Clergy stealing from the nobility and handing it to the poor. (Bettmann Archive via Getty Images)
Progressives have been fighting on the neoliberals’ terms. Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker propose a flip, an approach that is more humane– and that promises a far more prosperous country…
In 1962, the historian of science Thomas Kuhn published a short book that changed how educated people think about intellectual progress. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that knowledge does not advance through the steady accumulation of better facts. It advances through ruptures—moments when a prevailing framework, or paradigm, collapses under the weight of anomalies it cannot explain, and a new one takes its place. The Ptolemaic model of the solar system gave way to the Copernican. Newtonian mechanics gave way to relativity. The shift is rarely smooth or purely rational. People resist. Institutions resist. The old framework doesn’t simply yield to better evidence; it has to be displaced by an alternative that can explain not just the anomalies but everything the old model explained, plus more.
We are living through one of those moments now. The prevailing economic paradigm—the neoliberal consensus that dominated policymaking across the Western world from roughly the mid-1970 to 2020—has collapsed. It has not collapsed quietly, in the pages of academic journals, where it was already in serious disrepute. It has collapsed loudly, publicly, and catastrophically, in the lived experience of hundreds of millions of people who were told the model would deliver prosperity. Instead, they watched it deliver stagnation and insecurity and drew the obvious conclusion: The people running the system either do not know what they’re doing or do not care about them, or both. The democratic consequences of that conclusion are now visible everywhere.
This essay argues three points. First, that the democratic emergency we face—the rise of authoritarian populism across the developed world—is not primarily a political failure but an economic one. It is the result of a failed set of economic ideas: When the neoliberal paradigm lost its intellectual and popular support after the 2008 crisis, there was no credible alternative, and the resulting vacuum was filled by populism. Second, progressive responses—while valuable—have not filled the paradigm vacuum because they have operated largely within the neoliberal frame rather than replacing it. Third, that an emerging modern economic consensus we call Market Humanism has the potential to replace neoliberalism—not by proposing a new set of policies, but by constructing a new paradigm grounded in twenty-first-century science. This new paradigm can not only to help us create an economy that is fair, prosperous, and sustainable, but also repair our broken democracy…
[The authors explain how neoliberalism broke the social contract (and democracy) and why the progressive response has failed. They explain the “scientific revolutions” that set the stage for Market Humanism: “From Selfish Homo Economicus to Cooperative Homo Sapiens,” “From Markets as Efficient Allocators to Markets as Evolutionary Innovators,” “From Value Is Market Price to Value Is Solutions to Human Problems,” and “From Inequality Is Meritocratic to Inequality Is Created by Structure and Power.” They then outline the steps necessary– the four imperatives of Market Humanism: “Grow the economy by making it fairer,” “Grow the economy by supporting the middle class,” “Measure what matters—human flourishing,” and “Make the state a partner in prosperity.” And they explain how Market Humanism can help democracy succeed. They conclude…}
… It is useful to recall what happened during a previous time a major paradigm changed. For most of recorded history—thousands of generations—people looked up at the sky and saw what seemed obvious: the sun moved, the earth stood still. Entire systems of knowledge, theology, and political authority were built on that foundation. Then, in the early seventeenth century, Galileo Galilei perfected the telescope and turned it on the heavens. What he saw—moons rotating around Jupiter and the phases of Venus—was inconsistent with a universe organized around a stationary earth at the center of the universe. Galileo’s theory actually had evidence you could see with your own eyes.
He brought that evidence to the most powerful institution of his day. He showed the Church’s leaders what the telescope revealed. They looked. They understood what they were seeing. And then they told Galileo to shove his telescope where the sun did not shine. He was tried by the Inquisition and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
Why? Not because they couldn’t see the evidence. But because if the earth was diminished, so were they. The geocentric paradigm was not just a theory of astronomy. It was a foundation of institutional authority, and the people whose power rested on that foundation were not interested in whether it was true. They were interested in whether it was useful—to them.
This is the situation we are in now. The evidence against the neoliberal paradigm is not ambiguous—we can see it right in front of our eyes. But the paradigm has made a small number of people very wealthy, and they have spent decades building the infrastructure that keeps it alive in policy long after it died in the academy. They will not abandon it. They will call the alternative radical, un-American, dangerous. The rich and powerful will circle the wagons and spend whatever it takes.
They will still lose. Not because they suddenly see the light. Because a paradigm that is empirically wrong cannot indefinitely outrun one that is empirically right—not when ordinary people are the ones living the difference and noticing it. The defenders of the old paradigm will lose because stagnant wages, predatory healthcare, and hollowed-out communities are not abstract to the Americans paying their costs. They will lose because ordinary people pick up the telescope, look through it, and refuse to look away.
That is what Market Humanism is. It is not the property of the academics who built it or the policymakers who will implement it. It belongs to the people whose lives it describes—workers, small business owners, teachers, nurses, scientists, young people told their whole lives that the rules of the neoliberal economy are incontestable facts of nature, and who now are beginning to suspect, rightly, that they were scammed.
This paradigm does not need permission from the people in power to take hold. It needs only to be claimed by the people who have been waiting for it. That is how every paradigm that ever displaced a wrong one has won—not because the powerful changed their minds, but because enough ordinary people stopped accepting a story that no longer matched the world they lived in.
That is what is being asked of us now. The telescope is pointing at the sky. The evidence is clear. The alternative is built. What remains is the work of ordinary people, in extraordinary numbers, refusing to live inside a story that no longer explains the world. The people told for 50 years there is no alternative are about to discover that there is—and that it has been theirs all along.
* Adam Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776
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As we cultivate change, we might recall that it was on this date in 1991 that Nickelodeon premiered its first three original animated series– “Nicktoons“– Doug, Rugrats, and Ren & Stimpy. One of these was not like the other two.
Ren & Stimpy follows the misadventures of Ren Höek, an emotionally unstable (indeed, psychotic) chihuahua; and Stimpy, a good-natured and dimwitted Manx cat. But while Doug and Rugrats were clearly family fare, Ren & Stimpy featured a surreal blend of dark humor, sexual innuendo, violence, and shock. It’s producers had trouble with Standards and Practices; it’s creator was fired after the first year… but kids loved it. It ran for five seasons and 52 episodes (93 segments).
Over the last several decades retail investors had been eclipsed in the stock market by institutions (e.g., pension funds). But COVID and the economic environment that surrounded started a trend that is reversing that polarity. Retail investors now account for roughly 30% of daily US equity volume, according to Goldman Sachs. Their stock trading in May of this year ran 10% above the previous record, set during the January 2021 meme-stock frenzy, and June set another all time high.
Much of that growth has come from the individuals known as day traders.” And while for the last 18 months or so, institutional investors have been cautious, often underweight, under-levered and short of conviction, these active amateurs in the retail crowd did the opposite, buying the dips, riding momentum strategies, and adding leverage. Retail investors tend to follow the herd, as can be seen in the surge in popularity – and valuations – of meme stocks and artificial intelligence stocks in recent years.
But as Simone Foxman reports, money is not all that they lose…
Surging retail trading isn’t just transforming markets; it’s also highly correlated with demoralization in young men, according to a new study.
One-quarter of men aged 18-29 said they trade stocks daily, and almost two-thirds of them (64%) report feeling like failures, according to a study of 2,000 men published Wednesday by the Institute for Family Studies, a pro-marriage think tank. The findings were strikingly similar to outcomes among men who gamble: Of the 23% of young men who said they gambled daily, including on sports and events, 66% reported similar angst, according to survey, which asked the young men a variety of questions about their personal behaviors and outlooks. Daily fantasy sports and pornography use were similarly correlated to feelings of failure, the survey found.
The struggles of young men are generating growing alarm among academics, pundits and billionaires. They warn that men are lagging in education and employment, gambling with their financial health on sports or event betting platforms and facing mental health crises.
At the same time, the line between gambling and investing has been blurred. Stock volumes from retail investors have doubled over the past 15 years, and day traders have driven record options volume. Now platforms like Robinhood Markets Inc. and Interactive Brokers Group are trying to capitalize on interest from Gen Z by also offering event-betting alongside stock-trading.
Some research suggests young people have embraced risky financial behaviors to try to generate returns in a world where homeownership and other markers of financial success are out of reach. Eighty percent of Gen Z investors said they’d invested or considered investing in stocks, options, crypto or prediction markets because they feel financially behind and see these investments as better tools to meet their financial goals, according to a Northwestern Mutual study.
The IFS researchers hypothesized that day trading, gambling, playing fantasy sports and porn use — among other activities — may be both coping mechanisms for dejection, stress and loneliness and also exacerbate them. Young men who engaged in these activities less than daily were about half as likely to report feelings of demoralization.
Overall, 42% of survey respondents said the statement “all in all, I am inclined to think that I am a failure,” described them very or somewhat well. This feeling was particularly strong among men without college degrees and those who were neither employed nor in school.
A quarter of participants said they felt lonely all of the time, while 30% expressed feeling that way some of the time.
The study also found disillusionment with the American dream, even as young men fostered high hopes for the future. Seven in ten respondents said that success is more a matter of who you know than ability or hard work, but 84% still said they had ambitious plans for their futures.
Further to the passing reference to “event-betting” above, we should note that prediction markets, while smaller than retail investing (at least for now), are growing explosively. Like day-trading, prediction markets are pitched in the language of empowerment and democratization. The former involves stocks and bonds, while the latter sells “event contracts“; but they share the same user base, the same psychological architecture, and the same uncomfortable gap between how they are marketed and what they actually deliver… so seem likely to contribute to the issues unpacked above.
As we parse symptoms and diseases, we might recall that it was on this date in 1966 that the U.S. Treasury Department, citing a lack of demand, ceased production of the $2 bill, which had been around in various forms since 1862. The (redesigned) denomination, featuring a portrait of Thomas Jefferson, was reintroduced in 1976… though readers will be forgiven if they mistakenly thought that “the deuce” was still retired: so few are in circulation that they are rarely encountered.
The first $2 bill, a Legal Tender Note (United States Note) with a portrait of Alexander Hamilton in profile view- in contrast to the familiar portrait in use on the $10 bill since 1928 (source)
To observe the obvious, power– and the exercise of power– is havingamoment. It’s a little surprising that there’s not a broader discussion of Michel Foucault (and here) afoot… but then, the subjects and terms of our civic discourse are effectively being set by the powerful; and it’s hard to read Foucault as anything but a thorough-going critic.
But, David Polansky and Daniel Schillinger argue, we need to listen wisely, not too well: the powerful wielding Thucydides are misreading him…
It’s almost never a good sign when Thucydides is in the news. The ancient Greek historian of the Peloponnesian War is typically invoked either to alert us to the possible return of a bygone age of terrifying great-power conflict, or to confirm that strong states can and should advance their own material interests, irrespective of justice.
Earlier this year, the Canadian prime minister Mark Carney earned much acclaim when he quoted, at Davos, the most famous lines in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War: ‘The strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.’ While Carney intended his reference to be a critique of US behaviour under the Trump administration, Thucydides is also invoked in defence of aggressive or even imperialistic policies, especially in the United States. Yet those who look to Thucydides for either a justification or a critique of empire should be disappointed. Thucydides pulls no punches: he writes to expose the delusions of both the strong and the weak, the unjust and the just. Self-deception is a leitmotif of his History. Because self-deception is perennial, and because it can prove disastrous to victors and vanquished alike, Thucydides’ work remains timely and timeless, as he expected it would…
[The authors outline the war between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians and Thucycides’ vantage…]
… The line Carney invoked is often associated with ‘realism’ in world politics. This is a somewhat woolly term that encompasses both a moral position of scepticism about the possibility of justice in political life and an analytical approach to understanding political events in terms of material power and interest. Thucydides is a plausible originator of realism inasmuch as he offers an unvarnished and unsentimental account of the operation of political power among Greek cities. His realism may be contrasted with the ‘liberal institutionalism’ of a thinker such as Immanuel Kant, who holds out hope for mutual cooperation and even perpetual peace among states.
During the 20th century, these lines of ideological disagreement came to define discussions of international politics in both academic and political discourse. For example, the British historian E H Carr warily observed, during the Second World War, the spread of what he called ‘utopianism’, as reflected in the excessive hopes that international institutions such as the League of Nations might foster world peace. In response, Carr offered a qualified defence of realism for providing a pragmatic and flexible guide to politics in a dangerous world: ‘realism is the necessary corrective to the exuberance of utopianism, just as in other periods utopianism must be invoked to counteract the barrenness of realism.’
Thucydides’ own relationship to realism is more ambiguous than his reputation might suggest, however. For one thing, he never uses the term itself (which does not much predate the 20th century – in fact, it was Friedrich Nietzsche who first applied the term to Thucydides). He also rarely issues judgments under his own name. Many of the most notorious lines in his History are spoken by historical figures. Would anyone suppose that lines spoken by Richard III contain clear statements of William Shakespeare’s own views?
No doubt, Thucydides provides ample material for those who hope to find realist perspectives in his work. It is also true, however, that his History elicits a range of searching reflections on war’s causes and consequences. Note that Thucydides emphasises, humanely, the suffering occasioned by the Peloponnesian War. Some of this suffering was caused by disasters coinciding with war, not least the plague at Athens, which killed as many as a quarter of Athenian citizens by 425 BCE. But much suffering was caused by the Greeks themselves, including the Athenians and Spartans, whom one might have thought too ‘civilised’ to become so violent. In Thucydides’ words: ‘Never had so many cities been taken and laid desolate … never was there so much banishing and blood-shedding, now on the field of battle, now in factional strife.’
Thucydides himself was hardly exempt from events that shook the Hellenic world. He suffered from the terrible plague that struck Athens. He served in the war as an Athenian general, only to be exiled by his fellow citizens as punishment for failing to prevent the revolt of Amphipolis in 424 BCE. Yet Thucydides writes about the war with sobriety and restraint. There is little editorialising in his History; the author all but effaces himself. Thomas Hobbes, who was the first to translate him directly from Greek to English, observes: ‘Thucydides is one, who [does not] digress to read a lecture, moral or political, upon his own text, nor enter into men’s hearts further than the acts themselves evidently guide him.’ It is this same reserve, meanwhile, that seems to invite readers to impose their own interpretations upon the work.
The most well-known line in Thucydides’ History – and the one still encountered by undergraduates the world over, not to mention the attendees of Davos – is the one delivered by the Athenians to the Melians: ‘The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’ This episode, the Melian Dialogue, occurs in 416 BCE (more than halfway through the war), when the Athenians send an expedition to the neutral island of Melos to compel the Melians to submit to Athenian rule. Prior to the siege, nameless representatives from both cities meet for parley.
Note, however, that the standard translation of the famous line is more ominous than the Greek verb, συγχωρέω, really warrants. A more accurate rendering of the line would be: ‘Those who are superior do what they can, and the weak yield.’ Perhaps the translation issue explains, in part, why many readers suppose that the Athenians here say that ‘might makes right.’ What the Athenians actually say is that the language of justice only has a place in negotiations among relative equals in power. Between the powerful Athenians and the weak Melians, the Melians must yield to Athenian interests. So, even if the Athenians’ line contains a threat, it also invites the Melians to speak without pretences.
The Melians reject this offer to find common ground on the basis of shared interests. Although we do not hear from the Melian people but only from their oligarchic rulers, these announce that the Melians will fight the far-more-powerful Athenians, even as the Athenians ask only that the Melians become tributary allies of Athens, supporting the Athenian empire with cash and ships. The Melians even seem to expect that they will defeat the Athenians – because they will receive the help of the gods (as just men) and the Spartans (as Spartan colonists). In their own words: ‘We trust that the gods may grant us fortune as good as yours, since we are just men fighting against unjust, and that what we want in power will be made up by the alliance of the [Spartans], who are bound, if only for very shame, to come to the aid of their kindred.’
The Athenians explain to the Melians that neither nature, the gods nor the Spartans will protect them: ‘As you have staked most on, and trusted most in, the [Spartans], your fortune, and your hopes [for justice], so will you be most completely deceived.’ And the Melians were deceived: the Athenians destroyed the island, killing all the men and enslaving the women and children.
The Athenians would soon suffer a similar fate. On the heels of the Melian massacre, within six months’ time, the Athenians would launch an expedition to Sicily, ending in the total destruction of their forces – about 40,000 men, the size of a whole city. For many readers, the Athenian disaster in Sicily represents punishment for the annihilation of Melos.
In one of his rare direct statements on the war, Thucydides himself declines to blame its outcome on any particular military encounter – not even the Sicilian expedition – nor upon the Athenians’ pursuit of empire. More broadly, the Athenian response to the Melians holds true for other cities. There is nothing in Thucydides’ History that refutes the Athenians’ central claim: the strong are simply in a greater position to impose their preferences, which the weak disregard at their peril. Every city rules to the limits of its power.
The question, rather, is whether any city does so wisely, without illusions. What, after all, did the Athenians gain – except infamy – by destroying tiny Melos? Why did the Melian rulers prevent the Athenians from speaking to the people, and why did they insist on self-destruction when they needed only to pay tribute to Athens? The pathos of the Melian dialogue, for Thucydides, lies in the self-deceptions of both the Melians and the Athenians – and the disastrous consequences to which these give rise.
he Melians represent one instance of a broader psychological phenomenon depicted by Thucydides: a fervid attachment to justice, especially in times of war, can carry with it certain delusions. In Thucydides, the just are self-deceived, both because they think that they will prosper on account of their justness, and because they overrate their own attachment to justice.
Sparta is a case in point. The Spartans and their allies insist on the justness of their war against Athens. To hear them tell it, the Athenian empire imposes slavery on its subject cities, since these are compelled to contribute tribute and ships to Athens. By contrast, the Spartans call themselves ‘the liberators of Hellas’.
This rhetoric of justice masks the Spartans’ true motivations, which Thucydides unmasks. Thucydides comments on the Spartan decision to declare war against Athens in the first place: ‘The [Spartans] voted that the treaty had been broken, and that the war must be declared, not so much because they were persuaded by the arguments of the allies, as because they feared the growth of the power of the Athenians.’ While the Spartans denounce the injustice of the Athenians and proclaim the freedom of all Greek cities, they act as they do because they see their own hegemony on the Peloponnesus threatened. At the very moment the Spartans vote for war and prepare to invade Attica, they remain nominally in treaty with the Athenians. Evidently the Spartans do not care about the injustice of breaking the treaty so much as they care about protecting their interests, whatever they may think or say – though they do make sure to say, as a pretext, that the Athenians have broken the treaty.
The Spartans also commit many of the worst atrocities reported by Thucydides…
… At best, the Spartans are hypocrites, trumpeting the causes of justice and liberation while quietly acting out of fear and self-interest. Yet the truth is worse and more complicated. The Spartans are moved by a passion for justice, which burns hot when they mete out punishment. Those who threaten the interests of the city – including their own best slaves, whose only fault is their excellence – incur the wrath of the Spartans. They are self-deceived because they do not seem to realise that their passion for justice has grown into a monstrous taste for punishment. The crimes of the Spartans receive a fraction of the attention paid to the fate of the Melians, partly because the Spartans committed their atrocities without the Athenians’ famous (or infamous) rhetorical flourishes.
Meanwhile, the Athenians may appear not to be self-deceived. After all, they talk tough about the weakness of justice in affairs among cities, and aren’t shy about pointing it out to others. In a conference at Sparta before the outbreak of the war, envoys from Athens offer a tripartite defence of the Athenian empire. First, human passions – especially fear, but also desires for honour and profit – compel cities to rule to the limits of their power. Second, experience confirms this account of the psyche. Only weaker cities appeal to justice; the strong simply act, securing their interests as they can. Third, because human nature and experience together compel cities to seek expansive rule, no city should be blamed for so acting. Necessity excuses the Athenian empire.
Yet, Thucydides exposes the delusions of the Athenians no less than those of the Spartans. If the Athenians grasp the weakness of justice among cities, they overestimate the power of reason – including their own. It was the Athenians, after all, who insisted on a dialogue with the Melian elites, trusting (mistakenly) that they would be able to persuade the Melians to accept Athenian rule. By destroying the island in the end, the Athenians school the Melians in the weakness of justice, but they commit two blunders of their own: they lose the resources that Melos might have provided to their empire; and their massacre of the people hurts their reputation as the ally of the people in oligarchic cities.
Likewise, in the war conference at Sparta, the exposition of the Athenian position works not at all to dissuade the Spartans from declaring war (indeed, it seems almost calculated to enrage them). Again and again in the History, the Athenians browbeat their enemies at the bargaining table. It is unclear whether the Athenians care more about realising their strategic aims or vindicating their own cleverness.
It is not enough, in other words, for the Athenians to realise their ambitions; they also want the satisfaction of seeing the other cities acknowledge the truth of their worldview. But its truth should not require other cities to grasp it. Silent conquest would work just as well – or better, insofar as it avoids needlessly offending those whose acquiescence would be of benefit to them.
Finally, for all their vaunted realism, and even when they focus their deliberations on material realities, the Athenians make bad decisions, or fail to understand their own motivations. For example, when the Athenians decide, under the influence of the charismatic Alcibiades, to invade faraway Sicily, there is surprisingly little discussion of the actual strategic value of this venture. Rather, the citizens of Athens vote as they do for a variety of more personal incentives, with the older men seeing opportunities for vicarious victory, and the young seeking glory and adventure with little fear for their lives. And yet, as though mistrusting their own judgments, they elect to place the cautious Nicias in charge of the expedition, as if his personal moderation would somehow balance out their immoderate goals. In the event, this mismatch leads to disaster.
More broadly, this misunderstanding of their situation extends to the nature of their empire itself. Pericles, the pre-eminent Athenian statesman, admits that the Athenian empire is ‘like a tyranny’. Yet he does so only in the final speech (before his death), with the plague raging through his city. Even then, he cannot help urging the Athenians to hope for glory. He claims that, even in defeat, Athens will be remembered for having ruled over more Greeks than any other city.
In one sense, at least, Pericles was not mistaken: we do still recall the exploits of the Athenians. Yet our remembrance is owed less to Pericles than to Thucydides. But, where Pericles poetically declares that ‘heroes have the whole earth for their tomb,’ Thucydides depicts the end of the Sicilian expedition: the Athenians leaving behind the unburied and the wounded, drinking their own blood in the river Assinarus, and dying, ignominiously, in the stinking quarries of Syracuse. And where Pericles promises his fellow citizens that they will leave behind them ‘imperishable monuments’, Thucydides leaves us his far more ambiguous History of the war.
Thucydides saw in the Peloponnesian War ‘a rough master, that brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes.’ Observing the United States’ present conflict with Iran, which has increasingly severe implications for the global economy, it is evident that those who embarked on the war had outsized expectations of success at minimal cost, and the tough talk that accompanied its outset was a reflection of those same expectations rather than a true apprehension of events. This kind of faux-realism has a way of excluding the subject from the harsh logic of their own claims about political life.
Meanwhile, others routinely predict the decline of US power as a cosmic punishment for its repeated aggression against other countries. While decline may be inevitable over a long enough timeline, the many announcements of it are also a form of wish-casting for a just universe, in which the unjust inevitably receive their comeuppance. After referencing Thucydides, Carney offered some tough-minded talk of ‘middle powers’ banding together, which was rather vague on actual power analysis: how sure are we that these states really do constitute middle powers (as opposed to small ones)? And what do their aggregated capacities really amount to?
A similar self-deception pervades the Hellenic world throughout the war. The Athenians deceive themselves as to their true capacity to rule over their fellow Greeks, especially as to the power of their reason to control events and persuade others. And they even go so far as to deceive themselves as to how their exploits will be remembered by those they conquered. The Spartans deceive themselves as to the justness of their cause, no matter their own acts of manifest injustice. Finally, the Melians deceive themselves that their own just cause in facing a stronger invader will be rewarded through salvation by either their Spartan allies or the gods themselves.
By contrast, Nietzsche accords Thucydides the highest praise for his ‘unconditional will not to deceive [himself]’. He sees the world as it is, and he does not attempt to find in it confirmation of what he already believes he knows. Thucydides’ self-knowledge defines the distance between him and us, which is not merely temporal but psychological. It is ironic, then, that so many with greater confidence and less self-awareness apply their own purposes to a work concerned with the vast human capacity for self-deception…
As Thucydides said, “Ignorance is bold, and knowledge is reserved.”
As we fumble with force, we might recall that on this date in 48 BCE, Julius Caesar‘s forces defeated the Roman Republican army led by Pompey in the Battle of Pharsalus. A climactic event in “Caesar’s Civil War,” the victory boosted Caesar’s power and legitimacy. While the civil war dragged on until 45 BC, Caesar grew steadily stronger until his ultimate victory, after which he was appointed “Dictator,” and set into motion the conversion of Rome into an imperial state, completed by his heir Octavian (or as we also know him, Augustus).
Scholars disagree as to whether the Battle of Pharsalus was the inciting event for the collapse of the republic or a symptom of the republic’s collapse. Either way, Caesar’s victory there was the turning point from republic to imperial rule.
“Changes” is widely considered to be one of Bowie’s best songs and has appeared on many best-of lists. His biographers have suggested that the track is a manifesto of his entire career, predicting a constant change of musical styles: the first verse focuses on the compulsive nature of artistic reinvention and distancing oneself from the rock mainstream; the second verse concerns clashes between children and their parents, urging them to allow their children to be themselves as teenagers. Bowie frequently included the song in his live performances; it was the final song he performed on stage before his death in 2016.
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post… J. F. Martel explores why art matters, arguing that when early humans first painted cave walls, they began to find out who they really were: our minds emerged from our images…
In 1940, rumours of secret passageways to an old manor lured four teenage boys into a hole in the ground near the village of Montignac in southwestern France. Instead of a tunnel laden with gold, they found a series of natural chambers bejewelled with exquisite paintings: horses and elk, ibex and bulls, almost perfectly preserved on the limestone walls. Experts examining the Lascaux caves in subsequent years using radiocarbon dating estimated that the paintings had been made some 19,000 years ago. [See here.] Today, the images are believed to be around 20,000 years old. But Lascaux is far from the oldest example of human art. Since 1940, many other caves have been found in Europe, Australia, Indonesia and Africa containing art no less astounding. Some of it is more than twice the age of the Lascaux murals.
Cave paintings at Lascaux, France. Courtesy Wikimedia
These discoveries have turned the questions of when and why humans invented art into central problems of the human sciences. As fair and poignant as such questions may be, they leave unaddressed the deeper mystery of what art is in the first place, where it comes from in the human soul, and what it might reveal to us about the nature of reality.
Popular legend holds that when Pablo Picasso visited the Lascaux cave a few years after its discovery, he emerged exclaiming: ‘We have invented nothing’ – art had appeared full-grown from its earliest instance. The common interpretation is that Picasso was humbly attributing the invention of art to our prehistoric ancestors rather than claiming it for himself and his contemporaries, or any human of the modern age. But perhaps this apocryphal story conveys a weirder truth, namely that no one really invented art. Instead, it was the other way around: art invented humanity…
[Martel develops his case (fascinatingly). He concludes…]
… The idea, then, that human beings invented art, that art ‘belongs’ to humanity, is true only after the fact. In a more primordial sense, art invented humanity by giving humans access to the process through which it brings forth a world, along with everything else.
What I mean here is that art did not serve to express a humanity that already existed. Rather, it acted as the mirror we needed to catch sight of our own image in the flux of nature. The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures. The assumption hidden in the question is that they already had minds like ours and simply chose, out of all the things they might have done on a frigid day in the Ice Age, to pick up ochre and make animal pictures. But the evidence, it seems to me, points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of generations, that occasioned the emergence of those minds we take for granted. We are putting the cart before the horse when we understand ourselves as the source of sense and meaning. In reality, we are participants in something that exceeds us, and the aesthetic, poetic dimension of great art reconnects us with that excess as a matter of course.
But again, we are led back to two kinds of art. Artifice is art that imitates nature: an attempt to represent the world on human terms, resulting either in imperfect reflections (according to Plato) or in perfected abstractions (according to Aristotle). Real art, by contrast, enacts natura naturans – that is, creation as such. If we can speak of imitation here at all, it is not in the sense of mechanical copying but of what the Christian mystics call imitatio Christi: the imitation that becomes instead of merely aping, a creative event transcending all the ways in which the intellect reduces things-in-the-making to things made.
Art alone puts us in touch with certain kinds of truth and beauty. And in that way, art restores us to reality. For it to succeed, however, it must be left to its own devices (or lack thereof). It must be free to eschew the logic of utility and to embody the freedom we stifle under the pressures of means-and-ends thinking.
‘All art,’ quipped Oscar Wilde in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), ‘is quite useless.’ For Wilde, art necessarily and essentially serves no purpose – and artists ought to know better than to wish it otherwise. At the same time, he elsewhere argued with equal conviction that if it weren’t for the efforts of the Impressionist painters, the London fog would not exist. It was they, he claimed in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891), who brought forth this aspect of the world, which had gone unseen until then:
Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? … The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last 10 years is entirely due to this particular school of Art … One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it come into existence … There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them.
Claude Monet and his circle did not represent what was already present; they made present what had hitherto been absent. This power to make us see, for Wilde, is what makes art invaluable.
Is there a contradiction here? How can art be both invaluable and ‘quite useless’? It depends on how we define that last term. One might argue that if nobody paid attention to the fogs that crept through Victorian London until then, it was because there was no use in doing so. By attending to what no one cared to notice, the Impressionists drew from the invisible background of the human world a new entity that then became impossible to ignore. If art is useless for Wilde, it is only in the sense that it explores those regions of reality for which our present intellect has found no use – at least not yet. By making visible that which we could not see, to paraphrase Paul Klee, art expands our perception of the world. It thus fulfils a function precisely analogous to that of science; but whereas science is driven by an ideal of utility, art seeks what has not yet appeared on our radars. Artists alert us to what we do not yet know we do not know. Through their work, new realities, new ideas and new emotions become available.
Indeed, science begins – and can only begin – in the world that art has made. Ultimately, what we call art is the fruit of the human imagination’s capacity to go beyond immediate perception, to dream what lies around this corner, outside the human world. From this point of view, the hypothetical stage of the scientific method is nothing less than art: an exercise through which we step out of the mundanities of the actual to explore the possible as such, testing our dreams and extending our reach into the more-than-human.
This is why the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in 1968 described aesthetics as a ‘science of the sensible’. Art, for him, makes the world that science later measures, but the world it makes is ultimately beyond all measurement because it is the world that exists before we divide it into lengths, magnitudes and quantities. Bergson, a major influence on Deleuze, had called this a ‘qualitative multiplicity’, closer in nature to a continuous melody than to a series of discrete, static things that can be isolated from one another. It is what comes first, because it is the Real itself.
Paradoxically, art is useful only if it is allowed to remain entirely useless – that is, entirely free to go where it will. Wilde finds an ally here in Baudelaire, who followed his observation of the strangeness of the beautiful with a sharp rebuke to those who would subordinate artistic beauty to a utilitarian logic. Baudelaire asks:
How could this necessary, irreducible, and infinitely varied strangeness … ever be controlled, amended, and corrected by Utopian rules conceived in some little scientific temple or other on this planet, without mortal danger to art itself?
The privileging of utility over uselessness, of work over play, is the death of art – and the death of the given world in which our utilitarian spirit must be grounded if it is to have purpose and meaning.
Today, art is pressed upon by forces that would subordinate it to all-too-human ends. Some say that it should educate and elevate impressionable minds, training them to behave in accordance with a preexisting moral code. Others claim that it should play a therapeutic role, either as an instrument of medicine or as a means of escape by which workers might regain their strength before the next working day. Still others insist that art ought to serve the needs of the state or the market, upholding the preconceived ideas of a polity that mistakes its limited view of reality for the whole of reality. The rise of artificial intelligence has only intensified this levelling of art into non-art. By definition, artificial intelligence is capable only of artifice, since it inhabits a virtual universe of things made (data) rather than things-in-the-making. To fail to distinguish between the artifice it generates and the true art it imitates is to mistake representation for creation, and so to blind ourselves to the very source of what makes both art and humanity possible.
Art must remain useless (or become it again), and it must do so in the name of truth as well as beauty. At the beginning of this essay, I distinguished two forms of each of these ideals: one that merely confirms what we think we know, and another that reminds us of the mystery that underlies all our partial knowledge and imperfect beliefs. Above all, art confronts us with that radical mystery, without which our problem-solving and utilitarianism would be pointless. This mystery is not a theory but a truth, the very ground of that truth whose splendour Plato called beauty, Herzog called ecstasy, and Keats, speaking to his urn, declared to be one with truth itself. It is ecstatic because it takes us outside ourselves, connecting us with the wonder that burns at the heart of the world, and which, out of every search for answers, calls forth new questions – and, with them, new reasons to live…
As we muse on the mystery of musing, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that French highwire artist Philippe Petit committed the “artistic crime of the century,” traversing a 200-foot steel cable across the 138-foot gap between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. 1,312 feet above the ground, he performed for 45 minutes, making eight passes along the wire, during which he walked, danced, lay down on the wire, and saluted observers from a kneeling position. Office workers, construction crews, and policemen cheered him on. The unpermitted/illegal performance took Petit six years of planning.
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