Author’s note: I have pondered and reflected upon such a topic for a long while, usually stirred by observing or interacting with homeless people in some once-illustrious—gilded but fallen—American city. This time, after staying at a beautiful, historic Art Deco hotel in downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin, (where I witnessed the plight of some people and the blithe unawareness of others), I decided to allow my thoughts on the topic to sublimate through reflection via writing.

Opposing Worlds Collide, Triggering Psychic Defenses

They walk among us—those people: the unfortunate ones who we pretend do not—and perhaps even wish (did not)—exist. The homeless are among us and upon us, though they do not typically intercourse with us—except to beg of us or impose upon us, at which point they often irritate us—inciting in us, discomfort and anxiety. Such instinctual irritation probably owes to our own psychological barriers and protections, which obviate the appropriate visceral response(s): of horror, of dismay, of shame, of guilt;—in short, of a multitude of sentiments which we would rather not feel or express.

Our aversion to these emotions, often creates in us, an automated psychological and emotional distancing in the form of annoyance or avoidance—which can only be maintained if we do not experience homeless people up close and personally as real people with whom we share a common humanity. To recognize our shared nature would necessitate a compassionate viewing of the world through their fearful, forlorn eyes—a rather horrifying perspective, and one which we are unprepared to experience, in the course of an ordinary day or during a trip to a new city. Such a tension results in either pretending their plight does not exist, or assuring ourselves that their circumstance is their own fault, and consequently not our burden to bear.

During our stay in Milwaukee, I witnessed hotel staff at the Ambassador Hotel, a beautiful and well-preserved Art Deco hotel that provides an authentic “Jazz Age” experience, sternly ward off homeless people who—owing to the older neighborhood “in need of gentrification” (wherein the venerable old hotel lies)—kept wandering up to the property to harass guests, presumably to beg for money; and in a world which wholly revolves around—and is circumscribed by—money, such a clear delineation between the “haves” and “have-nots” could not be more jarring or visceral (than the one on Wisconsin Ave in 2025).

On one hand, it was comforting to be able to trust that the hotel staff were dutifully doing their jobs, protecting the personage and property of guests; on the other, I was again saddened by the reality that the homeless occupy a disparate world that is wholly walled-off from “decent society.” At the threshold of a place like the Ambassador, there lies a disconcerting portal between two distinct, but separate, worlds that interface with one another: to enter the “Roaring 20s” world of the Ambassador, one must first exit the presently-dilapidated, deracinated, demoralized, and degenerated world of contemporary Wisconsin Ave—and it is precisely the job of staff to make sure the two worlds remain distinct, never intersecting for longer than necessary: i.e. the amount of time it takes to cross the threshold from one world into the other.

In practical terms, who could, in good faith, fault businesses and employees for trying to prevent the homeless from trammeling over current and future business interests? Such a proposition, as to grant the homeless special privileges of guilt-ridden solicitation and unrestricted trespassing, would be morally preposterous; further, such allowances would clearly violate the natural and social rights of ordinary citizens to go about their business in general peace and security. Thus, I do not suggest a change in the practical, operational regulations and procedures, surrounding a place such as the Ambassador, but rather an uncomfortable but dutiful shift in perspective, by those safely contained within society, towards those who have been exiled—excommunicated and cast beyond the gates. This essay challenges its readers to become aware of our own psychological defenses and false rationalizations, in order to allow for a greater—humane—understanding of the problem of homelessness—on a twofold (personal and societal) level.

One such rationalization and (often false) generalization is the notion that the homeless are somehow, by and large, deserving of their predicament: as if society itself in its current iteration were a fair adjudicator of their merit as human beings. The more nuanced truth is that the homeless are often victims of Fate (to varying degrees)—and are, therefore, not homeless solely due to (great and grave) personal fault. Such an opinion is one that relieves us from the burden and pain of empathy, and should therefore be treated with great suspicion.

Through a largely unconscious process that occurs in the individual psyche en masse, a conception of reality is created—where those who live “on the outside” are somehow extraneous and adjacent to our society, while physically living within its borders. And so, the larger point (which is itself an indictment of our society at large) to be wary of, is the essentially automatic (assumptive) separation and delineation of worlds that—with an accompanying lack of empathy, understanding, and identification—automatically places such people outside of our capacity to be compassionate, and individually-discerning on a case-by-case basis; in such a way, worlds are walled-off and tens of thousands of people—and their experiences of life—are dismissed as invalid and not worth consideration—much like resumes and cover letters, in the age of auto-rejection.

“Over-Connection” Necessitates Dissociative Fragmentation

Perhaps ironically, one of the chief problems of the modern “connected” world is that we are constantly attuned to the suffering of others instead of minding our own business at home, enjoying life where we find it. Such over-connection and over-stimulation eventuates in the embodiment of an anxious, frenzied spirit where the external world often feels completely unstable and utterly horrible, precisely because we have realtime “knowledge” of happenings around the world. This knowledge is not only unnatural for a local, communal animal such as man, but also precludes the real enjoyment of life in the immediate, local present—such a declaration is to say little of the cacophonic nature of such decontextualized information, but I digress. Nonetheless, I find such an adaptation, as that of human beings to the superimposition of a virtual world upon a “real” one, to be maladaptive and incompatible with genuine human flourishing. Yet unlike other forms of remote suffering which modern persons are bombarded by, homelessness is fundamentally different—and, is therefore, our societal blight to reckon with, and communal plight to bear.

Why?, one might ask. Well, I think it is because “these people,” who suffer tremendously in our midst, are, in fact, our neighbors. We see and encounter them daily in our cities and communities, while simply going about our own business and lives. Unlike more remote “starving children in Palestine” or the “displaced peoples in Ukraine,” these people—these homeless people who lack the basic necessaries of life—suffer in our midst, while we attempt to make the best of our own lives in a shared vicinity. Such an acknowledgement does not serve to invalidate other forms of suffering, but instead is to simply note that in such matters, proximity does indeed determine responsibility and culpability: in other words, if it is in our power to do something about the suffering people in our midst, we ought consider how we might do so—as individuals foremost, and as a society more generally. It is only when forced to confront such a reality that we feel an appropriate sense of pity and horror at the homeless person’s very existence in such a denigrated state: a state that could be characterized as complete and unequivocal un-safety: a state where such persons are in grave danger, in both person and possession, at all times with no reprieve in sight.

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The Homeless As the Modern Excommunicated

Can you imagine what living in such a state for any period of time would do to a person?—spiritually, psychologically, morally, and emotionally speaking. The human psyche is incredibly fragile in many respects, though also surprisingly resilient in its ability to adapt and manufacture realities that serve the end of continuation. Our minds are in many ways prone to fragmentation, and the trauma of homelessness feels to me like the end of one form of life, and the beginning of another, sub-societal one: in our society, the homeless feel akin to the excommunicated of old, in that we seldom even acknowledge them except as a statistic; fewer yet, attempt to speak for them and their interests as individuals. In such a way, I feel that they represent the true lower caste in our highly-stratified and centralized—technological and consumerist—modern crony-capitalist system.

To most of us, I think the homeless remain a bit of an enigma, in that I think we do not really understand their experience of life, or their preceding descension into the abyss. Consider that in our applied-scientific materialist society,—which is, I think, ultimately aimed at the maximization of technological and methodological “innovations” that can be produced and consumed, and which are “weighed and measured” via various macroscopic statistical methods—the worst plight one may suffer (barring personal tragedies), is to become materially destitute; once the former occurs, mental, emotional, moral, and spiritual destitution invariably follow—that is, if they did not occur concomitantly or in precession.

It would seem that the vast majority of homeless people, once they descend into homelessness, rarely fully rise out owing to the sheer horror of the experience (of homelessness), and its many desecrating influences and effects; if homelessness were only a temporary, ephemeral epiphenomenon of cascading life crises that could be overcome once the proverbial dust settled, I do not believe we would see a surging homeless population as we do today. In a community where persons are constantly under siege by the scarcity of basic necessities (and other dangerous and mentally-unstable homeless and non-homeless people)—in addition to the ever-present and easily accessible, addictive and escapist, “pseudo-elixirs of despair” (in the form of various drugs and alcohol)—life expectancy for the homeless living in homeless “communities” cannot be very great; “quality of life,” or the lack thereof, is unimaginable (to normal persons) under such deleterious conditions.

Nonetheless, modern man’s conscience is able to view homelessness as a “problem” in macroeconomic and social terms, because it is en vogue to speak of man in statistical and general terms, as if each life were but variables on a chart to plot and otherwise manipulate:

The statistical method shows the facts in light of the ideal average but does not give us a picture of their empirical reality. While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way. This is particularly true of theories which are based on statistics. The distinctive thing about real facts, however, is their individuality. Not to put too fine a point on it, one could say that the real picture consists of nothing but exceptions to the rule, and that, in consequence, absolute reality had predominantly the character of irregularity.

—Carl G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self

In other words, the fundamental reality is one of individual human existence and experience, and therefore a statistical perspective is necessarily distant and abstracted from truth. But if we were to allow ourselves to see homeless people not as a monolithic socio-economic group of undesirable persons, but as individual human beings who have fallen due to specific reasons and circumstances totally unbeknownst to us, we must be prepared to face the full weight of our conscience in light of startling truths.

Homelessness is Far Easier to Slip Into Than We’d Like to Admit

Surprisingly, a cursory glance at some quantitative, statistical data about homelessness indicates that many persons deemed “homeless”—typically those who retain jobs and live temporarily without a home in vehicles or with other generous persons—are often able to stabilize their lives and recover. But for those actually living on the streets, such redemption seems elusively “beyond the pale”—for each soul, there is a proverbial point of no return.

Yet the former discussion brings me to a larger point—viz. that of a shocking realization—which is to acknowledge that homelessness in the modern world is, in actuality, incredibly easy for the most atomized and isolated people (particularly those without financial support from family or any other specific group of which they are a part) to “slip into.” Homelessness can occur from any number of concurrent life-calamities, which could hypothetically proceed as follows: e.g. the loss of employment and the inability to replace it, which is then compounded by personal and/or student loan debt, and a lack of savings/investments to draw from (in a time of crisis); death of a provider (if dependent) or a spouse (who does not have adequate life insurance—which requires money to pay for in the first place); serious injury with an accompanying massive burden of insurmountable medical bills that leave one both deeply indebted and economically non-viable; acute or chronic illness that one cannot cope with alone or pay to manage/ameliorate; untreated or poorly-managed drug/alcohol addiction or mental illness; or, any similar occurrence or combination of the aforementioned possibilities—the essential point is that there are innumerable paths and combinations that can lead to homelessness in our society.

How Might One Become Homeless?

Of course it is these latter examples (untreated and poorly-managed mental illness and/or drug and alcohol addiction) that many people wishing to absolve their conscience of guilt tend to fixate on, but I believe this may be a mistake: while it is undeniable that many homeless people are addicted to various substances and/or often suffer from various mental illnesses, I don’t think the procession of events across time is necessarily so clear. What I mean by this is that homelessness—as in living alone on the street—is likely a final destination reached after a long downward spiral of descension: in such a conception, it is difficult to note just when “addiction” or “mental illness” become pathological, necessarily leading to one’s ruination. In other words, it is worth acknowledging that many non-homeless people may suffer from such diseases just as badly (or even worse in some cases): e.g. I personally know of about a half-dozen people who have died from drug overdoses, and none of them were ever homeless to my knowledge. This discussion serves to illuminate the obvious: that drug and alcohol abuse and/or severe mental illness, do not necessitate homelessness,—i.e. as in a directly causal relationship—but are merely potential factors, in a vast sea of possible tragedies and misfortunes that could haphazardly align in a sadistic twist of Fate.

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People Without a “Safety Net” Will Always Be Threatened By the Specter of Homelessness

In the case of mental illness, which is seen by many as rampant (and by others as over-diagnosed), any trained psychologist (or therapist) will tell you that such conditions are invariably exacerbated by externally-imposed stress and wholesale life-strain placed upon the organism—which homelessness (or the threat thereof) as an experience, undoubtedly does. Thus, I find dismissals of the homeless on the grounds that such people were essentially “predestined” to live in such a state—on the grounds of their genetic (and/or circumstantial) proclivity towards descension into the moribund mires of mental illness and/or ruinating addictive predispositions—as a form of intellectual dishonesty and moral shirking. While the proximate cause of homelessness may be remote and unknowable in general terms, what follows is certain: we live in a society that induces enormous stress and strain to rise above our fellows: from the time we enter school until that time we are buried in the grave, we are encouraged to ruthlessly compete with one another—trampling others to rise above the pack, if need be.

The essential point I am attempting to illuminate is thus: a growing number of people in our society (particularly young people with lots of debt and little help from friends or family) occupy a class of people that some left-leaning sociologists have started to call the “precariat”: people who live a perpetually precarious (and anxious) existence. For such people, the horrifying specter of losing what little they have and descending into the void of homelessness may always loom large over their lives—it is an enduring threat to keep treading water for fear of disappearing beneath the surface altogether. For people who have a safety net (in the form of a supportive family or ample savings) to fall back on should they fail—perhaps even monumentally in some fortunate cases—at any point in life, there exists a disconnect and lack of understanding about those persons who do not possess such a necessary “luxury”; for great things cannot be built without great risk—but if the risk is so great that it could eventuate in homelessness, is it any wonder people have stopped trying to build something great for themselves and their loved ones? There has to be a mean struck—in terms of risk—between security and the elusive possibility of beneficence.

A Shocking Revelation: How Our Society Measures A Person’s Value

Since we conflate economic value (measured in terms of present wealth and future productive capacity) with human worth and dignity, it follows that the fallen, i.e. the homeless person, is literally viewed by our society as a person with no worth or value. Within such a conception, homeless people are either a “problem” to be managed by macroscopic interventions, or pitied (by various private charities and organizations) as feckless individuals—who are in need of the most patronizing forms of (undignified and degrading) “charity” imaginable. I posit, however, that the homeless are just like you and me—or, if such a declaration is too potent, what you or I could be if our life circumstances were somewhat or altogether different; and we—owing to our innately-human weakness and inadequacy—fell, gave into our vices, and became wholly-circumscribed by the insular world of the homeless (that, as has been said, exists within our society, but is its own wholly-separate sphere of human experience). Hence, we should see the homeless as human beings with compassion, allowing ourselves to feel the pain that our psychic defenses actively inhibit us from experiencing.

With such a conception, I am reminded of Simone Weil:

Justice consists in seeing that no harm is done to men. Whenever a man cries inwardly: ‘Why am I being hurt?’ harm is being done to him. He is often mistaken when he tries to define the harm, and why and by whom it is being inflicted on him. But the cry itself is infallible.

The other cry, which we hear so often: ‘Why has somebody else got more than I have?’, refers to rights. We must learn to distinguish between the two cries and to do all that is possible, as gently as possible, to hush the second one, with the help of a code of justice, regular tribunals, and the police . . .

But the cry ‘Why am I being hurt?’ raises quite different problems, for which the spirit of truth, justice, and love is indispensable . . .

When harm is done to a man, real evil enters into him; not merely pain and suffering, but the actual horror of evil. Just as men have the power of transmitting good to one another, so they have the power to transmit evil. One may transmit evil to a human being by flattering him or giving him comforts and pleasures; but most often men transmit evil to other men by doing them harm.

Nevertheless, eternal wisdom does not abandon the soul entirely to the mercy of chance and men’s caprice. The harm inflicted on a man by a wound from outside sharpens his thirst for the good and thus there automatically arises the possibility of a cure. If the wound is deep, the thirst is for good in its purest form. The part of the soul which cries ‘Why am I being hurt ?’ is on the deepest level and even in the most corrupt of men it remains from earliest infancy perfectly intact and totally innocent.

To maintain justice and preserve men from all harm means first of all to prevent harm being done to them. For those to whom harm has been done, it means to efface the material consequences by putting them in a place where the wound, if it is not too deep, may be cured naturally by a spell of well-being. But for those in whom the wound is a laceration of the soul it means further, and above all, to offer them good in its purest form to assuage their thirst.

—Simone Weil, “Human Personality”

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“Solving” Homelessness May Require a Paradigm Shift

Ultimately, there is quite obviously no immediate solution to the present crisis of homelessness—that is likely becoming worse, as “economic conditions” and the “job market” further deteriorate. I think, fundamentally, we need a paradigm shift about who and what the homeless are—asking ourselves uncomfortable and puzzling questions about how each individual homeless person (encountered throughout the course of routine daily life), in fact, came to be homeless. Fundamentally, such an experiential methodology—as individual inquiry via experience and deliberate thought into an issue such as homelessness—precludes citing tired, trodden macroscopic interventions—interventions which primarily serve to deflect and relocate the locus of responsibility outside our ability to act as conscious, intervening agents, on behalf of ourselves and other people. As odd as it may sound, I am asking people to consider what they could do to prevent the people they are associated with from ever becoming homeless in the first place, if anything at all; it seems to me the embarkation point when discussing such matters is in the realm of kinship,—the familial and local—wherein a buttress against the degeneration and disintegration that is homelessness could be formed and strengthened.

I do believe the reestablishment of various formal and informal, public and private institutions could also help alleviate the effects,—helping to mitigate and soothe—but ultimately, I think what is needed is a reifying of humane values—values which could help to gradually restructure the aims our society from the bottom-up, organically. For instance, consider: if we are to be true Americans, perhaps we should evaluate to what extent we are deviating from our ideals and founding principles: I leave such ponderings to the reader. In all, such a large, systemic problem cannot be solved by continually treating downstream symptoms and effects: the goal should be to prevent homelessness from afflicting our communities (like the epidemic it is) in the first place.

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The Bottom Line

Hence, I am incredibly dubious about simply “throwing money” and resources at the problem by funding various NGO organizations and charities, whose institutional interests may preclude them from genuinely seeking to “solve” (or greatly diminish) homelessness—because its solvency would be against their own personal interest, i.e. putting themselves out of a job (in an economy which does not have enough good, sustaining jobs). Donating money to “the experts” to “solve” problems for us, in fact, is a great cancer in our society: for in so doing, we absolve our conscience of not taking decisive action in those spheres wherein we may actually intervene in the lives of real, embodied people (who live in our locale). In fact, we see such a “principle” play out all over the modern economy; for instance, through crowd-funding and voluntary contributions to “creators” through platforms like Patreon—where people donate money to live vicariously through people who are actually doing the work, or seeming to do so; from afar, who would, or could, know the difference?

And so, I have arrived at a startling observation about our present-day world: we live in a society which tends to believe, if implicitly by our actions and inaction, there is an amelioration for every ill (though there quite obviously is not)—and that if there is, it most often comes in the form of a good or service that may be purchased as a consumer product; hence, when politicians and constituents alike talk in the “public sphere” of “solving” various plights—such as that of the perceived “crisis in education” which centers around our schools, or that of a surging homeless population—it is most often expressed as a “lack of resources” or “funding.” Within such an assumption, it is implicitly asserted that if the “funding” were to simply increase, the “problem” would go away or be greatly diminished—as if matters pertaining to human life were a binary system of directly-correlable variables. But reality for human beings as we but glimpse it, is incredibly complex, convoluted, and dynamic; as a result, our “solutions” very seldom have the desired, projected effect. Thus it is as follows: funding without a proper conception of reality—on which hinges, applicative direction—is, itself, cancerous: you can “fund” a fire with gasoline and it will surely grow, not extinguish. There is, therefore, no guarantee that adding “resources” to a likely misunderstood problem, would not do precisely the opposite: i.e. make the problem worse.

Hence, in the case of homelessness in the highly-centralized present—where many millions of individuals feel less an agent and more a byproduct of circumstance—a real solution will not come easily or expediently: real solutions almost never materialize in such a way. Thus, I might suggest that one of the first steps we can take is simply recalibrating our understanding of the issue, acknowledging that we do not, in fact, genuinely understand the proliferation of homelessness in recent decades. It seems to me that one of the chief problems with demoralized peoples, such as the homeless, is that they are disposed to believing they are worthless—irredeemably so, I might think. From such a vista, what if we were to simply tell the decent homeless writ large—i.e. those who are (or would) sincerely seeking help—something along the lines of, “by virtue of your humanity, you are deserving of our empathy, grace, and compassion in the form of an interested intervention.” It seems to me such efforts would be far more potent if they were grounded in something much more permanent (and lasting) than temporary housing and a meal ticket for today.

Integrating the Ideal With the Real

But we also cannot be naïve about who or what the homeless are: many among their ranks indeed are severely mentally ill, and are, therefore, likely very dangerous—and whether or not such mental maladies precipitated their homelessness is, practically-speaking, immaterial. We therefore (as a society) cannot forcibly integrate the world of the homeless into ours: citizens not only deserve, but require, that third-spaces such as parks remain safe and accessible for their own flourishing. But to acknowledge that there must be protections and interventions to safeguard not only the rights, but also the needs of individuals living within each disparate world, is in no way inhumane; but instead, such a recognition may be the first step towards a potential solution—boundaries to bring about a bridging of worlds, if you will.

To deal with the homeless properly, they must be seen as what they are—or, more aptly, who they are: individual human beings, like you and me—who, for whatever particular reason(s), have fallen into the pits of hell on earth; such people should therefore be viewed less a nuisance or plague descended, and more as a reflection of our failures as a highly-organized society to prevent many hundreds of thousands of individuals at any given time from “falling through the cracks.”

Expressing such sentiments, I am again reminded of Simone Weil:

The fact that a human being possesses an eternal destiny imposes only one obligation: respect. The obligation is only performed if the respect is effectively expressed in a real, not a fictitious, way; and this can only be done through the medium of Man’s earthly needs.

On this point, the human conscience has never varied. Thousands of years ago, the Egyptians believed that no soul could justify itself after death unless it could say: ‘I have never let anyone suffer from hunger.’ All Christians know they are liable to hear Christ himself say to them one day: ‘ I was hungered, and ye gave me no meat.’ Everyone looks on progress as being, in the first place, a transition to a state of human society in which people will not suffer from hunger. To no matter whom the question may be put in general terms, nobody is of the opinion that any man is innocent if, possessing food himself in abundance and finding someone on his doorstep three parts dead from hunger, he brushes past without giving him anything.

So it is an eternal obligation towards the human being not to let him suffer from hunger when one has the chance of coming to his assistance. This obligation being the most obvious of all, it can serve as a model on which to draw up the list of eternal duties towards each human being. In order to be absolutely correctly made out, this list ought to proceed from the example just given by way of analogy. Consequently, the list of obligations towards the human being should correspond to the list of such human needs as are vital, analogous to hunger.

Among such needs, there are some which are physical, like hunger itself. They are fairly easy to enumerate. They are concerned with protection against violence, housing, clothing, heating, hygiene and medical attention in case of illness. There are others which have no connection with the physical side of life, but are concerned with its moral side. Like the former, however, they are earthly, and are not directly related, so far as our intelligence is able to perceive, to the eternal destiny of Man. They form, like our physical needs, a necessary condition of our life on this earth. Which means to say that if they are not satisfied, we fall little by little into a state more or less resembling death, more or less akin to a purely vegetative existence.

They are much more difficult to recognize and to enumerate than are the needs of the body. But everyone recognizes that they exist. All the different forms of cruelty which a conqueror can exercise over a subject population, such as massacre, mutilation, organized famine, enslavement or large-scale deportation, are generally considered to be measures of a like description, even though a man’s liberty or his native land are not physical necessities. Everyone knows that there are forms of cruelty which can injure a man’s life without injuring his body. They are such as deprive him of a certain form of food necessary to the life of the soul.

Obligations, whether unconditional or relative, eternal or changing, direct or indirect with regard to human affairs, all stem, without exception, from the vital needs of the human being.

—Simone Weil, “The Needs of the Soul”

Closing Remarks

Seen in such a light, the staff at the Ambassador Hotel indeed acted properly: it is not their job to solve the world’s ills, but to protect the hotel, its guests, and future business interests for the entity which employs them to do so. Thus, to simply let the unsavory bits of the homeless population run amok as many (Democratic) cities do—letting them squat on public property, taking over whole public parks designed to fulfill a community’s need for third-space recreation—is not only absurd and unjust to its constituents, but also does nothing to rehabilitate existing homeless people, nor prevent additional “precarious” people from themselves becoming homeless.

In fact, the goal should be to initially bridge the gap between the two worlds, before the barriers can then be blended and thereafter dissolved; our goal should be to eliminate the “homeless population” as a socio-economic group capable of being statistically-measured (owing to its commonality and vastness), but I highly doubt we can ever prevent individual persons from sometimes becoming homeless. Thus, I am apt to conclude there will always be some homeless people in an imperfect world such as this; but like most things, such a discussion (as we have been having) is a matter of scale, scope, and proportion—and at present, it is very obvious to all but the willingly-ignorant, that the current social framework of society is lacking (in such a respect) to a startling degree. Hence there are more homeless people in modern America today than ever before. It is our responsibility as individual human beings to recognize and consider the essential humanity of “the least among us,”—for if you don’t, who will?

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The Present Situation

These happenings have occurred concomitantly with the second restoration and reopening of the RMS Queen Mary Museum—Britain’s great (interwar and post-war) flagship, who has recently been restored again, and now rests heartily in Long Beach, California; Such a thing feels to me, an American, as a bastardization of justice: for the SS United States was perhaps, technologically speaking, the greatest ocean liner of all time: the final form of an evolutionary development that was a bit too late to be fully appreciated; the Big U is much like an Iowa-class battleship—of which all four are preserved—in this regard: incomprehensibly powerful and effective at fulfilling a somewhat obsolete design ethic, but remarkably majestic nonetheless. Unlike the Iowas, however, the United States showed what mid-twentieth century American industry and engineering could accomplish in a peacetime, civilian capacity.

Tragically, she will soon languish in serene solitude, forever out of view (as she has been for some time), at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. Of course, such a glancing comparison (as the one made above) does not appreciate that the Queen Mary was saved at a time when the age of the ocean liner had only recently subsided (1967); consequently, nostalgia and appreciation for man’s final triumph over the sea, made tangibly manifest via the trans-oceanic “superliner,”—which not only moved tens of millions of travelers and immigrants all over the globe over the course of the first six decades1 of the twentieth century, but also deployed and ferried home, millions of the free world’s troops during both World Wars—was much more relevant and intelligible (on a personal level) than it is today; I am, however, heartened by what I perceive to be a great upwelling of public support and sentiment for the ship’s preservation as a museum in Brooklyn, NY—where free, indefinite dockage has been secured.

The Impact of an Icon Cannot Be Quantifiably Measured

When we don’t appreciate or dedicate time to understand the past, we lose sight of historical reality and ourselves: for we are a continuation of the past—we remain a continuity of our ancestors, however fragmentary and broken that dissolving link may now be. As such, there are many armchair critics who believe the SS United States is simply the rusting hulk of a mid-century cruise ship—who fail to understand and appreciate both the technological and socio-cultural significance of the former, “ship of state”2 ocean liner; and the simple rattling off of impressive facts about the Big U's size, speed, fire-proofing, and all-aluminum superstructure do little to convey her true impact: an impact that waned as time went on, no doubt, but one that flowed from a place of great hope and excitement—conviction and common purpose—when she was christened before a crowd of approximately 30,000 spectators (and approximately 500,000 people, including television viewers).3

The launching and christening of the United States.

To put it succinctly, the SS United States was the last superliner to be conceived and executed while the age of the liner and seagoing transportation—though waning—was still under the light of day: the same cannot be said of the SS France, a great liner in her own right who served a long and dignified career. Modern people, who live in the generic jet-age of standardized plane models and procedures, unpleasant and cramped quarters—and a generalized sense that the adventure begins upon arrival—have much difficulty in appreciating what ocean-bound travel on the great liners of the past century was like. For the purpose of understanding the camaraderie and atmosphere—even magic—of shipboard travel in a bygone age, I cannot recommend enough, The Only Way to Cross, by John Maxtone-Graham.

One of the vital social functions that ships like the SS United States served was the bringing together from all walks of life, disparate people—which had the particular function of humanizing dignitaries, celebrities, and executive officers like the captain. On a ship, all passengers are functionally equal, no matter how much they had paid for their lodgings and shipboard amenities: i.e. all are subject to the captain’s orders and command. Thus, it was not uncommon for regular, hard-working professionals on holiday to meet and mingle with celebrities like Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Hope, John Wayne, Joan Crawford, and JFK (before becoming president)—even presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower traveled on the SS United States, and frequently mingled with their subjects! Thus, the atmosphere of an ocean liner was far different than that of modern modes of travel and transportation: the whole passage inadvertently became an experience unto itself, imprinting itself on the memory of those who sailed on her (much like a military flag ship).

Conceiving the SS United States as the Capstone of Liner Historical Development

Conceiving of and contextualizing, the SS United States as America’s sole “superliner” requires an understanding of the difficulty that the North Atlantic presented to Western Man for centuries—truly hearkening to the first Europeans who stumbled across this “New World” by way of sailing ship: before the airplane, the only means of transport to worlds oceans away was by ship: first through sail—which lasted many centuries and spanned dozens of generations of sailing ship; then through the bastard-marriage of paddle-wheel steamer to composite sailing ship.4 But by the mid-19th century—with the advent of the steam engine (which spurred an industrial revolution)—things were rapidly changing. When the screw propeller and reciprocating steam engine were eventually invented, ships began to grow exponentially in size, speed, tonnage, and safety in ways deemed hitherto unimaginable.

And yet, almost a century after the launch of the levianthic, SS Great Eastern—a failed, 692’ behemoth powered by steam and iron, that represented a radical concept at the time—the SS United States may very well have perfected the form of the ocean liner. That is to say, she featured the proper combination of not only grace, beauty, and comfortable appointments, but also a level of size, speed, and safety that had never been married so perfectly before. For instance, she was the first ship that had finally solved the age-old problem of fire at sea; of note: it was fire that took the SS Normandie when she was still in the luster of youth. Unlike the ships that had come before, the SS United States’s interior was furnished with compartmentalized spaces featuring fully flame-retardant materials (and heaps of heat-insulating and fire-blockading asbestos); even the RMS Queen Mary, despite her nearly-impeccable record, cannot say such a thing about her construction methodology and materials; and it was fire—however dubious the circumstances—which consumed the latter’s (slightly-superior and more modern) sister ship: RMS Queen Elizabeth. Suffice it to say, the Big U was second-to-none in all of the most significant ways a liner could be measured i.e. safety, speed, affordability, and passenger comfort; if those were her only virtues, such as great ship would be worthy of preservation, but there is more.

The story of the SS United States began during World War II, when the USA realized the dearth of large ocean liners at its disposal for moving troops. Off the top of my head, I can really only think of one substantial liner used as a troop ship by the US Navy: the USS West Point, i.e. the SS America.5 Another (military troop ship) was going to be made of the SS Normandie, but alas it was not to be, as the Normandie—then the greatest and most lavish liner ever conceived and executed—caught on fire,6 whilst being outfit and repatriated as American troopship USS Lafayette, in New York Harbor. Because of the ongoing war—which had taken the nation of France off the world stage (except as a Nazi satellite and buffer state)—the loss of the SS Normandie wasn’t fully felt or appreciated at the time.

“Ships of State”: A Nation Without Liners is a Nation Without Troopships

As a result, America had to rely heavily on British shipping,—notably the RMS Queen Mary, RMS Queen Elizabeth, and RMS Aquitania—slow military transports, and military capital ships to deploy and retrieve its troops across the globe. Thus, the United States government saw the merit in subsidizing a truly world-class liner (like the British government had done for decades through the “Board of Trade,” starting with RMS Mauretania and Lusitania), which could be requisitioned as a troop ship by government decree if the need ever arose (it didn’t); hence, the SS United States was born in 1946—at least in ideation.

The privilege of designing the new ship was given to legendary American ship designer, William Francis Gibbs, who had previously designed many ships for the United States Lines, including the USL’s (at the time) current flagship, SS America. Though similar in appearance, the SS United States is a far cry from a simple upsize of the SS America; rather, the Big U is an evolutionary leap beyond the America’s design, which took the latter’s compartmentalization and fire safety standards even further, and married it to world-class engineering in terms of size, speed, and exotic materials.7

Resultantly, the Big U was lovingly and painstakingly conceived and executed at the behest of Gibbs; the ship became his ultimate creative act and endeavor: the resulting achievement of a lifetime dedicated to maritime duty, service, and ingenuity; it was as thought all of the lessons Gibbs had previously learned—about safety at sea, hull formation and design, propulsion systems, passenger accommodations, etc.—would come to be applied within the canvas of the SS United States project; such an evolutionary ship proved revolutionary: on her first crossing each way in 1952, the Big U won the Blue Riband8 for her nation: an honor that she will (likely) never relinquish. Until the SS United States reclaimed the award, an American ship had not garnered the award for an entire century: dozens of ships and numerous nations had won (and held) the Blue Riband since SS Arctic and SS Baltic had claimed it for the United States in 1852 and 1854, respectively. After the excitement of the Blue Riband, the Big U would go on to have a great and reliable, if unremarkable, career.

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Born in a Waning Age

The Big U’s proprietor—i.e. the private, but publicly subsidized, United States Lines—operated her in tandem with running mate, SS America. Of note to readers at the present moment: the SS America—America’s original flagship—also met an inglorious, ignominious end: being broken to pieces on the rocks off an island in the Canary Islands, after she broke loose during a failed towing attempt in 1994; it would seem that in the end, the ocean always wins, taking back from man, his momentary victories over nature and her multitudinous forces.

Contemporary critics of the United States’s preservation as a museum-ship frequently like to point out that because she came about at a time when the world was in transition, she is therefore (somehow) less important than ships like the Queen Mary. I am not sure I follow such a line of reasoning, as no ship has ever borne the name of the United States so proudly, boldly, or magnanimously; when it comes to machines purposed for transportation, no news (of war or incident) is usually good news: just ask Boeing as of late—or, more aptly, the defunct White Star Line, who amalgamated into Cunard, never having fully recovered its reputation from titanic infamy.

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And to such an end of safe, effectual transport—which is the only true “end” for modes of transportation—the United States (with credit owed to the dutiful service of her captains and crew), nobly performed the duties with which she was tasked: it is not her fault that the jet would come to supersede the ocean liner; nor is it her fault that she was too late for WWII (and that she had the pleasure of operating at a leisured time, of tense and tenuous, mid-century peace, that ended up holding).

Further, owing to the military interest in the ship, the technological aspects of the ship’s design were kept a closely-guarded, classified state secret until after her service life had concluded.9 As a result of such a partnership between public and private interests, details on the SS United States propulsion and other electro-mechanical systems remained scant for a long while—at least compared to other contemporary liners. I mention all of this to acknowledge that such details being classified has tremendously hindered efforts to repurpose or conserve the ship; until at least 1978, the United States government—under the auspices of the United States Maritime Administration—expressly forbade the ship being sold to a foreign power or agent (or the operation of the ship under a foreign flag), which was long enough to thwart a 1976 attempt to acquire and repurpose the ship by Norwegian Cruise Lines, who ultimately chose to purchase the similar SS France instead—rebranding her the SS Norway.

A 990 Ft. Picture: What it Means to Neglect the Preservation of the Past

Seeing such great ships—once icons of their respective nations, who received such triumphant fanfare by millions of doting spectators upon arrival in New York Harbor—be jet-tisoned to an early grave (as was the case with the SS United States in 1969), neatly demonstrates how short-sighted and ephemeral most material pursuits are in actuality—no matter how noble and significant they may have seemed at the time; and yet, it is far more difficult to maintain a necessary understanding and appreciation of the past without such non-fungible links to our common cultural past, from which we have emanated and been given life.

But in all this we should note that great people and great things are created with “meraki”10 by people; such material things, therefore, deserve to be remembered at least—preserved if (and when) possible. I am not sure where this leaves the Big U, but ultimately: material things matter because the people who built them mattered—their lives, their dignity, their work, their loving creations. The former is not merely to state that if we want to matter to the people of the future—which for many good, contemporary concerns, they too may forsake and cast off our many good (and wayward) works—that we ought care for (and thus preserve) certain tangible achievements of the past, but also to acknowledge that doing so is part of our uniquely human duty, to link the past to the present through synthesis of artifacts and narrative.

To not do so, is to shirk our duty to link the past to the present, and the present to the future. “Legacy” is a strange concept and one that is mostly absent from our present culture, which almost always tends to forsake the old for the new—the change endemic in such an incessant “religion of progress,” fails to preserve even the “good” parts of the past. Everywhere in America over the past century, our history—and therefore the many good, beautiful, and ingenious creations of our ancestors—has been forsaken through a process of razing and remaking, in a new sterile (and sprawling suburban) conception. If we hope to preserve our country, we must preserve tangible links to our past—particularly ones as triumphant and beneficent as the SS United States: a great icon and symbol of America at her best; she presents in plain sight, what we could—as a nation—once more aspire towards.

End Game: What All of This Means for Us—I.e. for Our Material Creations and Pursuits to Turn Out to be Meaningless in the End

But that is only one side of the token: for in the end, I don’t think a simple return to the soil of the land and sand of the seafloor is a satisfactory aim for our species. And so, in light of such wanton disregard for the great material achievements of organized industry in the past, I must (rhetorically) ask Gibbs and others: was it worth it? Or, should we all aim to spend our time pursuing things that may end up to be more everlasting than the creation of the greatest (American) passenger ship of all time?—on whose hull plates and turbines, once rested the hopes and aspirations of a mighty nation in its Belle Epoque of cultural cohesion, economic prosperity, and military and industrial might.

Such discussion raise a larger notion about the endless march of technological progress and its propensity to trample the people who make such a ceaseless pursuit possible—while later callously and flippantly, discarding their loving creations as abject scrap material: only fit to be used as an artificial reef. Disregard of the significance of past machines and edifices has become so rampant, that once it is deemed that “usefulness” has been fully expunged—or a “more efficient” alternative exists—we are told that what was once revolutionary, now has no practical use, meaning it should be destroyed or otherwise discarded: such a principle, I think, defines the disposable nature of American “consumer culture.” Ceaseless “innovation” for its own sake eventuates in swift discard—and with such swiftness, people in our society (who spend their lives building such machines) often live to see the death of the great feat they had personally helped achieve: such a phenomenon must be incredibly disheartening and destabilizing to those people. Why don’t we, as Americans, attempt to create lasting, permanent things anymore?

That, I think, is the lesson that of the SS United States: i.e. that when something great and momentous is pursued and created by humans, no one ever asks how it will end; but all things, peoples, and nations must end: such entropy is a “first principle” of the universe; and seeing such vacuous values—i.e. that of a nation wholly dedicated to short-sighted material pursuits (as in the case of America)—laid bare by the tangible demise of an achievement I personally—for many reasons—value greatly, is yet another reminder that life is short and civilization is incredibly transient and frail. Time is the true currency of life and most real history is never recorded: how we spend the time in our individual lives is, therefore, what matters most. And while I would nonetheless love to see the Big U preserved for posterity, perhaps our collective achievements are not so great as we have come to think: our successors never seem to think so, at least.

There is Still Time to be Hopeful: She is Not Yet Lost

To survive and remain whole (rather than loosely-affiliated fragments), a nation needs a culture to be proud of and inspired by: to aspire to great heights, one must be inspired. To have a functioning culture, thusly requires a mythology; and what does the SS United States represent for us, but a tangible, mythological link (however momentary) to the past?—a link which when severed, is seldom if ever, duly duplicated: it is for these reasons the Big U—our ship—is not only indispensable, but irreplaceable: the social, political, and economic factors that made the achievement of her creation possible will, in all likelihood, never coalesce together again. Ergo once she is gone, she is gone—and all others of her kind (excepting the Queen Mary) are already gone. To sink her and not save her is to forsake our duty to our collective cultural myth—our ethos as a nation, on which our survival and flourishing hinge.

Superliner United States: At Your Service!

But nonetheless, what happens next—in the coming weeks and months—will come to define us and our age: will we dispense with a ship once deemed indispensable and vital to American predominance and flourishing?—a ship that is, perhaps, the greatest remaining icon of post-war, mid-century Americana at her best and strongest. Or, will we do right by our ancestors and save their momentous ship?—one that so many proudly toiled and served on—which has become our “burden” to either persevere or dispense with. To me, the choice is obvious, but this is a question of pecuniary means and an often short-sighted public will; I am hopeful, however: as the tide of public opinion seems to be changing. For instance, a coalition in New York has formed and appears to be taking legal action.

What will you do to help save the SS United States before it is truly too late?

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Endnotes

But what I want to talk about today is something very different: the virtues of tech (rather than belaboring its multitude of well-established vices). The seemingly absurd irony of discussing the virtues of an interconnected apparatus—upon which we are now so dependent, and which has been largely used as a tool for large-scale social control (and to extort as much money and data from the consumer as possible), is not lost on me—though I believe, if one allows deeper analysis, the truth will present itself as more confounding, muddy, and hazy (as it always tends to do).

Disenchanted With a Disenchanted World

My disenchantment with tech was precipitated by some of the formative and foundational books I read regarding the dangers of tech and technological enslavement: a very real specter that haunts us thus; such books included: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Science, Liberty and Peace, George Orwell’s 1984, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter, C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man, F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and The Constitution of Liberty, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Over Soul and Self-Reliance, and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Anti-Education Lectures. I am sure I am missing other well-reasoned and thoughtful accounts, which have proven more true than false.

Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death: where he argued in essence, everything once seen as important and taken seriously, had turned into “show business,” i.e. menial entertainment.

Some central ideas (from the books listed above) that have stuck with me include the notion that nothing is gained without “something” else being lost: i.e. there is no advancement in human technology without something else—usually a social intangibility, or skilled craft related to production and “the division of labor”—being lost to posterity or irrevocably changed; I still find such an idea compelling and at least mostly true: for instance, before the advent of commercial farming and refrigeration, most of any given population had to be farmers—whether they wished so or not was irrelevant. Thus, we can wax poetic about the lost idyll “agrarian way”—and such one-sided nostalgic panegyrics are surely potent, and are filled with genuine humane concerns and compelling arguments about how simplicity for simplicity’s sake is the best mode of life for the human being—but postmodern man has something in abundance that none before have: choice, in terms of life mode and methodology—if only on the surface of things. To whatever extent postmodern men have choice in terms of how to live and what to live for, it is both a blessing and a curse in that it is extremely liberating—so much so, that such a liberation may in fact be a burden itself.1

Another idea, advented by Postman—who was drawing from Huxley and Thoreau—is the definition of technology, which is a contrived device or process invented by humanity, through the application of science, which serves no real purpose, in that it doesn’t “solve” any real or apparent problem. Postman then compared, through juxtaposition, “tools” to “technologies,” wherein the former, unlike the latter, was designed with a specific purpose in mind—and was therefore, not extraneous and superfluous (in that it would distract the individual from serious things through its powerful and numbing analgesic properties), but integral to human advancement and progress; technology then, is the inventing of a device or process that serves no real human purpose: therefore, in pursuing technological advancement, human beings must walk a “tight rope,” ensuring that they do not mar the world with new forms of an old Frankensteinian problem: that is, heedless and needless technologies created for their own vain sake. In my estimation, AI would probably fit into the aforementioned category, but I also see how it is a powerful tool that can be used to automate monotonous and laborious tasks.

And yet, I recently—whilst hibernating during an unusually cold winter—have felt an undue desire to start playing video games again. Only equipped with my work and writing computer—a 13" M1 MacBook Air, which is a miraculous fanless device (that is surprisingly powerful yet so sleek and well-made)—I have been playing a few games, including an old childhood favorite2 of mine: the absolute masterpiece of an imaginative world that is Myst, which I beat in the span of a couple of days (with some help). For those who don’t know, Myst is a point-and-click adventure game that was originally released in 1993; at the time, it was a technological marvel that used pre-rendered still images packed with uncanny detail (at a time when most video games used blocky 3D graphics and 8-bit colors).

Before Myst, video games used 2D-sprites and simplistic 8-bit color palettes.

The History of Myst: How It Changed Video Games Forever & Defined a Genre

Video explaining the revolutionary technical and vision of Myst. HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

Over the years, Myst has been reimagined and re-released multiple times by indie developer, Cyan Studios (who is a wonderful and ethical company that has never sold out to a big development studio), in numerous iterations—including RealMyst in 2000 and RealMyst Masterpiece Edition in 2014—culminating in the 2021 edition of Myst which is a full remake, where the game was fully remade in the Unreal Engine (with real-time rendering of a fully 3D world) and released on Mac, PC, and Linux; the latest version, can also be played in miraculous VR which I have tried, but did not prefer (due to motion sickness); I have found the 2021 edition of the game to be as immersive, clever, rich, detailed, challenging, and compelling as almost any great work of literature I have read—well, perhaps excepting Dostoevsky.

While playing games like Myst, I find myself constantly thinking—prodding, deliberating, and otherwise perusing a world which admittedly is not real and does not “exist,” but which is so well-crafted that it inspires a deep awe: a desire to experience everything the world has to teach to better know it and its many secrets. The world of Myst has its own ethos—its own religions and mythological notions; underlying all adornments are deep philosophical assumptions and premises. In such a resonant way, it is like experiencing a fantasy world featured in a great work of literature like The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings; it is much more a world that was painstakingly created with great care, ingenuity and creativity, than a commercial consumer entertainment product: and it is precisely in this way, that I find Myst to share much more in common with great literature than a mindless MMO video game (of which there are a multitude).

Since finishing Myst, I have begun playing the 2024 edition of Riven: the even better remake of the sequel to Myst. Whereas Myst featured numerous worlds within its game-world, Riven features different islands, all part of a dying world, where fissures to deep, empty cosmic space (called the “starry expanse”), have opened up, further underlying an assumption that the world itself will soon tear itself apart and perish; Riven ensues within this pertinent and apocalyptic, time-sensitive atmosphere. Without spoiling the plot, the player is transported to the world of Riven, where—like Myst—he or she (with little direction) must solve innumerable riddles and puzzles, while attempting to piece together an intelligible narrative to make sense of the seemingly nonsensical; to explicate whilst experiencing—as if the whole “game” were but a grand exploration of a grand idea within the brain of the world’s author, who eons ago, wrote the world into existence with his pen—the decay of world which escapes and supersedes conscious apprehension. In Riven, most of the joy simply comes from exploring: simply being—taking time to see and discover what underlying motifs and universal realities the represented game-world has to teach us: about ourselves, our human nature, and by extension: our world.

There are other games (or genres of game) I play (or have played) that have similar, if adjacent, benefits:

• Flight simulators—particularly World War II combat flight simulators. My current favorite of which, is the IL-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles series, which dazzles in virtual reality, where I frequently play online with other players; in fact, I have been a member of numerous virtual squadrons, where I have had the opportunity to meet, befriend, and form a virtual community with people whom I would likely never have had the pleasure of meeting in real life, owing to geographical realities. A game like IL-2 allows one to experience the challenge and thrill of air combat in an unreal, virtual world that has been created with parameters based on historical realities and the limitations of physics, both of which make mastery of such a pursuit difficult yet extremely rewarding in a way that doesn’t feel cheap, easy, or readily accessible; the former is particularly so, when battling online against seasoned players, with no navigational aids or external views (hence the need to learn and master “dead reckoning”) and realistic manual engine management. In fact, I have a hobby YouTube Channel dedicated to my exploits and shenanigans in IL-2, called “Virtual Warbirds.”

  IL-2: Great Battles | The Pony Express: P-51 Video Journal | Filmed on Combat Box (December '23)

• Historical fiction—usually in the form of vast, “open world” games: such games that I have experienced and been enriched by include: Kingdom Come: Deliverance (KCD), a Medieval first-person RPG (role-playing game) set in 15th century Bohemia: a world which I could surely not experience otherwise. KCD is a beautiful and masterfully-created world that is worth exploring and has a lot to teach via experiential gameplay and an included, in-game encyclopedia, which is packed chock-full with historically-accurate information. Like Myst, KCD was lovingly created by an indie (independent) studio that is based in modern-day Germany—near the very regions featured in the game, in fact. Thus, to create the game-world, Warhorse Studios had to conduct extensive historical and biographical research on the place and time featured.

  

  Renaissance Venezia in ACII.

  

  Renaissance Firenze in ACII.

  

  Notre Dame in AC: Unity. Of note: Ubisoft’s model of the iconic and renowned cathedral was so detailed that it was used in the reconstruction efforts.

  

  The beautiful Sasau Monastery featured in Kingdom Come: Deliverance.

  Similarly, I have found immense value in exploring the worlds of the Assassin’s Creed series (until recent releases which have increasingly felt like a shameless Ubisoft cash grab), which are historical fiction games set in places like Renaissance Italy, Revolutionary America and France, Ptolemaic Egypt, and Hellenic Greece. Through the lens of games like Assassin’s Creed and Kingdom Come, I have realized the truth endemic in one of the “first principles” I was taught as a history major many years ago: namely, that the past is, itself, like a “foreign country that defies comprehension” through a myopic, modern lens; as such, seeing and experiencing the past—which can never be truly done through heady book-learning (or visual methods such as these)—as it might have been, gives many of these games (and similar quality games like the ones mentioned) much value. As a result, I find them to be worthy creations that contribute to human flourishing; that is, in so far as one does not become wholly absorbed or consumed by their unreal worlds: for still, we must live in the here-and-now, despite whatever proclivities we may possess towards virtual worlds—whether they be constructed post-hoc in the imagination by virtue of text printed on a page, or rendered in the full glory of subtly variegated color and three dimensional polygonal space—on one of our many miraculous “displays3,” which are capable of breathing idea-worlds into an uncanny, yet unreal, “existence.”

• Virtual museums: the first of which that comes to mind is Titanic: Honor and Glory, made by another indie developer, viz. Vintage Digital Revival, in the Unreal Engine. For those who don’t know, the entire RMS Titanic is being recreated in glorious 3D graphics (along with its berthing port-city of Southhampton, England). The game is currently under development, but a tech demo is available for free to download (linked below). Ocean liners have long intrigued me4 and inspired nostalgia for a bygone, idyllic age of comfortable, affordable, luxurious, and timely ocean travel—especially in an age like ours, where air travel is increasingly miserable. The historical ship—brought to life in the game—is beautiful and impressive beyond mere words: it is an achievement (and folly5, perhaps) that defies comprehension in an age whose chief values are cost-efficiency and expedience. Witnessing the ship’s splendor within the game, has been—on numerous occasions—enough to bring tears to my eyes at the resulting splendor of an organized and dedicated, passionate labor that is difficult to even conceive of in our century.

Titanic: Honor and Glory Demo 401 v2.1 (Full Tour)

Titanic’s first-class “Grand Staircase” in the free “Demo 401.”

If you want to try it for yourself, you can download it below for free:

Demo 401 (Titanic’s Harland and Wolf Yard Number while under construction) download: Download page.

And there are innumerable other technological marvels that are worth exploring and noting, but lay beyond the pale of this inquiry. But, I must note a few other (digital) favorites of mine that captivate and elevate the embodied soul and mind:

• Film which has captivated and dazzled the hearts and minds of men far and wide; digital video, in particular, has afforded nearly anyone (with a few thousand dollars and drive) the opportunity to become a professional-level filmmaker (and therefore a master storyteller).

• Digital music: being able to listen to nearly any song or piece of music ever conceived is a gift that we take for granted each day, but it would have been unimaginable as recent as fifty years ago. Further, electronic music—e.g. chill step, binaural beats, dubstep, etc.—can be very beautiful; and it is worth noting, that programs which allow for the easy creation of new music are incredibly valuable and good. Like digital video, digital music has somewhat decentralized the production of music—which has consequently disempowered the “gatekeepers” of old (although it has also introduced some new issues regarding artist compensation and DRM (digital rights management).

• E-readers with e-ink displays (which are easy on the eyes, like paper) allow for one to keep an entire library—including highlights and notes—in a device the size of one book, allowing for chronicled study that would have required great wealth (space and a ton of books) in even the recent past; with (backed-up) e-readers, one no longer has to dread books getting lost, burnt, or turned back into wood pulp.6

New and Old Mediums: Humans Always Resist Change (for better and worse).

With the aforementioned masterpieces in mind, I postulate that good games (or even well-made documentaries and films) are but a new outlet—a new medium for human creativity to utilize as its canvas. Hence, I posit that a creation being proffered in a new and innovative form, does not make such creations inherently less than those mediums which came before—though it is worth noting, that within the economic confines of our consumer-driven culture, they frequently are, by virtue of “market factors.” Yet, for instance, there was a time when writing (to express information and ideas) was new and innovative—and of course, stodgy orators like Socrates feared that such a development would undermine the existing, rhetorical spoken word: and to his credit, he was correct: no one gives six hour orations by memory any longer—and we don’t have to bear such (likely) artifices of sophistic window-dressing; yet this, i.e. the advent and promulgation of the written word, has been to humanity’s immense benefit.

Like anything else, the principle I am here suggesting is about using conscious discernment to choose wisely: what we feed ourselves and indulge—literally and figuratively—is who (or what) we will likely become: for we are malleable and adaptive creatures—though it is worth noting, we are also resilient (at least in terms of potentiality). For instance, in our “techtopia,” we need to be especially mindful about the ways in which we use our devices: of course obsessive social media usage is bad for everyone—most notably teenage girls (who are most apt to overindulge on mindless, vapid and insidiously vain reels); of course porn—including new forms like VR and AI-generated “girlfriends”—is sickening our hearts, minds, and souls—particularly those of teenage boys; of course there are grave dangers present on the Internet, particularly in terms of its propensity to endow scammers and grifters with the best “platform” ever conceived for such charlatanism; similarly, verifying information—particularly with the advent of generative AI—is increasingly difficult and requires more intuitive judgment than ever, since mass misinformation and disinformation has proliferated; and yet, on the other side of the token, the mass dissemination of information of the Internet has led to a great distrust of authority, and I think this a positive (if disruptive) development and direct causal effect of the “information age.”

And yet, I must ask: at present, do the net benefits outweigh the social costs? I am apt to conclude, probably not—but also must note: we live on an individual level—therefore, we must make the best of whatever circumstances present themselves to us over the course of a lifespan: that is the essential task of human flourishing: i.e. an adaptive and expansive malleability, that makes us increasingly better and stronger and more self-reliant. In all, technology (particularly the personal computer with graphical capabilities) endows us—through a wondrous power of advanced calculation at our “beck and call”—with a tool of profound capacity, that may be used in a twofold manner: namely, for exploration and creation; if we instead use it to indulge, delude, soothe, and otherwise anesthetize—wherein we choose to eschew its virtuous powers, instead wallowing in its entrapping mires—who do we have to blame but ourselves? And so, while I don’t believe human beings to be capable of skillfully navigating a sea boundless choice in general terms, on an individual level, there is potentiality for skillful and adept prowess, as it applies to using technology without being consumed by its sirenous allurements.

When we apply such gifted powers to ill ends, and then subsequently blame “IT (Information Technology),” as if IT were the “thing itself”; to do such thing is, for examples, akin to blaming all food for the ultra-processed junk food which fattens and sickens us thus; or, similarly: to blame “smut” for the degradation of the written word—where it is seldom noted that, if it weren’t electively-indulged, it would cease to exist (owing to economic, market factors😉). All of this leads to the conclusion that we—each of us—are, in this technological age, more responsible than ever for what we put in our bodies and minds—and what we allow ourselves to be bombarded with (and subjected to). Thus, I am apt to conclude that for most of us (unimportant folks who escape the ungracious public eye): like anything else, tech—particularly computers, excepting the purposefully-addictive “smartphone”—is what we make of it; and hence, if we use it as a tool in moderation—rather than as a technology to which we must always find and adapt a use (smart watches?)—I think the negative effects may still be minimized before it is too late, while the benefits may be maximized and multiplied. But in all of this, individual choice and rational action—that may war with the unconscious, base desires that technology companies have long since learned to exploit (to our peril and their nefarious ends)—is required to buck the trend and reverse course: for we are otherwise soon to be consumed by that which could liberate and empower us.

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"Masculine republics give way to feminine democracies, and feminine democracies give way to tyranny." —Aristotle, Politics

Part I focused on the concept of voting one’s “self-interest”—perceived or otherwise—while Part II took a look at the negative concept of “positive democracy”, i.e. democracy exercised for its own sake as if it were an end in itself (emanating from a positive view of human nature), rather than merely the reluctant means to achieving the end of good governance, free from the horrors of abject tyranny that in every age threatens to encumber, plague, and swallow up whole, human civil society (which is almost always centered around some formulation of civil government).

Part III wishes to take a deeper look at the underlying assumptions which support and undergird the drive by all entrenched institutional interests—from the state itself, to the media, schools, business corporations, and large-scale entertainment apparatuses (like Hollywood and various professional sports leagues)—to universally, and in an exercise of united lockstep (as if what we were witnessing was a socio-political ensemble being played out on the stage of modern civil society), push people towards the ballot box in a bid for widespread civic engagement. Such an overarching drive towards the polls seems to have—for such interests as those alluded to above—taken on a quasi-religious significance. Consider the following plea to protect our “democracy”, which, I think, features a startling but implicit undertone that is attempting to subvert our rational mind on the basis of emotion, to the end of imparting an unstated assumption that democracy—exercised as an institutionalized form of civil government—is essentially, in and of itself, hallow: i.e. sacred:

In the “canned news” above, there lies an implicit declaration that democracy itself is sacrosanct, and therefore necessarily deserving—for its own sake—of our protections (presumably whatever the cost); such a quasi-religious metaphysical tenet is both blasphemous and fatalistic in that such an aphorism bares for all to see, our unstated apathetic nihilism: on the one hand, it is an admission of our idolatry—a brazenly-glaring “slip of the tongue”, wherein our degraded, scientific and material age of secularism exalted—wherein the atomized consumer-citizen admits of himself, that he views the omnipotent and all-encompassing state as the closest remaining approximation of “God”. Thence, political activity embodies a proximate pseudo-religious association and quality, which is spiritually dissolving to the individual: it is if man bathed in acid and called it “holy water”.

I suppose in such a pluralistic and secular society with no overarching meta-narrative to bind us to our fellows, participation in statecraft—no matter how passive—becomes, itself, a ritualistic and “sacramental act” of acquiescent consent: a consent from which the socio-political state—on the federal and state levels—derives its authenticity and legitimacy. This is not to say that consent entails merely voting for the “winning” candidate before whom we would prostrate ourselves willingly and voluntarily, but rather that the act of voting itself shows faith in the institutional apparatus of government itself, which unconsciously implies a belief in the veritable viability of the state itself, which then underlies an assumption that in some remote capacity, such a state is (still) fulfilling its modus operandi. But what happens when a state ceases to largely fulfill its primary functions and secondary obligations?—when a state prioritizes its own institutional interests over that of its constituents? And further, what happens when such a state is so large, vast, interconnected, and otherwise levianthic that it can no longer be forcibly resisted? As sitting president, Joe Biden, warned us, stating: 

“If you wanted or if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons. The point is that there has always been the ability to limit — rationally limit the type of weapon that can be owned and who can own it.”

And so, we have reached the decisive point in our three-part inquiry into the nature and veracity of the ritual-act of voting in the year 2024—and why I believe not only a fruitless endeavor, but an ensnaring one at that (for a multitude of reasons). Foremost, the latter declaration—i.e. that participation in statecraft via voting in the age of mass society is, itself, a fruitless endeavor—brings me to an observation: it is in the age where government is as wicked and dysfunctional as ever, that there exists a seemingly (at least on the surface of things) confounding but incessantly ubiquitous drive (that seems to be increasing in scope and magnitude each passing election cycle) by the dehumanized system itself, to push for everywhere—via every communicative medium available to it—political engagement, exercised for its own sake (as if political engagement were of a spiritual, quasi-religious importance). 

I do not think the former may be understated: for it has become an overarching tenet of our society, which feels as though no woman, man, or child cannot simply be left alone, or to his or her own devices: we used to be a society of private individuals—i.e. individuals that lived and let live—who freely pursued their own ends given that they did not harm others or society at large. But we have increasingly become a digitally-interconnected but physically-disconnected “community” of individual moral “busy-bodies” that aggregate online into echo chambers, from which they branch out into the artificial world which we have created for ourselves to be contained by, casting aspersions of feigned moral concern that necessitate intervention, which then precludes anyone from merely being—or being left alone. This, I think, is the origin of the shift in recent decades, towards viewing the mere act of writing in—or connecting fragmentary lines—to indicate a preferred candidate for a given office, itself, an act of great civic virtue. It is almost as if people—when they post “selfies” afterwards on “social” media—are “boldly” (but in a way that seeks external validation and recognition) declaring: “Look at me: I voted!”; “I am, therefore, a good person—a good and obedient tax-paying citizen!” To me, such cringeworthy demonstrations of signaled “virtue” show a profound weakness and great spiritual defeated-ness; it is almost as if the individual—created distinctly and in the image of an omnipotent, omniscient, and consummately good God—has been fully absorbed, subsumed, and taken within the great degenerated mass.

I must declare it again: civil government itself—particularly a fully-secularized one at that—is not “holy”; therefore, the ritual act of going and casting one’s lot in the form of a vote is not “sacred” or “hallowed”, but decidedly hollow. It was, hitherto—on the appearance of things past and forgone—a good and dutiful thing to do (assuming one is properly informed and invested), but I think that no longer so: it is not merely that I feel unrepresented or unspoken for, but moreso that I believe that investedly participating in the system which feeds upon our very life-force and essential human energies—which to rule us effectively and completely as it increasingly does, requires us to be in a constant state of fear, paranoia, anxiety, and other neuroses, to maintain its power over our minds—to be antithetical to individual human flourishing, which is of a intellectual and psycho-spiritual orientation. We cannot, therefore, hope for government to save us from our sufferings—to salvate our souls: we instead must look immanently within, and eminently without, to hope to “achieve”, and be worthy of, such an aspirational effect.

If it’s not clear by now, I am inherently skeptical of such an activity: for political engagement is merely the means to secure the “end” of social, governmental, and civilizational harmony, but is never an “end unto itself”—even those aforementioned “fruits” of civilization, are themselves, ephemeral, transient, and fleeting: for what is won with greatly arduous toil, is soon lost with quick prolapse. But again, we must inquire: who is so well-informed and intentioned, that he or she would merit the “right to vote” and otherwise participate in government? I, for one, have no such time or energy to dedicate myself to the wholesale “study” of such dizzying and disorienting current affairs about which enough can seldom be known to dictate intervening action: such a sentiment is probably why I find myself gravitating towards the realm of ideas and history, both of which can be “verified” to some vague degree, owing to their fixed, “set in stone” nature. I would rather contend that it is mass political engagement itself—i.e. the mass phenomenon of mechanized propaganda begun by Bernays and others—that has allowed the truth to be so obfuscated,—and virtue, resultantly, to be extinguished and inverted thus (nearly everywhere, that is). Consider what to be plugged into the news, or current on affairs, actually entails: constant bombardment with pain, death, suffering, moral degeneracy, and cultural decay (for that is what sells and invokes attention)—always seeing and interacting with the chthonic, but missing the mundane but everyday miracle of embodied existence; what “good” is there in a continual flow of negative information? which only serves to keep the individual informed, insofar as it orients him or her towards groupthink and collective opinion, but which requires—for purposes of control—such informed people be kept dizzied with neurotically-scintillating information. 

But, as I said above, we no longer live in a world that truly allows people to opt out or live their own lives free from the flow of (negative) “information”, which many say is the “currency” of democracy. And so, what we have is a ubiquitous push—which I think only serves the interests of the system itself, which needs voters, yes, but moreso obedient taxpayers—towards (wholly or partially) unwilling civil participation. Leave such people alone, I say! Let those who wish to be wrapped up in the news and election cycle be wrapped up and consumed by it—it is their “sacred” right to do with their lives what they choose: if they wish to eschew real life for such cosmically mean and inveterate affairs, let them!

But can we also not have a bit of humor?—is not humor a partial antidote to chaos, misery, and suffering? Consider that we live in such a “nation of scholars” that in recent days—mere days before that great civic holiday, called “election day” on which we hang our dearest hopes and dreams for a future that will be better than the troubled present—that “who is running for president” has been trending on search engines:

Why should people such as these be goaded, encouraged—even shamed into voting? Why should we just not simply leave them alone, let them be, and leave them to their own devices, allowing them the opportunity—insofar as they do not harm others—to pursue their own private ends? If they wish to abstain, it is their right– and who are these audacious internet rousers to suggest they do otherwise than that which their slothen natures would allow? This is not to say that such people are irredeemable or in any way immoral; in fact, I think more people, who do not feel in within them to vote, should be told explicitly: if you don’t know nor care, the right, i.e. moral thing to do is to suspend judgment: for in the absence of a reasonable assumption of knowledge, admitting one’s unknowing and uncertainty is the right way forward. In such an estimation, I include myself: as that is precisely what I have chosen to do this time around—despite admonishments and incisive glares from friends and family—disenchanted with, and disillusioned by, all sides and their completely inept, ill-conceived “plans” for saving that which I love, but that which I fear is—at this point—largely unsaveable. And for my own individual path and attempt at flourishing, I chose to remove myself from contemporary politics post-2020, when it became clear the country I loved and believed in no longer really existed—and if I was being honest with myself: hadn’t for quite some time.

Please understand dear reader: the surest way to abject and complete tyranny is through democracy emboldened with centralized authority, standing armies, and an ineptly incompetent but pervasive bureaucracy—all of which constitute the very conditions of the contemporary (residual but retreating) West. Bearing Tocqueville in mind, one comes face-to-face with the truly horrifying specter of so-called “majority tyranny” (that I discussed in passing in the previous part of this essay); but I postulate, what we are witnessing is—owing the large-scale psycho-spiritual degradation of modern people—is perhaps even more alarming: for modern society possesses and embodies, an absurd principle—not in a spiritual and transcendentally paradoxical sense, where seemingly disparate ends may be woven together, e.g. as in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, but in a literal one; we have not only become untethered from our foundational preceptorial moorings, but have also become—quite literally—unhinged: psychologically, spiritually, religiously, socially, culturally, physically, and otherwise. The human mind has indeed been “torn to shreds” and put back together in a new manner, of which we are largely unaware, but which most of us suspect.

What this means in practical application: base impulses and unconscious desires have been stoked through mechanization and subsequent wielding of propaganda (by which I include incessant advertising); such activities of “public relations” aim at undermining the rational mind through subversion, which has largely captured the minds of men and made them increasingly neurotic: i.e. irascible, despairing, anxious, and malleable, whereby the great mass of humanity is more aptly able shaped and molded by social-conditioners, always being an incapacitated subject, allowing him or her to be bent towards “ends” of which he or she neither knows nor chooses. This is, I think, the true human and individual cost of being constantly plugged-in to the purposefully-negative and misleading, 24-hour news cycle (and its “great public holidays”, of which the presidential election is the crown jewel).

And so, when one is faced with witnessing reality in real-time, consider the wholesale lack of control and agency that people who are caught up in it all, truly have: extend such fallen fellows grace and understanding, but do realize that such extensions of other people’s power are truly and terrifyingly dangerous to themselves, other people, and liberty far and wide. Such people, seeking the enaction of what they have been convinced is “right”—eschewing nuance and discernment—will employ drastic measures to achieve power; and the power which could very well ensue, will be but an iron-fisted enforcement of the “general will” of the ever-so-slight “majority”: a majority which is itself not noble or honorable in any traditional sense of those elevated concepts, but is instead seeking its own short-sighted advantage (i.e. within the timeframe of a mere four years, wherein no truly beneficent and restorative work may be accomplished) as it perceives it (based on largely unconscious factors of which it is unaware). All of this is to reiterate: democracy with centralized authority is the surest form of tyranny—which Plato and Aristotle knew with reasoned certainty 2,400 years ago, but which modern man has forgotten—but is an absurd one at that because the masses—goaded on from above and below—become increasingly apt and likely to descend in a downward spiral, towards an iron-fistedly enforced and prescribed, absurd madness. Such a mass phenomenon of “madness”—or perhaps, psychosis as in a delusional disconnect from reality—can be seen most vividly in the realm of “social issues”, where almost all human norms since the beginnings of western civilization have been radically uprooted, even inverted, in the last sixty some-odd years.

I realize what I am saying is likely to fall on deaf ears and only accomplish branding the author as the sole, fringe lunatic in an otherwise functioning but imperfect mass society: to them I say, you may well be right, but first hear me out, because social phenomena and long-standing trends are almost never as they appear on the surface of things.

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Edward Bernays and “The Century of the Self” Obsession: i.e. the Concept of Extrinsically-Derived Identity

E.g. the public consciousness should always bear in mind and heed, these callous, hyper-rationalistic, disimpassioned—but insidiously manipulative—words from the “Father of Public Relations”, Edward Bernays, (who was nephew to psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, and an instrumental “guiding-hand” and “man behind the curtain” in the “war” fought to capture and captivate the minds of men), who within twentieth century mass society—with its hallmarks being an increased organization of labor under corporatism, collectivism, and the otherwise wholesale centralization of power—was a giant in the burgeoning world of orienting the public mind towards desired, but foregone and pre-ordained, conclusions : 

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. 

We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. 

Our invisible governors are, in many cases, unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet. 

They govern us by their qualities of natural leadership, their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure. Whatever attitude one chooses toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons—a trifling fraction of our hundred and twenty million—who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world. 

It is not usually realized how necessary these invisible governors are to the orderly functioning of our group life. In theory, every citizen may vote for whom he pleases. Our Constitution does not envisage political parties as part of the mechanism of government, and its framers seem not to have pictured to themselves the existence in our national politics of anything like the modern political machine. But the American voters soon found that without organization and direction their individual votes, cast, perhaps, for dozens of hundreds of candidates, would produce nothing but confusion . . . In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion without anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issue so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public question; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time. 

In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and chemically tasting before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would be hopelessly jammed. To avoid such confusion, society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to its attention through propaganda of all kinds. There is consequently a vast and continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some policy or commodity or idea. 

It might be better to have, instead of propaganda and special pleading, committees of wise men who would choose our rulers, dictate our conduct, private and public, and decide upon the best types of clothes for us to wear and the best kinds of food for us to eat. But we have chosen the opposite method, that of open competition. We must find a way to make free competition function with reasonable smoothness. To achieve this society has consented to permit free competition to be organized by leadership and propaganda. Some of the phenomena of this process are criticized—the manipulation of news, the inflation of personality, and the general ballyhoo by which politicians and commercial products and social ideas are brought to the consciousness of the masses. The instruments by which public opinion is organized and focused may be misused. But such organization and focusing are necessary to orderly life. 

—Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928

Though Bernays bore for all (in the above passage), the true underlying reality of our “free market”, capitalistic system, his words should disconcert us all. While today he is little-known, Bernays was a permanent fixture of twentieth century business and politics; among his many “accolades”, Bernays—who repurposed Freud’s psycho-analytic methods to undermine and placate (unknown and unrealized) desires of the unconscious—is “credited” with getting women to smoke cigarettes, through a campaign where he attached rebellious psychic-significance to the act of smoking itself, where the former became a “freedom torch”: i.e. a symbol of great—imaginary and intangible—but rebellious psychological power. Unfortunately for us, he also used his “talents” for many other subversive and questionable “ends”, such as promoting the “American Breakfast” of eggs, bacon, and pancakes—as well as lobbying for the addition of fluoride to municipal water supplies across the nation to “combat dental caries.” In short, Bernays was frequently employed by corporations and government alike, to subvert the unconscious mind of the American citizen—often using doctored statistics and data to achieve his desired, “evidence-based” results. The contemporary philosopher, Noam Chomsky, frequently discusses Bernays—and even wrote a book largely about Bernays entitled, Manufacturing Consent: 

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To See Where We Are Going, We Must Know From Whence We Came

Consider, to the contrary, these virtuous and manly words, in which genuine moral concern for the well-being of the world and the people in it, is palpably apparent:

Are people becoming, or likely to become, better or happier? Obviously this allows only the most conjectural answer. Most individual experience (and there is no other kind) never gets into the news, let alone the history books; one has an imperfect grasp even of one’s own. We are reduced to generalities . . . More useful, I think, than an attempt at balancing, is the reminder that most of these phenomena, good and bad, are made possible by two things . . . The first is the advance, and increasing application, of science. As a means to the ends I care for, this is neutral. We shall grow able to cure, and to produce, more diseases –bacterial war, not bombs, might ring down the curtain– to alleviate, and to inflict, more pains, to husband, or to waste, the resources of the planet more extensively. We can become either more beneficent or more mischievous. My guess is we shall do both . . . The second is the changed relation between Government and subjects . . . On the humanitarian view all crime is pathological; it demands not retributive punishment but cure. This separates the criminal’s treatment from the concepts of justice and desert. . . Thus the criminal ceases to be a person, a subject of rights and duties, and becomes merely an object on which society can work. As a result, classical political theory, with its Stoical, Christian, and juristic key-conceptions (natural law, the value of the individual, the rights of man), has died. The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good — anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.

I write ‘they’ because it seems childish not to recognize that actual government is and always must be oligarchical . . . But the oligarchs begin to regard us in a new way. Here, I think, lies our real dilemma. Probably we cannot, certainly we shall not, retrace our steps. We are tamed animals and should probably starve if we got out of our cage . . . But in an increasingly planned society, how much of what I value can survive? I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has ‘the freeborn mind’. But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticise its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology . . . Who will talk like that when the State is everyone’s schoolmaster and employer? Admittedly, when man was untamed, such liberty belonged only to the few. I know. Hence the horrible suspicion that our only choice is between societies with few freemen and societies with none. Again, the new oligarchy must more and more base its claim to plan us on its claim to knowledge. If we are to be mothered, mother must know best. This means they must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists, till in the end the politicians proper become merely the scientists’ puppets. Technocracy is the form to which a planned society must tend. Now I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man’s opinion no added value.

—C.S. Lewis, “Is Progress Possible: Willing Slaves of the Welfare State,” 1958.

Opting Out, or the Way Forward

All of the previous, brings me to a decisive point in our inquiry: would we not be better off if we merely tended to—and were allowed to—“cultivate our gardens”?; was the former not the original promise of liberalism and its accompanying system of free enterprise? I think it no exaggeration to state: the current system feeds on well-intentioned human beings; to such an end, it uses any and all participants for its own purposes: the previous includes criminals and illegal aliens—who help serve a “greater” purpose of keeping the population in a constant state of miserable neuroses, i.e.,  anxiety, depression, fear, and perhaps even terror (at times)—all of which serve to justify, the continued existence of the leviathan itself, for the sake of “ameliorating” the very problems it has created. The current American system then, does not operate for the benefit of such goodhearted people, but rather at their expense. How ought we go about changing such a state of affairs?—surely not by engaging with it, all the while placating ourselves to its insidious games? 

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What is Man? What Does He Need to Flourish?

Man is a spiritual creature: encumber, weaken, and plague his spirit, and he (or she) will wither and die the worst of slow deaths—even if he retains the vestiges of physical life: if no other reasons have caused you to question, consider seriously, this one. Proceeding from such a first principle, this is why I believe attempting to take part in modern statecraft is a fruitless endeavor that will only thieve one’s life-force that could be directed elsewhere: for it is hopelessly thwarting to continually engage in, and be consumed by, such overarching realities in which the powerless individual cannot help affect in any meaningful way. It was probably during the latter-half of the nineteenth century that political engagement—if it hoped to change anything—necessarily required mass organization, cooperation, and a united principle of “satyagraha”, whereby disparate peoples willingly and peacefully, choose to arrange themselves around a common cause; but in such mass movements, there lies an inherent narrowing of scope of what changes are truly possible without revolutionary upheaval, which itself almost always causes more harm than good. Therefore, repeatedly engaging in modern politics, via menial and passive methods, ensures that disconnected individuals will—almost undoubtedly—grow frustrated by the lack of tangible and palpable change; I therefore believe, to continually do the latter is the surest way to misery and spiritual ruination for the individual: for we have allowed them, i.e. the degraded oligarchy which rules, to tear us apart for their own meager purpose. As a result of our current circumstance, the most radical act that we can therefore do, is to love our neighbor—to give of ourselves to the benefit of our countrymen.

As I alluded to earlier, voting is an inherently passive “activity” that encourages the individual, atomized within the mass, to merely “come out of the woodwork” every so often, to cast his or her “sacred” vote, making one’s “voice heard”; but then—as if it were all a ruse—we must then return to a passive and thwarted life of watchful but inactive receptivity, allowing corrupt governance to commence. All of the preceding hinges on acknowledgment of the unsettling reality within the modern world of globalized civilization—whereby most people indeed do live physically-separate “online” lives of constant “connection”—and further: it is the system itself that beckons and summons us to do just that, ceasing everywhere in the “world of civilization” to refrain from living in the “real” world of nature, i.e. what was hitherto regarded as consummate reality itself—where form and substance, matter and animation, melded and met, in one. 

But now, we are increasingly disembodied form—floating aimlessly in the web of decontextualized and cacophonic information, of a discordant but entangled connectivity—no longer grounded to earth, to nature, nay to a real, tangible material existence mired, but set in rock and mud, in grass and sand, in stream and expansive plain; all of the above, with its poetic license, is to say we live almost entirely artificial lives within a great and expansive digital artifice that we have conflated with the “thing itself”, i.e. the real world of a posteriori experience. We are therefore, increasingly inhuman in every traditional sense or meaningful signification of the conceptual term; the former gives living animation to Orwell’s declaration: “the proles (i.e. those living beyond the pale of contemporary human society) are human—we are not human”. Further, we fight one another for scraps—nay, we fight each other for "cooking pots and rations in the streets", rather than uniting to fight the real enemy which are those parasitical forces that prey upon the mass of humanity and its constant fear, dread, anxiety, and suffering. 

How did we get here? How do we go back and begin anew from firm foundations?—once more leading human lives, keeping the good parts of the present, while eschewing most inhibitions and superfluities? I’m not sure, but I suspect that the way forward is to opt out, putting the onus and burden of action upon us: upon the individual, upon the family. I believe we have arrived at the present moment through the “mere”—to invoke that word that has become something of an unintentional motif throughout this work—passive and inactive, “voting the lesser of two evils”. The latter of which, when done for long enough—and extended outwards indefinitely, as has been the case in Western societies for decades—eventuates in the same destructive, denigrated, and debased place, as if evil were merely left unchecked, untrammeled; we have been playing games of pandering and placation—fighting over commonsensical premises, when we should perhaps be withdrawing, retreating, and forming a great undercurrent of high and lofty humane culture, that could everywhere speak to the “human condition”, offering potential ameliorations in a way which debased contemporary politics could never dream of. Edmund Burke famously told us, “evil prevails when good men do nothing”: voting, especially within the current framework, is not really doing something—and if it is, it is not something truly good. 

A Shocking Conclusion?

All of the previous leads some escapist within my being to ask: what is to stop us from merely opting out en masse?; perhaps instead we could build—and retreat to—“parallel structures” of our own making, living in true community once again and seeking out life itself, “mean as it may show us to be” (as Emerson implored us). Remember, the current iteration of corporatized consumer-culture relies upon you! In fact, it necessitates a continual, participative process of production and consumption—from “cradle to grave”—which is measured in mere quantitative qualifications: that is to say, in merely impersonal and statistical economic terms, i.e. those of GDP.

Therefore, if we remain engaged, we remain entranced; if we remain entranced, we will never achieve nor fulfill our higher nature—our higher calling. We will, instead, be forever and perpetually dragged through the muck and mud, of the ever-descending and downward-spiraling, present. And so, I say: opt out!—find a way out! If “they” stop you—with hook, crook, or mere economics (as is presently being done)—find another way! Be resourceful! Do not give up, nor give in, but mostly do not delude yourself into thinking that we can passively “vote” our way out of societal suffering and tribulation. Bear all this in mind, dear reader, as you are forced to brave a litanous procession of endless political advertisements this (and every ensuing) election season! Most of all: do not allow them to demean and pander you, as though you were but an unruly child, carelessly and haphazardly braving the cereal aisle in the supermarket!—you are too great and lofty a creature to fall for such berating nonsense that is sure to thieve from you, your vital life-force!

Either way, if you choose to vote, do not merely vote your own interest. Instead, attempt to seek the advantage of all human civilization everywhere, no doubt—but do so in one’s own homeland first. Seek to resist and conquer not by force, but through the dual-application of the reasoned pen and trading purse; rejuvenate art, culture, and music: once more create again for creativity’s sake, but aim at “Truth”—unknowable as she may be. It takes individual action to make the world a better place: for that is one of the enumerable lessons of history. Every great movement, and every watershed moment, has shown that revivifying reification begins first with the individual, i.e. you—and me. 

For these reasons, do not merely vote your own selfish self-interest!—and neither allow yourself to be the fuel that the inhuman machine runs on. Opt out of such illusory chains: for your life and higher being hinges on mental tranquility and spiritual well-being—which is precisely the joy which the cesspool that constitutes contemporary partisan politics wishes to thieve from you! But either way, dear reader, do know: if the twentieth century has taught us anything (and in this I am calling to mind those prison-camp philosopher-bards: Frankl and Solzhenitsyn), it is that the mind and higher being within us all can be liberated in the midst of torment, suffering, and great lament—with external circumstances that far outstrip our own—but only if one does look simultaneously up and within, seeking repose and reprieve from outer discord and socio-political rancor.

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In moving forward, we should look to the past for firm foundations, good ideas.

But either way, the whole structure of American Republicanism is centered around such notions of common decency and the decentralization of power, as well as the promise of those who—by fortuitous endowment, no doubt enhanced by the opportunity-rich conditions available to some in imperfect early America—promised, if imperfectly (owing to human nature), to facilitate the common good of the whole organism (and that of its inferior and subjugate, component parts); a  society ought be a living organism, not a mere inhuman machine: living in the sense that it is animate and alive—fatally flawed assuredly, but alive and filled with real uniqueness of being, nonetheless.

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The preceding is why, in the early days of American civilization, the “right to vote” was restricted to those who were landed—but early America in its very creed, sought (as an anti-Federalist and Jeffersonian ideal) to make every man the “lord of his own domain", no matter how menial; but what is very often omitted and seldom acknowledged by proletarians: such endowed “landed aristocrats” were also—quite often—properly educated: which is to say, those who owned property in their own right, were blessed to have had the leisure necessary to afford and facilitate, the reception of a liberal education in the full and proper sense; they were therefore, ostensibly by extension, invested in the permanence of place and the flourishing of the people in that particular place which they were so deeply and personally invested; such an arrangement meant statesman were often beholden to their neighbors on a personal, "face-to-face" basis. We must acknowledge: it is a lot easier to be a pedant behind a computer screen than it is in person, where real audacious and brazen "courage" is required. But nonetheless, genuine “progress” for a civilization such as America or Britain, would encompass a wider, more judicious, and more fully-realized application of its estimable principles—far and wide—thereby reaching a greater number of persons from all races, and noble religions and creeds.

Further, such a collection of statesmen as America’s diverse and disparately stitched-together “Founders”—who in reality consisted of a patchwork of individuals from various backgrounds and inheritances—were therefore, generally invested in the tranquil flourishing of the domestic whole; unlike modern America, the culture—at least in an aspirational sense—was that (among other things) of a soulful nobility, "can-do" spirit of self-determined and self-reliant agency, and a collectively common (but individually-prescribed) "pursuit of happiness”: i.e. an attempt at human flourishing; it is therefore no coincidence that the “pursuit of happiness” is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, wherein Thomas Jefferson famously effaced it as a sacred prescriptive command, eschewing what had hitherto been conceived of by John Locke: i.e. the right to "property"—material (as in land and resource) and immaterial (as in mental and physical labor). To such ends, the American government was designed intentionally with an Aristocratic-bent, modeled in part after the mercantile and bourgeois, Venetian Republic—and not merely, the more warlike and agri-democratic Roman one, with which we are all more familiar.

"Positive democracy", it turns out, is net-negative: why we ought aim at goodness, rather than inclusivity.

The Electoral College—against which it is en vogue to levy attacks in the age of wayward and absolute “democracy”—for instance, was conceived as but a buttress against such “tyrannies of the majority” whim. As such, America’s mode of government was designed precisely to pit one “estate” interest (as in the three "estate" interests, or houses, of pre-revolution, Ancien Régime, France) against another—ensuring that institutional interests by each present party would be in continual opposition to one another, so that precisely nothing “radical”—to quote one of the circulating anti-Kamala Harris ads—would ever “get done”. Which is merely to say: to preserve the evolutionary Anglo-American format and tradition of governance, which developed incrementally over time (since 1215 in fact, when the Magna Carta was first issued by King John II of England) with continual but gradual refinements: America, at her infancy, may have had far more in common with Burke than Paine, it turns out. 

America's "Founders" issue the "Declaration of Independence", declaring separation from Great Britain.

But we have forgotten our founding principles (and creed) in the age of positive democracy; to that destructive “end”, we no longer allow (or even wish for) the wise and good (to whatever extent it is possible) to administer government on our behalf. Our politicians are us, and we become them: for we project onto those who rule us, every shadow impulse from below—creating a two-way feedback loop. As “they” become worse, so too do “we”—as we become worse, so too do they. But perhaps more damningly: our intimations and suspicions have been borne out time-and-time again, as if it were all prophetic!—self-fulfilling or otherwise. Absolute power does in fact, corrupt absolutely—every single time. Why should the result be altogether different, if the mere distinction at present, is that such grasping undertones are of a tyrannically-democratic pretense? Who can, here and now, make the case that the democratic impulse itself—which demonstratively asserts that “I, myself, am so great that I deserve to take part in my own governance”—has not simply been commandeered by those who, for their own ill purposes, wish the Republic harm? Now, as always, good power must resist those forceful and ill-gotten powers—which seek to do us all iniquity for their own warped conception of political society as a canvas whereby some may paint others in a new manner, of their own likeness.

But we now occupy a world in which the wicked and avaricious have been made more powerful, while the good have been made impotent: that is the true cost of our gradual economic losses of power—as witnessed in the realms of: housing, education, work, healthcare, taxation, (legally-mandated) insurance(s), etc. Such a process didn’t occur over a fortnight: how could anyone then suggest it may be undone, here and now, with this “2024 Election”, about which it is said—like every preceding election in recent memory—that it is “the most important election of our lifetime”? What people has ever loosened their chains merely with the vote?—especially when the balance of power, between ruler and ruled, has shifted so dramatically in one mere century. I believe we may witness in our lifetimes, the effective abolishment of the “Second Amendment”, which will—once and for all—eliminate the necessary threat of forceful resistance; all other nations have fallen in such a regard: America is but the last holdout, but she too has been chipped away at, “bit by bit”.

A world-order with tattered foundations cannot stand for long.

As evidence of the previous—i.e. the drive to raze our wisened foundations and begin anew from the ashes as a new, conscious state-creation—consider that which we all know in our heart-of-hearts, but frequently fail to verbally explicate: America has become a place in which its consumer-citizens cannot even agree on fundamental and foundational presuppositions from which to proceed and orient ourselves (and by extension, our society); and few realize this is precisely the illogical conclusion of positive democracy: that is, democracy which is exercised and extended outwards for its own sake and "purposes". Democratic participation is not—nor has ever been, itself—a worthy ideal which should be collectively pursued for its own sake: hence why Plato and Aristotle knew such an obvious "truth" (wherein both described the way in which democracy always devolves into lower, more tyrannical forms of governance), at the concomitant dawn of philosophy and "Western Civilization", both of which are sadly in retreat.

As a result, such obvious truths, which have been hitherto known for ages—e.g. what is a woman?—have come under fierce attack from an increasingly unhinged, disjointed, irrational, and inhumane political left; the right is not without equal blame: for it is there that much hostility, resentment, general unfriendliness, selfishness, and megalomaniacal micro-management—as often seen in stodgy HOAs and uber-entitled directorial boards—occurs. In such a pluralistic society, with only a smattering of vague guiding principles and purposes remaining, is it any wonder that political advertisements directed at the masses placate the selfish, while eschewing the good of the whole? America has become a place in which its consumer-citizens cannot even agree on fundamental and foundational presuppositions from which to proceed.

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But the conditions of early America that I sketched above—i.e. where decent men and women, who are of a somewhat philosophic dispensatory bent, are empowered and take an active ownership in the state interest itself—can only exist insofar as a society itself aims at “The Good”, and thence uses every tool at its disposal to facilitate such estimably worthy ends; but to do the aforementioned, a society must not merely aim at self-preservation and material wealth, but human flourishing. But fulfilling such an impossibly difficult task, is first based on knowing what that aforementioned “Good” be—if only to a vague degree—which is itself only possible insofar as we, en masse, will it so. As you consider voting this election season, ask: what does contemporary American society aim at?—if anything at all, beyond the mere material fulfillment of litanous base impulses.

Tyranny: as such things change, much remains the same.

Perhaps when adjudicating our current plight—seeking to understand how tight we find our chains—we should consider those wise and beneficent words of the sagacious Erasmus, who in his On the Education of the Christian Prince, painted an immemorial portrait of tyranny that, in every age, rings true: 

Now let him bring out the opposite side by showing a frightful, loathsome beast, formed of a dragon, wolf, lion, viper, bear, and like creatures; with six hundred eyes all over it, teeth everywhere, fearful from all angles, and with hooked claws; with never satiated hunger, fattened on human vitals, and reeking with human blood; never sleeping, but always threatening the fortunes and lives of all men; dangerous to everyone, especially to the good; a sort of fatal scourge to the whole world, on which everyone who has the interests of state at heart pours forth execration and hatred; which cannot be borne because of its monstrousness and yet cannot be overthrown without great disaster to the city because its maliciousness is hedged about with armed forces and wealth. This is the picture of a tyrant unless there is something more odious which can be depicted. Monsters of this sort were Claudius and Caligula. The myths in the poets also showed Busyris, Pentheus, and Midas, whose names are now objects of hate to all the human race, to be of the same type. 

The main object of a tyrant is to follow his own caprices, but a king follows the path of right and honor. Reward to a tyrant is wealth; to a king, honor, which follows upon virtue. The tyrants' rule is marked by fear, deceit, and machinations of evil. The king governs through wisdom, integrity, and beneficence. The tyrant uses his imperial power for himself; the king, for the state. The tyrant guarantees safety for himself by means of foreign attendants and hired brigands. The king deems himself safe through his kindness to his subjects and their love for him in return. Those citizens who are distinguished for their moral character, judgment, and prestige are held under suspicion and distrust by the tyrant. The king, however, cleaves to these same men as his helpers and friends. The tyrant is pleased either with stupid dolts, on whom he imposes; or with wicked men, whom he puts to evil use in defending his position as tyrant; or with flatterers, from whom he hears only praise which he enjoys. It is just the opposite with a king; every wise man by whose counsel he can be helped is very dear to him. The better each man is, the higher he rates him, because he can rely on his allegiance. He loves honest friends, by whose companionship he is bettered. Kings and tyrants have many hands and many eyes, but they are very different. A tyrant's aim is to get the wealth of his subjects in the hands of a few, and those the wickedest, and fortify his power by the weakened strength of his subjects. The king considers that his purse is represented by the wealth of his subjects; the tyrant strives to have everyone answerable to him either by law or informers. The king rejoices in the freedom of his people; the tyrant strives to be feared, the king to beloved. The tyrant looks upon nothing with greater suspicion than the harmonious agreement of good men and of cities; good princes especially rejoice in this. A tyrant is happy to stir up factions and strife between his subjects and feeds and aids chance animosities. This means he basely uses for the safeguarding of his tyranny. A king has this one interest: to foster peaceful relations between his subjects and straightway to adjust such dissensions among them as chance to arise, for he believes that they are the worst menace to the state that can happen. When a tyrant sees that affairs of state are flourishing, he trumps up some pretext, or even invites in some enemy, so as to start a war and thereby weaken the powers. The opposite is true of a king. He does of his own people. everything and allows everything that will bring everlasting peace to his country, for he realizes that war is the source of all misfortunes to the state. The tyrant either sets up laws, constitutions, edicts, treaties, and all things sacred and profane to his own personal preservation or else perverts them to that end. The king judges everything by the standard of its value to the state . . . The tyrant is first concerned to see that his subjects neither wish to nor dare to rise against his tyrannical rule; next, that they do not trust one another; and thirdly, that they cannot attempt a revolution. He accomplishes his first end by allowing his subjects to develop no spirit at all and no wisdom, by keeping them like slaves and devoted to mean stations in life, or held accountable by a system of spies, or rendered effeminate through pleasure. He knows full well that noble and acute spirits do not tolerate a tyranny with good grace. He accomplishes his second point by stirring up dissension and mutual hatred among his subjects so that one accuses the other and he himself is more powerful as a result of their misfortunes. The third he attains by using every means to reduce the wealth and prestige of any of his subjects, and especially the good men, to a limit which no sane man would want to approach and would despair of attaining.

—Desiderius Erasmus, On the Education of a Christian Prince, 1516

Desiderius Erasmus: a truly noble thinker from a bygone world; I think we need a new Renaissance.

While we should venerate our “kings” in the proper sense—i.e. those who have “fulfilled” their natures to the fullest extent possible by the dual-application of education and habit—we now bear among us, those (unwilling and disenchanted) “citizens” who tear down past figures who could have very easily usurped presidential power for their own capricious purposes, but consciously decided—despite the perpetual temptation—not to do so on principle alone: and George Washington is perhaps the greatest exemplar of the former in our sweet American canon! But either way, make no mistake: only those who deeply care for, and are wholly concerned with, the “common good” deserve the “natural right” of voting: i.e., taking an active part in the governing process, and otherwise holistic machinery of government. 

Tocqueville: The trouble with democracy is the wholesale worship of mediocrity—the exaltation of equality for equality's sake.

We should all aspire to be aristocrats—not merely by birth, but by merit; which is to say, we ought tirelessly strive to be those superiorly learned and modulated creatures—who through philosophy properly-applied, become better in disposition as demonstrated by consciously-ordered habit. Such a high-and-mighty fellow can then be shown to demonstratively possess an inner governing principle of honor, duty, obligation—who then can enter the arena and be responsible to safeguard our fellows, culture, and nation-state. Why do we allow people to represent us—geopolitically and on a global scale—who cannot even govern themselves? 

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The modern political arena laid bare.

One of many reasons modern politics have devolved to the degree they have, is precisely because they have become harbor to self-aggrandizing miscreants to placate mass hoards of self-aggrandizing miscreants; in such a devolved “order”, both political masters and willing participants are guilty of seeking their own (usually short-sighted and material) benefit at the public expense. The previous, i.e. cultural decadence, is why all great empires hitherto known have eventually fallen—including Greece, Rome, France, and Britain: why now, should America be any different? Great men and women build great civilizations, but groveling and conniving cowards seeking their own advantage at the expense of other people (and the institutional apparatuses that buttress and sustain a great civilization) tear them down.

E.g.: with advertisements and “corporate branding” literally everywhere, it feels more and more like we are truly living in Idiocracy.

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We have, quite literally, reached a point in American civilization, where doing and being good—to whatever toilsome extent that is possible for a creature as flawed as man—rewards less (in terms of tangible but mean benefit) than its corollary: when a civilization reaches that point, it has surely lost its soulful principle of collectively-directed spirit. All of this is to say, America has become a culture without a soul that is steadfastly becoming merely parasitical—on the past no doubt, but also on the good-hearted individuals and families of the present: consider America’s declining birthrate, which shows that for various economic and environmental factors, people feel it a hopeless endeavor to have as many children as they indicatively desire. What kind of “civilization” are we becoming when people can’t even fulfill such a good and necessary—but basic—biological and spiritual imperative?

The proper role of a state and its methodology are, in actuality, mutually exclusive.

In our technocratic age, criminals—petty or otherwise—and illegal immigrants are often treated better than naturalized citizens, it seems: what insanity! The former is not to say we ought be inhospitable to individuals seeking a better life by emigrating or seeking asylum, but rather to acknowledge the sheer hypocrisy and dysfunction of the current governmental tapestry (and its vast, but inept, bureaucratic apparatus). When everyone seeks his own advantage, Rome—new and old—burns; it truly does feel like what we are witnessing are the early stages of onset, of an all-consuming cultural conflagration.

The role of a state ought be to facilitate the public “common good”, rewarding virtue whilst punishing vice; the means which it employs to such an end is of little consequence insofar as it achieves said end in actuality. For instance, consider that justice—in an Aristotelian sense—is not mere retribution (as many on the modern political right so wish), but that which is good for both the individual and the whole: who can look at the privatized and so-called, "prison-industrial complex", and argue in good faith that it aims at any modicum of "The Good"? Perhaps the aim of punishment ought to be corrective action aimed at bettering society by reorienting prisoners towards "The Good" in a tangible, practical manner—and not merely indulging and harboring (i.e. housing and clothing), nor exploiting, prisoners (all the while financially-incentivizing an increasingly numerous "population" of prisoners: petty or otherwise). But the other side of such a token of "true justice", at which a good society aims (at least in principle), is that prisoners—for the benefit of their own soul—often require swift and fierce punishment, through imposed corrective action. But in the current political dichotomy, prisoners are seen—quite literally—as either an irredeemable scourge upon society (for the Trumpian right), or as easy targets for an increasingly neo-Fascistic and extortive, capitalistic state that is racist, sexist, and xenophobic to its very rotten core (and is therefore irredeemable and in need of being torn down) to the increasingly neo-Marxist left. Such a non-critical conceptual duality is utter insanity. What tenet or law precludes viewing of the prisoner through an individual lens and on a case-by-case basis? But what is usually missed in such discourse, is the sheer ease by which individuals may become themselves consumed by a public sphere that wholly lacks nuance and discernment: i.e. it is far easier to pick a wayward "side" than exist in no-man's-land, and draw the ire and artillery from both front lines.

Our brief tangent notwithstanding, consider: Anglo-American practitioners of now-sacred “democracy”—like Locke, Jefferson, Tocqueville, Thoreau, Emerson, etc.—understood the former, namely that democracy exercised for its own sake is the surest way to abject tyranny; but to the contrary: a society which aims at some nebulous combination of "the Divine"—in its many manifest conceptions—by extension, aims at moral virtue, which teaches us to value the human being for his own sake and that of his dignified, embodied existence. It is only within the confines of such lofty aims that "human flourishing" may be pursued: for the human being is, in primary terms, foremost an embodied soul-principle of spiritual orientation. And don't take my word for it, but instead receive such a vital message of paramount importance from all of humanity's great sages: from Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Augustine, Boethius, and Rumi—to Kant, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche—to Lewis, Huxley, Orwell, and Jung. We have misunderstood and forgotten first things: is it any wonder we have become a mass of materialistic heathens who can no longer govern ourselves?

Aiming at "The Good", the humane, the decent, the illuminated, the perplexing, the stupefying, the mystifying—i.e. those things which make us human and not merely beasts with the ability to deliberate, are in fact, the surest safeguards against an inhumanely exercised tyranny (and the overarching destruction of individual dignity, which everywhere precedes the disintegration of the social contract, around which political life is foremost centered). But we have now reached a point in America, where it is so obvious to almost everyone, that our government has long since ceased, by-and-large, to facilitate the common good; and in that state of affairs, voting one’s own interest might, in actuality, be morally defensible!—which bodes catastrophe for the future of our valued civilization. Is it too late?—is America already irredeemable? I don't think so: for like the phoenix, that which has been reduced to ashes, may thereafter be reborn and rise once again; tyrants may dispense with individual people—and with force if they deem it necessary—but "spirit" and ideas are much more difficult to dispense with (over the long-haul).

In the end, what you do decide to do is up to you—and we all ought to respect one another's choices in light of the extenuating circumstances:

For in the end, the "empowered" democratic individual controls but little in the age of overarching wayward democracy. And so, if you go to the polls this 5th of November, do so with a calculated realism, rather than a foolhardy idealism, understanding that no people has ever fully voted its way out of tyranny—especially one as vastly interconnected and insidiously hidden, yet persistently pervasive, as ours.

Part III will analyze the incessant and ubiquitous call for “political engagement”, as though the former was good in itself—for its own sake.

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. . . it was Orwell who told us that as a society becomes increasingly totalitarian—as ours undoubtedly has in recent years and decades—political engagement in the most colloquially menial way, becomes ubiquitously incessant, and therefore almost unavoidable.

These days, I find myself attempting to stay adjacent to contemporary politics, but I feel compelled to share some thoughts on the topic of voting. The urge to write on the subject has no doubt been spurred on by being constantly bombarded with low-rent vulgar political advertisements in recent weeks and months, which have made political engagement almost unavoidable. I guess the latter is not surprising: for it was Orwell who told us that as a society becomes increasingly totalitarian—as ours undoubtedly has in recent years and decades—political engagement in the most colloquially menial way, becomes ubiquitously incessant, and therefore almost unavoidable.

These days, meaningless political slogans and tropes are everywhere.

The first vulgarity that has grown increasingly distasteful to me, is the entire concept of voting based on one’s so-called and perceived, “self-interest”—as if the average human being could even know what such a nebulous thing would consist of if made manifest; such a concept has become so synonymous with the act of voting itself that people, particularly those on the left, have turned the former—i.e. that it’s one’s sacred “right and duty”, to exercise one’s “right to vote” in one’s “own interest”—into something of a maxim: if an implicit one. Of course, such a concept is—at its core—utterly misinformed and even immoral for a multitude of reasons. 

First and foremost, voting one’s “own interest” based on material, class, and socioeconomic conditions at the expense of others and the state at large, is—quite obviously, I think—myopic and selfish in the most menial of ways; I would further suggest that if such "logic" of voting on one's "self-interest" is extended outwardly as a general principle of democratic society, the result itself becomes morally reprehensible. I firmly believe the so-called “right (and duty) to vote” is wayward and misconstrued—especially when pleas for others to vote are being made by the most meanly average people being placed before us unsolicitedly, front-and-center, to bemoan what they perceive would happen to them, if candidate x, y, or z is, or isn’t elected. To them I say: stop the pedantic doom and gloom and understand: no matter who is (or isn’t) elected, it is very unlikely that things will change in any discernible or tangibly meaningful way! Has the inertia of modern, post-industrial society truly changed since 2020? Or 2016? Or 2008? It seems to me the non-digitized world pre-2008 has been abolished; and it seems completely obvious that it will not be coming back so it is no use seeking to superimpose the past upon the present and future—tempting as that proposition may be for the working class.

Political theater; and pleas by "actors":

Before getting hot and bothered, please understand more intelligibly what I do here mean: the machinery of government, administered in the current mode, is so vast and inter-connectedly entangled, that almost nothing but an organized upwelling of the masses—who, for the first time in history were suddenly so constituted and comprised, by mostly wise, decent, and skillfully virtuous individuals—from below could stop its headlong inertia. We are ruled, extensively by effect, yes—but impotently and inefficiently—by a giant leviathan, consisting of hoards of unelected and unaccounted-for professional bureaucrats, which in actuality constitutes the fourth branch of government operating within the United States’ umbrella of influence. It seems to me such members are almost interchangeable, and thus have no true names or faces that may be dealt with through suffrage (as we convince ourselves we do with politicians).

The current state of American governmental bureaucracy: good luck deciphering such a levianthic behemoth, with its oft entangled and overlapping jurisdictive authority.

If such a state of affairs is granted as more or less true, how then is a bombastic show of democracy, front-and-center, going to disentangle and uproot such entrenched institutions with their own vast and convoluted agendas and institutional interests?—many of which, we can’t even be well aware of with truly deep study. Suffice it to say, the monster standing before us is simply so vast, intricate, and complicated that even people who (presumably, if we take them at their word) attempt to join its legions of public officials, to subvert and reform it from within, can but understand it little and accomplish still less—and in most cases, such idealistic actors are soon consumed themselves by the former's serpentine trappings. Do we expect such a hydra to go out without a fight each passing election cycle?

Excuse me for unbelieving, when an illusioned and unthinking working-class "actor" is placed before us—perceivably to relate and relay the many blights which are affecting the modern American worker—so that we may resonate with them and their deeply-held conviction for "solution-based action", which is inherently simplistic and reductive in nature; and is therefore, incapable of understanding any singular issue with great acuity—much less solving one of an infinite multiplicity. We are then—against our will—bombarded with "brain-rotting" sloganistic messaging (and its implicit dichotomous thinking) from such agents of naive unknowing—who sincerely wish for simple-thinking (that befits their level of capacity) to prevail in the political arena: the latter of which, as a result it should be noted, has devolved to the level of a circus stage.

Such actors appear onstage to: lament, bemoan, and otherwise implore us, about what the raise or lowering in this or that tax, increase or decrease in wholly-inefficient state-sponsored welfare programs, increase or decrease in the surge of migrants, etc. will personally (on the grounds of a mere uncritical and unfiltered perception) mean to them; I admittedly, but empathetically, think most of these wayward and partially-informed "characters" (for who in such an age of cacophonic, decontextualized information can truly be informed of all valid perspectives on any single issue—much less all issues, which is what would be truly necessary, I think, to cast an informed vote) in such commercials that are, it should be noted, advertising a political "product"—and bad ones at that; I do not think it elitist to simply acknowledge, that most people who are consumed by the political arena in the current age, are indeed incapable of comprehending what is facing us and them alike: and such people should therefore, abstain from speaking with such dogmatic certainty and callousness, to avoid further denigrating an already troubled "public sphere".

For instance, consider those visceral admonishments—mostly by white-collar working women, who have fallen quite non-perspicaciously, to the unholy alliance of state and corporate power working upon their minds in unison (and largely without their knowledge)—that certain candidates intend to do away with the “hallowed and sacred right” of women to maintain autonomous will over “their bodies” (wherein it is conveniently omitted that they house “clumps of cells” which will soon be soulfully-animated, and in a wholly-separate body no-less); what such proponents of "choice" actually mean: they wish to maintain, the unnatural and unholy power that Western women have enjoyed—over budding life, to bring about death if so desired—since the middle of the previous century; and such a power, i.e. the ability to end life before it fully blooms, is conveniently called (in a true maneuver of Orwellian doublespeak) the “right to choose”—whether to abort or keep—their co-created offspring. Such women of our modern progressive age have misunderstood that having and raising children of their own—if done gleefully and with the support of a loving and giving partner—is far more fulfilling than almost any conceivable career in the soulless corporate world, where everyone is mere fodder and therefore replaceable; to the contrary, what good mother (or father) may be replaced? Further, if people cease to have children (as is already happening), who will raise and rear the next generation?

Therefore, if it is the devil’s work to everywhere scheme to maintain, and persevere for individual life, then I suppose I be his henchman—if a reluctant one: for who dares oppose ascendent modern woman?; scorn her (in her eyes), or merely tell her she is "wrong", and everywhere face the social consequences: that is the reality of life in 2024, where men and women alike have chosen—for their own willful purposes—to constantly make war with nature and seek to evade the consequences.

Consider to the contrary: that perhaps such anti-abortion advocates aim at protecting the “sanctity of life” for those who are in that wholly-dependent state of nascence, whereby they are too weak and impotent—and are in a sense symbiotic organisms, united as one with their birth mother (with measurable psycho-spiritual and material benefits granted to both beings)—to defend themselves and their corporeally-embodied existence! No matter where you personally stand on such a gravely serious issue, can we at least acknowledge the disgustingly disingenuous nature of such grotesque advertisements?; advertisements which dichotomize and reduce, a serious issue of life-and-death, to mere trope and triviality—an issue about which perhaps, volumes arguing either side and everywhere in-between, could be written? The latter, i.e. the disingenuous nature of most modern political discourse, is my real point: as political advertisements targeting the female voter base, with what amounts to emotionality-charged propaganda, to argue for or against allowing individual states to determine abortion policy within their jurisdictive borders, is not only absurd, but immoral—and is doing all American men, women, and fetuses alike a great disservice in misrepresenting and hyperbolizing the true issue(s) at stake. But what is to be expected when politics have become mere “show business”, as Neil Postman once told us?—in 1985 in fact: decades before the phenomenon of Trump and "reality" politics.

Many "real" issues remain largely hidden—and are therefore, seldom discussed.

We are now beginning to understand the true danger of our current socio-political devolution: which is to say, more important than the many distractive issues being everywhere discussed, consider we live in a world where satisfactory housing, healthcare, and nutritious, non-toxic food are prohibitively expensive for most citizens; where vast sums of private consumer debt (and an ascendent public debt) is the norm, not the exception; where retirement is becoming a relic of the past; where the social fabric is seemingly disintegrating and basic human decency—i.e. demonstrable care and concern for others in word and deed—is rarer than ever; where community is virtual, which is to say: unreal; where citizens sometimes target police, and police, sometimes exorcize inner torments outwardly through predatory and unnecessary acts of violence against citizens of the increasingly and dully legalistic, but all-encompassing (as in it controls, regulates, and otherwise oversees) nearly every aspect of our lives, “nanny” state. Where college straps students with legions of debt and wastes—unless a student be pursuing a genuine education (as in that which is pursued for its own sake and rich psycho-spiritual, intangible benefits) or highly-specialized and worthwhile profession of their choosing—many prime years of their lives that may be better spent elsewhere: for college, unlike yesteryear, no longer promises even a decent job within a reasonable timeframe after graduation, as studies show.

While on the topic of work, or the lack thereof, consider that sustaining jobs have become a rarity—and meaningfully-fruitful work, a luxury; almost all jobs are posted on job sites and use discriminatory, AI-driven, “applicant tracking systems” to sift through hundreds of depersonalized applications. As a result, so-called ghost jobs (i.e. jobs that don’t actually exist) have proliferated on nearly all job posting sites; and worse still for our youth: moms usually have to work (even if they don’t want to)—since wages are so stagnant (in terms of purchasing power) most households cannot meet basic needs without two sources of full-time income. Worse still is the epidemic of fatherlessness and disintegration of the nuclear family—which is to say nothing of the ongoing social conflict between generations—wherein the young blame the old, and the old blame the young for the country’s perceived disintegration: such a generational conflict increasingly governs interactions between family members of different generations, tearing them apart in all but formality; in tougher times, we need to lean on family more, not less—but that is not what is being witnessed in the world today, in the age of globalization, where families are as fragmented and disconnected from one another as ever before. 

If we hope to avoid such plights as those which have befallen our forebears, it is high time we, for instance, disallow our government to send foreign aid to and fro, while allowing its own citizens—whose rights and well-being it is their sworn duty to serve and protect—to either perish or wallow in the mires of a squalid mediocrity; we should talk openly and see if we can first understand, and thereafter invent "solutions", to any number of our many and varied blights: from mass homelessness and rancorous inner city slums, to incessant inflationary economic troubles—both of which have been spurred on and exacerbated no doubt, by the unbounded and heedlessly wasteful sucking of the public teat by the few, at the expense of the many: 2008 was the primer for the corporate-welfare state—2020 was, for all intents and purposes, its sequel. How do we behead such an entrenched hydra?—or ought we, as individuals, simply (and disillusionedly) deal with the effects of such an established and seemingly unchangeable "order"? I might sound (and be) a bit defeatist, but I would suggest the latter: taking responsible control of one's life, means accepting—if begrudgingly—those things which are beyond the pale of individual control and agency.

The disastrous effects of the current socio-political arrangement:

Consequently, the state and its ideologues raise our children and teach them its inhuman “values”; in short, everywhere we can see the disastrous results of such an arrangement of our work life, which dominates our “culture” (and daily lives). We do not so much work for corporations and the bloated bureaucratic welfare state—who often legally own the rights to the fruits of our labors, and increasingly infiltrate many other aspects of our lives—as we so imagine, but are instead possessed and owned by such a united, twofold but sacrilegious, marriage of power: who knew the "separation of church and state" would entail the supplantation of the church by the "joint-stock company"?, i.e. multinational corporation. Who in this modern age is truly free?—by which I mean acts as a self-determining and willful agent, whose time is spent pursuing those higher things which are most dear and fruitful to it (and its individually derived and prescribed purpose)? Of course, I am aware life has always been mean—in the sense that it has, and always must be, first oriented towards survival and propagation; but something has seriously changed since the new millennia and things are not the way they used to be: that much is clearer than ever.

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Industrialization, and the technologies which were so derived, promised to free us (and our time) from needing to pursue primary needs holistically: as in, with our fully-fledged force of being; instead, it has enslaved us to them altogether. As such, we stand at the precipice of a (post-industrial and technological) "collectivist" neo-serfdom—where the individual and family are actively being inhibited from owning property and even their labor—which Hayek so presciently warned us about. To participate in suburbanized and sprawling modern society, we are also increasingly reliant upon—and indebted to—our own technological inventions: the smartphone, automobile, and other similar (often "connected") mechanized devices are prime examples of appendages and articles, which we must toil and contort ourselves to acquire, maintain, and sustain simply to exist and participate in modern society; for in all of the aforementioned cases, once-luxuries soon become essential indispensabilities: and that is the ensnaring (and enslaving) "trick" of modern life, which straps us to our jobs, to simply keep moving indiscriminately—perhaps getting or going nowhere—on the "hamster wheel" that seems to constitute modern man's experience of existence. Is it any wonder then, why we are in the midst of a "burnout epidemic"?

Worse still: what does all of the above aim at? In what direction do the wheels of this impersonal modern machine turn? I think it no understatement that many Americans are addicted to “work” for the sake of the production and consumption process itself—as if that process be a worthy end in itself: talk about atomization! One finds under such social conditions, people often do what they can get away with—relying on external imposition to “keep them in line” (hence the sad, but genuine, need for a more pervasively repressive police state apparatus)—rather than an internal compass of one’s own conscience, fashioned through the twofold process of proper education and habituation. Could the lack of such social functions being everywhere mal-performed, be why theft is so rampant that chandleries have to lock up razors and soap, lest they too be stolen? We have misconstrued and misunderstood that education—in the proper sense—is an essentially moral task: and in such a pluralistic and secular world that is quickly degenerating further, what shrewd and discerning parent would allow such a state to morally form their children?—if they have a choice, that is. But people (and parents) increasingly have no true choice in any meaningful way: and that is precisely the point of this essay.

We have misconstrued and misunderstood that education—in the proper sense—is an essentially moral task: and in such a pluralistic and secular world that is quickly degenerating, what shrewd and discerning parent would allow such a state to morally form their children?—if they have a choice, that is. But people (and parents) increasingly have no true choice in any meaningful way: and that is precisely the point of this essay.

The internet has allowed families to "connect" from afar; what is commonly omitted: the modern arrangement of social and work life, has also necessitated that it be so.

Hence in the modern world, we seldom find people who willingly and consciously do that which is morally right for the good of the individual and whole populace (for these usually accord on a spiritual level)—as well as for the more abstract and less tangible "goods" of state, culture and the otherwise association of people (of common heritage and values), which we have long-since called, “society”. It is in the age of incessant political engagement, pandering, invocation, and placation we find ourselves in the present predicament. What if the solution is not overarching political engagement, but “mere” brotherly love for one another, one's nation, and all decent humanity far and wide? What if we pursued work for ourselves in the best and most meaningful way?; a way which accords with our very particular nature—not as we are, but as we could be? The most damnable thing about voting is that it requires almost nothing of us but signifies consent: real change—a reordering of our lives around our most sacred and deeply-held principles—in our life mode and methodology, could require of us the contrary: nearly everything—if not the kitchen-sink! The latter is, I think, the true cost to bear for individual authenticity in the age of post-modernity; and make no mistake: all is decidedly not lost—for man is far more than the sum of the stringent and strident social conditions wherein he eventuates and thereafter awakes, having found himself made conscious in a world which ill fits his best, highest, and most aspirational nature. In many respects, the latter is the true challenge of emergent adulthood, which eventually impresses upon all of us, a farcical consummate reality—with all of its absurdity, brokenness, and otherwise imperfectability—which is so divorced from the ideal, it leads us to question the very fiber of the universe itself, and of all ontology: i.e. Being.

But the "solution" is not mere disenchanted dissolution of all ideals when confronted with "real": i.e. the solution to illusion is not mere misanthropic dissociative disillusion. We must instead, reckon with the world as we find it: that is to say, as it really is; not merely to bemoan what it ought be—nor to delude ourselves with new, carefully-crafted illusioned rationalizations, that seek to merely soothe, delude, and artifice a starkly-unsettling, unveiled reality that does not accord with what we were taught within the carefully-contrived confines of our self-contained school-worlds.

Part II will explore America's nearly-ubiquitous belief in "positive democracy", which is at odds with the very ethos of her own Founders.

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The human race, as far back as memory of the world goes, has lived and still lives conformably in society, this axiom alone decides the great dispute still waged by the best philosophers and moral theologians against Carneades the skeptic and Epicurus . . . namely, whether law exists by nature, or whether man is naturally sociable, which comes to the same thing. This same axiom, together with VII and its corollary, proves that man has free choice, however weak, to make virtues of his passions; but that he is aided by God, naturally by divine providence and supernaturally by divine grace.[1]

For Vico, these necessary contingencies (of man living in society with agency) is mostly due to the “natural law of gentes”[2] and the guiding hand of Providence which directs human agency towards the end of civil harmony through the three ubiquitous and universal human institutions of religion, marriage, and burial:

We observe that all nations, barbarous as well as civilized, though separately founded because remote from each other in time and space, keep these three human customs: all have some religion, all contract solemn marriages, all bury their dead . . . For, by the axiom that "uniform ideas, born among peoples unknown to each other, must have a common ground of truth," it must have been dictated to all nations that from these three institutions humanity began among them all, and therefore they must be most devoutly guarded by them all, so that the world should not again become a bestial wilderness.[3]

For Vico, there are three stages of development for human civilization, namely the vulgar, the heroic, and the divine which correspond with their respective institutions: “This was the order of human institutions: first the forests, after that the huts, then the villages, next the cities, and finally the academies.”[4] The subject of this inquiry is not the transition from vulgar to heroic to divine, but rather the ambiguous force of “Providence,” by which human development is directed and encouraged.

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The original "Frontispiece," of The New Science

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One recurring and overarching claim that Vico makes throughout his New Science, is that all human beings—who exist first as individuals, then families, and finally as cities made up of smaller political communities—develop due to a marrying of human agency with the force of Divine Providence, which convicts even those living in barbarous and vulgar times to found institutions which foster human advancement:

This axiom establishes that divine providence initiated the process by which the fierce and violent were brought from their outlaw state to humanity and by which nations were instituted among them. It did so by awaking in them a confused idea of divinity, which they in their ignorance attributed to that to which it did not belong. Thus through the terror of this imagined divinity, they began to put themselves in some order.[5]

It is in this providential way that even those human beings living under vulgar conditions have some semblance of a metaphysical understanding of the universal, which inspires action towards the end of human refinement and advancement through the creation of the three sacred institutions which lay the groundwork for further human development. Thus for Vico, “without religion no commonwealths can be born, and if there were no commonwealths in the world there would be no philosophers in it.”[6]

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In such a conception, it may be said that while religion may give birth to philosophy and other divine pursuits (in so far as they attempt to order man’s soul and his commonwealth according to what Providence has ordained), it is human nature itself that gives birth to two conceits—that of nations and scholars—which by conceiving of things contrary to their divine order undermine the guiding hand of Providence, thereby regressing man from divine or human times to human or barbarous times, respectively:

In such commonwealths the entire peoples, who have in common the desire for justice, command laws that are just because they are good for all. Such a law Aristotle divinely defines as will without passions, which would be the will of a hero who has command of his passions. These commonwealths gave birth to philosophy. By their very form they inspired it to form the hero, and for that purpose to interest itself in truth. All this was ordained by providence to the end that, since virtuous actions were no longer prompted by religious sentiments as formerly, philosophy should make the virtues understood in their idea, and by dint of reflection thereon, if men were without virtue they should at least be ashamed of their vices . . . And from the philosophies providence permitted eloquence to arise and, from the very form of these popular commonwealths in which good laws are commanded, to become impassioned for justice, and from these ideas of virtue to inflame the peoples to command good laws. Such eloquence, we resolutely affirm, flourished in Rome in the time of Scipio Africanus, when civil wisdom and military valor . . . happily united . . . But as the popular states became corrupt, so also did the philosophies. They descended to skepticism. Learned fools fell to calumniating the truth. Thence arose a false eloquence, ready to uphold either of the opposed sides of a case indifferently. Thus it came about that, by abuse of eloquence . . . these citizens provoked civil wars in their commonwealths and drove them to total disorder. Thus they caused the commonwealths to fall from a perfect liberty into the perfect tyranny of anarchy or the unchecked liberty of the free peoples, which is the worst of all tyrannies.[7]

In light of this decay caused by the exercise of philosophy divorced from its emphasis on virtue and justice—I.e. seeking to understand, align with, and acquiesce to Divine Providence—Vico argued that Providence causes in such cases,[8] either internal reform or external destruction. This process of redirection occurs continually when human beings err, in order to reset the equilibrium of history and reorder the course of human affairs towards their proper End, which seems for Vico, a combination of individual virtue and justice melded with a harmonious commonwealth, where each individual serves the common good, by exercising his or her will and ability in the service of others as Christ instructed. In this way, there is for Vico, an interplay between human agency and the force of Divine Providence that manifests itself in space through temporal time which may be called history, aiming at an End that seems to be beyond human comprehension, though intelligible to a certain degree through the activity of philosophy which is birthed from natural religion. While it seems to me Vico believed Divine Providence would actualize its will in the temporal world in time, it is also true that human agency can act in a manner that does not accord with the Divine Will and therefore history is in actuality, essentially cyclical—in so far as it is a perpetual falling away from, and reconciling to, the Divine Providential Mind. And while Providence will ultimately triumph through the actualization of the Divine Will in temporality, the action of human beings—in so far as we are endowed with the ability to accord with (or depart from) the ambiguous and elusively nebulous force of Providence (thereby elevating or debasing ourselves into the three stages of development)—remains contingent upon human agency, rather than determined by forces and circumstances outside of individual or societal control.

Throughout his New Science, Vico used language such as the word “caused” to describe human actions that he felt were directed and ordained by Providence towards some great end:

In our religion, divine grace causes virtuous action for the sake of an eternal and infinite good . . . providence, through the order of civil institutions discussed in this work, makes itself palpable for us in these three feelings: the first, the marvel, the second, the veneration, hitherto felt by all the learned for the matchless wisdom of the ancients, and the third, the ardent desire with which they burned to seek and attain it. These are in fact three lights of the divine providence that aroused in them the aforesaid three beautiful and just sentiments; but these sentiments were later perverted by the conceit of scholars and by the conceit of nations.[9]

While it is abundantly clear that Providence does direct the course and actions of men spatially in the temporal world towards the end of “an eternal and infinite good”—i.e. the fulfilling of man’s ultimate teleological purpose by aligning with, and sharing in, the divine nature communally—how this is accomplished is much more perplexing. My intimation—based on the cited passages and the text as a whole—is that Providence operates not necessarily consciously or directly, but rather through the congruous vehicles of natural law, reason, and conscience—which all simultaneously drive man towards family and civilization (i.e. through the universal institutions of marriage, burial, and religion), thereby refining and reforming his character to align with what he was created to be. In this way, Providence seems to be universal and directed, yet reconcilable, with free notions of human agency which Vico frequently acknowledges throughout the text as a necessary contingency for true virtue and goodness. And yet, because there is a clear teleological end to which Providence directs the actions of men, it transcends the “skeptical” labels of Fate, Fortune, and/or Chance, which the Stoics and Epicureans employed (but Plato rightly recognized as erroneous).[10] Similarly, from his axiom established in Book 1, paragraphs 135-136, it is certain that Vico acknowledged the supernatural reality of revelatory “divine grace”, which superseded the natural intimation—and impersonal inclinations—of “divine Providence”.[11]

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References

[1] Giambattista Vico, Thomas Goddard Bergin, and Max Harold Fisch, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Revised Translation of the Third Edition (1744) (Cornell University Press, 1984), 135-136.

[2] In Book 11, subheading 550, citing his earlier axiom in subheading 146, Vico wrote: “the natural law of the gentes was by divine providence ordained separately for each people, and only when they became acquainted, did they recognize it as common to all.

[3] Ibid., 333.

[4] Ibid., 239.

[5] Ibid., 178.

[6] Ibid., 179.

[7] Ibid., 1101-1102.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 1110-1111.

[10] Ibid., 130.

[11] “This same axiom, together with VII and its corollary, proves that man has free choice, however weak, to make virtues of his passions; but that he is aided by God, naturally by divine providence and supernaturally by divine grace.”

Fall is here, temporary and transient death is near.
        The changing season, gives me a reason
        To plunge into, that enervated state of being.

Like Spring, Fall shows us there is soon to be great change.
        Unlike Spring those signs of change are ominously portentous,
        Carrying with them forebodings of the year’s
        Cold and slow, whimpering demise.

Oh Fall, how you always forsake thee!
        Like clockwork you come and you go,
        Leaving but death and a no-thing sleep in your wake.

You leave me feeling the need to slumber along,
        Hardly awake during this time and state.
        But in rest and recuperation, my soul does steep.

Unlike Spring, you are the embodiment of death,
        Made manifest in the realm of materiality.
        But until next year, the live world does refrain.

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Dull but monochromatically colorful are your signs and symbols,
        Unlike that cheerfully vivid budding state,
        At the end of the year’s first quarter.
         Beautiful indeed you, too, are!

But either way, you don’t speak to me, nor I you.
        Will we ever reconcile? Will I ever appreciate the
        Autumnal cycle which signals the year’s time
        Has moved past full bloom into recession?

What is it about you, oh Fall?
        That time of slumberous death which precedes instaurative birth.
        They say all life grows out of death—Is it thus so?

It must be I say,
        But how to reconcile my soul,
        To a reality against my will for a perpetual summer?

I do not wish to go out with a whimper,
        But instead with a vigorous
        And life-affirming vitality!

Unlike Fall which does slowly die of retreat—
        Reposing always into its sweet,
         But tame wintered den.

Mortal enemies it seems we are but destined to be.
        For in you I see,
        But the most slothen in me.

I was made to be a man of action,
        But Fall demands of me rest and reflection—
        And that heightened state of contemplation!

I was born in that place, which is without season. 
        Which has cast upon me and my internal rhythm,
         A great and consternating confusion.

Thus it is hard to comprehend,
        Those metaphysical reasons,
        For the necessity of constantly changing seasons.

These are but necessary integrations, I see.
        To reconcile them within me,
        For a man is endowed with both agency and mind.

To live wholly in one without the other,
         Is to die to oneself in the other. Therefore,
        To be in perpetual summer, is but to waywardly falter. 

Eschewing being and mind, exercised for their own sake.
        Is to reject all that is best and mightiest.
       Always stuck in action, will result in quiet desperation!

Perhaps it is God, maker of season—
         And not I, who knows best! He whom directs the seasons,
          For seemingly nebulous reasons.

The seasons thus thrust upon the internal,
         An imposed external order. Take heed we must,
          Rising and falling with the rhythm of season.

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First it was superfluous luxuries, then necessities. It is Saturday June 8, 2024 and the muse has spoken to me as I sit whilst sipping tea in “Aromas” cafe and coffeeshop in Colonial Williamsburg, Va, USA. Over the past few days, my fiancée and I have been traveling from where we were staying in Florida for the past few months—on what will be referred to in the future as a temporary “expedition”—back to our transplanted home town of Annapolis, MD for work. Nonetheless, my experiences of the last few days have upwelled and distilled some deep-seated sentiments and lamentations about the present state of American civilization.

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It needs but little qualification to acknowledge that America has long been a “consumer culture,” where the concept of citizen has been displaced by the consumer, whose existence is defined by an infinite procession of consumption—from cradle to grave—of commodified consumer goods. My experience thus far in the so-called living museum that is Williamsburg, Va has invoked in me, a deep sadness and consternation, because my hopes and expectations for what Williamsburg would or ought be, were woefully different from reality as I found it. I had visited Williamsburg as a youth and remembered it fondly, but memory is a strange faculty that is dubious even under the best of circumstances. What I found in 2024 was a place that was truly no-place: a locale with charming buildings and beautiful vistas that is contrived, artificial, and corporatized; it is not so much a living and breathing testament to the arduous past when life was mostly unpleasant, but rather a carefully concocted and curated experience oriented towards consumeristic tourists who either desire—or are made to desire by a lack of true alternative choices in an organic free marketplace—a litany of cute, cookie-cutter shops, many of which are simply ubiquitous corporate outposts.

Colonial Williamsburg: Where outward beauty masks an unsettling reality.

Here in Williamsburg, I have not found the unique spirit of Colonial America, but rather an amusement park aimed at towards tourists who desire to consume entertainment and amusement as if it were a physical product, instead of a spiritually nourishing encounter with the past . Perhaps it is naively idealistic of me to think it was ever (or could be) otherwise. I do realize from its inception, Williamsburg was a philanthropic contrivance, but it is hard to imagine it being originally conceived as the vast and intricate shopping mall with paid parking that it is today.

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What I wish to write about here is something adjacent and analogous but different: that is, the consolidation and commodification of everything into a consumer product has created a society whose aim is to extort as much money from the consumer as possible, rather than safeguard the well-being of the citizen and facilitate the common good. This process of mass commodification nearly everything has been unabated for so long, I think it no exaggeration to state that almost every product and service—from privatized healthcare and insurance, to public goods like basic utilities including water, electric, and heating—have become part of a grand extortionist plot to separate the consumer from as much of his or her money as is humanly possible without bludgeoning and subsequent theft. Dare I even mention zoning restrictions on the usage of private property, which has contributed to an affordable housing crisis that has caused mass homelessness, leaving America’s once-proud cities in squalid tatters? What “man of the system” can—or hypothetically, even could—fix this?

Mass homelessness in the order of magnitude of tens-of-thousands, afflicts most, if not all, of America's major cities.

Compounding matters, nearly all of the aforementioned products and services are state-mandated, meaning that one cannot simply opt out of the grand extortionist plot. Under such conditions—and coupled with an ascendent and incendiary, public and private system of indebtedness—it is no wonder that the cost of living has exponentially increased to such a degree that many people can hardly afford to simply exist. I myself am one of them despite running my own boat repair business, making $145/billable hour. We live in a world where a large corporation can make fortune bottling and selling a ubiquitous natural resource such as water, while attempting to organize one’s deepest and most profound thoughts via writing essays such as this one often don’t even pay a penny. Living in a consumer-materialist world, with its sirenous allurements and ubiquitous entrapments, has caused me to reevaluate my deepest convictions and evaluate if my actions and lifestyle aligned with them: as it turned out, I was not being true to my deepest, most dear, noblest, and best self—the self which I am currently not, but hope to someday be. These past years, I have sacrificed higher things for the sake of lower ones—no more I say!

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This whole diatribe was unleashed when my fiancée (now wife) and I spent $36.56 on two small pots of tea, an avocado toast with smoked salmon, and a sausage breakfast sandwich, after which the college-aged baristas would not give may fiancée a glass of ice water, citing “management”: for apparently spending what roughly correlates to three-hours of labor for service workers, no longer entitles one to a complementary glass of aqueous sustenance from the tap—or at least not in the putrefied “Colonial heart” of America that lives on only as a costume gilding of what is in actuality part amusement park and part shopping mall. At Williamsburg, only lip service is paid to the still-born American Ideal, which briefly birthed a great nation of autonomous yeoman farmers—who were lords of their own domain—coupled with a complimentary urban mercantile system that afforded great social mobility and economic opportunity, but which —250 years later—turned out to be headed for a post-industrial neo-serfdom. “You will own nothing and be happy,” the World Economic Forum infamously told us in 2016. "Never letting a good crisis go to waste," the preceding message then went viral, and was reiterated and reformulated by the WEF in 2020, hoping to use the heavy-handedness of the Covid-19 Pandemic—where a litany of prescriptive restrictions issued didactically from on-high were deemed necessary—as the means to the end of predetermined global policy directives aiming at the consolidation of power and resources under the umbrella of global governance. In late 2024, we do truly seem to be heading towards a world in which people truly do own nothing—will we be “happy?” If so, will we be virtuous and worthy of renown?

Klaus Schwab, Founder of the World Economic Forum

At Williamsburg, my fiancée was told she could—like a good consumer—purchase a $4.00 16 oz. single-use plastic bottle filled with slightly-filtered tap water (that is likely contaminated with endocrine-disrupting chemicals from leeching plastic) and Aromas would graciously acquiesce to part of her request, giving her a glass of ice to go with her water. The message was clear and simple: “you’re not welcome here, but give us your money.” Business in this manner was and is unacceptable. Schemes such as this one are compounded by parking, which in Williamsburg is paid and exorbitant. Will I ever want to come back? What is laughably backwards in our society: activities that are genuinely worth doing for their own sake, or for the benefit of oneself and/or others—like reading, writing, teaching, speaking and discoursing with others, connecting with peers or children through play, adventuring in nature, gardening, building things with one’s own hands, etc.—are neither financially viable nor sustainable, and are therefore being increasingly omitted from daily life to the detriment of all decent humanity far and wide. But bottling and selling water—which is so obviously bad for people, animals, and planetary ecology that it and other predatory usages of single-use plastic, probably should be banned—does: that is the sad reality of the world we currently inhabit. But there is no use allowing resentment to fester, for the operative question is What is to Be Done?

What is to be Done?: The forgotten Russian novel.

In cities like our beloved home of Annapolis, MD, parking has recently been made paid throughout the city and the going rate is $5/hour. What local can afford this on a daily basis? And with the sprawling state of modern America with its expansive and endless stroads, who can exist without a car? When I moved to Annapolis in early 2020, parking was free within city limits for up to two hours except on Main Street, but everything changed when the old Hillman parking garage was razed and replaced with new, for seemingly no purpose other than beautification—but it’s a parking garage; why ought something inherently utilitarian and piggish be covered with lipstick on the citizen’s non-consensual dollar? City-wide paid parking was supposed to be a temporary stop-gap measure to make up from lost revenue from the garage, but as Milton Friedman told us, there is nothing more permanent than a temporary governmental program. I have decided to silently protest and have collected many parking tickets to date which I have not, and will never, pay: for the way to stand up to imposed injustice is civil disobedience; you don’t fight the evil of avariciousness with docility and compliance.

We are seeing what happens in a society when good men and women stand idly by and do but little: for in a vacuum where those who are charitable, decent, and believe convictively in the common good—yet stand by idle, complacent, and agreeable—the avaricious and rapacious step in, having mastered and honed various surreptitious methods of manipulation and the bending of others to their will, thereby seizing control of what ought be public resources before commodifying and selling them back to a docile and lethargic public that is consumed with consumerism and mindless platitudes that reek of self-soothing: “this is just the way it is,” they tell themselves. But it doesn’t have to be. It wasn’t always like this: consumerism as a cultural phenomenon and quasi-religion of materiality is a decidedly new aspect of modernity and post-modernity. I have watched this process exacerbate and intensify in my own short lifetime. Perhaps I am simply more aware than I used to be, but then I start recounting all of the things which used to be accessible, free, and commonplace and realize that I am not merely nostalgizing the past. Corporations are not inherently evil and they assuredly have their place in our society, but if left unperturbed and to their own devices, they usually make every place a no-place because they are not people and they have no soul; therefore the corporation eventually makes every place in which they fester soulless and inanimate. Why one might ask? Because while the small mom-and-pop shop operates based on individual agency and intuitive judgment on the part of the proprietor(s), the corporation instead acts by way of its overarching and non-negotiable bureaucratic policy, aimed at maximizing profit while reducing the risk of legal liability. This is why every shopping plaza across the county has the same dull and loathsome feeling that inspires existential dread and the ubiquitous religious sentiment of the day: nihilism.

Compounding matters, there are few third-spaces anymore—fewer yet where one can just be and exist without spending money. I have never been one to obsess and salivate over the injustice of inequality or inequity of outcome; I also hold the heretical belief that every human being is foremost an individual and is therefore, by definition, unique—meaning every singular person is necessarily unequal and distinct from every other. But it couldn’t be more clear to me how this trend of reducing accessibility to place on economic grounds could and has intensified disparate social outcomes. To some extent, it has always been this way and when I reflect upon such matters in the past I am immediately drawn to the 1920s world of factory workers in which F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby takes place, but as suburbia has displaced urban environments in the last 70 years, there are now very few public places in existence worth noting. Most that remain are relics of the past.

I grew up in the suburbs, but in my 20s came to possess a visceral distaste for their empty and desolate, car-centric environs. I sound like a leftist, but assuredly I am not. But that does not mean what is happening in America these days is in any way good, just, or right; I see it very clearly and I cannot be silent. Stadiums and other public amphitheaters for events used to be such a place, but these days almost all stadiums are as exclusive (and unnecessarily luxurious) as ever due to the exorbitant prices of sporting and music events. And yet, for whatever reason, it is in the age of inaccessibility that the owners of professional sport franchises have the audacity to suckle from the teat of the public purse, citing grandiose economic benefits that almost never materialize in reality.

In my home sports town of Miami, the historic and public Orange Bowl—where my father once attended games for the 1972 Miami Dolphins, who remain the only professional sports franchise of the modern era, to be undefeated or untied—was razed to the ground in 2008 due to a shady back-room deal, to make way for a modern monstrosity called Marlins Stadium—that despite being almost 20 years old at present—has no noteworthy history to speak of. Additionally, the Orange Bowl played host to five open-air, pre-corporate Super Bowls and numerous collegiate national championship games, that were a spectacle put on for the common man and fanatic for pennies on the current dollar.

JFK and Jackie Kennedy greet Cuban expats in the Orange Bowl in the immediate aftermath of the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion.

One cannot even watch public television or YouTube anymore without constantly being involuntarily bombarded with advertisements: another sign of the times. Is the solution to truly cut the cord and chuck our phones and computers into the rubbish bin and live the lives of isolated hermits? Is the solution, as Vaclav Havel insinuated, to build “parallel structures” to act as havens for home, hearth, and community within the existing consumer apparatus? Surely it is not to simply turn the other cheek and allow ourselves and our world to be further destroyed by the wicked and avaricious?

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A few hours north of Williamsburg, the Annapolis waterfront is presently being redesigned to combat flooding and increase public utility—or at least that is the pretense for the project. I fear what is to come for this most sacred of American cities that once acted as the Unites States Capitol. On the waterfront, longtime waterfront fixture, Pusser’s—a “hole-in-the-wall” outdoor bar and restaurant that embodies coastal Maryland and “waterman” culture—was bought and is being replaced by two cookie-cutter offerings that have nothing to do with Annapolis or Maryland waterfront charm by corporate conglomerate, Atlas Restaurant Group, who is colloquially “credited” with gentrifying and cleansing Baltimore Harbor, stripping away its historic soul as collateral damage. Will Annapolis go the way of all of America’s other deracinated and sterilized cities? In time, it is likely to do so. What evidence is there to the contrary?

Baltimore's Inner Harbor

One of the most detestable aspects of modern America, which is defined by suburbia, is that every place feels like every other place—and therefore shares the same defining character, which is to say that of no-place at all. One of the aspects of life that makes being alive worthwhile is the experience of novel things, people, and places—through travel and adventure—which inspire, edify, cleanse, revivify, allowing the reification of the nobler parts of man, whilst temporarily casting away the busy-ness of modern life and the monotonous component parts of routine daily life.

When everywhere is nowhere: a view of a "stroad" that could be anywhere in the USA.

It is my belief that through these phenomenologically novel experiences people become better, spiritually richer, and more liberal—in the original sense of the term—through a process of reorientation which the modern world necessitates by virtue of its overarching soulless character. But if every place is the same, that is to say if every place is no-place, what value is there in traveling—especially when travel itself has become a commodified consumer product to be bought, sold, and consumed, making it prohibitively expensive for most all people? If we don’t live in a Brave New World, I don’t know what would constitute one. But how to reverse course and save ourselves from certain spiritual death? How do we preserve the sanctity of humanity and the human person in the age of the consumer?

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In many ways, South Florida is the perfect microcosm of modern civilization. Among the lines of palm trees and manicured lawns, those who know a bit of its history and ecology can discern the artificial and imposed suburban product that has been constructed on top of a wild and fascinating place. Parts of natural Florida remain, but the expansive and encroaching concrete jungle and desolate stroads that carry most Floridians to and fro threaten to blot out these remnants of the authentic Florida.

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What is Authentic Florida?

We have to consider the primary nature, character, and attributes of a place in order to make any judgment of how it ought to be today. What was Florida like before real estate speculators began remaking it?  

Pre-twentieth century Florida was a raw, sublimely beautiful but pestilential wilderness: one that had tenfold more (non-native) disease-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquitoes than it had people. It was a region dominated by subtropical rainforests with an immense, slow-flowing “River of Grass” in its interior, which fed and nourished with pure, nutrient-poor water, all surrounding coastal areas. The seasonal overflowing of Lake Okeechobee through the region called the Everglades created a watery sawgrass habitat, dotted with “tree islands” rich in biodiversity, which has been seldom seen or duplicated elsewhere in the world. Near the coasts, vast forests with hardwood hammocks and sand -pine scrub predominated, which provided ample habitat for mammals like raccoons, opossums, deer, black bears, squirrels, river otters, coyotes, and the much-maligned Florida Panther. Of course, toothy reptiles including a multiplicity of snakes (many of which were and are poisonous), as well as alligators and crocodiles were (and are) also present in abundance.

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At the coasts, the delicate balance of an immense interior wetland coupled with salty, sun-drenched coastal areas carved out vast and elaborate rivers and brackish estuaries that were once teeming with life. Many modern readers will be familiar with Florida’s “Intracoastal Waterway,” which was an “improvement” upon nature, whereby existing barrier islands were repurposed and connected as deemed necessary to form an inland latitudinal vein for commerce and transit. Inlets were then dredged in predetermined areas to allow ocean access. These historical disruptions in hydrology remain poorly understood, but their effects are felt all over South Florida today.

Mangrove forests are ubiquitous in coastal Florida.

Nonetheless, in the pre-industrial homeostatic environment, vast expanses of coral proliferated off the eastern coast of South Florida (from Stuart to the Dry Tortugas, which lie about 70 miles west of Key West), creating Florida Reef, which has now been reduced to about 1% of its pre-industrial stony coral cover. Over eons—and with changing climates that caused sea levels to ebb and flow—the Florida Keys, which are the only subtropical coralline islands in the contiguous United States, were formed. The islands which today constitute the terrestrial Florida Keys were once underwater coral mountains, where the living colonial organisms known as coral polyps once thrived and built immense reef structures in a bank-barrier arrangement spanning nearly 350 statutory miles along North America’s continental shelf. Today, one will find the remnants of the modern reef structure eroding at an alarming rate; in the vacuum afforded by the mostly vanquished reef-builders, soft, weedy, and opportunistic corals and sponges (particularly zoanthids) have proliferated—but each year, Florida Reef inches closer and closer to geologic death: a tipping point whereby the reef system is eroding faster than new coral tissue can accrete via recruitment and calcium carbonate deposition. This demise, which began over 3,000 years ago, was comparatively glacial until the early 1980s, when the Diadema antillarum sea urchin—which consumes benthic algae and detritus for sustenance—suffered a Caribbean-wide mass mortality event likely due to a single-celled ciliate pathogen that was only identified in 2022. Since 1983, coral—particularly the fast-growing (and critically endangered) Acropora species, cervicornis and palmata respectively—have died in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary at a breakneck pace. 

Coral decline at Carysfort Reef; pictures by Phil Dustan.

The Industrialists Who Made Modern Florida

Most people don’t realize just how recently “civilization” in an industrialized sense was brought to Florida. While Europe was marching off to war in the summer of 1914, Florida was still a vast and largely untamed wilderness (and comparative civilizational backwater). In Western popular culture, the United States' “Wild West” is often considered the last truly free and wild frontier, but historically it was Florida, which was not fully settled or adorned with modern conveniences like intricately connected (st)roadways and other infrastructure (like a network of drainage canals), air conditioning, or culture—the latter of which would eventually take the form of amusement and entertainment—until the latter half of the twentieth century. In general terms, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that the two innovations of land reclamation and air conditioning are by and large what made Florida desirably inhabitable.

Before 1850, Florida and its ecology were largely unknown to westerners, except as a hellish bog which proved an impenetrable expanse during the Seminole Wars of the nineteenth century (which afforded the ragtag Seminole and Miccosukee tribes the distinction of never being formally conquered by the United States or Western Civilization). 

As Michael Grunwald elucidated in The Swamp, which is perhaps the best history written on the development of South Florida and its large-scale draining and repurposing of the Everglades, Florida had been a haven for boondoggling drainage and development schemes after the abatement of the Seminole Wars in 1858. But it was industrialist Hamilton Disston in 1881 who first conceptualized a practicable concrete plan to reclaim up to twelve million (beginning with four million) acres of Florida, which he purchased via a “sweetheart deal” from the Florida Legislature to bail out its bankrupt internal improvement fund for a mere one million dollars. To date, Disston’s land acquisition remains the largest private acquisition of land in world history. Disston, who after his purchase became the largest individual landholder in the country, saw Florida and its “land by the gallon” through the lens of a speculative prospector, wanting to make in this world something that was truly his, not merely a product of his fortunate material heredity. It seems that Disston believed if only the vast sheets of standing water could be drained, the rich biological muck left behind would constitute an agricultural hinterland, with rich and nutritive soil for the yeoman farmer and industrial agribusiness alike. In this way, it was Disston’s seeming ambition to make something of himself in the civilized socialite world–by remaking in his image the unique subtropical frontier that was Florida–which fueled his quest to dredge and drain natural Florida.

A depiction of US soldiers looking for Seminoles within the Everglades.

Despite Disston’s best attempts–which eventually drove him to sell off his inherited sawmill empire in order to provide additional funds–Florida’s Everglades remained steadfast in their refusal to submit to the will and wishes of men, however great his tools and technologies were becoming. As a result, Disston’s efforts to drain Florida’s Everglades yielded but few tangible results: the dredging of eighty some odd miles of drainage canals to the north and west of the lake, as well as the leveling of an indiscriminate amount of land in the Kissimmee Basin to establish pastures. Yet, even these accomplishments (that took years to complete) ultimately made matters worse, as Disston decided (against the advice of his chief engineer) to eschew the arduous and prohibitively expensive (but necessary) drainage canals to the south and east of the lake. Once his reclamation efforts to the north drained the Kissimmee flood plain, the shallow three-mile ditch dug west to connect Lake Okeechobee to the Caloosahatchee couldn’t handle the increased flow and so inundated much of the temporarily dry land in South Florida. Once a temporary drought subsided, Disston's efforts made flooding worse.

As a result, an 1887 State Commission declared Disston’s best organized and industrial machinations to be evanescent, tattering his image for posterity and leading him to be largely viewed as the latest carpetbagging Northerner in a long-winded procession going back decades. But as Michael Grunwald argued in The Swamp, this condemnation was misguided, as Disston did accomplish part of what he set out to do: permanently draining much of the Kissimmee valley and digging one of a litany of drainage canals from Lake Okeechobee to the sea. It is just a simple fact that the Everglades were too vast to have been conquered by one man and his legions of nascent steam-powered machines.

Lost in the immediate aftermath of Disston’s futile quest is the following reality which has repeatedly unfolded throughout history: those who pioneer or prove an idea or concept are seldom the beneficiaries of their own genius. The contemporaneous invention of the light bulb is but a prime example of this historical phenomenon. Thomas Edison, due in large part to his marketing genius which aimed to fulfill the requisite contingency of corporate profitability, was able to become inextricably linked for all posterity to both the light bulb and electricity in a more general sense. This historical perception formed despite Edison merely perfecting and commodifying the former, while politicizing and dogmatically campaigning for a technologically inferior version of the latter under the guise of safety. Edison–in both of the previous cases–skillfully maneuvered in such a way that would have made Machiavelli blush, utilizing the insurgent techniques and technologies of “public relations” (which is to say, propaganda). And so, while Disston was the first to conceive of the mechanized reclamation of nature in Florida, he would die before another would make fruit of his budding and audacious seed. 

Napoleon Bonaparte Broward and his Disciples 

Proceeding Disston was Florida’s nineteenth (and perhaps most infamous) governor, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, for whom “Broward County” in South Florida is aptly named. Broward, a democratic populist who was reportedly reluctant to run for office, took it upon himself to channel and voice the budding popular desire to harness and bend Florida’s natural world to the wishes of men through land reclamation, flood control, and water management. Broward thus campaigned upon the promise that “water runs down hill” and once taking office, he attempted to drain the swamp but also ran into difficulty. Broward was out of office by 1909 and died unexpectedly the following year. But despite not living to see the fruits of his machinations, Broward’s legacy persists to this very day: for Broward began, on a public governmental level, what Disston had failed to do through private enterprise. The problem, as we have come to find out, was this process of indiscriminate drainage–begun on an industrial scale by Disston and Broward–done impudently and in a non-deliberative manner, with little consideration for potential negative consequences: for at this time Florida was still the edge of the civilized world, and as a result, land-reclamation grew into a popular movement rife with religious fervor aimed at fulfilling pretenses of “Manifest Destiny.” The drainage of South Florida even drew academic intrigue and curiosity from Scientific American and Teddy Roosevelt, who paid a visit to South Florida to witness for himself the ongoing “work.” And yet, even early conservationists, who attempted to protect South Florida’s wading birds from plume hunters–and certain ethereal forests like Paradise Key from development–were completely oblivious to the wanton ecological degradation that would “flow” from drainage efforts by way of irreparable hydrological alteration. Thus, drainage and land reclamation proceeded recklessly and unabated (except by nature itself), without proper oversight or planning; what God-like human being could plan such a feat as the draining of the Galapagos of North America without it proving disastrous?

Flagler’s Folly: The Railroad That Went to Sea

Just after the turn of the twentieth century, Florida’s status as a prospective frontier “boom town” began to become a reality via the advent of Henry Flagler’s “Florida East Coast Railway” (in addition to Henry Plant’s west coast railroads) which would eventually connect Jacksonville to Key West, with notable stops along the way at St. Augustine, West Palm Beach, Ft. Lauderdale, and Miami. But this process of creating logistical transportation arteries via railroad-ification—which dammed and severed Florida’s natural lands and watersheds—did not transform Florida over a fortnight. In fact, when Flagler’s railroad did reach Key West in January of 1912—a mere four months before the sinking of White Star’s infamous RMS Titanic—his conquest of the sea was relatively short-lived: for in 1935 one of the most powerful hurricanes in recorded history pummeled the Florida Keys, destroying large spans of the “Railroad that Went to Sea,” rendering Key West inaccessible via modern overland transportation. For a brief period in the depression-ridden mid-1930s, it seemed as though man’s attempted conquest of nature was all for naught–except perhaps as ample fodder for satirized accounts of his folly. But it is hard to know whether it is nature or man that is more stubborn and persistent: for by 1938, the defunct and destroyed remnants of Flagler’s “Overseas Railroad” (that was also bankrupt) were resurrected and repurposed into the construction of the “Overseas Highway,” which had begun in 1927, bringing with it civilization— and its discontents.

The Overseas Railway

While it is perhaps foolish to pin the blame for what has happened to Florida in the century since on three once renowned and celebrated–but increasingly infamous–men, it should be noted it was their collective idea to civilize the seemingly un-civilizable as a sun-soaked northerner’s winter playground, an agricultural Eden, and an urban paradise that has ultimately led to the creation of what Florida is today—for better and worse. I therefore think it reasonable to assert that Hamilton Disston, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, and Henry Flagler are three of the “Founding Fathers” of artificial Florida, (along with Julia Tuttle, Henry Plant, and a few others).

Environmental Fallout From Continued Conquest of the Natural World

Following Flagler’s triumphant conquest of Florida’s east coast–as well as Disston and Broward’s efforts to drain her interior–Lake Okeechobee itself was diked in the 1910s, which was done first with a miniscule 6’ earthen dike that would later burst twice in the hurricanes of 1926 and 1928 respectively, killing approximately 2,500 (most of whom were poor farmers) overnight during the latter raging tempest. Concomitantly, two functionally equivalent but distinctive waterways were dredged to drain surplus water (and also allow for trans-Florida navigation) from Lake Okeechobee during the wet season, which were connected to two previously existing, coastal rivers: the St. Lucie in the east and Caloosahatchee in the west, respectively. Other elaborate canals (some also connecting to existing rivers like the Miami) were dug through urban southeast Florida to fulfill similar drainage and navigational ends. After the disaster that was the Okeechobee Hurricane of 1928, the Army Corps of Engineers–led by trained engineer and president, Herbert Hoover–began construction on a 30’ concrete dike that completely encircled the lake, in order to cut it off from the Everglades ecosystem on its immediate southern shore.

The result of this process was to cut off the Everglades from their historical watershed in the Kissimmee River Basin—which was also later straightened (and then partially restored) to allow for more efficient agricultural usage with ill ecological effects. As such, South Florida has been plagued with a manmade water management crisis for nearly one hundred years where Florida Bay has become both—alternatively and dependent on season—a warm, hyper-saline environment, as well as a eutrophied and turbid watery expanse with vast quantities of polluted freshwater. Both of these unnatural conditions have increasingly contributed to mass die-offs of expansive subaqueous seagrass meadows, which then in turn float to the surface and decay in the intense sunlight, providing ample fodder to fuel massive algae blooms and red tides, both of which have been increasing in frequency and intensity in recent years (and have created immense hypoxic oceanic “dead zones'' that kill aquatic creatures numbering in the millions).This is to say little of the nutrient pollution of the Everglades ecosystem itself in which invasive plants now proliferate—as well as the coastal rivers and estuaries—which have all but been destroyed by the introduction of massive quantities of nutrient and heavy-metal laden freshwater and sediment, into what were historically nutrient-poor brackish and saltwater coastal regions. 

What is Artificial Florida? An Exploration of an Imposed Reality

Without becoming bogged down in the muck, the preceding context provides a backdrop for the following assertion: Florida, as it exists today, is an almost entirely artificial creation. Don’t get me wrong: there are still remnants of the old sublime and essential Florida in abundance—particularly in various state and national parks, as well as along the coasts. On a personal level, some of the most exhilarating and memorable moments in my life have been spent on Florida Reef, despite having only experienced it in a degraded form. Thus, if one so chooses, he or she may find and live (almost entirely) in “Old Florida,” while reaping the rich benefits and conveniences of modern life. It is not for these people (often not native to Florida) to whom I am writing, but rather those who occupy and defend—whether overtly or implicitly—the artificial, unreal Florida.

Before proceeding further, I must issue the following disclaimer to state definitively and clearly that I’m not arguing against the progress that is civilization, when properly applied, which I take to mean: the sensible improvement of nature so as to preserve its essential order while creating a more habitable place within which humans can live well. The principle of an edifying rational and reverential dominion and coexistence with nature was perhaps the dominant ethos for Anglo-American civilization until the decadent utilitarian materialism of post-WWII Americana came to dominate our Old World roots, culturally and philosophically speaking. With the preceding in mind, one may also consider the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America who fulfilled the oft-issued–but usually unqualified–colloquial platitude of “living in harmony in nature” to a degree that most westerners (including myself) can seldom conceive: for their very existence was intimately tied to the very land (and sea) from which they sprung, in a way that made their religiosity and reverential spirit virtually indistinguishable from (both individual and societal) practical actions undertaken; archaeological digs of the Calusa that once occupied “Florida’s Ten Thousand Islands,” have proven as much for the Calusa ate the very animals they worshiped. When analyzing a magnificent achievement like Flagler’s “Railroad That Went to Sea,” which was once-dubbed an eighth wonder of the world, I am not sure it would fall outside of the bounds of the preceding expressed principle, as who can argue in good faith (and whilst typing on a device as similarly miraculous as a laptop) that Florida would have been better in its primordial form without a network of railways and hotels? I cannot think of any polemical charge more audacious, myopic, and privileged.  

Miami’s “Freedom Tower”

This leads me to state for the record that I am not oblivious to the historical reality whereby a lack of power due to insufficient and ineffectual technologies in large part necessitated that man’s hubris and willful desire to dominate nature iron-fistedly be blunted, tempered, and stultified. Learning to have power and exercise it wisely for the sake of the “Good” is an existential and spiritual problem of monumental proportions that is uniquely endemic to modern civilized man–and perhaps in our critiques of those who occupied the (recent) burgeoning industrial past, we should bear this reality in mind. For it is men like Hamilton Disston who defined and occupied the “Gilded Age” where the idea of America as a land of infinite and expansive progress and technological innovation took shape (and subsequently the Jeffersonian ideal of a humble agrarian republic was inexorably and irrevocably rejected), embracing instead the idea of a limitless “Kingdom of Man” in the temporal realm, promising material abundance and luxury seldom conceived as remotely possible before the modern age. And so, my argument is simply that as human technologies become more powerful and more able to fulfill human dreams, our hubris and tendency to dominate nature, to its and our detriment, must be chastened.

Can we–i.e. those living with the comforts, luxuries, and safeties afforded by modernity–truly conceptualize a world (or pre-industrial Florida) in which 2,500 souls could perish from a storm surge in one night–without any prior warning? Early settlers in Florida must have felt a profound vulnerability in light of the pure inhospitality of a place that was a seeming paradise and yet also, without a moment’s notice, could become a portal to an inner circle of hell. Such a condition is arguably more foreign to a modern civilized human being than the indigenous peoples of Florida appeared to the first Spanish explorers of the sixteenth century. As a matter of historical reality and interpretation, it may very well be that the Spanish had more in common with the native peoples than we moderns have with either. As evidence of this, consider that mosquitoes (and no-see-ums) were once so voracious in South Florida (before the advent of modern methods of pest control) that shipwrecked sailors buried themselves in the sand on Florida beaches up to their heads to prevent being assailed by miniature vampires from head to toe, instead choosing consciously and under duress, to leave only their rational faculties exposed. And so, in light of such beautifully terrifying and persistent forces of nature (with its multiplicity of pestiferous dangers), one may come to understand modern man’s quest to subdue the vast wilderness that was primordial Florida.

For Guidance, Maybe We Ought Look to Early -Modern Europe

Nevertheless, there is a key distinction between desiring to tame and govern wisely and attempting to merely dominate and impose upon. As evidence of the previous claim regarding the ethical governance of nature by civilized man, one may consider the creation of the many gardens in Europe during the early -modern and modern periods. Despite differences in style between the English and French, gardens represent man seeking to cooperate with nature in order to improve her, aiming at the ideals of beauty and harmonious order. It is in the vast gardens of Europe, particularly those competing gardens of Blenheim and Versailles, where nature has been put on display in such a way to demonstrate the beauty of creation, as well as man’s stubborn persistence and ingenuity to carve out an improved and cultivated environment to inhabit. Taking the raw material of nature and envisioning improvement constitutes a supreme act of creation, which is neither an imitation nor a replacement of nature, but rather a stewardship that makes the world more beautiful and habitable so that civilization and its higher offspring like art, literature, and philosophy may flourish. 

By seeking to replace nature with an imposed human vision, Florida’s “robber baron” visionaries transformed it largely into a pleasure-seeker’s paradise. Today’s Florida is then–in many ways–working as intended, since it was designed (in large part) to capitalize on the insatiable and morbidly inflamed human desires for escapism, the pursuit of temporary and transient pleasures, amusements, and entertainment: the latter of which is forever enshrined in the public’s unconscious consciousness by way of Florida’s litany of theme parks. I’m not suggesting that human culture should be dour, pretentious, or in any way “un-fun,” but amusement in the absence of substance is cancerous and a surefire way to eventual meaninglessness and nihilism. Walking the streets of twenty-first century Florida, I intuitively sense a materialistic hedonism gilding a deep-seated and internal teleological dearth; this cultural decadence makes Florida seem–in many ways–more vain, hollow, and vacuous than other places that I have lived or visited.

At Florida’s inception as a civilized land of new opportunities, other possibilities for exploration and adventure were present, which were (and still are to some extent) provided by eco-tourism and the like. But it seems that as time has progressed (and South Florida has become further developed and gentrified by landed corporate interests), these more primal pursuits have been increasingly sanitized and made sterile—and are perhaps on the way to being retired altogether. And this progression from the raw, unabated natural Florida to the ever -more artificial Florida, has grave consequences for both the geographical locale and the people who inhabit it. Some of these maladies are obvious: incessant traffic and construction, environmental pollution and degradation of apocalyptic magnitude, an exorbitant cost of living, a general lack of freedom, increased legislation and taxation, and a palpable increase in general social dysfunction and hostility; other effects are much more difficult to detect and discern and so remain more elusive but insidious.

Can Community Take Root in Artificial Florida?

Florida as an intensified microcosm of patterns that are unfolding all over the United States and other western countries presses upon us fundamental questions: what does the Florida-fication of the world do to human culture and community? Can people make common cause and find a common home in an environment so manufactured and didactically imposed upon the natural world? Florida’s rapid 150 year transformation—from raw, rugged, and expansive wilderness, into a largely artificial concrete jungle aimed at fulfilling the perpetual human appetites for quick, easy, and transient pleasures—is an experiment that offers some answers to these questions. 

Living in a degraded and deracinated place such as South Florida has an effect on its inhabitants that is seldom consciously conceived or analyzed. After all, a common colloquial trope in the immensely beautiful but morally decadent Florida Keys is “come on vacation, leave on probation.” This statement is generally said tongue-in-cheek, but humor often has the ring of truth. This is why in Florida, “Florida Man” abounds. This is why in Florida, privileged teens may be seen–brazenly under the light of day and whilst knowingly being recorded–dumping buckets of trash overboard their parents $300,000-400,000 luxury vessel, presumably to avoid a BUI charge after a day of vacuous, vain, and hedonistic partying at “Boca Bash,” which is but one of South Florida’s watery public orgies. Such episodes occur in abundance in South Florida because a blithe, viscerally selfish, and overtly vain “look at me” superficial materialism is one of its defining cultural motifs, which undergird its unconscious and unstated collective metaphysical assumptions. To me, a second-generation native Floridian and lover of the authentic Florida, the lack of responsibility for one’s own actions, community, and place are revolting.

This is not to say that there are not a multitude of wonderful individuals and families who occupy South Florida (I am proud to know and call many of these friends and loved-ones), and there are even pockets of coherent community that have taken hold along the margins of this manufactured environment. I simply want to acknowledge that living in a place where there is an overbearing and oppressive societal pressure that directs humans away from higher and more permanent things towards those which are more shallow and ultimately fleeting has a marked effect on people. To what extent this effect is irresistible I cannot say, for the human spirit is an incredibly resilient metaphysical force. I fear, however, that in an increasingly concrete, glass, and plastic world—cut off from our collective Source of which nature is the most emblematic and readily apparent sign—the effects of such corruptions will continue to increase in intensity and frequency. This is why the Florida of 2024, intuitively from my vantage point, seems to have further degraded from 2014 (or 2004) Florida.

Upon moving back to Florida in 2024 after a four-year hiatus, I have been flummoxed by the general lack of community, sense of common good and purpose, and lack of respect for others and place; there even seems to be a palpable, overarching hostility that governs how many Floridians interact with one another. But perhaps this is to be expected in such an over-developed, artificial, and heterogeneous place that serves to make purposelessness a hegemonic principle: one in which tolerance seems to be the highest ethical principle. Can it be any other way? It seems to me that without a uniting ethos, convictive purpose, or general principles held in common—and excepting even a given place that the community shares—there is nothing to stitch disparate individuals into a coherent culture. Hence social fragmentation appears (to me at least) to be the defining characteristic of contemporary Artificial Florida. 

Despite these criticisms, I still must acknowledge my deep-seated reverence and love for Florida and its natural world (what’s left of it anyway), which is perhaps more beautiful and unique than any other place in North America–especially for those who value rich biodiversity and turquoise seas teeming with life. If Florida could reinvigorate its adventurous and brave frontier ethos, I think it would (subjectively) feel much more authentic once more: for that more primal strand of its culture is not only tolerable but desirable. It has been an inner conflict between love for the natural and a visceral distaste for the artificial that has governed my return home and that has now presented a silver lining: experiencing Florida once more has given me a renewed appreciation and thirst for community, belonging, and place in a metaphysically significant manner. It has also given me a renewed desire to venture into the wild and unknown. Weighing these competing and paradoxical factors is no small task, but it may be that I will have to leave Florida once more to find such a place, where both community and watery wilderness can exist in tandem. 

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"No sea-lover could look unmoved on the blue rollers of the Gulf Stream and the crystal-clear waters of the reef, of every delicate shade of blue and green and tinged with every color of the spectrum . . . a sort of liquid light, rather than water, so limpid and brilliant is it."1 —Commodore Ralph Munroe in 1877.

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This natural history research essay was originally written in 2017, edited and uploaded in 2020, and may be downloaded in PDF format at our home website—free of charge and with many visual references and resources—here: https://www.greatconversationpublication.org/post/paradise-lost-the-historical-demise-of-florida-reef

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Even a scientist is a human being. So it is natural for him, like others, to hate the things he cannot explain. It is a common illusion to believe that what we know today is all we ever can know. Nothing is more vulnerable than. scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself. —Carl G. Jung

The increasingly ubiquitous call for the people to merely “trust science” as a sovereign, objective informant to political and social policies has reached a fever pitch during the covid-19 Pandemic. What sense can anyone truly make of this ambiguous claim? There seems to me two possible ways of understanding what it means to “trust science,” each of which appear unfounded upon further examination.

The first understanding of trusting science is the call to heed and follow the consensus of the scientific community, at-large, especially in regard to policy recommendations. This understanding must appeal solely to two blatant logical fallacies. The first is an appeal to the authority of the scientists as a trustworthy basis for their recommendations. The second is an appeal to the consensus of this group, suggesting that, since a majority agrees about political and social measures, their recommendations are necessarily valid. The problem is that neither of these appeals actually engages with the “scientific community’s” research, evidence, and claims—the area of their expertise. That is not to say that the recommendations of scientists are not informed by their research findings and empirical evidence, but that the public is not invited to read, analyze, and critique their studies. It is evident that much of today’s science is made inaccessible to the public through paywalls, excessive jargon, highly specialized equipment, and barriers to academic institutions. To trust that their research does in fact support certain conclusions or recommendations merely an alleged “consensus” propagated via media and by word of mouth alone, is intellectually irresponsible.

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The second way of understanding this call to “trust science” goes a bit further than the appeal to authority; it attempts an appeal to the work of the scientists themselves, though not directly. The thought is that, assuming that scientists are correct and trustworthy on empirical, scientific matters, we should extend their authority to other realms of thought. This is born of the modern notion of the superiority of material causal explanations of the world—though empirical methodologies and their practitioners have no special tools for devising this metaphysical assumption from reality. As Aldous Huxley explained in his essay Science, Liberty, and Peace, “Unfortunately some scientists, many technicians and most consumers of gadgets have lacked the time and the inclination to examine the philosophical foundations and background of the sciences. Consequently, they tend to accept the world picture implicit in the theories of science as a complete and exhaustive account of reality.” On this premise, we have elevated practitioners of science to an almost God-like station, by extending their conclusions and methodologies to other social and political matters which inductive empirical inquiry holds little water, which has resulted in restrictions like “stay-at-home” orders, which have been instituted in the name of combatting the spread of coronavirus.

It is certainly the purview of scientists to study a virus itself, describe how it spreads, and even predict the social consequences of allowing the disease to spread. However, none of this empirical work concerns itself with value judgments about whether these consequences are inherently good or bad. On the contrary, the realm of political and social organization must concern itself with ultimately non-empirical questions of metaphysics and ethics, questions about where value lies and how we ought to act accordingly. In the case of coronavirus, empirical findings have nothing to say about how we ought to weigh the likelihood of the virus spreading and killing a percentage of the population against political imperatives for freedom and order. Science cannot establish what the ends and purpose of the political community ought to be, whether that be the protection of the people, the maximization of their liberties, or the realization of a certain ethical code.

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Certainly, scientists are entitled to fuse their research findings with their own philosophical and metaphysical conceptions of the world—indeed, it can be hoped that all people use what resources and experience they have to devise meaning and truth from the world—but when doing so, we must acknowledge that they step outside of the realm of their expertise and cannot be considered authorities on the matter. It is not my purpose here to show that any recommendations of scientists are morally or factually wrong, but to show that the call to blindly “trust scientists,” without demanding engagement with their empirical expertise, is both insufficient and politically dangerous, since they have no special claim to the answers of these complex moral and social questions.

Moreover, both conceptions of the call to “trust science” rest on the faulty assumption that scientific work stands exalted and alone as an objective and benevolent good that is impenetrable to political and social forces of greed, power, deception, and error. History alone tells us that this has never been the case. However, in an age when science has become more specialized and resource-intensive—in the technologies used and in achieving access its institutions—we cannot pretend its products are immune to the political and social conditions in which it is developed. The research institutes and universities which today produce the majority of scientific scholarship, through the training and employment of its experts, require extensive financial and social capital to subsist and grow, indicating the difficulty of regarding scientific entities as objective participants in our complex modern society.

Again, none of this itself denies the validity or claims of particular scientific works or doctrines, but it demands that we develop a higher standard of examination and evaluation for scientific institutions and its practitioners, pushing back against the notion of blind faith in its merits and directives. As C.S. Lewis stated in his essay entitled "Is Progress Possible?", “That (blind faith) is how tyrannies come in. In every age the men who want us under their thumb, if they have any sense, will put forward the particular pretension which the hopes and fears of that age render most potent.” In our age, our willingness to endlessly extend scientific authority to political and social matters, ignorant of their inherent dependence upon and intertwinement with these relations, cannot be rationally or morally defended.

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Aristotle’s great-souled individual, as it has been asserted, is the embodiment of virtue as it relates to the active life. According to Aristotle, an overarching identifier of magnanimity is seeking to be worthy of adoration and the adornment with honors, “a person is considered magnanimous if he thinks that he is worthy of great things, provided that he is worthy of them.”[1] Magnanimity, in contrast to the lesser virtues of temperance and neatness, implies “greatness, just as beauty implies a well-developed body.”[2] From this, one may deduce that to be magnanimous is to be large and prominent as it relates to acting upon the world. Unlike the foolish man who overestimates his greatness of character—and the pusillanimous man who underestimates himself—the magnanimous man “is a mean, because he estimates himself at his true worth.”[3] The great-souled individual it may be said, occupies the mean between the excess of foolishness and the deficiency of pusillanimity, as it relates to one’s disposition/character in relation to external honors and adornments.

Proceeding further, Aristotle asserts that the magnanimous man is characterized by “greatness in every virtue.”[4] Magnanimity for Aristotle is a sort-of “crown of the virtues,” which is only bestowed upon the most noble and worthy possessor of “all-round excellence” of character.[5] Since it is “chiefly with honors and dishonors the magnanimous man is concerned,” it is clear the great-souled man is a man of moral virtue, i.e. prudence, rather than merely contemplation. A man of action, the magnanimous man is chiefly concerned with honors because “honor . . . is clearly the greatest external good,” according to Aristotle.[6]

One of Aristotle's distinctions of the great-souled individual, as opposed to polemical and sophistic critics, is that they must not only appear worthy of external honors, but actually be worthy of honors through excellence in character, i.e. virtue: “it (is) hard to be truly magnanimous, because it is impossible without all-round excellence.” In this way, the magnanimous man becomes an archetype of moral virtue for Aristotle, who in every circumstance, is consistently able to ascertain the proper mean-state of action through deliberation due to a well-regulated moral disposition. And hence, the great-souled individual becomes a sort-of Golden Mean to which all may aspire, as he is able to achieve virtue by finding the equilibrium between opposing vices.

What differentiates the one who is great-souled from those who overly value adornments and are too ambitious in pursuing them: the magnanimous man does not “even regard honor as a very great thing,” and therefore does not seek honor for its own sake, but rather achieves it as a byproduct of living well.[7] And so, possessing honors does not mean one is worthy of them, as only the man who has a “just claim to great honors” are rightly called magnanimous.[8] And thus it seems the colloquial maxim that “character is what one does when no-one is watching” aligns with Aristotle’s conception of magnanimity of spirit, or greatness of character manifested in action in accordance with virtue.

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With the groundwork for the ideal of the magnanimous man laid, Aristotle then paints a “portrait of the magnanimous man,” which plainly conveys that the great-souled individual is superior to others in virtue—not in a manner that is condescending or exploitative, but rather to lift up others who interact with him. In Aristotle’s description, what seems paradoxical is—in all actuality—intricate nuances of character: “the magnanimous man does not take petty risks, nor does he court danger . . . and when he faces danger he is unsparing of his life, because to him there are some circumstances in which life is not worth living.”[9] From this it is apparent that in all matters, the magnanimous man values most highly what is truly good and just (means) rather than any effect or benefit he may derive (ends). The primary end which the magnanimous man values is final—that is to say utilizing reason to live in accordance with virtue, which is the proper function of the active-life principle.

When reading Aristotle, one does not sense the great-souled man is of a contemplative disposition (which Aristotle later argues is the highest and most fully-actualized manifestation of human reason). And yet, deliberating means does require the understanding of ends, which Aristotle argued hinges on an acquiescence of the First Principles of Nature via episteme (or scientific knowledge), from which man’s function and Final End may be deduced. Prudent in action to the highest degree, the magnanimous man is “disposed to confer benefits, but is ashamed to accept them.”[10] Likewise, the magnanimous man is self-sufficient and worthy of reverence, as he “is ashamed to live in dependence upon somebody else.”[11] Other characteristics ascribed to the great-souled man include a refusal to “nurse resentments;” a revulsion to flatterers and general disdain of praise; a rejection of abuse towards friend and foe alike; and a preference to “possessions that are beautiful but unprofitable to those that are profitable and useful.”[12] From this portrait, one may surmise the magnanimous man does require means and station in order to confer upon others his magnanimity.

In short, the portrait painted of the magnanimous man is one of self-sufficiency and disinterestedness towards honors, glory, and popular acclaim. It may be said in summary, the magnanimous man is in general, a benefactor and ardent supporter of the higher way of life that celebrates the civilized aspects of the human animal and community: for he is a lover of beauty and goodness for its own sake, making such fruits manifest through the actualized embodiment of virtue. In times such as these, we could all aspire to be more maganimous.

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[1] (Thomsan, The Ethics of Aristotle: the Nicomachean Ethics, trans. 1953), book 4, chapter 3.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

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On the night of September 29th, 2020 America was subjected to one of the most indecent, raucous, and shameful displays of public spitefulness, discord, and party-dogmatism in recent memory. It is no stretch to say that incumbent president Donald Trump acted as a petulant child, while Joe Biden demonstrated his senility and lack of substance. It seems that for the 77-year-old Biden, completing a sentence without error, losing his train of thought, or going off an irrelevant tangent is an impossibility. Trump on the other hand, is unable to address others with respect and decorum and both he and Biden—when pressed—are unable to present even basic concrete and tangible policy recommendations. The moderator, Chris Wallace, who is son of the late renowned media man, Mike Wallace, frequently interrupted, argued with, and goaded on the candidates to a point that the “debate” devolved into nothing less than a public mud-slinging spectacle between three grown men who acted more like children than men. ‘Tis the state of public “discourse” in America in 2020.

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The late Neil Postman is rolling in his grave as he warned us that even forty years ago, politics had devolved to a state of “show business.” It is certain however, America’s politics have regressed even further as now a presidential debate is not altogether different than “reality” television. Many would blame Donald Trump entirely for this diminution of the public sphere—and for certain he is culpable for further eviscerating the facade of civility and seriousness that remained prior. What is missed in this analysis however, is what made (and continues to make) Trump appealing to a large swath of middle-America: Donald Trump does not mince words or cloak sinister intentions behind eloquent rhetoric. Far from a soothsayer, Donald Trump is brash if not uncouth, which is alluring to the average patriotic American voter who has grown tired of empty promises, lofty platitudes, and meaningless slogans, like Obama’s infamous “change” cliche.

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“Change,” for instance, masqueraded as an inherent good thanks to Barack Obama’s ability to publicly propagandize. And yet, “change” or “progress” (and “make America great again) are hollow and empty in the sense that whatever is promised, it seems America continues its delineation from its venerable founding principles of localism, familial autonomy, natural law doctrine canonized via law and institutions, equality under the law, and so on. “Change” as a slogan implies beneficial change, but change is not a good in and of itself, but rather movement. “Progress,” another ambiguous “ideal,” implies movement in a desired direction, but trumpeters of progress seldom articulate what it is they do in fact desire to make us and therefore it is doubtful the rest of us would subscribe to the former’s perception of what is desirable. And thus to explicate what “change” and “progress” actually mean to the point of offering tangible and demonstrable proof of how progress is better than the status quo, is an almost impossible task that reduces the uniqueness of the individuals that make up the body politic, into a hegemonic and monolithic tribe. Even more damning, we must not forget that the insidious and anti-American institutions and policies like the Federal Reserve, wage tax, prohibition, the Eugenics Movement, etc. were once cornerstones of the “Progressive Platform”—which, by the way, happens to change more than the tropical winds.

Why should the “Green New Deal,” which Joe Biden’s website clearly endorses at least in principle, be any different? Why would packing the Supreme Court with “Progressive” judges (which Biden refused to denounce) in order to advance the “Progressive” agenda (of which many plans as they currently stand would be considered un-Constitutional), be to the benefit of a nation already divided and unable to agree on anything of substance? The average American has grown leery of governmental expansion into every sphere of the individual’s life and hence has materialized into a nationalist political movement. The fact of the matter is that today in America, government has unfortunately become like a shepherd overseeing its sheep. Its role is no longer to protect the natural rights of the individual, enforce contracts, provide for mutual defense, and regulate interstate and international commerce, but rather to do us or make us good. In all actuality, what person occupies the oval office should be of little consequence or concern to the average citizen, as policies enacted at the federal level should have little bearing on the nuances of local life.

Trump, as opposed to the career politician, promised (and to what degree he followed through on this we can debate) a return to American normalcy with strong industry, military, police, religious institutions, and so on. At the least, he pays lip service to the principles of the framers, even if his deeds say otherwise. The left on the other hand, increasingly detests American misdeeds in the world (of which there are a multitude for certain) and improperly ascribes causality to our original founding principles (and therefore wishes to reduce and remake us in their image). If America continues to stray from its intended trajectory as the world’s greatest project in ordered liberty and self-government, then surely further change would be akin to regression, not progress. It as the economist Thomas Sowell echoed, “fundamentally transforming (Barack Obama’s words) a relatively fair and just society, can only be for the worse.” And hence for this author, progress would be something like a return to our sacred founding principles and institutional structures enshrined in our nation’s foundational texts. If we fell short of our own lofty ideals before, true “progress” would consist of returning and reforming our ways to better actualize America’s own ideals to the greatest degree humanly possible.

Make no mistake: America needs much reform in the areas of health care, policing, military intervention, education; other maladies like governmental overreach via surveillance and an increasingly autocratic bureaucratic element must similarly be curbed. And yet, presidential debates such as the one that occurred on the night of September 29th, reduces serious issues that require much deliberation and honest discourse into mere demagoguery and tribalism. America is a nation divided that cannot even agree on its own principles and ideals. It seems to me that we are so polarized as a nation that one side rejects our foundational meta-principles, while the other blindly and zealously defends them to the point that they become quasi-apologists for a warped vision of America (i.e. as a world-dominating industrial superpower) that is antithetical to what the founding generation—whom they claim to adore and esteem—intended. Let us not forget that America was not supposed to go abroad “seeking monsters to destroy” and thus celebrations of nationalism and military dominance and fundamentally un-American. In the America that I believe in, industrial might and material well-being are ancillary to liberty and equality under the law: the only true equality.

And yet, because the people of this nation have been increasingly stripped of their ability to reason through machinations of the public school system (in addition to the increasing dominance of applied-science over multi-disciplinary liberal education), the modern citizen is unable to reason or deliberate about any serious matter. Hence it should come as no surprise that the presidential debates too, have devolved to the point of being nothing more than a verbal gladiatorial circus whereby one combatant faces off against another, in a two-hour-long barrage of vindictive and petulant verbal insults and slurs. The loser in such a case is not one side or the other, but rather the American experiment in ordered liberty and self-government which is all but extinct in 2020. The winners to the contrary, are those powerful multi-national corporatists and “masters of man (to use Adam Smith’s language),” who wish to subvert the well-being of the American republic for their own self-aggrandizement. Thus, empathy and open discourse, it would seem, are the only possibilities for true “progress,” which is no longer “forward” (because we have gone astray), but rather to cling to the essence and idea of America. Only then, may we discuss true reform and how best to proceed.

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Who are we? What do we hope to accomplish?

The Great Conversation is a digital print publication dedicated to adapting the confusing and confounding ideas of the so-called “Great Books” to the modern world. Our mission is to use their gravitas stature to anchor insights about modernity and post-modernity. Put succinctly, our aim is to take the message of the Great Books to the modern world in a culturally-relevant and intelligible manner.

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One of the philosophical pillars of Marxism is the fetishization of consumption. According to Marx, commodity fetishism is a socio-psychological phenomenon in which individuals begin to believe that the value of a product arises inherently from the product itself rather than the complex system of labor relationships that produced the product. As an example, when someone buys an apple all they see is that said apples cost a particular price at that particular store. What is not considered is the farmer that tended the orchard, the trucker that transported the apples to market, the mechanics that tend to the fleet of trucks, and all of the hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals that input their labor to make such an industry possible. For Marx, this sort of economic reification lays at the foundation of how capitalism alienates labor and contributes to the destruction of interpersonal relationships and codependency within communities.

The issue with the critique that commodity fetishism lays at the feet of the capitalist system is that it is correct. Modern capitalism and rapid advancements in technology have led to an atomization of our society such that individuals have very much become displaced and isolated. Loss of a sense of place and community, and anxiety over lacking in meaningful work are all acute symptoms of our present global technocracy. This is definitely not a new topic and has been reviewed quite extensively in a number of essays and studies following Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone, that details the marked decline of social capital and organizational participation in the United States. However, what is new are the recent neo-conservative defenses of capitalism that either ignore or dismiss this social anxiety and alienation that forms the basis of said capitalist critiques.

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Typically, these arguments center around the obvious material achievements of capitalism and how its adoption has caused an incredible reduction in poverty and a rise in the standard of living on a global scale; that an attack on capitalism inherently comes from a place of privilege and places itself squarely against these gains. Yet such defenses come across as both dishonest and out of touch, completely ignoring the degradation of various institutions and communities and are therefore unable to contend with the critique of commodity fetishism leveled by Marx. Any desire to present this struggle as a dualistic choice between socialism and capitalism should be seen for what it is: intellectually shallow. There is no easy solution to these competing concerns of progress and preservation, freedom and inequality, but the attempt must be made time and again.

Concerning Apartments

The idea of place both conceptually and practically is a vital prerequisite for community to even exist, let alone flourish. Although modern telecommunications allows us to communicate and even participate in some third spaces with each other over great distances, there is a fundamental importance in living and doing life together with those around you. Being invested in a physical place and the people that make up the fabric of that place is what forms the basis of not only strong communities but also a healthy republic, in which people are able to love, support, cherish, and debate with each other freely and dynamically. Perhaps what is most concerning (and the primary source of our social woes), is the slow erosion of this sense of place; the small lights of communal living being snuffed out across America.

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The largest contributing factor is, I think, the rapid urbanization that has occurred in the United States over the past century, causing a greater degree of transient communities. Cities are expensive places to live with a high population density which in turn creates greater demand for rental housing, specifically apartment style living for massive amounts of people. Rental communities inherently pose a barrier to the creation of vibrant communal living, simply because people do not own the space. Individuals and families are not tied to the investment that home-ownership entails but instead to a temporary lease making the basis of your living there a temporary transaction that could cease the moment a better deal presents itself. More importantly, apartments lack the character, space, and individuality of single family housing. They are designed with cost efficiency in mind, presenting cramped spaces in which people live in not homes, but units which all bear the same aesthetic with the exception of perhaps layout or the number of bedrooms.

Not even suburbia has maintained its identity in the face of urban sprawl, as apartment complexes of little variation move outwards from the city. Even the individual housing communities built by large land developers are built in identical models, squeezed together row by row. Now none of this necessitates that community cannot exist in such places, in fact, there are a number of cities such as New York City proper, where neighborhoods are able to maintain their distinctive characteristics and sense of belonging. Yet it should be pointed out that such places are historic and are preserved as such, built in a different time with far different intentions, and many of its inhabitants owning their homes rather than renting. Yet for the most part, however, rental communities present isolation for the sake of economic convenience. Apartments do not cultivate a sense of identity or ownership, and the responsibility that comes along with it no matter how hard they might try otherwise. There is too stark a difference between a neighborhood in which generations of families live and work—invested in both the present and the future of that place—and that of the ever-changing apartment boxes.

Drive-Thru Starbucks

Just as homes help to form the backbone of a community, private businesses and the third spaces they provide can play an equally important role. And just as housing is increasingly lacking in its role, businesses have followed suit. A clear example of this can be seen in the city of Jacksonville, Florida which is currently the largest city in the United States by land size (excluding some small towns in Alaska). Due to its ever increasing size, Jacksonville is peculiar in its urban sprawl in that when you drive along the highways that connect the city you will see the same amenities placed in succession of each other. At each intersection off of the highway, a shopping plaza containing a number of chain businesses all contained within the same modern-looking buildings placed next to equally similar apartment boxes of modern trappings. Driving no more than ten minutes from this intersection you will inevitably happen upon the same sight: shopping plazas of nearly identical businesses ready for consumption next to the same indistinguishable apartments.

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The scene presented can be found in neighborhoods all across America wherever gentrification has taken hold. Despite the tired arguments of politicians that claim all sorts of economic benefits from these business parks, they hold the same issues as the modern apartment complexes, namely that they are not really “places” per se. These businesses purely exist to beget consumption, all of it purely transactional and impersonal. Seldom, if ever, found in these cookie-cutter plazas are generational family-owned business, or single craftsman who run their own shops, or even aspiring, upstart business that are the passionate culmination of years of labors by its on-site owner. Instead, they have all been replaced by businesses with no particular character, staffed by employees who have been reduced to being merely a number with no sense of investment outside of their bi-weekly paychecks, which are then, in turn, spent at some other business park. These business parks, it would seem, are just as transient as the apartments attached to them: and they are therefore, places to consume rather than cherish, as they provide little service towards the creation of community, by abstaining from fostering a sense of place or belonging for staff and patron alike.

Although these pre-fabricated plazas may strike us as clean, bright, and inviting, it is precisely in their architectural composition that the loss of place and purpose is most clearly demonstrated. The Bauhaus architectural movement of the 1920’s and 30’s which sought to combine the aesthetic art of architecture with that of technology, mass production, and function has now found its full expression in modernist architecture. Office spaces, retail parks, apartment buildings, and even homes are now all designed with only utility and efficiency in mind, resulting in modern buildings made of steel frame, concrete, pre-fabricated wood and glass in the shape of tight boxes with random fixings tacked on. There is an utter lack of substance and beauty within our modern setting, which in turn creates a lack of presence, culture, and meaning beyond economic utility. The phrase from the architect Louis Sullivan, “Form follows function” is typically taken to mean that the design of a building should be dictated by its intended purpose and is the central thesis to modern architecture. But the phrase has farther reaching philosophical ramifications than one may suspect at first, giving credence to a worldview that is dictated and defined by utility.

If form is now meant to follow function then we live in a world without meaningful ends to be pursued since our ends have simply become the means themselves. The higher ideals of beauty, purpose, authenticity, and meaningfulness have all been cast off as relics of a bygone era by our current industrial-capitalist system. In their place, the "ideals" of convenience, progress, technology, speed, function, and utility now stand; the means and methods of things rather than their ends. It is a world purely designed and dictated by function, as if it is a machine to be controlled by particular inputs for certain outputs. And if the buildings of our office spaces and retail parks are dictated by this philosophy then we can also imagine that the work done within them is too.

Loss of the Agrarian Republic

The Romans had a strong grasp on the importance of agriculture as well as the debt that was owed to the independent farmer who both provided the food for the Roman people and was the primary source of soldiers for their army. The poems of Virgil and Horace enter into deep explorations of the honorability and virtue of rustic living in the countryside and working on an agricultural estate. Roman agricultural manuals emphasized a practice of “Sustainable Agriculture” that advocated for moderation in all practices, a respect for the cyclical nature of agriculture, and ingenuity and steadfast care on the part of the overseer of the farmland. This in turn created a philosophical and religious nature to Roman agriculture; the Roman agricultural gods were to be respected and revered as daily practice, the heavens mixed with earth as it was, and the philosophy of Stoicism which taught simplicity, moderation, and right order was easily demonstrable through the life of the farmer.

Most of these works, however, were written with a very intentional purpose in mind. From the period of the late Roman Republic into the ascendancy of the Empire, the concentration of wealth among the patrician class became acute and the small, while the independent farmer was becoming a dying species as their land holdings became bought out by larger estates. Many of the poems, manuals, and treatises we see are meant to coincide with political reforms aimed at protecting farmers and encouraging people to become farmers themselves. Much like Rome, the American Republic is itself experiencing the loss of the independent farmer in the face of industrialization and government-backed agricultural corporations. The rural communities of America are suffering from both poverty and a lack of purpose as independent farming communities continue to come apart alongside the growing wealth of American cities that hardly stop to consider where their food comes from.

Much like Rome, The foundation of the United States from its colonial beginnings was rooted in this principle of the plain, yeoman farmer that etched out his own existence and prosperity in the new American landscape. This ideal of America would eventually and rather quickly become embodied in the vision of the Jeffersonian republic. This vision was one of hopeful pioneers seeking out new lands to homestead and the creation of independent, self-sufficient communities. Beyond this, Jeffersonian democracy held a number of core values that centered around the ideals of Republicanism: anti-corruption, anti-aristocracy, civic virtue and duty, individual freedom, and the limiting of government. But the ideal and its application are inseparable things, and therefore, to uphold the values of republicanism would require a life that looks similar to that of the more “simple folk” that a city seemingly cannot supply in our modern context. So it is this spirit and this vision that is currently at risk as the institution of farming degrades from a way of life into just another factory business alongside the fabricated shopping plazas.

Alongside this spirit of rugged individualism is a unique realization of community brought about through an economic codependency that has withered away amidst a globally-connected economy. A limit on the supply of labor, the general intensiveness of agricultural and blue collar work, and the geographical isolation of a small town—along with a variety of other factors—all culminate in an interdependency that necessitates vibrant communal living which gives each individual a place among their peers. This phenomenon has many expressions: a family helping another to bring in their harvest, a local produce market in which you know the sellers, the local mechanic whom you share drinks with on the weekends, or an electrician who does a repair out of a bartered favor from a month prior. This list of examples may go on endlessly, with the same point that there is a social cohesion and trust brought about through the circumstances of living outside of a city. Of course these may be ideal circumstances, but it is the likelihood of such instances arising that is the present concern.

This point cannot be overstated, because there are a number of important effects that this kind of rural living possesses, but one in particular needs to be singled out: the loss of an individual is not so easily replaced. The loss of a family farm, a local shop owner, or a pastor would be acutely felt in the corners of smaller communities where they live and work. Whereas in corporate America, individuals as well as businesses feel easily replaceable, creating a sense of competition and fear where a feeling of importance and gratitude should be. The alienation of our labor and the atomization of our communal being is perhaps most acutely felt here. We have become disconnected from the feeling of authenticity and importance in our work because it has become another product to be purchased and consumed, easily replaceable whenever the need arises. Our labor and the fruit that it bears should instead bring us the virtue of joy, not necessarily because we enjoy the work but rather because it is the most practical way in which we may be connected in sharing creation.

The Importance of Sewing Machines

A more nuanced topic was briefly mentioned in the previous paragraphs; the authenticity and purpose of our work. This is a difficult topic to explore since the experience of work seems so vast and subjective. Yet it is important, because many of the past and present critiques of capitalism are rooted, in many ways, in the inability of the average worker to truly own their labor and engage in work that is meaningful to them. There are two broad categories that can be roughly identified in regards to our work today: one being a cultural and philosophical issue of how we view our everyday labors, and the second being the very practical reality of what employment looks like in America today and how that may result in economic reification.

There is a fundamental importance to being connected to the end purpose of our labors, to see the product of our work. The problem is that many individuals no longer work for and towards dignified ends but instead for wages and benefits. We have begun to pursue work for the sole purpose of the reciprocated compensation, rather than the fulfillment of the work itself. So much so that we work only to be able to afford leisure, forever pursuing more time off or being able to afford the next vacation, as if the purpose of our laboring is to be able to get away from laboring to begin with. One can hardly be blamed for such a result, as the specialization of labor combined with the rapid advancement of technology has moved many people away from the tangible work of the farmers and blue collar folk, into sterile office environments where we are firmly disconnected from the fruits of our labor. It certainly is difficult to feel a strong sense of purpose making burgers in a fast food restaurant or answering calls in a call center.

The ramifications of this disconnect between work and purpose are as numerous as they are subtle. The most severe impact is a cultural one; our attitude in regards to how we approach our work has become mercenary. The barista at the local cafe no longer sees their profession as one of creating community and aiding the flourishing of authentic human connection, instead it is just a job: a means of financial compensation in order to be able to afford their leisure. Or consider the individual who serves as a janitor in a company office: the drudgery of the work prevents them from seeing the vital importance their role has in the success of so many people. As a summation: work is no longer viewed as an integral part of who we are, but instead as a nuisance that we must be compensated for, potentially creating a dangerous relationship between financial gain and fulfillment.

It is here Marxism finds fertile ground in its attacks against wage slavery and the promises of just material compensation for each individual. The problem, however, is both the compensation of our labor and our own attitudes regarding work itself, which both capitalism and marxism fail to address in a substantive way. Capitalism imagines that at some point in the future enough jobs and wealth will have been created that everyone will be able to compete for, and partake in, well-paying and meaningful careers. Whereas Marxism supposes that it is class conflict that has created this derision, forcing the masses to work in menial labor for which we are ill-compensated—and that the remedy is merely material equality that brings about a classless society. Granted, these are very broad definitions, but even with all their variants both of these supposed systems really only deal with the issue of compensation for labor and not our perspective of it. It’s not so much that we are always after the next position or greater pay (although they play their part), but instead we are looking for something more immaterial: community, appreciation, a sense of purpose, pride, and joy regardless of whatever that work may be and how much we are paid for it.

For the most part, in order to feel a sense of place, purpose, and order, our work must be tied to tangible things and tangible places. Our work must then become an act of (and sharing in) creation: aka something that is intrinsically desired but this is not so easily understood in actuality. It is like someone who engages in sewing as a hobby, when they get home they find enjoyment and love in working on particular pieces of clothing and honing their craft. The work is tangible has a distinct purpose in clothing others; it is an art which can be improved and perfected, which allows the sewer to become a creator and appreciate the act of creation. The ancient Greeks had a word for such a concept: Arete, which meant excellence in all that we are or the fulfillment of our potential. The word was applied to humans, animals and inanimate objects—aka whatever is fulfilling its purpose with excellence can be regarded as possessing Arete. More importantly, Arete was regarded as a moral virtue so as to say to excel in your craft means to also excel in character and vice versa. It is this heart for work, and the pursuit of excellence within it, that seems to have been diminished by our modern circumstances.

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Railroads and Telegrams and Bombs

It is impossible to discuss sociological issues on a broad scale without talking about the subject of technology, and so some words will be spent here for the purpose. We immediately run into difficulties upon doing so, however, because both the definition and issue of technology is so vast. It would be easy and not inaccurate to lambast technology with the all too familiar critiques against modern telecommunications for its hand in driving a wedge into our public spaces and in ruining civil discourse. Yet it is unproductive, because this is a generally privileged way of perceiving the word technology, dependent upon widely accessible internet services that are usually only available in the first world. Technology can also take the form of rudimentary electricity that allows a young girl in India to finish her schoolwork at night in order to receive an education or desalination plants in North Africa that give life to agricultural communities.

So the broadness of the subject presents a unique problem where if one desires to say anything definitive regarding technology it must be incredibly specific and fully contextualized to the point that we really aren’t saying anything substantive at all on the topic. And the metaphor of the “double-edged sword” doesn’t hold up well either, since we have continued to accept axiomatically that the adoption of new technological means far outweigh the risks and downsides. In spite of all the dire warnings, the encroachment of technology into daily life carries on day by day and most appear to be unwilling to stop it. If the conversation about technology as a social phenomenon is to be had, then it is evident that it cannot begin with technology in its physical manifestation as its starting point, lest we continue to be reactive rather than proactive. It is the attitudes, approaches, and virtues regarding technology that should be the primary focus, since it is our disposition that determines the form and purpose. One such attitude regarding technology demands particular attention: that of hope.

It would be difficult to look at the great gains in the standard of living and the comforts that technological advancements have provided and not be amazed. The rapid progress of technology and industry in the past half-century alone makes it easy to imagine that most, if not all, of man’s material woes will be resolved in the not-so-distant future. It is this kind of hope that we place in scientific progress that drives the ceaseless automation and mechanization of all things. The technologist's vision is promising but its hope is—unfortunately—fundamentally misplaced because the struggle of technological progress is not against externalities of an otherwise mostly good human nature, but rather against pervasive cynicism that creates a cycle of solutions begetting problems that require solutions.

Technology, despite all of its trappings, is a vast collection of tools to be utilized for the intended purpose of its invention, not a philosophical or social force that presents a means of reform for a world so desperately in need of it. The history of technology demonstrates this truth over and over again, exposing the cynicism and viciousness of our species in equal measure to every instance of hope and progress we may produce. For example, every advance in medical technology has been equaled with a further means of acutely killing an enemy—and for each advance in our ability to communicate over great distances, the more fragile our communities become. It is certainly true that the craftsman should use sturdy, well-made tools to ply his trade but his reliance is always upon the virtue and honesty of his skill.

It is prideful to imagine that given the right tools the world can be crafted anew in a more perfect image; it is precisely through our technological inventions that both the flaws and the heroism of humanity are put on display. Yet we cling to the hope that it is the tools, rather than its users who are to blame in these present circumstances. There is no doubt that we are to blame in this matter and our lack of humility has been our undoing, allowing the tools to best its masters. Therefore, technology must be put in its rightful place: its efficacy ceaselessly questioned at every opportunity and shunned when it begins to endanger the things we love and hold most dear. Holding the advances of technology at a respectable distance, while carving out spaces through which one can engage with the world in a tangible sense is perhaps one of the most important acts we may participate in.

The Silence of Our Forefathers

What we are after is nothing less than lives worth leading, where individuals may be authentic and pursue their own aspirations, while remaining part of communities that are bonded together through charity; what I wsih to see is the common good actualized in such a way that all may participate, meaning that individuals, their respective communities, and our common institutions, can be fulfilled in their appropriate ends. The conservative lies by stating that such a thing can be achieved by rewinding the clock and going back to a specific point in history. Although there may be certain times and places where people have come closer to the ideal, it has never truly been achieved in common, nor would we want to forsake the important progress we have made in other areas either. Whereas the progressive lies by claiming that with enough time, power, and innovation, this dream can be realized in the future. Such fanciful hopes are routinely dashed against the rocks, as every ideal falls suspect to corruption, greed, envy, and the lust for power.

Subsequently the world has been left unchained and spinning on a path towards destruction—or so it seems. But this is also nothing new. As nihilism and postmodernism continue to reign dominant as the primary lens for our thinking, it shouldn’t be any wonder that our modern world seems bent on being a culture that is quite good at the proposal of solutions that will never be implemented. With no truth or purpose to center ourselves around, we have become a society of professional complainers, wallowing in the shadows of the temples our forefathers built that we could never hope to rival. And it is that bitterness that manifests itself into the hate, calumny, and factionalism that is sold by mass media as being so omnipresent in our public sphere today. Whole ways of being are threatened: communities, institutions, histories, and cultures swallowed whole by the ever-turning struggle for power, therefore it is inevitable that people now fight so bitterly in desperate struggles for those same levers as a means of self-preservation.

In this moment, Marx seems to finally make his thunderous point heard, leaning into the factionalism and the progressive promise he states triumphantly, “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” Maybe so, because there certainly seems to have been a point where we have accepted these chains and have been regretting it ever since. Unfortunately, Marx stands as another of many thought leaders who have entered the power vacuum left by modernity in the hopes of coming out on top. It is the same spurning of history and hopeful pride for the future that has paved the path of ruin for centuries before his writings—and most likely for centuries after. Maybe it is time to say that the gig is up, for we truly have no more fight left in us, and that the answer was always there all along, possessed in those same temples that we have inherited. The task of our time is the same as it was yesterday and the centuries preceding it, we just simply forgot what that task was.

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We live in an America where individual rights have become the last bastion of indubitable and universal truth. In light of this axiom, the left is pushing for more and more universal "human rights" than ever before: "free" healthcare, "free" education, "free" child care, and some are even calling for universal basic income. Living in a 21st century democracy (in a land that was founded upon the notion of universal human rights), we always risk forgetting that the very assertion of individual human rights--a bedrock of our society--is a young and radical idea. As the perception of what constitutes a so-called human right, increases in number in 2021, the very idea that the source of their legitimacy was man qua man--not custom, history, or even God’s explicit command--only came about at the end of the 18th century.

These newly declared human rights were proclaimed to be “unalienable” and their canonization formed the bedrock of an individual’s self-worth. While these rights may have been “endowed by their Creator” in the case of America, or declared “under the auspices of the Supreme Being” in France, they resided firmly in individual man, with no need for appeal to a higher source--whether peasant or king. Because the conception of unalienable rights were established on the basis of being self-evident--and because they were the foundation for sovereign self-government, i.e. for all other laws--this metaphysical declaration had no special law to protect it: after all, it was assumed that, like man, it tautologically proved itself.

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Arendt astutely noted that this new experiment, i.e. the idea that individual man without appeal to any larger authority other than his own individual human dignity, led to an unforeseen problem--a problem that made itself known after the Great War in Europe. The problem is something of a paradox that lies within the basic premise: if a nation declares, on behalf of its citizens, a universal and self-evident truth that every individual is endowed with certain unalienable rights regardless of ethnicity, social class, or religion, it seems to speak of an abstract human being who exists in some state of nature, as opposed to the citizen of a concrete state tasked with upholding the aforementioned human rights. It almost speaks of abstract man as potential, but not actual. But this abstract man seems to exist nowhere except when he is materialized within a social structure, state, or nation: the very things he was supposed to be able to stand outside of. The liberal premise to the contrary, maintains it is not that France or America gave the individual person rights, but, instead, they respected the inherent dignity in each and every individual.

The "Magna Carta": This proclamatiom, first issued and signed by King John II in 1215, is widely considered the first conceptual declaration of human rights.

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According to the declared logic, the citizen and the stranger should both have the same human rights, by virtue of their humanity, even if they do not share equal civil rights. It would take a crisis of stateless people, i.e. people that actually embodied this abstract humanity, to show how abstract individual human rights--when tested--fell flat; that when push came to shove the nations of the world “found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.”[1]

Individual human rights, within a nation, immediately morphed back into specific and enumerated civil rights guaranteed by individual nation states. It became self-evident that “the people, and not the individual, was the image of man,”[2] at least the imagined man for whom these declarations of individual rights were made. Arendt traces the real-world 20th century implications of this slippery paradox, or that the more abstract and universal human rights became in theory, the less protective and applicable they actually became in practice.

The Declaration Tested

Post WWI Europe was an atmosphere of disintegration. Many countries not only were ravaged by war but some ceased to exist. The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, for instance, broke apart into Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia; the fall of Czarist Russia created Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states; and national minorities struggled in Eastern and Southern Europe as they lived under the flimsy protection of international Minority Treaties. These minorities were the beginning of stateless groups that were left outside of any nation-state of their own (and eventually the pale of the law as well), which allowed these minority groups to become rootless and unprotected and therefore open to the scorn of totalitarian propaganda and villainization.

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With a crisis of stateless and denationalized people groups, the very premise of individual human rights was tested internationally. The two historical approaches nations had always used towards stateless refugees had been either repatriation or naturalization. These previous policies were put to the test and failed as great waves of foreign refugees poured in: Armenians, Russians, German and Austrian Jews, and Spaniards fleeing civil war. These hundreds of thousands of stateless people declared the ancient right of asylum: surely the most visible symbol of the Individual Rights of Man in international relationships. Yet this symbol faltered under the weight of numbers, with nationalization failing first. More and more ethnic groups entered, giving up their previous citizenship, yet stubbornly retaining their ethnic nationality. It became clear that due to both quantity and stubbornness, naturalization would not solve the problem.

Their only other proven solution was repatriation. The problem was that these refugees were truly stateless. Their country of origin had expelled them, would not recognize them, and would not agree to take them back. Indeed, due to the political organization of the modern world, there was no unclaimed territory left that a group could take to form a community of their own. With the current host country refusing them legal entry, their previous country refusing to recognize them as their own, and no neutral ground to stand on, these stateless peoples were outside of the law and were truly, by definition, outlaws. Arendt frames the situation thus:

“The stateless person, without right to residence and without the right to work, had of course constantly to transgress the law. He was liable to jail sentences without ever committing a crime. More than that, the entire hierarchy of values which pertain in civilized countries was reversed in his case. Since he was the anomaly for whom the general law did not provide, it was better for him to become an anomaly for which it did provide, that of the criminal. The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime.”[3]

So here stood the test of the idealism declared over a century ago: the nations that had promised all individual human beings the dignity and Rights of Man, now faltered on an international scale. The human rights that were supposed to exist independent of individual governments turned out to be completely reliant upon the good faith of government, public and private institutions, in addition the passage of new legislation to keep these groups and their customs within the law to allow them to subsist and exist legally. It turned out that loss of national rights inevitably meant the loss of individual rights and that the former entailed the latter. While civil rights were only supposed to spell out in tangible laws the metaphysical and eternal Rights of Man, the eternal and immaterial nature of these alleged rights proved unattainable and unenforceable whenever non-citizens (of any country) appeared. It appeared that just as man is both eternal and temporal, so his laws must be also.

The End of the Rights of Man

Residing outside of the law and their supposed individual rights, Arendt argued that these stateless peoples were essentially forced outside humanity. Her argument for this claim is based on a detailed assumption of what it means to truly have human rights. While not stated in the Declaration of Independence or the Declaration of the Rights of Man in France, the basic underlying assumption is that each individual would have the ability to make their opinion significant and their actions effective within a public life; that they could fully share in what Aristotle describes as the nature of man, a political animal, i.e. a creature meant to share in action with others. The drafters of these documents did not foresee the future world in which the right to have rights would first be necessary.

Rejection of outsiders from a legal and safe human community shattered these assumptions, leaving hundreds of thousands of stateless peoples not only outside of the law, but more importantly outside of any meaningful and self-determined human community, thereby in essence disintegrating a crucial part of human nature. While it may be true that regardless of human or governmental action there are inborn and actual unalienable rights that belong to every man, it still appeared that it was his political status and communal qualities that make it possible for him to be treated as such and to participate as if he did.

It seems obvious to say that the stateless individual still shares in human dignity and human rights, after all nothing changed but his geographical location and bureaucratic designation. The stateless man was still flesh and blood like naturalized peoples, but governments found it one thing to acquiesce metaphysically in a charter of principle, yet another to accept it tangibly and legally. The problem of stateless and rightless individuals is not one relegated to the past, but unfortunately no easy solution has appeared in the last century.

The irony of rightlessness is that the victims were innocent and it was easier to deprive a completely innocent person of legal (and thus communal) place than someone who had actually committed an offense. There were systems in place for criminals, but there was no system for innocents whose only crime was being expelled by their own government for no other reason than their ethnicity or social class.

Outside of definition and outside of the law, they existed in some unholy purgatory fading from the face of the earth. In another great irony, the whole problem was created not out of a lack of civilization or savagery, but instead was born from geographical gridlock caused by the fact there was no uncivilized place left on earth. And “only with a completely organized humanity could the loss of home and political status become identical with expulsion from humanity altogether.”[4]

The tragedy of rightlessness is “not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them,” as entire peoples became superfluous and noisome by their very existence. Once a human loses their political status they should--in theory--step into, and be covered by, those unalienable rights of the individual, yet the opposite occurred. A man with no qualities other than his humanity found no way for others to treat him as a fellow-man. He was outside of the equalization that politics brings to human interaction. Equality is not simply given to mankind, but instead is administered through human organization that, “we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights.”[5]

Thus stood the abstract man who was outside of the law, lacking both legal and physical place--not even able to be identified as a slave, but only a human animal. Arendt argues that in the timeline of totalitarianism, it was this condition of superfluous and rightless peoples that dovetailed with certain radical ideologies regarding race and class, that brought power and force to the questioning of their humanity--and finally to their right to live. In an era marked by hyper-nationalism and tribalism, these rightless people became easy targets and fodder for totalitarian ideology. These groups were simply the superfluous: the pests that belonged nowhere, that were shuffled around but protected and wanted by no nation. Eventually, Hitler could target these rightless groups with more than deportation, finding instead a quite literal final solution.

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[1] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 299.

[2] Arendt, 299.

[3] Arendt, 286.

[4] Arendt, 297.

[5] Arendt, 301.

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the ‘wisdom’ of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious such as digging up and mutilating the dead.[1] —C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

I affirm the Medieval Scholastic axiom that “all learning is an assimilation of the knower to the Known,” in addition to the Augustinian notion that true wisdom is loving various forms in the proper order to the correct degree according to their intrinsic merit. To sufficiently (but succinctly) explicate the contention that all liberal and genuine education aims at ordering the human soul to an external reality of which each human being is a part, there are several fundamental questions that must first be explored. First, human beings must be differentiated from other (lower) life forms that occupy the corporeal world of a posteriori experience. After which, a case that liberal education is essential for ‘human flourishing,’ i.e. ‘happiness,’ may be made. But this can only occur in so far as liberal education is defined and delineated. To accomplish this, one must perceive the archetype at which it aims. Then—and only then—may pedagogical methodology be explored.

What is a Human Being?

Aristotle defined man as “the rational animal,” which seems to be a good starting point in our inquiry. By rational, Aristotle meant that man possesses the peculiar and unique mental faculty of reason. What this entails is that while other animals—even higher forms like certain sociable mammals—are driven primarily by instinct (or the passions), man possesses the capacity to deliberate about both means and ends, as it relates to action, inaction, or even the leisurely contemplation of the telos, logos, ethos, or pathos. While Aristotle’s definition of man as the rational animal is by no means complete and is frequently challenged within the so-called ‘Great Tradition’ itself, it seems that one does stand on firm ground differentiating man from beast on the basis of reason, which enables man to rise above his passions and base impulses.

When philosophers first differentiated man from beast primarily on the basis of reason, it was understood that reason was the highest part of the human soul. For Plato, the human soul had three distinct parts, namely the head, chest, and belly, or the mind, the spirit, and appetite respectively. Aristotle, in his De Anima, argued that the soul is essentially the form (or actuality) that animated the body (or potentiality). While there is much debate within the tradition as to what constitutes a human soul, it seems tenable to suggest that whatever its particular parts and delineations, the soul is the essence of the corporeal human form and the animation of each individual human being. From this premise, it is generally surmised that in order for the soul to live in harmony with itself and the external world, it must be ‘well-ordered’ in such a way that it does not contradict itself by having components that are unequally yoked or in opposition to one another. This conundrum is usually formulated as an axiom that within the soul there can be no internal discord—or that impulse must be subjugated to reason, and so on. The process by which this endemic and inherent strife plays out over time in the soul is typically classified as the ‘human condition’; the humbling knowledge of the existence of such a condition of not only wretchedness, but also that of utter ignorance, constitutes a vital aim of liberal education:

Above all it is thus that we can acquire the virtue of humility, and that is a far more precious treasure than all academic progress. From this point of view it is perhaps even more useful to contemplate our stupidity than our sin. Consciousness of sin gives us the feeling that we are evil, and a kind-of pride sometimes finds a place in it. When we force ourselves to fix the gaze, not only of our eyes but of our souls, upon a school exercise in which we have failed through sheer stupidity, a sense of our mediocrity is borne in upon us with irresistible evidence. No knowledge is more to be desired. If we can arrive at knowing this truth with all our souls we shall be well established on the right foundation.[2]

And thus, it would seem the path to ‘happiness,’ or ‘blessedness,’ or ‘human flourishing’ is through a re-orienting and re-ordering of the soul upwards towards what actually is, rather than what each individual wishes was. This process of re-orientation of the human soul is best undertaken through a process called liberal education, which is necessarily individual first and foremost in prescription.

What Constitutes a Liberal, or Genuine Education?

Broadly speaking, liberal education is an educational program suitable for study by a free person, aiming at ‘happiness,’ ‘blessedness,’ and ‘human flourishing.’ While this definition is by no means comprehensive or unambiguous, it is an effectual premise by which to proceed in our inquiry. In the context of liberal education, freedom is in essence the so-called ‘free-born mind.’ Freedom in this context could also be defined in a Cartesian or Hegelian manner as a type of self-consciousness endemic to, and characteristic of, the truly thoughtful individual. Inherent in such a conception of freedom, is the notion that the process known as liberal education—which is undertaken via both the senses and mental faculties—leads to both self-knowledge and knowledge of the external world, so that individuals may direct their actions and love towards that which is worthy, as opposed to that which is expedient, useful, or otherwise fleeting and superfluous:

For it seems to me that the first ideas which his mind should be made to absorb must be those that regulate his behavior and morals, that teach him to know himself, and to know how to die well and live well. Among the liberal arts, let us start with the one that makes us free. They are all of some service in teaching us how to live and employ our lives, as is everything else to a certain extent . . . Everyone should ask himself this question: ‘Beset as I am by ambition, avarice, temerity, and superstition, and having so many other enemies of life within me, shall I start speculating about the motions of the world?[3]

In this passage, Montaigne implicitly suggests what has already been hinted at throughout this exposition, i.e. that genuine education is necessarily and inherently moral and poses the fundamental questions: “what is the proper function of a human being and how should we live in light of this?” Since man is the only rational animal, the answer to the aforementioned question about adapting means to ends seems to suggest that the proper function of man is a rational life in accordance with the natural order; or to formulate this another way: the proper function of the human being is to first deduce and apprehend—and then actualize via courageous and bold activity—the Universal Principles of Reason. Thus, it would seem the first step towards human flourishing is attaining some degree of wisdom, which Cicero defined as “the knowledge of everything divine and human, and of the causes which regulate them.”[4]

‘Happiness’: What Liberal Education Aims At

It has been asserted that liberal education aims at individual ‘happiness,’ ‘blessedness,’ or ‘human flourishing,’ which Eva Brann conveyed with precision in her lecture on liberal education:

The prime object, its be-all and end-all, is happiness. All else is unintended though hoped for consequence—the less intended, the more likely to eventuate. It is emphatically neither to teach students to think—a patent impossibility—nor to make them “productive citizens”—a dangerous wish until you know what they’ll produce. Much righteous defense of non-vocational education is drivel, and people who have its future at heart should come clean. So once more: the four years conventionally assigned to such education should themselves be gloriously happy—always remembering that true happiness requires the heightening delimitation of occasional agony, confusion, and even despair. In fact, happiness as a “pursuit” is specifically American, an unalienable right (meaning not an anxious chase but a steadily pursued activity)— so says our Declaration, Public Law no. 1. Other ways to put this view of the aim of Liberal Education is that it is not a utility, a means, but is lived for its own sake. So liberal schooling must be a present experience of fulfillment, and the acquisition of the unwearying habit of thoughtful happiness.[5]

Plato, in his Republic, argued that blessedness was achieved first by the proper ordering of the soul in a descending order, where reason (the highest part of the human soul) rules the spirit and appetite: his idea was in essence to subjugate the lower parts of the soul to the higher.[6] This process of ordering oneself was necessary to transcend the shadowy world of sense perception to perceive the thing itself, or form—of which the ‘form of the good’ was the ultimate and eternal essence from which all other forms like beauty, justice, and so on, emanated. Aristotle defined ‘eudaimonia,’ or ‘complete happiness,’ as “an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue,” which implies that ‘happiness’ is a process by which virtue—or correct action in accordance with the proper nature of the human being as the rational animal—is actively made manifest in space through time. Implicit in the concept of Aristotelian Happiness is the notion that no matter one’s natural disposition or inclination towards the good, prior habits, or degree of prudence,[7] happiness lies within the power of the deliberative individual, who is responsible for intuiting First Principles before deliberating how to adapt means to universal ends in the particular circumstances that the rational human being occupies, which—in order to be deemed “happy”—must be actualized via conscious and consistent action over the course of a lifetime. Seneca and other Stoics would later argue that happiness consisted in the melding of the private and public life, with the implicit suggestion that reasoned and wise action in the public sphere could only be fueled by leisurely contemplation of what actually is in private. Later Christian neo-Platonists, tended to synthesize the wisdom of the ancients with Christian doctrines and this is perhaps most evident in Boethius, whose Consolation of Philosophy argued that ‘happiness’ was essentially found by the movement of the soul out of material darkness—which is at the whim of Fortune and happenstance—and into the ethereal light, where it could share in the ‘good,’ which Boethius perceived to be God: the perfect being from which all else emanates and takes it source, whose nature is complete and lacking nothing. Boethius wrote,

God, the ruler of all things, is good. For, since nothing can be thought of better than God, who can doubt that He is the good, other than whom nothing is better . . . we must agree that the most high God is full of the highest and most perfect good. But we have already established that perfect good is true happiness; therefore it follows that true happiness has its dwelling in the most high God . . . Since men become happy by acquiring happiness, and since happiness is divinity itself, it follows that men become happy by acquiring divinity. For as men become just by acquiring integrity, and wise by acquiring wisdom, so they must in a similar way become gods by acquiring divinity. Thus everyone who is happy is a god and, although it is true that God is one by nature, still there may be many gods by participation.[8]

Despite the differences and nuances present in each of these conceptions of ‘happiness’ within the Conversation itself, there does seem to be a common thread, which could be formulated accordingly: “‘happiness’ or the ‘good life’ consists in man first apprehending knowledge of things divine and human—or at least being humbled by realizing the extent of his own ignorance, leading to an acquiescence to the natural order of things—and then applying these principles which have been ascertained in one’s own active life.” Given the paltry extent of human knowledge, such a project is no small task, but rather an immensely difficult one. However, it would seem that the path towards what is commonly called happiness is an unceasing activity (that ought only end with death), with ebbs, flows, digressions, and constant revisions that occur when the seeking individual is presented with new information that challenges previously held notions of reality and one’s place in it. To put it another way: since man is the rational animal endowed with the perceptive and deliberative faculty of reason, to live well is to live reasonably in accordance with the principles of reason, which is the only part of the human soul that may be called god-like or divine. It would seem then, the only way to be truly ‘well-functioning’, ‘happy,’ or ‘blessed’ then, is to properly exercise one’s reason to live in accordance with the true nature of things.

Pedagogy: What is the Best Way to Initiate Fledglings Into the Liberal Tradition?

Since it has now been established that liberal education is necessary for genuine human flourishing and happiness, the discussion must now gravitate towards a discussion of educational methodology and means, i.e. pedagogy. First it should be noted that when discussing education, we are talking about children, rather than adults since children are a malleable potentiality, whereas adults are actualized children and not as suitable for continued development—though there are obviously exceptions to this generalization: “Whoever wants to educate adults really wants to act as their guardian and prevent them from political activity. Since one cannot educate adults, the word “education” has an evil sound in politics.”[9]

It would seem liberal education is a twofold process, where the latter task hinges upon the former: namely, the first requisite for liberal learning is the sparking and fueling of an insatiable curiosity, where bright-eyed youths brimming with anxious excitement wish to learn the secrets of the universe and themselves. Only after this desire for learning and true knowledge has been cultivated, are young initiates ready and apt to absorb the “Great Tradition’ and its Tao—as C.S. Lewis called it in his Abolition of Man.[10] While some may argue that Rousseau overstated and exaggerated his case in Emile—going so far as to suggest that his noble savage and tabula rasa, Emile, should only read Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—there is something to be said for sparking within a young neophyte, a sense of adventure and excitement for life, which could then inspire the youth to take charge of his or her own existence. In this way, Rousseau’s pedagogical project seems to have consisted of a fueling of the spirited element of the soul, which he believed would cultivate in Emile, an insatiable desire for learning, living, and improving:

I want it to make him dizzy; I want him constantly to be busy with his mansion, his goats, his plantations; I want him to learn in detail, not from books but from things, all that must be known in such a situation; I want him to think he is Robinson himself, to see himself dressed in skins, wearing a large cap, carrying a large saber and all the rest of the character’s grotesque equipment, with the exception of the parasol, which he will not need. I want him to worry about the measures to take if this or that were lacking to him; to examine his hero’s conduct; to investigate whether he omitted anything, whether there was nothing to do better; to note Robinson’s failings attentively; and to profit from them so as not to fall into them himself in such a situation. For do not doubt that he is planning to go and set up a similar establishment . . . The child, in a hurry to set up a storehouse for his island, will be more ardent for learning than is the master for teaching. He will want to know all that is useful, and he will want to know only that. You will not need to guide him; you will have only to restrain him.[11]

In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis echoes a similar sentiment, namely that his experience as an educator taught him that it is the lack of—and not the excess of—spirit or sentimentality that inhibits genuine education in the pupil:

For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head . . . Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it — believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.[12]

From these two prescient passages, it seems fair to conclude that the first step towards liberal education is the sparking of the spirited part of the soul, in order to fuel curiosity, creativity, and an insatiable desire for learning. Once this prerequisite is met, the pupil ready for initiation into the liberal tradition.

The question now at hand is that once curiosity and a desire for liberal learning has been stoked, how ought this be done? As has been argued, liberal education is the only educational methodology suitable for the ‘free-minded’ individual which aims at ‘happiness,’ ‘blessedness,’ ‘human flourishing,’ and ‘human contentment,’ which seems to be possible in so far as the human individual fulfills his or her proper function by ordering themselves in accordance with the Universal to the extent humanly possible. In essence, the task of liberal education then, is to form and sharpen the faculties of perception and judgment so that the actions our subject undertakes in his or her life accord with the principles of reason and just sentimentality. This is why Eva Brann argued that before the ‘young birds’ could fly on their own, they ought to first bathe in the Great Tradition:

Some human works are best learned by doing. Improving worldly conditions is not among these. A time of receptive learning should precede active intervention; first shape yourself, then society; in particular form views about what makes for human contentment, then interfere judiciously. The necessary acquisition of technical know-how should follow the stocking of the human soul’s treasury with desirable goods.[13]

In her lecture, Dr. Brann offers a disclaimer that liberal education ought to have nothing to do with ideology, whose connotative meaning implies indoctrination, rather than the cultivation of one’s own reason and conscience:

It is an immediate consequence that education should not be preoccupied with current evils and their eradication. That project requires political engagement and usually involves ideology. Ideology, pre-packaged thinking, does not belong in a community of learning: political philosophy, yes; politics, no. The sure test is this: If people get hot under the collar it’s politics; if they become deeply interested, it’s philosophy. The program of a liberal education should concentrate on works of great quality rather than of so-called “relevance,” with its thoughtlessly complicit instrument, “information.” Information is purest relativity; it gains its standing as knowledge relative to a pre-judgment of purpose, and it preempts mentation, dislodging reflection.[14]

C.S. Lewis, echoed a similar sentiment in his Abolition of Man, where he suggested that educators in a program of liberal education ought to have a sense of reverence for the tradition they are propagating, while simultaneously being convicted to ‘raise up’ their pupils:

In the older systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him were prescribed by the Tao — a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did not cut men to some pattern they had chosen. They handed on what they had received: they initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which over-arched him and them alike. It was but old birds teaching young birds to fly.[15]

And thus, it would seem that the best means by which cultivate the mental and spiritual faculties of the liberal learner, is to focus on the so-called ‘Great Books,’ which Eva Brann described as,

“Great” is, once more, a concretely and specifically signifying term for us. These works are above us; we couldn’t write them. They are also for us; their authors meant for us to read them. Moreover, they affect us; they take us out of ourselves and return us to ourselves the better for it. That’s their effect on us. Here’s their nature in themselves: they are inexhaustible. Every reading, after an often semi-stunned first time, reveals subtleties unnoticed before. They are beautiful. It might be a crotchety or a canonical, a stylish or a crooked, a perfect or a blemished beauty, or—that’s a possibility—the ugly beauty of mere sharp intelligence. Great books are original; they go to the beginning of things. Great fictions give the lie to reality; they imagine worlds and figures with more actuality than mere facts possess. While it would be hyperbole to claim that they move the soul more boisterously than do real existences, it is fair to say that they move it more resonantly.[16]

Barriers to the Administration of Liberal Education on a Macroscopic Scale

There are a few caveats to the described prescription of liberal education as the means by which the human individual may attain ‘happiness,’ by aligning his or her soul with reality through the exercise of the acute faculty of reason within the structure and buttress of tradition. As Eva Brann illuminated in her lecture, first among these inhibitions is the fact that liberal education is not necessarily practical or expedient—and further it may only be undertaken if the prerequisites of adequate pecuniary means and time, i.e. leisure, are available: “Liberal education is costly. It requires leisure . . . It requires tutors, the guardians of this learning, to whom their vocation is not only their life but also a living. Consequently the night of a child’s conception should be followed that morning with the first small investment in this guarded leisure activity.”[17]

Furthermore, genuine and liberal education is only suitable for those who are so inclined and capable, as Friedrich Nietzsche implied in his lectures entitled, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions: “No one would strive for education if they knew how unbelievably small the number of truly educated people actually was, or ever could be.”[18] Following this premise, Nietzsche foresaw two detrimental tendencies in education, i.e. movement towards democratization and over-specialization, both of which threaten the very existence of genuine liberal education. For Nietzsche, the democratization of education could only serve to weaken and cheapen the rigor necessary for the exceptional individual to be deemed truly ‘educated.’ As he explained it, it would seem the exceptional individual would be stampeded by the herd in this new Millian program of ‘education’—aiming at the greatest possible happiness for the greatest number—administered on a mass scale:

Expansion is one of the favorite national-economic dogmas of the day. As much education as possible—leading to the greatest possible happiness . . . Here we have Utility as the goal and purpose of education, or more precisely Gain . . . From this point of view, education essentially means acquiring the discernment that keeps a person ‘up to date’ . . . This perspective . . . gives rise to a great, even monstrous danger: that at some point the masses will jump over the middle step and run straight after earthly happiness. This is what people today call the ‘social question.’ In other words, it may seem to these masses that education for the greatest number of people is merely a means to the earthly happiness of the few, and nothing more. Striving for ‘universal education’ weakens education so much that it can no longer bestow any privileges or be worthy of any respect at all. The most universal education of all is barbarism, is it not?[19]

Another impediment to liberal learning and genuine education that aims at wisdom is the advent of academic specialization, which began in earnest in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. Because naturalistic materialism became the dominant (if unspoken) cosmology of the post-Enlightenment intelligentsia, the phenomenon of specialization arose in response to the heightened importance placed on naturalism’s accompanying radically empirical epistemology. And thus, the world of education migrated from a focus on the liberal arts to scientific research, but Nietzsche saw this development as problematic and antithetical to genuine knowledge and understanding:

The current system reduces scholars to being mere slaves of academic disciplines, making it . . . increasingly unlikely for any scholar to turn out truly educated. Academic study now is spread across such a large area now that anyone with real but unexceptional talents and academic ambitions will devote himself to a narrowly specialized subfield, remaining totally unconcerned with everything else. As a result, even if he stands above the vulgar masses within his subfield, he belongs with them in everything else—in everything important. A scholar with such a rarefied specialty is like a factory worker who spends his entire life doing nothing but making one single screw . . . There have been centuries when it was self-evident that scholars were ‘educated’ and the educated were scholars . . . In practical terms, the academic division of labor is doing just what religions sometimes try to do: diminish education, even destroy it . . . We are already at the point where the scientist or academic as such has nothing to say about any serious general question, especially the deepest philosophical problems.[20]

From the aforementioned passages, it seems clear that since liberal education is about absorbing the great traditions of the past in order to form one’s own faculty of judgment, aiming at the end of living well, liberal education must be sufficiently broad rather than specialized. And further, liberal education ought to be democratic in so far as it is meritocratic: while liberal education should be made available to those who are apt and inclined, it must be protected by guardians of the Tradition itself, so that it may be preserved rather than debased and dispersed. I would argue it is indubitable that Nietzsche’s prophetic musings have continued to exacerbate and intensify in the nearly 150 years since he gave his lectures on education—which makes it quite difficult to explain the necessity and gravity of liberal education to a largely disinterested and ignorant world. And yet for the sake of the world, it is my hope that liberal education be restored to its lofty throne, if only so the illusive but exceptional human being who arises every now again may have the educational means to truly flourish.

Citations:

[1] C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 77.

[2] Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in Waiting for God (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2021), 109.

[3] Michel de Montaigne, Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford University Press, 1958), 65.

[4] Cicero, On Duties, ed. M.T. Griffin and E.M. Atkins (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 64.

[5] Eva Brann, “Liberal Education,” 3.

[6] While reason ought to rule the chest (spirit) and belly (appetite) in the Platonic Tri-partite Soul, the lesser parts of the soul do serve particular purposes if they operate under the tutelage—and in accordance with—reason.

[7] In Aristotelian ethics, prudence is the supreme faculty of moral judgement and is considered the chief moral virtue which is able to adapt abstract general principles to particular circumstances.

[8] Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Richard H. Green (Englewood, NJ: Macmillan/Library of Liberal Arts, 1962), 62-63.

[9] Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” (1954), 3.

[10] C.S. Lewis used the term ‘Tao’ to signify the universal, objective, and absolute abstract moral principles that order and undergird the world of phenomenon of which human beings have direct experience. Another way to express the ‘Tao’ is as the ‘Universal Laws of Nature,’ or ‘Natural Law.’ His idea was that there was a loosely organized, general, and abstract set of principles and ideas that transcended particular circumstances and were—in that sense—universal.

[11] Jean Jacques Rousseau, “Book 3” in Emile, 185.

[12] Lewis, 13-14.

[13] Brann, 4.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Lewis, 60-61.

[16] Brann, 13-14.

[17] Ibid., 3.

[18] Friedrich Nietzsche, Anti-Education Lectures: On the Future of Our Educational Institutionss, 14.

[19] Ibid., 15.

[20] Ibid., 16.

“Learn from me, if not by my precepts . . . how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature would allow.” —Victor Frankenstein

The Relevance of Prometheus

In Romantic circles of the 19th century, allusions to the Promethean allegory “abounded.” Percy Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound while Lord Byron wrote Prometheus. In response to her husband, Percy Shelley, and her father, the renowned William Godwin, Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. Percy and Godwin, and to a lesser extent Mary Shelley’s own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, were cavalier provocateurs, social radicals and self-described atheists—who lived to push the envelope in their quest to “liberate” humanity from long-established social convention and hierarchies. Mary Shelley however, hearkened back to the more conservative, previous generation of Romantics, who grounded their enthusiasm for the natural world in Christianity.

In the Promethean Allegory, Prometheus is both hero and villain. In one ilk, he molded humanity (and then subsequently furnished humans with fire) out of clay to aid the titans in their struggle against the gods. While Prometheus is the benefactor and creator of humanity, his revolution against the divine order cost him dearly, as he was chained to a rock, whereby an eagle (the iconographized form of Zeus) would incessantly peck out and regurgitate his internal organs. Gruesome and grotesque was the punishment of Prometheus, though his revolution against the gods was the impetus for Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein.

Frontispiece to Frankenstein, 1831 Edition

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Francis Bacon: A True Prometheus

In the 17th century, Francis Bacon revolutionized epistemology with his radical empiricism, which spawned his Novum Organum, or “new instrument,” which we know today as the “scientific method.” In actuality, there was nothing new about it, as inductive reasoning or small truths coalescing together to form some semblance of a logical conclusion, had been practiced since the time of Aristotle or even before. What was new, however, was Bacon’s disdain for knowledge other than that ascertained through empirical means, observable and tested via the senses. Bacon deemed traditional social institutions and long-held philosophical convention as dogmatic and therefore erroneous. These inhibitions represented his four “idols,” which prevented the advancement of the “kingdom of man”—his words, not mine.

Bacon was the man who famously declared that “knowledge itself is power,” ushering in the new age of scientific management and applied science. The end of Baconian knowledge is power, and this is precisely why it is nefarious. Traditionally, power had been the means to some greater end: monarchs for instance, justified their absolute power (fallaciously) in a Hobbesian sense as a means to peace, social harmony, and order. Bacon, however, treats that which was traditionally a means as an end unto itself. This is what C.S. Lewis elucidates in Abolition of Man, when he states that what we are witnessing in the modern age is a rebellion of the “branches against the tree.” The tree then is Truth itself which is sacred as an end in itself. The branches are simply the means by which the final end of knowledge—or as this sort of knowledge was hitherto known: wisdom—was attained. Bacon, or the Promethean, then, does not fancy knowledge, for it is simply a means to “interrogate, bend and break nature” in order to multiply the power of man towards “useful ends.” This is why Bacon chastised previous ages for “using as a mistress for pleasure what ought to be a spouse for fruit.”

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To bring into fruition his insatiable lust for power, Bacon and his minions were “willing to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious, such as digging up and mutilating the dead,” as Lewis tells us. In The Modern Prometheus, Victor Frankenstein does just that: he digs up deceased human and animal corpses in order to stitch together a grotesque and vile amalgamation of limbs and flesh: “I pursued nature to her hiding-places . . . I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate lifeless clay . . . I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit.” Bacon would be proud: for Victor expanded human power by intelligently arranging matter to create a conscious being!

What is Scientism?

Scientism is a dogmatic belief system that flows from Bacon’s Applied Science. For eons, knowledge—and consequently the application of knowledge—was thought to be holistic and comprehensive in nature, rather than fragmented and compartmentalized. Hence the “sciences” as we know them today, namely chemistry, physics, biology—and their applicative derivatives—were but one branch of learning known collectively under the discipline of “natural philosophy.” For ages, a “science” was but an academic discipline aimed at ascertaining the absolute Truth. St. Thomas Aquinas for example, called philosophy and theology the two “queens of the sciences”: all other academic disciplines like natural philosophy, politics, ethics, rhetoric, logic, math, and so on, originated from the former two queens. Only in the Modern Age has science become synonymous with not only natural philosophy, or the pure sciences, but also Baconian Applied Science, which aims solely at the increase of humanity’s power absent traditional moral concern. In Abolition, Lewis upheld Aquinas’s notion that the pursuit of the theologian and philosopher is to conform the soul to reality, while the magician and the applied scientist are in essence the same as both seek to conform reality to human will and desire. The way the world is moving, “science” is more and more the quest to “advance” human knowledge—and therefore power—not arrive at Truth. Scientism then, is by definition the rule of amoral applied science for the sake of advancing the power of the kingdom of humanity.

Victor Frankenstein as Prometheus

Just as Prometheus questioned the divine order, so too did Victor Frankenstein. In true Jacobin form, Victor condemned what he deemed the unjust and cruel nature of the world which he occupied. To this end, Victor embarked upon a quest to rearrange the natural order of things in a manner that corresponded with Victor’s his own mental fancy of the way things ought to be: “I had a contempt for the very uses of modern natural philosophy. It was very different when the masters of the science sought immortality and power; such views, although futile, were grand; but now the scene was changed.”

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In the novel, Victor’s quest to conquer what he deems the injustice of death, is initially masked by altruistic notions about “helping his fellow creatures” in a cruel and ruinous world. Eventually, Victor’s “selfless” ideals dissolve, as he is consumed by his quest to animate inanimate matter through the haphazard arrangement of organic scraps, in a manner eerily similar to Prometheus—who molded man from clay as a power ploy to overthrow the divine order. Rather than acquiesce the necessity of death as the culmination of life, Victor boldly rebels against the cycle of death and re-birth, which greatly angers and emboldens him to extend the bounds of human knowledge, in a quest to extend humanity’s power over nature and its rhythms.

As the tale goes, once Victor breathed life into his creation by harnessing the power of lightning by apprehending and applying the physical laws of nature, he has an epiphany and recognizes the atrocity which he has committed. Upon this moment of cognizance, Victor decides to rest before attempting to erase his creation from existence. The rest is history: when Victor awakes, his “creature” is nowhere to be found and Victor is bewildered. Scorned by humanity for his grotesque outward appearance, the malleable creature devolves from benevolence to vengeful depravity aimed at his creator, who hated him and shirked his responsibility to inculcate just sentiments in his offspring.

Humanity at large is horrified by the creature’s ghastly outward appearance because it is apparent he is the incarnation of some unspeakable sin, and consequently reject his every attempt to garner affection. The creature’s vengeance and depravity ultimately culminates in the gruesome murder of all whom Victor holds dear.

In the novel, Victor is never fully conscious of the true gravity of his crimes against nature indicated by him chiding Walton to press on at the expense of his men to achieve “greatness” in the name of science and advancement. Victor, like many “monsters,” believes himself to be merely the malefactor of Fortune’s fickle nature: “I myself have been blasted in these hopes, yet another might succeed.” Delusionally, Victor measures his circumstances based on the effect, rather than the true cause and in doing so, absolves himself for acting upon his mistaken and corrupt ideals—ideals which Bacon himself would have been proud of. Nonetheless, Victor does realize he has been sentenced—like Prometheus—to a perpetual loop of futility as Victor conveys he is to pursue without cessation the malevolent fiend which he had created.

Modern Prometheanism

The momentous elevation of Victor above nature in an existentially dangerous manner, is an allusion to the excesses of radical Enlightenment rationalism that melded into what we know as “progressivism,” which was occurring in earnest as Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein. Progressivism stems from a quasi-religious longing for human beings to invest their efforts into something profound with teleological implications. Rather than emphasize the metaphysical which progressivism—with its Darwinist and materialistic roots—all but denies, progressivism seeks to channel its efforts towards the hope of some greater future that is enlightened and closer to perfection. In this quest, “progress,” rather than the attainment of Truth, became the ultimate end of human existence during the 19th century—and this pursuit of an “artificial Tao,” as Lewis calls it, continues today. Accordingly efforts to eradicate various evils like disease, alcoholism, and birth defects, for example, became the impetus for applied medicine, prohibition, and the Eugenics movement respectively. Mary Shelley rebuked these new doctrines as insidiously dangerous. As a faithful Catholic, she clung to much more conservative and traditional ideals that “struck at the root of evil, rather than hacked at its branches,” to use Henry David Thoreau’s famous idiom, that chastised the efforts of industrialists-turned-philanthropists.

Mary Shelley Laid the Groundwork for Thoreau, Huxley, Orwell, Lewis, and Others

Though Thoreau would later characterize modern technology as “improved means to unimproved ends” and Aldous Huxley would warn that the danger of technology is that it is but a “more efficient instrument of coercion,” Mary Shelley was perhaps the first to illuminate modernity’s insatiable appetite for temporal progress. Today perhaps greater than ever, humanity continues its quest to maximize its knowledge of the Baconian variety, in a bid to achieve a new age of heaven on earth, powered by the rule of applied science, or scientism.

A day does not pass when I do not come across an article that speaks of doing what was hitherto regarded as “disgusting and impious” such as geoengineering the climate to “save the planet” from Climate Change, as if the earth’s spawn is capable of saving that from which we arose. Likewise, genetically engineering chimeras with human and animal DNA so that their organs may be harvested for transplants is well underway, despite the fact that it reduces both life forms to “raw matter to be shaped and molded in the images of the conditioners,” like Lewis conveyed in Abolition.[1] Similarly, it seems as though Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the great collective pursuit of our time. For what reason or purpose I do not know, as it does not seem to solve any particular problem facing humanity, though it undoubtedly introduces a multiplicity of new ones. The late Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death that any tool must solve some prescribed problem, otherwise it is merely a superfluous technology and either distracts and anesthetizes, or is perhaps more even more sinister: AI seems to me the latter.

The specific case of AI presents a multitude of problems that Huxley’s Science, Peace, and Liberty elucidates, such as who wields this great advancement of human power? Big tech? The governments of the world? Either way, it seems unlikely that AI is to be used in a liberal and democratic manner, but rather to widen the gap between the ruling class and those it rules, because the average citizen will only have access to whatever technologies are made available to him or her, not the entirety of what exists. It seems robotic law enforcement for example—in our age of incessant legislation and centralization of government and corporate power—will not work for, but rather against the average citizen.

Perhaps most grotesque and inhuman of all are those miscreants working to achieve an eternal existence in the temporal realm: across the globe, transhumanist applied scientists are at work seeking to achieve a singularity between man and machine. Like Victor Frankenstein, these deranged individuals are working to preserve the dead via cryo technologies in order to delay the decay of the brain so that in the not-so-distant future, the brain may be synchronized with a computer in order to “live” forever. While that to me does not constitute life, to the Modern Promethean—who will never cease to advance his or her power—it is close enough.

Mary Shelley was a prescient sage. While we should listen to our sages, human hubris and vanity knows no bounds. Though Frankenstein remains the most popular gothic novel in the English language 200 years later, we have failed to grasp and apply its motif as we attempt to ascend to the heavens via our own Tower of Babel that is nearly complete in 2019.

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[1] Garrett Dunlap, “The End of the Waitlist: How chimeras could solve the organ transplant problem,” Science in the News, March 9, 2017.

Plato’s “Theory of Forms”

Much of Aristotle’s Metaphysics deals with “Primary Being,” which seems to be many things, yet draws inspiration—but breaks from—Plato’s metaphysical teachings, which are enshrined for posterity most vividly in his so-called “Cave Allegory,” featured in Book 7 of The Republic. In the scene, Socrates explains to Glaucon, through a rational a priori[1]argument that what the fatally flawed senses perceive to be reality are like “shadows cast upon a cave wall” by a dimly flickering fire: “what people in this state [i.e. prisoners living together in a dimly lit cave] would take for truth would be nothing more than the shadows of manufactured objects.”[2] Instead of relying on sense perception, Plato famously suggested that in order to apprehend the source of all physical and metaphysical things one must transcend the bodily prison—the cave—in order to perceive the “Form of the Good,” which is the most preeminent form and is the source of all the lesser forms. Regressing further from the Source to lesser forms, it follows that there are forms which act as the source for all material things. In such a philosophical disposition, all that the individual senses and perceives about the material world are “shadows,” or warped reflections of the Ultimate forms:

The region revealed to us by sight is the prison dwelling, and the light of the fire inside the dwelling is the power of the sun. If you identify the upward path and the view of things above with the ascent of the soul to the realm of understanding, then you will have caught my drift . . . My own view, for what it’s worth, is that in the realm of what can be known the things seen last, and seen with great difficulty, is the form or character of the good. But when it is seen, the conclusion must be that it turns out to be the cause of all that is right and good for everything. In the realm of sight, it gives birth to light and light’s sovereign, the sun, while in the realm of thought it is itself sovereign, producing truth and reason unassisted. I further believe that anyone who is going to act wisely either in private life or in public life must have had sight of this.[3]

“The School of Athens,” by Raphael

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What is most evident and vital to take away from this cursory explication of Platonic Forms is that they supersede the material, while simultaneously being separate. In this way, the material realm for Plato was a sort of distorted, corrupted, and inferior imprint of an ethereal, elevated, and eternal essence, which is the telos, or purpose, of each material thing that the individual perceives via sensory perception.

Form in Aristotle’s Metaphysics

It was in light of Plato and his Theory of Forms that Aristotle wrote his Metaphysics, which deals with establishing the grounds for episteme, which is frequently translated as “scientific knowledge.” More specifically, Aristotle’s Metaphysics deals with what is primary and most real, that which forms the basis of all other knowledge:

Knowledge and science for their own sake are found to the highest degree in the science of what is most intelligible; for he who cherishes science on its own account will cherish whatever is science par excellence, which is the science of what is most intelligible. But the most intelligible matters are first and basic reasons, since it is by and through them that any given subject becomes intelligible, not vice versa.[4]

In this way, the Metaphysics—or the exploration of First Principles—seems to precede and form the basis for the Aristotelian canon of works.

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As In Plato, Form Composes the Essence or Telos of Corporeal Things and Is Primary

Like Plato before him, Aristotle believed that the essence of a thing preceded its physical manifestation, or existence. Aristotle explained this phenomenon by suggesting the form, or essence of the thing was the actuality that necessarily existed before the potentiality, or corporeal material, could come into being:

It is by art that those products come whose form dwells in the mind, where by “form” I mean what it is to be that product, its first or primary being . . . It is then, from this point onward and towards health, that the process is called the “making.” Hence it follows that in a way health comes to be out of health, and a house, out of a house, that is, the material being, out of the immaterial; for in medical science is to be found the form of health, and in architecture, the form of a house. And here by “primary immaterial being” I mean “the what it is to be” of anything.[5]

From this passage, it is clear that form is a type of primary being, i.e. a primary cause of the thing that exists. A recurring claim throughout the Metaphysics is that there can essentially be no effect induced without a cause: “whatever comes to be is generated by the agency of something, out of something, and comes to be something.”[6] Based off of this metaphysical premise regarding the nature of material things produced, Aristotle attempts to explain the confounding mystery of existence, i.e. effect, by exploring the chain of causation.

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Aristotle Breaks From His Mentor, Plato: Form and Material Manifest in Individual Perceptible Bodies

Aristotle finds the primarily immaterial explanations of material reality to be lacking, which is why he seemingly rejects Plato’s concept of transcendence, which may be seen as an early conception of an immaterial idealism, later popularized by Berkeley. In particular, Aristotle rebuked Plato’s notion that it is desirable to separate the form from the matter in order to reveal the essence of the thing—regardless of plausibility: “there is no need of setting up an idea as an exemplar; though men have sought to discover such forms, especially in cases like these, which concern primary beings. An agent or producer is adequate to account for the production and for the embodiment of the form in the matter.[7]” Aristotle went even further to deny the veracity of Plato’s claim that form can exist sans matter: “it would be impossible for anything to come to be if nothing was present previously . . . thus, the material part is essential . . . it is this material that comes to be something.”[8] Similarly, Aristotle castigates purely material explanations of reality, arguing incessantly that material things necessarily possess a telos, essence, or shape about them that provides the archetype for the potentiality to be made actual: “The proximate matter and the form are merely two aspects of the identical reality, the one with respect to a thing’s capacities, the other with respect to its actual operation. Therefore, to seek a reason for their unity is like explaining how one is one.”[9]

While Individual Bodies and Matter Differ, Form is More General Than Particular

Of note, is Aristotle’s notion that a form is a sort-of general essence, archetype, or blueprint. Thus, individual iterations of a particular “form”—for example that of a human being—will differ when potentiality is made manifest in the perceptible plane that we call nature: “different as they are numerically, they are one in form; for man generates man . . . There is in the composite . . . such and such a form in their particular flesh and bones; and though they differ in matter (potentiality), for each has his own, father and son (Callias and Socrates respectively) may share one form, for form is indivisible.”[10] Thus one may conclude that form is a sort-of archetype and essential generality that prescribes the rough shape and nature of a corporeal body, rather than a dictatorial peculiarity that governs individual manifestations of a particular form.

Aristotle’s Metaphysics Points to a “First Cause”

Aristotle’s philosophy proceeds from the fundamental assumption that knowledge is based on an acquiescence to the necessity of a First Cause; and thus, i.e. episteme, or scientific knowledge, is the basis for all intellectual pursuit:

(III) The object of scientific knowledge (episteme) is of necessity. Therefore it is eternal . . . and what is eternal cannot come into being or cease to be. Again, all scientific knowledge starts from what is already known . . . because it proceeds either by induction or by deduction. Induction introduces us to first principles and universals, while deduction starts from universals . . . (VI) scientific knowledge consists in forming judgments about things that are universal and necessary; and demonstrable truths, and every kind of scientific knowledge, depend upon first principles . . . the state of mind that apprehends first principles is intuition.[11]

In this way, Aristotle’s Metaphysics may be seen as an inductive rational inquiry proceeding from particular perceivable objects and phenomenon towards the Ultimate, which Aristotle calls the “Unmoved Mover.” This process, relies on “nous,” or the intuitive faculty, which—if used properly—may be coupled with prudence, or practical moral judgment to form “sophia,” or wisdom. It is necessary to summarize what Aristotle’s project entails and aims at, in order to understand how his conception of form and matter allow him to induce first principles, of which the Unmoved Mover is First and Ultimate. Before proceeding further, it should be noted that there is a moral “end” in sight for Aristotle and thus, his metaphysical underpinnings are intricately tied to his ethical theory on virtue, happiness, and the good life for human beings: “Every art and every investigation, and similarly every action and pursuit, is considered to aim at some good. Hence the Good has been rightly defined as “‘that at which all things aim.’”[12]

Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover” in Relation to Plato’s “Form of the Good”

For Aristotle, the form of a thing constitutes a sort-of “thinking,” where as the material coming into being constitutes a “making.”[13] Further, “power” is the ability of form to actualize itself by becoming manifest in material, which indicates the existence of agency, will, and faculty within the form:

“Only those which are capable of being healed; they alone are potentially healthy. In those cases in which the change from the potential state to fulfillment is brought deliberately, the process takes place as willed . . . As to the things which have the source of their becoming within themselves, they are potentially all that they will be of themselves . . . If . . . there is something primary . . . it cannot be said to be ‘of’ anything else.”[14]

Following this line of reasoning, power seems to be the ability to be the cause of oneself, as opposed to external factors or chance. In such a sketch of the nature of primary beings, there seems to be an unspoken hierarchy. At this point, it must be noted that for Aristotle, form is a type of primary being in itself: “by ‘form’ I mean what it is to be that product, its first or primary being.[15] In such a picture, it would seem that there is a perpetual chain of causation that can be traced upwards, from contingent beings to primary beings. In individual entities, form is both prior and the rational principle and essence of a thing (actual), yet cannot exist in the absence of material (potentiality). The endless regression from the minute to the Infinite, does however, arrive at the existence of a First Cause, which is the Form of form itself, from which all else (directly and indirectly) emanates.

A Portrait of the “Unmoved Mover”

Aristotle seemingly breaks from Plato once more, when he declared that reason seems to dictate that there is one singular cause, rather than a conglomeration of eternal essences, that is the source of all things: “Some of our contemporaries . . . prefer to regard universals as primary beings, since genera are general; they seem to prefer such principles and primary beings because of the abstract manner of their investigations.”[16] Aristotle instead suggests, that there are “three types of primary being,” including “immovable being” to which his Metaphysics seems to culminate.[17] Because change and motion are continuous—and time seems to be a sort-of progressive locomotion—“there necessarily is an eternal changeless primary being.”[18] Because eternal primary being are actual, rather than potential—for this would be inferior and subordinate for eternal beings—they must necessarily be without material: “And these primary beings must be without material. For they must be eternal, or else nothing is eternal. Accordingly, they must ever be actual.”[19]

Aristotle conceived of a perpetual universe and thus concluded accordingly regarding the First Cause, “There is something which is always moved with unceasing and cyclical motion. Consequently, the first heave must be eternal. There is therefore also something which moves it. And since a moved mover is intermediate, there is, therefore, also an unmoved mover, being eternal, primary, and in act.”[20] This Unmoved Mover, Aristotle reasoned by way of logical syllogism, is active in the activity of knowledge:

Such a mover must impart movement as do the desirable and intelligible . . . But what is primary for desire and for intelligibility is the same; for what is desired is what appears good, and the primary object of rational choice is what is good . . . So the starting-point is the activity of knowing. Moreover, intelligence is moved by the intelligible.[21]

Aristotle’s concluding observations regarding the nature and essence of the Unmoved Mover, are imbued with deep teleological implications:

The first mover’s action is enjoyable . . . Thus, knowing, by its very nature, concerns what is inherently best, and knowing in the truest sense concerns what is best in the truest sense. So intellect finds its fulfillment in being aware of the intelligible . . . But mind is active in so far as it has the intelligible as its possession. Hence, the possession of knowledge rather than the capacity for knowledge is the divine aspect of mind . . . If the divine, then, is always in that good state in which we are at times, this is wonderful . . . it is in this better state that the divine has its being and its life, and the divine is that activity. The self-sufficient activity of the divine is life at its eternal best.[22]

Tying Up Loose Ends

If the reader is perplexed and confounded at this point in the exposition, I confess that I am not surprised and will seek to offer this summation as solace. The topic of this inquiry has been to explore and distinguish between form and matter in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. To do this, it was necessary to contextualize Aristotle’s ideas by juxtaposing his metaphysical disposition alongside that of his teacher and mentor, Plato—who forever revolutionized the study of non-physical reality by articulating and canonizing his “Theory of Forms.” For Plato, the forms are abstract eternal essences that imbue with teleology physical things—which are but distorted imprints of perfect ethereal forms. Chief among the eternal essences for Plato, is the “Form of the Good,” which is the purpose towards which all things should direct their conscious action. In order to know the forms, one must transcend the material in order to ascend to the realm of the metaphysical, which is the motif of Plato’s famous cave allegory. In this quasi-dualistic outlook, it would seem that matter almost corrupts form, as darkness hides light. In Meno, Plato similarly argues that true education—the process by which knowledge is recollected by stripping away material experience and instead relying upon rational inquiry—aims at the attainment of knowledge and virtue through aligning the soul with the Good, even if virtue itself is unattainable except as a gift endowed by the divine: “virtue appears to be present in those of us who may possess it as a gift from the gods.[23]

Unlike Plato, Aristotle takes a more earthy approach: whereas Plato disdains the material as a carnal prison inhibiting spiritual transcendence, Aristotle frequently are fervently argues that form—which for him is the shape, order, mind, and essence of a corporeal thing—is only knowable in so far as it is made manifest in the material world. With the assumption that every effect induced has a cause, Aristotle explores the perpetual chain of causation before finally arriving at a First Cause, which is the Unmoved Mover, which seems to be something like the soul, essence, and/or mind that imbues, governs, and sets in motion the universe. This Unmoved Mover is actuality itself—and seems to be the only form that is capable of existing without body: for the Unmoved Mover is active in the activity of the Knowing of Ends. It would seem that as the soul animates the body, the Unmoved Mover animates the universe: “The soul is . . . the substance corresponding to the account, and this the essence of a particular sort of body.”[24] Despite a stark difference in methodology, Aristotle concludes—like Plato in Meno—that the activity of knowing, i.e. knowledge, is something divine and God-like that emanates outwards from the Unmoved Mover. And thus, through philosophical contemplation and the activity of happiness—which is “an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue,” i.e. man fulfilling his proper moral and intellectual capacities—man may share in the divine spirit, essence, and mind that emanates from the Unmoved Mover.

Is it difficult to parse the precise difference between Plato’s Form of the Good and Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, though the former seems to be an eternal essence of sorts, while the latter is described as a conscious, knowing, and active—though disengaged— primary of all primary beings. Nonetheless, the ideas and concepts described ambiguously and abstractedly through the limited medium of language in Aristotle’s Metaphysics leave much open to interpretation and innovation. While their epistemological and metaphysical methods and dispositions differ, do Plato and Aristotle not both aim at the Ultimate—i.e. the source of all order in chaos, light in darkness, knowledge in a sea of confusion, and most importantly of all: purpose in a seemingly purposeless cosmos?

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[1] A priori, is a Latin term used in Western philosophy which means “from the prior” and is used to signify things known prior to sensory experience. Platonism, in particular, is a rational philosophy that inherently mistrusts sense perception and instead relies upon rational arguments constructed by the mind, as opposed to drawing philosophical conclusions from observations garnered via the senses.

[2] Giovanni R. Ferrari and Tom Griffith, Plato: the Republic (Edinburgh, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 221.

[3] Ibid., 223.

[4] Aristotle and Richard Hope, Metaphysics (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 7.

[5] Ibid., 142-143.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., 147.

[8] Ibid., 144.

[9] Ibid., 179-180.

[10] Ibid., 146-147.

[11] Aristotle, Thomson J A K., and Hugh Tredennick, The Ethics of Aristotle: the Nichomachean Ethics (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976), 206-211.

[12] Ibid., 63.

[13] Metaphysics, 143.

[14] Ibid., 190-191.

[15] Ibid., 142.

[16] Ibid., 249.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid., 256.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid., 258.

[21] Ibid.

[22] Ibid., 259-260.

[23] Plato, Grube G M A., and John M. Cooper, Five Dialogues (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2002), 92.

[24] Aristotle et al., On the Soul and Other Psychological Works (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2018), 22.