A Homeric List (yet another stupid list)

Writing about Homer made me think: what's the art that doesn't just astonish us but actively heals us?

I don't mean comfort, I mean that it has a subconscious effect that you only notice later. These are almost religious rituals that bring you back into balance with the world: they remind you that life is about more than us and that whatever excitement we feel, we have to be brought back into balance if we're going to exist in harmony with our worlds. If we're really listening or watching, our problems afterward seem proportional to how bad they actually are. 

Three categories: 

Core Healers: Brings you back to balance. 

Healing through Contemplation: Changes how we perceive reality so that experience becomes more meaningful. 

Healing through Memory: Teaches that even if it seems that it doesn't, reality always retains what's made our lives meaningful. 

You all might consider this incredibly pretentious but... **** you! 

...obviously I had some help from ChatGPT consulting all this. Please accept my assurance this is stuff I've experienced in one way or another.

Core Healers:

Homer

The Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes, Psalms, Proverbs

Dante Divine Comedy

Shakespeare late romances and high tragedies

The Mahabharata

Aeschylus: the Oresteia

Virgil: Aeneid

War and Peace

Brothers Karamazov

Wordsworth: The Prelude

Leaves of Grass

One Thousand and One Nights

Healing by Contemplation:

Eliot Four Quartets

Rumi

Gerard Manley Hopkins

John Keats

Emily Dickinson

Czeslaw Milosz: late poems

Wislaw Szymborszka:

Boris Pasternak: Poems

Seamus Heaney: Postscript

Montaigne Essays

Tao Te Ching

Gitanjali by Rabirandath Tagore

Healing by Memory:

In Search of Lost Time--also known as Remembrances of Things Past by Marcel Proust

Doctor Zhivago

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers, Buddenbrooks

Virginia Woolf: The Waves, To The Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway

Thornton Wilder: Our Town

Carol Shields: The Stone Diaries

Gerard Murnane: The Plains

George Eliot: Middlemarch

Maybe?

Anna Karenina

Crime and Punishment, The Idiot (Dostoevsky)

Ulysses

Les Miserables

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (Jose Saramago)

Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

The Ramayana

Zhuangzi

The Tale of Genji

Paradise Lost

I hope to write about so many of these some day, but I need to fill in my gaps. My unfortunate literary habit (not with Homer) is that when I'm bored, I skip ahead twenty-one hundred pages (or more...). You are free to do the same until it's time to set your thoughts down on the thing in itself.

Movies:

Core Healers:

Ordet

Tokyo Story,

Late Spring

Andrei Rublev

The Tree of Life

The Apu Trilogy

The Decalogue

Healing through Contemplation:

2001

Yi-Yi

Wild Strawberries

The Sacrifice

The Immortal Story

Ugetsu

Sansho the Bailiff

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

Healing through Memory:

Ikiru

Fanny and Alexander

A Matter of Life and Death

The Searchers

Arrival

Before Sunrise

Before Sunset

Boyhood

The Holdovers

Little Women

Roma

Pinocchio

Maybe?

Ran

Winter Light

The Thin Red Line (sigh)

The Straight Story

My Neighbor Totoro

Diary of a Country Priest

The Flowers of St. Francis

The River

Days of Heaven

25th Hour

Moonlight

Schindler's List

A More Popular List...:

It's A Wonderful Life

The Wizard of Oz

Groundhog Day

Field of Dreams

ET

Spirited Away

Kiki's Delivery Service (also Miyazaki)

Babette's Feast

...I'm not going to pretend I think these movies are as good, but they have the same effect.

Art:

Core Healers:

Michelangelo: Sistine Chapel, Last Judgement, Pieta

Piero della Francesca: The Resurrection, The Legend of the True Cross, Madonna del Parto

Rembrandt: Return of the Prodigal Son, late self-portraits

Andrei Rublev: Trinity

Hagia Sophia (Istanbul)

Chartres Cathedral

Ise Grand Shrine (still never been)

The Parthenon

Donatello: Mary Magdalene

through contemplation

Turner: The Fighting Temeraire, Rain Steam & Speed, Light and Colour, Angel Standing in the Son

van Gogh: Olive Trees, The Sower, Wheatfield series, Cypresses

Vermeer: Woman Holding a Balance, The Milkmaid

Caspar David Friedrich: Monk by the Sea, Abbey in the Oakwood

Cezanne: Monte Saint-Victoire, the late bather paintings, late still lifes

Jean Simeon Chardin: The Ray, Soap Bubbles, The House of Cards, The Kitchen Maid

Zen gardens

Gothic cloisters

Islamic courtyards

Buddhist Sculpture

Gandharan Buddhas

Greek Classical Sculpture

through memory:

Bruegel: The Harvesters, The Census at Bethlehem, Tower of Babel

Titian: Pieta, Flaying of Marayus

El Greco: Burial of the Count of Orgaz

Piazza San Marco

Medieval Tomb Sculpture

Funerary Monuments

Maybe?:

Leonardo Notebooks

Fra Angelico: San Marco Frescoes

Rothko Chapel

Chinese landscape painting

And then there's music....

core healers:

Bach: St. Matthew Passion, B-Minor Mass, The Art of the Fugue

Beethoven: Symphony #9, Missa Solemnis, late quartets, Piano Sonata op. 110

Mozart: The Magic Flute

Wagner: Parsifal

Mahler: Symphony #3

Sibelius: Symphony #7

Brahms: Clarinet Quintet, Violin Sonata #1, String Quintet op. 111

Haydn: The Creation, Seven Last Words on the Cross,

Poulenc: Dialogue of the Carmelites

Ives: Symphony #4

Ravel: L'enfant et les sortileges

Elgar: The Kingdom

Rachmaninov: Vespers

Janacek: Cunning Little Vixen

Rautavaara: Vigilia

Golijov: La Pasion Segun San Marcos

Tan Dun: Water Passion

James MacMillan: St. John Passion, Seven Last Words on the Cross,

through contemplation:

Bruckner: Symphonies #8 and 9

Debussy: La Mer, Nocturnes, Images,

Ravel: Daphnis et Chloe, Mother Goose

Vaughan Williams: The Pilgrim's Progress

Beethoven: Piano Concerto # 4

Mozart: Piano Concertos #22, 23 and 27, Gran Partita, Symphony #39, Divertimento K.563, Great Mass in C-minor,

Schubert: String Quintet

Bach: Goldberg Variations, Well-Tempered Clavier, Violin Sonatas and Partitas, Cello Suites

Schumann: Kinderszenen, Waldszenen, Gesange der Fruhe,

Faure: Late Chamber Music

Brahms: Symphony #2, Piano Concerto #2, String Sextet #2, Piano Trio #1, Clarinet Sonatas,

Haydn: Symphony #104, op. 76 quartets

Smetana: Ma Vlast

Dvorak: Piano Quintet #2

Elgar: Introduction and Allegro, Symphony #2

Janacek: Mladi

Verdi: Falstaff

Chopin: Barcarolle, Berceuse,

Hindemith: Harmonies of the World

Richard Strauss: Four Last Songs

Vaughan Williams: Symphony #5, Phantasy Quintet

Ives: Symphony #4

Rautavaara: Angel of Light, Cantus Arcticus

Ligeti: Lux Aeterna

Stravinsky: Apollo

Martinu: Frescoes of Piero Della Francesca

Takemitsu: A Flock Descends in the Pentagonal Garden, Dream/Window

Bartok: The Wooden Prince, Mikrokosmos, 44 Violin Duets, For Children, Hungarian Peasant Songs,

though memory:

Beethoven: Pastoral Symphony

Sibelius: Symphony #5, Tapiola

Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde, Ninth Symphony

Schubert: Piano Sonatas D. 894, 959, 960, Octet, Both Piano Trios, Songs: Nacht und Traume, Im Abendrot, An die Musik,

Brahms: Clarinet Quintet, Clarinet Trio, Intermezzi for Piano op. 117, Violin Sonata #1, Double Concerto, Cello Sonata #2

Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius

Bach: Lutheran Chorales

Chopin: Your favorite nocturnes and mazurkas

Golijov: The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind

Tchaikovsky: Sleeping Beauty

Tan Dun: The Map,

Mozart: Sinfonia Concertante, Quintet for Piano and Winds, String Quintet in C,

Dvorak: String Quintet op. 97

Richard Strauss: Metamorphosen

Nielsen: Wind Quintet

Bartok: Piano Concerto #3

Shostakovich: Viola Sonata

Stravinsky: Orpheus

Rachmaninov: Symphonic Dances

Janacek: On an Overgrown Path

Hindemith: Mathis der Maler (symphony or opera), When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom'd

Martinu: Field Mass

Copland: Appalachian Spring, The Tender Land

James MacMillan: The Confession of Isabel Gowdie

Vaughan Williams: Mass in G, Symphony #3,

Maybe?

Beethoven: Sonata op. 111, Symphony #4,

Arvo Part: Tabula Rasa, Te Deum, Passio, Fratres

Mozart: The Marriage of Figaro, Piano Concerto #24, Jupiter Symphony, Cosi fan tutte, La Clemenza di Tito,

Schubert: Fantasie for Four-Hand Piano, Rosamunde Quartet, Arpeggione Sonata, Songs: Litanie auf das Fest Aller Seelen,

Olivier Messiaen: Eclairs sur l'au Dela, La Transfiguration de Notre Segnieur Jesus Christ, Des canyons aux etoiles

Bruckner: Symphony #5,

Palestrina: Missa Papae Marcelli

Stravinsky: Les Noces

Tomas Luis de Victoria: Officium Defunctorum

Thomas Tallis: Spem in Allium

Josquin: Missa Pange Lingua

Janacek: Cunning Little Vixen

Haydn: Symphony #102

Schumann: Fantasie,

Brahms: Symphony #3, Clarinet Trio, Haydn Variations, Handel Variation, String Quartet #3,

Nielsen: Symphony #3

Shostakovich: Symphony #15, String Quartet #15

Bach: Christmas Oratorio

Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker

Vaughan Williams: Symphonies #3, 6, 9, Dona Nobis Pacem, Five Mystical Songs,

Wagner: Die Meistersinger

Debussy: String Quartet, Preludes--Book II,

Poulenc: Gloria

Honorable Mentions for religious music:

Black Spirituals

Jewish Cantillation

Haftarah Trope

Gregorian Chant

Byzantine Chant

Renaissance Polyphony

Georgian Sacred Polyphony

Qur'anic Recitation

Persian Sufi Music

Vedic Chant

Dhrupad

Tibetan Chant

Shomyo

African-American Spirituals

Gospel

Palestrina

Orthodox Chant

Quranic Recitation

Sufi Singing

Whirling Dervish Music

Vedic Chant

Pop Candidates.... MMMMMMaaaaaayyyyyybe?

Louis Armstrong Hot Five and Seven

Abbey Road (side 2)

Astral Weeks (Van Morrison)

Pet Sounds

Hijira (Joni Mitchell)

Spirit of Eden (Talk Talk)

Aerial (Kate Bush)

America IV (Johnny Cash)

You Want It Darker (Leonard Cohen)

A Love Supreme (John Coltrane)

Sacred Concerts, Black Brown and Beige, New World A-Comin' (Duke Ellington)

Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground (Blind Willie Johnson)

Mahalia Jackson (all of it...)

Aretha Franklin (only gospel)

The Stanley Brothers (most of it...)

Carousel

The King and I

Fiddler on the Roof

Porgy and Bess

The Carter Family

Into the Woods

Sidney Bechet

Treemonisha (Scott Joplin)

Astor Piazzola: Adios Ninono, Las Cuatro Estaciones Portenas

Um Kulthum

Ravi Shankar

Mohammed Reza Shajarian (so ChatGPT tells me)

Komitas Vardapet (ditto)

Guo Wenjing (ditto)

Toumani Diabte (ditto)

Graceland and America (also Paul Simon)

Come On Feel the Illinoise (Sufjan Stevens)

...I don't know shit about dance....

what it means:

Again, all three categories are the kind of ritual experiences that approach what you get from spirituality or religion. They're more than exciting, they're more than moving, they bring you into balance. They reorder your soul and make your inner monologue quieter.

You don't have to like all of these. I don't, but they are the kind of spiritual experiences that change lives.

...I'm going to drag all my friends to art kicking and screaming even if it k*lls them....

A Word on Karol Rathaus

 If we want to bring the general public into living composers, we have to start by making up for the 100 years of composers who didn't get the proper hearing. They need to understand how music evolved, and that music evolved much more slowly and traditionally than they think it did. Every gradation between Mahler on the one side and Schoenberg on the other brings the audience a little closer to understanding 20th century music, and once they figure the Second Viennese School out, everything else gets a little easier.

The very few who got a fair hearing didn't get it because of the quality of their music. Don't misunderstand, the quality of most famous composers is unfathomably high, but who gets known is often still a mixture of lucky connections in 'music politics' and the ability to represent a movement rather than themselves.

I like Steve Reich very much, but even at 90, he and Glass are a 'movement.' They represent it, it's their 'brand', and they sound like no one else even as they always sound like themselves. But that's the thing, you either like the 'brand' or you don't. And those who don't will never buy into Reich because no matter what he does, he always sounds like Reich.

Meanwhile, there are literal dozens or hundreds of composers in every generation writing demonstrably excellent music we don't hear except on rare CDs. Even after you first hear them, you don't know what they're going to sound like from piece to piece because they don't have a 'brand,' and often deliberately so. With very few exceptions, I have always been of the opinion that the best composers are the most curious musical minds, who are not satisfied to write in the same vein every time and are always looking for new musical experiences.

But that means that when you ask, 'what do they sound like?', everybody sort of draws a blank.

Karol Rathaus: Sinfonia n. 2 op. 7 (1923) - YouTube

What does Karol Rathaus sound like? Well, I think he's in some uncanny valley between Berg, Bartok, Schoenberg, Busoni and Hindemith. But he's good! He's better than good. He sounds like himself, but he also sounds like other composers because he is not willing to go all the way into the artistic revolutions where composers may carve singular names for themselves at the price of earning audience wrath. Does he sound that different from Erwin Schullhoff? Viktor Ullmann? Ernst Toch? Egon Wellesz? Well, we won't know well enough to say until we hear their music more often. I certainly don't and I've heard my share of them all, but I'd bet any amount of money that if we do hear them more often, the differences would mostly be immediately apparent.

Anyway, this symphony may be a masterpiece: very much in the harmonic and coloristic vein of Busoni's Doktor Faustus, but having something truly dark to say. It's yet more proof that expressionism and atonality were separate movements. It's clearly influenced by early Schoenberg: Pelleas and Erwartung, but it also is clearly build on fourth intervals, which was Paul Hindemith's theoretical suggestion of where tonality could head next.

Would it strike new listeners as a masterpiece when they first hear it? Well, does Schoenberg? The point is not that listeners would get it on the first hearing, the point is that listeners would get it on the second or third. Many times I've gone to the symphony two times in a weekend only to encounter a new piece. The first time I heard it, I didn't like it. Then I heard it again: you have the basic outline in your head of how the music is built, you have a general idea of what to anticipate, and you can begin to appreciate the work in more than just an outline. Some works everybody loves are instantly communicative: like Verdi and Dvorak. Some works everybody loves usually take a few listens: believe it or not, a lot of people feel that way about Brahms or Shostakovich. They don't get it on the first listen, but by the time they've heard works by them four or five times, they begin to love the music desperately.

Written in 1923, the height of hyperinflation in Weimar-era Berlin, this is clearly a statement of interwar despair. It also feels a little bit like Honegger 2, yet to be written, only it's far less jazzy and far more monochrome. Monochrome doesn't mean dull, no work is more monochrome than Sibelius 4, but it is clearly dark, cthonic, and possessing a certain kind of Schoenbergian sublimity that's bearing witness to something appallingly dark.

What Is The Odyssey?

.The Odyssey is not the book you think it is. Most of the action you remember happens in Books 9-12, the whole back half of The Odyssey has far less action than those four chapters. Those four chapters are the part everybody loves. Everybody thinks this is a great action-adventure story, but the major point of The Odyssey is not the adventures of Odysseus. The major point of The Odyssey is that 'these douchebags are drinking Odysseus's wine!'

Homer, at its core, is not about its action: epic poetry is not about action. Epic poetry is about ritual. Homer is about ritual because rituals are what give order to life.

What makes poetry epic is not the excitement, it's not even the scale or scope: it's the stakes; it's the sense that these events matter, that these people matter; matter so much that we are not ourselves if we don't learn their deeds and teach them to our children. The Rage of Achilles is not just about Achilles's rage, it is about the rage of every person who has ever mourned a murder victim, and its nothing short of a ritual enactment of what every person who's experienced that rage wants to do. The Trojan War is not just about the Trojan War, it's about every war and every fear we have that civilization-wide death is coming for our peoples just as it came for theirs.

We may think that in our biggest movies we have that kind of grandeur, but we look for that grandeur in the wrong places. There are only a very few artistic creators in all of human history who come close to that kind of sublime solemnity: maybe Wagner or Michelangelo, or Goya or Milton. But if you really want to understand what Homer is like: don't picture a Christopher Nolan movie, you'll only find that kind of grandeur in a very few places in American culture. Picture the Baptismal Massacre in The Godfather, or Colonel Kurtz's camp in Apocalypse Now. Picture the ape picking up a bone in 2001. Picture the oil fire in There Will Be Blood.

That's four moments in American film, there aren't many more, in which the limitations of what entertainment can do are so transcended that it takes on the properties of a religious ritual.

Those moments are not just art, those are moments so transcendent that they put us in touch with the possibility that there are forces in the universe more grand than anything of which our imaginations can conceive. When you (I) see the massacre at the end of The Godfather, it is as though evil itself has emerged from hell and subverted Christianity's holiest sacraments. Many people watch that oil fire in There Will Be Blood, and instead of an oil fire they see the destructive forces of capitalism itself given body and being. And the monkey with the bone in 2001? I needn't describe it, everyone who's seen it can tell you it's exactly what Kubrick says it is: the dawn of man.

Now take all those tableaux's and stretch them into a thirty hour movie where half the tone is basically the same as all those scenes, and half the tone is so quiet that we can hear our own thoughts. Now you have an idea of what a Homeric epic is. We think of Homer beginning the Greek half of Western Civilization because he managed to take the most literally awesome five minutes of The Godfather or 2001 and stretch it to the length of a book.

That's Homer. He's is not about the adventure, he's about the transcendence. Every moment of his books is that ritual where every book in his epic seems to summon a new sublime force from the ether. Not every moment in his poems is sublime, but every one of his chapters has elements that feels connected to some subtextual element of the universe so much bigger than what it seems to be. Every other page is a grand tableux or a feast or a retelling of events every member of society was expected to know, but they're not necessarily that exciting. If they are exciting, it's not because they feel eventful, it's because they feel important.

You can't find the equivalent in too much American art, you can only find it commonly in religion: in a Passover Seder, an Easter Passion Play, a Catholic holy sacrament. And just like those rituals, it's supposed to be a little repetitive, it's supposed to try your patience a little bit. That is what Homer does, the rituals he describes are meant to summon forces that transcend material limits, and like a giant Italian cathedral, he retells it in poetry so ornate, so visceral, and often so gorgeous, that even as you hear it, even as you're sometimes bored, you can still hear the creation of the earth.

I have no doubt that some people will see this new adaptation of The Odyssey and come away feeling they had a spiritual experience just as awesome: maybe they did. But will they have it again?

What has always irritated me to the point of rage about Christopher Nolan is that I think he's convinced the American public that you can make great art out of spectacular brainteasers.

I don't think Nolan is a bad artist, I think he's a bad entertainer. Nolan's a great craftsman, but he is Self-Serious with two capital S's, and so often without humor, without human complexity, without emotion itself. It's not art, I'm not even sure it's entertainment. It's a toy: and just like in James Cameron, a lot of his movies' impact would evaporate away from a multiplex where you see it in giant frame alongside 500 people.

Meanwhile, a large part of the point in Homer is the renewability. If you go back to this Odyssey movie in a week or a month, will you have the same experience of it? If you watch it on something less than an IMAX screen, will you have the same experience of it? If you watch it on a home entertainment system, will you have the same experience of it?

The point with Homer is that millions of people over three thousand years decided that his poetry has that level of transcendence. No matter who recited it, no matter who read it, no matter who translated it, millions of people decided that the essence of Homer came through. Lots of people recited Homer through the millenia, lots of people recited his entire poems from memory. Some of them got great reviews, some of them got bad reviews, but it was the essence of Homer that mattered: a direct contact with the original source.

Now, the truth is, nobody can live with that level of transcendence all the time. Parts of Homer are supposed to be funny and probably were to ancient Greeks and Romans, and even where he's not trying to be funny, Homer can be kinda dreary. In terms of the ancients, I much prefer Ovid where you get lots of jokes and ordinary people and sex and spoofs of the gods. Certain stories from Ovid are some of the most spellbinding reading on earth, and in a very modern way. Nobody knew that better than Shakespeare, who occasionally used Ovid as a cheat sheet.

But the dreariness is part of the reason we read Homer, a dreariness that if the new movie is as good as half its spectators say it is, the movie completely lacks. Many people read Homer and all his rituals and find themselves saying 'GET BACK TO THE PLOT!' But Homer tells us 'the rituals ARE the plot.

Take, for just a minute, the final segment of The Iliad. The middle third of The Iliad is slow, deliberately slow. Achilles refuses to fight for the Acheans, and what do we do? We wait, and wait, and wait.

Then comes the stuff we read the book for. Many say The Iliad is the greatest book ever written and I wouldn't correct them even if a lot is not to my taste, but the last third of The Iliad may be the greatest long segment in a book ever written and it's almost not a question. What happens is so powerful, so sublime, so incredibly exciting and quick moving that it defines epic in the way we now think of 'epic': and all the moreso because we've had to adjust our clock to a much slower pace, so that when the release of violence comes, it is a bloodletting that is absolutely ecstatic.

I don't dare give away any more of the main plot for those who don't know it than's necessary to make my point, but here's the gist what happens. After all that, after the most brutal, terrifying, exciting, inspiring, and somehow uplifting display of violence and rage in the history of... history.... comes the final scene, when Priam, the ancient Trojan king, comes to plead for the body of his son whom Achilles so detests and so dishonored so he can get a proper burial. He asks him to remember his own father, and so overcome is this half-god full of rage that they both weep in each others' arms. Is there a moment of that much humanity, that much forgiveness, in any other story ever told? Long before my father died, I teared up whenever I thought of that passage. But here's the point: what do Achilles and Priam do after they forgive each other and weep in each others arms as though they are father and son themselves?

They eat.

The second half of The Odyssey is quiet. Conflict is there; tension and action too, but it's there to be resolved, and the ultimate point in Homer is not the conflict, the point is the resolution, the bringing back of disturbed cosmic forces into cosmic order. THAT is what makes him considered one of the three or four greatest writers who ever lived.

Like so much of the greatest art, Homer is instruction: a kind of 'how to' manual, not for how to take action, but how to heal. That is something very few Hollywood movies try to do, and save certain Spielbergs and Fords, the ones that do don't make much money.

Epics, real epics, are not meant to be action-packed, they're meant to show that action is just one small phase of a much larger life cycle. Excitement is just the beginning, what brings people back to Homer is just what brings people back to the final Shakespeare plays, to Mozart operas, to Bach and Rembrandt, maybe Spielberg even, maybe even Bruce Springsteen or late Johnny Cash. What brings people back to Homer is the capacity and the hope that he helps to heal us. The real point of the back half of The Odyessey is everything Odysseus does to restore the order of his house. Homer doesn't just excite us, he doesn't just move us, he quiets us, and makes the difficulties of little people like us easier to go about.

Homer isn't remembered because he invented the action epic, he's remembered because when we're traumatized, he was the first to show us how to put ourselves back together.

------------------

Bastille Day: An Essay for Tisha B'Av - Part 3

 (please god let me finish this one...)

And here's the problem with unity in 2026, Israel or anywhere else: every consensus is falsely earned.

----------------------------

In a world where humans are no longer the most intelligent species on earth and thinking is farmed out, division is the natural state of the world because we don't know who's done the thinking, and we can't even trust that our sources aren't programmed to lie.

Thinking as we've understood it since the late 18th century is over. The centuries of reason may have run their course, and if all that is true, so then are the circumstances that created and maintained democracy.

To all those who hate AI, to all those who complain endlessly about slop, I will aggravate you in a way you probably didn't see coming:

AI is the best thing that ever happened to humanity.

Provided it doesn't come to life and kill us all, it is exactly the worldwide blessing we need.

Its programmers are not exactly known for altruism, but for the moment, we are saved by the fact that AI's business model forces the content to be as factual. Compare that to social media: social media rewards engagement, and few things engage on social media like factual inaccuracy. During this moment in history when social media has ruined the abilities of whole societies to think critically and believe the truth, AI is a stunningly effective corrective to the conspiracy theories we all see on Facebook, Twitter/x and Sextpanther. People fault AI for getting thousands of facts wrong, and they're absolutely correct, but tell ChatGPT that vaccines cause autism or that Trump won the 2020 Presidential election and see what it says.

I don't use AI to write my essays (I can't believe I have to write that), but I have AI review it after I write virtually every paragraph. And even if I say AI didn't write my essays, the time may come that you never trust again, dear reader, that my content is self-generated. Human content becomes no different from the content we generate, and in 1000 years, can we even be sure that the Bible as we read it today will be the authentic one and an AI generated one becomes the generally accepted Bible in which Yahweh was a visible being and Jesus is a Jewish god? 

But the moment is coming, we know not when or how, when the business model changes, and AI can rewrite politics and history and philosophy in real time, even science: not one tweet at a time, but a worldwide wipe of the truth, and even those of us who remember the truth will begin doubting whatever truth we knew.

But even as AI can be used to correct democracy, it's too late. In the age of AI, I don't know how community trust is possible, precisely because people doubt the authenticity of everybody else's claims. In an age when all community trust can only be false, consent can only be manufactured by coercion. Truth probably can't run the world anymore, trust probably can't run the world anymore, not even AI can run the world. In such an era, only order can run the world, and however good a resource AI is, the very fact of its existence can eventually turn it into the worst version of itself that is programmed by its supervisors to tell lies and rewrite history on nearly every internet site in existence.

If we find a way to make people trust AI, the future is likely democracy. If societies find no way to broadly trust it, the future is likely dictatorship.

The 20th century belonged to democracies like America, the early 21st century belonged to Western Europe, the real 21st century probably belongs to dictatorships like China, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, quite possibly India and quite possibly Israel.

-----

So if AI isn't going to be used by people to clarify the truth, AI will be used to obscure it: maybe even erase it.

Chomsky wasn't wrong about manufactured consent, he was just wrong about which era.

------------------

A Word on Gilbert and Sullivan

I've had Gilbert and Sullivan in my head the last few days. Something bothers me...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYVO7UEoNBM

I was at this performance fourteen years ago, and due to circumstances in my own life I cried at the end watching Jack Point, whom I related to from the moment he came on stage. Most of Gilbert and Sullivan is supposed to be frivolous, but Yeoman of the Guard is something else entirely. Like Tales of Hoffman, it is their attempt to show that they are made of more serious stuff. This is, in some ways, an extraordinarily profound opera. It was a sad state of affairs last year to see Yeoman of the Guard murdered by an amateur troupe (which did quite well by Iolanthe this year...).

I will not go nearly so far as Tam-Tam von Klassikheute in promulgating Arthur Sullivan as the greatest composer of the British Isles, but I absolutely understand the argument. In that same week, I was utterly absorbed at the Proms by Vladimir Jurowski bringing the darkness of the Manfred Symphony to pitch, but Manfred did not make me weep. Gilbert and Sullivan made me weep.

I'm not going to make my argument about comedy and tragedy. That strikes me as a symptom of the issue, not the root. However, I maintain that entertainment, at least good entertainment, is harder to do than art. Art requires humanity, entertainment requires perfection. If you successfully communicate what's in your heart, and what's in your heart is more complicated than a simple sentiment, you've achieved some level of artistic quality: it's very hard, but you have enormous freedom to create any form you like.

But good entertainment requires a skill so genuine that there's no ambiguity about what it is. There's plenty of bad entertainment out there, and those who like it can go suck a lemon, but the really good stuff can only be done by people who acquire the most colossal skill that one has to work at for a lifetime. Compare a true artist of acting like Leonardo di Caprio to an entertainer like Jim Carrey. I have no doubt di Caprio works very hard at what he does, but part of that work is the freedom of self-indulgence. I think what Carrey does is harder, requires more work, more discipline, and more exhaustion. What do you think Robin Williams worked harder at? His Oscar-winning roles or his standup?

I believe there is an alternate universe where Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Dvorak, Mendelssohn, Richard Strauss, they all wrote operettas, and they did it just as well as Johann Strauss and Offenbach. What operetta composers do, if they do it magnificently, requires genius of a level to which only the greatest composers ascend. Are they as great composers as the great composers? Of course not. Profundity is profundity. Entertainment can certainly be profound, but it usually isn't.

The Yeoman of the Guard is where Gilbert and Sullivan step out of the world of entertainment and prove what entertainers have been proving since the beginning of recorded time. Going from great entertainment to great art is a lot easier than going from great art to entertainment. Gilbert and Sullivan could write a great opera. Do you really think Wagner could write a great operetta?

Note from the next morning: I take it back. Gilbert and Sullivan sucks.

Bastille Day: An Essay for Tisha B'Av - Part 2

On the one hand, I praise family: not exactly praise it, but praise the optimism of it.

On the other hand, the institution in no way deserves to be let off the hook. It's a prison from which there is no release but one's attitude toward it. For most of us, family is as much a burden as a bond: hopefully 49% burden/51% bond, but there's no guarantee of that. In dealing with them you feel hope for your life and dreams slipping away year by as they demand ever more of your autonomy until your will is just an extension of theirs and your hopes for your own life are utterly crushed and there is no getting back the lost decades: by that time, you're so demoralized that we don't have the mental presence of mind to lift ourselves to what we want out of life even an inch, and pretty soon thereafter, many of us become the oppressor rather than the oppressed.

Do they manipulate consciously? I don't know. Does it matter?

What's ultimately unfair about this is that for the vast majority of humanity, we know this from the time we're small children. By 7 or 8, you know exactly who the narcissists are. They're the people you're desperate to hang out with in spite of feeling miserable in their company, and they fundamentally dictate the terms of our lives from cradle to grave, even by running away from them, they still dictate our lives; and by the time we have the opportunity to live a life for ourselves, we don't have the morale to do better.

The ones who do have morale to do better are lucky enough to be born to circumstances that let them stretch their wings as far as they go: be it through a supportive environment or merciful heredity. But the most unfair part of existence is simply that success breeds success, failure breeds failure.

And what does it take to go from failure to success? Ironically, it takes an engine of utter selfishness, a family catalyst who is an utterly diagnosable narcissist and often wears their Selflessness with a capital S, cares not a bit for human feeling, and deliberately poisons the wells of immediate close relatives autonomy so that he or she may maintain their dominion over them: because so unsatisfied are they with their lives that if they have no one to dominate, they would collapse into a black hole. They love, but their love is a love of possessions.

Not all narcissists are terribly ambitious people, but I'd venture any amount of money that a VASTLY disproportionate number of ambitious people are narcissists.

We all know some versions of these people: come on. As I said, some statistics show that 7% of the world population is narcissists: and I utterly believe it. Some of us have known dozens upon dozens of them. Hopefully, some of them are kept up at night with the fear that this person is us. I suppose there's a small chance that exonerates some of us, but if there is no difference in actions between a person incapable of empathy and a person who acts out of emotional desperation, does it matter?

We all know them. And, ultimately, we all know who they are. Whether it's your parent, your child, your sibling, your spouse your friend or your lover, these people poison happiness because they have a compulsive need to dominate. And the domination does not stop when their objects of derision aren't there, these are the people who try to poison the people they dominate in the minds of others.

And yet, here is the paradox. So many of these people of toxicity and arrogance are the engine which lifts families out of failure to success. And the satisfied lives that their grandchildren often have are made possible because of the chronic campaigns of shame to which they subject their spouses and children. Ironically, it often DOES lead to better lives, but it does not lead to better lives for their children. What profit it a man to gain the world if he lose his soul? But these children, having lived lives of outward prosperity and interpersonal misery, swear on their lives to do better for the closest people in their lives, and they do it. So ultimately, there is some dimension in which these narcissists are a kind of hero.

In the Bible, this is the trajectory of the story from Abraham to Joseph, and this may ultimately be the trajectory of the Israeli people.

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I lived in Israel for a year, and if naricissism is endemic in 7% of the world population, it must be at least twice as high in Israel: 14%? 40%? 140%?

Just as the success of New York and LA is powered by tornadoes of ambition, so then is Israel.

Israel is a bonded family of people who make each other utterly miserable.

And yet the new generation is the 2nd happiest people on Earth!

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As happens from lifetime to lifetime, there is always a new founder's generation during which the world completely resets in a hail of instability: in the 1780s absolute monarchy was deposed, in the 1860s slavery was ended, in the 1940s a new middle class was made, and in the 2030s? Well, there's a whole world looking to interconnect, looking to lift themselves into Western prosperity, and far more united in their goals than we are.

And as World War II departs from living memory, so then does the entire ethos it set for the world. In America, the frugality of the depression, the passion for stability and norms, the belief in democracy, and the belief in individual rights, and, paradoxically, the simultaneous belief in the importance of community.

The truth exists out there, but we are so infinitesimally far from knowing it. Until then, the truth is not discovered but made :: built :: a peaceful order constructed from the chaos of conflict. What matters is not the ethos itself, but that the ethos is shared: that there are shared norms of how to determine the truth, what etiquette is, what is comforting and what is hurtful. Over the course of a lifetime, some countries gain that ability, and some countries lose it.

America was once polite because we had that shared consensus. In the Ages of Jackson and Grant, we were a deeply rude and vulgar people, but by the Ages of Roosevelt and Eisenhower, we were the nicest people on earth. Hypocrites? Perhaps; but we managed to convince ourselves we were happy. but over 80 years we have lost that consenseus and it will take at least a lifetime to get it back. In the meantime, we have become rude again.

Israel has always been the rudest country on earth in precisely the way people are that when they're desperately unhappy, but suddenly, everybody's happy! The elderly in Israel are (irony alert) #18 in happiness: that may seem high but it's a mildly low total relative to its per-capita prosperity. But now, young people are #2?

What changed?

What changed was the variable that creates the deepest unity of all. More Israeli Jews are now people of color than white: more than 50% of Israel is now Jews of Middle Eastern/Northern African descent, not European. The secular revolution came barely more to them than it came to other Middle Eastern countries. Among Israelis over 65, 15% of Israelis are religious. Among Israelis under 30, 62% are religious!

These are easily verifiable claims and that total will only grow in the next few generations.

Even as Israel reaches a height of international contempt, a mixture of prosperity and religion puts it on a trajectory to be the most satisfied nation on earth.

But just as Pharaohs come who know not Joseph, the world's contempt is likely to eventually erode Israeli prosperity, and eventually erode Israeli happiness. In tough circumstances, the Jews of Israel are likely to turn ever more to God, and as their opportunities dwindle, what then would make them different than the Palestinians they subjugate?

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What of Israel's neighbors? The World Happiness Index lists Palestine as the 103rd happiest country on earth. If you think that's low, Jordan: 125, Egypt: 127, Lebanon: 145, and Syria has no place in the index due to its long civil war.

What makes these countries so unhappy? Is it Israel? Maybe a little: there is, of course, that theory that the Middle East is the one part of the world that does not progress in political functionality because Israel snuffs out progress in its infancy by supporting sympathetic absolutist rulers and parties.

But before I hand the fanatics among you yet another bad theory about the Middle East you've never heard of, consider the damage they did on their own.

If the Israeli government is as practical as it seems, it has no interest in provoking and prolonging civil wars on their borders. It's the easiest thing in the world for civil conflict to spread. Lebanon: a 15 year civil war on Israel's northern border from '75 to '90 of which Israel had minimal interference until year 7: generally agreed upon death toll: about 150,000. Syria: a civil war on Israel's northwestern border from 2008 to 2023: generally agreed upon death toll: 625,000.

Egypt? 90% observant Muslim, but ruled for 80 years by a series of secularist Muslim dictators. Modern Egypt's had no civil war, but if the Arab Spring proved one thing, it is that relax the dictator's hold on Egypt, and Civil War would be as likely there as in Syria. Liberals thought it was a new day for Egypt, but polls show that only 5% of Egyptians want democracy. One third of Egyptian citizens support the Muslim Brotherhood--a banned political party agitating for an Islamic dictatorship. When Egypt had its one basically free election (who knows), 47% of legislative seats went to the Muslim brotherhood, and another 25% went to the still more fundamentalist al-Noor Islamic party. Meanwhile, 40% of Egyptians claim to support the dictatorship.

Some of these countries are unhappy because they mourn their lost loved ones, others are unhappy because they fear losing their loved ones, but the presence of civil conflict, either through loss or fear, is as poison for happiness as family conflict.

So it is my theory (for now, at least) that what ultimately causes unhappiness is division: the constant sense that you have to fight every day for what you believe and that every day is a constant struggle. Our lives attain purpose and meaning through struggle, but don't trust any leader who tells you you attain happiness through struggle.

Palestine? You may think the struggle unites them, but in their one election, Hamas attained power with barely more seats than the other party Fatah. Even after three years of Hamas leading a struggle, Hamas can only get 35% of people to say they approve of the job they're doing even as it could be death to criticize Hamas, and only 41% of Palestinians say they prefer Hamas to any alternative. 24% of Palestinians still go for Fatah, and 32% seem to hold both in contempt.

Even as the world hates Israel, the new generation of Israelis is more united than ever before. One killed person on October 7th didn't have anyone to mourn them, when that was broadcast, 20,000 Israelis came to the funeral. At the funeral of the Bibas kids, deliberately killed in captivity, so many tens of thousands showed up for the procession that the figure was literally uncountable.

On the Israeli rememberance day for soldiers who die in Israeli service, the entire country stops for as sirens blast like shofars. One minute the day of, two minutes after. It is a custom that Israelis in their cars literally stop in the middle of the road, open their doors and stand at attention.

This is a country where people literally speed up when encountering pedestrians and yell at you that you shouldn't be walking in the road.