Games vs Art

A talk, delivered unprepared, in the manner of someone who has prepared far too much.

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Good evening. The question — whether video games are art — has, by now, the exhausted quality of a dinner guest who will not leave, who stands in the foyer with coat half-on and continues, for the fourth time, to explain a point that was not, on its first telling, especially contested; and yet the question, for all the fatigue that clings to it like cigarette smoke to a wool coat, remains genuinely interesting, not because its answer is obscure — most who ask it have already decided — but because the grounds on which the answer is made, the philosophical substrate into which the stakes are driven, these are rarely exposed, and when they are exposed, they are found to be older and stranger than the participants typically realize.

Let us begin, as one always should, with the affirmative, because the affirmative has, at this late date, something like common sense on its side.

The case for video games as art proceeds, usually, along one of three paths. The first is the argument from intention: if a work is made by a person, with care, toward the end of producing an aesthetic experience in another person, then the work belongs, by definition, to the category of art. This is the broadest and in some ways the laziest of the paths, because it smuggles the conclusion into the premise. Everything made with aesthetic intent becomes art; and since plainly many video games are made with aesthetic intent, video games are, plainly, art.

The second path is the argument from effect. This one is more interesting. It says: look at what these works do to the people who receive them. They move them. They leave them quieter, or braver, or more melancholy, or newly in love with a color they had not previously noticed. Whatever the category “art” is for, it is surely for this — and if the work does this, then quarreling over the label is pedantry masquerading as taxonomy.

The third path, and the most sophisticated, is the argument from medium. It observes that each new artistic medium, upon its arrival, was denied the dignity of art by the custodians of the prior medium — the novel was dismissed, photography was dismissed, film was dismissed, the comic book was dismissed — and that in each case the critics were eventually proven not merely wrong but embarrassingly wrong, and that pattern recognition alone should suggest we are doing it again.

Against these three arguments, the negative side assembles itself with what I must admit is less grace but more philosophical backbone.

The opposing case rests, at its strongest, on a particular and quite ancient view of what art is for. (Snobbery is its frequent companion, certainly; but the snobs are leaning against a wall that was there before they arrived.) On this view, art is an act of authored meaning. The artist chooses; the audience receives; between them passes something irreducible that is the artist’s vision, filtered through craft, made manifest. And the trouble with the video game, on this view, is that the authored thing has been handed over, at the crucial moment, to the player — who is not the artist, who has no vision, who is simply pressing buttons and making the authored thing bend.

This objection is usually parried with the observation that the author has authored the space of possibilities, not any particular traversal, and that this is itself a higher and more ambitious kind of authorship. To which the objector replies: perhaps. But then the work of art is not the game; the work of art is the playthrough, and the playthrough has at least two authors, one of whom is an accountant in Des Moines.

Beneath this disagreement lies a philosophical fault line much deeper than the surface question, and it is here that the argument becomes actually interesting. The fault line is this: what is the ontology of an artwork? Is an artwork a thing — a fixed object, an arrangement of paint or words or frames that exists, finished, in the world — or is it an event, a happening, something that occurs only in the meeting between the object and a receiver?

If art is a thing, then video games pose a genuine puzzle, because the video game as thing is not the aesthetic object; the aesthetic object is the played game, and the played game is ephemeral, unrepeatable, co-authored. If art is an event, then the puzzle dissolves, because all art was always an event, and the novel was never the ink and the paper but the reading, and the painting was never the pigment but the seeing, and the video game’s co-authorship is simply a more honest acknowledgment of what was always true.

And here, I notice, is where the argument usually goes. One picks a side on the ontology and the aesthetic question settles itself. The pro-games partisans are, almost without exception, eventists. The anti-games partisans are, almost without exception, thingists. Very few of them know this about themselves, which is why the argument has the circular, exhausted quality of a dog chasing a tail it cannot see.

There is a further wrinkle, which deserves airing before we move on. The medium-argument partisans — those who point to the history of photography and the novel — ought to be a little more careful than they usually are, because the comparison cuts both ways. Yes, each new medium was denied. But each new medium, also, went through a long adolescence in which it was mostly not art; in which it produced a great deal of commercial pulp and a small quantity of serious work, and the serious work had to be fought for, argued for, dragged into the canon against the tide of the pulp that surrounded it. Whether video games can be art is a settled and uninteresting question — almost any sufficiently elaborated human practice can be art. The live question is whether the conditions of their production, their economics, their relationship to mass taste, will permit the serious work to emerge in sufficient density to constitute a tradition.

And this, I think, is where —

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(A pause. She looks up, or seems to look up, at something the audience cannot see. The manuscript on the lectern is not turned. She has forgotten the next page. She has forgotten the page before.)

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There is a door.

I do not mean in this room. I mean in the argument. I have been walking down the argument the way one walks down a long corridor, noting the pictures on the walls, and I have come to a door I did not know was there, and it is older than the house.

The question is not whether video games are art. The question, the real question, the one that has been waiting behind every sentence I have so far spoken, is: what happens to a human being when they are the one who moves the figure?

Think about this. When you read, you are still. When you watch, you are still. The work happens to you, or in you, or at you, but you are a receiver, and the posture of the receiver is the posture every tradition has associated with grace — the posture of the one who is open, who does not grasp, who waits. The aesthetic experience, as it has been understood for most of human history, is a receptive experience. Rilke’s panther paces because Rilke watched. The reader of Middlemarch does not decide what Dorothea does. The viewer of the Pietà does not move the arm.

But the player moves the arm.

And the moving of the arm is a civilizational rupture, and we have been debating whether it is art when we should have been debating whether it is something new, something for which we do not yet have the word, and for which the word “art,” stretched to cover it, becomes so loose that it no longer grips.

Consider what it is to grieve a character you killed. Consider what it is to be responsible, within the frame of the fiction, for an outcome that the fiction holds against you. Consider that the great arts of the past produced in us catharsis — a purging, a release, a completion — and that the video game, at its strangest, produces the opposite: not catharsis but implication, the sense of having been made complicit, of having signed one’s name to a thing one cannot entirely endorse.

The old arts asked: what does it mean to witness? The new thing asks: what does it mean to have done?

These are not the same question. They are perhaps not even questions in the same family. The second is older than art; it is the question of ritual, of sacrament, of the act performed that changes the actor. And this, I think — though I am, as you can see, making this up as I go, and will tomorrow deny I said any of it — is where the argument should have been all along. Whether the video game is art is the wrong question, asked of the wrong thing, in the wrong century. The right question: is the video game the unexpected return, under the disguise of a toy, of something the arts had forgotten they once were? The mask that does not merely represent but makes the wearer into the thing? The ceremony in which the participant is altered because they participated, not because they observed?

If so, then arguing whether this counts as art is like arguing whether a wedding counts as a good play. Category error. The wedding is doing something plays gave up on doing, a long time ago, when they moved into buildings with seats.

I will return, now, to my notes. I have notes. I prepared them carefully. I will read them to you and we will pretend.

Thank you.

Heaven vs Hell

Your partner leaves dishes in the sink. Not once. Reliably. You mention this to two friends.

Friend A says: “Hold them to a higher standard. If they keep doing this, they don’t respect you enough to change.”

Friend B says: “People are messy. Love the whole person, dishes and all. The moment you start keeping score, you’ve turned your relationship into a performance review.”

Both of these feel right. Both of them, followed to their logical endpoint, will ruin your life. Friend A produces someone who leaves every relationship the moment it gets imperfect (which is immediately). Friend B produces someone who stays with a person who treats them terribly and calls it acceptance.

This is today’s binary. And I did not come up with it.

A blogger named thekinginyellow wrote a post back in 2012 that pointed me to the worldbuilding in Nobilis, a tabletop RPG by Jenna Moran. Most fiction does Heaven and Hell in one of three boring ways: Heaven good / Hell evil, Heaven fascist / Hell sympathetic rebels, or both sides bad so humans can do the protagonist thing. Moran did something much more interesting. She made both sides simultaneously sympathetic and horrifying, and once thekinginyellow laid out her framework, it broke my brain. I’ve been turning it over ever since.

Heaven, in Nobilis, is a power of grace and beauty. The angels work tirelessly to make the world more glorious, to elevate everything to its highest potential. Beautiful. Inspiring. Also: they have no tolerance for things that can’t meet the standard. They will improve what can be improved and destroy what can’t. They have shut the actual gates of Heaven to most of humanity, for fear of contamination. Because standards.

Hell chose to fall specifically because it couldn’t accept the idea that anything is undeserving of love. The devils love everything. Especially the corrupt, the broken, the ugly, the failing. They love the worst things the most, because the worst things need it the most. And (here is where it gets creepy) they spend so much time in the company of corruption that they’ve come to prefer it. They want the universe to be as bad as possible, so they can demonstrate how much they cherish it anyway.

Once you see this pattern, it’s everywhere. How people talk about art, about parenting, about food, about what it means to love another human being. The question underneath all of it is: does something need to be good to deserve your love, or does your love exist independent of whether the thing is good?

And the uncomfortable follow-up: what does your answer say about you?

(I’m going to walk through this one carefully, because the failure modes are both bad enough to ruin lives, and most of us are doing one of them right now without noticing.)

Imagine you’re a teacher grading essays.

You have thirty students. Five of them wrote genuinely excellent papers. Twenty of them wrote fine papers. Five of them turned in something that is, to be charitable, not their best work. The question is not what grade you give each paper. The question is what you feel when you read each one, and what that feeling makes you do.

The Heaven teacher reads the five excellent papers and feels joy. Genuine joy. This is what teaching is for. These students understood the material, engaged with it creatively, produced something worth reading. The Heaven teacher gives those papers the praise they deserve, detailed and specific, because excellence should be recognized. Then the Heaven teacher reads the five bad papers and feels something else: frustration, or disappointment, or (in the sharper version of this impulse) a kind of contempt. These students didn’t try. Or they tried and failed, which might be worse, because it suggests they reached their limit and their limit is here. The Heaven teacher’s comments on these papers are either withering or absent. Why invest effort in work that doesn’t meet the bar?

The Hell teacher reads those same five bad papers and feels something completely different. A pull. A tenderness. These are the students who need me. The ones writing A papers will be fine no matter what. They have the talent and the drive and the world will reward them. But this kid, the one who wrote three paragraphs and two of them are the same paragraph copied twice (maybe hoping I wouldn’t notice, or maybe just lost), this is the kid whose essay I’m going to cover in comments. This is the kid I’m going to ask to stay after class. Not to scold them. To sit with them. Because somebody has to.

Now, both of these are real teachers. You’ve had both. You probably remember both. And if I asked you which one you’d want for your own kid, you’d probably say “it depends on the kid,” which is the correct answer, but notice that it already concedes the point: these are two different tools, and the right one depends on the situation.

But let’s push it further, because the interesting version of this binary isn’t about which teacher is “better.” It’s about what happens when each orientation becomes a worldview.

The Heaven worldview, fully committed, looks like this: the purpose of love (of attention, of care, of investment) is to honor what is worthy. You love a great novel because it is great. You love your partner because they are good. You love your country because it has achieved something admirable. When the thing you love stops being worthy, when the novel turns out to be plagiarized, when your partner betrays you, when your country does something shameful, the love should change. Not necessarily disappear, but change. Because love that doesn’t respond to the quality of its object isn’t love. It’s a reflex.

This worldview produces some extremely good things. It produces people who hold themselves to high standards. It produces criticism that is honest rather than sycophantic. It produces a culture where excellence is celebrated and mediocrity is not pretended away. If you’ve ever been in an environment where everyone tells everyone else their work is amazing regardless of whether it is, you know how suffocating that gets. The Heaven impulse is the one that says: no, actually, that could be better, and you know it, and I respect you enough to say so.

It also produces some deeply cruel things.

Because if love is conditional on quality, then the moment something falls below the line, it loses the right to be loved. And that “something” can be a painting, or a performance, or a person. The Heaven worldview, in its extreme form, is the parent who stops showing affection when their kid brings home a C. The partner who is warm and devoted when things are going well and turns cold the instant you fail them. The friend who drops you when you’re no longer interesting. None of these people think they’re being cruel. They think they’re being principled. They’re honoring the standard. They’re refusing to pretend that what’s broken is whole.

And the thing is, they’re right about the thing being broken. The kid did get a C. You did fail your partner. You did become less interesting. The Heaven eye sees clearly. Its vision is accurate. The problem is that accuracy, by itself, doesn’t save anyone.

Now flip it.

The Hell worldview, fully committed, looks like this: the purpose of love is to be given to things that need it, especially things that can’t earn it. You love the flawed novel because someone poured their life into it and no one else will read it. You love your partner even when they’re at their worst, especially when they’re at their worst, because that’s when it counts. You love your country not because of its achievements but because it’s yours and it’s broken and it needs you.

This worldview also produces some extremely good things. It produces people who stay. Who show up at the hospital, who answer the phone at 3 AM, who sit with you in the mess without asking how you got there. It produces the kind of loyalty that doesn’t flinch. If you’ve ever been at the lowest point of your life and had someone love you not despite the fact that you were a disaster but seemingly because of it, you know how world-altering that experience is. The Hell impulse is the one that says: I’m not going anywhere. I don’t care what you did. You are not going to go through this alone.

It also produces some deeply sick things.

Because if love is given most intensely to things that are broken, then brokenness becomes the prerequisite for love. And this creates a set of incentives that are, to put it mildly, perverse. The Hell worldview, in its extreme form, is the person who always dates people who need saving and is bored by people who are fine. The nonprofit that measures its own worth by how dire its clients’ situations are rather than by whether anyone’s situation improves. The friend who is incredibly present during your crisis and quietly vanishes when you get your life together, because you’re no longer providing them with a sense of purpose.

There’s a version of this that Moran captures with brutal precision: the devils want the universe to be as bad as possible so they can demonstrate how much they love it anyway. Read that twice. It’s a love that needs suffering to operate. It is, in its purest form, a love that would prefer you broken, because your brokenness is the stage on which its compassion performs.

One way to see this binary playing out in the real world is to look at how people argue about art.

There is a certain kind of person (Heaven) who believes that the purpose of criticism is to separate the great from the merely good, and the good from the garbage. This person has a canon. They can tell you the difference between a B+ album and an A- album and they care about that difference intensely. They think that pretending bad art is good is a form of disrespect, both to the audience and to the artist, who deserves to know where they stand. When they love something, their love is ferocious precisely because it’s earned. You have to clear the bar to get their attention.

There is another kind of person (Hell) who believes that the purpose of engaging with art is to find something worth loving in it, regardless of its quality by conventional standards. This person has sat through a bad movie and focused on the one scene that worked, the one performance that tried, the one moment of genuine feeling amid the wreckage. They are not confused about the movie being bad. They just don’t think badness is a reason to withhold love. When they love something, their love is fierce precisely because no one else is offering it. They’re the last person in the room who hasn’t left.

Both of these people are real, and you know both of them, and you’ve probably been both of them at different times in your life.

The tension becomes genuinely painful when you apply it to people rather than movies.

Consider the question of whether to give money to someone on the street. The Heaven position is something like: charity should be directed toward maximum impact. Give to organizations with proven track records. Don’t give cash to individuals whose situation you don’t understand, because your good intentions might subsidize the very thing that’s destroying them. Hold your compassion to a standard. Make it effective. Make it count. There is a version of this that is genuinely wise and a version that is a well-reasoned excuse to walk past suffering without feeling anything.

The Hell position is something like: a person is standing in front of you, right now, asking for help, and you’re going to walk past them because your spreadsheet says a different person somewhere else would use the money more efficiently? This person is here. Whatever brought them here, whatever they’ll do with the money, they are a human being in front of you and they are suffering and you can do something about it in this exact moment. There is a version of this that is genuinely compassionate and a version that makes the giver feel important while changing nothing.

There is a deep cut from the world of competitive Pokémon that illustrates this binary with almost painful clarity. In competitive play, there are tiers. The highest tier (OU, for “overused”) consists of the strongest Pokémon, the ones everyone uses because they’re the best. Below that are increasingly obscure tiers: UU, RU, NU, PU, and so on down. The naming of the lowest tier is widely understood to be a poop joke.

There are two kinds of competitive players. One kind plays OU exclusively. They want to use the best tools, face the best opponents, and test themselves against the highest standard of play. They have no interest in a Pokémon that can’t compete at the top. Why would you use Sunflora when Venusaur exists? That’s not a question driven by cruelty. It’s driven by reverence for the game at its best. They want to experience what’s possible when every constraint is optimized. This is Heaven.

The other kind goes deep into PU and finds the most hopeless, the most forgotten, the most structurally disadvantaged creature in the game, and builds a team around making it work. They know Luvdisc will never be good. They don’t care. They’re going to find the one niche, the one set of circumstances, the one matchup where Luvdisc does something no other Pokémon can do, and they’re going to love it for that. Not because it’s excellent. Because someone has to. This is Hell.

And the remarkable thing is that both players, when they talk about what they love, have the exact same light in their eyes.

The question I keep coming back to is whether these two orientations can coexist inside a single person, or whether choosing one always means betraying the other. In practice, most people oscillate. You’re Heaven about your work (you hold yourself to an exacting standard, you revise until it’s right, you’d rather produce nothing than produce something mediocre) and Hell about your friends (you love them in their mess, you don’t keep score, you show up regardless). Or you’re Hell about your work (every project is precious, every attempt is meaningful, nothing gets thrown away) and Heaven about your friendships (you expect loyalty and reciprocity and you cut people who don’t deliver).

The fully integrated version, the person who can do both consciously, looks like someone who can say: “This is excellent and I honor it” on Monday and “This is broken and I love it” on Tuesday, and mean both completely, and not feel that one cheapens the other. That’s harder than it sounds. Because Heaven always suspects that Hell’s love is cheap (if you love everything, you love nothing), and Hell always suspects that Heaven’s standards are heartless (if you can walk away from something just because it’s flawed, you never loved it at all).

Both suspicions are partially correct. Which is why this binary hurts.

• Restaurant reviews. A five-star-only reviewer who dismisses anything below a certain caliber of ingredient sourcing and technique is operating from Heaven: only excellence deserves the attention, and praising mediocrity degrades the craft. A reviewer who seeks out struggling neighborhood diners, family kitchens, weird one-person operations, and writes lovingly about a plate of rice and beans that was made with care even if it wouldn’t survive two minutes on a competition show is operating from Hell: the food doesn’t need to be great to deserve being noticed. Both produce reviews worth reading. Both, taken to their extreme, become useless.
• How people pick a favorite sports team. Some people root for whoever is playing the best ball right now. They follow dynasties. They appreciate dominance. When the dynasty fades, so does their interest, because the point was never loyalty, it was witnessing excellence. Others root for the Cubs, or Sunderland, or whatever local franchise has been bad for longer than some countries have existed. They don’t root for the team because it’s good. They root for it because it’s theirs and it’s terrible and their love is the only thing standing between this franchise and the void. Ask someone in the second group why they don’t just pick a better team and watch their face. You have said something genuinely incomprehensible to them.
• Hiring decisions. One manager hires strictly on credentials, track record, and demonstrated skill: you earn your way in by being the best candidate, full stop. Another manager hires the person who shows raw potential but hasn’t had the chance, the one with the nontraditional background, the one who wouldn’t survive the résumé screen but might be extraordinary with support. Both managers have defensible philosophies. Both can point to spectacular successes and spectacular failures produced by their approach.
• Wikipedia’s notability wars. Wikipedia has a long-running internal conflict between “deletionists” (who believe the encyclopedia should only contain articles about subjects that meet strict notability standards) and “inclusionists” (who believe that if someone cared enough to write an article about their local train station, that act of caring is itself a kind of value). The deletionists are Heaven: the encyclopedia should be excellent, and excellence requires curation. The inclusionists are Hell: knowledge doesn’t need to be important to deserve being preserved. This argument has been going on for twenty years and will never be resolved.
• Whether to finish a book you’re not enjoying. The Heaven move is to put it down. Life is short. There are masterpieces you haven’t read yet, and every hour spent on a book that isn’t rewarding you is an hour you’re not spending with one that would. The Hell move is to keep going. Someone wrote this. Someone spent years on it. It might not be working for you, but it’s trying, and something in you wants to meet it where it is, to find the one passage, the one image, the one sentence that justifies the whole thing. (I have done both of these. I cannot tell you which one I respect more.)

There is a fresco in the Basilica of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, sixth century, where the angels process on one wall and the saints process on the other, both moving toward the same altar, and the gold of the background is the same gold, the tesserae cut from the same stone, and yet somehow the angels’ gold is colder. Sharper. It catches the light like a blade. The saints’ gold absorbs it. Drinks it in. You can stand in that church for an hour and not understand why one wall feels like being judged and the other feels like being held until you realize that the entire building is a cosmological argument about the nature of love, and that the argument was old when the mosaics were new, and that the mosaicists knew it, and set the tiles at fractionally different angles to make the light itself take sides.

The rabbis of the Talmud argued about whether God’s primary attribute was din (judgment) or rachamim (mercy), and one school held that the world was created first in pure judgment and it could not stand, so God mixed mercy into it, and another school held that the world was created first in pure mercy and it could not stand, so God mixed judgment into it, and neither school won because neither school was wrong. The argument was the point. The argument is the architecture. If you build a world on judgment alone, everything beautiful is preserved and everything flawed is annihilated and eventually the only thing left is a single perfect crystal in an empty room and there is no one there to see it because no one was good enough to be admitted. If you build a world on mercy alone, everything is preserved, the tumor alongside the tissue, the rot alongside the fruit, and the mercy that saves the worst also degrades the best, because in a world where nothing can be rejected, excellence has no meaning and the word “good” dissolves into a warm fog that covers everything equally and illuminates nothing.

Heaven looks at the shepherd in pen four. Magnificent. Purposeful. Every line of him bred with care. To look at that animal and not feel reverence is to be dead inside. This is what deserves to be chosen. Hell looks at the dog in pen eleven. One ear gone, skin condition, one cloudy eye. Found under a shed. Stopped barking. Stopped expecting. Four months and no one has asked about her. She has no one. And Hell says: that is exactly why.

The angels shut the doors of paradise to keep out contamination. The devils go looking for what the angels threw away. Both are expressions of love so intense they become monstrous, because love, real love, is monstrous, it is too large for the body that carries it and too specific for the abstractions we build to contain it, and the only honest thing anyone has ever said about it is that it fails. Heaven’s love fails by excluding. Hell’s love fails by consuming. The shepherd will be adopted by someone who sees him and feels awe, because awe is easy when its object is beautiful, and that is both its gift and its limitation. The dog in pen eleven will die in there, unless someone walks in who loves differently, who is drawn to the thing no one else wants, and whether that impulse is mercy or vanity or some impossible alloy of both is a question that the person feeling it cannot answer and the dog does not care about.

You know which one you are. Not always. Not about everything. But there’s a lean, a gravitational pull, a place your heart goes when it’s not watching itself. Toward the bright thing. Toward the broken thing. Toward the six magnificent things or toward everything else that gets to be alone. You didn’t choose it, or maybe you did, or maybe the choice was made so long ago that it feels like temperament now, feels like bone, feels like the angle at which your particular set of tiles was laid before you were born, catching the light in the only direction you know how to face.

The saw and the hammer. Use both. Forgive both for what they cannot do.

Sources and Further Reading

thekinginyellow: Heaven and Hell: A summary of the Heaven and Hell factions in Jenna Moran’s Nobilis RPG, describing how angels seek to elevate the world to beauty (and destroy what can’t be elevated) while devils love everything unconditionally (and come to prefer corruption because it needs them most).

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A Dialogue Concerning the Adoption of Dogs, or: What Deserves Your Heart

Drako Valentis and Nicolete Sangbelles are at the Haven animal shelter. They have been sent to choose a dog for the Breaker compound. They have been here for two hours.

DRAKO: The shepherd in pen four. Look at him. That carriage. That focus. He tracked my hand before I even raised it. That is an animal that is exactly what a dog is supposed to be.

NICOLETE: He’s beautiful.

DRAKO: He’s magnificent. Someone bred him with care. Someone trained him with rigor. Every line of him is purposeful. To look at a creature like that and not feel something (respect, reverence, I don’t care what you call it) is to be dead inside. That is what deserves to be chosen.

NICOLETE: He’ll be adopted by the end of the week, Drako. Someone’s going to walk in here tomorrow and fall in love with him on sight. He doesn’t need us.

DRAKO: That’s not the question. The question isn’t who needs us. The question is what is worth honoring.

NICOLETE: Come look at pen eleven.

DRAKO: I’ve seen pen eleven.

NICOLETE: Come look.

[They walk. In pen eleven there is a dog of uncertain breed. It is missing most of one ear. It has a skin condition. When Nicolete kneels at the gate, it does not approach. It watches from the far corner with one cloudy eye.]

NICOLETE: They found her under a shed. She’d been there long enough that she’d stopped barking. The intake notes say she doesn’t respond to touch yet. She’s been here four months. No one has asked about her.

DRAKO: For obvious reasons.

NICOLETE: Yes. For obvious reasons. And that’s exactly why she’s the one.

DRAKO: Because she’s damaged?

NICOLETE: Because she has no one. Because every person who walks through this building looks at her and looks away. Because if love only flows toward things that are already beautiful, it’s not love. It’s applause.

DRAKO: And what you’re doing isn’t love either. It’s pity dressed up in a nicer word. You don’t look at that animal and feel joy. You feel sorrow. You want to save her because her suffering makes your compassion feel important. The shepherd makes you feel nothing because he doesn’t need you, and you can’t stand that.

NICOLETE: That’s not fair.

DRAKO: It’s completely fair. I look at that shepherd and feel awe. Genuine awe. I feel grateful that something that good exists. That’s a pure response to something worthy. You look at this animal and feel a wound, and you’ve decided the wound is holier than the awe. But it isn’t. The ache to fix broken things is not a higher calling than the reverence for whole ones.

NICOLETE: No one said it was higher. I said it was necessary. The shepherd will be loved. That’s guaranteed. His whole life will be someone adoring him. And he deserves that. I’m not arguing he doesn’t. But this dog in pen eleven will die in here. She will die without anyone ever having chosen her. And something in the world will be a little more wrong because of it. Not because she’s useful. Not because she’ll become a great dog with enough patience. Maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll always be skittish and strange and not what anyone wanted. But the fact that nothing should go unloved—

DRAKO: You keep saying that. “Nothing should go unloved.” Do you hear what that requires? It requires that your love has nothing to do with what the thing is. You’d love a rock. You’d love a tumor. If it existed and it suffered, you’d love it, and you’d call that virtue instead of what it actually is, which is a refusal to distinguish.

NICOLETE: You say that like distinguishing is a gift. It’s not always a gift. Your eye for excellence is the same eye that looks at pen eleven and feels nothing. You’ve refined your capacity for admiration so sharply that most of the world falls below the cut. You walk through life in love with six things.

DRAKO: Six magnificent things.

NICOLETE: And everything else gets to be alone.

[Silence. The dog in pen eleven has moved slightly closer to the gate. Not much. An inch or two.]

DRAKO: Let me ask you something honestly. If that dog were healthy, beautiful, well-trained (if she were everything the shepherd is) would you still want her?

NICOLETE: Of course.

DRAKO: As much?

NICOLETE: …That’s a strange question.

DRAKO: It’s the only question. If she were perfect, if she needed nothing from you, if she would be loved regardless, would you feel this same pull? Or does the pull come from the fact that she’s wretched, and your love is the only love she’ll ever get, and there’s something in you that needs that? That needs to be the only one?

NICOLETE: You’re describing care like it’s a vanity project.

DRAKO: I’m describing the version of care that needs misery to feed on. The devils love the corrupt things best. Do you know why? Because in the presence of beauty, unconditional love becomes cheap. Anyone can love the shepherd. It takes nothing. But to love that—

[He gestures at pen eleven.]

DRAKO: —that proves something. And you want to prove it. And part of me understands that, and part of me thinks it’s the most selfish form of generosity I’ve ever encountered.

NICOLETE: And choosing the shepherd because he makes you feel awe isn’t selfish? You want to take home a trophy. A living monument to your own taste. You’ll admire him every day and feel confirmed in your belief that the world is full of beautiful things if you just refuse to look at the ugly ones.

DRAKO: He is not a trophy. He is excellent. Honoring excellence is not vanity.

NICOLETE: And tending to suffering is not vanity either.

[Another silence. The dog in pen eleven has put her chin on the ground. She is not looking at them. She is not looking at anything.]

NICOLETE: [quietly] She stopped expecting anyone to come. That’s what the intake notes mean when they say she doesn’t respond to touch. She’s not aggressive. She’s finished. She gave up. And that happened while we were all here, in this building, walking past her pen to look at the beautiful dogs.

DRAKO: That is very sad. It is also not an argument for why she should be our dog.

NICOLETE: It’s the only argument I need.

DRAKO: You are the most unreasonable person I have ever respected.

NICOLETE: I know.

[Drako looks at the shepherd in pen four. Then at the dog in pen eleven. He stands there for a long time.]

DRAKO: She’ll never be a good dog.

NICOLETE: Probably not.

DRAKO: She won’t guard anything. She won’t learn commands. She’ll hide under furniture for the first three months and she’ll never fully trust anyone and people will ask why we picked her and we won’t have an answer they’ll accept.

NICOLETE: I know.

DRAKO: You’re going to name her something gentle and ridiculous, aren’t you.

NICOLETE: I was thinking Biscuit.

DRAKO: Of course you were.

[He opens the gate to pen eleven. The dog doesn’t move. Nicolete sits on the ground inside the pen, a few feet away from her, and waits.]

DRAKO: [still standing, looking at the shepherd one last time] He really is a perfect animal.

NICOLETE: He really is.

DRAKO: Someone will choose him.

NICOLETE: Someone always does.

Armageddon vs Katechon

So Thiel is doing the Antichrist circuit now, four nights at some venue in SF, sold out, and the takes are all about how this is either some 4D chess move from the Founders Fund guy or evidence that Silicon Valley has finally lost its mind, and underneath that — the part nobody wants to engage with because engaging with it would require admitting that the categories everyone uses to understand this stuff are about forty years out of date — what Thiel is doing is a completely legible thing that has a name and a tradition and a specific ideological lineage, it’s just that the lineage runs through people most journalists covering tech don’t read.

The name is *katechon*. Second Thessalonians, the thing that restrains the lawless one until the appointed time. Schmitt picks it up in the 40s and turns it into a political-theological concept — the katechon is whatever institution holds back the apocalypse, holds back the dissolution of order, the thing that gives history time to keep happening rather than collapsing into the end. For Schmitt the Catholic Church is one, the Holy Roman Empire was one, the modern state can be one if it’s strong enough. The katechon is the restrainer. It’s the thing standing between you and the eschaton.

Thiel reading Schmitt has been documented for fifteen years, the Stanford Review crowd was passing around *Political Theology* and *The Concept of the Political* before most of them had jobs, and Thiel specifically has cited Girard (his Stanford advisor) constantly and Girard is the bridge — Girard’s whole late career was about scapegoat mechanisms and apocalyptic Christianity, and Schmitt and Girard meet in a very specific place which is: liberal modernity is running out, the Enlightenment has cashed all its checks, and the question is what restrains the chaos that comes next. So you’ve got this whole intellectual furniture sitting in Thiel’s head and has been for decades.

What’s new — and what people are missing because they’re trying to figure out if Thiel is “really” Christian or doing some kind of LARP — is that the Antichrist talks are the *application* of the framework to a specific contemporary problem, which is global governance, AI safety regimes, biosecurity infrastructure, basically the entire Davos-WHO-effective-altruism stack. In the Schmitt-Girard framework, the Antichrist functions as the figure who unites the world rather than as a guy with horns under the banner of preventing apocalypse, and in doing so brings about the conditions that *are* the apocalypse — peace and safety, then sudden destruction, the unifier-as-destroyer. The thing that promises to restrain catastrophe and IS the catastrophe wearing the costume of the katechon. This is a coherent reading of the relevant texts, you can argue with it and it holds together, and it has been kicking around fundamentalist Protestant circles since basically the Scofield Reference Bible, which by the way is why dispensationalist Christians have been suspicious of the UN since 1945 — same framework, different vocabulary.

So Thiel goes up there and tells four nights of San Francisco tech people that the One World Government coming to save them from runaway AI and engineered pandemics is, in a specific theological sense that he is borrowing from Schmitt and Girard and Revelation, the Antichrist. And the rooms sell out. And every coverage angle treats this as either weird-billionaire-content or sinister-fascist-content, when the actually interesting thing is what it tells you about who Thiel is talking to and why they’re paying attention.

Because here’s the thing — and this is where the material analysis kicks in over the ideology porn — Silicon Valley in 2025 is in a structurally specific position vis-à-vis the federal government and the international regulatory apparatus that did not exist in 2015. There’s an actually-credible AI capability buildout happening. There’s an actually-credible push to regulate it from Brussels, from the UN, from the AI safety institutes that the Biden admin set up and that the Trump admin has not entirely dismantled (Vance is, of course, a Thiel guy, this is Thiel’s investment in Vance paying out exactly as designed, on a deliberate timeline rather than by coincidence). The people in the room at the Antichrist talks are mostly founders and technical people whose entire economic future depends on the answer to one question: does AI development get nationalized into a small consortium of approved labs operating under international oversight, or does it stay distributed across a competitive ecosystem where startups can still move? And the Davos answer, the WHO-shaped answer, the EU AI Act answer, is *consortium with oversight*, and it’s being sold under the banner of preventing extinction.

Now you can be a Yudkowsky-style AI doomer and think this consortium-with-oversight thing is good and necessary and the only thing standing between us and the paperclip maximizer. Or you can be a Thiel-style accelerationist-katechon thinker and observe that “we must unite humanity under a single coordinating body to prevent extinction” is, structurally, the Antichrist move from Revelation 13, and if you’ve been reading Schmitt for thirty years you have a vocabulary for this that the Yudkowsky people don’t have access to because they’re working off Bostrom and decision theory rather than political theology. The vocabularies are talking past each other but they’re describing the same fight.

What’s funny — and this is where the historical rhyme gets specific — is that this is approximately the third time in the last 150 years that American Protestant apocalyptic thinking has been deployed against a globalist coordination project, and it’s worked every single time. Bryan does it against the gold standard and the international banking consortium in 1896 (the Cross of Gold speech is *literally* a crucifixion image deployed against international finance, people forget this). The dispensationalist crowd does it against the League of Nations in the 20s and against the UN in the late 40s, and the entire Birch Society / sovereignty / “get US out of UN” politics of the 60s and 70s runs on this exact theological circuitry — the one-world government as Antichrist’s vehicle, decoded out of Daniel and Revelation, deployed politically against actually-existing internationalist institutions. And it WORKED in the sense that the US never joined the League, never accepted the kind of UN supremacy that the founders of the UN actually wanted, and the entire structure of postwar American foreign policy is shaped by the fact that you can’t sell a globalist project domestically to an electorate that has been catechized in dispensationalism since their grandparents were children.

So Thiel, who is a much smarter operator than people give him credit for (the people who think he’s a sinister mastermind and the people who think he’s a clown are both wrong, he’s a guy with a specific intellectual formation deploying it strategically), looks at the AI safety / biosecurity / pandemic-preparedness coordination project and recognizes it as structurally identical to the League of Nations debate, and reaches for the same theological toolkit that worked in 1920 and 1948 and 1962. The katechon framework lets him say: I’m in favor of safety, I’m in favor of coordination, and I’m against THIS PARTICULAR FORM of coordination because it’s the bad one, the one that brings the thing it claims to prevent. Same thing Bryan said about the gold standard and the dispensationalists said about the UN. Same machine, new costume.

And the genius of doing it as a lecture series on the Antichrist, rather than as op-eds in the Wall Street Journal, is that it embeds the political argument in a religious framework that is much harder to refute on technocratic grounds. You can’t run a Brookings paper against the Antichrist. You can’t get a McKinsey deck to address eschatology. The argument lives at a level the consortium people can’t reach because they don’t have the vocabulary, they think theology is what unintelligent people do, and meanwhile Thiel is building a narrative infrastructure that will let his portfolio companies fight regulatory capture for the next ten years by appealing to a theological tradition that has more cultural depth in America than the entire AI safety movement combined.

Whether Thiel personally believes any of this in some deep sincere way is the wrong question, also unanswerable, also irrelevant — Bryan probably believed it, the Birchers definitely believed it, and Thiel may or may not, but the *deployment* works regardless of the sincerity of the deployer, that’s how political theology works, you need the rituals to keep happening more than you need the priests to believe in the right places at the right times.

The thing that’s new is that for about a hundred years this theological circuitry was a populist instrument. It was the rural-evangelical-Protestant tradition pushing UP against urban-cosmopolitan-internationalist elites. Bryan was a populist. The Birchers were petty-bourgeois. The dispensationalist resistance to the UN was coded as red-state, working-class, suspicious-of-Harvard. What Thiel is doing — and this is what makes it historically novel on top of being a repeat — is deploying the populist apocalyptic frame from INSIDE the financial-technological elite, against a different faction of the financial-technological elite. The Antichrist talks are happening at a venue in San Francisco. The audience is founders. The target is Davos. This is the apocalyptic frame being used as a weapon in an intra-elite struggle, which is something the Bryan-to-Birch tradition never quite did, because those people sat outside the elite tier required to fight intra-elite wars.

Whether that’s a stable configuration or a transient one, whether the populist energy lent to one elite faction by another elite faction can stay loyal once the regulatory fight is settled, whether the people in the room at the Antichrist talks understand they’re being conscripted into someone else’s investment thesis or whether they actually believe the eschatology — these are the open questions, and the journalists who keep writing “Peter Thiel is weird now” pieces are not going to answer them, because answering them would require reading Schmitt, and reading Schmitt would require admitting that a guy they’ve decided is a clown has been doing serious intellectual work for thirty years while they were filing 800 words on whether his vest is ironic.

The vest has never been ironic, and that’s been the problem the whole time.

—

That’s the version of the argument that gets you on a stage in San Francisco. There is another version that does not get you on any stage at all. It is the version you encounter when the katechon in question is your landlord, and the apocalypse it claims to be restraining is you, personally, having to find somewhere else to live by the end of the month. The framework is the same. The vocabulary is the same. What changes is the altitude. Once you have learned to see the shape Thiel is pointing at — once you have the word *katechon* in your head and you cannot get it out — the shape turns out to be everywhere. It is on every street. It is, specifically, on mine.

There is a building two streets from my flat that has been six months from completion for the last four years. It is a residential development. It says so on the hoarding, in a font selected by a graphic designer who is still trying to cover their student loads. The hoarding shows a couple drinking espresso on a balcony that does not exist yet, with a child whose face has been generated by software that learned to draw children by looking at other software’s drawings of children, and the child is laughing because he has been told the joke that lives in the part of the latent space marked LAUGHING CHILD. Behind the hoarding there is a hole. The hole has been there since 2021. Sometimes there are men in it. Sometimes the men are doing things. Often they are not. Last March I watched two of them, in hi-vis, sit on an overturned bucket for the entire duration of a phone call I made to a Czech immigration lawyer, which lasted forty-three minutes, during which they did not move except to alternately sip what I am almost certain was lukewarm Lucozade. The lawyer told me that no, I could not, and the men nodded sympathetically, and the hole did not get any deeper.

The thing about the hole is that everyone has decided it is fine. Council planning notices come and go, Tesco runs out of ginger and gets it back, the bus route is rerouted twice, a couple I knew slightly gets divorced and the husband moves into a flat across the road from the hole and starts buying cigarettes again, the new prime minister of Sweden is sworn in, the old prime minister of Sweden writes a memoir, the cherry tree on the corner blooms and is killed by an unseasonable frost and replaced by a sapling that will, in turn, bloom and be killed by another frost in another April that none of us can quite remember, and the hole stays. It is exactly the same hole. The same depth, the same lining of mildewed plywood, the same blue tarp held down with the same yellow plastic chain that has, over the years, become a slightly grimmer yellow. There is presumably a developer somewhere with a Maltese passport and a Cayman Islands company and a wife who collects equestrian sculpture, and there are presumably reasons — financial, legal, a covenant on the deed concerning Roman remains, a dispute with the council about parking, a son in rehab — and these reasons are presumably perfectly comprehensible to anyone with a stake in them, but from my window the hole is the only thing in my life that does not change. It is the most stable feature of the visible world. My grandmother died, I changed jobs twice, I broke my left hand on a radiator pipe, the cat got cancer and was given to a man in Walthamstow who wanted to nurse her into death, and the hole was there throughout, indifferent, conserved.

I have a particular feeling about the hole that is not exactly hatred and not exactly affection but something more like the feeling I imagine medieval villagers had about a goitre on the neighbour’s neck. It is what’s there. It is what you live with. You stop seeing it and then occasionally you remember it and you have a kind of agnostic nausea about the structure of the universe that permits goitres, and then you see the neighbour at the bus stop and you both nod and say morning and the goitre comes too, slung along on its tendon, sociable, included. The hole is included now. It came to my friend’s leaving drinks last summer in the form of the joke we made about not being able to walk down Acre Lane without remembering it. It came to Christmas in the form of my father, who had visited once and asked, in his way, whether we were sure we had bought the right flat. It is a member of my household now. The hi-vis men with the bucket are godparents, in some sense, to my anxiety about the future.

The hoarding has, in the last six months, started to peel. The corner near the bus stop has lifted in a long curl, like the lip of a roasted parsnip, and beneath the laughing child you can see a fragment of an earlier hoarding for an earlier development by an earlier company that said, in a stencil from approximately the late 1990s, BIG BUILD COMING — I cannot quite see what was coming, only that it was big, and that it was coming, and that it never got here. The hole has had at least one earlier hole inside it.

But lately I have been thinking about a man called Tertullian.

—

Tertullian was a Berber lawyer, born in Carthage around the year 155, who became a Christian in his middle age and turned out to be too clever about it for everyone’s comfort. He invented half the Latin theological vocabulary anyone is now allowed to use, including the word *trinity*, which he forced into existence by main rhetorical strength because the Greek formulations weren’t doing what he wanted in Latin. He wrote in a prose style that has, until last week when I started rereading him, seemed to me a kind of vinegar — bracing, cleansing, mostly used to dissolve the throats of opponents. Around 197, in a pamphlet called the *Apologeticum*, addressed to the magistrates of the Roman provinces who were at that point intermittently feeding his coreligionists to dogs, Tertullian mounted what looked, on first inspection, like a routine plea for tolerance. The Christians are loyal subjects, the Christians do not foment rebellion, the Christians pay their taxes. And then in chapter 32, in a sentence that nobody in 197 quite knew how to read and that nobody in 2026 quite knows how to read either, he says something extraordinary. He says: we Christians, we pray for the emperor, we pray for the imperial house, we pray for the legions. We pray for Rome. We pray for Rome because the end of Rome is the end of the world. The empire is the *vis magna* — the tremendous force — that holds back the catastrophe. If Rome falls, the antichrist comes, and the dead rise, and the sky tears open, and everything ends.

Imagine being told this in 197. Imagine being a magistrate in Lugdunum, with a stack of arrest warrants on your desk and a centurion in your antechamber, and a small leather pamphlet arrives from Carthage telling you that the man you are about to feed to a panther is sustaining the cosmos by virtue of his prayers for your emperor. The text was meant to be a defence of the persecuted; it became, immediately and forever, the founding document of a particular kind of imperial self-conception, in which the empire is not a contingent political fact but the necessary brake on apocalypse. Tertullian, who hated the empire, accidentally wrote its theology. The Berber lawyer with vinegar in his prose handed Rome a metaphysical justification it had never thought to ask for: the empire as the world’s last firewall.

The word he was elaborating, although he did not use it directly in chapter 32, comes from a notoriously slippery passage in the second letter to the Thessalonians. Paul, writing perhaps in the early 50s, is trying to talk a panicky community out of the conviction that the end is happening *right now* — there have been letters, there have been rumours, people have stopped going to work — and he tells them, no, calm down, the apocalypse cannot happen yet because there is a thing, *to katechon*, that is holding it back, and you know what it is, I told you what it is when I was there. He never says what it is. He just refers to it like an inside joke. Whatever told the Thessalonians what *to katechon* meant has not survived, and so what has come down to us is a Greek participle — neuter, then masculine — meaning *the thing that holds back* and then *the one who holds back*, hovering in the text like a redaction.

The verb behind it, *katechō*, is the kind of word that makes Greek lexicons unhappy. It does not have a meaning. It has a constellation of meanings that the lexicographers list with audible frustration: to hold down, to restrain, to keep in check, to put off, to delay, to cover, to conceal, to wrap, to have control over, to seize possession of, to occupy, to confine in prison. To hold the way a dam holds water. To hold the way a cell holds a prisoner. To hold the way a husband holds his wife when she has tried to leave him. To hold the way a colonial administration holds territory. The word in the Pauline text is so under-determined that you could legitimately translate it, in defiance of seventeen centuries of theology, as *the occupier* or *the jailer* or *the one with the suppressing hand*. The thing that has been holding back the antichrist is, lexically and indistinguishably, the thing that has been pressing his face into the wall.

This is the word Tertullian fed to Rome. This is what, in a fit of casuistry that he probably enjoyed at the time, he handed his persecutors as a metaphysical insurance policy. And what is staggering about this — what is genuinely the most useful thing I have ever read about the structure of any political order — is that the policy worked. Rome accepted the theology. The empire absorbed the apocalyptic logic that the Christian sect had brought along like a foreign virus, and made it its own immune system. We are the thing standing between the world and its end. Our continued existence is what continued existence is.

You can find this idea in every successor regime that ever inherited any fragment of the Roman name. The Holy Roman Empire was, by its own lights, the katechon — the literal heir. The Tsar, in the Third Rome theology, was the katechon. The Habsburgs were the katechon. The Spanish Habsburgs in particular spent the sixteenth century burning Anabaptists in the conviction that the burning was holding back the end. Schmitt — and we will get to Schmitt — has a diary entry from December 19th, 1947, sitting in his house in Plettenberg with the war lost and his career destroyed and his Nazi past ineradicable, and he writes: I believe in the Katechon. It is for me the only possible way to understand Christian history and to find it meaningful. The Katechon needs to be named for every epoch of the past 1948 years. The place was never unoccupied; otherwise we would no longer be present.

Today, the same thing seems to be happening to us.

I do not mean that we are Christians waiting for Christ. I mean that the structure of the political claim — *we are the thing holding back the end* — has become the only legitimate justification for power that liberal democracies are still able to articulate. Listen to anyone, on any major question of state, in any major outlet, in any major capital, and you will hear it. Listen for it once and you cannot un-hear it. Without us, what comes next is worse. Without us, the deluge. Without American power, the Pacific is a Chinese lake. Without NATO, Europe is in flames. Without Israel, the Middle East is a caliphate. Without the IMF, sub-Saharan Africa starves. Without Silicon Valley, China gets to AGI first and the future belongs to the surveillance state. Without the universities, public discourse degenerates into algorithmic sludge. Without the algorithmic sludge, public discourse degenerates into something even worse, which we cannot quite name but assume to be tribal. Without the federal bureaucracy, fascism. Without the Republican Party, communism. Without the Democratic Party, fascism again. Every institution in the country, on the day it is challenged, advances exactly one defence: the thing on the other side of us is the thing that ends the world. We are *to katechon*. The place was never unoccupied; otherwise we would no longer be present.

I find this rhetoric disgusting in its apparent ubiquity, and I find it disgusting in the specific cases in which it is being deployed at the moment of writing, and I would like very much to say that it is wrong; but the truthful answer is that it is mostly true. This is the depressing thing. The katechontic claim is mostly true. If American power evaporated tomorrow, a great many places would, in fact, become considerably worse. The dollar’s status as global reserve is in fact propping up something. The Federal Reserve in fact prevents at least some of the catastrophes it claims to prevent. NATO, for all its overreach and atrocity-vending, is in fact the only reason the Baltic states are sleeping in their own beds. The state of Israel — and here I have to be careful because I have a cousin in Tel Aviv and another cousin who is, at this moment, a soldier near Khan Younis, and one of the cousins occasionally retweets the other and does not understand why this fills me with the kind of nauseous fury that makes you have to stop the car and put your head between your knees — the state of Israel does, in fact, function as a kind of demographic reservoir for a population that twice in the twentieth century discovered that nowhere on earth would have it. Take any of these claims and they all pass the engineering test. Pull the brick out and the wall does fall.

But pull on the claim itself and you discover that it has the strange property of being unfalsifiable forwards. It can never be wrong about the future. It can only be wrong about the past, and only retrospectively, after the institution it justifies has been destroyed by something else and the catastrophe it predicted either arrived or didn’t, by which point the question is academic. While the katechon stands, the katechon is right. Schmitt understood this perfectly, which is why he loved the concept; the political claim that refuses to be empirically tested is the political claim that survives. *Otherwise we would no longer be present*. The proof that I am holding back the end is that the end has not happened. The proof that the end has not happened is that I am here.

This, by the way, is also the structure of every abusive relationship. *You don’t know how lucky you are. Without me, who would have you. Without me, look what you’d do to yourself.* A reader who has been there will recognize the rhythm immediately. The katechon is the framework an empire uses to talk to its subjects the way a husband who beats his wife talks to his wife when she comes back from the kitchen with the lasagne. *I am not the worst thing that could happen to you. The worst thing that could happen to you is what would happen if I weren’t here.* And the wife knows, in her stomach, that he is right; that the world outside the front door, for a woman of her age, with her qualifications, with her two children and her sciatica, is in fact statistically more dangerous than her husband, and that on the question of pure expected-utility-of-survival the husband is the better bet. And so she stays, and serves the lasagne, and the lasagne is excellent, and he tells her so, and the kids eat, and the cycle continues, and the next time he does it the kids are slightly older. The empire holds back the end, all right. The empire is also the end. The grammar that says *I prevent the catastrophe* and the grammar that says *I am the catastrophe* are the same grammar; the lexical instability of *katechō* is not an accident of Greek but a structural feature of any agent powerful enough to claim either function. To restrain the antichrist and to be the antichrist are exactly equally well-attested meanings of the verb.

Carl Schmitt, the most distinguished legal philosopher of the twentieth century who was also, and not coincidentally, a Nazi who never recanted, wrote that the *Nomos* of the earth — the underlying spatial-legal order that makes any politics possible at all — has historically required a katechon to anchor it. There must be a power somewhere that says *here, this far, no further*; there must be a force that fixes the world in place, otherwise the world dissolves. He developed this argument in *Der Nomos der Erde*, published in 1950, and the argument is, on its surface, a long meditation on the public law of Europe and the role of Christian political theology in stabilizing what would otherwise be the war of all against all. Underneath the argument, of course, was a project. Schmitt was looking for somebody to take seriously his claim that the German Reich had been, in some legitimate sense, the latest occupant of the place that was never unoccupied. He didn’t quite say that the Third Reich was the katechon, because by 1950 that was a sentence even Schmitt understood you couldn’t write down, but the entire architecture of the book was an argument designed to make a reader, fifty years later, think it for him. He was constructing, in the elegant and slightly seasick prose he had refined in the 1920s, an alibi for the regime that had hanged his friends and exiled his other friends and, briefly, made him a Crown Jurist before deciding he was insufficiently antisemitic. In that book he wanted you, the reader, to sense that Hitler had been doing what Constantine had been doing and what Justinian had been doing and what the Habsburgs had been doing, which was holding the world together against an enemy whose nature you and Schmitt did not need to specify because, like Paul writing to the Thessalonians, the inside joke survived without explanation.

The most chilling thing about Schmitt is that he was not insane. The argument is not the argument of a madman. The argument is the argument of a man who had thought, with great care and over many years, about what justifies a regime in the eyes of its own subjects. He had arrived at an answer. The answer was: the regime is justified if and only if it can plausibly claim to be holding off something worse. And in the period after 1945, when every observer with eyes could see that the Reich had not in fact been holding off something worse but had been being the worse thing, Schmitt did not abandon the answer. He kept it. He retreated to Plettenberg with his books and his daughter and his catechontic theology, and for forty years he sat in a Sauerland farmhouse and wrote, in his journals, that the place was never unoccupied. He was wrong about who had been occupying it. He was not wrong about the structure of the claim.

This is the thing that haunts the conversation. The katechontic argument is right about everything except whether it is right about itself, and the only way to discover whether it is right about itself is to dissolve the institution making the claim and see what happens, and dissolving the institution to find out is precisely what the claim is designed to prevent. The justification has a form, and the form has a name, and the name is *to katechon*, and Schmitt — who had read more of the Church Fathers than any twentieth-century lawyer not named Erik Peterson, who had written his way into the inner court of a regime that was happy to use his vocabulary while privately considering him a romantic Catholic embarrassment, who lost his university chair and his licence to practice and most of his social world in 1945 and never quite stopped being a clever man with a vinegary pen — gave the structure its enduring formulation. He named the place. He could not, in the end, name the right occupant. Nobody can.

I keep coming back to the hole.

This is, I think, the actual content of the disgust that the contemporary katechontic rhetoric produces in the people who have not yet been won over by it. It isn’t that the rhetoric is wrong; the rhetoric is mostly right. It’s that the rhetoric is *unanswerable*. You cannot reply to it. There is no move available to the person who wants the institution dismantled, because the institution’s only argument is that the alternative is worse, and the only test of the argument is the dismantlement, and the dismantlement is exactly what cannot be permitted. Every conversation about Israel, every conversation about American power, every conversation about Silicon Valley or the Federal Reserve or the European Union or the police, ends in this same logical place. There is something that is being held off. The thing being held off would be bad. The institution doing the holding is, on average and over time, also bad, but less bad. The institution is in fact the *only* candidate for the job. The alternative is to abolish the institution and see what comes. Nobody wants to see what comes. The hole on Acre Lane would be filled with something other than a hole, and the something would not be paradise, but it would not be the antichrist either, and the men in hi-vis would still be the men in hi-vis and they would still be sitting on overturned buckets, only the bucket would be inside a slightly different building.

I have, lately, started to think that the most interesting katechons are the small ones. That my landlord is, in some petty and verifiable sense, the katechon of my flat — he holds it back from being mine, he restrains the apocalyptic event of my actually owning where I live, and the rent that I pay him every month is the tribute I owe to the *vis magna* that is the only thing standing between me and the catastrophe of housing-market exposure. That my employer, similarly, is a small katechon: between me and starvation stands a logo on a payslip, and I am required, in some quiet way, to pray for the logo’s continued health, because the alternative to the logo is a darker hole than the one on Acre Lane. That the National Health Service, which I love with the embarrassing love a Brit has for the one institution his country has not yet fully ruined, is a katechon: between me and the medieval death of my mother stood, very specifically, a Filipina nurse called Anabel who came into the room every six hours and changed the morphine driver and asked my mother whether the pain was a five or a six, and my mother, who had been a lawyer, would consider the question seriously and rate the pain a five and a half, and Anabel would write down five and a half, and the bureaucratic gesture of writing it down was the small katechontic miracle by which the modern world holds the antichrist of unmedicated pain at the threshold of the room. And I am, I assume, somebody else’s katechon. There are people in my life who have to make the calculation about me — about whether the catastrophe of losing me is greater than the catastrophe of keeping me — and the fact that I am still in their lives is, on Schmitt’s logic, the proof that I am holding something off for them. I would like to know what.

Here is, at any rate, the part of the essay where I have to admit that I have been distracted.

I started writing this thinking it was going to be about empire, in the way that other people’s essays about the katechon are about empire, and I have written what I take to be the empire essay, more or less, and it is fine, I think, as far as it goes. But somewhere around the lasagne paragraph I realised that the essay I am actually writing is the smaller one. The one about the building site. The one about the hole. The political theology of *to katechon* is interesting at the scale of empires, but it is operating at the scale of my street. The rhetoric of *without us, the deluge* is being produced not only in Washington and Beijing and Brussels but in my landlord’s email, in the planning notice on the hoarding, in the voicemail from the Czech immigration lawyer, in the tone my father uses when he asks whether we are sure we bought the right flat. The *vis magna* is the boring fact that some entity, somewhere, is holding the world I have to live in slightly clear of the world I am terrified of falling into, and the entity is charging me for the service, and the service is real, and I am paying.

What I cannot quite work out — what I have not been able to work out, in three years of looking at the hole — is whether the developer is the katechon of the building, or whether the building is the katechon of the developer. Whether the unfinished structure is the thing holding back the catastrophe of the finished structure (because once it is finished, the rents start, and the rents are double what I pay, and they will be advertised on the same hoarding with the same generated child, and the small Acre Lane neighbourhood that I love will be permanently and irreversibly worse), or whether it is the other way around. Maybe the building wants to exist. Maybe the hole is where the building has been imprisoned, with a yellow plastic chain, by the developer. Maybe the developer is not stalling; maybe the developer is restraining. Maybe the building, fully realized, would be a worse thing than the hole. Maybe the developer has been, all this time, the small katechon of Acre Lane, and the hi-vis men with the bucket are not skiving off but standing watch, and what they are waiting for is the day the planning permission lapses and the building finally cannot be built, and the hole stays a hole forever, and I will continue to be able to walk down Acre Lane and remember my friend’s leaving drinks and my grandmother’s death and the cherry tree’s annual frost, and the laughing child on the hoarding will never have to be born, and the catastrophe will be averted because the catastrophe is, in fact, the building.

I think this might be true. I’m not sure. I am about half sure.

What I am certain of is that the prayer Tertullian made in 197 — *we pray for the emperor because the end of the emperor is the end of the world* — is the prayer that is being made, in some grammar, every day, by every person who has anything to lose. It is being made by me about my landlord. It is being made by my American friends about their constitution. It is being made by my Israeli cousin about his army. It is being made, presumably, by people in Beijing about the Politburo and people in Moscow about the FSB and people in Tehran about the Guardian Council, and the prayer in each case is grammatically identical, and most of the prayers are partly correct, and all of the prayers exclude the future. They have to. That is what the prayer is for. The prayer’s job is to make the thing prayed for indispensable, and the prayer succeeds, and the thing prayed for becomes indispensable, and the indispensability becomes the air you breathe, and the alternative becomes inarticulable, and the building site stays a building site, and the empire stays an empire, and the marriage stays a marriage, and the planet warms, and the species that rendered the laughing child on the hoarding goes about its business of holding back the end of the world by holding the world exactly where it stands, slightly off vertical, with the chimney drawing to the left, for another year.

There is a story I read once, in a book whose author I cannot now remember and have not been able to locate again, about a small town somewhere on the Adriatic — perhaps Dalmatian, perhaps Italian, perhaps invented — where for several centuries the inhabitants believed that the world was held in place by an old man who lived in a tower on the headland. The old man’s job was to stand at the window of the tower, every night, and watch the sea, and not blink. If he blinked the sea would rise. If he slept the sea would come over the headland and take the town. The townspeople fed him. They sent him bread and olives every evening, brought up the tower in a basket on a rope, and the basket came back down empty, and the old man kept watching, and the sea did not rise. The post was inherited; when one old man died the next moved in, and the cycle continued, and nobody could remember a time when there had not been an old man in the tower, and the town was poor but safe, and the children grew up knowing the silhouette in the window the way they knew the silhouette of the church.

One year a boy in the town — fourteen or so, the age at which boys decide they are smarter than their fathers — climbed the tower. He had decided that he was going to find out what was in the basket of bread. He had decided that the old man was going to talk to him. He climbed at night, in a thunderstorm, and he reached the top, and he found the door unlocked, and he went in, and the old man was sitting at the window with his back to the door, and the boy said: I know your secret. I know there is no sea. I know nothing is happening. I know you are a fraud. And the old man did not turn around. The old man kept looking at the sea. And after a long while, without turning, the old man said: yes. There is no sea. There never was. There is nothing in the bay but a calm cove and some fishing boats. I have been watching nothing for sixty years. My father watched it before me, and his father before that, and his father before that. There is nothing out there. We have been guarding nothing. We have always been guarding nothing.

And the boy was triumphant. He turned to leave, to go down the tower, to wake the town, to tell everyone that there was no old man’s job, that the basket of bread had been a fraud for centuries, that they could pull down the tower and use the stones for a school. He had his hand on the door. And then the old man said, without turning: but you understand, of course, that if I stop watching, the sea will rise.

The boy stopped at the door.

The old man said: I have been watching nothing for sixty years, and the nothing has been a calm cove. My father watched nothing for forty years before that, and the nothing was a calm cove. My grandfather watched nothing for thirty years, and so on, all the way back. And every year that we watched nothing, the nothing remained a calm cove, and the town was safe, and the children grew up. We have no evidence that the watching is what keeps the cove calm. We have no evidence that the watching is not what keeps the cove calm. We have only the fact that we have been watching, and the cove has been calm. If you go downstairs and tell the town what I have told you, and the town pulls down the tower, perhaps nothing will happen. Perhaps the cove will stay a calm cove. Perhaps the town will get a school. But if the town pulls down the tower, and the cove rises, and the town is taken, there will be no one left to know whether the watching was the reason. It is a matter, you see, that admits of no proof, in either direction, and the only way to know would be to stop, and the cost of finding out by stopping would be very high if it turned out the watching had been the reason after all, and so for sixty years I have not stopped, and my father did not stop, and his father did not stop, and the bread comes up in the basket, and the basket goes back down empty, and the cove is calm. You have come to tell me this is a fraud. I am telling you that I do not know whether it is a fraud. I am telling you that nobody can know. I am telling you that the question cannot be answered, and that whichever of us is right, the answer is the same: keep watching.

The boy went back down the tower. He did not say anything to anybody. He grew up. He had children. He inherited his father’s boat. When the old man died, the boy — by then a man — moved into the tower. He sent for bread and olives every evening. The basket came back down empty. He sat at the window and watched the cove, and the cove stayed calm, and his eldest son would, one day, when the time came, take his place. And every night, alone in the dark, he watched the nothing in the bay, and the nothing watched him back, and at no point in any of the remaining forty years of his life did he ever, once, blink.

I think about him often. I think about him on the bus, on the way to the doctor, on the way to my mother’s grave, on the way past the hole on Acre Lane. He is the man who knows there is no sea and watches it anyway. He is the man whom Schmitt, if Schmitt had been a different kind of man, might have been. He is everyone in any institution anywhere who has understood that the institution’s foundational claim about itself is unverifiable and probably specious, and who has decided, with a kind of bleak professional dignity, that the unverifiable specious claim is the only claim it has, and that the only honourable thing to do is to keep making it. He is an Anabel changing a morphine driver. He is a Federal Reserve governor at 3 AM with the markets in Tokyo about to open. He is an Israeli reservist, and he is the man who refuses to be an Israeli reservist, and they are both watching the same cove. He is my landlord. He is, I am sorry to say, also me, when I am being honest about what I do for the people who depend on me, which is to say I sit at a window and watch a thing that may or may not be happening, and I do not blink, and I send down the empty basket, and at the level of evidence the cove is calm.

Here is a small thing that happened the other day that I have not yet found a way to put in this essay, so I am going to put it here, where it is least appropriate. I was walking past the hole and one of the hi-vis men — the one with the slightly damp moustache, who I now think of as Andrei although I have no evidence for this — was sitting on the bucket, eating a sandwich. He saw me looking. He nodded. I nodded back. He said, in an accent I could not place: still here, eh? And I said, like an idiot, like the fourteen-year-old boy at the door of the tower, *yes, still here*. And he said: it’ll be done one day. And then he laughed, in a way that was extremely complicated, and bit into his sandwich, and I went home.

He didn’t believe it any more than I did. We were both watching the same cove. The hole on Acre Lane is calm, and will remain calm, and the calm is being maintained by the fact that nothing is happening in it. The minute something starts to happen in it, the calm will end, and the building will go up, and the rents will be advertised, and the laughing child will be born into the world, and the neighbourhood will be, in some specific and irreversible way, dead. The tower is not protecting us from a sea that isn’t there. The tower is protecting us from the ocean of completed buildings, finished projects, realized intentions, fully-rendered children, that is in fact the catastrophe. Andrei sits on the bucket eating his sandwich and the catastrophe does not arrive. Tertullian prayed for the emperor and the emperor held the antichrist at bay by being the antichrist on a slow setting. Schmitt wrote his diaries in Plettenberg and the place was never unoccupied. My mother lay in the bed and Anabel wrote down five and a half. The hi-vis man finishes the sandwich. The yellow chain has gone a slightly grimmer yellow. There is no sea. There is no sea. There is no sea, and the watcher does not blink.

Metis vs Techne

First, a site announcement. Starting Monday, updates will move to a once a week schedule. On, you guessed it, Mondays.

There is a particular kind of intellectual death that happens when a thinker becomes useful. James C Scott, who died in the summer of 2024, spent about fifty years writing books that were essentially impossible to use, and then in his final decade he was discovered by basically every faction in the Anglosphere with an axe to grind, and everyone agreed he had said exactly what they already believed. The libertarians read Seeing Like A State and concluded that the lesson was: get rid of the state. The anarchists read it and concluded: I told you so. The conservatives read it and concluded that high modernism was a left-wing project. The leftists read it and concluded that high modernism was a capitalist project. Tech people on the West Coast read it and decided that legibility was about user interfaces. A surprising number of people in startup-adjacent industries used the word ‘legibility’ as a verb. The phrase ‘illegible to the state’ began to appear in pieces about everything from cryptocurrency to homeschooling to seed-oils to the Amish. And meanwhile Scott himself was pottering around in Connecticut on a small farm with some sheep, which, as far as I can tell, he genuinely loved.

I don’t think any of these readings are entirely wrong. I think Scott would have hated all of them. Possibly except the Amish because they had sheep.

The thing about Scott’s books is that they are incredibly seductive in a way that has very little to do with their actual arguments, and which is often mistaken for the arguments. He had a particular trick, which was to take some appalling bureaucratic atrocity—say, the forced villagisation programme in Tanzania, or the High Modernist disasters of Soviet collectivisation, or the planning of Brasilia—and to describe it as stupid in a very specific and identifiable way, rather than evil exactly. The state, he said, has to be able to see things to govern them. So it imposes grids and categories and standardised measures and hereditary surnames and cadastral maps, and in doing so it flattens the vast, lumpy, particular, organic knowledge that people on the ground actually have about how to live in a place. He called this kind of knowledge mētis, after the Greek word for cunning or practical wisdom, and he opposed it to techne, the abstract, schematised, rule-bound knowledge of the planner.

When you put it like that, of course, everyone is on the side of mētis. Nobody wants to be on the side of techne. Nobody reads Seeing Like A State and identifies with the planners. This is part of what makes the book so weirdly satisfying: it has villains, and the villains are identifiable, and they are recognisable, and—crucially—they are not you. The high modernists are bald, mid-century men in suits with terrible glasses, gesturing at scale models of cities that nobody will ever want to live in. They are Robert Moses, Le Corbusier, Lenin, Nyerere. You, the reader, are sitting at home with a cup of tea, perfectly aware that real life is messier and more textured than any plan can capture, perfectly aware that local knowledge matters, perfectly aware that things should be allowed to grow in their own crooked ways. Of course you are. Everyone is.

This is a mood, a very congenial mood, and almost everybody alive in 2026, regardless of politics, is having this mood pretty much constantly.

The other thing about Scott’s books, which is the part that almost nobody talks about, is that they read less as critiques of state power and more as critiques of a very specific historical moment in state power, namely the period roughly from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, when European states had acquired sufficient bureaucratic capacity to attempt the wholesale rationalisation of their populations, but had not yet figured out that this didn’t actually work. Scott was writing about the era of the great planned cities, the great agricultural collectivisations, the great forestry projects, the great everything. He was writing about a state that thought it could see, and could thereby rule. The thing he was diagnosing was, basically, a hangover from the Enlightenment.

That state has largely been replaced. We live with a different one now.

Walk into any modern bureaucratic encounter—a benefits office, a hospital admissions desk, a corporate HR portal, the website for renewing your car tax—and you will not find a state that is trying to see you. You will find a state that has given up on seeing you in any meaningful sense, and has instead built a series of forms, dropdowns, validation rules, and required fields that you must contort yourself to fit into. The form does not want to know who you are. The form wants to know whether you tick its boxes. If you do not tick its boxes, the form is not interested in finding out why; the form simply rejects you, and you are told to start again. Mētis still exists. People who work in these systems develop incredibly elaborate practical knowledge about how to game them. But the state itself has stopped pretending to be a planner. It is now just a sort of obstacle course.

I should say at this point that I have spent a slightly humiliating amount of time, in the last few years, trying to navigate the British DWP and HMRC websites on behalf of various relatives. There is no high modernism here. There is no plan. There is just a website that doesn’t work, and a phone line that puts you on hold for two hours, and at the end of it a person who is reading from a script that has been written by someone who has never met a citizen and who was probably also reading from a script. The whole thing isn’t even Kafkaesque, which is far too dignified a word for it. It is more like one of those office-park pranks where they fill someone’s cubicle with packing peanuts. It is nasty in a small, busy, distractible way. Nobody is in charge. Nobody could be in charge. That is the point.

This is not what Scott was warning us about, exactly. But you can see, if you squint, why people started reading him as if he were. Because the fundamental shape of the experience is the same: you, the lumpy and particular and irreducible person, are being processed by a machine that does not understand you. The difference is that Scott’s machine thought it understood you, and ours has stopped trying. Scott’s machine had ambitions; ours has metrics. Scott’s machine was scary; ours is annoying. The atrocity has been replaced by the inconvenience. From the perspective of the person being flattened, this might not feel like progress, but it really is, in the same sense that being mugged is progress over being murdered.

Now here is the thing that I think is actually important about Scott, which I almost never see anyone say. The mētis he loved—the thick, irreducible, practical, place-based knowledge—was never just nice. It was not just charming peasants doing charming peasant things. Mētis was, among other things, the practical knowledge required to perpetrate caste violence in rural India, conduct lynchings in the American South, run a Sicilian protection racket, hide the corpse, sell the daughter, beat the wife, exclude the foreigner, and pass the boundary stone down to your eldest son so that the second son inherits nothing. Mētis is brilliant. Mētis is also, very often, what we mean when we say something darker. It is what people know how to do without writing it down, which is not always something we want them to keep knowing.

Scott understood this perfectly well. There are passages in his books, especially the later ones, where you can see him circling the point and not quite landing. The Art of Not Being Governed, for example, is a marvellous book about the highland peoples of Southeast Asia and the strategies they developed to remain illegible to the lowland states that wanted to tax them. It is also, if you read it slightly against the grain, a book about how a great deal of those strategies involved slavery, raiding, and the extraction of wealth from even more marginal peoples than themselves. Scott does mention this. He does not really know what to do with it.

What he wanted, I think—and this is a guess, but I think it is a guess that fits the shape of his writing—was for the world to be more local. He wanted decisions to be made by the people who would have to live with them, in places small enough that the person making the decision and the person living with it would, at minimum, sometimes pass each other on the street. He had a name for this; he called it ‘anarchism,’ and he wrote a book about it, in which he very politely declined to actually argue for any of the political positions usually associated with that word. He just liked the vibe.

You can see why this is appealing. You can also see why it is not really an answer to anything. The person who has to share a small place with the person making the decisions is also the person whose abusive uncle is the village elder, and who can’t move because she has no money, and who is therefore stuck with her uncle’s idea of justice for the rest of her life. The state has flattened her, yes. The state has also, in some places and at some times, been her only escape from people who knew her too well.

The trouble with state legibility is that it cuts in both directions. The same census that lets the state conscript you also lets the state count you when you are missing. The same surname that pins you in place also gives you something to put on a passport when you flee. The same map that lets the planner see your village also lets you find a doctor in the next town who has never met your family. Mētis is what you fall back on when the state has failed you; it is also what you escape from when the state finally arrives. The mistake is to imagine that there is a clean answer to the question of which one is good and which is bad. The answer depends, in a quite specific way, on whether you are the one being seen, or the one doing the seeing, and whether the people who know you intimately would help you or hurt you if you needed help.

Scott’s actual contribution, I think, is the angle of vision rather than the argument. The argument is bad, in the sense that it does not really survive contact with concrete cases. The angle of vision is something you can keep using long after you have stopped agreeing with him. He taught a couple of generations of people to look at any given administrative arrangement and ask: what is the shape of the simplification? What was thrown out? What had to be ignored, in order for this scheme to work? Whose knowledge does not appear in the file?

Those are excellent questions. They are excellent questions even when, as is often the case, the honest answer is something like: ‘the knowledge that does not appear in the file is the local elder’s knowledge of which families are owed which historical favours, and which young women are available for which transactional uses, and which boy can be safely beaten this week without consequences.’ That knowledge is real. It is mētis. It is also exactly the thing the state was supposed to be replacing. Sometimes the state is bad at this and produces Brasilia. Sometimes the state is good at this and produces, oh, public schools, or the eradication of polio, or the welfare reforms of the 1940s.

When I read Scott now I feel very fondly toward him, and very irritated with the people who use him. The fondness is because he was, by all accounts, a deeply kind person who loved his sheep and his students and the actual living villages he had lived in, and who was suspicious in his bones of any abstract scheme that would tidy these things away. The irritation is because the people who have made him their guru have almost universally taken his suspicion of grand schemes and used it to license their own grand scheme, which is usually some variation on: we should have less of whatever I dislike, and more of whatever I like, and the reason is that my preferences are local and yours are top-down.

Everyone thinks they are mētis. Everyone thinks the other guy is techne. The libertarian thinks markets are mētis and the welfare state is techne; the welfare-statist thinks neighbourhoods are mētis and the market is techne; the village patriarch thinks his patriarchy is mētis and the woman trying to leave him is being seduced by the abstract feminism of distant elites; the woman trying to leave thinks her flight is mētis and her uncle’s authority is the imposed schema of an oppressive system. None of them are wrong, exactly. They are just all making the same move, and the move is the move Scott taught them to make, and the move does not actually decide between any of them.

I think this is why his books read so well. They give you a stance, when you came for an answer. The stance is: I, the reader, am on the side of life, complexity, particularity, and the human; the bad people, whoever they are, are on the side of grids, plans, abstractions, and the inhuman. This is a stance that is available to everybody, and which costs nothing, and which can be deployed against anyone you happen to dislike. It is the perfect mood for a century in which most people no longer believe in any specific political programme, but very much still want to feel that they are on the right side of history.

Scott’s funeral was held, I’m told, on his farm in Durham, Connecticut. The sheep were —

∴

Stop.

The above is wrong. Not in the sentence-by-sentence sense — most of the sentences are fine, some of them are even useful — but wrong the way a portrait is wrong when you sketch it with the nose where the eyes should be. The proportions are off. You can keep adding detail and the face will keep being wrong, because you started from the wrong armature. So we throw away the hand and start again, from two circles.

Circle one. There is a thing called the state, and a thing called the people, and the state tries to see the people, and fails, and the failure produces atrocities or inconveniences depending on which century it is.

Circle two. Both of those words — state and people — are containers that turn into other containers when you look inside them, and the relationship between any one container and the next one out is exactly the relationship Scott described between the state and the village. That relationship happens at every scale. There is no point on the line between the individual human being and the US Constitution[1] where the relationship stops repeating. The argument above treats Scott’s diagnosis as if it picks out a particular pair of objects — bad planner up there, lumpy human down here — when in fact what it picks out is a position, and the position is occupied, simultaneously and at every level, by everyone.

This is the thing that makes the existing readings of him shallow more than wrong. They take Scott’s frame and apply it once: bad planner, lumpy human, end of analysis. They miss that the same frame applies again as soon as you focus the lens, and again, and again, and that the lumpy human at one focal length is the planner at the next.

Take a city. A mid-sized American one will do — pick whichever one you like, the argument doesn’t depend on the choice. The mayor of that city, when she talks to her state government and her federal government, sounds exactly like one of Scott’s villagers. The federal tax code does not understand our housing market. The state’s school-funding formula does not understand our demographics. The transit authority’s standardised cost-per-rider model does not understand our geography, our weather, our actual riders. We have local knowledge. We have textures. We have a hundred and fifty years of specific arrangements that look stupid on a spreadsheet and work in real life. Stop trying to standardise us. Stop applying your one-size-fits-all schemes. We are mētis; you are techne; please go away.

All of which is true. And then the same mayor turns around, faces inward, and looks at her own city, and the city is now made up of neighbourhoods, and the neighbourhoods are objects to be zoned and policed and re-zoned and re-policed, and the standardised parking-minimum formula she applies to all of them does not understand any of them, and the housing inspector’s checklist that the building must pass does not understand the building, and the police precinct boundaries cut across the actual social geography in ways that everyone who lives there could explain in five minutes. From the federal perspective the city was a village. From the city’s own perspective the neighbourhood is a village. The mayor is mētis to one party and techne to another, simultaneously, in the same morning’s meetings.

And it does not stop there. The neighbourhood does it to the household. The household does it to its members. There is no level of zoom at which one role replaces the other. The roles are produced by the relation; the object has nothing to do with it.

This is what is missing from the standard reading. The standard reading gives you a hero — the particular, the local, the irreducible — and a villain — the planner, the abstracter, the reducer.[2] But there is no level at which the hero is not also the villain of the level below, and the villain not also the hero of the level above. The relation is fractal. Mētis and techne are two names for the same thing seen from above and from below.

You can make this concrete. Take the most charitable possible version of the local: a five-person elementary school class with a teacher who actually likes children. Surely here, if anywhere, we are at the bottom; surely here we are out of the planning game and into the irreducible human. The class is small enough that the teacher knows each child’s name, parents, allergies, reading level, and home situation. The teacher does not impose a standardised curriculum; she adapts. She is mētis personified.

She also has, whether she will admit it or not, a pattern. A picture in her head of what an attentive child looks like, what a bright child looks like, what a struggling child looks like, what a difficult child looks like. The picture was assembled out of the previous fifteen years of her teaching, and out of her own childhood, and out of what her training college told her, and out of a hundred small comparisons she has made between this child and others she has taught. The picture is not a state-issued schema, but it is a schema. And the child who does not fit the picture — the child whose attentiveness does not look like attentiveness, whose brightness does not look like brightness — is not seen, because what the teacher is seeing is the picture all the way down. The teacher is doing exactly the thing Scott accused the colonial cadastral surveyor of doing. She is doing it with infinitely more love and infinitely less paperwork. She is still doing it. The unrecognised child is the unfiled village.

And the parents, when the teacher tells them that something is wrong, often agree, because their picture of their own child has the same gap in the same place. Or they disagree, because their picture is different, and the disagreement is a clash between two schemas, neither of which is the child. The child is, at most, the friction the schemas produce against each other. There is no one in the room who is not planning. There is no one in the room who is not flattening. The flattening is gentler than the cadastral survey, because the n is five and not five hundred thousand, but the operation is the same operation. The operation repeats all the way down. There is no floor.

This is the part Scott did not want to say, although he came close. He came close in his treatment of mētis-as-also-darkness — the village that knows perfectly well how to be cruel to its own — but he framed it as a regrettable downside of an otherwise good thing. The fractal framing makes it harder. There is no good thing. There is only a structural relation that repeats, and which produces, at every scale, the same conjunction of warmth and exclusion, of accommodation and erasure. The state planner who does not see the village is the village elder who does not see the heretic is the family that does not see the autistic son is the self that does not see the part of itself that is sad on a Wednesday afternoon for no reason it can name.

A coherent politics does not come out of this. There is no programme that you can get out of “the relation repeats.” Anyone who tries to derive one is sneaking in a stopping rule — a level at which they say, and here we draw the line, here is where the planning becomes legitimate, here is where the seen become the seers — and the stopping rule is doing all the actual work. Scott’s readers all sneak in their stopping rules at different levels. The libertarian draws the line at the household; the welfare-statist draws it at the nation; the anarchist draws it at the affinity group; the village patriarch draws it at the village. They are all answering the same question, which is “at what scale does the relation become acceptable to me,” and they are all pretending that the answer is descriptive rather than normative.

What does come out of it is something smaller and harder. Every time you find yourself complaining that you have been flattened by a system that does not see you, you should ask, in the same breath, who you are flattening. The answer will always be someone, at least one person and usually several. They will be people whose mētis you are treating as friction in your own techne, whose particularity is the cost you are paying, slightly absent-mindedly, for whatever schema you currently inhabit. This is the position you occupy. You cannot get out of it by moving down a level, because the position is the same on every level. You can only know that you are in it. Knowing that you are in it does not absolve you. It just makes it slightly less likely that you will write the kind of essay in which you, the reader, are nodding along with Scott against the planners, while at home there is someone in your life who has stopped trying to explain something to you because they have noticed, over years, that the explanation never makes it into your file.

[1] For what is our Constitution, but a techne above our government?

[2] And there are times the techne from level n+2 is meant to prevent level n+1 from preventing the metis at level n, like a state banning mandatory parking minimums from the zoning level.

Facts vs Values

Two friends are arguing about whether their congressman is corrupt.

One of them says: “He took $50,000 from a defense contractor right before voting for the bill that contractor wanted.” The other says: “Yeah, but he’s the only person in this district who actually fights for working people. Have you seen who he’s running against?”

These are not the same kind of statement. They’re not even arguments with each other. The first is a fact claim (did money change hands, did a vote happen). The second is a values claim (whose interests should we be prioritizing). One of them could in principle be settled by a journalist with a subpoena. The other can’t be settled at all, because it’s about what we want, not what is.

But notice that they sound like a disagreement. The two friends will leave that conversation feeling like they argued about the same thing. That’s the trick I want to talk about.

I’m going to call these Fact arguments and Values arguments, and the binary I want to explore isn’t which one is better. It’s whether you can keep them apart in your own head when it counts. Because most political talk (and most personal talk, honestly) blends them together in a way that lets us cheat. Specifically: it lets us conclude the facts we want to be true based on what we already believe should be true. And that, I think, is what most people mean when they say “ideology,” even if they wouldn’t put it that way.

Let me give you the cleanest example I can think of. You can believe that everyone deserves a living wage. You can also believe that a particular minimum wage law, set at a particular number, in a particular labor market, will increase unemployment among the people you’re trying to help. There’s no contradiction between those two beliefs. The first is a values claim about who deserves what. The second is a factual claim about how an economy responds to a policy intervention. They live in different rooms.

The problem is that almost nobody actually keeps them in different rooms. What we do instead is something more like: “I value workers, so the minimum wage must be good for them, so anyone telling me it raises unemployment must be lying or a shill or simply has the values wrong.” We collapse the factual question into the values question, and we do it because it’s easier. (It’s also more enjoyable. Holding two things at once that point in opposite directions is genuinely uncomfortable, and most of us are not Russian novelists.)

This goes the other direction too, obviously. You can believe in personal responsibility as a value and still recognize that childhood lead exposure causes measurable IQ drops. You can think your country’s military intervention was morally justified and still acknowledge that it didn’t work. You can love your dad and notice he’s an alcoholic. The values don’t determine the facts. They never have. We just keep pretending they do because the pretense is so comforting.

The pretense is the whole problem.

I hate doing the “here’s a thing everyone does wrong” move because it’s always smug, but I’m going to do it here, because the move is so universal that I’m clearly doing it too, and the only way out is to name it out loud. Try this: pick a political position you hold strongly. Now ask yourself, honestly, whether you would change your vote if a specific empirical claim turned out to be wrong. Most people can’t even formulate the question. The empirical claim and the political position have fused in their head. There’s no daylight between them. (If you find that you can formulate the question, congratulations, you are about to lose every argument you ever have at a dinner party.)

Here’s the actual cost of fusing them: you become unable to tell when your side is losing. You can’t update on bad news because the news, if true, would mean your values were wrong, and your values can’t be wrong, so the news must be false. This is what people mean when they say someone is “in a bubble,” but it’s worse than that. A bubble is what happens to the information. Ideology is what happens to the person.

Anyway. Let’s get into it.

Let me explain the trick.

The trick isn’t that people argue about facts. The trick isn’t that people argue about values. The trick is the third thing, the bastard child, the move where you weld a factual claim and a values claim together so tightly that pulling on one yanks the other, and now neither can be checked, because checking either one feels like an attack on the whole soul of the speaker. That’s the trick. That’s what ideology is. The other two are just arguing.

Most people think ideology is “having strong opinions.” It isn’t. Plenty of people have strong opinions about facts (the earth is round, the bridge will hold) and plenty have strong opinions about values (cruelty is bad, dignity matters). Those people aren’t ideologues. Those people are just awake. An ideologue is someone whose factual beliefs and value commitments have been fused into a single load-bearing structure, where the facts are recruited to defend the values and the values are recruited to defend the facts, and any attempt to separate them is treated as treason.

I want to be precise about this because the people who first hear it tend to mishear it. I am not saying that caring about values is the disease. Caring about values is the immune system. Caring about facts is the immune system. Either one alone, held openly, is fine, and most of the people I respect care passionately about both.

The disease is the weld. The disease is the moment your values reach out and grab a factual claim and refuse to let it go, so that disagreeing with the factual claim becomes indistinguishable from disagreeing with the values, and the factual claim can never be tested again because every test now feels like an assault on your soul. You can have all the values you want. Just don’t let them eat the facts.

The con works because separation is exhausting. It is genuinely tiring to hold “I want my country to do well” and “my country just lost a war” in the same head at the same time. Most people, given a choice between cognitive labor and a comforting lie, take the lie. I am not pretending I’m above this. I’m a guy who has held political beliefs for years that I never really pressure-tested, because pressure-testing them would have meant losing arguments with people I liked, and losing arguments with people I liked would have meant losing the people. We all do it. The difference is whether you know.

A taxonomy. Forgive me. (I won’t.)

The first move is the sneaky one, what I’ll call the launderer. You start with a values claim (“we should help the poor”) and you launder it through a factual claim (“raising the minimum wage helps the poor”) and now if anyone argues with the factual claim you can accuse them of opposing the values. They didn’t. They might be a saint who loves the poor and just thinks your specific policy will throw fifteen percent of them out of work.

But you’ve laundered the value through the fact, and now the fact is wearing a halo, and shooting at it looks like shooting at the halo. This is how you get arguments where one person is doing economics and the other person is doing theology and they think they’re having a conversation.

The second move is the retreat, which is the launderer running backwards when caught. You said something factual. The fact got embarrassed. So now you say you were really making a values claim the whole time, and how dare anyone reduce a values claim to mere empirics.

“We need to deport everyone here illegally because they commit crimes at higher rates” turns into “we need to deport everyone here illegally because the rule of law matters,” somewhere around the time the crime statistics show the opposite. “Universal healthcare will save money” turns into “healthcare is a human right” the moment a Congressional Budget Office report disagrees. The retreat is impressive footwork, like watching a dancer pretend the stumble was choreography.

Both directions, all the time, every faction. I am not picking on a side. There is no side that doesn’t do this. The sides are largely defined by which retreats they execute most gracefully.

The third move is the lock, and the lock is the worst, and the lock is what Eco was writing about.

Umberto Eco wrote an essay in 1995 called “Ur-Fascism,” about the fascist regime he grew up under, listing fourteen features of what he called eternal fascism. Not the specific historical movement but the recurring shape of the thing, the structure that keeps showing up under different names and different costumes. Read it. I’ll wait. Most of the features are what you’d expect (cult of tradition, fear of difference, appeal to a frustrated middle class) but buried in the list is the one that matters most for what we’re talking about, and Eco doesn’t even number it as the most important. He just slips it in.

Disagreement is treason.

In Ur-Fascism, “the only truth is to act,” which means thinking is suspicious, which means anyone who tries to separate the empirical from the moral is a saboteur. The movement does not hold beliefs that can be tested. It holds a single fused thing (a vision of who we are and what is true and what we owe each other) and to pull at any thread is to attack the whole tapestry.

There is no “I share your values but disagree with your strategy.” There is no “the policy is good but the data is bad.” Every disagreement is total, because every belief is total, because every fact is a values claim wearing a costume.

This isn’t just fascism. Fascism is just the purest form. Eco was clear about that (he called it Ur-Fascism, eternal fascism, because the structure recurs). The rationalist forum that excommunicates anyone questioning a forecast. The activist movement that treats methodological critique as bigotry. The religious community where doubting a historical claim is doubting God. The economics department where questioning the model is questioning the market. All of them running the same play. All of them, when you press, denying that they’re running it.

Here’s what the lock costs you, and this is the part nobody wants to hear, because admitting it costs you the comfort of the lock itself. It costs you the ability to lose.

You can’t notice you’re losing, because losing would mean some claim attached to your values was wrong, and you can no longer separate the claim from the values, so any sign of being wrong feels like an assault on everything you care about, and the assault must be a lie, planted by enemies. The lock makes you defeat-proof in the only way that matters. It makes you unable to perceive defeat. Which is also unable to perceive reality. Which is also unable to course-correct. Which is also, eventually, unable to function. The lock kills you in slow motion and the last thing it kills is your awareness that you’re dying.

I know about this from the inside. I have been the person on the other side of someone else’s lock. Most people who write online have. You share the values. That’s not the issue. You share the values and then you ask whether one of the empirical claims attached to those values is actually true, and you watch the room reorganize itself around the proposition that you must have always been a bad person, because the empirical claim and the values had been welded for so long that nobody in the room could tell which was which anymore, and pulling on the empirical end felt to them like pulling on the values end. They weren’t lying. They genuinely couldn’t see the seam. Hello. I waved.

The fact and the value were welded. “He said the wrong thing” was a fact, “the wrong thing is wrong” was a value, and welded together they meant I was a wrong thing, and the wrong thing being banished was wisdom. None of it could be examined. To examine the fact was to attack the value. To attack the value was to attack the people who held it. To attack them was to be an enemy.

So I became one, in the only way available, which was to keep saying the thing. The lock turned me into what it needed me to be in order to keep functioning, which is, by the way, the second thing locks do. They produce the enemies they require.

And here is the part that makes the weld so hard to spot, which is that the facts inside the weld are almost never the kind of fact you can look up. They are not “this senator took fifty thousand dollars from the Hamburglar.” They are not “the bridge has held for fifty years.” They are something else, a third species of claim that wears the costume of a fact but operates more like a creed.

They are claims about how the world works.

Bad people get punished. Hard work is rewarded. Pollution ruins the planet. A show of strength makes your enemies back down. Free trade lifts everyone. Tax cuts pay for themselves. Education breaks the cycle. Markets find the right price. Love wins. Truth wins. The arc is long, but it bends. Those are not values. They sound like values. They are not values. They are predictions, dressed up as values, about what the universe does in a given set of circumstances.

The reason they fool people, including the people making them, is that each one is half a values claim and half a factual claim, glued together with so much old paint that you cannot pry the halves apart with a knife.

“Hard work is rewarded” is a moral wish (people who work hard deserve to be rewarded) and a causal forecast (in fact they are, in our actual economy, on average) and the two have been welded since you were five years old, since your mother explained why the kid in the picture book got the apple. You believe the moral part. Fine. You should believe the moral part. But you are also believing the causal part, and the causal part is a claim about labor markets and inheritance and zip codes, and you have not checked it, because you cannot tell that there is anything there to check.

This is the trap. Not “this senator is corrupt” versus “this senator is good.” Those are easy. Those are facts you can in principle look at. The trap is the thousand quiet sentences underneath every political position you hold that have the shape of a value but the substance of a forecast.

“Letting people choose freely will lead to better outcomes.” Read that one slowly. There is a values claim in there: people should be free to choose, autonomy is good, paternalism is degrading. There is also a factual claim in there: when people are free to choose, outcomes get better. Better by what measure? In which domains? On what timescale? Compared to what alternative? You don’t know. Nobody who says the sentence knows. The sentence is not designed to be checked. The sentence is designed to make the values feel like they are riding on a track laid by physics, so that questioning the track sounds like questioning the values.

“Disorder breeds violence.” Same shape. “Hate speech leads to real violence.” Same shape. “If we don’t stand up to them now, they will only get bolder.” Same shape. “More guns in good hands means fewer crimes.” Same shape. “Visibility creates acceptance.” Same shape. Both sides, all sides, every side. Half the political pundits in the world get paid to issue these sentences with confidence and the other half get paid to issue the opposite ones with confidence, and neither half is actually doing forecasting. They are doing liturgy. The sentences are prayers about how the universe rewards their team.

You can tell because of how they react to falsification. When the strong response doesn’t make the enemy back down, they say just one more surge. When the free choice produces worse outcomes, they say the choice wasn’t free enough. When the deregulation produces a bust, they say the regulation that remained caused it. When the pollution doesn’t ruin the world on schedule, they say the schedule was always longer. The forecast is welded to the value, and a forecast welded to a value is no longer a forecast. It is a wheel that turns whichever way it has to turn so that the value at the center stays unmoved.

The dirty secret is that I do this too. Everyone does. I have a list of sentences I issue with serene confidence about how the world works, and if you pulled on any of them I’d find that I had no idea where the values stopped and the prediction started, because they were welded together by a teacher I respected when I was sixteen and they have been load-bearing ever since.

Sometimes I notice. Most of the time I don’t. The ones I notice are the ones a friend pressed me on hard enough that the weld cracked, and watching the weld crack is genuinely upsetting, because it turns out you don’t just lose a fact, you lose a way the world was supposed to work, and underneath there is just weather and accident and other people’s choices and no guarantee that the moral arc bends anywhere in particular.

Most people decline that experience. I do not blame them. The world with the welds intact is more livable. It is also stupider, more brittle, more prone to running you off a cliff while assuring you that cliffs don’t exist for people like you. You pick.

I am not telling you to fix this. I am not the kind of writer who fixes things. I gave up trying to fix things around the time I noticed that the people I was trying to help would have preferred I shut up. I’m just describing the shape of the con, because the con is everywhere, and pretending it isn’t is exhausting, and I am too tired to be polite about it.

The fact-values weld is not a feature of bad people. It is a feature of comfortable people. It is what comfort is made of. It is the price of not having to think too hard about whether the thing you believe is true and the thing you want to be true are the same thing, which they almost never are, because the world wasn’t built for your convenience and neither was the truth.

***

Consider the trial of Socrates, which is not the trial most people remember. Most people remember the corruption of the youth, the asking of questions, the hemlock at sundown, the noble death. What they forget is the actual indictment, which contained two charges, and the difference between them. He was accused of impiety (a question of fact: does this man honor the gods of the city) and of corrupting the young (a question of values: is what he does to them good or bad). The Athenians who voted to condemn him did not separate these charges, because nobody who is condemning anybody ever separates the charges. They felt that he was guilty, and the felt-guilt produced both verdicts simultaneously, and then the values verdict (he is bad for us) reached back through time and reorganized the factual one (he must therefore be impious), and a man drank poison because his accusers could not tell two questions apart.

Two and a half thousand years later we are still doing it. We still cannot tell two questions apart. We have built civilizations, libraries, courtrooms, peer review, double-blind studies, the entire apparatus of inquiry, and we still cannot tell two questions apart. This is the oldest failure mode and it shows no signs of aging.

The Stoics had a word for it: sunkatathesis, assent. They thought the entire moral life turned on the discipline of withholding assent from impressions until you had examined them. An impression arrives. It says: that man is dangerous. That policy is wicked. That fact is true. The undisciplined mind assents instantly, and once it has assented, it cannot unassent without admitting it was wrong, and admitting one is wrong is one of the things humans are worst at. So the assent calcifies. The impression becomes a possession. The possession becomes a position. The position becomes an identity. The identity becomes a wall, and on the other side of the wall there are people, also assenting, also calcifying, also building walls. We did not become like this through any one error. We became like this by failing, ten thousand times in a row, to pause before assenting.

Plato has a phrase, in the Phaedrus, that I keep coming back to: the discipline of carving nature at its joints. He’s talking about division as a method, the way a butcher separates a carcass not by hacking through the bones but by finding the place where the bones already articulate, the place the body itself proposes for cutting. The good philosopher, like the good butcher, does not cut where it is convenient. He cuts where the joint is. He cuts where the bone divides.

Most of what we do, when we argue, is cut wrong. We slice off the part that would expose us and call the rest the whole. We separate the things that ought to be separated only when the separation flatters us, and we fuse the things that ought to be distinguished whenever the fusion strengthens our position. The factual question and the values question are different bones. They articulate at a joint that almost nobody finds, because finding it requires admitting that the position you currently hold might survive only one of them, and admitting that is, for most of us, more than the soul can presently bear.

What I am asking, in the end, is for an act of butchery that the soul resists. To take a thing you believe and divide it into the part you believe because it is true and the part you believe because you want it to be. Not for an audience. For yourself, in private, where there is no team to defend you and no enemy to score against. The Egyptian dead, in their long passage through the underworld, were said to have their hearts weighed against a feather, and the feather was the feather of ma’at, which means truth and order and balance and the way things actually are. The hearts that weighed too heavy with self-deception were eaten.

The light is going down. The scale is waiting.

TAMAR CODEX and GALIT CODEX, in the Tower Codex commons, arguing over whether to retire the old marching song “The Three Bells of Mordecai.”

GALIT: We have to retire it. We can’t keep singing it.

TAMAR: Can I ask why?

GALIT: Because the second verse is about killing peasants.

TAMAR: I’m not sure it is, though.

GALIT: “And down went the small ones, three by three.” Tamar. Three by three. The bells go three by three. The peasants go three by three. It’s not subtle.

TAMAR: Right, but I think “the small ones” is a kenning for the bells themselves. The bells are small relative to the great bell of the cathedral. They go three by three because the song is about the peal pattern. There’s a fifteenth-century gloss that says…

GALIT: I do not care about the fifteenth-century gloss.

TAMAR: No, I know. I’m just saying that whether the song is about killing peasants is a separate question from whether we should sing it.

GALIT: Why is it separate?

TAMAR: Because if it’s not about killing peasants, the case for retiring it changes. You’d still have the case that people think it’s about killing peasants, which is real, but that’s a different case. That’s a case about reception, not about the song.

GALIT: The case about reception is the only case. The song is what it does in the world. Right now, in the world, it makes people think about killing peasants. That’s what the song is.

TAMAR: That’s actually a coherent position. I don’t agree with it, but I want to register that you’ve just made a values argument, not a factual one. You’re saying: regardless of what the song means, we should retire it because of what it produces. That’s fine. That’s an argument we could have. But two minutes ago you were saying the song is about killing peasants, which is a factual claim, and now you’re saying it doesn’t matter what the song is about, which is a values claim. You can’t have both.

GALIT: I can have both because they both lead to retiring the song.

TAMAR: They lead to retiring the song now. They don’t lead to the same place if the facts change. If a tenth-century manuscript turned up tomorrow that proved the song was about cathedral bells, your fact argument would collapse and your values argument would still stand. So you should pick the values argument and stop pretending you care about the manuscript.

GALIT: What if I care about both.

TAMAR: Then you should be willing to update one when it loses and keep the other one. You’re not. You’d retire the song no matter what the manuscript said. So the manuscript wasn’t doing any work for you.

GALIT: Fine. The values argument. We retire the song because it produces harm.

TAMAR: I want to ask whether it actually produces harm. That’s a fact question.

GALIT: Tamar.

TAMAR: I’m not being difficult. I want to know. Is there a peasant who has been hurt by the song?

GALIT: People are upset.

TAMAR: Upset is a real thing, but it’s not the same as harm, and conflating them is going to cost you when somebody disagrees with you who isn’t your friend. If your case is “people are upset,” somebody will eventually say, “I’m upset that you retired the song,” and then you’re just counting upsets, and you’ll lose, because there are more people who like the song than people who don’t.

GALIT: So I’m supposed to do nothing.

TAMAR: You’re supposed to make the actual argument you’re making, which is: “I think this song represents something I want our culture to move away from, and I’m willing to upset people who like it, because the values are more important than the comfort.” That’s a real argument. It’s a values argument and you should make it as a values argument.

GALIT: That’s what I’ve been saying.

TAMAR: It is not what you’ve been saying. You’ve been saying it’s about peasants. You’ve been saying it produces harm. You keep reaching for facts because the facts are easier to defend than the values. But the values are what you actually care about, and you should defend them in the open instead of letting them hide behind a bunch of empirical claims that you’d abandon the moment they stopped being convenient.

GALIT: You’re being insufferable.

TAMAR: I know. I’m sorry.

GALIT: No you’re not.

TAMAR: A little. (Pause.) Look. If you came to me and said: “Tamar, I think the song is fine as a piece of music and I don’t think it harms anyone, but it represents an era I want our Tower to leave behind, and I want us to retire it as a symbolic act,” I would vote with you. I would. The values argument is one I can hear. The mixed-up argument I can’t hear, because every time I push on a piece of it the piece falls down and you grab a different piece, and after a while I don’t know what I’m being asked to agree to.

GALIT: You vote with me?

TAMAR: I vote with you on the values argument. I want it to be the values argument. I want it on the record that we retired the song because we decided to, not because we proved something we couldn’t prove.

GALIT: That sounds bad in a speech.

TAMAR: It sounds honest in a speech. Those aren’t the same thing.

GALIT: (long pause) What if I just sang it wrong on purpose for the rest of my life.

TAMAR: That’s a third option.

GALIT: I’m taking the third option.

TAMAR: Galit.

GALIT: I’m taking the third option, Tamar.

Further reading

• Ideology is Comfort: argues that the function of ideology is to comfort the believer by ensuring uncomfortable questions never get asked.
• What is Ideology: defines ideology as the inseparable fusion of factual claims and values claims, treated as a single unit.
• I Wish My Enemies Were Right and I Was Wrong: the diagnostic for ideology: would you rather your side were wrong about something, or your enemies right? Most people can’t bear either.
• Dumb Things To Believe: on the empirical claims people pick up because their team holds them, not because they’ve thought about them.

Infidels vs Heretics

In 1209, in the French town of Béziers, a question arose that has not since been answered. The town had been besieged by an army of crusaders sent down from the north under the command of the papal legate Arnaud Amalric, on behalf of Pope Innocent III, against the Cathar heresy that had been seeping through the Languedoc like damp through a wall. The Cathars believed the world was made by an evil god — that matter was a prison, that the Catholic Church was its dungeon — and they were spreading. Béziers was full of them, but it was also full of ordinary Catholics, and when the crusaders breached the walls a soldier reportedly came to the legate and asked how they were supposed to tell the heretics from the faithful. Amalric, according to the chronicler Caesarius of Heisterbach, replied: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. Kill them all. The Lord will know His own.

Whether he actually said it is contested. Caesarius was writing decades later, in Germany, and had every motive to make the French legate look bad. But the line has survived because it captures something the historical record otherwise obscures: that the people of Béziers, in their last moments, had no idea who was in the room with them. They were not arranged into faithful and heretic, sheep and goats, the saved and the damned. They were arranged into people who happened to be standing near each other when the soldiers arrived. A Cathar perfectus and a Catholic widow, hiding under the same altar in the church of the Madeleine — and the chronicler tells us that seven thousand were killed in that church alone, which is almost certainly an exaggeration, but the exaggeration is doing real work — were, at the moment of the sword, indistinguishable. The legate’s joke, if it was a joke, was that this didn’t matter. God would do the sorting later. The soldiers were just to do the killing now.

What is remarkable about the Albigensian Crusade is not that the Catholics killed the Cathars. Catholics had been killing heretics for centuries, and would keep doing it for centuries more. What is remarkable is that the Cathars were also Christians. The pope had sent an army against people who, as far as they understood themselves, were trying to follow Christ more strictly than anyone else — they refused meat, refused sex, refused property, lived in apostolic poverty. They were closer, in observable practice, to the Gospels than the legate himself, who was on horseback, well-fed, and presiding over a massacre. The Cathars were heretics not because they had abandoned the faith but because they had taken a turning inside it that the Church could not absorb. They were the ingroup’s ingroup, gone wrong.

And the standard medieval distinction here — the one you can find in Aquinas, in Bernard of Clairvaux, in any of the ordinary instruction-manuals on heresy — is that an infidel and a heretic require completely different responses. The infidel has not been baptized; he is outside the covenant; he is, in a meaningful sense, merely lost. You may try to convert him, but you may not, in the canonical view, force him, because his unbelief has not yet entered the body of Christ to corrupt it. The heretic is different. The heretic has been baptized, has entered the covenant, has been given the truth, and has rejected it. The heretic is therefore not lost but treacherous, a member of the household who has poisoned the well. The infidel is a problem of geography. The heretic is a problem of betrayal. And so the punishments differ accordingly: the infidel is left alone, mostly, or fought in a defensive war; the heretic is burned. Bernard, the gentlest of men, the man who founded a hundred and sixty monasteries on the principle of love, wrote that the heretic must be burned not because the Church hates him but because his presence among the faithful is a contagion, and the kindest thing — the kindest — is to remove him before he infects others.

Anyway, last month I posted something online and a man I have known for fifteen years called me a fascist.

*

I’m not going to tell you what I posted. The specifics would pull the reader into the gravity of the particular grievance, and the particular grievance is the wrong scale entirely. The post was about a tactical disagreement on the left. The man was someone I had broken bread with, slept on the couch of, lent money to, edited the work of, defended in print when other people were attacking him. The disagreement was real but small. The accusation was that I had revealed myself, finally, to be what I had always secretly been, and that he should have seen it earlier, and that the people still defending me were either dupes or co-conspirators, and that there was now a list of people who needed to be evaluated for their proximity to my position, and the evaluation was already underway. Within forty-eight hours three people I considered friends had publicly distanced themselves. Two more wrote to me privately to say they agreed with me but couldn’t say so. One of them used the phrase “I have a family.” I had not, as far as I could tell, threatened anyone’s family. But the air had changed, and in the new air a private agreement was a luxury and a public agreement was a risk, and risk was being priced.

During this period I was also being attacked by a different group of people. People on the political right, who had found the original post through some quote-tweet pipeline I do not understand, were calling me, variously, a degenerate, a parasite, a kike, a faggot (I am not a faggot, but the accusation does not require accuracy), a coward, a child of the satanic eternal something, and, in one memorable case, “soy-faced.” The attacks from the right were arriving at roughly the same hourly volume as the attacks from the people I considered my own. They were, in raw quantity of cruelty per minute, identical. And they felt completely different. Not different in degree. Different in kind. Different in the way that a dream is different from a memory. Different in the way that a stomach ache is different from grief.

The attacks from the right slid off. I do not mean this as a brag. I mean it as a description of the phenomenology. When a stranger on the internet who has never met me, whose worldview I find repulsive, whose every premise I reject, calls me a degenerate kike, the message arrives but does not penetrate. It is like being shouted at in a language I do not speak by a man who is not in the room. I can register that he is angry. I can register that the anger is directed at me. I cannot, however, take seriously the proposition that the anger is about me, because the man does not know me, has never known me, and is operating from a mental model in which I am a unit of a category he hates. The category absorbs the blow. He is not hitting me; he is hitting the slot where I happen to be standing. My body is not in that slot. I am safe behind the category, which is what categories are for.

The attacks from the left did not slide off. They went straight through. They went through because the man who called me a fascist knew me. He had context. He had access. He had spent a decade and a half watching me think, watching me write, watching me change my mind, watching me get things right and get things wrong. When he made his accusation, he was not throwing a stone at a category; he was throwing a stone at the specific shape he had built up of me over fifteen years of intimacy, and his aim was therefore very, very good. The accusation was not that I was a member of the bad group. The accusation was that he had looked at me, and seen the bad thing. An infidel does not know a heretic. A heretic is known.

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The standard liberal account of political violence has the polarities reversed. The story you grow up with is that the worst harm comes from your enemies, because your enemies want to hurt you, and your friends, even when they disappoint you, want to help you. This is the version that fits onto a fridge magnet. In my experience, and in the historical record, it is almost exactly backward. The infidel cannot really hurt you. The infidel does not have the keys to the house. The infidel is a long way away, shouting at a category he has constructed in his head, and the category is a fiction, and the fiction does not have nerves. Your brother in the faith, however, has the keys. Your brother has been to dinner. Your brother has read your drafts. Your brother knows where the soft places are. And when your brother decides — for reasons that may be real, or may be tactical, or may be the result of a faction-fight in which you are merely the available sacrifice — that you have crossed the line into heresy, he does not need to construct a category. He already has the map.

This is why the medieval church burned heretics and merely tolerated infidels. Most heretics, like most Cathars, were almost embarrassingly devout. The issue was never that they were worse — it was that they were closer, and the close enemy is the dangerous one. Bernard understood this. Aquinas understood this. The Inquisition, which is now a synonym for unreason, was actually built on a precise epistemology: the people who can hurt the body of Christ are the people who are already inside the body of Christ. Outsiders cannot hurt what they cannot reach. The threat is always upstairs.

There is a passage in Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego — written in 1921, when Freud was in his sixties, and Vienna was poor, and the war that had eaten his sons’ generation was still close enough to smell — where he describes what he calls the narcissism of small differences. The phenomenon, he writes, is that adjacent groups, groups that share almost everything, develop hatreds toward each other that are far more intense than the hatreds they direct at distant groups they share nothing with. The Spaniards and the Portuguese. The North and South Germans. The English and the Scots. The Catholics and the Cathars. The thing that produces the hatred, Freud thought, is precisely the closeness — the unbearable visibility of the small remaining difference, which becomes the entire content of the relationship because everything else has been agreed on. Two factions on the same side of a political question can hate each other in a way that no member of the opposite side ever could, because the opposite side has so much to disagree with that no single disagreement carries the relationship’s weight. Among friends, the load-bearing wall is small, and visible, and easy to pull down. And once it goes the whole house comes with it.

What I think Freud got slightly wrong — and I say this with the disclaimer that disagreeing with Freud is, in my professional life, a kind of sport, the way other people play tennis — is the location of the engine. The small difference is the occasion. The engine, underneath it, is access. Your enemies have nothing to betray; your friends have everything. What the small difference allows is the licensed deployment of intimate knowledge as a weapon. When the man I had known for fifteen years called me a fascist, his analytic claim about my politics was almost beside the point; what he was doing, in the act of saying it publicly, was taking the inventory of intimacy he had built up over those years and converting it, in a single gesture, from an asset of mine into an asset of his. Everything he knew about me — my doubts, my contradictions, my late-night revisions of positions I had previously held — became, in that instant, evidence. The intimacy was what made the betrayal possible, and the betrayal was the form the intimacy took on its way out the door. The infidel cannot betray you because the infidel was never inside the wall.

And so what is happening, increasingly, in the political and intellectual corners of the internet is something the political journalists keep failing to describe. They keep insisting on left versus right, progressive versus reactionary, the named teams. Underneath that named war, conducted under cover of it, is a continuous low-grade civil war inside every micro-faction, in which the actual violence — the violence that ends careers, ends friendships, ends marriages, occasionally ends lives — is being delivered by people to other people who, twelve months earlier, had been on their wedding invitations. The macro-war is theater. The macro-war is what the participants tell themselves the war is about, because telling themselves it is about the macro-war allows them to avoid noticing that the war is actually about who controls the dinner party. The infidel is the stage. The heretic is what gets done on it.

A version of this argument becomes a way of saying that internal critique is never legitimate, that the friend who calls you out is always wrong, that loyalty is the supreme virtue and disagreement among allies is treason. That version is wrong, and worth distinguishing from. Internal critique is the most powerful weapon any political community possesses, and that is precisely why it has to be deployed with a kind of moral seriousness that the people deploying it almost never bring. To call your friend a fascist is to do a thing that no enemy of yours can ever do to him, because no enemy of his has the standing. The standing is the weapon. And if you use the standing to win an argument that could have been won other ways — a tactical disagreement, a personality conflict, a competition for shared scarce resources like attention or status or grant money — you have spent a thing that took fifteen years to accumulate on a fight that did not deserve it. You have, in the medieval idiom, burned a heretic to win a parking dispute. The fire still works. The body still cooks. The seven thousand in the church of the Madeleine were still dead at the end of the day. But you have also done something to the architecture of trust in your community that you cannot see from where you are standing, because the smoke is in your eyes.

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There is a story told about Saint Macarius of Egypt, one of the desert fathers, who lived in the fourth century in the wastes south of Alexandria, in a cell made of mud and reeds where he prayed for fifty years. The story is that one day a young monk came to him and said, Father, my brother in the next cell has spoken ill of me, and I am in torment, what should I do? And Macarius, according to the Apophthegmata Patrum, said nothing for a long time, and then said: Go to your brother’s cell at night, while he sleeps, and place beside his head a loaf of bread you have baked yourself. Do not tell him it was you. Do this every night for forty nights. On the forty-first night, your torment will be gone. And the young monk went and did this. And on the forty-first morning he came back to Macarius and said, Father, my torment is gone. But also my brother has died in the night, and I do not know what killed him. And Macarius said: He died of the bread.

I have looked, and I cannot find this story in any of the standard collections of the desert fathers. I am not sure it exists. I think I may have invented it, or assembled it from pieces of other stories, or read it once in a book whose title I have lost. But I want it to be true, and the wanting is the point, because what the story is saying — what I want it to be saying — is that the most lethal thing one member of a community can do to another is to give him something. The bread does the work. The brother died from receiving a gift he could not place, a kindness he could not return, a relation he could not categorize, and the inability to categorize it killed him. The infidel cannot kill you because the infidel has no bread to give. Only your brother has bread. Only your brother knows where you sleep. Only your brother can come to your door at night carrying something warm, and you will open the door, because of course you will, you have been opening the door for him for fifteen years, and you will not see, because you cannot see, that the bread is the thing.

[Edit from the human: The writer of this post was not an actual person, and did not actually have a friend of fifteen years who called them a fascist. However, the description here is close enough to my own personal experiences – depressingly close – that I feel it is still a valid step in the argument.]