Then in the winter of 2019 I adapted it for a reading I was doing in NYC at the KGB Bar for a Writer’s Circle meetup. Friends were there. It was cold outside, and warm and wonderful and giddy inside the bar where everyone understood how the world was supposed to work and for whom.

Next month I’ll return to the book. The next chapter focuses on why a term like “religion” still makes sense, can be made reasonably precise (even for rigorous intellectual inquiry), and has the advantage of preserving our practical intuitions. For now, I’d like to share this with you.

It’s nominally about “the holidays,” but the holidays as a reminder that our calendars don’t always climb higher and higher. Modernity, the 21st Century, emancipation, suffrage, from one thing to the next: two steps forward, one step back, slip, fall, onward, but always, always keep in mind what’s next, the future is just waiting for us to deserve it.

That’s not the only kind of calendar there is. Calendars are also round. The days come back around. It’s Monday again, turn, Spring again, turn, a New Year again, turn. As secularists we are trained to see one way, and not the other. But there is wisdom to be found in other ways of marking our time here.

The Mesoamericans had a name for the funny five days that fell outside their ritual calendar, which consisted of 18 months of 20 days each, totaling 360 days. They called them Nēmontēmi, unlucky days, empty or useless days. We have those days too. The days between Christmas and New Year are a strange kind of null-time. We lose track of the weekdays, there is no weekend.

It’s no time to start something new. We drift in the doldrums between life’s squalls. It’s the right time to remember that at any moment we might fall off the edge of the world.

—

There isn’t much to say about Christmas that hasn’t been said. Crass commercialism? Check. Feeling marginalized? Happy Holidays! Feeling combative? Join the war against the “war” on Christmas. No God to speak of? Don’t fret, popular science writer Simon Singh suggests that we celebrate the season scientifically by tuning into the static between radio dials—one to two percent of which, in case you didn’t know, is creation’s echo.

It’s a nice sentiment, and I’ve always been a sucker for that, “we are such stuff as supernovas are made on,” idea, but science and reason need some help to help us with the other 98% of the static—that electromagnetic mess we call living.

If you’re feeling uncharitable, you could call the holiday season a wish-fulfilling Freudian bonanza. We wrap our beneficence in foil to subvert the surprise, since most of the surprises we’re bound to receive in life aren’t beneficial. We go crazy with lights like ex-lovers who doth protest a little too much about all the fun we’re having since the sunlight dumped us. We sing “let it snow,” when there’s not a goddamned thing we can do about the snow. Most of what we deal with in life is dealing with the things we can’t do a damned thing about, so we create rituals to give our impotence a marketable face.

Time bequeaths too much to us: a vast history, a complex language, an unforgiving biology, flawed parents, flat feet, funny noses, and overwhelming choices, so by the end of the year we’ve had it. Our processes have oxidized; the stars have shifted; the continents drifted, and at least half the projects on our to-do lists are no closer to finished than when we wrote them down in January. So we slurp some eggnog, swap some trinkets, drink too much, call it quits and start the calendar over, counting again from one.

But we don’t have to be uncharitable. Intellection has limitations. Sometimes a mask is more honest than the face who wears it. We can choose charity, lean into the revelry, spin up the carnival, and drink spirits for clarity rather than stupefaction. In faith I promise to come back here every year, to you. Chisel away at the blanks, together. Pick at the sentiments and update the tragedies, together. Sup on this language, together. Turn this me-shaped space into a we-sized love that someone someday might call a life well-lived.

To begin, let me confess that I believe different spirits mask different selves, reveal different truths. Perhaps it is the character of the fruit’s fermentation, the grain’s zymurgy, the oak barrel’s history. I don’t know. I am doubtful of scientific support for my experience and accept that the variation is based on nothing other than my prejudices, but still, the effect on me is palpable.

Beer, in general, makes me happy. Its influence on my constitution is sufficient that my teenaged son knew the best time to tell me bad news was when I’d had enough beer to drink. It’s also what I tend to drink when I write, but not when I read. Beer is what I drink when I feel like dancing in this wrack of a universe. If I were going to the cross, I’d want a pint.

Whiskey, however, makes me melancholy in a bracing British sort of way. Never maudlin, just, “yes, you’ve been kicked in the teeth. Yes, I’ve found your molar and part of a bicuspid. But your canines are lost. Yes, it’s horrible, but let’s get you to a dentist. Don’t cry. The dead outnumber the living and always will.” When I’ve had enough whiskey, I’m great for game theory and dominating sexual play, but my mentation is more machiavellian than munificent.

Wine, now wine unlocks something else entirely. Under the vine’s sway, I understand the proximity of desire and spirit. When I drink wine, I am hungry for a flesh that transubstantiates the spirit—a reverse communion. After wine and the grace of a ravenous woman, you could pull the wafer from my mouth whole. There’s a reason Dionysus was the god of wine and not beer. The Greeks had both. Sophocles cautioned against too much beer, but not wine. Wine is the claret of tragedy’s sweet hunger. It’s what makes of an orgasm “the little death,” what draws us so near to beasts in the throws of pleasure that our lovers appear angelic, and our bodies become, in that death, matter’s lucent surface staved in God.

We hide so much from ourselves and one another. Spirits reveal some things, but hide others. There are truths we can’t hold onto for very long, as individuals or as peoples. For most of my life I didn’t believe in fate, but I don’t know what I believe anymore. Don’t know whether I believe there’s a pattern, or if life’s apparent orchestrations are just a confabulation of the humdrum-drumming that beats no rhythm at all.

What I do know is that I am regularly astonished by grace. Stupefied by it, actually. Perhaps its origin is autographic. My secular education has trained me to see it so, but I often see it another. The holidays always bring me back around to some aboriginal memory. A reminder that calendars were the tribe’s first mask, the mask that made civilization possible, concealed chaos and revealed the invisible order of time’s gyre. What but the grace of a billion strangers organized about festivals, rituals, and feast days has made this moment possible?

There was a time when shaman sent men and woman out into the wilderness on vision quests to pursue the truth in seven directions (North, South, East, West, Up, Down, and Center), but now the best we can do is a binary: left and right, progressive and populist, black and white. How spiritually poor we’ve become. Our vision blinkered by these secular winds. Yes, the nights are brighter but the days are darker. For me and those like me there is no shelter in a church or mosque, temple or synagogue. You must find grace your own way, not because Jesus or the Buddha walked some way, not because Rabbi Akiva said such and such, or Mohammed visited some sacred spot, but because you walked your way and thought the path worthy because you walked it.

I know that even a moment’s sober survey of the world reveals a monstrous, insouciant, boorish, infinite range of terrible ascents surmounting our grandest aspirations. The stars are too far. Peace too long. Violence too bright. Comity too dull. Stereotypes too easy. Misfortune just up ahead, waiting on the floor of your guest bedroom in a heap of limbs called “Dad.” I feel you. I am as wary as the next man. Somewhere up ahead there’s a day with my name on it.

It’s probably true that my dad’s death has quickened my thinking in this way. Talking to your father about life after his lungs have stopped working and he can’t manage enough wind to whisper can be clarifying. It brings all your haughty little opinions about life and meaning to an ugly point.

Of course, when I found my dad on the floor last winter just after midnight, February 2nd, 2025, in our guest bedroom, dropped like a rag doll face down and barely breathing I didn’t, yet, know he’d broken his neck. I didn’t know so I helped him onto his back. That may have been a mistake. I don’t know. He wasn’t moving. I didn’t notice that, but he wasn’t. The doctors said it probably didn’t matter. But I’ll never know for sure. It took them two days to figure out he was paralyzed. They thought it was a stroke that caused the cardiac arrest. But it wasn’t. It was that broken neck.

911 was fast. But not fast enough. Within minutes my dad wasn’t breathing. I had to start CPR. I don’t know for how long. Probably ten minutes—maybe less. I heard him die while I was working his chest and forcing the air back into him like a failing balloon. That death rattle you’ve heard about, it’s real. You can make it yourself if you’re curious. Make a “k” sound, but further back, not your palette, where your tongue attaches to your throat, back there. There’s a little bit of moisture there that colors the “k” sound, gives it some character, some life, a little gurgle. You can hear the breath leaving if you try it, slipping out. Only yours will come back. My dad’s didn’t.

I loved my dad. I respected my dad. I admired my dad. He grew up in the back woods of Arkansas without indoor plumbing to a son-of-a-bitch child molesting polygamist. But my dad never raised a hand to me in any way. My dad dropped out of high school. Joined the army. Earned his GED. Got an AA degree. Stayed married for 50 years, built and sold a business, and liked to golf. There aren’t a lot of good stories about dads these days, or at least it feels that way. But my dad was really good at being a dad, so I want to kick that out into the cultural ether and let it ripple.

It took him five months to die. Ventilators eventually kill you. They’re designed to save you of course, but give them enough time to work and you’re done for. Along the way there were a lot of plans, and positive thinking, a lot of hope followed by downgraded expectations. We were realists. Willing to deal with the universe as it is, and accept whatever mercy it would give. But in the end the universe just had better things to do than dispatch mercy for my dad. Sadly, the universe often has better things to do.

Not long before my wife and I were married we stayed in this little cabin in Idyllwild, CA. There’s not much to do in Idyllwild but drink, hike, and fuck, so that’s what we did. And this would be unremarkable except for one detail. The walls of this particular cabin were covered in carvings.

Lovers primarily, but there were families too. Lots of “Joe + Mary” enclosed in a heart, followed by a date. When I say covered, by the way, I mean covered. They were everywhere—dates and strangers as far as the eye could see. There was barely space for us to leave our own mark—but we did, and we have three times now. We took an old dull knife out of the utility drawer and found a way.

No matter how overcrowded the field, no matter how many times we’ve carved our names in the wall, no matter how many times we’ve loved or written, or failed, there’s always room for one more. Though scraped clean, we remain, curling the “Q” of Quincy, mashing Molly’s “M,” squeezing our voices through the rock and the hard place into the day’s brief light. We are all, each and every, love’s palimpsest.

We have our mother’s hair and our father’s eyes, and the nematode’s gastric simplicity in our guts. We may slide through the world’s warm chutes like some transitional species in an evolutionary chart, but we will remain. We will remain. Although remainders, we will remain. Although gone, we will remain. Drink enough wine, and you’ll believe it. Drink enough wine and the world comes back around. As bad as it gets, the dirge swells, curls up on itself, spins tipsy, syncopates the minors and turns to a ditty. Drink enough wine, and you can even bear your dad’s banana peel slip from the world, because different fruits bear different truths.

And the truth is this. Here on the high side of winter, as the sun reverses its long dying and begins to rise sooner, again stay longer, we remember that the ruin of clouds which have been accumulating all year will fizzle and fade. Thinned by the sun, the light will burn them to wind. But the light won’t stop there. It will burn everything. Even time, like water, will evaporate on its forever-wave. And though it’s hard to remember, we must, we must start the year over and recall, once again, that everything is just light under the various sways of gravity, and gravity is just the density of bodies in rapture, and rapture is just the madness of love, and the madness of love is the reason of creation.

—Memento mori, memento vagari

We live in an age of abundant empirical data, predictive algorithms, machine learning, five-sigma certainties, and genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphic analysis, an age in which waves of gravity born a billion light years away are captured by the curious, and cars can fly.1 How should a humanist stand in relation to these wonders? As scold, cheerleader, ostrich? Should we strive for objectivity, or abandon the pretext?2 If the former, how do we establish objective humanistic frames? If the latter, why should anyone take us seriously? Without some commitment to objectivity we can make no claims about human society, its character or its trajectory, that rises above the tyranny of self-righteousness or the frivolity of taste.

One approach is to embrace mathematical rigor, and incorporate testable hypotheses into our arguments. This is the approach Peter Turchin and his fellow cliodynamacists have taken. Converting traditional historical and archaeological analyses into large datasets, they make empirical arguments about social evolution, and work to identify recurring historical patterns.3 An antagonistic approach is to avoid grand theories altogether. Stick to primary texts, make narrow claims in situ, and refuse to induce beyond the boundaries of one’s particular specialization. These are both very fine strategies—necessary and indispensable to the production of human knowledge. And they are they both inadequate.

We know they are inadequate because “we believe all men are created equal” even though our physical, mental, and emotional capacities vary widely both inter and intra-sexually. No empirical dataset will ever show that we are, in fact, equal, and no circumscribed historical epoch or epistemological frame will justify this principle. Furthermore, we believe critique has power even though political regimes for thousands of years have ground dissidents into paste. And we believe justice aspires to cecity even though a two-tiered pleb, patrician legal system is the historical norm.

Experience ceaselessly frustrates our aspirations. Yet, here we are: writing and reading books, protesting and posturing, volunteering and donating blood. No aggregation of data could have predicted the rise of Islam, or Empress Wu Zetian’s subversion of imperial Chinese norms in the 7th century. And no fidelity to disciplinary boundaries would prepare you to see the deep similarities between 14th century lay European Catholicism and 12th-15th century Japanese Pure Land Buddhism, when famine, disease, and war in both geographies, led to democratizations of ritual, faith based salvation, Apocalypticism (Mappō in Buddhism), anti-elitism, and social welfare networks that circumvented traditional institutional hierarchies.

Complex human societies are shaped by forces impervious to empirical reduction or socio-cultural primacy. The very existence of multi-ethnic, transhistorical communities of strangers—what we call religions—belies this. And this kind of creative, anagogical exploration must continue, even in a secular context. It must not be relegated to the past. To make arguments by analogy, aspiration, and intuitive speculation, arguments that pull facts alongside, rather than chase behind them, is vital to our survival as a technologically advanced species. And the impetus to do this is provided by history.

Everywhere we look there are affirmative arrangements towards which human communities tend: transcendent mythology, cooperation, trade, abstract units of exchange, medicine, articulation and translation. But also alongside and intertwined are persistent deprecations: a pervasive sense of impending cosmological doom, a belief in the perfidy of strangers, the circumscription of sexual gratification, the certainty that something deep in the human code is flawed, cracked, occluded, sinful. Theory and philosophy, that is to say hermeneutics and ontology, are still the best and only tools for this kind of exploration. But these methods are hampered by deep and consequential limitations. And here we come to the second and more serious problem of evidence in the humanities. If the humanist’s relationship to objectivity is essential, even if fraught, their relationship to their own subjectivity is fateful.

If some historian somewhere found a letter written in the unmistakable handwriting of Abraham Lincoln that read, “I would subject every negro soul on this continent to the wrack of a southern whip if it would but preserve the union,” would that nullify his Peoria Address, or his House Divided Speech? In light of this evidence, should we consider emancipation a national accident, rather than a natural, even if bitterly fought, amendment to the nation’s original promise. The answer to that question tells us more about the humanist and our present than it does Lincoln and our past. There’s over 5,000 years of written history behind us, countless revolutions and genocides, war, engineered pestilence, slavery, yet here we are in 2025 with 75% of the world’s population calling each other on their cell phones, hundreds of millions of dollars devoted to international charities to improve access to potable water, and deaths from natural disasters and famine dropping to historic lows. So what story should we tell?

Both, of course.

History can turn at any moment. A chemical or biological war could wipe out billions. Millions of working poor are one paycheck away from homelessness. But your disposition towards the strangers who populate our past, present, and future inflects your thinking. What is your relationship to that uncertainty, to the often disagreeable angularity of facts, to the pell-mell of emotions that propel history? How readily can you shed the warmth of social approval? How enamored are you with your own moral luxuries? Have you acquired a taste for truth’s overpowering astringency? Degrees do not prepare you for its bitterness. Politics is an obstruction. Ideology is poison. Only your relationship to your own magnificent inconsequence can prepare you to see the world as it is and as it might be.

It’s possible, reasonable even, that you might reject my framing, my emphasis on intimacies normally expunged from intellectual labor. Certainly you would be in good company. One consequence of the West’s secular turn is that holistic questions of character and intent have been conspicuously shunted to biographical curiosities and coteriean gossip. Spiritual virtues, what Nietzsche called “die große Gesundheit,” the great health required to meet the challenges of a secular age,4 were sanitized from our social sciences, our philosophies and histories. The appearance of originality and intelligence are sufficient to draw attention. Intent is bracketed the way phenomenologists bracket the thing-itself. But everyone intuitively understands that “character is higher than intellect,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson declared, Nietzsche cribbed, and Ralph Ellison refined.5 The consonance between one’s interior life and one’s social performance, character, engenders trust and admiration everywhere.6 Whereas an irresolute genius is indistinguishable from a buffoon. And originality unmoored from intent inevitably leads to perversion. Intellectual horsepower is simply not enough to excavate wisdom from history’s ruin. Undeniably, many miracles manifested out of the West’s secular turn: universal suffrage, antibiotics, literacy, vaccines, caloric abundance. But the value and importance of these essential, private intimacies in our scholarship has plummeted. And this diminished value inflects the collection, filtration, and the sorting of evidence because the intellectual climate we inhabit weathers our intellectual analysis in unmistakable ways.

Misanthropy, resentment, and disaffection darkens scholarship, just as well as out of touch, elite, sanguinity obscures injustice. Much work has been done in the 20th and 21st centuries to uncover the ways in which complex societies elided the suffering of the disenfranchised who powered their ascendance: Blacks in America, Africans in Islam, Koreans in Japan, Jews in Europe, Kurds in Turkey, Indigenous Tributaries in Central and South America, Women everywhere. But that is only one aspect of our history. There are no scales to balance suffering against satisfaction, and I’m not suggesting there can be. But I am saying, forcefully, that unexamined presumptions affect every aspect of our intellectual work. Formal empirical frameworks can be a bulwark against this. Focused historical delimitations can be a bulwark against this. Neither is perfect, nor near perfect, but they offer some protection. But for humanists who would plunge into history’s torrent and return with something of value for the communities that enable their idle, there is no other check than self-awareness.

Roughly 117 billion humans have inhabited the earth so far, maybe 100,000 languages have been spoken, and at least that many distinct cultures have passed across her face.7 The magnitude of human diversity humbles the imagination, yet we strive to say something about them, even a sliver of them? We purport to say something about “power,” to say something about “religion,” to say something about “money,” to say something about “knowledge.” Philosophers and theorists are comfortable establishing these faithful orders the way any 4th-century South Asian anchorite was comfortable proclaiming the nature of the universe was suffering. But this comparison isn’t a critique. It’s a defense of the anchorite’s purview and our genealogy, an unabashed celebration of the philosopher’s impulse to create a larger moral universe, because this is the waken,8 the alchemy, out of which our higher aspirations are made. In order to meet this challenge, introspection and humility must be part and parcel of our practice. The cenobite’s moral power was tethered to their self-awareness. A similar kind of secular mindfulness of the limitations inherent in our theoretical or aspirational assemblages is needed to continue that work into the 21st century. Towards that end, I propose three principles.9

Wisdom doesn’t scale. Two or more things are true at once. And vanity shades everything.

Let’s take the middle proposition first.

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The Law of the Excluded Middle

For the physical and life sciences, the statistically empirical application of the law of the excluded middle is the principle that propels them forward.10 For any given proposition, it is either true or it is false. By rigorously limiting the nearly infinite number of observational end points, the scientific method produces data that authorizes it to judge material phenomenon as either (very, very probably) true, or (very, very probably) false. The truth is this or the truth is that. This “excluded middle,” this or, is as if divine. Like the Dharma and the Tao, like Ørlǫg, like God’s judgment, the truth is revealed through its application, and its disjunction is irrevocable. Until the Enlightenment, this filtration had been the purpose and aspiration of every culture’s germinal transcendental mythology, but now that revelation has become a pantheon of humans. Yes, those cultural mythologies always masked political arrangements that benefited the powerful, but it often also tempered them. For every Christopher Columbus there was a Bartolomé de las Casas.11 The impact of this unmasking cannot be overstated, even where it has been overestimated—as we’ll discuss shortly.

In truth, most of what the sciences produce is junk: it fails to replicate, secures tenure but not truth, yields provisional observations that evaporate when rigorously randomized, suggests correlation but ducks causation. On and on. Yet we have penicillin. It is riddled with errors, yet we have refrigeration and microscopes. Its truths are always provisional, yet we split the atom, then bound it. It is embedded in flawed institutions managed by equally flawed humans, yet it reached back through time and harvested life’s hydrocarbonic remainder to heat the arctic, water the desert, and put a slab of glass in your pocket that recalls at whim the sum total of human knowledge. To deny that 21st century material civilization is a snow globe of miracles is to embrace nihilism.

Humanists can, indeed should, provide the moral imagination to guide scientific disjunction, but we cannot partake in it. We have no recourse to its logical powers. For us, two or more things are always true at once. We might emphasize one element over another, but it’s always a choice. A humanist disturbs the facts of history as surely as an observer disturbs the waves in a quantum mechanical system. Their character shapes their framing. It is natural to envy the power of the experimental sciences, their certainty, but the degree to which we forget that our epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic frames are irrevocably imbricated with their exceptions, and often their antitheses, is the degree to which we become legalists and harridans. We have no access to the excluded middle. Our insights are ephemeral. Like language itself, a humanist’s work skims the surface of a universe in constant flux. But this linguistic improvisation is “the new skin for an old ceremony.” And that ceremony is meant to recall the verities that increase the degrees of freedom that engender human flourishing. To that end, scientific certainty must be preserved and bounded.

This requires the humanist to have a flaneur-like relationship to science’s most beguiling foster child, technology, which leads us to our first principle.

Material Culture is not Symbolic Culture

Material culture is power crafted to purpose. It flows from one symbolic culture to another, is largely indifferent to ideology, and serves no end other than its own reduplication. With a few notable exceptions—the late Bronze Age collapse, the fall of Rome, the disintegration of Mayan civilization in the 9th century—material culture expands relentlessly. Its complexity increases. Its energetic reserves surge.12 When the Aurignacian peoples used carinated burins to innovate tools better fitted to killing and building that was material culture and that was power. We don’t really have any idea what the Aurignacian’s thought, or the Gravettian’s after them, or the Mousterian or Oldowan before them. But we have their tools. Those tools passed on. They were copied and improved. What remains of their symbolic culture is unknowable—gone forever.13

Power was there waiting for humans long before it was mythologized by symbolic culture, or legalized by scripture. Only the dead are free from it. And power as material culture is why anyone beyond a few acolytes care that E=mc2, or that fusion powers the stars. The world of GPS devices and atomic clocks, electric cars and Monsanto seeds runs off the same grid that powered our ascendance over other animals, and it is only tangentially related to symbolic culture. Roughly speaking, symbolic culture, which is transmitted through oral and literary culture, is subsequent to material culture.14 Shakespeare’s genius will never surpass that of the wheel, no matter how profoundly I am stirred by Lear’s lament. Mahavira’s cosmic compassion can’t encompass the mortar and pestle that first pressed plants into salves against suffering. Even where it endures, symbolic culture is an always-half improvised explanation of the material conditions of a universe which precedes but does not define us.15 Humans are bound by these conditions, but they are not entirely beholden to them. And this limited freedom has produced these two different strategies for managing our bloody inheritance. One, material culture, scales. The other, symbolic culture, does not. They should not be confused.

Symbolic culture inflects material culture, but it is only inflection. No symbolic culture finally controls material culture for long. It’s why the colonial era could only happen once in human history. For a hundred years it was European iron and gunpowder versus horses and arrows. But now, guns are everywhere. Tanks are everywhere. Land mines are everywhere. Cell phones, drones, and gas powered engines have suffused every symbolic culture with material power— with the exception of a few edge cases like the uncontacted indigenous peoples of Brazil who prove the rule. The United States couldn’t even successfully set up a puppet government in Afghanistan, a country with a GDP just over one-third the size of Vermont’s, the smallest cog in the US economic engine ($17 billion vs $43 billion). No Western power will ever set up a satrap in South Asia again. Power is still asymmetrical, of course. We can still bomb, cajole, and bully. But material culture’s proliferation has ensured that 19th century style colonialism will (very likely) never happen again.

But many humanists have mistaken the virulence of material culture, or technology, for that of Western symbolic culture. Hundreds of thousands of pages have been spent searching for some secret hollow at the heart of Western civilization, some peculiar materialism, some insatiable emptiness that swallowed the world’s pristine heterogeneity. But it wasn’t that. It was material culture, and it will continue on long past any Western hegemony. Yes, the conditions for the Industrial Revolution emerged in Europe, but they were preceded by every other material innovation before them. Yes, the extractive colonialism of the 15th-18th centuries was brutal, and Western, but it was also absolutely unremarkable in the history of empire. Violence has been here all along. Predation and heterotrophy predate photosynthesis and herbivory by hundreds of millions of years. “War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him.”16 Chimpanzees wage war. Bonobos commit infanticide. The weapons and wares of material culture will fill the hands of humans symbolically oriented towards other suns until we are gone from the earth. Barring calamity it will continue to scale, increasing in power by orders of magnitude that dwarf the growth of symbolic culture.

The pace of technological progress has short circuited our ability to think clearly about human social evolution, politics, and religion. Material culture possesses no wisdom. But symbolic culture does. A missile is no less moral than a hammer. But symbolic culture can and does influence how we use the hammer, how we use the missile. The technologies of summoning, transmutation, telekinesis, bilocation, and translocation have uncoiled our cerebral aspirations from our mortal limitations and produced the delusion of a secular break with the past. But there has been no break from the past. The world has not become disenchanted, as Weber claimed and many followed. Our universe is and will always-already be enchanted because symbolic culture is an enchantment, the collective song that animates an indifferent universe.17 Superstition and violent chauvinism can surge forth at any moment. No symbolic culture will ever be free of it. There is no escape velocity from menace, anxiety, or fear. Wisdom must be found again and again within each generation using the metaphors and analogues endowed to it. This leads us to our final principle. Vanity.

Big Ego, Little Ego

Ecclesiastes was right. Shakespeare was right. Śaṅkara was right. Ego and vanity are inextricably human. But they are also only one side of the double helix that supplies the blueprint for human invention. On the other side is the spiral of curiosity and spirit.18 No creature completely ruled by vanity could write “Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas,” or “We are such stuff / as dreams are made on and our little life / is rounded with a sleep,” or “Subtler than the subtle, greater than the great, in the heart of each living being, the atman reposes.”19 In Platonic terms, the flame of liberation casts the shadow of understanding. To know we are in the cave is already to be liberated from it. And though we aren’t entirely ruled by vanity, neither can we escape it.

So there are two ways to go for those who would aspire to the kind of work you and I have been thinking about here. One, to diminish the influence of one’s vanity to such a fine substance that it barely perfumes your work, to stay so close to one’s sources that one’s voice is barely a whisper, and to seek out so many antagonists to one’s prejudices that your biases become inconsequential to your analysis. Two, to encompass so much, account for so many, attend so earnestly, bear as great a weight as one can manage, and then more, to the point of breaking, to the point of failure, straining to the very limit of your capacity to surf language’s wild current so that your biases are outnumbered by your affections.

Turn your vanity into an aesthetic choice, your own song.

This is only one way of knowing. There are others. We’ve barely touched on them. They are of immense value—priceless. I feel gratitude for historians and linguists, biologists and chemists, translators and specialists laser focused on curiosities beyond my eye to discern.

But the way of knowing I’ve outlined here, its principles and aspirations, is important, urgently needed. It’s fallen into disrepute in the academy. It has no home in politics. It doesn’t belong in temples. It should be evaluated by how much it can discern, down to the fractal of the fractals that make up the borders of our knowing, or up and out, towards the larger fractal that encompasses the cosmic correspondences of which we are a part. This knowledge is aspirational. Transubstantiating what might be, into what is. Evidence in the humanities is and must always be selective. It’s unavoidable. Every humanist is always making this choice. I’ve made mine, and this book is its fruit.

—Memento mori, memento vagari

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My introduction is thematic, and flirts with apologia. However, I have too many friends who do this for a living to discard the practice altogether, so I’ve done my best to leave you some sign posts in the footnotes. I hope it’s worth the trip.

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Introduction

There’s a good chance that whatever you imagine the secular academic study of religion to be, it isn’t that. Perhaps you’re thinking about God, fate, death, reincarnation, enlightenment, good and evil? Or perhaps you’re thinking about the historical Jesus, Buddha, or Mohammed? The early church? The final, true utterances of Bahá’u’lláh? You imagine, maybe, the people who do this professionally are grappling full-time with the doubts that fire your brain when your anxious desires collide with the insouciance-cosmic at 1 o’clock in the afternoon on some fateful Monday.

It’s understandable. Why not, after all? Meaning, purpose, the good life, with even minimal levels of economic security, these questions arise unbidden—even if always shaped by the times and places of our births. But that’s not, usually, what scholars of religion do. Yes, some do. The Dead Sea Scrolls still pop up in news stories, and even some serious scholars are still trying to find the historical Jesus, or decipher what, exactly, has been “lost in translation” over the centuries. But those are sectarian projects, edifications of legitimacy. Not altogether different from the activities of the Chinese and Indian governments’ attempts to strengthen historical claims of ethnic continuity. Not altogether different from the migrants whose Atlas-sized aspirations coalesced into Mormonism: how better to transmute the brutal travails of Western expansion into glorious mission, than to discover your prophet had visited that very Bounty two thousand years before you were born?

We all crave authenticity. In certain psychic registers, it’s as important to human habitation as oxygen and light are to the body. It’s true for people and it’s true for nations. It’s true for scholars and it’s true for martyrs. It’s true for Mormons and it’s true for indigenes. It’s one of the core insights of the Mahabharata: “Doing one’s own duty imperfectly is better than doing another’s well.”1 The consonance between invisible purpose and public performance is critical to understanding the religious daemon that permeates history. We’ll discuss it at length, but until then its immediacy and universal appeal shouldn’t be far from our minds.2

Setting aside the scale and negative consequences for the disenfranchised, I have no quarrel with the scholars who pursue sectarian projects. I hope they find what they’re looking for. Of course, some of you reading this may not want to “set aside” the “negative consequences for the disenfranchised.” For you, this is a euphemism too far. You’re highly attuned to slavery, misogyny, colonialism, indigenous suffering, the moral imperative of the disenfranchised. I understand and appreciate that urge. I’ve learned a lot from you, and will continue to. But this too is a sectarian project. You’re also an acolyte of an otherworldly order. Your indoctrination to this order, however, involves a mystification of your origins so it is obscured. Mary Douglas called this mystification “structural amnesia” in a brilliant, dense little book called How Institutions Think, and we’ll touch upon this process of mystification when we discuss otherworldliness.

Right now we’re talking about scholars who study religion itself, the phenomenon, the category, the impulse to discover meaning.3 Moreover, we’re talking about a particular kind of study of religion, humanistic study. It might not appear so, but humanistic study is not altogether different from scientific study. But where the sciences work with the artifacts of the material world, the humanities work with the artifacts of subjective experience. Its data aren’t, as in the sciences, scalars and vectors, but observation and interpretation, what happened and why it happened, or, if you prefer values from another domain, fact and intent—the bedrock of every legal system since Ma’at emerged from the orb of King Menes mace circa 3150 BCE.

Indeed, for most of our written history, all of human knowledge was part of the humanities. The law was metaphysics was philosophy was science was religion. Science’s sympatric speciation from the humanities during the Enlightenment produced a new set of cultural norms, and the disciplines have grown more isolated since then. This severance is often opined upon, and less often seriously examined. But either way it’s a familiar moment in world history.4 I have nothing to say about that here, except to echo C.P. Snow’s observation that the split between the two cultures benefits no one, and to reassure you I have no intention of abiding it.

So what can we say about the humanistic study of religion? What has it learned about the elemental human impulse to transmogrify animal ejaculations into spiritual emissions?5 Quite a lot, actually. The state of knowledge is deep and wide. There are clear patterns, and there are meaningful insights, but they’re not the kind of insights most people want to hear. And they’re not, unfortunately, the kind of insights that have advanced the field as a whole—as happens, sporadically, in the sciences. On the contrary, they’re insights that have blown the field apart and marginalized it within the academy. As a consequence, the study of religion is a hot mess.

A drone’s-eye view of the scholarly study of religion/“religion”/[religion] would reveal a smoldering disarray of meticulously articulated cultural and intellectual skirmishes, a microcosm of every philosophical upheaval of the last 50 years.6 No other academic field labors further from its lay root than religious studies. Thousands of freshmen walk into “Intro to Religion” lectures each fall wondering about the big questions, and they leave having flitted through every disciplinary mote: politics, scriptures, syncretism, colonialism, ritual, literature, sociology, psychology, ecology, philosophy, architecture. It’s roughly equivalent to walking into a Star Wars movie titled Yoda Says, and being shown a documentary on the history of the making of documentaries about the making of animatronic puppets.

The same can’t be said for “Intro to American History,” “Intro to Archaeology,” “Intro to Sociology,” or most other humanistic disciplines. “Intro to Philosophy” probably approximates religious studies’ ability to frustrate the laymen, but only because of its perceived proximity to religious concerns—enlightenment, wisdom, finitude.7 But, in general, other domains of knowledge just aren’t this helter-skelter. Their objects of study don’t suffer from the same confluence of elite disarray and common misperception.8

Yes, other disciplines have questioned their predicates. For the most part, all of the humanities do at the highest levels.9 Each dissipates into ether when probed assiduously, much the way the ego dissipates under scrutiny in Vipassana meditation. It’s the degree to which the study of religion is unsettled by these questions. Sociologists accept that social fact precedes psychosocial shape. Psychologists accept that psychological process precedes psychosocial conduct. Archaeologists accept the law of superposition, that deeper undisturbed artifactual layers precede later historical developments. But religious studies has no such grounding. Many scholars are not even convinced “religion” is denotative. For them its incantatory, something summoned into being through academic ritual and colonial litany. Humans donning divinities and masking mortality is just something humans do. It’s not necessarily “religious.” For these scholars, and even those who don’t go quite so far, religion obfuscates more than it illuminates.10

I’m being a little tongue-in-cheek, and, yes, I’m also telegraphing. But I do take this perspective seriously. This is an observation, not a diagnostic. When I say the study of religion is “a hot mess,” this isn’t the prelude to a normative argument. It’s a data point, a place to begin. This is a feature of the discipline, not a bug, and it’s critical to understanding religion per se. As many scholars have argued, it is true that there are times and places in human history in which it wouldn’t have made sense to refer to some social phenomenon as a “religion” in the common sense, as separate from the “secular.” At least not from within that selfsame inertial frame—from the perspective, say, of a 16th century BCE Egyptian brewmaster. In Ancient Egypt the Pharaoh was Horus in life, Osiris and death, and the axis mundi around which Egyptian law and society spun (maat). Religion was the nation, and nation was the religion.11 And so it’s not useful to use “religion,” as the member of a binary pair, because it obscures our understanding of that time and place.

But there’s a curiosity here. One constitutive element in this ancient atomic structure has taken on far greater weight than the other. The “nation,” the ethnos, has not been so easily dispelled by intellectual trends. Even though the argument that nations are a new kind of political organization has been around for half-a-century—dependent on the dissolution of imperial hegemonies, the rise of local languages, and the advent of mass media—the impact of this argument has been altogether different. Take area studies, things like German or American studies, for example. No student of German or U.S. culture questions the reality of the nation. Sure, particularly in the United States, students of a certain ideological disposition may question its legitimacy, but not its reality. Constructed or not, imagined or not,12 most people who care to study these things agree that nations exist. It’s coherent to talk about them. It’s a useful framework—a valuable map.

There are proto-nations, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Prussia, who were catalyzed by Napoleon’s imperial conquests. And there are failed nations, like Catalonia and Kurdistan and Palestine, who have not, yet, emerged as nations. And there are quasi-imperial nations, like Russia and Turkey, with their subordinated peripheries and centralized ethnic hegemonies. And there are, undeniably, violent disagreements around the morality of national authority, such as with Israel and South Africa. But even accounting for scholarly nuance, and hot confrontations, nations are.13 They have borders, eras that begin and end. They have enemies and allies. They are not universal.

That’s not true of religion. And that’s the curiosity. Why did the same roughly parallel insight 50 years ago lead to two very different outcomes. Yes, the argument that nations are new is probably overstated, as we’ll see, but it’s also probably true. That insight advanced multiple fields. Why did it have a different impact on religion? Why are religious studies scholars marginalized even within the humanities? Why is the field so balkanized?14 Ironically, the answer to this fragmentation is not incoherence, but universality. Scholars of religion have a real problem—ubiquity.

Most scholars of religion I know, both personally and through their work, who have thought about religion as opposed to particular “religions”—like Christianity or Sikhism—nurture, guard, or forcefully reject a profound and disorienting insight. Religion is everywhere. It is absolutely everywhere. Forget what you learned in history class, or intro to sociology. It’s not marginalized. It’s not dying. It’s not a vestigial remainder of our pre-secular past. It’s not chilling behind church doors, or inert between the bindings of bibles and canonical anthologies. It’s not abiding silently in statuary or slumbering in icons.

No. It’s everywhere. And not only that. It has been everywhere for tens of thousands of years. The Sumerians and Egyptians had it. The pre-state tribes who built Göbekli Tepe had it. The hunter-gatherers who painted the Sulawesi caves in Indonesia had it. Looking back over the vast savannah of Homo sapiens’ history there’s nowhere you don’t see it. But this is a real problem. Because if something is everywhere, it might as well be nowhere. It’s useless as an analytical tool. Moreover, most definitions of religion prove to be either tautological or arbitrary: religion is the list of religions, an open set of accidental properties whose sum defines its substance15; or, the list of elements in the set is limited ad hoc, fitted to the analysis in a kind of just-so framework.16

This is why many scholars have turned to critical theoretical analyses instead, scrutinizing things like power and discourse, deploying terms like “social formation,” and “regime” to describe the communities that construct meaning out of the material world’s enormous facticity. Their arcane language and dense analysis isn’t an end in itself. It’s a good faith effort to draw some kind of circle around a very, very large problem. So the language takes on a life of its own, becomes a kind of private cant so that a devoted coterie of readers can manage this otherwise overwhelming problem. I take this problem seriously too. Indeed, I think it’s the most serious problem there is in the humanities: to draw out the warp and woof of religion’s “sacred canopy” without perpetuating the delusion we dwell beyond it.17

We are talking about the elemental stuff out of which communities larger than the Dunbar number,18 that is to say communities of strangers, reproduce meaning for themselves in the world. It is the substance of the grail and the stupa, the pyramid and the Word, by which time turns into space. It is the thing that transforms anxiety and death into a ritual for life and shapes your collective purpose. Nations, influencer communities, international student movements, Marxism, woke right, woke left, antisemitism, covid culture, gun culture, scientism, MAGA, sports, 9/11 truthers, environmentalism, all of these movements contain social dynamics and moral hierarchies that are largely indistinguishable from those that describe traditional religions: Baptists, Druz, Pure Land Buddhists, Shia, Śaivite, Hassids, etc.

If this comparison is startling or implausible to you, please be patient. What is stated plainly will be supported later. Rather than retreat from religion’s ubiquity, we will don it, drawing on its essential strands not to escape from it, an impossibility, but to weave a new canopy fitted to this time of twilight and renewal.

Those of us who study the processes by which communities discover, construct, and defend a common purpose within an implacable universe are hermits. But those who are curious about the processes are legion. We are partners in this. I want you both to draw near. The urge to understand how the communion wafer was made does not change the fact that someday you're going to want the wafer too, or want the chant, the benediction, or want for it in a bottle, book, or bong. Maybe not on your death bed, but maybe when your wife or mother dies, your father, son, or husband, your best friend—cancer, dementia, a broken heart, a bomb. One day you’re going to lament, and wail, all your complexity, sophistication, and learning, stropped to a razor’s edge of terror and loss.

We are all alone together in this magisterium. It took our species 300,000 years to establish the flimsiest institutional purchase on this truth. We are each alone. We are each together. Griots, shamans, and prophets have bled for millennia to keep this truth alive. It is our responsibility to help them.

The most miraculous transformation that the universe has yet abided was not turning God into a man, a wakan into a wolf, or hominids into astronauts, it was turning you into a you. A one and only you, an individual against all probability, against a phalanx of political pressures and evolutionary urges, somehow you emerged—the queerist of all creatures. No theory can capture you. No state can put you to death. As long as you remain, you will always be the open heaven.

—Memento mori, memento vagari

And so, in the spirit of that inscrutability, I’m writing this, a somatic theory of religion that centers embodied experience, engages various traditions, and most importantly, makes the claim that the rise of the individual, and his or her attendant agency, rights, and freedoms is not a Western curiosity, but a spiritual evolution at the crest of a 300,000 year wave. I will publish this argument in 3,000 word chunks (give or take). I intend for it to be incredibly short, closer to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy than a traditional academic monograph or work of nonfiction.

Like all monkeys, a host of vanities attend my effort, but they are nattering and subdued. My overriding motivation is to say something true, to say it beautifully, and to spend some time with You supping on this wild abundance.

Preface

Anyone who cares to know knows that the humanities are in deep crisis. It’s not simply a “right-wing” talking point. Deserved or not, what was once the locus of wisdom in the secular West has become a punchline for pundits, and an albatross for budget strapped colleges. The reasons for this development and the contours of the problem are debatable. And I have precisely zero interest in exploring them. But that doesn’t mean I have nothing to say about it. So instead of diagnosing and pathologizing, I would begin with treatment and care. I would begin with love.

I love the humanities. Not because I was born into it, or because of a stand-and-deliver teacher, but because it called to me. When I was 18, I had my first “real” job. I was a custodian at Disneyland. Ironically dressed in white, I was responsible for patrolling the park for trash, back-sweeping the lines, cleaning bathrooms, and vacuuming up horse piss in the parades. I hated it. Hated it as intensely as I’ve ever hated anything in my adult life. But I needed the money, so I showed up and did my job, transitioning from a seasonal worker to full-time employee with benefits in the way that happens when you regularly show up for a job that sucks and no one wants.

In order to get through the days I memorized poems to recite to myself as I wandered the park. “Gaily bedight a gallant night in sunshine and in shadow…” “You ask me what the lobster is weaving there with his golden feet…” “I desired my dust to be mingled with yours / Forever and forever, and forever…” “I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young…” “Though nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower”… Even today, I still know many of them by heart. I don’t know why I started doing this. I mean, I know why I was doing it. I loved them. But I have no idea where that love came from. No one around me cared very much about poetry. I was a listless and uninspiring student. I wasn’t trying to fuck some cute English student. It was just me and the indignity of Disneyland’s custodial services and the poems—and the books.

I started reading privately before I started performing it for professors. Fringe books that no one reads seriously anymore. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Decline of the West (long before weirdo Neo-Nazis started tweeting about it), Hamlet’s Mill. And all the stuff we used to think you’re supposed to read: Ulysses, The Sun Also Rises, The Trial and Death of Socrates, War and Peace. My list isn’t vain. Whatever pride I felt in telling this story when I was younger is eclipsed by those I’ve met who put this habit to shame. Where I read a book and memorized a poem they’ve read ten, and memorized a score. My only point is that however you want to analyze this early affinity, whatever sociological schema you want to deploy, or psychoanalytic framework you’d like to apply, the most elegant explanation is love. I loved these books. Parsimony matters in life as much as it matters in science. I wanted to understand what the people who wrote them were trying to say about their brief time on this planet because I loved hearing them say it.

I wanted, and still want, to converse with the best and brightest from all times and places because it enlivens me. I don’t need to be black to love Frederick Douglass, and I don’t need to be Greek to love Socrates, Chinese to love Chuang-zi, a woman to love Mrs. Dolloway. I don’t need to read Classical Persian to love Rumi in translation and trust the translator loves Rumi too, and to feel a little bit bad that people who don’t read English will never know the strange and miraculous possibility of meeting him in a Borders in Brea, CA in the year 2,000 nearly 800 years after he was born. The Great Chain of Being can be applied to writers as well as salamanders and angels, so I am happy to join hands in mutual affection with those who would spend their days loving too.

I have lost all taste for critical theory, Marxist or otherwise. I offer no broadside against it. At one point in my life I found Frederick Jameson and Jacques Derrida thrilling. Paul DeMan and Mike Davis were regular companions. Nearly every paragraph in my copy of One-Dimensional Man was underlined and notated. Foucault and I were intimates.1 I will not “take on their arguments” and demonstrate their limitations, though there are many, because there’s no end to the regression. Reading arguments that deploy critical theory to say something about [fill in the blank] is like watching a poorly attended dramatic reconstruction of the least significant skirmish in the Revolutionary war. The one where you’re a little embarrassed and a little charmed by the players’ earnest grievances.2

I know that’s not fair. And I’m tempted to include another footnote (like 1) that says, “Look, I don’t mean all critical theory. I don’t mean every paper. And here are the list of thinkers I still like,” but I’m not going to do that. I, of course, don’t mean all critical theory, but I do mean a lot of it. Modern academic humanities’ misanthropy is clear, even if it should be carefully diagnosed where it’s found. But we’re friends, right? You’re here with me. We don’t need the syntax of a frock coat to talk seriously about scholarship. And no golden handcuffs limit my range of sentiment, so I can say what many of you know or at least suspect.

But I can’t emphasize this enough. I come to praise Caesar, not to bury him. There’s no rhetorical sleight of hand here. I celebrate the full range of the human intellect. What is a gravestone but an earnest protest against the dust? Objection, indignation, the bloodhound’s hunt for hypocrisy: Socrates, Gautama, Jesus, Rabbi Akiva, Martin Luther King, et al., this was their fuel, and it propelled—in function if not always in fact—the aspirations of countless civilizations and billions of souls. I don’t begrudge, and more than a little admire, Foucault’s commitment to the archive. But to dwell forever in the swamp of human frailty is to commit oneself to dissatisfaction and abjection, and I will not do that.

There are practical and spiritual reasons for this.

Spiritually, I embrace your body’s electric possibility as much as I celebrate mine. I am in awe of the people who designed and built handicap ramps, invented branches of medicine to treat non-human animals, and transacted with shells along the Dnepr thousands of years before there was a US, a China, a Haudenosaunee, or a UN. I know our list of sins is long: slavery, poverty, war, smallpox blankets, rape. But perception matters. As the proverb goes, “when a pickpocket sees a saint, all he sees is a pocket.” Trite? Sure. Limited? It is. This is not advice to offer a refugee or the victim of a landmine or famine. But, also, are you sure? Do those who suffer crave hope’s succor less than the privileged? Is agency harmful in that pursuit? I doubt it, but maybe. Let’s agree to set that question aside for now. I’ll speak only for myself. I prefer to collect and amplify the lumens of our better nature, so that’s what I aim to do with my time here.

Practically, I’m an active investor in the project of civilization and I have no interest in shorting it. I know an argument can be made that a fundamentalist’s morality is no further from the summit of human beneficence than the Declaration of Independence, but I don’t believe it, and I don’t think you do either. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Yes, we’d probably want to sacrifice a little rhetorical beauty for philosophical rigor and replace “men” with “human,” and maybe (maybe) “nature” for “Creator.” But there is no creed anywhere, in any language, that more clearly enshrines the worth of the billion, billion youes who have been or will be. I’m one of those youes, and I’m all in on the project.3 I’m an evangelist for individual human rights because I am one. Civilization and material prosperity have been the single best guarantor of individual human rights in our 300,000 year history, so I’d like to do my part in boosting it.

But, look, if you still love all these Diogenes-come-lately who floss in public and deface the coin of the realm, then I hope you find some quiet grotto where you can sit together and watch life’s rude bloom necrotize in peace. It is pretty to watch at a remove, and it is a luxury as grand as any Sultan’s to have the time and space to do so. I don’t begrudge your pleasures. I understand them. The more ghosts we summon to our banquet of vanities the grander the party. But I guess I hope you’ll recognize these pleasures rather than moralize them because cataloging the ills of the current socio-cultural order makes you no more virtuous than a coroner.

I don’t mean to be snippy. But I do mean to highlight the pleasure young men and women feel in tearing down their forebears. It’s a pleasure that should not be elided, if we are to understand the function of critical theory in the modern academy. It’s a pleasure distilled perfectly in Graham Greene’s “The Destructors,” whose anti-hero “T.” and his gang of vandals indulge in the destruction of beauty without malice.4 This may sound oxymoronic, but it isn’t. For all the destruction the vandals work it is not intended to harm. The mercy they show to those who love the things they destroy is brimming with intent, carefully planned and executed. None of us are strangers to this convolution, though we may be estranged from it.

Most of us who have been encultured during critical theory’s reign do not wish ill upon the things we theorize into dust. The pleasure we feel outsmarting Aristotle, Jefferson, Hemingway, or the Bible isn’t personal. It’s a minor vanity amongst the host of heavenly vanities that accompany our species’ universal indignities—ceaseless alimentation, animal digestion, circumscribed evacuation. The higher we sit in our own estimation the greater the ruin we survey, and the more heroic we appear to one another and ourselves. The stakes must be high, or the impulse to dismantle what came before us appears adolescent—closer to Mean-Girls-style Darwinism than the urgent calling of the righteous.

The difficult part is that sometimes the stakes are high. The difficult part is that sometimes conservation isn’t the right frame. Sometimes destruction is warranted, even desperately needed. And sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes you’ve reached the mountain top and you need to give people a generation or two to acclimate. Regardless, malice and the impulse to destruction are not the same thing. One is a constitutive universal process and the other is personal. Often we need the surge of malice to exercise the impulse, but that’s because secular culture has substituted vitality for wellness. It provides no intelligible framework for destruction as process. Progress is moral in secular culture, and so its inversion can only be understood as an aberration, an abhorrence.

Yes, the impulse to destruction cannot be indulged without consequence. It must be disciplined. But it can’t be ignored without consequence either, otherwise it curdles into sadism5. Indeed, one of the great innovations in the history of our species was the tribe’s ability to discipline the destructive impulse through male warrior societies—and later sports. The destructive impulse isn’t gendered exactly, but its exercise is. Our embodiment entangles us in particular ways to the ebb and flow of the material world. This is, perhaps, part of the reason why suffering morphs but doesn’t subside. Women suffer in hyper-masculine cultural frames, as men do in hyper-feminized social spaces. There is no final, settled consessus. Things are always slipping away from us. There’s nothing to hold onto for very long. It’s a fight to stay on your feet and follow true north.

Chaos lurks inside the machinery of all living things. Shiva captures this perfectly, as does Job’s Yahweh. Our negative capacity is critical, essential even. In fact, it may be the philosopher’s stone in the alchemy of self-awareness. I’d lay money on it. But Keats was right. It serves another function. Our negative capacity is the ground from which beauty is born, and all theories should be beautiful. And for their part, Derrida’s and Marcuse’s methods and theories are beautiful—exquisite. Only a lover’s fidelity could lead Paul DeMan to read Rousseau so closely. What was it that Oscar Wilde said? “For each man kills the thing he loves.” Well, I love them (and others) unequivocally for their beauty. And I will gladly destroy what they have wrought.

It’s time for their disciples to be swept aside—metaphorically, of course. Not because they are wrong, but because they are exhausted. Their time has passed. We don’t need a tome’s armor or a professional vocabulary’s defensive arms. We don’t need rigid scholarly conventions. The ground has already been swept clean. Onward. We can start again with first principles: truth, wisdom, beauty. We can leave specialization to the specialists whom I also love and will rely upon shamelessly. Risk error, fail nobly, misread generously, borrow immodestly, all of these tools are at our disposal. And I plan to use them all to construct a humanistic theory of religion that abides scientific insights even as it refuses to abandon the numinous flame passed from generation to generation.

The religious impulse is fundamentally the ironic impulse. But not “ironic” in the everyday sense of the word, not in the lightly bemused, clever, slacker sense of the word. Ironic in the philosophical sense, in the sense that Hegel and Kierkegaard worried over. Irony as the ever present, ominous, possibility of negation. “Neti, neti, neti,” as the Advaitans say. So we will begin there in our quest to ratify the spiritual significance of the individual in the history of our species.

—Memento mori, memento vagari

I wrote the essay below at a turbulent time. In December 2020 covid hysteria was pumping its shrillest choral notes straight into the amygdala of a million-million starving souls, and I was increasingly alienated from the habitus which had shaped my mature adult life.1 I was angry a lot and often took out that anger on my cohosts on The American Age podcast. And to my great shame, I traveled thousands of miles to stand in the kitchen of a good friend and vomit my “public health” frustrations all over his beautiful and well-deserved tenure track life. I was pugnacious and indignant and righteous and unfit for polite society, and I needed help.

Let me quickly add that the essay below has absolutely nothing to do with covid. I don’t want to alienate you. I want you to understand what I was working through outside of the essay. Only now, five years later, do I see how it led me here to Briefly Wild. Covid is a highly toxic epistemological compound. And I’d like to leave it in its place (for now). I have plenty of opinions about the pandemic, none of which involve conspiracies, but all of which put me firmly beyond the ken of the average New York Times reader. But they’re irrelevant here. What matters is that the world I inhabited for two decades was no longer habitable to me.

I was still reading a lot, but I wasn’t writing much. I’d occasionally make a half-assed effort to turn my dissertation into a proper book, but my heart wasn’t in it. I had no project, just plans, endlessly renegotiated. And that’s the setting. Me: upset, alienated, occasionally brutish, and definitely not writing. So, in true dramatic fashion, I was of course invited to contribute to Artists as Writers: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life, edited by my friends Seph Rodney and Steven Fullwood.

At the time I was hiding my lack of literary production from myself and my friends. I was always professing to be “working on something,” but really I wasn’t working on anything. I was avoiding writing—assiduously, aggressively, and comprehensively avoiding it. But I wanted to be writing. I needed to be writing. And writing about writing when I wasn't writing was like finding a lifeboat on an empty sea. It wasn’t hanging off the side of some other craft, tucked under the seat of some secret seaworthy ambition. It was bobbing in the dark, untethered to anything but itself, and it wasn’t going anywhere. Its only promise was not drowning.

And not drowning helped me remember that I’m a different person here in this nowhere place than I am out there in the somewhere place we sweat and shower through day-to-day-to-day. And when I spend time here, it affects me out there. I carry some of this place with me, like a pomander around my neck, some portion of my mammalian brain is drawn upward, olfactored towards the sublime.

Fortunately, Intellect Press, distributed in the U.S. by The University of Chicago Press, is kind enough to allow their writers to keep their copyrights, so the essay is reproduced in its entirety below. But if you’re curious to read some (much better and more practical) tips for living as a writer, I’d encourage you to pick up a copy. It was published in April of this year.

I am grateful to my friends Seph and Steven for their facility as editors and project managers. It’s not easy corralling so many people for so long. And I am a better person and writer for the time I have spent with them.

—Memento mori, memento vagari

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The House-Lew

“I sulked. Sulking is a big effort. So is not writing. I only realized that when I did start writing […] Not writing is probably the most exhausting profession I’ve ever encountered […] I mean if you’re supposed to be writing.”

—Fran Lebowitz, Paris Review, 1993

If you glossed it, jump back up for a second and spend a moment with what Fran Lebowitz said about writing in her 1993 interview with James Linville and George Plimpton.

I mean, there it is, right? Why you’re here—Lebowitz’s pregnant and inevitable qualification: “If you’re supposed to be writing.”

You’ve picked up this book about living and sustaining a creative life through writing, so presumably you’ve already decided you’re supposed to be writing. Sympatico! I supposedly feel the same way.

Still, it’s worth thinking about for a moment.

There are a lot of other things you could be doing. Going for a walk. Reading. Watching a movie. Masturbating. Curating your social media. Painting your masterpiece. Studying for the LSAT. Getting and spending. Trading up. Trading in. Trading off. Loving your neighbor as yourself. Or much better, yet, researching the perfect pair of inserts for the boots you’re going to wear on that dream trek across the Camino de Santiago.

You know the trip, don’t you? The one where that super-duper, self-actualized version of yourself absolutely, fucking radiates sexual potency, cultural omniscience, and spiritual equanimity in the Spanish sun.

Come on, you know that trip. We all have that trip.

But you’re not doing any of that. You’re here, with me, reading about writing. So, let’s be real about it for a couple thousand words. What are you really doing here?

Seriously. What are you doing here? You’re going to die—like, soon. I know you know that, but do you know it?

In fact, from a certain point of view, say that of general relativity, you’re already dead, and so am I. We just happen to be in the same inertial frame so it looks to us like we’re both alive. Although, depending on when you find this book, I might not be.

But let’s just imagine for a moment we are alive to one another. You and I—all of us—even at the apex of our powers are always already on our way to that somewhere else we’ll never actually be. We don’t know how many trips around the sun it’ll take to get there, but the destination is inexorable. Like eggs in an ovary, the number of days you have in that carton of years you call a lifetime was set long before you were old enough to read or understand that what you’re reading might not literally be about the thing you think you’re reading about at all.

So, look, when you pick up a book about creating and sustaining a creative life through writing the first thing you need to come to terms with is the “life” part. Keep at least one eye on the possibility that there are other things you could be doing with it.

The “creative” part kind of takes care of itself. Look around you. The whole damned world is an artifice. It’s all “creative.” It’s not just the museums, the writing workshops, the poetry readings, or the Banksy-ed apartment buildings. If you think for one second that the Verizon customer service rep you just argued with for 20 minutes isn’t a bonafide Picasso in some aspect of his, her, hir life you’re probably an asshole.

Is he, she, xe a transcendental genius? Probably not. But neither are you (probably), so let’s just call it even. Any primate who can successfully make the transition from a toothless, diaper-wearing, milk siphon to an adult who believes that Donald Trump can MAGA, or that AOC is so woke she can turn the Rust Belt Green, deserves our admiration for their creativity.

Our respective capacities to shamelessly summon fantasy before the merciless banshees of history is one of the few canonical miracles I can get behind. And although it does occasionally commit a genocide, circumcise a 12-year-old girl, and turn melanin into a metaphysical proposition on value, I’d say on balance I’m a fan of our boundless creativity.

That covers the living and the creating, so let’s get to the writing. What does it mean to be a “writer”? I consider myself an expert on this subject because I’ve spent the bulk of my adult life not doing it, so I can personally attest to Lebowitz’s observation that it is mentally and spiritually exhausting to avoid it. The way, I would imagine, being homeless is exhausting.

As a writer, I confess a sense of entitlement to the bounty of human achievement, and regretfully but unreluctantly claim my own awful portion of the persecution, suffering, and injustice that shapes our collective history.

If I can extend my sympathies to the fifteenth-century Harrapan shepherd who stood in terror on the Gangetic floodplain as horse-riding marauders descended on his farm and he wondered if his wife and daughter would be raped and murdered or only raped while he and his sons lay dying in the mud, then I will claim a cultural kinship with Harriet Tubman without apology even as I acknowledge that some not-so-distant “23andMe” cousin was a member of the Klan in Arkansas and let his weird little Euro-American pecker rub up against the negress his family saved up to own until he convinced himself she wanted to be raped.

The world is gruesome and delightful, even if the proportions are askew, and I’ll stretch my sentences as far as they’ll go to spelunk for the shiny bits. I’d encourage the same for you.

In return, I promise to use my little lies to tell the biggest truths I can manage. I hope you’ll do the same.

We’ve got to look out for one another. It’s easy for our self-conscious gyrations to lead us astray when we’ve been yoked with the feeling that we’re supposed to be writing. It is, as Lebowitz said, exhausting when we refuse its call. But it can also be exhausting when we heed the call only to become overly preoccupied with other people’s pursuit of the same calling.

Let’s be honest, though. We’re talking about a certain kind of writing, aren’t we? You wouldn’t be reading this essay if you were just wondering how to slam out an app review for Wired. Not that there’s anything wrong with that kind of writing. That’s most of what humans read, and I appreciate an elegant turn of phrase about the evolution of skeuomorphic design in mobile apps as much as I appreciate it in a Samuel Johnson essay about character. Dexterity with words is to be admired where it’s found. But we’re talking about something else. We’re talking about how to live as a writer, which is presumably very different from living as a fireman or an engineer, which should also not be confused with making a living from writing.

So here it is. Here’s my advice for becoming the kind of writer who writes because they feel exhausted when they don’t. You need to build two homes. One home is not enough for the kind of writing we’re talking about. You’ll need two.

One for living. And one for dying.

And this home here, this writing-home that you’re so drawn to, is your dying-home. The further this home is built from your living-home, the more space you’ll have for it and the less space you’ll need for the other.

No offense to your living-home. We all belong to some nation, some class, some ethnicity, some profession, some culture, some gender. Even if you reject these things, embrace your universal humanity or pan-sexuality, someone else will assign them for you. You might not like it, but that’s the game. Get ready to duke it out, start a revolution, burn a flag, or dress in drag. Everyone is ready to kick Descartes around until it comes time to admit they’re not autonomous minds reasoning their way into their own freely chosen identity—then they’re all for Cartesian dualism. You’re the pro-socialisty of the prosocial primates, so other primates get a say in who and what you are. As the cliché goes, they brought you into this world, so they’re happy to take you out.

Like I said, you can fight over your identity, if you want to—and, honestly, maybe you should. Some of us really are standing in the way of what you want. And it’s not always ignorance, or education, or fear. Some people just don’t like you. Or maybe they do like you, so they want you to dress like they do. Or maybe they really, really like you and don’t want you to burn in hell. I probably wouldn’t want you to burn in hell either if I went in for such things. Maybe I’ll join you in fighting these people because as fate would have it, my thinking evolved like yours and it’s the neighborly thing to do, but don’t believe your own progressive propaganda. It’s gonna be a war.

But in your dying-home, there is no war, just you surrounded by nobodies and no ones out in the vast emptiness that is everyone’s native land—a place that has never been colonized by any idea or liberated from any oppressor. The more time you spend here, the more garish your living-home becomes. With all its social coordinates, performances, and manners, when you return to your living-home it will sometimes feel oppressive, humorless, and rigid. But because your dying-place is empty and limned with words, you can really open up and love your guts out.

I mean, my god, there’s just so much space out here! You can even bring some of it back. It won’t be missed by anyone. I promise. Try it. A scintilla of that nothing is like a metric ton of love. Even the largest vanities vanish inside of its unconditional event horizon.

Unfortunately, a lot of people who write build their houses too close together, and their living gets all tangled up and grown over. They become heavily invested in the sum of their social relations. This happens especially when writers are paid to write. It doesn’t have to happen, of course, so if you get paid well enough to cover your rent by doing this kind of writing, propitiate whichever cosmic entity will secure its future and keep right on doing what you need to do—but remember to revisit your dying as often as possible. Consider putting some daylight between your two homes to remind yourself that you share kinship with every other thing that is, was, or will be. Even your ancient cousin, the rock, was there once and will join you there again.

Or, if I might make one last suggestion, if you accidentally built your homes too close together, go ahead and tear down the dying-place you’ve got going and start over further out there.

It might take you forever to find the perfect nowhere, but you’ve got forever for this place.

Time isn’t the same out here. Forever is a nothing.

Don’t worry—you can leave your living alone. It’ll take care of itself. Just go along with some crowd and keep things from getting too out of hand.

But when you’re alone, seek out your cabin in the dark, just you and your emptiness trekking into the night’s wild indifference with all the courage that you can muster and all the words that you can carry.

You might get lost, lose some things along the way, or this place might swallow you up whole. But if you’re lucky it will break you open, make a stranger of your mother, turn all your convictions to dust, and leave you scattered across the hills.

Last time out I tried to back my way into a discussion about the difficulty of talking about the present by parsing the relationship between oral and literary cultures, and intimating that there is a certain kind of writing that might help us do it. It helped me begin to tease out some threads that are tightly woven together, but it also exposed the difficulty of explaining why someone might want to do something like this. Why not just say…

It’s really hard to untangle your vain aspirations from your spiritual aspirations. It’s really hard to be in the world and say something about the world that isn’t overdetermined by the world.1

It’s certainly shorter to confess that, but as soon I do a host of questions arise, the most basic being: what do I mean by “spiritual” aspirations?

So let’s start there. By spiritual I mean “productive paradox”: yoked to freedom; supplicated to sovereignty; faithful to doubt; indifferent to finitude. In short, I mean the entire gamut of contradictions I wrestle with when I aspire to transcend the social speculums that describe me. These are sometimes called religious commitments, but you could also call them transcendent aspirations, numinous encounters, ultimate concerns, maybe even existential party music if you were trying to take yourself a little less seriously.2 And that’s really hard to do. Indeed, if you were trained in a certain kind of critical theory, as I was, you might believe the task impossible, quixotic even—a fool’s vanity.

But as Dolly Levi says in Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, “There comes a moment in everybody’s life when he must decide whether he’ll live among human beings or not—a fool among fools, or a fool alone.” I believe in my marrow that to give up this folly is to give up on being human amongst other humans. To accede to the task’s impossibility, that is the task of saying something numinously true, something real that can’t be reduced to a mere psychosocial urge, is to surrender the world to the brutes, the Khans, and the mercenary ghouls. Those who view every social relation as a low-stakes bid to satisfy an appetite, optimize an outcome, or frustrate a rival, whether political or personal, study at the knee of Qin Shi Huang. I refuse to do that.

But I’m no monk. No mendicant. My blood runs hot. Even as I aspire to the verities, I’ve no desire to excise the brute’s erotic edge from the human world. If we give up the potency and pleasure of taking and winning, struggling, overcoming, and holding for a little while some kingdom, whether of body or mind, we commit ourselves to the dismal bureaucracy of the middle managers who are forever deferring their agency to some network beyond their control. I refuse to do that too.

Moral progress is not an illusion. Spiritual insights are not equal. To discover these truths for oneself is the highest calling, and to bring them back to civilization’s firelight is the most urgent obligation.

So this is what I mean by spiritual aspirations. To strive and fail, over-and-over-and over again until my hip is out of joint, and my ego is blighted by the effort. What is left over after that, that residuum, no matter how infinitesimal, can be deposited into eternity’s vault. But what does this have to do with oral cultures? What does this have to do with literary cultures?

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Oral Culture

We are submerged in oral culture. It’s all around us. Literary culture did not supplant it. We are caught in the current of this 100,000-year-long river, and we will be deposited like silt along its banks as it runs to the limits of all human history. You can’t straddle it. You can’t stand outside of it. Foucault called it “discourse” but that’s an effete’s shame.3 It’s not “discourse” in his sense of frustrated agency. It’s the prosocial cognition of an unruly body endlessly adapting to a world of competing wants.4 But your path within the current is inflected by your own quirky affinities. You are not simply a product of this cognition. You are the cognition.

Most of this current5 gives shape to, or energizes, our strategies to either alleviate our disaffections or titillate our affections. This is something pretty close to what the Buddha meant by dukkha.6 This current is you every day in your most mundane everydayness—washing, wiping, weeping, whispering, wriggling and wild. This is you raging about Trump or Biden, or fretting over white people, or idling about capitalism. This is you feeling shame at the laundromat7, or indignant pride at the laundromat, or indifferent but impatient at the laundromat because you can’t wait to watch pro-wrestling when you get home. This is you scripting your way through the world with vetted observations and righteous indignations. But it’s also you glancing back at what you’ve done and wondering over its consequence. This is most of what most of us do all day everyday.

There’s a poignant exchange in Yukio Mishima’s Spring Snow between the main characters Shigekuni Honda and Kiyoaki Matsugae, in which they lament how indistinguishable their aspirations will be from the currents of history. I don’t have the patience to find it right now. But it’s enough to say that our submission to the current is so near total that stories of those who don’t submit entirely become myth before they become fact. Because its origin is lost and its destination is unknowable it is no wonder that you evolved to crave the pleasure of its surge. Your power to alter its course is one electron orbit away from zero, so the safest move you can make for your own sanity is to forget it’s not zero. I get it. I feel the same urge.

But like Honda and Matsugae, some part of you waxes as you apprehend history rushing by, and you glimpse how little of you dwells within it, and you begin to wonder. And you’re right to wonder. Arjuna was right to question his role in the slaughter of his brothers in the Bhagavad Gita. You’re right to second guess your support for shaming the unvaccinated, right to second guess your suspicion of immigrants, right to wonder if your political frustrations have more to do with dissatisfaction in your marriage or career. Inside of every individual nurtured to be such is an angelhair-thin fiberoptic connection to a queer possibility.8 And it is this queer possibility that makes us the best kind of fools. Because if frustrated desires were all of it, if that were everything, if it were all just negotiating the social codes of living amongst other living things who are trying to eat your apples, we wouldn’t have begun burying our dead. Everything would be pictograms. Venus would be a pile of stones to dash strangers’ babies upon. And perfumery would be the highest science.

But this isn’t the sum total of history. It isn’t just “one damned thing after another.” Some gluon of your you binds the world’s wild and brutal splendor to another possibility. And the degree to which you embrace it is the degree to which you are free to flicker in and out of this mysterium. That has probably always been true. One must be yoked to be free. Shamans, griots, poets, Harriet Tubmans, pratyekabuddhas, Socrateses invented, or sustained—depending on the time period—the possibility of being human.

May their tribe increase.

Literary Cultures

Even though cultures who possess the technology of writing are economically, militarily, and politically orders of magnitude more powerful than cultures who do not, literary culture is still a tributary of oral culture. The process of inculturation, of becoming a scribe, a professor, an intellectual, a pundit, a master of literary culture and the technology of writing, regardless of the way the writing is encoded,9 is always already almost entirely oral. Find one scribe who has not been the well-cared for servant of some empire and I will show you a dead or broken scribe. This means that scribes must always be the product of the power dynamics that produce these behemoths. Successful scribes must simp for power, which is one reason academia is ossified with such rigid hierarchies, and will always be ossified in this way. No, that doesn’t mean that professors of [whatever you like] are simps, but it does mean that most have learned to compartmentalize the more distasteful aspects of scholarly culture in order to chase the subtleties that call to them. And those who haven’t are insufferable. But I pass no judgment (well, okay, on the latter I do). Tenure is a gift, and life is very long. I wish for more professors of [whatever you like] rather than fewer.10 But this misprision causes humanists who are ensorcelled by the written word no shortage of consternation. They chase after books to find the source of things that live beyond them.11

I don’t want to go too far with this, though. There are plenty who have bucked this trend. Many are friends. But because literary education is handmaid to the epistemic machinery that undergirds complex societies, this wild goose chase distorts the proper relation between literary and oral culture. Literary culture is whatever the oral culture, that is the culture of the everyday interaction of humans within and around human institutions and practices, says it is. This was pretty infamously illustrated when Donald Trump stood in front of St. John’s Church in Washington, D.C. on June 1st, 2020 after the George Floyd riots/protests and held the Bible upside down for a photo-op. Sure, whether you care or not that Trump was holding the Bible upside down says something about your social habitus,12 but that everyone everywhere understood that holding up a book means something, and something important at that, says something about our culture per se.

Put simply, most writing serves the oral culture it is a tributary of. Some scholars call this kind of writing secondary orality and tie its emergence to the birth of new media. I spent time in Part I talking about secondary orality, and you’re welcome to explore it, but the point is that secondary orality’s attributes aren’t new; they are scaled up versions of what’s been going on since writing became an economic activity about 5,000 years ago.13 But as with oral culture, that’s not all of it. And that “not all of it” is the point I’m trying to make in a variety of ways. There is some vapor in our animal cognition, a hitch in our predatory gate that draws us inside of ourselves and towards another world, one that isn’t found in nature. It draws our scribes away from the letter of the sovereign’s law towards the Epic of Gilgamesh, towards Siduri the alewife who reminds us to rejoice in life’s mortal splendor. If there were no secret urge there would just be debits and credits, debtors’ jail, and horse thieves. The symmetry, I hope, is clear. But the difference shouldn’t be glossed over. It matters.

Writing did not open this new vista. Literary culture is not the source of Siduri’s wisdom. Reading Moby Dick or learning Sanskrit won’t summon nobility ex nihilo, but it can curate and amplify the gallery of whispers which house are grandest ambitions. Literary culture is an exponential intensification of oral culture—for better and for worse. Far more powerful than oral cultures who do not possess the technology of writing, literary cultures extend our embodied oral cultures across time and space, creating secondary ecosystems nearly as wild as the material environments that drive biological adaptations. This cultural extension can be represented as an exponent’s exponent of its base, in which the literary production’s power is both a product of the oral culture and productive of culture.

Stroll through the religion or philosophy section of The Strand in Greenwich Village or a Barnes & Noble up the street and you can see and feel and touch the remainders of oral traditions long past. The dead are all around you. And they call to you. Even covered in ISBN numbers and currencies of exchange they inspire and discomfit with their centuries old hectoring. Though the humans who lived the sacrifice of their achievement are bones and mud, their vitality persists. They were here.

In the 3rd century the Carthaginian Christian women Perpetua and Felicity were torn apart by wild animals for public spectacle during the reign of Septimius Severus before Perpetua guided the executioner’s sword to her own throat.

Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī began a homoerotically charged spiritual affair with Shams al-Dīn Tabriz in the 13th century capital of the Seljuk Sultanate. Engorged with divinity, he produced ecstatic poetry ‘til dawn and danced wildly in the streets until his scandalized family (probably) murdered his lover.

“But it’s a translation!” “Martyrdom is political!” Yes, it is. Yes, to both. We can’t lose our heads about the provenance of the literary traditions we’ve inherited, but we shouldn’t lose our hearts either. People will be loving Rumi long after critical theory becomes a curiosity for future scribes, and Christians will still be inspired to get in their trucks and drive hundreds of miles to help storm victims because they weigh their sacrifices against people like Perpetua and Felicity. These people: Rumi, Perpetua, Felicity were here. Right here. As much as you and I are here, and they left something behind. What will you leave behind? What will I?

An entire universe of signification has evolved alongside our oral culture, a niche construction that emerged out of the slipstream that first led us to bury our dead and mimic birdsong.14 It is a universe of things, a landscape of deserts and mountains, oceans and archipelagos. It is filled with ruins and artifacts. It is not a void. It is not inert. It has a will of its own. It is alive and wild and filled with the echoes of the living. It isn’t necessary to inhabit this literary universe to gain clarity about our present moment. No one needs to read or write to feel themselves. But this is the world that I inhabit. I will do my best to see this time and place as it is and write it as I can. Maybe I’ll catch a favorable wind. Maybe I won’t. The effort will be mine but the judgment will be left to others.

I hope to produce writing that finds you, writing that disorients you, that calls to you, urges you to shake off the “institutional amnesia”15 that twists your thinking back on itself. That is the kind of writing I mean to work at. Not quite scholarly, not quite commercial. I have no plan other than to follow the sentences where they lead, out into the wilderness where I hope to find you too and sit with you for a while.

When I say there are ways to tell the truth, there are ways to remember death, there are ways to neither exaggerate your import nor surrender your splendor, this is what I mean.

“…to see what is in front of one’s nose is a constant struggle,” Orwell said at another time and place, for other ends, to different purposes than mine. But he was right forever. It isn’t a cliche if you don’t let it be. It isn’t a cliche if you feel what he meant. If you crane your neck, bend your ear, hover for just a moment in the current that is rushing towards the ocean called “when all is said and done,”16 you can hear him calling to you.

I am calling to you too across the marronage of time.

—Memento mori, memento vagari

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Written media are not all the same. A sentence here in a Substack newsletter is different than a sentence there, say, in a book of essays. This is a little strange, though, isn’t it? After all, why wouldn’t they be interchangeable? The morphologies are the same, the denotations and connotations don’t change whether they’re pixels or print, or print available as pixels. They would seem to be fungible. Why wouldn’t an essay (nominally) about Orwell read the same here as it would in a printed anthology, or The Hedgehog Review? Such an essay published amidst other essays on totalitarianism wouldn’t immediately be suspected of cliche, but an essay here, in this format, with a title like mine, and a reference to Orwell in the subheading? That’s a heavier lift. Let’s talk about why and the implications of that why.

For starters, I’m not merely talking about social status.1 Everyone understands the value and prestige that attends acceptance by an exclusive group, from the Ivy League to your church’s parish council. Recognition via the promotion of one’s articulations, written or otherwise, bears weight. This happens on social media when someone famous boosts someone anonymous. It happens when a publication accepts your work. It’s a deep pleasure to be seen by those with social status when we also recognize the value of that social status.

This clarification is important, the “recognize the value of” part.2 I’m not being pedantic. The surge of validation is relational. And it’s a very, very messy relation, not at all limited to academic standards and social media heraldry. I’m thinking of the pleasure of hate, the pleasure of owning people,3 star-fucking, the craving to be seen triumphant over those we disdain by those we disdain, schadenfreude, etc. This isn’t irrelevant to the discussion, but it’s a branch I’ll explore later. For now I’d like to contemplate its form.

There are the structural differences between social media posts—the vast majority of which are written4—and something like an essay. Length is an obvious one, but that’s not the only thing. Speed is a factor, how quickly the written artifact can be made. There’s also how easily it can be shared, via email or app versus physical distribution. Then there’s the likely disjunction between the appearance of spontaneity and its reality. Social media, especially video, often has the appearance of being unrehearsed even though it is often heavily edited.5 Essays, on the other hand, can’t really appear unrehearsed in the same way. An “unrehearsed” essay is probably just a bad essay. The medium itself implies negotiation, between the author and the language, author and audience, audience and language. And more esoterically between the author and the self.

When writing or editing an essay there is a congress of interlocutors. “Is this what I mean to say? Is this what I mean? How will people take this? Is this clear? Wait, what did I mean here? What does this mean? Where did this come from? Is this what I actually think?” In many ways, the essay can’t exist qua essay without this negotiation taking place.

There is another element too. And I’m not sure what to call it. But it’s alchemical. The interpersonal essay, the poem, transmutes time. Synchrony and diachrony enzymatically illuminate one another—reader, writer, self—even across vast distances and irreconcilable differences. A third space emerges out of this relationship. One that is dependent upon, yet transcends the thing itself. This is different from social and visual media which are artifacts of time. Remainders of its passage. This is why home movies are always tinged with melancholy, and social media is readily objectified by symbolic culture. An essay can only be objectified if it is vivisected into memetic morsels.

Social media isn’t just fast, however. As an object it is ephemeral yet endlessly repeatable. This endlessly repeatable ephemera is not altogether different from ritual, which also occupies an endlessly repeatable discrete frame. And like ritual, social media creates a kind of hypereality that feels more real than the original.6 If this idea sounds familiar it’s because you’ve either read or been exposed to Jean Baudrillard’s work7, or because you’ve watched The Matrix like twenty times, which I definitely haven’t done… Anthropologists and scholars who study this kind of media call it “secondary orality.”

Secondary orality is a play off of the well-known distinction between literate and pre-literate, or oral cultures. Given how saturated the contemporary world is in writing, it’s difficult to keep in mind that literate cultures are only about 5,000 years old. Writing first got going in the Fertile Crescent and along the Nile, more or less around the same time (about 3,200 BCE), and then caught on in the Gangetic plain, and the Yellow River after that, 2,600 and 1,500 respectively.

That may sound like a long time ago, and it is compared to a contemporary nation’s lifespan, but it is less than 5% of the (approximately) 100,000 years we’ve been in the business of producing symbolic culture. Furthermore, for most of that 5,000 year history, writing was the purview of economic and cultural elites. We tend to remember the priestly class and the poets when we think of our literate ancestors, but it was the bean counters who first learned to read and write. They were primarily preoccupied with inventory and exchange. Who owned what and whom? How many oxen for that gaggle of slave girls? Etc. Writing was special. It was an artifact of social power and it conferred social status.

But this was a belated tool. For most of our time on this planet our species has produced oral cultures. We had no paper, no books, no tablets, no reeds, and certainly no screens. It was just bison, and raptors, and wild horses, and jungle cats, and people strung about the earth in long attenuated trade networks, swapping jewelry, bowls, spears, and stories along the Danube and the Mississippi, along the Ganges and the Nile. It’s an open question how far back oral culture reaches into our past. Above I mentioned 100,000 years because that’s generally agreed upon, but archaeologists have found evidence of red ochre production in Kathu Pan, located in South Africas Northern Cape, as far back as 500,000 years ago. That’s right in the middle of the Acheulean tool making cultures, when Homo Erectus was learning to cook with fire and tend to their sick.

What did they need to paint red? How did they decide who got the ochre, when and where was it used? There probably weren’t any permits for it, but I bet the hominid who harvested it wasn’t too happy when his teenage son used it to paint his favorite boom-boom stick. “Get your own hematite, Groog-wiks!”

That means that oral culture is the submerged part of the iceberg that is the history of human cultures. It’s the 90% we don’t see when we’re sifting through the historical record, or parsing the political implications of the populist turn, or critiquing the history of colonialism. In Freudian terms, it’s the vast subconscious apparatus that drives our symbolic productions. For hundreds of thousands of years oral culture, as the primary form of non-biological adaptation, also mediated our relationship to ourselves, not just each other. You’re swimming in it right now and have been as long as you’ve been a you to swim. “This is water,” as David Foster Wallace said, and it’s hard to see it because of that. And it’s not just you, or us, it’s an ocean that encompasses our whole race. From Adam to Armageddon it will always be all of all of it.

So that’s orality, but what is “secondary orality?”8 It’s a written artifact with oral characteristics that, most importantly, only emerges from literate cultures. Secondary orality is a consequence of mass media, industrial apparatus, digital infrastructure, all of which require the technology of writing to exist. Its form is literate, but its function is oral. Let me say that again, its function is oral. It’s a manifestation of the 90% that is very, very hard to see because we’re in it and of it. And our fundamental confusion about what social media is, what modern media culture is, what the New York Times is, what Fox News is, what politics is, makes most intellectual commentary on our present moment an unselfconscious organ of the very oral culture it is attempting to analyze. Writing doesn’t necessarily transcend the hurly-burly rush of the everyday when it is instrumental to it. It has to be made to do that.

Next time we’ll figure out how together by exploring how Orwell helps us separate writing from writing.

—Memento mori, memento vagari

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Adding to the confusion, the ancient regime of politically inflected but earnest media institutions have abandoned their common cause with objectivity1 and joined the melee. NYTimes readers see conservatives and their clown-car rodeo sideshow, featuring Jewish space lasers and deep state super spies dutifully arrayed behind Donald, Elon and the ever-versatile JD Vance. And Fox News watchers see liberals feasting on their harvest of nutty professors, juiced on green subsidies and Soros dollars, stampeding across the US border shoulder-to-shoulder with Antifa and CCP insurgents.

These are sardonic caricatures, I know. But any casual scroll across various media channels (social or legacy) will validate their broad contours, as will the probing Shibboleths we exchange when sizing up our acquaintances. “Are there any tariffs on this meal,” you smirk at lunch with your colleagues. “We done destroying the planet,” you offer the mechanic as he services your F-150.

We all use these short hands, float little signifiers and study the response, playing low-key spies for our own moral order. And look, it’s probably always been this way. The intensity of the behavior that emerges in high school is a stage of life, yes, but it’s also sound fundamentals. In-group, out-group dynamics are primitive, elemental even. They come before reasoning and they never go away, but they do get better at dressing-up in reason’s garments. And they’re also indispensable to survival.

We climbed atop Darwin’s heap because of our unmatched ability to cooperate. But cooperation requires a binding agent, some kind of glue to keep the community together. Dumping on out-groups is a low-cost, reliable way to shore up in-group affections when you don’t have a nobler purpose ready-at-hand.

I have friends and family assembled on both sides of this ideological fray. Each side is fuming and righteous, and rock-solid sure that the world’s political complexities would be, at the very least, simplified if [insert partisan-slag here] were banished to the wilderness. They all sense that our world’s alliances are unspooling faster than they can be darned. They’re scared, alert to the unpredictable nature of our present moment, and anxious of its implications. And that anxiety has created a particularly absurdist form of political theater in the West generally, and in the US in particular. The political schisms in this country are real, of course, but they’re not the point. They are a kind of distraction, light on facts, heavy on drama—probably best understood as an entertainment genre rather than urgent political disputes.

The reality is we don’t live in the world we thought we did, and we’ve never lived in that world. What world do I mean? I mean the gilded world of ascending moral righteousness. Much of our contemporary rectitude is inertial, derived from the herculean tasks of civil rights victories generations ago. Yes, we are materially prosperous, but we’re also as spiritually starved as we’ve ever been. And a spiritually bereft man2 is incapable of persistent righteousness. All he has is social triangulation, a critical tool for survival, but a poor guide to principles in the social fray that emerges from competing wants.

I said that we are as spiritually starved as we have ever been, and I meant it. Paradise belongs to the present. It is an ever-renewable yet ever-vanishing resource of any given moment in time. Always here, and always gone. God is as near or far as she has ever been. Enlightenment is right around the corner and it’s flung to the edge of all time and space, just as it has ever been.3

Jesus is gone, yes, but more importantly he was here. The son of God walked the earth, loved lepers’ feet, and rose from the dead. And he’s perched and alert and ready to guide you to heaven.

The Buddha was here. Sure he gets reborn, but there’s a difference between this guy who riddles like the Buddha come again, and the actual dude holding a flower and waxing philosophic to Śāriputra in the palace garden—and yet here he is.

Once, there was a gilded age in China. The Han rode golden chariots, the grand historian understood the Mandate of Heaven, and traditional medicine kept Lao Tzu alive until he was 996. And the Huaxia4 shall abide forever.

I’m sure you get the idea.

But don’t mistake my irreverence for spiritual cynicism. I believe in God and Enlightenment—deeply. I may just be an effluvium of egotistical impulses surging up out of the molecular soup, but I do believe in something larger than myself. These myths can be a potent source of compassion and human flourishing. But we shouldn’t forget that they can also be wielded as a cudgel to enforce and shape the status quo, as they are being used now in the United States by both the left and the right to maintain the appearance of a higher purpose, like eradicating racism (impossible) and returning America’s post-WWII demography (also impossible).

We are muddling through a time of intense religious fervor, which is, unfortunately, not the same thing as an intense spiritual fervor.5 And one of the ways that fervor manifests is in the expression and spread of secular fundamentalism, which is not altogether different from sacred fundamentalism. Yes, the institutions differ, and the orientations are orthogonal,6 but fundamentalist Progressive dogma and fundamentalist Christian dogma have a lot in common. Some people call these dogmas the “woke left” and the “woke right, and we’ll come back to this phenomenon down the line, but for starters I challenge anyone to find a meaningful difference between Ibram Kendi’s question begging and Jerry Falwell’s. No matter who your devil is, stupid is as stupid does.

The United States is prone to these kinds of religious revivals. There was the Revolutionary War, the First and Second Great Awakening’s, Woodstock and now this moment here that we must all suffer through, as participants and observers. But these are also times of tremendous transformation and creativity. New forms are born. Subcultures speciate and hybridize. The husks left behind desiccate and burn. It’s not neat or tidy. It’s not a rational process. It’s a kind of madness, in point of fact. But it is a madness teeming with beauty and possibility. But make no mistake, it is a time of real danger. People will get hurt. You and yours might not make it. Me and mine might not either. I’ll pray for us both.

The reality is that the presumptions of pleasure, leisure, and easy living that dominated the late 20th and early 21st centuries have satisfied our appetites but not our aspirations. Capital’s two-and-a-half century growth spurt has transformed human existence in a way that can only be compared to the inventions of farming, advances in metallurgy, and the Industrial Revolution.7 Nothing about the titillations of technology or explosions of convenience in the last 50 years should surprise us. Humans have always thrived by making it easier to survive. From the invention of microblades in the Last Glacial Maximum, to fast food drive thrus, making it easier to secure food, shelter, and clothing both satisfies and transforms our desires. But there are consequences.

We are fat but starving. We are safe but terrified. There’s a button or screen to satisfy every appetite but there’s no spigot from which we might satisfy our spiritual thirst. And so, out of this schizophrenia of privation and abundance, our politics is transformed into a gladiatorial-style spectacle, humming with malice and giddy with ill-intent.

Gotcha! Lock her up! Traitor! Snowflake! Racist!

We do not choose the time and place of our birth. It’s beyond our control. We might even call it fate. But we can choose how we engage with the world we’re born into. You can, for example, pick a side. Any side you want. Seriously. Become a partisan. Lob grenades. Own the libs. Banish the fascists. Disdain the spineless. And why not? It’s vital. It’s the very stuff out of which history is made. Plus, so many people are doing it you’re likely to find a lovely group of combatants to spend your life with. People who will help reinforce your moral rectitude while you take vacations, raise your kids, and pay off your mortgage. The dopamine hit you feel dumping on the wretched and the ignorant is real and so is the pain they’ll feel. To each his own. But I’m going a different way.

I’m embracing moderation, political moderation. I am become moderate. But not the formless moderate universally disdained but endlessly courted by political activists. My moderation is a middle way.8 My moderation is on fire, alive, active. It sifts, filters, and rejects. It endlessly whittles until the kernel of truth is found. It believes in objectivity as an ideal to endlessly strive for. It believes in Democracy; it is committed, faithful, and loyal to it. My moderation understands that Democracy isn’t just a good time. We cannot inherit our goodness. We have no right to it. It must be solved for each generation, over and over again. And the relationship between the wisdom of the collective (the common good), and the perennial wisdom of our highest virtues (the uncommon good) are in constant tension. One cannot finally be solved with the other. Rule by the elite, and rule by the mob all finally lead to dystopia. Each must check each—forever.

My moderation believes there is a right view, a right intention. There are principles and virtues. We can live by them. We can fight for them. Out of them emerge the ten thousand things. Binary choices are the currency of zealots and millenarians. Democracy is madness just barely cooled by reason, with one rein remaining on the bit, one bender away from chaos. It’s not proper. It doesn’t always make the right choice. But as long as it can be maintained its wildness shades towards the good.

I’m enraptured by all that I don’t understand. I am curious. And I will punch you in the face to prove it. If you want to join my side, I’ll be happy to scrap alongside you.

—Memento mori, memento vagari