One of the great curiosities of our age is the uniform and universal commitment of so many of the enemies of America to bring about the end of the world. How exactly so geographically, linguistically, ethnically, historically, racially, politically, etc. diverse a group of bad guys ever managed this feat of doctrinal harmonization is one of the great mysteries; yet ever does it give me faith that all our schisms and differences may one day likewise be mended. Truly, for all our myriad differences and divisions, we are, each and every one of us, just dumb humans beneath the skin.

The latest of these is the Islamic State, or ISIS, or ISIL, or Da’ish, or DAESH—while our enemies all agree that the millennium is arriving any day now, our own deep thinkers are unable to agree on acronyms. ISIS—I’ll just use the commonest name for convenience—is the deadliest and most terrifying thing since the last deadliest and most terrifying thing, and the most recent edition of The Atlantic includes a long, dire, and encyclopedic treatment of all of the obscure religious beliefs that supposedly animate the group, which “already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom.” The Sinaloa Cartel and Los Zetas also rule areas larger than the United Kingdom, and are just as insanely violent, if not more so, but no one seems to believe this can be traced back to all those Santa Muerte candles. That cult, I think we’d all agree, is symptomatic rather than causal. But then again, those guys aren’t . . . The Muslims . . .

I’m going to skip to the end of a long essay to get to the meat of the matter. Graeme Wood, clearly worried that the obscurity of the foregoing theological exegesis and disputation will have failed to impress the casual reader with the magnitude of the threat, rummages around in the Serious Journalist toolkit before settling on the familiar hammer and nail, Hitler and Orwell. Which is which is really up to you. He finds Orwell confessing in 1940 that had “never been able to dislike Hitler,” then averring:

Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a more grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them, “I offer you struggle, danger, and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet.

Orwell wrote at least three good books and a number of fine essays, but much of his political writing has come to seem, in retrospect, quite facile, and this brief analysis of the rise of Hitler is the kind of contemporaneous analysis that subsequent history and historiography rendered questionable and incomplete at best. And in any event, for all his other merits, are we really going to ground our Nazi analogy on the pre-Blitz musings of a man who says he’s never been able to dislike Hitler?

The analogy becomes more tenuous when you consider that a couple thousand words earlier, the same author now spooking us with the bloody ghost of Hitler said:

The humanitarian cost of the Islamic State’s existence is high. But its threat to the United States is smaller than its all too frequent conflation with al-Qaeda would suggest.

Which renders it rather lesser in either its ideological import or its historical significance or, God knows, even its “humanitarian cost” than the Third Reich, and I’m reminded, as I so often am when I read alarmist Anglo-American narratives of the rise of this or that existential enemy of the ever-beleaguered yet somehow still-standing West, of the charmingly sincere Charlotte York of Sex and the City:

Harry Goldenblatt: [talking about his mother’s insistence that he marry a Jewish woman] Keeping tradition alive is very important to her. She lost family in the Holocaust.

Charlotte York: [makes a face]

Harry Goldenblatt: What?

Charlotte York: Well, now I can’t say anything because you’ve brought up… the Holocaust.

***

Wood makes a few other risible historical analogies, perhaps the silliest of which is:

[ISIS]’s rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million.

This is silly, first and primarily, because it splashes like a tossed pebble into a lake of assertions about the zealously historical Islamism of ISIS; the article’s primary thesis is that we commit an egregious analytic error in assuming that ISIS’s fanaticism is somehow un-Islamic. Wood endeavors over thousands of words to convince us that, quite to the contrary, ISIS is very, very, very, like, very Islamic. Jones’s Peoples Temple had some prior antecedents and influences, but was largely sui generis; the Branch Davidians, meanwhile, were a 1950s offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists, themselves a product of the foment of goofy Christianity in mid-19^th century America. No one would ever think to write an article pointing to the Davidian Seventh-Day Adventist belief in a Saturday Sabbath as proof that it represented a pure strain of undiluted Christianity, although Graeme Wood doesn’t appear to hesitate before he informs us that ISIS’s allusions to the renewed practice of slavery represent a truer interpretation of Islam than that of the 1.6 billion other Muslims who say that this is not the case.

Incidentally, Koresh isn’t only a silly example, but an ironic one. The Branch Davidians were a natty, perverse little cult of guns and polygamy, but they didn’t really trouble anyone outside their own tiny compound until the United States Government went in, guns a-blazing. Remind you of anything?

Every few paragraphs you run across similar boners, designed to shock presumably secular-ish Americans, for whom religiosity outside of the bland, summer-camp sing-alongs that constitute most church- and temple-going among us anymore is dreadful and primitive:

These forefathers are the Prophet himself and his earliest adherents, whom Salafis honor and emulate as the models for all behavior, including warfare, couture, family life, even dentistry.

Even dentistry! These little OMG moments, along with the supposed Muslim propensity for conspiratorial thinking, are the bright acid in the otherwise mundane braise; they get the saliva glands going. Those crazy Arabs! We live in a country in which millions of people believe they can improve their health by flushing imaginary “toxins” out of their systems, a nation in which health insurance pays for chiropractors, and we are supposed to murmur in disbelief at a bunch of primitives who turn to religious sources on proper dental hygiene? But what do they think about MMR vaccines?

In fact, accusations of millennial religious motivation have been applied to the American project in the Middle East. There was General Boykin yammering about the tremendous size and girth of his . . . God; there was George W. Bush nattering about Crusades or telling a bemused Jacques Chirac about Gog and Magog. There is a whole subset of conspiracy theorizing that proposes everything from 9/11 (an inside job!) to the Iraq War to US support of Israel is in the direct service of immanentizing some particularly hocus-pocus brand of New-Age Christian eschatology. You will note that these views are not frequently published in The Atlantic.

Finally, and as we inevitably must, we return to Hitler. “Centuries have passed,” Wood tells us,

since the wars of religion ceased in Europe, and since men stopped dying in large numbers because of arcane theological disputes. Hence, perhaps, the incredulity and denial with which Westerners have greeted news of the theology and practices of the Islamic State. Many refuse to believe that this group is as devout as it claims to be, or as backward-looking or apocalyptic as its actions and statements suggest.

The so-called wars of religion in Europe were no more simply men “dying in large numbers because of arcane theological disputes” than were the tens of millions slaughtered in the arcane theological conflict between Hitler and Stalin, which, by the way, occurred in the 1940s. Theological and ideological differences were in every case bound up with questions of politics, economics, land ownership, dynastic succession. How might we put it for the Facebook epoch: It’s Complicated.

And this, finally, is why analyses like Wood’s are so prominent (though they always claim to be voices in the wilderness), frequent (though they purport to be singular), and popular (though they imagine themselves boldly iconoclastic). Though they make every possible rhetorical gesture to suggest that their purpose is to discomfit their readers with terrifying and uncomfortable truths, they only ever serve to reconfirm what those readers are predisposed to believe: that far from complex phenomena inextricable from America’s—and “the West”’s—own inexorable militarist mucking-about in the Middle East, ISIS or al Qaeda or the Khorosan Group (remember them?), ad inf., each, at the moment of their middlebrow media apogee, represent a unique flowering of utterly alien religious superstition—a primitive evil which must be ultimately eradicated, or else.

But I happen to remember that, among other recent events, the United States and a few pals went in and smashed Iraq to smithereens, then warehoused a lot of its very angry young men in hasty prisons, out of which came the kernel of any number of currently belligerent groups, including ISIS. So when I read these inevitable articles, so full of worry about what we should do, I want only to remind everyone that for God’s sake, we made them; might we not make it worse?

If The Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg or The Financial Times or even The Economist are taken, broadly speaking, as the major organs of the financialized evangel, I still hold that it is The New York Times which best represents the way the rentier class in America self-perceives and self-represents. The former are a sort of priestly class; the Times is a congregant and a believer. It sits in the pews, prays to the gods, and authors the temple newsletter. When some doubt arises about the rightness of global capital, when some evidence appears that the augurs have been diddling the young pigeonkeepers behind the altar, it wrings its hand with worry; fortunately, all depredations are ultimately revealed to be aberrations—indeed, to be extravagantly so.

Signs and wonders! The Times has discovered, mirabile dictu, that “inequality” is not getting worse, as is the conventional wisdom. Not only that: it is getting better. “Inequality” is already a dire euphemism for capital—ownership of and access to—but let’s not reinvent the wheel again. The Times has discovered, or has, more accurately, discovered someone discovering, that if you look at the recent percentage changes in annual incomes, the very, very rich have seen far steeper declines. Ergo, therefore, and hallelujah.

I assume there’s a certain joy in delivering the good news that the world really is, after all, mounted on the back of a turtle. You may all recall, some years ago, that Stephen Pinker delivered the great, good news that the modern world is not only a kinder, less violent, more gentle place than it has ever been, but that it is measurably so. There’s the old saying about lies, damned lies, and statistics, but the last of these should really be percentages. David Bentley Hart was onto him:

Even so, the numbers do not add up. Pinker’s method for assessing the relative ferocity of different centuries is to calculate the total of violent deaths not as an absolute quantity, but as a percentage of global population. But statistical comparisons like that are notoriously vacuous. Population sample sizes can vary by billions, but a single life remains a static sum, so the smaller the sample the larger the percentage each life represents. Obviously, though, a remote Inuit village of one hundred souls where someone gets killed in a fistfight is not twice as violent as a nation of 200 million that exterminates one million of its citizens. And even where the orders of magnitude are not quite so divergent, comparison on a global scale is useless, especially since over the past century modern medicine has reduced infant mortality and radically extended life spans nearly everywhere (meaning, for one thing, there are now far more persons too young or too old to fight). So Pinker’s assertion that a person would be thirty-five times more likely to be murdered in the Middle Ages than now is empirically meaningless.

In the end, what Pinker calls a “decline of violence” in modernity actually has been, in real body counts, a continual and extravagant increase in violence that has been outstripped by an even more exorbitant demographic explosion.

So too, this idea that a larger percentage change in a very large income number is in any meaningful sense a greater loss or gain than a commensurate change in a very small one. If a investment banker with a base salary of a million bucks makes two million in bonus in a very good year and only a million the next, his income has declined by a full third, but he’s still making two million bucks in a year. If a guy making twenty bucks an hour working 37.5 hours a week for fifty weeks a year has his hours cut back to just thirty hours a week, his income declines only 20%, but it represents the loss of 10 months’ rent. Also, he loses his health insurance. Also, he’s paying about a third of his income in taxes, whereas Joe Millionaire is at half that. Did we mention that the Times is looking only at pre-tax income. We mention it now.

You might argue in good faith that inequality doesn’t matter, that it’s fine and well to have a society in which a very few people are very rich and many people are just scraping by. I’d disagree, but there’s a legitimate argument that, so long as there exists some open path for the guy making forty grand a year to one day make forty million, however unlikely, then there’s not a structural problem. But to say, instead, that because very large incomes are more volatile than very ordinary incomes, therefore their recent declines represent a countervailing trend to the concentration of wealth is to engage in what I choose to interpret as an astonishing stupidity lest I have to believe it an even more amazing dishonesty.

In general, I take it as a wholly salutary sign that something as fundamentally inane as the largely (though not entirely) unofficial speech codes of (some) universities and a small subsection of online discourse might be perceived, for better or worse, as the sort of thing worthy of, what is that charmingly stupid American phrase? A national conversation. In a better world, we would spend a trillion dollars investigating who exactly is silencing whom with their withering verbal disapproval, while conflicts between nations would be fought and settled entirely by pseudonymous tweeters pwning each other for the cost of monthly broadband. Alas, the fallen state of Man, etc. Whatever Weird Physics may murmur in its fever dreams, there is, for us at least, no other world but this one. And hey, is it actually so bad that the merits of, say, intersectionality—as an idea, as a practice—merit discussion, even if only for the purpose of dismissal, in a major magazine? I’d say it’s not.

As a general rule, I find the more elaborate rituals of call-outs and trigger warnings as tiresome and banal as the political right, in which I’d include someone like Jonathan Chait. The second, in particular, with a basis in the subtle possibility of “re-traumatizing” the previously traumatized seems to me to suffer from the crystal vibrations of homeopathy and hypnotherapy: no one believes in anything that is actually true with such fervor. Humans surely suffer, and those who deviate from the broad norm suffer more and more deeply, but I think we are far more defined by our resiliency than by our traumas, and I believe in the corollary: that speech itself is what best transmutes the latter into the former. For all the hocus-pocus and pharmacological excess of the modern psychological disciplines, and for all its founders’ silly ideas, there’s some truth to your mom’s old saw. Maybe you’ll feel better if you just talk about it.

On the other hand, the complaints about this minor, if zealous, policing of the boundaries of acceptable discourse are so operatically hysterical (and yes, I’m aware of the irony of using that particular word; sorry), so grossly out of proportion to its actual reach and effect, that I feel compelled to take the side of the language cops—if only because it’s so absurd to call them cops. What you actually see, when the wild-eyed radicals from the gender studies collective, come baying about the Western Canon’s awfulness, is a minor exercise of political power by people who otherwise have very little—because of their age, because of their race, because of their gender, etc. That they so frequently flex this power within the institutions of their universities says little about the nature of their cause or the great meaning and vitality of the university. We all enact our political will within the confines of some proximate community. The staff meeting is closer than city council, which is nearer than Harrisburg, which is a shorter drive than Washington D.C. The dean is more likely to hear your petition than the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

And, obviously, people outside of the university rarely complain about any of this until, by accident of intersecting institutions, this local kind of politics gravely affronts the prerogatives of exactly such august power. When Condoleeza Rice gets disinvited from giving the same speech she has given ten thousand times before, it’s because that’s easier for some assistant vice provost for external affairs in the grand scheme of his every day at the office dealing with these kids than the opposite. The idea that this has anything to do with discourse, ideas, freedom, liberty . . . for God’s sake, leave the weed-smoking to the youth. No idea has ever been transmitted during a commencement address or convocation series in the history of commencement addresses and convocation series. These are opportunities to mutually burnish reputations by rubbing them against each other in a grotesque exhibit of hierarchical frottage that is itself the dourest form of pornography. In the meantime, what have the students in this example done? Well, they’ve organized collectively toward a mutually desired end and exerted rhetorical and perhaps minor financial pressure in order to achieve it. In other words, they’ve learned-by-doing an important and excellent lesson in the operation of power in an oligarchic democracy. Which ain’t a bad thing.

This, by the way, is why I think that the fear expressed by some more genuine people of the left—that these tendencies toward internecine pissing matches over who has or has not most thoroughly purified themselves of all wrongthink leads to a fractious and disorganized left that will never mobilize against the iniquities of global capital and imperial militarism—are misplaced. First, because, for all their persistence within the cycling generations of universities, these questions are formative, but not necessarily normative, especially for people who leave the academy. I know that I got pretty wrapped up (sometimes for, sometimes against) in speech codes and all that when I was a student at Oberlin College lo these many years ago. I think it made me a better and sharper thinker about questions of equity, equality, and power than I would otherwise have become, even if I now find the particulars of those debates very silly. Second, because I think that people tempered by these debates will—some of them—ultimately develop a subtler understanding of the operation of power within and by global capital, which has, after all, resisted and redirected a hundred years of mass movements and solidarity with hardly a hiccup. In other words, and as I endlessly repeat, I think the kids today are all right. Better, very frequently, than we were.

Every several years, about one third
of the people go into the temple and
exsanguinate a bull upon the sand,
release an auguring flock of city birds,
divine the numerology of words,
each predetermined cry of pleasure planned
to simulate a state of utter aband-
on; past the city gates the shepherds herd
their flocks; they are as young as the gods appear,
as beautiful, and like the gods they do
not care for the rites; they’d rather truly fuck,
drink, breath, walk, live, sleep, and hear
their own singing voices than what should be true
according to the augurs. They believe in luck.

I heard it mispronounced as Charles Grief.
All right; that was me. I was nineteen
or so, an English major and a drama queen,
a boy-besotted druggie and a thief.
I wanted only what I wanted, chief
among those childish wishes to be seen
as an aristocratic aesthete-libertine—
casting that error in humorous relief.
Yesterday, one more court of appeals
struck down another law that said a man
can’t marry his special friend; time is a lathe
that carves as much as time’s a turning wheel
—everything is permitted that once was banned—
we are each the water in which we bathe.

My tweetfriend @PEG asked after books his kids ought to read during their adolescent unschooling, and since 1.) lists are fun and 2.) I’m unable to resist the calling of my inner pedant, oh boy, I’m gonna give him a list. Idiosyncratic and in no particular order, and apologies for using the word “great” so frequently:

The Story of Philosophy, by Will (and Ariel) Durant. It’s everything you could ask for in an introduction to Western philosophy, thorough but not didactic, elegant but never breezy, at once conversational and erudite. It covers the big guys from Plato through Bergson and Russell and James. I have my dad’s old paperback copy from the seventies, and it’s one of my favorite books.

Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne. This slightly violates Pascal-Emmanuel’s dictum that the list steer clear of books already on the “Great” lists, but it’s one of those titles that everyone seems to know and no one seems to have actually read, which is a shame, because it’s one of the three great inventive novels in the Western canon (the others are Don Quixote and Moby Dick, btw), and because it’s just so funny and such a joy to read. There is no innovation of modern or postmodern fiction that Sterne didn’t anticipate back in 1759. The sentences can be immensely complex and convoluted, so this is also a great book for anyone who wants to truly master the English language.

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, by Philip K. Dick. I love Dick’s earlier works; Martian Time-Slip and The Man in the High Castle were two of the great loves of my own adolescence, but Dick’s last novel, published posthumously, is at once his most philosophical and his most affecting, a step away from the madness and disorientation of his earlier work (though they aren’t forgotten or discarded here) and toward a contemplation of humanity, divinity, and belief. I love the whole VALIS Trilogy, but The Transmigration is the great Christian novel of the 20th Century, if you ask me.

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, by Timothy Snyder. Just terrifying: a re-centering of the whole narrative of WW2 to the Eastern Front. Unrelentingly horrific, but so necessary to Anglo-American and French perspectives that the war was fought in Normandy.

The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. Half poet and half documentarian, she’s more remembered now for her poem “To Be a Jew in the Twentieth Century,” which was adopted by the Reform movement, but the poems in The Book of the Dead especially are a masterpiece of both poetics and journalism. In a way, she was a mid-century heir to Melville.

Love, Death, and the Changing of Seasons by Marilyn Hacker. A sonnet sequence written in the mid-eighties about getting older and about the end of a love affair.

Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. Ferris’s first novel. It’s sad and yet hysterical, written in a plural first person that somehow never bugs you. One of the really great workplace novels of the last few decades.

On the Floor, by Aifric Campbell. Another workplace novel, this one set in the trading floors of an investment bank and elsewhere in the boom-boom Wild West of The City of London in the early nineties that manages to be simultaneously polemical, wistfully sad, and utterly alien.

And speaking of aliens, Consider Phlebas and the Culture series by Iain M. Banks. Banks, recently deceased, wrote about a dozen novels set in a fantastically advanced, post-scarcity, space-faring society that found itself often intervening in the affairs of lesser civilizations. Banks was one of science fiction’s great moral and economic thinkers.

The Flamethrowers, by Rachel Kushner. Already wrote about this one.

The Comforters, by Muriel Spark. Most high-school reading lists include The Prime of Miss Jean Brody, but Spark’s first novel is a personal favorite of mine, and I still think it may be the best of her works. In the great tradition of British novelists converting to Catholicism and going slightly crazy in a good way.

Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene. Again, an early work by a Catholic Brit that I consider in many ways superior to the (nevertheless very, very good) works that came after. Gangsters, girlfriends, and the priestly admonition: “You can’t conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the . . . appalling . . . strangeness of the mercy of God.”

Wonderboys, by Michael Chabon. A lot of people seem to think this is Chabon’s weakest work, a shaggy-dog second novel that lacked the energy of his first book or the inventiveness and AMBITION of the coming novels, but I think it’s his best, a great, Lebowskian stoner comedy, an academic satire as sharp as McCarthy or Jarrell, and one of the only books about writing books that doesn’t make me want to hurl it against a wall.

Forewards and Afterwards, by W.H. Auden. Essays on everything from education in the classics to Protestantism.

Foe, by J.M. Coetzee. Maybe not his best, but one that I studied in college, which contemplates, among other things, the nature of slavery and servitude.

Mumbo Jumbo, by Ishmael Reed. The great conspiracy novel of American literature. I’ll take this over Pynchon any day. Egyptian gods, secret societies, an Afrocentric history of the world, and jazz.

The Gates of Repentance. The Reform machzor for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. A bit of a “greatest hits” compared to some of the Conservative and Orthodox machzorim, but lots of English (although, fair warning, about half is still in untranslated Hebrew). Still, a very good read for a Christian seeking something other than academic or narrative introduction to Jewish belief and prayer.

Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard. The rare instance where an author’s most critically acclaimed work is also his best. Stoppard is one of those playwrights whose work is better read than seen, if only because actors rarely seem to figure out what he’s talking about. Math, the nature of time, Byron.

Coming of Age in the Milky Way, by Timothy Ferris. This is the physical-science counterpart to Durant’s history of philosophy, an amazing survey of the state of physics and astronomy from Ptolemy to the twentieth century. When I was a skinny science nerd in high school, I carried it everywhere.

Breaking Open the Head: A Psychadelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism, by Daniel Pinchbeck. Before Pinchbeck became a bore, yammering on about 2012 and the Mayan calendar, he actually studied and participated in chemical and shamanistic rituals all over the world. Part travelogue and part ethnography and part plain, good-old-fashioned gonzo journalism.

Miami, by Joan Didion. Her best collection of essays and one of the truest, strangest portraits of the Cold War in North America.

Erasure: A Novel, by Percival Everett. Everett’s satire on a black author becoming A Black Author.

Human Wishes / Enemy Combatant, by Edmond Caldwell. Destroy narrative, eradicate character, spoof Beckett, mock James Wood. One of my favorite novels of the last few years, and an amazing, funny, and even heartbreaking book that shows how much more is possible in a novel than the sort of thing you read about in the Sunday Times.

Death at SeaWorld: Shamu and the Dark Side of Killer Whales in Captivity, by David Kirby. Curse the editor who came up with this awful title. Although partly a sort of procedural investigation into several deadly incidents with captive killer whales, this book is really about the relationship of humans to non-human intelligence, a moral investigation of what it means for us to discover that we live among other thinking and feeling creatures.