without soldiers, terror, threats, or violence—in other words, in a highly Garcésian manner. The friars’ way of thinking about missions had changed drastically over the previous 150 years, and better results followed. Garcés anticipated many of these changes, intuiting that effective evangelization required submersion in, imaginative identification with, and respect for other cultures, as much as Christian doctrine could allow. The missiological concept of what Joseph Ratzinger would later call “interculturality”—the idea that all cultures are to various degrees open to “the truth about God and reality as a whole”—was not and could not have been articulated by Garcés, but he exemplified the ideal in action more than any other missionary of his time—indeed, of most times.

I recently had lunch with Fr. Anthony Tinker, pastor of St. John the Baptist mission in the Akimel O’odham town of Komatke. Fr. Tinker estimated that more than 90 percent of Akimel O’odham—or Gila River Pimas—identify as Christian, with somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of those identifying as Catholic. (Many others, thanks largely to the efforts of a missionary named Charles H. Cook, are Protestant.) A few are syncretists, using rites, ceremonies, and pastoral leaders that combine elements of traditional O’odham beliefs, but not many. Syncretism among the Tohono O’odham—or Papagos—is more popular, Fr. Tinker told me, but even among them he believed only 10 percent or so to be syncretists. Nearly all the O’odham, he said, tend to be attracted to St. Kateri Tekakwitha and Nicholas Black Elk, whose lives and examples are perceived as meaningful and empowering.

Fr. Tinker’s approximations appear to be accurate; Catholic Extension estimates that 11,000 residents of the Tohono O’odham Nation are Catholic, or about 85 percent of the total population. In other words, the O’odham—the descendants of those to whom Fr. Garcés once ministered—are significantly more Christian than their surrounding societies, and the Tohono O’odham Nation is one of the most Catholic areas in the United States.

Almost no one knows that. Thanks in part to the Black Legend, the story of how European civilization came to America is told from the Protestant east, not the Catholic southwest. A missionary like Garcés—an unembarrassed representative of the old Christendom, whose zeal for the faith inspired a kind of openness and flexibility that made him a successful figure of cultural mediation—hardly fits a narrative that positions Enlightenment deists as heroes. Nor does he fit comfortably into the tale told by contemporary anti-colonialists. As we approach the 250th anniversaries of both the Declaration of Independence and the Anza expedition, those who seek to write a truer, fuller national story will perhaps make room for figures like Garcés and the traditions he stood for. Or rather, stood in.

In the meantime, a few desert Southwest priests, having encountered and been inspired by Garcés, are seeking to advance the cause of his canonization. Whether or not that effort succeeds, the legacy of this wandering friar and his co-laborers—past and present, European and indigenous—will continue to be made manifest in those sunbaked, stark-white churches that stand in hamlets scattered across the Sonoran Desert.

The post America’s Greatest Explorer appeared first on First Things.

Leaving nuance aside, and condensing three decades of research and a vast body of supporting evidence into a phrase: We are now mesmerized by the least intelligent part of the human brain. For reasons of survival, one hemisphere of the brain, the left, has evolved over millions of years to favor manipulation—grabbing, getting, and controlling—while the other, the right, has been tasked with understanding the whole picture. So conflicting are these goals that in humans the hemispheres are largely sequestered, one from the other. Our seeming ability these days to hear only what comes from the left hemisphere does not arise from the brain’s having changed radically in the last couple of centuries, though it is indeed always evolving. It’s more like this: You buy a radio set, and you soon find a couple of channels worth listening to. After a while, you find yourself listening to only one. It’s not the radio set that has changed; it’s you. In the case of the brain, it would not matter so much if we had settled on the intelligent channel—but we didn’t. We settled on the one whose value has nothing to do with truth, or with courage, magnanimity, or generosity, but only with greed, grabbing, and getting. Manipulation.

And no, the difference between the hemispheres is not a myth that has been debunked, as I have explained at length elsewhere. What does need to be debunked is the old pop-psychology myth wherein the left hemisphere “does” reason and language, and is dull but at least reliable, like a slightly boring accountant, whereas the right hemisphere “does” emotions and pictures and is apt to be flighty and frivolous. All of this is wrong. We now know that each hemisphere is involved in everything and that, for the record, the left hemisphere is less emotionally stable, as well as less intelligent—I mean cognitively, as well as emotionally and socially—than the right. The right hemisphere is a far superior guide to reality; delusions and hallucinations are much more frequent, grosser, and more persistent after damage to the right hemisphere than after damage to the left. Without the right hemisphere to rely on, the left hemisphere is at sea. It denies the most obvious facts, lies, and makes stuff up when it doesn’t know what it’s talking about. And it is relentlessly, vacuously cheerful in the face of disaster.

You may say: “But so what? I don’t care where things go on in my brain.” It matters because each hemisphere takes a different view of the world, and their views are not strictly compatible. And so, when we reflect, philosophize, or discourse publicly, we are forced, without knowing it, to favor one “take” or the other.

What are these two hemispheric visions of the world like? You may recognize them from experience. The left hemisphere, using narrow-beam attention to one detail after another, sees what is familiar, certain, static, explicit, abstract, decontextualized, disembodied, categorized, general in nature, and reduced to its parts. All is predictable and controlled. This is an inanimate universe—and a bureaucrat’s dream. It is like a map in relation to the mapped world: useful to the degree that it leaves almost everything out. And its only value resides in its utility.

The left hemisphere perceives everything as a re-presentation. “To represent” literally means to present a thing again, when it is no longer present, but dead and gone. By contrast, the right hemisphere sees not the representation but the living presence. Bringing broad, open, sustained, vigilant attention to bear on the world, it sees what is fresh, unique, never fully known, never finally certain, but full of potential. It understands all that is, and must remain, implicit: humor, poetry, art, narrative, music, the sacred, indeed everything we love; it understands that nothing is ever static and unchanging, that everything is flowing and interconnected. This is a free world, an animate universe—and a bureaucrat’s nightmare. It has all the richness and complexity of that world the left hemisphere simply mapped.

Each of these two ways of seeing the world is vital to our survival. We must simplify and stand apart in order to manipulate things, deal with the necessities of life, and build a civilization. But to live in that civilization, we must also belong to the living world. This division of attention works to our advantage when we use both hemispheres. But it is a handicap—in fact a catastrophe—when we use only one.

As I explained in The Master and His Emissary, twice in the history of the West—in ancient Greece and then in Rome—a civilization started out with a fruitful harmony of left and right, but as it overreached itself, it moved toward the left hemisphere’s take on the world and then collapsed. The same trajectory is now being pursued for a third time. After the miraculous outpouring of creativity in the arts, science, society, and philosophy that we call the Renaissance, our civilization has, since the Enlightenment, moved further and further to the left, drunk on the belief that it knows everything and can fix everything. We are like sleepwalkers ambling toward the abyss.

There is a phenomenon in psychology called the Dunning-Kruger effect, whereby the less you know, the more you think you know, and vice versa. The left hemisphere doesn’t know what it is it doesn’t know, and so it thinks it knows everything. The right hemisphere, which understands far more, is aware of those vast unknowns.

When we are functioning well, the right hemisphere tests against experience the left hemisphere’s theory about reality. But the left hemisphere’s vision of a lifeless, mechanical, two-dimensional, geometric construct has been externalized around us to such a degree that when the right hemisphere checks back with experience, it finds that the left hemisphere has already colonized reality—at least for those of us who lead a modern Western urban life. It finds a perfect simulacrum of the world according to the left hemisphere.

The things that used to alert us to the inadequacy of our reductionist theories are fading away. They were: the natural world; the sense of a coherent shared culture; the sense of the body as something we live, not merely possess; the power of great art; and the sense of something sacred that is real but transcends everyday language.

AI—artificial information-processing, by the way, not artificial intelligence—could in many ways be seen as replicating the functions of the left hemisphere at frightening speed across the entire globe. The left hemisphere manipulates tokens or symbols for aspects of experience. The right hemisphere is in touch with experience itself, with the body and deeper emotions, with context and the vast realm of the implicit. AI, like the left hemisphere, has no sense of the bigger picture, of other values, or of the way in which context—or even scale and extent—changes everything.

But, you may ask, can’t AI help us by relieving us of mundane tasks and freeing up our time? Of course, information technology saves time by doing things quickly. Or does it? Bosses save wages, but we become their new, unwilling wage slaves. Meanwhile, with the automation of more and more processes that used to take a five-minute phone call, we find ourselves entering into hours-long commerce with computer programs that lead us into Escher-like closed loops, only to report playfully, “Oops, something went wrong . . .” And if after this you stay on the phone so you can speak to a real person, the real people increasingly appear to have been so degraded by enforcement of machine-like algorithms that they might as well be machines. IT, then, is quite capable of making life worse. This is already apparent in the increasing stress of everyday existence, and in the many small signs that we are losing our connection with other human beings. This loss of connection has become much more obvious in the last four or five years, and not just because of Covid.

As machines gradually displace people, what happens to human flourishing? What happens when reliance on machines strips us of our skills, a process already well advanced? And what happens if, for any reason—such as a shortage of resources, an extended power failure, the breakdown of civil order, or war—we can no longer rely on those machines consistently? How resilient, resourceful, skillful will we turn out to be when compared with our forebears? Leaving aside such alarming, but I think not merely alarmist, possibilities, consider the impact of the loss of daily contact with human beings as more and more jobs become automated. What happens to those who are rendered unemployed? A few clever ones may get jobs in IT, but the economic drive is very simple. Machines are cheaper than people, so the aim must be to employ fewer people.

And what about our dignity as free individuals? Can we escape the appalling prospect—already realized in China—that wherever we go, whatever we buy, whomever we are seen with, our every word, every action, the very thoughts we express on our faces, all is monitored, potentially marked down against us, and whatever freedom is left to us curtailed accordingly? We become non-citizens, un-people. The only answer to this seems to me to be a kind of AI arms race in which the supposed goodies use AI to head off the AI of the baddies. But even in this scenario, who are the goodies anymore? The World Economic Forum? The problem with increasing the reach of human power is that it will sooner or later be used for evil ends. And once a pernicious regime’s AI reaches a certain level, it can destroy any attempt to resist it, bringing the prospect of a totalitarianism that has no end.

Apart from that nightmare, there is much to fear if we leave important decisions in the hands of AI. All decisions affecting humans are moral decisions. And morality is not purely utilitarian; it cannot be reduced to calculation. Every human situation is unique, its uniqueness arising from personal history, consciousness, memory, intention, all that is not explicit, all that we mean by the deceptively simple word “emotion,” all the experience and understanding gained through and stored in the body, all that makes us humans and not machines. Goodness requires virtuous minds, not merely following rules.

It’s worth pointing out that people with schizophrenia exhibit thinking and behavior consistent with left-hemisphere overdrive and right-hemisphere hypofunction. They see a world of bits and pieces, and they often imagine that people have become inanimate, machine-like, or zombies. To them nothing seems real, and the world seems a simulacrum, a pretense, a play put on to deceive them: A person may look like a person, but uncannily isn’t. To me, the belief that machines could become sentient is the obverse of the view that we, sentient beings, are really just machines. The psychiatrist R. D. Laing described a schizoid patient who saw his wife as a machine:

She was an “it” because everything she did was a predictable, determined response. He would, for instance, tell her (it) an ordinary funny joke and when she (it) laughed this indicated her (its) entirely “conditioned,” robot-like nature.

The assumption of mechanistic “conditioning” reflects what is hardly even a parody of a not uncommon scientific position. It also represents a chilling psychopathology. But this mentality is not unlike the way we may begin to see each other, should the mechanical processes of AI become the standard for human behavior. As machines—or so it is claimed—become more like humans, humans are certainly becoming more like machines, by reason of their being obliged to interact with them.

The prospect of cyborgs is grim as well. The best way to destroy humanity would be to hybridize it with machines. I do not call those who pursue this aim evil—they may simply have a failure of imagination or of understanding. But the aim itself is evil, if we can call anything evil. It can only further degrade our idea of what a human life is for, and it opens us up to totalitarian control.

We are like the sorcerer’s apprentice in the story, who knew the spell to set things in motion but had no idea how to make it stop. The genie of information technology and other advanced methods is out of the bottle and cannot be put back (unless by a breakdown of civilization, which is, I am afraid, far from unlikely). So what can we hope for?

What matters for the future of humanity is imagination. The left hemisphere is often an impediment to imagination, and its goal is single and simple: power. AI exists to make things happen, to give us control; but its doing so is good only if we make progress in wisdom as fast as we make progress in technical know-how. Otherwise, our “progress” is like putting machine guns in the hands of toddlers.

Nevertheless, if employed wisely, AI has the potential to be an enormous help to us. Above all, it may help us repair the damage done by industrialization, the destruction of the living world. It might help us devise ways of limiting and perhaps reversing the pollution of the seas—or less destructive ways of generating power. (Perhaps our dependence on power is part of the problem, and we should aim to use less power in the future.) And though as a doctor I believe in treating diseases, I also recognize that each of us will die of something someday. We must focus on quality, rather than length, of life. Here again I believe AI can help us by addressing specific technical problems, while keeping as far as possible out of our daily lives.

Making the most of these new technologies will require us to grasp a paradox: To succeed at AI, whose purpose is to give us control, we must relinquish control, at least to a great extent. In other words, we must let go of those left-hemisphere mechanisms: bureaucracy, micro-management, and strangulation by systems. We must work with, not against, nature. A gardener cannot create a plant or make it grow; a gardener can only permit and encourage the plant to do what it does—or else crowd it out and stifle its chances to thrive. Humans, likewise, can only be more or less impeded in our growth by external pressures. We need spontaneity, openness to risk, and trust in our intuition in order to exercise imagination and creativity—and in order to be alive and truly present.

So if we wish to entrust the future to good gardeners rather than manipulators, we will need people with intelligence and insight, and we will need to give them time. Stop breathing down their necks. Stop asking how many papers they have published recently. Or how near they are to a patentable product. It is true that if you trust, sometimes you will be let down, but more often you will be handsomely rewarded. By contrast, if you monitor and control, you will never get more than mediocrity. And we cannot afford mediocrity right now.

What makes life worth living is what can only be called resonance: the encounter with other living beings, with the natural world, and with the greatest products of the human soul—some would say, with the cosmos at large, or with God. Only in encountering the uncontrollable do we experience the world in its depth and complexity and come fully alive. The resonance we enjoy in a real relationship with a sentient other is not possible where there is no freedom, no spontaneity, no life.

If we are not to become ever more diminished as humans, we need to remain in control of machines, not come under their control. I am not talking about an apocalyptic future; I am talking about apocalypse now. We are already calmly and quietly surrendering our liberty, our privacy, our dignity, our time, our values, and our talents to the machine. Machines serve us well when they relieve us of drudgery, but we must leave human affairs to humans. If not, we sign our own death warrant.

The post Resist the Machine Apocalypse appeared first on First Things.

The Iliad
by homer, translated by emily wilson
w. w. norton, 848 pages, $39.95

The Iliad is an ancient epic poem whose events occur over the course of fifty days in the ninth year of a decade-long war between the Greeks and the Trojans. It begins with Achilles, first among Greek fighters, offended by the decision of the Greek king Agamemnon to take Achilles’s war bounty, the concubine Briseis. Agamemnon is making up for the loss of his own bounty, Chryseis, the daughter of the priest of Apollo, in a deal he made in order to avoid incurring Apollo’s wrath. Publicly dishonored, Achilles withdraws from the Greek campaign to defeat the Trojans and return the beautiful Helen to her husband, Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus. He goes to his ships, taking with him his beloved ward Patroclus and his band of fearsome fighters. From there, Achilles watches, indifferent despite repeated requests for help, as the Greeks battle the Trojans, helped and hindered by the interventions of rival gods watching from Mount Olympus. Finally Achilles accedes to Patroclus’s entreaties to be allowed to fight. Patroclus enters the fray in Achilles’s armor, only to be killed by Hector, the greatest warrior among the Trojans. Achilles learns from his goddess mother that if he stays to avenge Patroclus, this choice will lead to both his death and his glory, as opposed to a long life and little renown back home. Achilles stays and fights. He kills Hector and desecrates his body for many days before Hector’s grieving father, King Priam, makes a daring, secret request for the body. Achilles agrees, and Hector receives a proper funeral in the last of the poem’s twenty-four books.

Now that you’re reminded of the story, I offer a trigger warning: If you work in any kind of professional setting, and you are reading Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad, you may struggle at the start of Book 22, when Priam beseeches Hector to return inside the city walls. Outside, fast approaching, seeking vengeance, is Achilles. We already know from the opening lines of Book 22 that “deadly fate bound Hector to remain . . . in front of Troy,” where he will fall to Achilles. This knowledge makes Priam’s effort to save his son even more affecting: It is a striking example of what Robin Lane Fox’s learned and heartfelt new book calls (following C. S. Lewis) Homer’s “ruthless poignancy.” But this ruthless poignancy—born of the interplay of powerfully determinative gods with the free efforts of well-born warriors—is disrupted in Wilson’s presentation of a desperate father trying to prevent the certain death of his child:

The old man groaned in grief and struck his head
Then raised both arms up high and wailed and shouted
and begged his dear son to come home again.
But [Hector] remained outside the city gates,
fixed in his firm intent to fight Achilles.
Priam reached out to him and spoke to him in anguish.

Wait, what? Reached out to him? Deep into a celebrated new translation of one of the foundational stories of Western culture, I come across a phrase I associate with bland and mindless writing? It breaks the Homeric spell and makes me want to put the book aside, pick up my phone, and delete emails.

To be clear, the phrase “reached out” has nothing to do with Priam’s knowing it’s just so busy a time for everyone right now with so much going on. Instead, using clear, accessible language, Wilson is describing Priam’s attempt—in word and gesture—to convince his son to return to him. But as is not the case with other prominent modern English translations of the poem, by Robert Fagles (1990) and Richmond Lattimore (1951), I find myself distracted, rather than challenged, by Wilson’s choices, here and at various other points. In Book 5, for instance, the war-mad Greek fighter Diomedes “kept his cool,” like a judicious bad boy in a teen drama; in Book 6, Helen therapeutically observes that Paris has “no capacity to change”; in Book 7, Agamemnon prevents his brother from fighting Hector with a “Stop! You are acting crazy, Menelaus!”; in Book 8, the goddess Hera, offended by Hector’s bold claims for victory in battle, turns to the god Poseidon and exclaims, sitcom-style, “This is incredible!”; in this same book, King Zeus darkly promises Queen Hera his divine support for the Trojan side as though he were a newsreader reporting the expected deaths of “yet more Greek warriors—mass casualties”; in Book 21, Hera encourages her child Hephaestus, the lame god of fire, to rescue Achilles from the raging river Scamander and its god, Xanthus: “Get up, my little twisty-foot, my son!”

Who calls the god of fire little twisty-foot?

Two people: his mom, and a twenty-first century translator keen on making Homer totally approachable for readers formed by, and happy with, a polemically informal, athleisurely non-hierarchical age. Wilson’s Iliad—which followed her widely noticed, similarly-minded 2017 translation of The Odyssey—was subject to a great deal of laudatory coverage in fall 2023, much of it focused on her confidently lean and demotic approach to translating an ancient epic poem about the outsized grandeurs and perpetual brutalities of manly noblemen at war. In her Translator’s Note, Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, makes clear her intentions in translating a poem she has read, taught, and written about for thirty-five years, a poem she celebrates as “the most gripping and heart-breaking work of literature I know.” She laments that Homer’s poem, so “grand, noble, and sublime,” has been for too long captive to (unnamed) English-language translations that “use contorted, unnatural language” in misguided attempts to convey that grandeur, nobility, and sublimity. She argues that such diction is contrary to Homer’s poem, which features “simple, direct syntax” consistent with its original, oral mode of delivery and reception. “In translation,” Wilson contends, “as in the original, Homer’s language should enable immediate comprehension and deep emotional engagement.”

Should it, really? Did it, really, millennia ago?

Leaving aside, for a moment, Wilson’s presumptions about Homer’s straightforwardly comprehending ancient audience, about which Robin Lane Fox has much to say that’s more textured and insightful, do we read classics—works of permanent relevance, in all times and places—in search of “immediate comprehension and deep emotional engagement”? I don’t think so. We read these books so as to be imaginatively estranged from our own times and places and mores by encountering a distant-feeling ethos and world of events. The war between the Greeks and the Trojans presents us with gods who can be propitiated by mortals but generally prefer to intrigue against each other and intervene capriciously in human affairs; with rationales for heroism that have more to do with personal pride and shame than with personal sacrifice for the greater good; and with unsettlingly beautiful-brutal analogies between the natural world and acts of human violence, both unfamiliar to us—as when the Greek archer Teucer shoots one of Hector’s brothers in the chest with an arrow. “Now Gorgythion / slumped his head sideways—like a garden poppy, / weighted with seed and springtime showers of rain— / so drooped his head, weighed down by his heavy helmet.” We are triply challenged: to make sense of the unfamiliar on its own terms; to find cause for convincing identification on our terms; and finally to consider where, and how, reading something remote into proximity can make possible the reconsideration of both then and here, the strange and the familiar.

Of course, in one sense a work like The Iliad is not really that remote or strange. In fact, it’s too familiar, a taken-for-granted book of always-already-assumed greatness. And in the moments when, without recourse to overtly contemporary English, Wilson frees The Iliad from its great book status—along the lines of what Maria Dahvana Headley accomplished with her exuberantly brash translation of Beowulf (2020), or Simon Armitage with his lyrical and brawny Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2009)—her Iliad is an arresting, demanding success. In fact, when Wilson doesn’t concede too much of the book’s power to the imputed need for ready accessibility, her translation resists “immediate comprehension” to wonderful effect. In Book 4, for instance, Odysseus, already renowned (before his later adventures) for his canniness and cunning, criticizes Agamemnon for claiming that some of the Greeks aren’t fighting as fully as they should. Wilson’s translation: “How can you say this, son of Atreus? / What words have slipped out past your fence of teeth?” Fagles chooses “clenched teeth,” while Lattimore opts for “fence of your teeth”; in the first major English-language translation of the poem, George Chapman’s 1611 Iliad, the equivalent is “thy set of teeth.” Fagles’s choice is too obvious; Lattimore’s, too precise; Chapman’s, too formal. Wilson’s is an unsettlingly direct and strange description of words imprudently released from someone’s mouth. In turn, I notice this moment in the poem—Agamemnon’s failure to rally others to his cause, precisely because of what he’s saying to rally them to his cause—in a new and fresh way.

Later, Wilson offers an invitingly plainspoken, rich, and melancholic description of the certain death that awaits Achilles’s Myrmidons in the fight against the Trojans, according to the prophecy of his mother, the sea goddess Thetis: “My mother told me something once. She said / the best of all the Myrmidons would leave the sunlight.” Here, the conversational familiarity of Wilson’s lead-in is balanced and in turn sublimated by the dense poetry of “would leave the sunlight.” Neither Fagles’s “leave the light of day” nor Lattimore’s “leave the light of the sun” has the same effect of making you stop and take notice and try to make sense of what’s happening before going on. Sometimes, when reading classics in translation, you don’t notice the translations at all because the effort seems so fully in service of conveying the original in a different language. This is very much the case with Fagles; at other times, as with Lattimore, you’re made to sense that you’re dealing with something both difficult and important, and you can either enjoy the gravitas or find it off-putting. Wilson’s translation draws attention to itself more than do these other major translations. It is confident, if sometimes too confident, in its contemporariness, which Wilson has put in service of our experiencing and admiring and finding relevant the literary achievement of “Whoever created The Iliad”—as she puts it, with a typical combination of mysterious wonder and dismissive aplomb.

Robin Lane Fox certainly knows who: a man called Homer. Lane Fox is equally confident, in Homer and His Iliad, that the poem is “its own best advertisement, but great questions remain, [such as] how, when and where it was composed and what accounts for its extraordinary power. This book gives answers to those questions. It is based on long familiarity and love.”

Lane Fox wants his readers to understand, appreciate, and join in his appreciation of how and why The Iliad “is beyond us, yet why it is still so profoundly moving.” Beyond us: not, as Wilson tends to suggest, anticipating or merely mirroring us. All this praise doesn’t mean that Lane Fox has written an insular, donnish love letter to his favorite poet. Instead, organizing his material in response to the poem’s four major areas of action—“the world of the gods and goddesses, the world of women and what, to us, is the natural world,” plus the primary setting that defines them all, the battlefield—Lane Fox marshals a remarkable array of evidence to argue for the concreteness of the poem and the poet.

The argument comprehends a chapter on Greek religion, in which Lane Fox notes that Homer’s original, religiously literate audiences would have found the poem’s fifteen major gods and related rites and rituals wholly legible; a chapter on Greek culture’s anthropomorphic projections onto the gods of family dynamics and particular capacities and tendencies; and one on the longstanding difficulty, among readers and scholars alike, of establishing the nature and status of human free will in the poem, given the decisive presence of divine omniscience, divine omnipotence, and divine interventions (including competing interventions) in the battles themselves. Lane Fox elsewhere devotes attention to the historical status of the poem’s setting: “Whether or not a Trojan war took place, Ilion-Troy was a real city” at least six centuries before Homer told its story. Relatedly, on the basis of centuries of Homer-inspired archaeological expeditions, he identifies correspondences between particular places or natural features mentioned in the poem, and their equivalents in and around the Dardanelles strait in modern-day Turkey.

Beyond providing a comprehensive contextualization for the poem’s premises and events, Lane Fox is intent on establishing who Homer was, how he composed—orally, Lane Fox proposes, citing oral composition traditions from different eras and from around the world—and where and when he began performing his poem. Lane Fox argues against those who would assign authorship to a time-spanning miscellany of unknown contributors anachronistically collected and contained in the name Homer, who together produced what was finally consolidated as the poem itself. Instead, he argues for an actual Homer who lived in the eighth century b.c. and was “most at home on or near the Aegean coast of . . . western Asia.” His evidence, internal to the poem (unlike disputable historical and archaeological findings), rests on the poem’s striking “unity of design” in ways both large and small. Lane Fox is convinced that only one remarkably artful person could create so many consistently arresting analogies between dissimilar things—such as the droopy head of a helmeted man dying from an arrow to the chest, and the droopy head of a poppy weighed down with seed and rainwater. Likewise when it comes to storytelling: Only one person could sustain so many highly controlled setups, which are in turn masterfully delayed before giving way to exposures of conflict and loss. For instance, Patroclus’s death is signaled in Book 8, alluded to in Book 11 and again in Book 16, at the end of which he dies, and learned of by Achilles in Book 18, setting up the poem’s denouement, with some three thousand verses about other matters appearing in between, including other combinations of setup, delay, and exposure.

Admittedly speculating, though with reference to his voluminous research, Lane Fox proposes that sometime around 750 b.c., “during or after a long raid or siege of a city in western Asia, Homer performed a first version of his great poem about heroes at war to fascinated listeners, all of them, therefore, men. Its fame then spread and earned it a free run at a religious festival.” The poem traveled from there, he thinks, gaining in popularity and standing among the ancient Greek people known as the Ionians, whose islands and cities ran along the western coast of latter-day Anatolia or Asia Minor in Turkey. Suggesting one reason for its early appeal, Lane Fox notes that the poem “does not honour one particular god, nor does it honour any city or presiding family.” He also notes that it describes social structures and practices that were at least two generations removed from the time of composition, and that the poem offers an incredibly detailed, obviously fictionalized account of a war that, had it actually taken place according to the relevant archaeological record, would have done so two hundred years into Troy’s existence and at least four hundred years before the poem’s composition. In other words, and contra Wilson, Homer’s original audiences would have been reckoning with a story whose elements were recognizable in some ways, yet also evoked ways of life and heroic events from either the recent or distant past. They would have lacked “immediate comprehension and deep emotional engagement”: We are like them, insofar as they would have been working to make sense of things in The Iliad, too.

Lane Fox devotes the latter part of his book to arguing why it is worth the effort, in all times and places. Provocatively, he does so in part by rejecting Simone Weil’s famous contention that “the true hero, the true subject matter, the centre of The Iliad is force,” and that “those who know enough to discern force, today as in the past, at the centre of all human history find in The Iliad the most beautiful, the most pure of mirrors.” Lane Fox finds Weil’s reading understandable in its totalizing claim for force, given that she was writing in France in 1940, but also too reductive: “It is not force which causes Hector to confront Achilles or Achilles to confront Hector,” he writes. “It is shame and honour on Hector’s side and on Achilles’s side anger and revenge. Throughout the poem’s fighting, victors and victims, so far from being [as Weil argues] objects [of force], wonder what to do and debate alternatives which are open to them.”

In other words, Lane Fox finds more evidence of subjectivity, agency, and humanness in the poem than Weil did, while at the same time pointing to the many occasions in the poem on which humans struggle and strive for advantage, for life itself, not knowing that the gods have already decided things for them. Such is Hector in his mortal fight with Achilles, or Priam in his going to ransom Hector’s body from Achilles. Aided in secret by the god Hermes, Priam crosses the battlefield and moves through the Greek camp to Achilles’s tent, where, in Wilson’s translation, the old grieving king “touched his knees and kissed his hands—the terrible / murderous hands which killed so many sons.” In turn, Priam addresses Achilles in open, total abjection, and he brings Achilles to tears by invoking Achilles’s own father waiting for his son to return—before angering Achilles by hoping that Achilles will someday return home to his father. The “ruthless poignancy” of this final sequence is due to our already knowing that Achilles will never return home; what is still more ruthless, more poignant, is our knowing that Achilles knows this himself. His releasing Hector’s body isn’t an act of rare and dramatic mercy born of extraordinary empathy or out of some warrior’s code of honor. Rather, it is done in obedience to a judgment from Zeus, of which Achilles learned before Priam’s arrival; and because he accepts that Hector’s receiving a funeral is part of a larger sequence of events that will eventually return him to the battlefield, where he will die.

Knowing all of this, we want Homer to signal, somehow, that Achilles was crying not just for his father or for Patroclus, but also for his mortal self. And yet he wasn’t. Out of what Lane Fox calls Homer’s “hard and ruthless depth,” Achilles has chosen glorious death over ordinary life. We want Achilles to be like us, but he’s not; we don’t want to be like him, and we aren’t. But whether we cite Aristotle or Thomas à Kempis, we are formed and called to learn and live through imitation. We want to close this distance between us and the hero of the poem. But it is one of many unclosable distances in The Iliad, mysteries of why people think, say, and act as they do. And so we never close the distance—the poem remains beyond us, as Lane Fox observes—but we keep trying. As mimetic beings drawn to stories as means of understanding our lives, we will always keep trying. What we discern with every effort, about a classic like The Iliad, is never a total meaning, but always a fuller, more refined measure of the work, which in turn invites yet another reading. I think this is why, by way most recently of Robin Lane Fox and Emily Wilson, we keep reaching for Homer’s poem.

The post Homer’s Reach appeared first on First Things.

Were they forgotten because they belonged to a forgotten society? None of us remembers firsthand the highly structured life of the preconciliar convent, the rituals and expectations of a pre-war aristocratic home, or the atmosphere of West London when it was a cheap place for artists to live. Yet the characters in these fading British communities are instantly recognizable to the contemporary reader. So are the dilemmas they confront.

Should Catholics withdraw from, or seek to engage with, a hostile society? That question runs through the work of one early figure in the Catholic literary revival, Josephine Ward (1864–1932). A friend of John Henry Newman’s—he appears as a minor character in her first novel, One Poor Scruple—Ward wrote about her generation, the first English Catholics in centuries who could attend Oxford and Cambridge and aspire to a public life in the world of letters. One Poor Scruple dramatizes a moment in the life of the Riversdale family, who have survived the long penal years by observing a quiet aristocratic life of sport and agriculture. Now, on the cusp of the twentieth century, a new generation is emerging. Their elders—including some members of the Church hierarchy—caution them not to trust the Protestant establishment.

We are told early in the novel that the older generation, the “persecuted,” had “come, in many cases, to idealise the enforced seclusion and inaction of penal days.” Now the younger generation, all converts, argue that “it was no compliment to the strengthening power of their religion that its adherents should be afraid of contact with the national life.” As the novel’s younger characters enter the world, they discover that a cloistered moral formation does not prepare them to navigate the moral challenges of fashionable society. And yet those who rely on worldly wisdom, without the doctrinal formation of conscience described by Newman, tend to go astray. Only in the novel’s postscript do we meet the third generation, who, in the new century, are finally comfortable as Catholics in Oxford, able to reconcile the old world of the reclusive Catholic with the (mostly Protestant) world of intellectual endeavor.

Many Catholic women novelists asked: To what extent can a Catholic immerse herself in Protestant society? How may Catholics evangelize the non-Catholic world and support the growth of a nascent Catholic community without losing entirely a corporate identity that has been maintained for so long by protectionist isolation? These questions were especially urgent for intellectuals and writers, who perceived the insufficient scope for the modern mind in a rural Catholic home, shut off from towns, universities, and the public life and public offices of Britain and Ireland. In response to this need many coteries emerged. Catholic intellectuals flocked to each other’s houses to share ideas and establish literary magazines: the Wards (both generations), the von Hügels, the Chestertons, and especially the poet and essayist Alice Meynell, who through her London salons perhaps single-handedly made the Catholic literary revival possible.

By the time Josephine Ward wrote her final novel, she was being published by her own daughter, Maisie Ward of Sheed and Ward, whose offices in London and New York shaped the intellectual lives of lay Catholics from early in the twentieth century. Another of Sheed and Ward’s bestselling writers was Caryll Houselander (1901–1954), at whose name all Catholic artists should bow their heads. After decades of publishing hugely popular spiritual prose, Houselander decided that she could no longer “preach” to her readers. Instead, she wrote one novel, The Dry Wood (1947), in which she created an ensemble cast of her favorite London characters so that she, their author, might walk among them and share their struggle.

Houselander was that rare thing: an artist who might also be a saint. Read Houselander’s letters and you will find a rule for daily life as fitting to the needs of the Catholic writer as St. Benedict’s rule is to celibate communities. She never married, and her one romantic attachment ended abruptly before the war, but she was a devoted friend to the many people with whom she shared her life. Fully and passionately a lay woman, she felt no desire to join any official cause or group, whether consecrated religious life or any of the many lay movements emerging around her. She was sharp-tongued, she drank, smoked, and was notorious for her odd appearance: bright red bangs, round spectacles, pure white face powder. And yet she ordered her working life with all the rigor of a religious sister, dedicating hours to the needs of others through her copious correspondence, her care of the vulnerable, and her conversation with friends. Houselander was terrible at big parties, too awkward and rude. But in small circles where she could talk freely, she crafted her voice, her view of the world, and her ability to live beyond herself, which for her was the ultimate secret and purpose of writing. By the last decades of her life, she was living very austerely: barely eating or sleeping, owning few possessions, and spending every hour writing or in conversation with friends.

Houselander viewed artistic production as a divine activity. No one, she said, “should ever make anything except in the spirit in which a woman bears a child, in the spirit in which Christ was formed in Mary’s womb, in the love with which God created the world.” Even so, among the lost women writers, Houselander was perhaps the most at home in the secular world in which she moved. English Catholics of her generation were often critical of modernity, but to her, “the modernist writers are not the contemptible egoists which they are too often supposed to be.” The Dry Wood is perhaps the most pious among the works of the Catholic literary revival, but in executing it Houselander drew upon the technical innovations developed by modernist literary peers and their experiments with time, place, and multivocalism.

Each chapter of The Dry Wood follows a different character in a London docklands parish. This narrative strategy was being deployed in the first decades of the twentieth century by modernist writers—Woolf, Joyce, Sommerfield—and was a reaction against the Protestant bourgeois novel of the nineteenth century, which focused on the individual moral arcs of characters linked by a network of relationships and overseen by an omniscient narrative voice. Twentieth-century literary modernism was critical of the bourgeois novel’s trust in individual consciousness; it was also critical of the omniscient voice and its providential orchestration of human relationships into a narratively harmonious order. In rejecting these conventions, modernist (often atheist) writers questioned literature’s investment in a totalizing moral, social, or religious order.

In The Dry Wood, Houselander was likewise reacting against the providentialism of the nineteenth-century Protestant novel, but unlike her atheist peers she did so by amplifying the mysterious operations of the divine presence. All her characters struggle on their own, separated from each other by strife and by the novel’s chapter arrangement, but their lives are ultimately drawn together into the final Mass, in an expertly constructed scene in which we see the great communal prayer of the Church depicted in all its earthly and heavenly dimensions. The novel’s structure reveals that no life is merely parallel. Even if the characters can’t see it, even if they continue to feel isolated, they are in fact part of one unified vision held in the eye of the omniscient maker.

The novels of Waugh and Greene often focus on the solitary figure of a priest or layman in spiritual combat with the world around him. By contrast, the lost novels of Catholic women are usually situated in families and parishes and in the institutional communities in which the writers themselves first encountered the faith: schools, convents, or convent schools. Rumer Godden wrote three convent novels, unsentimental depictions of communal religious life that nonetheless describe that life as a source of human fulfillment and divine grace for the women who choose it. Kate O’Brien’s Land of Spices (1941), set in an Irish convent school, follows the spiritual development of the prioress and the youngest student: a pair of women at either end of life who are bound to each other as mutual agents of grace.

Antonia White’s Frost in May (1933) is possibly the best-known convent novel among non-Catholic readers and, to the casual reader, might appear to be a study in feminist anti-Catholicism: It was the first title chosen by the feminist publisher Virago for its Modern Classics series. The book portrays a devout and passionate young girl’s experience in a strict convent school. Yet it does so ambivalently: The more narrow and manipulative elements of the convent’s management—the nuns’ close surveillance of students, their petty cruelties, their mistrust of anything worldly—is never wholly oppressive or claustrophobic but is part of the rarefied, spiritual atmosphere that so enthralls the students:

Holy Week arrived and proceeded on its majestic way. Each year, however much [Nanda] might have wavered in her devotion or her unquestioning obedience, its slow, magnificent rituals impressed on her afresh the beauty and poetry of Catholicism. Each of the great days had its special drama. After Palm Sunday every statue was veiled with purple, the organ was silent, and the altar bell replaced by a harsh wooden clapper. On the evenings of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, the children and the nuns sang the office of Tenebrae in the darkened chapel. She was profoundly moved by the lamenting psalms with the recurrent, urgent cry “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, convertere ad dominum Deum tuum.” . . .

Nanda noticed that the candles were being extinguished not by the usual sacristan nun, but by a postulant. At intervals her old fear of a vocation re-asserted itself so that the sight of any new aspirant always filled her with a certain discomfort. Supposing that one day one of those figures in ancient, borrowed skirts and dark flannel blouses should be herself?

The subtlety of such writing was lost on Virago, which has sold White’s works as depictions of passionate young women seduced by, yet valiantly fighting against, a repressive Catholic regime. In truth, White’s characters carry in them the spiritual wisdom of the Church and draw on it to question the world around them. As White knew, the Christian world is much broader than its critics allow.

At least Virago published White and Godden. Why did so many other novelists fall out of print? According to most scholars, the turning point was Vatican II. The preconciliar Church, we are told, took a reactionary stance toward the world, and its self-imposed separation provided the conditions for a flourishing literary movement; afterward, Catholicism ceased to define itself in opposition to modernity, and so the Catholic novel went into decline. This narrative, however, is difficult to maintain given the number of postconciliar novels that bring a distinctively Catholic perspective to their social, cultural, and ecclesiastical contexts.

Take the Scottish novelist Muriel Spark (1918–2006), who wrote The Comforters in 1957. It is one of the finest postmodern novels in the English language—postmodern in the sense that it reflects on, and even undermines, the novel form itself. The Comforters follows the difficulties of Caroline, a woman whose mental breakdown has inspired her to become both a Catholic and a student of postmodern literature. Now seemingly in her right mind, Caroline begins to hear the sound of an invisible typewriter, on which her thoughts are being recorded. Attuned as she is to postmodern techniques, Caroline is wise enough to see that the typewriter belongs to God and that she is the protagonist in a novel being written by the divine hand. Of course, no one believes her; they want to lock her up, but they can’t because they are themselves too mad or criminal to denounce her openly. What is Spark saying to us? That believers might be lonely and misunderstood, but they are not deranged. They see the truth even when the truth is much stranger than society can accept. She is also saying that we must understand who the author ultimately is and how we might come to see truly the stories of our own lives. Caroline perceives that “being written into the novel” is painful. She is impatient for the story to come to an end, “knowing that the narrative could never become coherent to her until she was at last outside it, and at the same time consummately inside it.”

Alice Thomas Ellis (1932–2005), who grew up in Wales, absorbed every word Spark wrote and then began to write novels herself. The 27th Kingdom (1982) follows a saintly novice forced to live among artists and thieves in bohemian Chelsea, where her enigmatic grace effects little reform in those around her. But it does terrify them and, in the end, saves at least one life. In return, bohemian Chelsea changes the novice in ways we are asked to regard as positive. She has been sent there by a Mother Superior who could not abide the girl’s spiritual excesses: levitation, the ability to stop fruit rotting with a touch of her hand. In the Mother Superior’s view, the girl must have real, interior grace, not showy miracles—and through her short stay among artists, this change seems to come about.

Spark and Ellis saw in postmodernity an opportunity to cultivate style—something they often found lacking in post-1960s Catholicism. They both perceived liturgical and spiritual innovations as popular fads; in their writing they aligned the wit of the novelist’s voice with the preconciliar Catholicism they loved. For them the avant garde in literature was a niche, chic world that belonged—after Vatican II—with the now maligned beauty of the Tridentine Mass.

Were these novelists too subtle to capture postconciliar readers? Clearly they were too subtle for a feminist audience, for the feminist literary courses that rewrote the canon at the end of the century failed to preserve either Ellis’s or Spark’s reputation. Either writer might have become a feminist icon. (Ellis ran a publishing house while raising six children; Spark was a single woman who wrote books about smart single women.) In fact, the entire corpus of Catholic women writers seems to have slipped between these worlds, the Catholic and the feminist: worlds that sometimes overlap, but never with much harmony.

It is true that Spark and Ellis disdained feminism. For them it was simply another question of style, something no political movement has ever possessed. Ellis recalled second-wave feminists as a group of “disgruntled females” organizing “consciousness raising sessions” and adopting other “outmoded and discredited Marxist tactics, so that in a while everyone hated them, though few dared to admit it.” Then “a dreadful breed of feminist men arose, claiming to sympathize with this struggle for justice, and everyone hated them too.” Ellis mourned a womanhood that she had known in Liverpool: tough, funny, capable women who could handle a scythe or smoke a pipe. She mourned the womanhood of early Hollywood actresses: sharp-tongued, elegant, clever, and moral—Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis—“none of whom,” said Ellis, “resemble in the least the downtrodden wimps so crucial to feminist myth.”

Her most bitter argument with feminism was its encroachment on Church doctrine, especially the popular argument that women would cure any ills lurking in the Church. “Those who think women incapable of authoritarianism can never have met any.” She claimed never to have known a man, “no matter how patriarchal, who could outdo a determined woman in terms of sheer terror.” It is perhaps important that so many of the lost Catholic women writers were themselves ferocious characters, whose books contain no small number of difficult women. Were they too much for Catholic readers? Too Catholic for feminist readers?

Alice Thomas Ellis’s house was notorious for its parties, the dissolute kind familiar in London’s literary scene and yet strangely also a source of religious conversion for many of Ellis’s guests. She was the perfect hostess: lingering just long enough at any one shoulder to land a devastating line but more usually hovering in the kitchen cooking and chain-smoking with the least glamorous of her guests or out on the street delivering uneaten food to the local homeless. The many stories about Ellis’s parties should not overshadow the lesser-known truths: the unseen hours she spent working with young writers, often housing and feeding them, laboring unpaid on their voice and narrative tautness—especially young women with no literary connections of their own, no other way into the publishing world and no formal training. It was this quiet dedication to the talents of others that Ellis assumed to be the work of all men and women, all artists.

Like almost all the writers of the Catholic literary revival, Ellis and Spark were converts. Their imaginations were shaped by a radical change in perspective. In Britain, becoming Catholic meant accepting a place outside of the establishment. In Ireland, conversion from Anglicanism often occurred alongside an awakening to the nationalist or republican cause. In both countries, conversion meant that writers could see their society, and the novel form in which they were already working, with clear eyes for the first time. For the interwar British writer Sheila Kaye-Smith, this was so true that during her conversion she wrote one supremely Catholic novel (The End of the House of Alard) before giving up fiction almost completely. Once she had written bestselling novels about Sussex farming life; after conversion she bought a Sussex farm, established a much-needed Catholic parish there, and spent her days living the faith in quiet gratitude.

It is striking how many Catholic women novelists experienced personal pain to an inordinate degree: child loss, loneliness, mental breakdown. The Catholic understanding of the salvific nature of suffering provided them with means by which to perceive the role their losses played in the small dramas of their own lives and in the bigger cosmic drama. Faced with the emotional and spiritual reality of deep suffering, convert novelists often saw in Catholicism what they saw in the novel itself: a space able to contain all the mysteries of human experience. Yet so many of these lost novels explore the mysterious operations of the divine will through lowly, ordinary characters who move in unremarkable settings.

For scenes of ordinary life—of ordinary women going about the daily round of cooking and feeding, scenes in which these simple tasks take on the majesty of consecrated activity, even the power to defend a neighborhood against war—no Catholic novel can compete with the lost works of Irish women: Maura Laverty’s Never No More (1942), Mary Beckett’s Give Them Stones (1987). In the hands of Laverty and Beckett, the simple tasks—baking bread, peeling potatoes—become incarnate signs of divine reality and sometimes manage to hold back real evil: the rebel’s gun, the sinner’s violence.

For the non-Catholic reader, these lost women novelists offer a crucial but overlooked vision of modernity, often expressed with great literary skill. For the Christian reader, these novels offer a means for holding together areas of contemporary life that have become increasingly divided. Most of the lost women novelists were writing at a time when the Church was struggling to define its relationship with a secular world. They were innovators who raised questions that would eventually be addressed at Vatican II, but they were also loyal to many of the traditions that disappeared after the council. Their vision incorporates a rigorous personal morality and a concern for social justice, an awareness of God’s grandeur and of his presence in the ordinary, and an appreciation for both personal piety and works of mercy.

Benedict XVI once wrote that “the only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb.” The Catholic literary revival’s lost women writers were not always particularly saintly, but their work is, in its sideways manner, a weighty apologia for Catholicism in the modern world.

The post Lost Women Novelists appeared first on First Things.

Anyone who lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 will remember the pitiable figure cut by the Eastern Bloc residents interviewed back then. They looked stunned, tongue-tied, disoriented, like rescuees emerging into the sunlight after days in a collapsed mine. Whether they were philosophers, firemen, or housewives, how inconsequential appeared the lives they had spent “building communism.” The vision of Karl Marx—only lately passed off as a magical combination of charity, machismo, and economic rationality—now looked mediocre and servile.

Our own economic ideology, though—well, that was another story! People were beginning to place free markets at the heart of Western civilization, in terms once reserved for Christianity or universal manhood suffrage. “Capitalism,” for perhaps the only time in its history, seemed synonymous with “freedom.”

Who was the author of this vision? A lot of people, but most prominent was the cantankerous and combative economist Milton Friedman (1912–2006). For a generation after the inflation of the 1970s, and thus in the triumphal decades when the United States was laying down the rules of the post–Cold War order, Friedman was the main spokesman for, and symbol of, the idea that free markets and free societies were basically the same thing.

Friedman spoke in every register of authority recognized by late-twentieth-century Americans. He was a brave and often solitary dissident from mid-century academic orthodoxies, arguing that the Keynesian theories out of which Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal had been built rested on a misunderstanding about who spent money on what. He had a powerful influence on conservative policymakers: Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon in the 1960s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. In 1976 he won the Nobel Prize. His Monetary History of the United States (1963) revolutionized the public’s understanding of the Great Depression of the 1930s. In his column for Newsweek and on his television show, he advanced cranky ideas that over time would come to sound like common sense: a volunteer army, for instance, or privatized package delivery. Most important, beginning in the 1960s he argued—in the teeth not just of contradiction but of outright mockery—that the United States was hurtling toward a never-before-seen combination of high inflation and high unemployment that might wreck the economy as we knew it. His vindication was swift and almost total.

Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative, by the Stanford historian Jennifer Burns, touches on the details of the economist’s life: his childhood in then-rural Rahway, New Jersey; his marriage to the economist Rose Director; his combative (but never ad hominem) classroom style. The particulars are not scintillating: Friedman collected ties depicting the Scottish economic philosopher Adam Smith. His license plates bore the macroeconomic equation

“MV = PY.” He liked woodworking. The only striking thing about Friedman the person was his sheer physical tininess. He stood five feet high, if that. The Labour politician Denis Healey, who as chancellor of the Exchequer presided over the long collapse of the British economy in the 1970s, once dismissed Thatcherism as the “half-understood, half-baked theories of that Jewish leprechaun Milton Friedman.”

Despite its trappings and its title, this is not really a biography. It is the intellectual history of a recusant tendency that arose within mid-twentieth-century managed capitalism and ended up overthrowing it. It is also a kind of business book, about the industry of academic economics.

Friedman credited Arthur Burns, his professor at Rutgers in the 1930s and decades later Richard Nixon’s Federal Reserve chairman, with having turned him into an economist. Burns would later call Friedman the greatest economist of his generation. But it was “price theory,” as taught in his years as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, that made a capitalist renegade of Friedman. A price is a privileged piece of information, an equilibrium between two pulsating, multifactorial complexities, namely supply and demand. Scholars can use price to study those complexities: The price of a vacuum cleaner can be a window on an entire marriage regime. Policymakers, meanwhile, must understand that messing with a price can send distortions and inefficiencies ricocheting invisibly through an economy.

Of course, money itself has a price: the interest rate. There may be gluts and shortages of money that, in accordance with the laws of supply and demand, affect its price. Since the resulting distortions can be tremendously consequential, it seems unsurprising that Friedman chose to focus his academic work on money. In the 1930s, though, it was an oddball decision. Monetary economics was thought an academic backwater, a waste of time for a young scholar of Friedman’s talents. Starting in the 1960s, Friedman’s research would help turn the Federal Reserve’s rate-setting into the main tool for stimulating or dampening economic activity, replacing (or at least supplementing) government spending. And in the 1970s, saving the American economy from runaway inflation would require the kind of monetary expertise that few besides Friedman possessed.

At Chicago, economics had ideological implications. Frank Knight, theorist of risk and mentor to Friedman’s generation, was given to exploring the paradoxes of capitalism—including the paradox that, in an efficient capitalist system (one in which everyone had all necessary information), profits (supposedly capitalism’s driving force and raison d’être) would tend to disappear. Knight concluded that profit “arises out of the inherent, absolute unpredictability of things.” Profit-making is therefore a sign of high character; a man who makes a profit has been willing to brave that unpredictability. Far from undermining the case for profits, this line of thinking gave birth to the myth of the entrepreneur as a risk-taking swashbuckler, even an existential hero, a myth that triumphed in the 1980s and survives today. Like socialism, price theory had a tendency to turn into moral browbeating.

Friedman’s brother-in-law, the legal theorist Aaron Director, had preceded him to the Chicago economics department. Doomed to writer’s block his whole life, Director never managed to produce the American version of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom that he had promised. But he did conceptualize the “law and economics” approach to regulation, by means of which his protégé Robert Bork would lead the dismantling of New Deal–era antitrust law. One can see it as a brilliant interdisciplinary innovation. One can also see it (as Jennifer Burns seems to) as a form of legalistic obscurantism: using an economic theory (whereby monopolies are transient and less dangerous than they look) to sabotage antitrust law (or undermine the will to enforce it).

Friedman himself thought monopolies tended to disappear. He also thought that capitalism in general was as likely to reduce income inequality as to exacerbate it. Burns not only pays commendable attention to the academic projects out of which these arguments arose, she also charts the influence of “a new type of institution”: the first nonprofit conservative foundations, such as the anti-communist William Volker Fund and the Foundation for Economic Education. Civic-minded pamphlet-printers and forum-conveners, these institutions spread ivory-tower research to a mass audience, albeit at the risk of shunting economists into what Friedman called “hack work.”

All of these people were laboring in the long shadow of the Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946). The bombshell of Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money detonated in 1936 and, as Burns puts it, “would set the intellectual agenda for Friedman’s entire career.” Keynesianism called for tempering the business cycle through “demand management”—accelerating government spending when the economy was sluggish, pulling back when the economy was running too hot.

But there was a problem with Keynesianism. It worked better on the blackboard than in a parliamentary democracy. Spending programs could be introduced as planned, but cuts and tax hikes would meet resistance. So, although bloating the state was not a part of Keynesian theory, it tended to result from Keynesian practice. Lyndon Johnson notoriously tried to fight an all-out war in Vietnam and build a mammoth welfare state at home. In any previous administration this would have been seen for the folly it was. In the heyday of Keynesianism, pushing the frontiers of spending ever outward seemed virtuous. Advisers could advise, but the people in charge were politicians with elections to win. Already in the early 1960s, the shapers of John F. Kennedy’s “new economics” were leaning on lenders to bring down mortgage rates, arguably laying the groundwork for this century’s subprime crisis.

It was in this intellectual climate, as president of the American Economic Association during the 1967–68 academic year, that Friedman began to point out that policymakers were underestimating the growth in certain monetary “aggregates” (compound measures of the amount of money in circulation). The American economy, Friedman warned, was headed for an unprecedented mix of inflation and unemployment. Since the economy was booming, after a fashion, Friedman’s jeremiads were met with sniggering mockery from the (mostly) Harvard professors who were still making economic policy. Friedman had his backers, too, but they tended to be angry galoots from the free-market foundations.

In an almost Shakespearean twist, it was at just this moment that Friedman’s mentor and oldest friend, Arthur Burns, began assailing him in public for his positions on employment and welfare. Nixon nominated Burns to lead the Federal Reserve in 1969. After an academic career dedicated to warning of the dangers of inflation, Arthur Burns would wind up misreading monetary aggregates. He pumped too much money into the economy on the eve of the 1972 election (not necessarily for devious reasons, Jennifer Burns believes) and set off one of the most calamitous episodes of inflation in American history.

It was Paul Volcker, Jimmy Carter’s 1979 nominee as Fed chairman, who eventually succeeded in bringing inflation under control—a tremendous vindication for Friedman’s worldview in its general outlines, which by then had come to be called monetarism. But on policy matters, Volcker diverged from Friedman’s prescriptions. He paid some attention to Friedman’s beloved monetary aggregates but put his main focus on publishing a target federal funds rate—and wound up durably lowering inflation. Friedman would remain an important supporter of Reaganomics and an important symbol of the American capitalist order for another quarter century. But his time as an intellectual leader was over.

What fitted Friedman for the half-prophetic, half-political role he played in the years leading up to the Cold War’s end? There is a paradox to it. Despite his generally classical-liberal policy preferences, Jennifer Burns calls him “the last conservative,” mostly because he had a nineteenth-century vision of economics as more a philosophical than a mathematical endeavor. He was the youngest brilliant economist whose worldview had hardened before the Keynesian revolution swept Washington and the world in the 1930s. His youthful reluctance to align himself with new lines of economic research, which might have made him seem unusually hidebound in the Truman and Eisenhower years, gave him an unusually open mind in the Nixon and Carter years, when quarrels over economic doctrine tended to pit one set of dug-in Keynesians against another.

Many Americans knew Friedman simply as a wisecracking economic pundit. You might have called him a maverick or a crank. He favored abolishing the Federal Reserve and, on that basis, built a number of friendships with like-minded leftists. He once proposed abolishing the federal bond market. He was the first to imply that favored businesses were collecting a kind of corporate welfare, and defended illegal immigration precisely on the grounds of its illegality, which provided an escape from the high wages and onerous benefits accorded workers over years of trade-union dominance. It is easy to associate Friedman with the low-IQ libertarian gripery that took over American public discussion as Great Society programs continued to lay waste to the country in the late 1970s.

None of this would have meant anything, though, if not for Friedman’s mastery of monetary economics and policy. Among the many arguments Friedman formulated in A Monetary History of the United States, the most consequential concerned the Great Depression of the 1930s: By allowing the money supply to contract rapidly, the United States had turned a passing crisis into a catastrophe. Until the book’s publication, the Depression had been considered the macroeconomic equivalent of a perfect storm. Friedman’s revisionist interpretation has proved not just a historiographical but a political landmark. It implies that the policy of first resort at the first signs of systemic sputtering should be to turn a fire hose of money on the economy, even at the risk that this money will be scooped up by the fat cats who brought the problems on in the first place. At any rate, this has been the model for government intervention in the twenty-first century’s increasingly frequent economic crises: around 9/11, the subprime collapse, Covid. Macroeconomic potlatch in times of downturn is today Friedman’s most enduring legacy, even if it is at odds with the values of “conservatism” and “sound money” that still define his reputation.

Here Jennifer Burns brings in a note of skepticism. Friedman’s monetary history had a co-author, Anna Jacobson Schwartz of the National Bureau of Economic Research, whose name tends to get zipped over and forgotten, as if she were some kind of amanuensis or research assistant. Schwartz was an accomplished economic historian who, by the time she and Friedman began collaborating, had already co-written (with Walt Rostow, later an adviser to presidents Kennedy and Johnson on Vietnam war matters) a history of the British economy from 1790 to 1850. The heart of A Monetary History of the United States is its calculation of money aggregates from multiple conflicting sources, and this work seems to have been done mostly by Schwartz. She had, too, a better sense of the book’s arc and its argument.

For long stretches of her own book, Burns focuses on the invisibility of woman economists, even highly qualified and active ones, in the years after World War II, and our subsequent tendency to overvalue men. It was Rose Friedman, for instance, who turned Milton’s lectures into the 1962 bestseller Capitalism and Freedom. Burns has a particular fascination with Dorothy Brady of Chicago, a longtime collaborator of Rose’s. One of Milton Friedman’s towering academic accomplishments was to undermine, in A Theory of the Consumption Function (1957), the Keynesian idea of who spent what. If, as the mid-century economic establishment believed, the rich socked away their money while the poor had no choice but to spend it immediately, then transfers from the former to the latter would stimulate economic activity. Egalitarianism was good for business. If this was not the case, though—and Friedman believed it was not—then income transfers might be futile or even counterproductive. From there it was but a short step to “Greed is good.” Brady, Burns notes, reached similar conclusions in research that antedated his.

Burns has a rare ability to wield economic terms and concepts clearly and precisely, without either dumbing them down or resorting to phony erudition. Rather than simply tell us that Friedman was marked by an early reading of Alfred Marshall, she will tell us what is in Alfred Marshall and where it shows up in Friedman’s work. In explaining how Friedman’s ideas of the Fed’s role differed from those of his rivals, she explains what “open market operations” are, what a “primary dealer” is, what the “federal funds rate” is, and so on. The arguments are both sophisticated and easy to follow.

Burns doesn’t seem to like Friedman much. She is more inclined to qualify and contextualize his insights than to marvel at them. Certain of his political engagements get on her nerves. One is his (minor) role as an economic adviser to General Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. Burns deserves credit for correcting a misunderstanding about the Chicago-trained economists who sparked an economic revival in Chile in the 1970s and 1980s. It is a myth of progressive oratory and journalism that, once Pinochet overthrew the elected Marxist government of Salvador Allende in a brutal 1973 coup, various unscrupulous American institutions (including the capitalist ideologues of the Chicago economics faculty) rallied to his cause, indifferent to his record of executions and expulsions.

In fact, economists at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago who came to be known as the “Chicago Boys” antedated not only Pinochet but even Allende. Many were indeed followers of Friedman’s doctrines. They traced their origins to a visit from the chairman of Chicago’s economics department in the early 1950s. Yet Pinochet took power without any economic program beyond stopping Allende’s expropriations. Only when the Chilean economy seemed to defy all attempts to revive it did he ask the Chicagoans for help. Friedman’s rationale for visiting was that Chile was not a worse dictatorship than the Soviet Union, which he had been happy to visit. This shows him to have been “literal-minded to a fault,” in Burns’s view. “Pinochet’s Chile,” she writes, “was not the time and place to assert that what felt like freedom was actually the road to serfdom.”

Burns’s other complaint concerns Friedman’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Here, too, she is extremely insightful, seeing clearly, as few historians of the period do, that the assassination of Kennedy was as important in shifting the country away from Barry Goldwater’s anti–civil rights vision as any moral argument. She deftly links Friedman’s thinking on the subject of discrimination to his perspective as the son of Ruthenian Jewish immigrants and his experience of anti-Semitism. But for that reason she is wrong to view Friedman’s invocation of the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws as “astonishing,” and she is arbitrary in describing this particular dissent—hardly his most bizarre—as a “shadow over his legacy.” Friedman’s skepticism about government plans to redistribute goods and opportunities by race was not a moral deficiency. It proceeded from a fear that another shoe might drop. On today’s American college campuses, the tight correlation between anti-Jewish sentiment and anti-racist zeal is a sign that he was on to something.

There is a basic question about Friedman’s supposed importance that was raised as soon as Volcker began tacking away from his policy suggestions: If Friedman was such an innovative thinker, then why do experts no longer rely on his policy rules? Burns’s answer is original and profound. “Slowly, painfully,” she writes, “Friedman would learn that monetarism was built on data from a world that no longer existed: the regulated and regimented postwar era, the land the New Deal built and inflation swept away.” Friedman and his allies had gathered evidence that the New Deal–managed economy was rife with inefficiencies and injustices—but only in a such an economy was it possible to gather such evidence in the first place. Our economy is too complex to manage that way. The post–New Deal order would perhaps be more efficient, but it would also be less accountable.

A balanced assessment of this order would become possible only after the global financial crisis of 2008. The vitality Friedman and others had attributed to entrepreneurial capitalism would turn out to have been bought at an astronomical price in middle-class security and political stability. Friedman’s reputation today is falling—but it stands much higher than that of the system he championed, mostly because there was a good deal more to him than his political engagements.

Friedman’s method of studying monetary aggregates, in fact, has lately been making a modest comeback. For almost all the economists who shaped economic life between World War II and the arrival of Volcker, the model of a successful economy was a war economy. But “Bidenomics,” as the present order is sometimes called, explicitly seeks to revive that tradition, and “Bidenflation” has been the result. Since inflation returned throughout the West in 2021 and 2022, many policymakers have blamed the aggregates. Most notably, the European Central Bank board member Otmar Issing linked galloping inflation in the Eurozone to a 30-percent hike in the money supply.

Friedman was a prophet of our present predicament. Where “cultural elites” develop, many crucial political questions come to pit those with intellectual credentials against a large mass of angry people who have none—but who may nonetheless be right. Economic policymaking fell into this situation long before society as a whole did. For much of his career, Friedman spoke for a side that was held to be discredited in advance. That kind of thinker never gets his full measure of credit. Year in, year out, he crafts arguments that are dismissed as idiocy, until one day their truth becomes absolutely undeniable—at which point they are dismissed as common sense.

The post Friedman’s Rise and Fall appeared first on First Things.

Our cultures and personal habits shape how we think. Flowers versus cows. Social values are at work here, but also the very shape of our survival and relationships: seasons, kings, armies, markets, factories, grandparents, universities, restaurants, hillsides, and deserts. Navigating each of these over time, and with others, orders the logic of our reasoning and judgments. What if Pascal had lived in Sumatra?

Philosophers and theologians have tried to identify ways of thinking that will get everyone on the same page of truth. Methods and manuals were offered on the basis of this conviction. Ramon Llull, the thirteenth-century theologian and missionary to North Africa, wrote the Ars Magna, detailing methods of thinking, demonstration, and contemplation that he believed applied universally to all minds and hearts, and could thus be used to convert the Muslims. Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole’s massively popular Logique de Port-Royal was a seventeenth-century handbook on correct thinking that they believed could reform French society (and convert Protestants).

But philosophers and theologians differ widely; they process information differently, start from diverse premises, have personal preferences. One of the most popular characterizations of intellectual “ways of thinking” is Isaiah Berlin’s distinction between the fox and the hedgehog, from the Greek poet Archilochus’s short lyric: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Berlin makes much of the differences. In a celebrated essay on Tolstoy, Berlin presents the novelist as a natural “fox,” examining the details and corners of individual psyches and interactions. But Tolstoy was uncomfortable with his own subtle outlook. So, according to Berlin, he went against his own intellectual style and sought a grand theory or big picture of things (in religious matters especially). By Berlin’s reckoning, this endeavor was ultimately both simplistic and distorting. Hegel and Marx were, in Berlin’s view, just plain hedgehogs, and that was a problem in rather deep and terrible ways. Though he was too careful to be blunt—too foxy—Berlin believed that theory-generating hedgehogs, while perhaps more thrilling to read, were more dangerous.

Theologians often fit this scheme. A Hegelian religious thinker will perforce be a hedgehog, while the more Lockean thinker leans to the fox. The boundaries blur; but so do the contradictory logics within any given writer. Are St. Bernard’s sermons on the Song of Songs foxy in their scriptural detail or hedgehog-like in their figural ambition?

Another scheme, which I’ve seen applied to science, is the contrast between bleeder and surgeon. It’s based on the transitional period of early modern medicine, when bloodletting was giving way to dissection and intervention. Bleeders “let things out” in various ways in order to heal (the Galenic notion of restoring humoral balance), while surgeons “go inside and fix things.” Applied to modern science, there are “bleeder” empiricists, who lay things on the table and sort through them, and theoretical “surgeons,” who burrow down and tie things up, getting at the roots and closing things off. Linnaeus on the one hand, Newton on the other. I’m not sure where theologians fall. Hamann the Bleeder vs. Kant the Surgeon? Perhaps fideism puts things on the table, as it were, to believe or not, while rationalism probes for a grand theory of religious truth.

I once proposed to my students my own theological paradigm for distinguishing intellectual approaches. It is based on a culinary classification—with apologies to vegetarians, because it only really works with meat. There are Stewers, Roasters, and Curers.

Stewers identify a base—beef or chicken, say—but then add all kinds of things and cook them together. And one can make many stews from the same base meat, altering spices, herbs, vegetables, broths, temperature, timing. As for roasters, we are talking about traditional roasting of the whole animal (pig or goat, say), not the lazy roasting of chicken legs on a Weber grill. One might “stuff” the animal with something—herbs, vegetables, or, if you are a medieval pope, a bunch of starlings. But it is the “whole animal” that represents the main substance and ordering flavor; the stuffing is incidental, and only works from within. A curer is yet another approach. He takes a particular cut of meat and works on it in a very particular way to create a very particular and cherished food: prosciutto, soppressata, jambon de Bayonne. These cured delicacies are all different, each made a distinct way, and all quite limited in their purpose, usually never eaten “alone” but served as a dish with others.

On this paradigm, Karl Rahner was a skilled curer (as are most Catholics, who enjoy a large buffet of diverse cured meats), while his attempts at roasting were less satisfactory. Barth, for all his varied accomplishments, was first and foremost a roaster (as are most Reformed). Anglicans tend to be stewers. Even when they seem wedded to a given concept or theory, they almost always end up mixing things into it that produces something rather less obvious (though not necessarily without a distinct taste). Thomas Cranmer loved to talk about “chewing,” “ruminating,” and “savouring” Scripture, which can be applied to all kinds of meats, but tends to favor those slowly cooked and ingested.

My culinary paradigm (no doubt food metaphors say something about me) can be supplemented by the fox and hedgehog distinction, though in general I believe hedgehogs tend to its-all-in-the-meat roasting, while foxes end up curing, since a close empiricism seeks to transform telling details into delicious insights. When it comes to the bleeder–surgeon distinction, it’s clear that stewers are closer to bleeders. The ingredients need to be chopped and sorted. Surgeons are roasters or curers.

A colleague of mine suggested distinctions between driving, walking, and staying home. Drivers are like hedgehogs: They have a destination that determines everything. But they are not terribly concerned about concepts. They want to get to where they need to go, and thus their methods tend to be measured by efficiency, lack of distraction, reliable forward motion. Most contemporary theologians are trained to be drivers (whether they are good drivers is another question). Which is why most contemporary theology books can be read quickly, from the conclusion backward. Theologies of “liberative praxis” and “radical inclusion” provide obvious examples.

Walkers take their time. Perhaps there’s a destination in mind, but what counts is the landscape, the trees, the details along the way. There are pauses, hoverings, backtrackings. Anglicans (of the past) were often walkers. Even Hobbes (who I think is foxier than he is often read as being) would carry a pen in the top of his walking stick to jot down thoughts gleaned “along the way.”

I admire the homebodies: They burrow down into something and learn it inside out. A career can be made (and should be) by zeroing in on local mollusks (as did the hyper-Protestant naturalist Philip Henry Gosse) or anemones. J. B. S. Haldane’s celebrated quote that God must have “an inordinate fondness for beetles” is the judgment of a naturalist, but it also ought to be one of a theologian. The doctrine of justification as expounded in Switzerland in the late sixteenth century has wondrous folds of character and detail, indicating a divine fondness for theological nuance and its embodiment.

God is fond of everything, and knows all the roads, and has traveled everywhere both fast and slow. God delights in flowers and cows both, sets a beautiful table and cultivates the perfect plot. If I am a stewer and a walker, I dare not always be these. And if I am hard-pressed to don the mask of fox or hedgehog, it is because I need both and sometimes neither to get at the truth.

There’s another category of thinking: the waiter. Negatively, waiters are those who just float along, barely thinking at all, grabbing at this or that, carried by unknown currents. This is the thought mode of the Internet Age: the mind as flotsam.

But there’s a positive vocation for the waiter, one of letting go and trusting. Thomas Aquinas was a waiter. Having gathered up all the knowledge that one can, garnered in every frame of thought, he let it loose, like a flock of doves, content to gaze up at the sky and wait for their return in some new formation or other, great or small. We should be waiters in that sense, adopting a posture of hard-earned and trembling patience: Fear God, and so begin to be wise (Ps. 111:10).

The post Hedgehogs, Foxes, and Other Thinkers appeared first on First Things.

Is there such a thing as good therapy? Not for kids, argues Abigail Shrier. Sure, “play therapy” for the littlest tykes probably does no more harm (and no more good) than a very expensive babysitter. But when the talk therapy developed for adults is administered to children and teenagers, “no harm” is the best case. Iatrogenic effects include demoralization, rumination, alienation, overdiagnosis, hypochondriasis, and overmedication. All this, for just a “fifty-minute hour” per week.

Shrier argues that therapy is to blame for America’s youth mental health crisis, by which she means the large and expanding cohort of “the worriers; the fearful; the lonely, lost, and sad.” The trends are bad and long-running. Between 1950 and 1988, the rate of adolescent suicides quadrupled. Between 1990 and 2007, the number of mentally ill kids rose 3,500 percent. In the past decade or so, one is tempted to say that mental illness has become fashionable. Diagnoses proliferate, some venerable, some novel, some evidently severe, some seemingly fanciful. Ever more teens present anxiety, depression, dissociation, gender dysphoria (the subject of Shrier’s previous book), eating disorders, self-harm behaviors, hair-pulling compulsions, and tics. To make her thesis go, Shrier relies on an expansive definition of “therapy”: the practice itself, the application of therapeutic concepts to parenting and school discipline, and the suffusion of therapeutic concepts throughout American culture. It’s a salutary polemic, if not airtight.

Forty-two percent of American kids today have a mental health diagnosis, and almost 40 percent have received therapy. They typically enter feeling overmatched by schoolwork, friends, and dating, and complaining of anxiety, insecurity, loneliness—teenagerness, in a word. One of Shrier’s interviewees likens the decision to start therapy on such a basis to a surgeon’s saying that the kid looks normal, “but let’s open him up and see what we find.” Any medical intervention carries risk: the nicked artery, the infection, the allergic reaction. The risks are weighed against expected benefits: the knitted bone, the cessation of pain, the remission of cancer. In the case of psychotherapy, the benefits may be rather vague. Indeed, Shrier argues that many kids get worse while in therapy: demoralized (the patient regards herself as a problem, one her parents can’t solve), ruminative (commanded by the therapist to dwell on disappointments and dissatisfactions), alienated (encouraged by the therapist to judge friends and family guilty or inadequate). By “recasting personality variation as . . . dysfunction,” therapists “train kids to regard themselves as disordered.” The diagnosis (ADHD, anxiety, autism—and that’s just the letter A), however ill-fitting or intrinsically bogus, becomes central to the kid’s identity, a tag on social media. Medication brings advertised side effects (loss of affect, mental acuity, and libido; weight gain; suicidal ideation), plus the failure of the kid to encounter the unmediated world. Shrier’s interviewees opine that this stuff is way too strong for developing brains. Far from a solution to the youth mental health crisis, the widespread resort to therapy starts to look like its major cause.

Whence its popularity? The pervasiveness of therapeutic concepts in American culture—individualism, self-realization, personal happiness—goes back centuries. One contemporary guise is the obsession with uncovering traumas, by confabulating memories if necessary. Shrier decries the sage status of Bessel van der Kolk, the psychiatrist who revived the discredited theory of recovered memory in the form of “body memories” with his 2014 book The Body Keeps the Score (holding steady on the New York Times paperback nonfiction list, as of this writing, for the 270th week). Van der Kolk’s sentimental rhetoric of psychic and somatic wholeness, his science-y charts and jargon, are so much gilding on the patently silly thesis that unpleasant memories are repressed from consciousness and preserved in muscle. I might as plausibly boast that I can do pushups with my hippocampus. Shrier nails van der Kolk as a charlatan whose northern European accent suggests “someone ambiguously serious about matters of the mind.” Just remember, you read it here first (“By Our Wounds We Are Healed,” October 2021).

We also observe a contemporary stress on the happiness and validation of children. Shrier describes the “therapeutic” parenting style that now seems dominant—more or less Dr. Spock on Adderall. It entails that kids understand and consent to rules, rather than submit to discipline. They must receive “consequences,” not punishments. Their feelings must always be consulted. They should “enjoy themselves” at school, at soccer practice, in piano lessons, at the dentist. The “ideal childhood mean[s] no pain, no discomfort, no fights, no failure.”

This is folly. In one of the best moments from the book’s many interviews, a German psychiatrist named Michael Linden points out that no life brims with “happiness,” moment to moment. Indeed, Shrier can list a bunch of worries and frustrations besetting her as she speaks to him over Zoom. This quantum of stress is normal; it doesn’t mean she is clinically anxious or depressed. So with kids, with the caveat that they may become stunted if “supported” too much too soon.

Therapy has wrecked pedagogy and school discipline, which now seeks to “diagnose and accommodate, not punish or reward.” Endless “accommodations” are afforded to kids who are poor test-takers or who struggle with deadlines. Classrooms are outfitted with fidget toys, suspensions and expulsions are condemned by the Department of Education, and teachers implement restorative justice and social-emotional learning. The result, in schools across America, has been a decline in academic outcomes and an increase in rudeness, unruliness, bullying, tantrums, and violent outbursts—the permission of “physical harm in the name of emotional well-being.”

So what good is therapy—for anyone? We exempt from this inquiry cognitive behavioral therapy and related methods, which train obsessives to suck it up. We are concerned, rather, with “conversations about feelings and personal problems styled as medicine” (Shrier’s definition, as the profession does not afford a clearer one). Therapy’s presumption that raking the coals with a mental health professional will make just about anyone happier may be not much truer for adults than for kids. Therapy poses some of the same iatrogenic hazards to adults as to kids, though adults are capable (Shrier stipulates, and one hopes) of recognizing, rejecting, even terminating unhelpful counsel. Shrier recalls benefits she has reaped: Her first therapist, whom she retained after moving to California for a boyfriend, was like a gal pal who always listened, always took her side, and helped her achieve a better understanding of her psyche. Against these gains are weighed certain pitfalls, not excluding the therapist’s sheer presumption. (She urged Shrier to postpone her wedding so that they could do some more work together!) Shrier appears to have moved on from therapy by now and to regard its benefits as, in her case, perfectly nice but not clinically necessary.

Is one good of therapy its reputation as a pursuit of leisured bourgeois people? Since the invention of nervous disorders in the late eighteenth century, vague psychological fragility has been associated with social prestige. Fainting couches are elegant, Freudian couches hardly less so. Shrier discusses the destigmatization of the now common childhood diagnoses: autism, ADHD, and so on. I would add that these diagnoses have all become positively prestigious, in an insurance-abetted trickle-down from the more exclusive pursuit of classical Freudian analysis. Perhaps the decision to start a kid in therapy is often an act of status-signaling.

Economic reality compounds social reality. As Shrier observes, the fragile teenager makes an easy and lucrative patient: She has mundane problems and is covered by her parents’ bountiful insurance plan. Chatting with her in a sunny office beats the hell out of administering subcutaneous antipsychotics in a hospital ward. Shrier is not detained by the fact that the fragile teenager is a member of a socioeconomic class. Socioeconomic terms are absent from Shrier’s analysis, except in this striking quote from a professor of clinical psychology: “One big problem with the field of academic psychology is that it has become limited to the privileged and the wealthy,” with the result that all adversity is construed as crippling trauma. When the worst thing that ever happened to you was getting picked last for dodgeball, getting picked last for dodgeball seems like the worst thing that can ever happen. (For a therapist to correct this misperception would not be “affirming.”)

I wonder whether, like psychology itself, Shrier’s thesis of therapy as the leading cause of teen distemper isn’t too strongly colored by the experiences of the middle and upper classes. No doubt kids in affluent households are indeed affected by therapy and its conceits, for they are exposed to both—whereas it is not clear that kids of the lower classes enroll in therapy in meaningful numbers, or that therapeutic conceits are in the air they breathe. Their insurance, if they have it, probably doesn’t cover therapy sessions, and their parents probably haven’t been obsessed with giving them a frictionless existence. On an expansive conception, “therapy” reaches lower-class kids through its encroachment into school (in)discipline. I wonder, though, whether even this problem is quite as pervasive as Shrier suggests. What if it were broken down geographically? Cozy corners may have replaced the principal’s office in our inner cities, but I reserve a certain doubt whether they have done so in meth country.

Longstanding trends such as divorce, fatherlessness, and unchurching might suggest themselves as environmental causes of poor mental health among the young. Shrier, though admitting that these trends coincide with the decline in youth mental health measures from decades back, dismisses causation—not by disproving it, but by comparing these conservative bugbears to the progressive bugbears of climate change, structural racism, and economic inequality. We can agree that progressives sound like idiots when they propose that kids’ mental health is worsening because after all who isn’t pathologically exercised over the polar ice caps? Shrier demonstrates, through anecdote and data, that even kids from progressive households don’t powerfully care about this stuff. Their parents and therapists project progressive doomerism onto them.

Shrier does not subject the mental health effects of the collapse of the American family to comparable analysis; she merely places the thesis under suspicion for its political salience. But the American family is awfully close to home. Do not kids get down about their own absent fathers and strung out brothers, more than about the headline “Oceans projected to warm two degrees by 2050”? By “kids,” in this scenario, we disproportionately mean kids of the lower classes.

I wonder, too, about smartphones. Shrier can hardly be accused of downplaying the toll of smartphones on youth mental health, as she sounded the alarm in her last book and sounds it again here: “addictive, sleep-depriving, and pathology-inducing.” And yet smartphones can’t be the problem, Shrier argues, since the decline began decades before they massively accelerated it by mainlining social media into kids’ limbic systems; the real problem is the therapeutic mindset that prevents adults from separating kids from the misery machines. Fair, I suppose, but it seems odd to classify such an acute and contemporary malignancy as a subset of a more nebulous one. Late in the book, Shrier says that if school counselors were serious about improving students’ mental health, they would urge a ban on smartphones during class. Here she positions smartphones as “the most ubiquitous and most persuasive” of the various forces “luring teens into a vicious cycle of negative self-focus.” Worse than . . . therapy?

Perils of the unified theory. That’s a quibble. Final point: One of Shrier’s frustrations during her interview with Michael Linden is that it’s early morning in California and she’s hoping not to wake her three kids while Zooming with Germany. She is open about the hard truth that kids generate stress. Accordingly, at the close of the book, she corrects the consumerist “decision to have children” (implying calculated expenditure in the expectation of happiness) with a vocational model: Either “your whole being inclines” to child-rearing, costs be damned, or forget it. But surely the vocational model is itself unthinkable outside a consumerist context, in which we command instruments of choice and can ask which lifestyle will be fulfilling. And it is dependent on affective scripts. Shrier offers compensations for put-upon parents, among them the “knee-buckling” love for a newborn. Alas, newborns overwhelmingly mean tedium, exhaustion, and noise, unless you’re lucky enough to get the kind that sleeps for twenty hours out of twenty-four. If your knees buckle, it probably won’t be for abundance of any tender emotion.

I insist because it’s hard to disentangle the obsession with kids’ feelings from the obsession with parents’ feelings. The relentless questioning whether kids are “enjoying themselves” is hardly separable from the question whether parents are enjoying their children, exhibiting the correct sentiments: Am I patient enough, gentle enough, attentive enough? Do I love enough? Toughening up our kids may begin with admitting that we can love them without always liking them all that much.

The post Leave Them Kids Alone appeared first on First Things.

The sentiment was clear: The banner waved by the keffiyeh-clad cohorts blocking access to airports and cancer hospitals and sabotaging staples of American culture such as Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting was emblazoned with but one word, “Disrupt.”

It’s hardly a novel tactic, nor one exclusive to the Hamas enthusiasts in our midst. Following the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, throngs of thugs took to the streets for what the media labeled “mostly peaceful protests” that left at least nineteen dead and cost the American economy a staggering $2 billion. Not to be outdone, self-styled climate activists picked the last few months of 2023 to disrupt a staging of Les Misérables in London, a performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Met, a speech by Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell in Washington, D.C., and—horror of horrors—the semifinals at the U.S. Open.

Everywhere you turn these days, it seems, there’s someone determined to stop you in your tracks until you capitulate and acknowledge the urgency and legitimacy of his or her cause. Just going about our lives is verboten. Silence is violence.

If you’re looking for the origins of this noxious tactic, you’d do well to cozy up with a slim volume entitled The Wretched of the Earth, written by the psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon in 1961. The world, adjudicated the Martinique-born intellectual, is divided into colonizers and colonized, and it is the sacred duty of the latter to shake off the yoke of the former by any means necessary.

One method in particular appealed to Fanon more than others: violence. “Decolonization,” he opined, “which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder.” First the settlers violently exploited the natives, he explained, and then the natives, to redeem themselves—not only politically but also emotionally and psychologically, to feel whole again—have no choice but to double down on brutality, directing it toward those deemed oppressors. Each tearing of limb or breaking of bone, mused Fanon, nudges the oppressed a bit closer to freedom.

You don’t need a PhD in postcolonial studies to point out the profound idiocy of the argument. For one thing, Fanon sings the praise of the colonized and their noble national character, a magical aura of identity that alone allows the wretched to overcome their plight. This sounds rousing, even romantic—were it not for the fact that most national boundaries in colonized countries were arbitrarily imposed by the colonizers, having little to do with inherent tribal, territorial, or cultural affinities. Even dimmer is Fanon’s reliance on essentialism, the demonic argument that all Arab Algerians possess a certain set of qualities while all Frenchmen possess another. (In the 1950s, he worked in Algeria as a psychiatrist and supported guerilla warfare against the French government.) Worse yet, nowhere in The Wretched of the Earth does Fanon bother explaining precisely what he means by “colony.” If you believe, like Fanon, that oppression is largely a state of mind, then 34th Street might as well be the Mosquito Coast, and folks disgruntled about the Biden presidency are just as entitled to their share of cathartic chaos as those consigned to groaning under the lash of the East India Company.

With a preface by Jean-Paul Sartre—removed by Fanon’s widow after the father of existentialism dared speak up for the Jews—The Wretched of the Earth became first a seminal academic text and then a primal scream for an entire generation of self-styled activists. They distilled the book down to its toxic essence and walked away with a simple summary: If you feel downtrodden, upstaged, or misunderstood, you must render the lives of your purported oppressors miserable. The point isn’t to convince anyone of anything. No one believes that a woman prevented from reaching the emergency room, say, or a man from catching his flight, would stop and sympathize with the blockheads who caused their discomfort. The point is simply to disrupt. It is an act designed exclusively to make the disruptors feel more powerful, a goal that justifies lawbreaking and violence.

The Hebrew Bible, hallelujah, gives us much better guidance about how to revolt.

What, after all, is that divine drama, the Book of Exodus, if not the story of a revolution? Moses, a stuttering octogenarian, defeats the imperious pharaoh. Hashem, the one true God, vanquishes the idols of Egypt. The Israelites, a small and stiff-necked people, stand up to the world’s mightiest empire and prevail. And then, at the height of the action, something unexpected happens.

The Israelites do not, like the French in 1789 or the Egyptians in 2011, take to the streets to celebrate their triumph. Instead, they’re commanded to retreat to the Great Indoors and enjoy a very private meal, the main purpose of which is to tell (and retell) to their children the story of their miraculous triumph.

Which, if you think about it, is strange.

“It is the way of the world,” wrote the late Israeli rabbi Moshe Zvi Neria, “that in times of revolutions and grand, sweeping changes, everyone is swept outside, and personal matters are pushed to the wayside and family life gets no attention because no one believes this is the right time to invest in the home.” But the Exodus, he continued, moves in the opposite direction. God’s people are called to “this first family feast of liberation and regeneration.”

Why the hurry home? Why did the Lord not allow the slaves who toiled for centuries at least one glorious evening of blowing off some steam by the banks of the Nile? Because revolutions, the Bible warns us, are heady things. What starts as a joyous cry of liberation can quickly curdle into wanton violence, and then harden into tyranny. Fanon’s key insight is correct: Revolutions are violent, and violence is cathartic. And once unleashed, the disruptive and destructive passions of revolution are nearly impossible to control, as we’re seeing these days nearly everywhere we turn in America.

How lucky we are, then, that the Bible gives us a revolutionary playbook of our own. The story of the Exodus, the rabbis insisted throughout the generations, isn’t mere history, nor is it strictly the collective tale of the Israelites. It addresses and implicates each and every single one of us. We are called to extricate ourselves from our own personal Egypts, whatever they may be. And to achieve that liberation, to attain the moral and spiritual clarity that allows us to refuse the soulless yelps of the marauders who insist that justice can only flow from causing others to suffer, we have the example of a much greater political leader than any slouching about the scene these days.

“It was as if Moses was saying, you can’t always rely on miracles,” wrote the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. “The best way of keeping the flame of freedom alive is to teach your children to cherish it, work for it, savour it, taste it. Get them to ask questions. Teach them the story in a way that fires their imagination and becomes part of their identity.” The story of the Exodus, he concluded, was “our apprenticeship in liberty.”

Our marching orders are clear. Whenever we see howling heathens insisting that our lives must grind to a halt until we succumb to their demands and bow before their power, we must resist their coercive assaults. But there’s something more important. The positive blow we’re called to strike entails hurrying home, hugging our children, and telling them—again and again and again—what we believe and why we believe it, speaking about America’s greatness and God’s goodness, about freedom and grace and the dignity of every human being.

Revolutions that skulk in the streets have a way of dying nasty deaths. Revolutions that focus on teaching children right from wrong go on forever.

The post How to Revolt appeared first on First Things.

Initially developed at the University of Toronto between the 1930s and 1970s, media ecology is a meta-disciplinary perspective that understands media as environments that shape human consciousness. Despite this expansive approach to media, media ecology has generally shied away from exploring that environment which encompasses all others—namely, the spiritual dimension. With few exceptions, that unbounded environment has been left to the theologians.

In A Media Ecology of Theology, Paul A. Soukup, S.J., seeks to bridge that divide, offering not a media-ecological analysis of the spiritual dimension itself but, as the title suggests, an examination of Christian theological expression through the lens of media ecology. Structured around the affordances that communication media provide theology, Soukup expertly shows how media environments have influenced and continue to influence the dissemination of Christian beliefs and disciplined reflection on those beliefs.

In a series of case studies, Soukup examines Christian theology’s changing media ecosystem, focusing on not only the usual suspects of communication media (e.g., orality, writing, print, film, social media), but also music, art, architecture, and ritual. Even translation, which occupies a kind of liminal space, gets a chapter. Although each of these case studies could stand alone, together they offer a picture of a complex ecology at work. Soukup deserves special commendation for the emphasis he places on the interaction of theology and religion with popular culture. That ecosystem, he argues, is a feature, not a bug, of Christianity’s two-thousand-year history of reflecting on its beliefs in both personal and institutional settings. Soukup does a fine (and important) job highlighting the ways in which both professional and “popular” theology show the stamp of communication media.

This book will be highly rewarding for those interested in theology or media theory, and doubly rewarding for those interested in both.

—Ethan Stoneman

The Index of Prohibited Books:
Four Centuries of Struggle Over Word and Image for the Greater Glory of God
by robin vose
reaktion books, 296 pages, $35

Any man under thirty knows all too well, either personally or from the experience of close friends, the diabolic influence that pornography can have on the mind. A few conservatives are thankfully beginning to rethink what constitutes “free speech,” but their efforts have been woefully inadequate. In considering what is to be done, we would do well to recall the lesson of the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

In his overview of the Catholic Church’s four-century experiment in censorship, Robin Vose aptly reminds us that censorship is “not just a strange feature of ancient times, a curiosity far distant from modern concerns,” but rather something characteristically modern. The Church’s comprehensive and systematic effort at controlling the flow of words and images was only imaginable after Gutenberg’s revolution. Against dishonest secular criticism, Vose shows that the Index was not merely a tool for inquisitorial persecution; rather like peer review and digital algorithms in our time, it was designed to filter information through expert criteria so that it would be a relevant and reliable “product of university-based academia.”

Yet this latter comparison invites pause. In a time when we are presented with ample reason to question expert opinion and peer review, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? To cite just one example, The Lancet instantly condemns as “conspiracy theories” any research into the possibility of a lab leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Who shall determine what counts as a legitimately harmful conspiracy and what is merely at variance with established opinion?

The crisis introduced in the seventeenth century by the advent of mass literacy and pamphleteering was ultimately not solved by the direct action of governments or the Church. In order for books like The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women to be taken out of circulation, what was required was the education of the newly literate public in standards of taste and decency—something that institutional efforts could encourage, but not mandate. Such words feel cheap in a time when ten-year-old boys are daily poisoning their minds with VR porn—clearly some kind of strong state action is necessary. It would be imprudent, however, to endorse the Counter-Reformation’s well-meaning methods of governance to curb the influence of wholly new information technologies. A radical rethinking of censorship for the digital age is necessary.

—Hunter V. McClure

Elizabeth Bishop:
A Very Short Introduction
by jonathan f. s. post
oxford, 176 pages, $12.99

Nearly thirty years ago, Oxford University Press started its “Very Short Introduction” series, an attempt to break away from the narrow specialization of academic publishing and reach the general reader. After decades of books on broad topics such as existentialism, aesthetics, slavery, and God, Oxford has started releasing compact introductions to individual authors.

Jonathan F. S. Post’s excellent Elizabeth Bishop: A Very Short Introduction is a recent offering in this commendable series. Few major poets are such suitable subjects for a brief study. Bishop published only ninety poems in her lifetime, as well as eight short stories and a few memoirs. As Post observes in his opening chapter, “No 20th-century poet has gone so far with so little, has made such a virtue out of scarcity.” Among the canonic poets of the English language, only Gerard Manley Hopkins has a smaller body of work.

Post also makes a virtue of that scarcity. Even within Oxford’s tight format, he has room to discuss all of Bishop’s significant poems. He provides a brief outline of Bishop’s life, but he avoids a chronological approach to her work. He presents the poems in thematic chapters.

Post starts by examining Bishop as a lyric poet fascinated by traditional forms—ballad, villanelle, sestina, and sonnet. As Bishop told Anne Stevenson, who wrote the first book on her work, “I have always been an umpty-umpty poet with a traditional ear.” Bishop left several masterful additions to the American canon with the fixed forms she handled. Post continues with chapters on Brazil (where Bishop spent sixteen years), poetry and painting, love poetry, and travel poems. None of these groupings seems forced. Bishop’s imagination was obsessive. She returned to the same subjects and landscapes with the same quiet hungers and hurts underneath.

The book is written in an engaging conversational style with the relaxed authority that comes from long classroom experience. (Post is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.) Both students and instructors will find this an invaluable companion to Bishop’s poems.

—Dana Gioia

What Happened to Civility:
The Promise and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project
by ann hartle
notre dame, 190 pages, $30

The best explanation for our current lack of civility in public and private discourse, according to Ann Hartle, professor emeritus of philosophy at Emory University, surfaces in the writing of the sixteenth-century French author of the Essays, Michel de Montaigne. On the precipice between classical and modern approaches to just about everything, Montaigne responded to the religious conflicts raging around him by articulating a new basis for overcoming differences and creating the social cohesion necessary for any polity: civility.

For Montaigne, civility rested, in turn, on the only foundation capable of withstanding even the most vociferous disagreements: moral character. Hartle emphasizes that the elements of moral character (such as magnanimity and charity) on which Montaigne’s civility relied were fragments of a longstanding, robust tradition in the West that wed classical philosophy and Christianity, without which freedom of speech and conscience would not exist.

Montaigne emerges as the hero of these pages for constructing a notion of civility to match changing conditions, including divergent Protestant and Catholic interpretations of that tradition. Yet Hartle also suggests that he played a role in those changes, self-avowedly preferring the independence of the self-consciously self-created individual to the authority of tradition.

Hartle insists that the only source of social cohesion that actually works precedes politics and lies in the sacred tradition itself, which casts each person in the image of God. To her, the virtues ultimately crumble without this deeper basis in Christian notions of human dignity and classical philosophy. It is unclear, then, why the book recommends Montaigne’s civility to the extent it does, if Hartle groups him with the forces eroding this bedrock tradition on which his ideas relied. Perhaps she is suggesting this is the best we can hope for, but the implications of her own argument suggest that we will need to go further and retrieve sources from before the cultural tectonic shifts she maps.

—Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

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—Sarah Rossiter

The post The Space Between appeared first on First Things.

that frame the tired river that runs East
smiled on your mother—just sixteen—and
your father, twenty-one, when they came
together in the city that never sleeps.

Yes, even then I knew you and loved you,
you uniquely you as that bent shad with its
mottled branches that will bloom again
come spring. Listen, son, for it is I

who have placed my words in your heart
and on your lips. For this is why I called you,
though it has taken you all these years
to understand this. Remember how, when you

were five years old? How even then you
would not stay there in your kindergarten
class in that old building there on Fifty-First?
Just two months after that B-25 clothed

in fog crashed into the Empire State Building
as the war was coming to its close. How you told
your mother it was time you learned to read
what those words there on those pages had to say?

How you had to understand those curves and dots
and glyphs so you could enter the bigger world
waiting for you just beyond? For wasn’t that
what books were for? And so on and on

it went from there, word by word by word,
from those crazy cartoon Katzenjammer Kids
to that witch that waited for children like yourself
in some ramshackle hut hiding in the woods,

a warning of what waited for you too, as on
you went from one book to another and then another.
Ah, the coalescence of those words, signs from
a thousand places as they blossomed, sounds of joy

and fear and wonder, sounds urging you on and on,
as you learned to echo back with words you learned
to fashion with crayon, pencil and pen, and later
with typewriter and computer, shaping world after

world as the words went spilling forth, and as
they will, until the eye no longer sees or the hand
no longer moves and the brain (but not the soul)
must at last empty into some vast Saharan desert.

—Paul Mariani

The post Word by Word appeared first on First Things.

a higher sum, she’ll play her violin,
flash gold-flecked eyes, throw you a long-stemmed rose.
When bets get high, she kicks you in the shin,
quite hard. You’re stunned, offended, in the throes

of ire and shame. You should have known, you think:
the wheel’s (discreetly) weighted on her side,
not yours. You kick yourself; your spirits sink,
along with your reserves of cash and pride.

But look: she’s left a gift, a length of rope,
the last recourse, or gambler’s horoscope.

—Catharine Savage Brosman

The post Games of Chance appeared first on First Things.

The falcon like a teardrop heaven cries
from higher than the city’s tallest tower
designed to fall precisely through clear skies
now hurtles at two hundred miles per hour
At such a speed what keeps her flashing eyes
from drying out her lungs from ripping open?
She’s been made fast but pigeons were made wise
at least enough to dodge a diving falcon

But you O Lord are like a bird of prey
whose talons I would not try to resist
When caught I will not try to get away
when held by you I’ll pray that you’ll persist
O hold me Lord while I am here below
then lift me up for I’ll be glad to go

—D. S. Martin

The post Peregrine Falcon appeared first on First Things.

For a magazine devoted to religion and public life, the piece by R. R. Reno entitled “Engines of Destruction” was rather strange (January 2024). Religious analysis was almost completely absent: Except for an attack on the positioning of Christian leaders and Pope Francis, it was entirely secular.

The result was a piece that was crudely partisan and focused on areas where the author admitted his knowledge is limited. To take one illustration: The problem with anthropogenic climate change (which is not a “perhaps”) is that it does lead to an increased number of costly weather events. When the increased number of droughts and wildfires is factored in, the economics of renewables becomes more balanced. Some economists would argue that if you are pushing for a longer transition (or even for continuing carbon energy sources), then a better way to go would be to advocate technological solutions such as carbon capture.

It would be wise for First Things to reintroduce a bit more religion into its analysis. One reason why most Christian leaders are sympathetic to immigrants is that immigration is a major biblical theme. They are sympathetic to the desperate stories of families trying to survive and create options for themselves. Making a biblical case for why a culture needs to limit diversity for the sake of greater cultural cohesion would be both difficult and really interesting. Perhaps Richard Hooker is a possible resource. 

Ian S. Markham
virginia theological seminary
alexandria, virginia

Under the Sun

J. C. Scharl’s poem “After the Funeral” is a moving modern recasting of Ecclesiastes (January 2024). The author of the biblical book viewed the world from a mortal perspective “under the sun” and concluded, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” After all, what is the purpose of industry, pleasure, recreation, and even wisdom if there is nothing beyond our material world? If you subscribe to the prevailing presuppositions of our culture, then you would have to conclude that life is as meaningless as “a broken useless pen,” worthy of nothing more than “a sigh.”

For decades, we have sown the assertion that there is nothing beyond our material existence. Now we have reaped the existential and experiential fruit of those assertions. Life is a “a clearance sale,” a “scattered rose,” and “a ruined cathedral.”

It is easy to bow the knee to our culture’s belief that life is merely a slow death march down “a darkening trail,” where our lives are as arbitrary as “a coin once flipped and idly caught again.” Scharl’s question is appropriate, “is that all life is?”

There is more to life than what happens “under the sun.” Jesus has come. Light and life have come into the world. Indeed, “in the dark, pinpricks of candles.”

Daniel Nealon
littleton, colorado

J. C. Scharl replies:

Thank you for your lovely letter; your connection to Ecclesiastes is profound. That book has always puzzled me, because of its apparent lack of “pinpricks of candles,” if you will.

My mother had a saying: “It’s all going to burn.” She usually employed this after we had broken something, lost something, or otherwise destroyed something that she held dear. It was her way, I thought, of distancing herself from the grief, but as I grew older, I wondered if she meant it more as a way of expressing sacrifice. I wondered if in fact what she was saying was: “Everything will become an offering. Everything will be made a gift.” I try to think of the world that way.

Thank you again for your careful and thoughtful reading.

Orthodox Doctrine

As an Orthodox Christian I was disturbed as I read “A Visit to Fr. Zinon” (January 2024). The most outlandish opinion expressed by Fr. Zinon was his belief that “Catholics and Orthodox recognize the validity of each other’s sacraments.” Such a belief had been promulgated by the Russian Orthodox Church in earlier times. The modern proponent of this understanding was the late Metropolitan Nikodim, an avowed ecumenicist, of Leningrad and Novgorod, who died of a heart attack in 1978 while in Rome for the installation of Pope John Paul I.

This belief has since been repudiated. As St. Anton the Georgian remarked to a Catholic priest: “As it is impossible to pour water and wine into a single vessel and keep them from mixing, so it is impossible to accommodate both Orthodox doctrine and heresy.” The article left me wondering if Fr. Zinon has been totally consumed by prelest (pláni), or spiritual delusion?

Vaseili Doukas
oak park, illinois

John P. Burgess replies:

Vaseili Doukas rightly raises the concerns that led Fr. Zinon’s bishop to ban him from serving as a priest. However, Fr. Zinon’s actions belong within a larger theological context.

Representatives of Catholic and Orthodox churches have long affirmed a mutual responsibility for unity of faith and sacraments. Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism declared, “Through the celebration of the Holy Eucharist in each of these Churches, the Church of God is built up and grows in stature.” Its Orientalium Ecclesiarum provided for offering the Blessed Sacrament to Orthodox brethren in

various circumstances affecting individuals, wherein the unity of the Church is not jeopardized nor are intolerable risks involved, but in which salvation itself and the spiritual profit of souls are urgently at issue.

In 1987 Pope John Paul II and Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I affirmed, “The Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church can already profess together as their common faith regarding the mystery of the Church and the bond between faith and sacraments.”

In Ut Unum Sint (1995), John Paul II praised the Joint International Commission for the Theological Dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, which has worked “steadily . . . with the purpose of re-establishing full communion between the two Churches. This communion . . . will find its fulfilment in the common celebration of the Holy Eucharist.” In 2006 Pope Benedict XVI and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I renewed this commitment.

To be sure, progress toward shared communion remains slow. Fr. Zinon’s reception of the Eucharist from a Catholic priest was incorrect according to his church’s canons. Might it nevertheless be understood as a proleptic expression of the two churches’ commitment to unity? John Paul II regularly exclaimed, “The Church must breathe with her two lungs,” referring to East and West. Zinon’s iconographic work invites us to breathe as deeply as we can—with both lungs.

Chosenness

Meir Y. Soloveichik in “The Undying People” (January 2024) correctly points out that anti-Semitism’s failure to eradicate the Jewish people is theological. God’s astounding willingness to risk his reputation on the survival of the Jews is reported in Genesis 22:17–18 when God declares to Abraham,

I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.

If God is not supreme to all the powers in heaven and earth, then he is not worthy of our devotion. To pursue the theology of anti-Semitism a little further, Satan’s attempt to thwart the redemptive purpose of God went awry at the Crucifixion, as some Church Fathers pointed out. Unfortunately, he continues to make a last-ditch attempt to overthrow the authority of God by exterminating the descendants of Abraham. 

James Robert Ross
st. petersburg, florida

Meir Y. Soloveichik has written an insightful article about Jewish perseverance. However, I think he’s missed an important point about chosenness. I agree with Robert Nicholson’s observation that anti-Semitism “almost always grows from a resentment of ‘chosenness.’” That’s because, in most contexts, chosenness implies favoritism. In ordinary conversation, to be chosen implies that you’re being rewarded for something. For many, it seems implicitly unfair that God favors the fortune of some particular group. In the eyes of God, should an accident of birth be more important than personal merit? Are the chosen trying to tell us that it’s easier for them to get into heaven?

In truth, being chosen by God is an experience that’s in a category by itself. It’s not an unearned privilege! In fact, it’s a hard and dangerous job. The chosen person is called upon to “walk point” for humanity. It’s not unlike the man in a military unit who is chosen to lead his soldiers into new and dangerous territory. To be chosen as the “point man” means that your comrades respect your ability to protect them. True, you’ll be the first to see new territory. However, you’ll also be the first to take a bullet. If you understand that, then you understand that Jewish people are not to be envied. 

Finally, it should be clear that even though the Jews are God’s chosen people, anyone can become a “chosen person.” Even a cursory glance at history would reveal that there are many non-Jews who have voluntarily taken on the hard, dangerous, and often unenviable job of leading humanity forward and upward. I strongly suspect that Don Gaetano Tantalo was such a one.

Wallace Schwam
pismo beach, california

Lewis and Doestoevsky

Thank you to Carl R. Trueman for his January 2024 essay “The Desecration of Man.” Trueman performs a valuable service by weaving a tapestry that illustrates the roots of the wreck of Western culture. One hopes that many readers will be spurred to read, or reread, C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, which I believe explains our current crisis as well as any book of the twentieth century.

I also appreciate Trueman’s reference to the “Rebellion” chapter in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan Karamazov’s argument against God cannot be countered through argument, but only through a life imitating Christ.

Dean Rutzen
alhambra, california

Carl R. Trueman replies:

I am very grateful to Dean Rutzen for his kind words of encouragement. There is too little of that even in the Christian world today. And I can only affirm his desire that people return to Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, a book as incisive as it is concise. Dostoevsky too should be on every Christian’s reading list: He was truly the prophet of the modern age. In the polyphonic dialogues of his major works, the pathologies of our day and the contradictions of the human heart alienated from God are displayed in painstaking detail.

His call for a lived, vital Christianity is also on target. While I believe the gospel is not reducible to a way of life, but is at its core a declaration of what God has done for us in Christ, the plausibility of our Christian witness is tied to the integrity of our lives. The problem of the human condition is not at root epistemological or technical, but moral. Only when, in the words of St. Paul, we present our bodies as living sacrifices will our words carry the apologetic weight necessary in this day and age.

Lady Chatterley

Patricia Snow, in her article “Self-Abuse” (January 2024), refers to “Chatterley on Trial” (February 2018), where I wrote about D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I discussed its use in a campaign to destroy the obscenity laws of the United States and England. Though she does not name me, there can be no doubt that her words are aimed at me. She says I “excoriated Lawrence generally” and “laid at his door responsibility for all of the pornography we have been subjected to since.” This is not correct. I do say in the piece that I do not love Lawrence as a writer, which is true. Nor do I admire some of his actions. But I accept that many think he was a great or at least a very good novelist, and I would not dream of challenging them. My attack was directed solely at Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I think is a comically bad book, though I conceded that it had some passages which are perfectly all right. Even if Lawrence had also written War and Peace and Great Expectations, Chatterley would be risible rubbish. It was not Lawrence’s fault that this embarrassing late work was chosen by social revolutionaries for use as a battering ram against the pornography laws. He did not write it for that purpose and was long dead when two very different trials, the first in New York in 1959 and the second in London in 1960, ruled on the legality of publishing it unexpurgated. So I cannot and do not “lay at [Lawrence’s] door” the “responsibility for all of the pornography we have been subjected to since.” In fact, I refer to “a clever alliance of social and moral liberals from both British political parties,” who I do blame for permitting this change for the worse in my own country’s laws.

Peter Hitchens
london, united kingdom

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Francis has pondered whether any war or execution can ever be just. In Fratelli Tutti, he writes: “There are two extreme situations that may come to be seen as solutions in especially dramatic circumstances, without [our] realizing that they are false answers.” These supposed solutions, he continues, “ultimately do no more than introduce new elements of destruction in the fabric of national and global society. These are war and the death penalty.”

Despite Francis’s characterization of both war and the death penalty as “false answers,” the Vatican has recently—if grudgingly—admitted that countries such as Israel and Ukraine have a “right to self-defense.” Thus, the Vatican permits defensive war (in line with international law) while prohibiting capital punishment.

Can these two positions be maintained together? Ultimately, I believe they cannot. The authority for prosecuting a just war and the authority for administering capital punishment have the same grounds. To undermine the one is necessarily to undermine the other. The Church may be correct to constrain capital punishment, but it cannot prohibit it without jettisoning the just war tradition.

In Romans 13:4, St. Paul authorizes the political sovereign to use the power of the sword to avenge wrongdoing. Pontiffs, doctors of the Church, and other important figures have interpreted this ascription of legitimate authority as applying to the political sovereign both internally and externally. The state may punish both domestic and foreign offenders when the sovereign judges it necessary for the common good. Aquinas quotes Augustine on this point: “A just war is wont to be described as one that avenges wrongs, when a nation or state has to be punished.”

Only legitimate political authority—the highest authority tasked with care for the common good of a political community—is authorized to use lethal force to punish. In the Christian tradition, as a rule, all private killing must be unintentional, justified under the principle of double effect. The paradigmatic case is self-defense, which Aquinas discusses in Summa II-II 40 and 64. In self-defense, one does not desire the death of the attacker. One wishes simply to end the assault and would be satisfied if the assailant desisted or fled. Because it is unintentional, killing in self-defense requires no higher authority. Francisco de Vitoria does not even offer justification for self-defense, arguing that it is permitted by the natural law. Private individuals or groups may intend to save themselves, foreseeing but not intending to kill the attacker; they do not have the authority to kill intentionally. The authority to inflict death as punishment is reserved to God, because he is the exclusive arbiter of life and death.

In capital punishment and just war, recourse to the sword involves non-defensive killing—“offensive” (even “aggressive”) action, in the sense of taking initiative. The criminal is taken from prison and executed; war is declared. In the classical natural law tradition, offensive killing is permissible only when it is authorized by a legitimate political authority deriving its power from God (Romans 13:4). And such an authority may kill only under very strict conditions. In the context of international relations, the elaboration of these restrictions produced what we call the tradition of just war.

Current understandings of the concept of “defense” have caused a great deal of confusion about just war. Contemporary international law, which the Vatican endorses, permits wars of self-defense and condemns wars of aggression. But what counts as “defense”? Classical authors strove for clarity. In their account, if an attack is ongoing, then a response in kind is considered defensive. If the attack has ended or been suspended, a response in kind is considered offensive. Unfortunately, international law today largely eliminates distinctions between completed (enemy soldiers attack, then retreat) and ongoing (enemy soldiers are in a live engagement) causes of war. Most wars that are called “defensive” by international law would be “offensive” in the view of classical just war.

An easy example illustrates the problem. Imagine you and your family are attacked in your home. You are permitted to defend yourselves in this instance, even to the point of killing the intruder. Such killing would be strictly defensive; the attacker’s knife is at your throat, either literally or as a realistic prospect. As long as the assault is ongoing, you can intentionally save your own life by killing your attacker. From a classical perspective, this private action is akin to defensive war: A foreign army storms across the border, and defending forces swing into action. Both the individual and the communal examples are permitted directly by the natural law. One need not consult jus ad bellum guidelines.

However, notwithstanding this natural right to self-defense, we are not permitted to repel an attacker and then pursue him into his house to kill him as punishment for violating our domestic tranquility, or in order to prevent him from doing it again. We are especially not permitted to gather up our neighbors, find the attacker’s home, and ambush him, killing him and his friends. Thomas calls this kind of killing rixa (strife) as opposed to bellum proper. Even if the offending neighbor and his friends put up a fight, vigilante justice would be considered murder under most accounts of criminal law. We have a right to defense, not offense. We must let the police and the courts (representatives of the legitimate authority) undertake the offensive task of meting out justice.

This offensive activity is exactly what occurs during war. One political community commits a grave wrong against another (a precondition for prosecuting a just war), often involving the death of innocents and the destruction of property. The offended community probably responds by declaring war on the attacking community. According to just war principles, this declaration allows the wronged nation to engage in offensive war at any time against enemy forces, even in enemy territory (precisely the pursuit that is not permitted in cases of private self-defense). In other words, just war involves offensive killing, action initiated to protect territorial integrity and exact retribution for an unjust attack. In this respect, speaking of just war as undertaken only in self-defense is mistaken, or at least misleading. Modern “defensive” wars are not actually akin to individual self-defense. We are never permitted to intend to kill in self-defense. Yet intentional killing of combatants (offensive killing) is the very object of most military actions, even when it is undertaken in a just cause.

Why do we permit intentional killing in just war but condemn it in instances of private killing (rixa)? After all, both cases can involve responses to grave violations of justice. The crucial distinction is this: Killing in war is under the command of a legitimate authority, whereas vigilante killing is not. This brings us to the crux of the problem with contemporary Catholic teaching on the death penalty. Just war requires the same legitimate authority as is needed for capital punishment. Undermining the authority needed for capital punishment undermines the authority needed for just war.

The logic of the matter is difficult to escape. To engage in offensive war, we must rely on the exclusive authority of the political community (delegated by God) to kill offensively. Only legitimate authority can command a counterattack. Yet by rejecting the moral legitimacy of capital punishment, we deny the authority of the political community to kill offensively, thereby rendering war-making nearly impossible, no matter how just the cause.

If the only licit kind of killing is self-defense, as is the case for individuals, then Hamas or some other force could make deadly incursions into Israel on a regular basis. They could retreat immediately to their enclaves, and the state of Israel would be morally forbidden to take offensive action by entering the enclaves to engage the hostile forces. Or Vladimir Putin could declare a unilateral ceasefire and the Ukrainian forces would have to stand down, just as a man defending his home must refrain from killing if the intruder puts down his weapon.

In short, either the state retains the right to punish wrongdoers in both the domestic and the international contexts, or it retains the right in neither. In fact, if one were to choose, it would seem that the state’s clearer claim is to the domestic use of the sword, since it has natural jurisdiction over its own citizens, whereas greater ambiguity surrounds the question of external jurisdiction among countries.

Unfortunately, the Vatican has diminished the Church’s just war tradition, limiting it in both theory and practice at a time when it is desperately needed. The conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza should remind us of the importance of just war principles. In their absence, public discourse easily falls into the extremes of utopian ideals on the one hand and a harsh realpolitik on the other. Neither extreme does a good job of limiting violence and protecting innocent lives.

The Church must remain a strong proponent of the just war tradition. Doing so requires acknowledging the possibility of legitimate recourse to capital punishment. This does not mean that Catholics must become enthusiastic champions of the death penalty, any more than that they ought to cheer at the prospect of war, but merely that we cannot abandon the death penalty in principle. In order to sustain the just war tradition, we must maintain clarity about the legitimate authority’s proper recourse to the sword.

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