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A big problem with E.R. Dodds’ classic The Greeks and the Irrational is, to the extent that anyone can tell, Dodds imposes concepts of rationality and irrationality drawn largely from Freud onto Greeks who had no idea that Freud was coming. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – psychoanalysis can tell us stuff about the past, for sure – but it puts Dodds on a spur track from the main line of a modern “social anthropology” that aims, to the extent this is possible, to understand other societies in their own terms. A book that took into account what the Greeks thought the irrational was would be very different than the one that Dodds ended up writing.

In a forthcoming article that argues somewhat along these lines, Robert Parker sets Evans-Pritchard’s work on the Azande side-by-side with Dodds as an example of how anthropologists, even in the 1950’s, were already beginning to look for other rationalities in other cultures. The comparison is an apt one, especially from Parker’s standpoint as a historian of religion. A major project of Dodds’ work, though, is to bring together “religion” as a mass phenomenon with the critiques of that phenomenon which were leveled by sophists and philosophers who belonged to, and addressed, a small elite. Insofar as those critiques are “rational” in nature, Dodds can draw a distinction between rational and irrational in Greek culture without thereby imposing on it a purely etic standard of judgment.

Where we draw the distinction, though, still matters. That’s because the Greeks, unlike the Azande (but like many other premodern societies) have a word that includes “irrational” among its meanings and that gets deployed in debates over what irrationality is. The word is alogos, and one would be interested to know the history of its usage so that we can understand what counted, for the Greeks, as irrational.

One category of things that the Greeks took trouble to stigmatize as irrational is animals – such that ta aloga, the irrational ones, was a kind of a byword for nonhuman creatures. What did animals do that was irrational? Very little, as it turns out: ancient philosophers who insisted on this distinction were hard-pressed to separate the only “apparently” rational activities of dogs and dolphins and the rest from the “actually” rational activities of human beings which the former seemed to emulate, while skeptics ran roughshod over the distinction. What really justified the Greeks in calling animals “irrational” was a lack. Animals lack logos in the sense that they can’t speak and therefore can’t give an account of their actions. The Greeks inferred from this that such an account was also missing internally, such that animals had a kind of subjectivity (phantasia) without thought.

In effect, animals were thus excluded from a human community united by speech and a set of practices surrounding speech. This exclusion served as the prototype for a number of others: women, barbarians and slaves, to name just a few. The focus on speech which underlay these practices, however, was a central feature of a more-or-less democratic polis community and fared poorly outside of those conditions. I’ll have more to say on what this meant for postclassical animals in a later post.

I never put down a book without finishing it. A super-rare exception to that rule (though preserving the letter of the law, since I read a digital copy) is Justin Smith’s Irrationality: a History of the Dark Side of Reason, which I’ve just given up on. I came to it out of frustration with E.R. Dodds’ The Greeks and the Irrational, a much better book which I’ve been writing about lately. One serious problem (or, more charitably, enduring challenge) posed by Dodds’ classic is that it never, and perhaps can’t, define the irrational which it claims for its subject. I expected that Smith, notionally a professional philosopher, would do better, but actually he does worse.

Smith aspires to write a history of irrationality, which means that he claims to have a notion of what irrationality is. But the seams start to show right away with the anecdote that begins Smith’s introduction, the story of Hippasus’ murder by Pythagoreans enraged at the former’s having publicized the secret of irrational numbers. That irrational numbers like the square root of 2 exist, glosses Smith, is proof that the universe isn’t actually rational as Pythagoras had maintained. Classicists know, however (and this isn’t the only error of fact or interpretation that I, as a specialist, was able to spot in the book), that “rational” and “irrational” here just have to do with ratios. The Pythagoreans (not Pythagoras himself, probably, although Iamblichus, the source of the anecdote, wouldn’t have made this exception) believed that the universe could be explained as a series of ratios between whole numbers; the square root of two, since it can’t be expressed as such a ratio, throws a monkey wrench into that system. Pythagoreans (or, better, their Latin interpreters) used
“rationality” and “irrationality” in so far different a sense from the modern one that it’s hard to see any contiguity between the two usages.

The same kind of claims might be advanced for much of the evidence Smith brings together. “Rational” is a predicate said of so many different things – numbers, logic, arguments, nature, political organization and thought, to name just a few – that it loses all definition.

Dodds has a similar problem – he equivocates between social rationality, a kind of functionalism, and individual rationality, a system for evaluating belief coherence – but at least his various senses of “rational” stand in a dialectical relation to one another. Society developsbelief-based means of controlling individual irrationality that appear ends-rational from society’s viewpoint, as ensuring the survival of the collective; from the viewpoint of the individual, however, these beliefs appear irrational because incoherent. An age of criticism thus follows an age of credulity. Since man’s irrational impulses still need to be controlled by society, however, a new age of credulity ensues.

We could argue about whether a lot of the entities invoked by Dodds – society, beliefs, human nature – actually exist, but, assuming they do, reason still operates in his argument despite Dodds’ refusal to define it univocally. Smith aspires to something similar, characterizing the overall argument of his book as a dialectical approach that praises some reason, but not too much (poor Adorno and Horkheimer get dragged in to give this position a pedigree, though I don’t think they would have recognized it.)

As it plays out, though, this is not really a dialectical argument but rather a statement of what I would pejoratively call a “moderate” position. Because he dislikes the extreme irrationalist and rationalist positions for consequentialist reasons (e.g., too much reason brings about the French Revolution), he situates himself as near to the midpoint between these extremes as he can get. Sometimes, as with the goofy equivalence Smith draws between neo-nazis and #metoo twitter, this means inventing an extreme: the moderate needs to have enemies on both sides.

There’s a kind of magical thinking involved in taking such a position – the belief that not being wrong makes you right, as though there were only a limited number of ways to be wrong – and it shows throughout the book. Smith seems to believe that his moderate position, perforce that of a reasonable man, gives him the authority to speak ex cathedra on a pretty wide range of issues where he has no actual expertise. Does being a political moderate, for instance, equip you to dismiss Lacan, Freud, Zizek and all of French theory without so much as offering a counterargument? It does if you believe you’ve already established your credentials as a reasonable man and if, as Smith does, you find that body of work personally distasteful.

You don’t necessarily need to take all those texts on board, but a book that claims to be offering a critical history of irrationality should do better than that kind of idle polemic. The more of it you read, the more you get the sense that what Smith says he wants to avoid – treating rationality as a mere “term of approval” – is in fact the presumption that underlies the whole project. Rationality seems to mean so many different things in this book because it actually doesn’t have a substantive definition, being just synonymous with “stuff Justin Smith likes.”

That’s disappointing, all the moreso since Smith has a job at a French university. You expect the French to know better, but maybe that expectation is just a holdover from happier times. In France as everywhere else, “reasonable men” like Smith are under attack on all sides as people seek to overthrow the regime of market neutrality of which such people are avatars. When that regime remained unchallenged, it could afford to sponsor internal critics like the French theoreticians Smith despises. Now that it’s under attack, it hires dragoons to write polemics in its defense. If Smith’s book is any indication, this slackening of intellectual standards on the part of the ancien regime won’t save it: nobody, not even its fiercest advocates, can make a convincing case for moderatism.

People worry a lot about free will now, not so much anymore because of the theological puzzles it poses as because it’s supposedly incompatible with modern science. There are basically two ways to gloss that incompatibility. One reading is that our experience of having free will is somehow “fake” because science teaches us that everything is either strictly determined or random. This approach takes the experience of free will as naively representative and declares it mistaken on that basis. To characterize any phenomenon of consciousness as naive representation, however, is seriously misguided – the same kind of error as taking thoughts to be identical with scans of brain activity correlating to those thoughts. When it comes to consciousness, the picture is not the thing; and neither is the thing the picture.

A more promising way to construe the incompatibility between free will and the modern scientific consensus would be to concede that the notion of free will as usually understood entails some kind of special (uncaused) causation that experimental evidence tells overwhelmingly against. Assuming we want to maintain a univocal notion of “cause” that has proven at least technologically useful, what we then have to do is reconstruct “free will” in a non-causal way, for instance as a special way of experiencing uncertainly about the future with reference to ourselves as agents. On this reconstruction, free will isn’t so much a way of changing the future as it is of acknowledging our moral responsibility vis-a-vis actions for which we’re not in a deep sense causally responsible.

Dreams provide us a way of understanding what this would be like. When we remember our dreams, we often recall ourselves as choosing while at the same time feeling (in retrospect) as though the whole plot of our dream had been predetermined. From this perspective, we can see free will as a feature of experience that doesn’t have any causal efficacy. That’s why, despite this experience of choice, people try to experience “lucid dreaming” – a kind of dream state in which we would “really” have free will, rather than just the experience of it.

The idea is then that our waking minds will have causal efficacy in the world of our dreams. Of course, if free will is non-causal anyhow, then it can’t have any more causal efficacy when we’re asleep than when we’re awake. However, it bears noticing that a distinction between “real” (i.e. causal) free will and merely experiential free will can’t even really be conceptualized outside of some kind of scenario like this one, where we observe and participate in a fictional world (i.e. the dream space) from an “actual” position in a “real” world outside it.

All that by way of introducing a passage from the Oneirocriticon that struck me when I read it a few days ago and has stayed with me since. It comes from the end of book two, where Artemidorus finally gets around to what we’ve all been waiting for, flying dreams:

πάντων δὲ ἄριστον τὸ ἑκοντα πέτεσθαι καὶ ἑκόντα παύεσθαι· πολλὴν γὰρ ῥᾳστώνην καὶ εὐχέρειαν ἐν τοῖς πραττομένοις προαγορεύει. διωκόμενον δὲ ὑπὸ θηρίου ἢ ὑπὸ ἀνθρώπου ἢ ὑπὸ δαίμονος ἵπτασθαι οὐκ ἀγαθον· φόβους γὰρ μεγάλους καὶ κινδύνους ἐπάγει.

“The best of all is to take off willingly and stop [flying] willingly; this predicts much ease and facility for those who do it. But it is not good to fly while being pursued by a beast or a person or a daimon; this brings great fears and hazards.”

How are we supposed to understand this “willingly” which makes so much difference for our interpretation of the dream? Categorically excluded, I think, is a causal interpretation where “willingly” means “you desire to do it, and this causes you to do it.” That’s because the whole Oneirocriticon treats dream actions as something for which you’re not causally responsible. Indeed, this must have been a general premise for ancient dream interpretation: how else to create an atmosphere in which people are comfortable recounting dreams they’ve had about, e.g., getting a blow job from their own fathers? The dream is something that befalls you, not something that you do.

Hekonta, then, has some kind of experiential meaning. But what kind? The text opens up a couple of alternatives, which I have a hard time choosing between. One way to construe it is as the same kind of special ignorance about future events I was talking about before – the only difference between it and our general uncertainty about the future being that free will has reference to our own, agential actions. Another way to construe it would be to read it in close connection with the second sentence I quoted above, which we’d then interpret as presenting alternative scenarios in which you’re not voluntarily taking off or landing. If the typology given here is exhaustive – that is, if either you fly voluntarily or you fly under compulsion from another agent – then the experience of free will would just be the experience of non-compulsion, in principle susceptible of verification by outside observers too.

Politics is about to eat the world again. The 2020 election, actually, is starting early, with a wide democratic enough democratic primary field for pundits to start the horserace well in advance of the general. This breadth of choice is deceptive: in all likelihood, we’re going to have to choose (yet again) between two aging cave-beasts whose different rhetorical stances conceal agreement on all the most important issues.

How much do we care if it’s Trump or Biden* who ends social security? That we’re now at the point of asking that question highlights one of the most depressing features of modern politics, which is that you can’t really do anything about it: even though you have a vote in a notionally democratic system, you feel this crushing sense of powerlessness. It used to be that only about half the country would feel this way at any given time, while the other half would feel like its votes had mattered and it was getting its way. The paint started to come off of this notion sometime during the Clinton years, when “getting your way” as a Democrat turned out to mean military intervention abroad and welfare reform domestically, but Obama’s second term, with its legislative non-function, really drove home how little anything matters. As I’ve said before, the world-beating idea in this situation turns out to be a guy who promises to screw you over in exchange for providing four years of red-hot “entertainment” a la Archie Bunker.

It’s starting to seem like the point of election coverage is to drive us so crazy that we don’t notice how the election itself is a broken lever on the runaway machine of US politics. I’m as susceptible to this kind of manipulation as anyone. Something I do to keep myself calm is to think concretely about what kind of a difference I can make, and to hold myself accountable for doing only exactly that much. In election coverage as in other areas, the news media commands our emotional involvement by making us feel anger or guilt over things we can’t do anything about. The only way to resist this is by coming to know our own capacities.

There are good reasons for thinking that college professors like me are in a position to make some kind of a difference. The biggest such reason is the demographic sort that seems to be happening around level of educational attainment: in 2016, Clinton beat Trump by 21% among college graduates, a gap unprecedented in recent times.** The college experience appears to be doing something to people’s susceptibility to Trump.

The MSNBC interpretation of those numbers is that Trump voters are just dumb. That may be true, but if it is then there’s not much we can do about it. More interesting to me is the question of why, or how, Trump induces such a strong educated/uneducated polarity in the voting population, a polarity that undoubtedly works in his favor since only about 30% of US adults have a college degree.

As with most of his core constituencies, Trump won this one by turning it against what he was able to portray as an opposite or an enemy. Trump first turned college-educated people against him (partly on purpose and partially by speaking like someone with a brain lesion), then looked to the wider crowd and said “these people, your enemies, are my enemies too.”

We’re not in a position to do much about what Trump says, of course. Not even people who are trained and paid to be in that position can shut him up. That he was able to make this particular representation stick, though, should be really disturbing to anyone involved in the production of college graduates. If the rest country hates them so much, then we may be turning out a defective product.

Why do they hate us? Is it the haircuts and social justice? That’s all just a sideshow: if Ben Shapiro is talking about it, you can be sure it’s totally insignificant. The real problem is a part of college education that both liberal and conservative political elites are fine with. At most colleges, even STEM majors learn a little bit of sociology: they interalize a picture of society where there are winners and losers, where winning and losing are a matter of skill rather than chance, and where winners and losers share no interests in common. The last piece of the puzzle is that, with our tacit encouragement, they come to see having a college education as the main factor separating winners from losers. That means that college graduates are prepared to see pursuing their own narrow interests as socially natural, as part of winning or as a prize for winning already done.***

You can see why it would be easy to hate people who felt that way, especially if they also acted like it, and “people who feel like that acting like that” is actually a pretty good characterization of US politics since the fall of communism. Trump wasn’t the first person to recognize this feature of national life; he wasn’t even the first politician to try to exploit it. He was able to exploit it with unprecedented success because you couldn’t think he was putting on an act or playing both sides: nobody would ever accuse Donald Trump of being smart.

Since what teaches graduates this lessons is a structural feature of college life and national discourse, not a discrete part of the curriculum, there’s no straightforward way to keep them from learning it. What we should be doing instead, I think, is to try to counteract it, first by making explicit how they’re being taught to see themselves as better than their non-educated peers and then by reminding them that, if anything, they’re worse – in terms of hustle, endurance, flexibility, what have you. Most college graduates, for instance, couldn’t last a week in an amazon fulfillment center.

The point would be, actually, not just to make them feel bad but to sell them on a vision of solidarity. When grads and non-grads fight, the only people who win are folks like Biden, Trump, the Koch brothers, the whole rest of that rotten capitalist-political class. Grads and non-grads alike are most of them workers, getting exploited by figures who, as long as we’re fighting each other, can remain safely behind the scenes.

We should emphasize that the alternative to solidarity is, in the near term, a brand of nationalist fascism that will lead to world war and, in the long term, complete ecological collapse. Some people will benefit from both those things, but probably not anyone you’ll have in your classroom (unless you teach at Harvard or Yale). For the most part, even the “winners” will end up losing.

What would be the right kind of class in which to present that message? I say, all of them. Kids need to hear it and we need them to hear it. Otherwise, we’re enabling another Trump win (and it may already be too late).

*It could happen. Obama wanted to pass “social security reform,” which is basically a codeword for the same thing. Like Obama, Biden seems to believe that campaigning toward the center means doing Republicans’ work for them.

** Historically, the gap is within five percentage points, and college graduates don’t always lean in a leftward direction, either. 2012 saw them go for Romney by four points, not that it helped him any.

*** The process starts even earlier at elite Ivy League schools like Yale, where I taught for a while and where I encountered a lot of kids who thought that just having gotten admitted entitled them to a job at Goldman Sachs. They weren’t wrong, either; in this case, it’s the system that’s crazy.

Book two of the Oneirocriticon completes its author’s natural history of the dream-life. Following a pattern established by earlier encyclopedists, Artemidorus of Daldis has interpreted the whole world – from humans to minerals to animals, fish and birds – as dream symbols. Fittingly enough (and excluding “off topic sections on dream flight and the numerology of the human lifespan which is meant to remind us that he’s a “real scientist”), Artemidorus concludes by talking about the dead.

If you’ve been raised on a steady diet of modern horror movies, you’ll expect that seeing dead people is never a good sign. Artemidorus confirms this expectation at a few points – you don’t want dead people to be going after your posessions, for instance, and especially not your clothing, which would mean that you’re going to die. On the other hand, dead people per se are actually a good sign in a lot of situations. As usual in the Oneirocriticon, the dreamer’s status and state of mind matter a lot.

If you’re really worried about something, for instance, seeing a dead person means you’re in the clear. That’s because people in the afterlife are chill: they don’t worry about anything, since they’re dead. As Artemidorus explains a little later with respect to whom you can trust in a dream – and dead people are very trustworthy, as it turns out – most people deceive themselves and others because of hopes and fears, phoboumenoi e elpizontes. Dead people neither fear nor hope for anything. Why would they? There’s nothing worse that can happen to you than death, which takes away all grounds for hope.

For similar reasons, it’s pretty good news for slaves to see a revenant. That’s because the dead have no masters: they’re anupotaktos, uncommanded. To dream of dead people, then, predicts freedom, which is what (on Artemidorus’ account, and it would be really interesting to know how accurate this was for the Roman context) slaves most of all want.

On the whole, you can see that the Oneirocriticon cultivates a much more friendly and less fearful relationship to the dead than we might have expected. Part of this is just the author’s contrarianism: a long polemic section on the interpretation of nightingales suggests that earlier books of dream-interpretation had been more uniform in assigning a negative meaning to symbols and signs associated with death. Artemidorus’ revisionist approach here might be part of a rhetoric of progress and experimentation by which he asserts his own superiority over his predecessors in the art.

In most cases, though, we can verify that his innovations take advantage of pre-existing cultural symbolisms rather than inventing new ones. This holds good for the dead, as well: the characterization of death as a state of lack on which Artemidorus is building goes back at least to Greek tragedy, where Antigone’s characterization of her own future corpse as aphilos, agamos, anumenaios, aklautos and alektos is not at all untypical. Even in Homer, what’s striking about the dead (for Odysseus, anyway) is their lack of body and even of mind. Death means something’s missing.

Most of the time, you don’t want to lose what death takes away. On the other hand, as Artemidorus points out, you sometimes do. If death didn’t come with certain advantages, there wouldn’t be such a thing as the death wish – and, to avoid anachronism, the Stoics wouldn’t have recommended it as a way out from intolerable situations. The readings presented in the Oneirocriticon draw out the implications of that attitude and, incidentally, show how different the ancient conception of death was from our own.

Near the end of my Sanskrit textbook, I find the following selection from the Baghavad Gita:

Krodad bhavati sammoha/sammohat smrtivibramah/smrtibramsad buddhinaso/buddhinasat pranasyati.

“From anger arises total delusion, from total delusion unsteadiness of memory, from unsteadiness of memory destruction of intelligence; because of destruction of intelligence, he perishes utterly.”

This is part of a sequence of stanzas that inspired Yoda’s “from fear comes hatred” etc. monologues in Phantom Menace, surely one of the most faux-profound things in the Star Wars canon. However that may be, I thought this stanza was pretty cool – not just because of its content, but because of the way in which it shows how some things about the ancient anger-management tradition that seem obvious to us are actually idiosyncratic and culture-bound.

First things last: the Greco-Roman analysis of anger is primarily non-cognitive, involving our minds (for the Stoics at least) only so far as it takes for them to give assent to the initial angering impulse. From that point onward we’re out of control, like witnesses at our own performance. Non-cognitive components of the mind or body take over and force us, like an injured animal (one of ancient writers’ favorite points of comparison), to pursue revenge against whoever or whatever angered us in the first place.

The BG text proceeds differently, describing the hold anger has over us not as a temporary surrender on the part of the hegemonic soul, but as permanent damage to our intelligent mind. That gives us an “internal” reason for avoiding anger that most Greco-Roman accounts, which focus on the external dangers of letting yourself go (it’s that western illusion of human nature again), are missing or grasping after.

How could anger produce delusion and, consequently, weakness of memory? To make sense of that, we’d first need to invert (or at least complicate) the etiology of anger as it appears in a text like Seneca’s De ira. First, we perceive something that is of the sort to make us angry; then, we either assent to an angry response or refuse it. The rightness of the initial perception is never in question, only our response to it. In the BG, by contrast, it seems as though one of two things is true: either anger is causally independent of perception and warps our perceptions so as to create its own cause, or else anger is causally dependent on perception but warps subsequent perceptions (and our memories, too) by way of sustaining itself. The second of these accounts seems more plausible, especially considering claims made elsewhere in the BG for the therapeutic value of withdrawing our senses from perceptibles. The premise that emotional states can cause us to perceive things wrong is one that both accounts have in common.

I think this approach is actually better than the Greco-Roman one for understanding certain brain-melting aspects of modern political anger. My anger towards Republicans and towards Trump in particular has led me into delusion before and would do so again in short order if I let my guard down. Certainly it works the other way too, and I would say this is a skid into which the modern Republican party has swerved. An anger that distorts reality to feed itself is potentially a powerful weapon: it produces infinite engagement and the kind of frantic loyalty that any politician would buy if he could.

One wonders if that means that the BG has an accurate cognitive model of anger, or just because the internet (by serving us algorithmically with stuff we’ll click on, which usually means stuff that makes us angry) simulates the perception-distorting properties that the BG hypothesizes. In the latter case, it’s a question about the internet rather than about anger as such. Should we, as the BG advises, withdraw from the internet entirely? Or is it possible, as the Greco-Roman tradition suggests, to mainline a feed designed to trigger us and not even be mad?

I find that I’m often misinterpreted for failure to speak directly. Something like this happened at the conference I attended this weekend, where someone (actually a respected scholar on the topic) stood up to say that my paper on Vergil’s Georgics had really been about “creative destruction:” you have to destroy something if you want to make something new. Far from it! In fact, the Georgics are about (among other things) how this is basically impossible. It’s not that you can’t create – which people do all the time, especially in the last book of the poem – but that destruction is impossible. What you kill (i.e. Orpheus, Eurydice) always remains somewhere, even if only in memory. Sometimes the preservation is more literal. Say, if you kill tens of thousands of your countrymen to make an empire out of a republic, tempus veniet when all those weapons and giant bones will come out of the ground again, much to the confusion of future farmers. It’s as Timothy Morton says: there’s no away for things to go.

Creative destruction is a modern trope with a modern trick. It’s an advertising slogan, designed to get you to notice one thing and distract you from something else. What’s eye-catching is the “creative” part, which everyone can get behind. It’s an adjective applied to a noun; the noun’s what you take for granted. You’re supposed to think, “hmm.  I love it when  people create!  Definitely worth a little destruction, if that’s what it costs!” You’re not supposed to think about whether destruction is possible, but you should. After all, if it’s not, do you really want to tether your creative process to it?

Actually, I think the Georgics are a lot more on the ball about this than Friedrich Hayek is. Or maybe Hayek’s contemporary and countryman, Freud, is the right citation: the mind is like Rome, except that the ruins are all still intact. It’s a layering where the layers intersect with one another. If you think you’ve actually destroyed something, you’re in trouble: it’ll get back after you like a ghost jedi, forcing you to recognize that the past isn’t past. Hayek dreamed of the unleashed forces of capitalism, destroying old structures and industries to replace them with the latest, greatest thing. That’s what we thought we were doing, 1996-2016. As it turned out, though, we hadn’t actually destroyed the old structures (manufacturing, racism, whatever), we’d just given them an identity, as old. Trump, the archetypical cranky, sponge-brained geriatric, gave them something to organize around. It’s the shock of the old.

The other problem with creative destruction is one that I hinted at before, which is that it makes actual creativity impossible. The big “disruptive” innovations of the past decade or so have been things like Uber (Uber for laundry, Uber for euthanizing your pet, whatever). Uber isn’t actually anything new; it’s just a different, worse way of ordering a cab, where the driver isn’t a professional and doesn’t get any money. Amazon isn’t anything new; it’s just a mail-order catalog with the cash on hand of a small nation-state. Facebook isn’t anything new; it’s just socializing, but with extra psychopaths. The logic of creative destruction means we’re stuck “disrupting” stuff by making worse, more profitable versions of it. That’s good for someone, but odds are it’s not you.

I don’t mean to say that mantras like “creative destruction” actually have a causal force when it comes to making the world shitty. But they do set up a permission structure. They’re excuses for bad, boring, dumb behavior. What’s worse, they’re excuses you make on behalf of other people. Destruction sounds good in theory, but it isn’t happening in practice. Maybe next time, we can build on top of something rather than blowing it up.

I went to a conference this weekend that got me thinking about what Classics still has to tell us at the end of the world. The most basic point, I guess, is the one that Lucretius makes at the close of book two of De rerum natura, which is that things don’t really end: they just keep getting worse.* If the world did end, we’d be lucky.

One of the oldest Greek poems we have comes at the problem with a certain directness. In his myth (or theory?) of the four ages, Hesiod describes the opposite of progress: we’ve been headed state down from the start, from gold through silver and bronze and the heroes (a brief upturn) to iron, which is where we’re at now. The age of iron is a punitive era, where justice – which once was internal to the world – now has to be imposed from outside against a race of men that only wants to kick against the pricks. Eventually, once things get bad enough, Zeus is going to blow us up – and we’ll deserve it. Hesiod was maybe the first law-and-order voter.

Hesiod, Vergil (in the Georgics) and Lucretius are all agreed that the Earth used to be a lot more fertile, too. The fact that we live in latter days also explains why we have to work so damn hard just to eat: “pater ipse colendi haud facilem viam esse voluit.” And that’s just going to get worse, too, unless, as Vergil advises, we trade our crops for honey-making bees – a strategy some U.S. farmers have actually employed in recent decades. You can make a lot more money gathering nectar from other peoples’ crops than by growing your own.

But we can’t all join the busy bees of the financial sector: if we did, there’d be nothing to make honey out of. Most of us are going to be stuck grinding crops out of the unwilling Earth through the rest of this long (perhaps endless) age of iron. Or perhaps it is a gilded age after all, a new age of gold, which is, as Ovid points out, “ferro nocentius.” Even gold gets turned to evil in the age of iron.

This wasn’t what most of the people at the conference had in mind, though. They were thinking of Trump and global warming – really more a fortuitous conjunction than a causal pair, but they’re both hitting at the same time, so there you go. The classics have a lot to say about Trump-like figures, but nothing useful: the closest anyone comes is probably Tacitus, who throughout his work takes a caustic attitude towards the kind of performative #resistance that leads to an ambitiosa mors. As to global warming, well, nobody could conceive of it – except, weirdly, Gregory the Great, who thought that parts of the world were getting hotter as the end times approached because the furnaces of hell were kindling up.

*Lucretius does of course think that the mundum we inhabit is going to disappear some day, but it’s more like getting old than sudden death. Cosmic cataclysms are for Stoics.

This is the last (I hope) in an ongoing series of posts about the lamest of the many miracles chronicled in Gregory the Great’s Dialogues. The fourth book has, unlike the other three, an overarching argument, which is the soul is real and persists after death. Gregory proves that point partly with apodictic arguments (“Angels are invisible, and everyone believes in those, so why can’t the soul be invisible too? That’s faith!”) but mostly with ghost stories. If anyone is a ghost, hears a ghost, sees a ghost, smells a ghost, etc., that’s good evidence that the soul can exist outside the body.

There’s an interesting inconsistency between that position and the one held by earlier theologians like Tertullian, Augustine, and John Cassian, all of whom tell us that we shouldn’t talk to ghosts because they’re demons in disguise. The difference may mark Gregory’s comparative lack of theological accuity or, more likely, a drift away from mortalist theories of the afterlife to something more like the modern view.

Whatever the explanation is, Gregory’s use of ghost stories as proofs gives him plenty of chances to share more of the goofy miracles that are his stock in trade. My favorite of these has to do with a certain Stefanus, escorted to heaven from his deathbed by an array of saints and martyrs (ghosts!) But that’s not a privilege just anyone gets. Stefanus is extra-holy. We know this because (once upon a time), somebody burned down his haystack and he didn’t even get mad. It’s a miracle!

In light of what I’ve already written about the importance of hunger for the moral universe of the Dialogues, this is actually less dumb than it sounds. In Gregory’s world, food is hard to come by, so someone who can let it go without getting upset has really learned not to value worldly goods. The thing is, that kind of asceticism isn’t itself particularly valued elsewhere in the Dialogues: most of Gregory’s saintly types recognize the value of worldly goods all too well, which is why they give to the poor and needy rather than hoarding for themselves. I think that Stefanus belongs to an older character type, the Roman Stoic, for whom externals really are indifferent. Stefanus’ quip when he hears that his crops have been burned – “You think it’s bad for me? Well, think about the other guy!” – tends to confirm this guess: a key part of stoic anger-management therapy is learning to feel pity for people you otherwise would have gotten mad at. The evil deeds of your enemy are symptomatic of an ulcer in the soul that’s far more painful that whatever (purely external) losses you may have suffered.

The last book of the Dialogues brings a lot more lay-types onto the scene. As such, in this book there’s a wider diversity of character than in the three proceeding: we’re no longer stuck with Gregory’s relatively uniform and even monotonous models of holiness. In this context, what Stefanus shows us is that Gregory’s sense of virtue might be little more big-tent than we’d thought. Intriguingly, it also suggests that at least a fragment of stoic ethics could, in the person of an Italian landholder, survive the end of philosophical education as such in the 6th century. The story forces us to ask: how much of ancient philosophy ends up getting mulched under and composted into the folk wisdom of the Middle Ages?

I’m trying to read Iamblichus’ Mysteries of Egypt, a Neo-Platonic philosophical treatise masquerading as a letter from an Egyptian priest. It’s slow going, not least because Iamblichus shares with many of his contemporaries a tendency not to tell you what the point or the payoff of an argument is until he’s finished making it.

So you don’t really know, for instance, why you’re supposed to care – and why Iamblichus’ authorial persona cares so much – about the thewn idiotetes, the distinguishing characteristics of the gods. Iamblichus’ point seems to be that the gods don’t have idiotes in the same way that we do, since that would imply limitation. The gods are everything at once, actually – as, in some sense, is everything except the somatic matter that sits at the bottom of Iamblichus’ hierarchy of being.

Well, the payoff of all that is this. Iamblichus’ rival, Porphyry, defines gods, demons, heroes, etc. by their place in the cosmos, by the elements with which they associate: ether for gods, air for demons, etc.. That’s their idiotes. Iamblichus argues that that’s putting an inappropriate limit on the infinite nature of the divine, and, what’s worse, making it impossible for humans to influence or commune with the gods. Iamblichus clearly thinks this relationship, which the rest of Mysteries teaches us how to manage, should be personal or at least manipulable.

You can’t talk to a deus absconditus, let alone subject him to your will using magical statues. Iamblichus needs his gods to be right here, not removed to the outer reaches of the universe. This means deterritorializing them: they can be right here, with us, because in some sense they’re nowhere. They don’t have a local habitation, just a name.

The way this works, or at least the way that Iamblichus wants us to conceptualize it, is on analogy with the sun: it’s somewhere – that is, out in space – but at the same time everywhere, since its light penetrates the whole cosmos. Since Iamblichus thinks of that light as a kind of instant emanation, we’re licensed to see it as the sun’s way of being as it were outside of itself. Like the sun, Iamblichus’ gods don’t keep their being to themselves (idios). They’re not abstract or nebulous, nor are they Morton-style hyperobjects that saturate the world. They’re radiant, at once near and far.

There are other things it might be useful to think about this way. Most websites are radiant, showering us with their being from a distance. This is extra true of social media sites that, like Iamblichus’ gods, at least give the appearance of obeying our commands. By way of that mediation, individuals are radiant now. So are countries. We could for instance think of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election as radioactivity, an unwanted radiance with unvelcome consequences.

Actually, so much of what makes it annoying to be alive right now is that kind of radiation. Distance used to be a pretty reliable buffer against people we can’t stand, but it’s hard to be indifferent to assholes when they’re constantly glowing at us. If you try to protect yourself by unhooking from twitter or nytimes.com or whatever, the people around you are still getting dosed. You can be a sane man in a society of mutants, which sounds even worse than getting blinded by the light.