It was obvious during the runup to the Iraq war that what was going on in the minds of many hawks — and not just the neocons — was not so much a deep desire to drop lots of bombs and kill lots of people (although they were OK with that) as a deep desire to be seen as people who were willing to Do What Has to be Done. Men who have never risked, well, anything relished the chance to look in the mirror and see Winston Churchill looking back.

Actually, I suspect that even the torture thing had less to do with sadism than with the desire to look tough.

And the austerian impulse is pretty much the same thing, except that in this case the mild-mannered pundits want to look in the mirror and see Paul Volcker.

Much of the problem in trying to stop the march to war was precisely the fear of many pundits that they would be seen as weak and, above all, not Serious if they objected. Austerity has been very much the same thing — and again, it’s not just the right-wingers who are afflicted.

I think there’s a great deal to this psychology. I certainly recognize it in myself. I’m not an Austrian because I think Austrian economics isn’t really economics at all – it’s not even trying to predict the outcome of particular economic decisions with any kind of accuracy. It’s a philosophical position, and I’m not sure it’s even subject to falsification.

But I’m not a true Keynesian in part because, well, there’s something fishy about it. The financial crisis that kicked off the Great Recession was a real event that changed people’s real risk tolerances. That sounds, to me, like  a profound psychological change that requires a similarly profound adjustment to correct, not a technical problem requiring a purely technical fix. I cannot believe that dropping money from helicopters or paying people to dig and fill holes would actually be efficacious at all.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not an advocate of austerity. I agree much more with Krugman than I disagree on the questions of what our fiscal policy should look like (expansionist) and on what our fiscal priorities should be (less spending on defense, more on improvements to the nation’s capital stock, and I suspect we agree that we should be seeking more efficiencies in health care spending as well). I suspect I’m out on a lonely limb with those sentiments at this magazine, but fortunately my employers let me write what I think.

But perhaps I am being too serious. I applaud Krugman for saying, earlier this year, that he doubts inequality is an important contributing cause of our sluggish recovery. That’s an argument against interest on his part, and against instinct, as it would be for me as well. Which is a habit to encourage, not quash in the interests of appearing serious.

The heart of Conor’s essay, though, is about Kant, and whether, per Pascal Emanuel Gobry’s suggestion, Kant provides a common language for traditionalists and modernists to talk to each other so that, while they may not agree, they may at least come to mutual understanding. Specifically, a Kantian approach to sexual ethics would go beyond demanding mere consent, but would demand that, in our relations, we treat each other only as ends, never as means, regardless of whether either of us is willing to be treated merely as a means.

Conor illustrates what that means in practice with the following example:

Imagine that Sean meets Jessica. Soon they decide they are in love with one another.

After six months, he moves into her apartment. It’s spacious and comfortable. Another six months passes. Gradually, he realizes that he doesn’t love her anymore and wants to break up. But the day he planned to do it, he loses a freelance client. Moving out would now mean finding a shared apartment rather than a studio of his own. He decides to keep dating Jessica for another couple months, until a new client comes on and he can again afford his own place. He has treated her as a means rather than an end. I’m confident that many secular modernists with consent-focused notions of sexual morality would agree that Sean has acted like an immoral jerk.

That’s certainly my moral intuition.

Now imagine that Sean instead told Jessica, “I never would have believed it when we moved in together, but we’ve somehow grown apart in the last couple months, and I think we should break up.”

And Jessica replies (however implausibly), “I’d miss you terribly if you left now. So stay here until you’ve saved enough to move to a better apartment. You don’t love me anymore, but I know you still enjoy the sex, and it’s my desire to keep you around a bit longer. I still love you, even if you don’t love me, and while your continued proximity may ultimately just make it harder for me to get through the breakup, I desire it anyway. What do you say? Let’s sleep together right now.” Once again, even most non-traditionalists would agree that the more moral thing for Sean to do is to refuse this offer. Perhaps that intuition is partly rooted in Kantianism.

You see his point? In the second example, if the relationship continued, both sides would be consenting, and yet there’s still something wrong, from a Kantian perspective – because, we might say, Sean is just “using” Jessica. (Or, perhaps, he’s letting himself be used. After all, in this scenario he is basically letting her pay him for sex – the payment is the right to stay in their affordable apartment – so that she can prolong for herself the illusion that their love hasn’t died.)

But I’m skeptical, as I usually am, of rule-based morality of this sort. So let’s change the scenario a bit. Suppose, instead of being a couple who’ve been dating six months, they are a married couple with a six-year-old child. And Sean wakes up to find his love has gone cold.

What, now, would Kant suggest?

Well, if you take his ideas about sex seriously, this isn’t actually that hard a problem – but Conor doesn’t take those ideas terribly seriously (nor do I). So: what would Kant advise?

Suppose Sean were to tell his wife, Jessica, that he’s fallen out of love with her and wants to break up – the way the six-month-dating Sean did in Conor’s hypothetical. That would be honest. It would mean not treating her as a means, I suppose. But what would it mean for his dependent daughter? To treat a child as an end can’t just mean honesty in interpersonal relations. It must mean ordering one’s life, in a fundamental way, around the child’s primary needs. Is it possible that breaking up a marriage is doing so?

I won’t say it can’t be – there are marriages that are worse for children than divorces. I won’t even say that it’s a rule that it’s better (for the children) to stay married if all that’s wrong is that love has died. I know people who grew up in such marriages who disagree, who wish their parents had divorced and ended the torment of living with two people causing each other so much pain. But, at a minimum, I would say there’s a big problem with a rule that says: the only moral choice for Sean is to break up the marriage, because anything else would be treating Jessica (or himself) as a means, without bringing the child into the equation as a primary factor.

So let’s say Sean decides to stay, for the sake of his daughter. Now what? Should he tell his wife he no longer loves her? Or should he lie? No, he’s not allowed to lie; that’s using her as a means, not an end. So she knows he doesn’t love her. Can he now seek extra-marital satisfaction, but stay together as parents? Well, is there any way to do so that doesn’t involve treating the other woman as a means rather than an end? Presumably not. So: does his wife have any obligations to satisfy her husband sexually? Even if it causes her pain to sleep with a man she knows doesn’t love her? Presumably not as well – that sounds like a textbook case of using each other as a means rather than an end. Even if she could rationalize putting aside her own pain so as to do a service to him, what possible excuse does he have other than his own needs? So what we’re left with is marriage as a kind of prison sentence: two people obliged to stay together in sexless, loveless mutual solitude. What a wonderful environment in which to raise a child. Maybe they should break up after all.

You see where I’m going with this. Kant’s ethics are an ethics of distance. They are animated by a fear of transgression that militates against intimacy, particularly sexual intimacy, most particularly a sexual intimacy intended to last a lifetime. Once we enter this particular dark wood, I don’t think Kant provides much of a map. Indeed, the whole “map” metaphor probably needs to be chucked.

Later on in his piece, Conor says: “It seems to me that, whether we’re talking about a three-week college relationship or a 60-year marriage, it is equally possible to treat one’s partner as a means or as an end (though I would agree that “treating as means” is more common in hookups than marriage).” I think that parenthetical is debatable. Well, I won’t opine on what is common in hookups; I don’t have enough direct experience (college was a while ago). But precisely because of the prolonged intimacy of marriage, it’s almost unavoidable that you wind up treating one another as means rather than ends, at least some of the time. Frankly, the real work of marriage is avoiding getting used to so doing.

What we should be concerned with is not rules but with cultivating a sensitivity to the qualities of our relationships. The right thing for Sean to do isn’t to ask “what actions would or would not constitute treating Jessica as a means rather than an end, because I don’t want to do anything that would transgress that line” but “what is it going to take to make this marriage work – work as well as it possibly can – because, for my daughter’s sake if not for mine or my wife’s, I don’t want it to fail.” That internal conversation – and, ideally, conversation with Jessica – needs to be as honest as possible. Which means leaving everything on the table, at least initially – including the possibility that the marriage can’t be saved, but also including the possibility that saving it will require some real creativity – rather than prematurely closing off options by saying, “but that would be wrong.”

And that applies equally well to six-month-Sean. In Conor’s hypothetical, Sean and Jessica are going to break up. The only question is whether they are going to break up now, or in a couple of months, after he’s agreed to keep having sex with her in spite of their mutual knowledge that the love is gone. Conor’s Kantian explanation for why Sean shouldn’t do this, even with Jessica’s consent, is that it’s using her (or she’s using him) as a means rather than an end. But another road – my preferred road – to the same result would be to say: what’s their relationship going to be like after the extra, say, two months of loveless sex? How will they feel about each other then, in the future?

In Conor’s hypothetical, Jessica says, “while your continued proximity may ultimately just make it harder for me to get through the breakup, I desire it anyway.” So she knows the right answer. What else do we really need to know?

As the film moves to the second act, the action begins to condense around the interrogation of a resistance fighter. Don Pietro (not the same figure who participated in the bread riot) emerges as a central figure. He is the conscience of the film. His is not a removed, impartial faith. He helps the resistance hide guns and uses his relative freedom from curfews to deliver messages to the underground.

But neither is Don Pietro a revolutionary in priest’s garb. After being forced to witness the prolonged torture of a suspected insurgent, Don Pietro curses the Germans and then stops, horrified at what he has done: “My God, what have I said? Forgive me Lord.” It is Don Pietro who will eventually deliver the film’s thematic coda when he says that “it’s not that hard to die a good death,” and then continues, “what’s hard is to live a good life.”

This mentality – as horrified by its own anger and cursing as by the oppressor’s tyranny – may seem foreign to a modern audience. After all, we are steeped in revenge narratives and the rhetoric of cultural and political self-righteousness. Perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the film is that it makes Don Pietro’s self-approbation appear natural, human, and normal. He is not an exceptional Christian; he is a normal Christian in exceptional circumstance. . . .

It is hard to imagine a seeing corollary character to Don Pietro in Zero Dark Thirty, someone who would look at terrorism and torture and be repulsed by his or her own drive for vengeance. In the world depicted by that film, history extends only as far back as 9/11. The traumatic years of war in Rome, Open City are place in a broader, cosmic historical span that helps guard against our tendency to see our own moment in history as exceptional.

I am not going to suggest that “Zero Dark Thirty” is going to become a cinematic classic, nor that “Rome Open City” is anything less than one. But it’s worth considering the possibility that Bigelow is showing us what we are, what being “steeped in revenge narratives” and believing that “history extends only as far back as 9/11″ have made us, rather than endorsing what we are. As I wrote in my review of Bigelow’s film:

Listen to the underscoring of the last half hour of the movie. It’s doomy and anxious as the stealth helicopters rise up and head into Pakistan. It stays that way all through the assault on bin Laden’s compound. That assault, by the way, is resolutely unromantic – but, again, that dovetails with the “journalistic” approach I talked about. But the camera lingers on discordant elements – the growing crowd of curious and angry Pakistani onlookers, the anxiety of the SEALS who know they have to get out efficiently, and, most notably, Hakim (Fares Fares), an intelligence operative on the team who’s clearly a native of some sort, and who seems particularly affected by the carnage in the compound (dead bodies, screaming women and children), and the potential for worse carnage if the crowd outside doesn’t disperse. And then, with a pause to blow up the disabled helicopter, we’re headed home – and yet we’ve still got the doomy underscoring. There’s no triumphalism. Indeed, if you blinked you might have missed that the mission is accomplished, that bin Laden is dead, that the “good guys” won. And that underscoring carries through to the big final question on which the movie ends: where do you want to go now?

I don’t think that adds up to “we report; you decide.” Katheryn Bigelow is actively undermining the “natural” mood of an American audience when they see bin Laden get shot. She’s saying: this, in and of itself, is just another assassination. If it means anything, that meaning comes from context. But the context she provides is ominous rather than triumphant.

That final question is asked of Maya, the gal who got bin Laden. And, rather than answer it, Maya tears up. What is she thinking? Normally, we’d have some basis of answering based on Maya’s character. But Maya, though she is supposed to be based on a real character, doesn’t have a character – not in the sense of a personal history or backstory. She has no friends. She has no interests. But she’s not just a monomaniacal person – we’ve met those types before in movies. She is her monomania. There isn’t anything else to her. . . .

Which leaves Maya, in my view, as more symbol than character. She is the embodiment of our own national demand for retribution. She is the force that commanded: we’re not stopping until we get the guy who murdered 3,000 innocents in cold blood on September 11, 2001. We’ll do whatever it takes. Nothing else really matters.

That’s what this movie is about. It’s a movie about that demand, that force, that virtually all of us felt, and that transformed, for a while at least, possibly permanently in some ways, our relationship to much of the world, to the national security state, to our sense of morality. That force is real, and we are protective of it, and now that it has done its work we don’t know where to go, nor precisely what to make of the work that it did, through us.

Bigelow’s approach, which denies us an easily-accessible moral perspective from which we can evaluate the world we are shown, is morally risky. After all, while I would argue that she doesn’t endorse our post-9-11 psyche, she doesn’t critique that mentality very directly either – the critique that I see as implicit in the film is gleaned from subtleties. And those subtleties don’t play that way with all viewers. A very good friend of mine saw the film and came out saying that he felt like he could have just seen a piece of North Korean propaganda. And I understand that reaction – indeed, based on a cursory review of the reviews, a wide swathe of critics saw the film as ending on a positive, triumphalist note of “mission accomplished,” which isn’t what I saw at all.

But it’s a little weird to critique Bigelow for not achieving realism because none of her characters (including Chastain – I don’t buy for an instant that her failure to participate in the initial torture scene is somehow exculpatory) are not repulsed by torture. Is such a character an important part of our national post-9-11 hunt for bin Laden? If not, in what way would inserting such a figure serve the cause of realism? For that matter, would it do anything to further our own moral education?

And while Bigelow’s methods are wildly different from those of the neorealists, they share a central concern with the texture of reality. The plots of Bigelow’s recent films (“Zero Dark Thirty” and “The Hurt Locker” – the ones Mark Boal wrote) feel rather paint-by-numbers, and the characterization is relatively shallow. But how deep is the characterization in “The Bicycle Thief” or “Rome 11 o’clock”? These aren’t stories with complex character arcs. They aim to show us what life is really like. And that, in my opinion, is Bigelow’s primary concern as well. It’s just that she’s interested in a different world than Rossellini and De Santis and De Sica – not the working class, but the men and women who fight our wars for us.

The neorealists, of course, had a political perspective that drove their cinematic concerns, and Bigelow is much shier, in her films and in her interviews, about articulating any agenda. I say perspective, though, rather than agenda, because it’s the perspective that survives – the concern that we don’t really know what the lives of the working poor are like, and so we need to see. Personally, I would argue that the same is true of the men and women who are Bigelow’s primary concern.

But what really divides them is precisely the difference in method, which in turn is driven by a difference in subject matter and in political agenda. The Italian neorealists were not only doing films about the experience of poverty; they were working from a stance of impoverishment. They used non-actors, filmed on location without elaborate sets, and so forth – they worked in a quasi-documentary style partly because that aesthetic served their message, but also because it was affordable, and affordability also served their message.

Bigelow also directs her films to feel “real” in a quasi-documentary fashion, but this is merely a style, and it is not at all affordable. To show the world she wants to show requires a lot of money, and (infamously) requires the cooperation of the authorities. Those constraints, in turn, shape the kinds of stories she winds up telling – more to the point, they drive her to tell fairly conventional stories, those paint-by-numbers plots and pat character arcs that I mentioned and that Hollywood is so good at. Her films would be stronger and less-compromised if they eschewed these narrative props, and stuck to giving us the experience of the particular realities that interest her most.

But if she did that, her films would never get made.

[The North Carolina Growers' Association] is required to heavily advertise for native workers before their applications for H-2A guest worker visas are approved, but these efforts seldom pay off. Even when unemployment was at its height in 2011, they received a grand total of only 268 referrals. They hired 90 percent of the applicants, but only 163 showed up for work on their first day—and that was the best response in NCGA’s history. . . .

Within two months, 80 percent of the native workers had quit. By the end of the growing season, only seven were left.

Now, as Matthews notes, this report doesn’t exactly come from a neutral source. It’s from a pro-immigration group working with a group of pro-immigration farmers. But unless they’re flat-out lying here, the numbers are pretty compelling. Most Americans just aren’t willing to do backbreaking agricultural labor for a bit above minimum wage, and if the wage rate were much higher the farms would no longer be competitive.

Anyone want to send me some contrary evidence? I’d be interested to see it. But all the evidence I’ve seen in the past points in the same direction as this study: it’s all but impossible to get native workers to fill field labor jobs. Immigrants really are doing the work we won’t.

Tonight is the beginning of Shavuot, or Pentecost, the celebration of the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai (and also the second of three harvest festivals). I don’t plan on doing much to celebrate this year, but I’ve done more in years past, when I was more religious, and picked up a tidbit or two from study sessions along the way. Here’s a favorite bit of mine.

Among the various embellishing accounts in the midrash regarding the events at Sinai are two radically opposed views of just how Israel received the Torah. Radically opposed – but with a key element in common.

First, when Israel received the Torah, they accept it by saying, na’aseh v’nishmah – “we will do, and we will hear.” How is it possible to do first and hear later? This is glossed by saying: the Torah was actually offered multiple times, to multiple peoples, and all rejected it because they found something in it that they objected to. Israel, by contrast, answered, “we will do and we will hear” – that is to say, we accept it without actually knowing (or understanding) what is in it. Acceptance was a leap of faith, not a contract.

The second midrash says almost the exact opposite. At the same point, the people of Israel are described as being camped tachat hahar – “under the mountain.” How could they have been “under” the mountain – surely they were camped beside it. Nope, goes the midrashic gloss. What happened was, Israel did not want to accept the yoke of the law. So God lifted the mountain and suspended it over the people, and a voice boomed out: accept the law, or this mountain will be your grave. So, faced with death, the people accepted.

In one account, the people accepted a binding covenant without reading it. In the other account, the people were coerced into a binding covenant. In neither reading, though, are we dealing with informed consent.

Which makes sense to me. My God is the God of reality. And you don’t make deals with reality; you just deal with it. I don’t always get along with God – these days, I am much less-interested in winning His favor. But I don’t go in much for raging against Him either, any more than I go in for raging against the ocean’s tides.

I’m going to have to think about my reaction a bit more, since people I deeply respect came away with a very different emotional response to the piece. But let me make a couple of clarifications.

First, why was I coy about the activities described in the Witt piece? Because I couldn’t think of a way of describing them that would be acceptable in this space, and merely alluding to them as “sludge” or “filth” would be doing exactly what I didn’t want to do. But I suspect Alan is right that this coyness made my argument seem more plausible than it might otherwise have seemed.

Second, would I attend such a thing? I hope not. I don’t think I could stand it. And I don’t want to be able to stand it. It’s not a goal of mine to plumb those particular depths.

But I suspect I could stand looking at images of those goings on (though I don’t think I would be aroused by them). I certainly could stand reading about them – I did. And that was precisely my point about mediated experience. The activities described are financed by the marketing of those images, but the images are not the thing itself. And neither is an article’s description. And in this case, I strongly suspect, a great deal of psychological and cultural significance is going on in that particular gap.

Third, what did I mean by “pretty civilized” behavior? Am I reducing civilization to consent? No – but I may be reducing it to rituals of courtesy, with which the scene that Emily Witt described was replete. Assuming she was describing it accurately, it sounded like a strange and (to me) unappealing culture, rather than an attempt to repudiate civilization. Of course, she may be describing it inaccurately – or I may be reading her wrong. Or my definition of civilization may be wrong. I am open to all possibilities.

Finally: why didn’t I judge the scene itself as morally horrifying? Because I just wasn’t interested in that question. How interesting is it for anyone to hear that I don’t like the ritual degradation of women – even women who (again, assuming the article is accurate) have enthusiastically signed up (not merely consented) for the experience? And what else, really, is communicated by my saying “shame, shame”?

There’s a titillating quality to these ritual condemnations that I distrust almost as much as I distrust the pornographic impulse in art. Maybe it’s as simple as that.

I was interested in Emily Witt after reading her piece. Interested to talk to her. Interested to understand why she felt – this is what I got, in part, from her piece – kind of guilty about not really being on the life-is-to-accumulate-experiences-the-more-the-better train, not being able to articulate what other trains might be. Personally, I don’t think it’s necessary to condemn that particular train in order to talk about what life is like on a different train, or to note that most people quite sensibly prefer to ride different trains than that one. I did not feel pity for her; I felt compassion.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I came away from reading the piece with a very different reaction from Dreher’s. Dreher summarizes the moral of the piece as follows: “Unlimited money + unlimited freedom = Hell — created not by God, but by humans.” But it seems to me that that’s a moral he could have written without ever reading the piece. What I don’t know, from reading his commentary on the piece, is how the experience of reading it changed him.

Because it’s quite an intimate piece. Emily Witt isn’t a detached observer. She doesn’t just describe what she saw (though she does that, very well), but what she experienced, and how it made her reflect on other aspects of her experience – and not only her sexual experience. In that important sense, it isn’t a pornographic piece. It isn’t designed to provoke a reaction – whether of sexual excitement or, as in Dreher’s case, righteous anger. It’s designed to bring us into her experience, and reflect on it with her.

The moral she draws, it seems to me, is much subtler, and more interesting:

It’s tempting to think that life before internet porn was less complicated. There are sexual acts in porn that it would not occur to many people to attempt. We have more expectations now about what kind of sex to have, and how many people should be involved, and what to say, and what our bodies should look like, than we might have at a time when less imagery of sex was available to us. But if the panoply of opportunity depicted in porn seems exaggerated, the possibilities are no less vast outside the internet. The only sexual expectation left to conform to is that love will guide us toward the life we want to live.

What if love fails us? Sexual freedom has now extended to people who never wanted to shake off the old institutions, except to the extent of showing solidarity with friends who did. I have not sought so much choice for myself, and when I found myself with no possibilities except total sexual freedom, I was unhappy. I understood that the San Franciscans’ focus on intention—the pornographers were there by choice—marked the difference between my nihilism and their utopianism. When your life does not conform to an idea, and this failure makes you feel bad, throwing away the idea can make you feel better.

Emphasis mine. I’ve read Dreher’s wonderful and moving book, so I know he knows something about being unable to conform to an idea, and how bad that failure can make you feel. He also knows something about adopting a new idea as an alternative basis to conform to, and how bad it makes you feel when you are failed again by that idea. The problem just might lie in trying to conform your life to an idea, whether that idea is one of life as a relentless experimental journey or of living according to the dictates of an authoritative tradition. And, frankly, I have a hard time believing he really feels that he, personally, suffered from too much freedom to be who he really is.

And yet, he had a visceral reaction to a bunch of freaky Friscans flying their freak flag. Why? What’s his stake?

The answer, I think, lies in the earlier portions of Witt’s two paragraph peroration. The truly suspect position is not that of participant in this kind of event – indeed, if you read Witt’s essay, you’ll see that the participants, including those in the audience, all appear to be behaving in pretty civilized ways. The suspect position is our position, viewing safely from a distance, watching the pornographic video whose existence of makes this activity financially possible.

What’s our stake? The mere existence of these objects for consumption forces us to react – to affirm or oppose, accept or deny, look towards or look away. Of course, that’s the nature of community, and human beings are social animals – we don’t really exist, as humans, outside of a community. So it’s hard to object simply on the grounds that we don’t want to have to deal with what we don’t want to have to deal with. But we do not exist in communion with people we watch. There’s a one-way mirror in between us and them.

This is true of any mediated experience. When it aspires to art, mediated work takes us into its world. We don’t consume it; it consumes us, and after the fact we can reflect on an experience we’ve had, in a kind of fantasy. That’s what losing it at the movies is all about. Pornography goes the other direction, away from art. It is designed to move us to action – not to invite us into an experience, but to cause us to do. That’s why I talk about jihadi websites as being essentially pornographic – their purpose is to incite violence, just as the purpose of pornography is to incite sexual release.

The people attending (and, at the margins, participating in) Kink’s extreme pornographic shoot are, in a sense, participating in a much more extreme version of the kind of immersive theatre that I really appreciate. Everyone there was implicated by his or her presence. And you can see the effect of that presence in the tender details that abound in Witt’s description of the event. The participants could not deny that they were present, could not give vent to actual sociopathy because they were in a social space, with other human beings. None of that is part of the porn-viewer’s experience. The porn viewer is “free” of what makes him most essentially human – his communion with other human beings. And porn – inasmuch as it is porn (because nothing in life is all one thing or another) – is designed to exacerbate and deepen that isolation. Which in turn feeds the demand for more of the same mediated “experience.”

Lurking behind Emily Witt’s complaint that there is nothing “left” to conform to but that love will be her guide to happiness is a kind of status competition – am I living enough of a life, a life I can brag about. I am very, very familiar with that kind of status anxiety, and like pretty much all other forms of status anxiety – about wealth, or social position, or, for that matter, religiosity (pay a visit to Borough Park some time to see that one in action) – it’s toxic. And when she talks about porn, what she notes is the same dynamic – a kind of status anxiety triggered by the knowledge that someone out there is living a more exotic sexual life. But why surrender to that anxiety? Why even take it as a given?

When Witt says that love “failed” her, because she didn’t ultimately learn what she desired, I thought to myself: were you really looking for that? That is to say, were you really trying to find out what mattered to you? How you wanted to live? Or were you nagging yourself with the question: shouldn’t I want something different? And if so, why? Are we really prepared to blame pornography for a failure to know ourselves? Who is responsible for consuming whom?

The desire to conform to social expectations is built pretty deeply into human nature, because we are social animals, and no doubt wouldn’t function well as armed groups without a strong instinct to fit in. But in the internet age, that desire is dangerous, and needs to be interrogated. Now, not being ourselves, not knowing ourselves well enough to be ourselves, is dangerous. It’s not just that there is a massive media edifice out there, of which pornography is only a part, determined to convince us that we are not happy being ourselves, and showing us alternative selves that, if we only did what that edifice wants, we could become, and thus be happier. It’s that all the more or less happy freaks now have their own corners of the edifice, where they can replicate the same alienating dynamic. And as more and more of our waking hours are consumed by mediated experience, more of our psyche is subjected to this alienating dynamic. Even if Princess Donna says, as I suspect she would, that what she is doing is so much more authentic, ethical, and artistic than what porn was, say, thirty years ago, her industry’s mind-share is so much larger than it was then that the ways in which it remains alienating matter more.

Those who have made the most of freedom for themselves may find themselves in the business of cage-construction. Because it’s the only way left to make a living.

UPDATE: I should be clear that the above reflects my reactions to the article, not to participating in the kind of extreme sexual “event” described, which is nothing I’ve ever done, nor plan to do. It’s possible that my reaction to actually being there would be wildly divergent from what Ms. Witt experienced. But I guess that’s part of my point: were I to put myself in that position, which I don’t plan to do, I couldn’t avoid having a direct, unmediated experience. Watching a video, or reading Ms. Witt’s article, isn’t at all the same thing, and though Ms. Witt’s article was, to my mind, not essentially pornographic, that’s because it allowed me to enter into the experience of Ms. Witt’s mind, not because it allowed me to enter the experience of being in that San Francisco dungeon with her.

I am planning to visit San Francisco next month, though. I’ll let you know whether I see any brimstone falling from the sky.

As soon as men and women … acquire the habit of weighing the individual advantages and disadvantages of any prospective course of action—or, as we might also put it, as soon as they introduce into their private life a sort of inarticulate system of cost accounting—they cannot fail to become aware of the heavy personal sacrifices that family ties and especially parenthood entail under modern conditions and of the fact that at the same time, excepting the cases of farmers and peasants, children cease to be economic assets.

This is unquestionably correct – but so what? Good china isn’t an economic asset either, but people buy it. Neither is that vacation home – for which you sacrificed a great deal of money to buy, and now have to spend time and money to maintain, and have to drive through traffic to get to, etc. Talk about personal sacrifices!

The conventional wisdom now is that experiences, rather than assets, are what give us the most satisfaction. And experiences are entirely ephemeral – they depreciate to zero immediately. Well, children provide a wealth of experiences – and they don’t depreciate anything like as fast as a skydiving adventure. So why aren’t they exceptionally rational investments, from a utilitarian perspective?

Silas Marner, before the little blonde girl shows up, was certainly maximizing something with his hoard of gold under the floor boards, but he wasn’t maximizing utiles.

Most people in developed societies want children. Most people want more children than they feel they can afford. They are not reluctant to make very substantial personal sacrifices – but most are status-conscious and reluctant to risk downward mobility.

And there’s little evidence that modern societies with “thicker” family bonds have higher fertility rates than those within more attenuated bonds. Indeed, the most recent evidence goes the opposite way. Remember that chart of European family structures? The weakest family ties were the “absolute nuclear” families, where new couples leave home to found their own homesteads and primogeniture undermines filial piety. That would, on the surface, appear to be the family structure least-oriented towards treating children as economic assets – workers in a family business, for example – and it predominates in England, Denmark, southern Sweden and the Netherlands. By contrast, the other family types – “stem,” “incomplete stem,” and “egalitarian nuclear” – that dominate elsewhere in Europe create stronger economic bonds between the generations.

So: how does total fertility vary across European countries?

UK: 1.91 children/woman
Sweden: 1.67 children/woman
Denmark: 1.74 children/woman
Netherlands: 1.78 children/woman

Spain: 1.48 children/woman
Italy: 1.4 children/woman
Germany: 1.4 children/woman
Greece: 1.39 children/woman

Either the relationship is the opposite of what the Schumpeter quote would suggest, or some other factor overwhelmingly predominates.

By the way, if you look beyond Europe you see:

Brazil: 1.82 children/woman
Iran: 1.87 children/woman
South Korea: 1.23 children/woman
South Africa: 2.28 children/woman

None of these are countries with weak family ties. Iran’s government actively enforces traditional religiosity. South Korea has a fierce Confucian tradition of filial piety. But they both have below-replacement fertility.

Whereas:

Ethiopia: 5.39 children/woman
Afghanistan: 5.64 children/woman
Yemen: 4.45 children/woman
Philippines: 3.15 children/woman

These countries have different predominant religions and different predominant ethnic groups, but they are all less-urban and less-economically-developed than the prior group of countries, and have not made a similar commitment to promoting family planning.

The overwhelming drivers of female fertility are urbanization and female literacy. Urbanization makes children more expensive. And literate women exercise more control over their fertility. Once you’ve made the transition to a modern, predominantly urban, literate society, the key variables that affect how many children women have relate to expense: the cost of housing, the cost of childcare, the cost of education. Make those cheaper, and fertility goes up – to a point. Make them more expensive, and fertility goes down – even way down. France, a European country where medieval family type varied by region, has one of the highest fertility rates in Europe – 2.08 children/woman. They’ve also got a longstanding pro-natalist bent to government policy.

And, by the way, this was true in medieval days as well. Age of first marriage went up and down with economic conditions – because there was no other reliable way to control fertility except to remain unmarried. Back purportedly before people weighed “individual advantages and disadvantages of any prospective course of action” parents were very concerned to make sure that a prospective husband could provide for his bride before they would agree to a match.

I think the mistake is in assuming that modern people don’t engage in a true process of self-creation – that all they do is shop. No, children aren’t free farm hands anymore. And yes, if that means children are now a consumer good, then they are a pretty risky consumer good to take on. They’re hugely expensive, there’s no quality control, and you can’t even sell them at a loss if you don’t like how they turn out, the way you can with a vacation home.

But if raising children is more like tending a garden, or learning to play the oboe, only much more demanding and much more rewarding, then I don’t see why there’s any reason to assume a rational individualist would decide to be childless. Unless that particular individual specifically didn’t want children. And most of us, several generations into modernity, still do.

But that’s somehow unsatisfying – particularly given that often the form of condemnation is to say that such or such act was contrary to Islam. I suspect that sometimes reads to non-Muslims as an abdication of collective responsibility: yes, we condemn this act, but by calling it un-Islamic we’re saying that we, good Muslims, are not really responsible for it – in fact, we’re suggesting that the person who did it wasn’t “really” a Muslim. (The fact that Christians and Jews play analogous games – saying Trotsky wasn’t “really” a Jew because he attacked Jewish religion, or even that the Crusades weren’t “really” evidence that Christianity promotes violence because Jesus preached turning the other cheek rather than holy war – doesn’t seem to register with the critics.)

What I sometimes feel non-Muslims are looking for is a statement like this: yes, this was violence done – wrongly – in the name of Islam. I (the Muslim condemning violence) vehemently assert that such violence is contrary to Islam, and that the perpetrator is a criminal according to Islamic law, but I recognize that the perpetrator thought he was submitting to the will of God when he committed his crimes. And for that reason I am ashamed of him and angry at him, not only for the crimes he committed, but for besmirching the name of God as well in committing them.

It seems to me, though, that if such a statement can be made, then there should be things one can say prior to any atrocity that would lay down important religious markers.

For example, I was thinking about the pornographic violence that abounds on the jihadi internet. Is it permissible, as a good Muslim, to consume such images? Have respected Islamic authorities ever said that it is haraam to view (or to read) this kind of material, on the grounds that it may lead one into sin (murder being a pretty grievous sin)? I’m an outsider, so I don’t know what the requirements would be to making such a ruling, but it doesn’t strike me on its face as a silly idea. It would be analogous to other prohibitions designed to prevent, for example, adultery.

I also don’t know whether that kind of ruling would be particularly efficacious in preventing violence. I doubt it would, in fact, since you can always shop around for an Imam who will help you get into whatever trouble you want to get into. It’s not hard to find rabbis – including Orthodox rabbis – who condemn settler violence, for example, or who condemn the settlement enterprise itself, but those aren’t authorities that the settlers respect; they have their own rabbis. But from an inter-communal perspective, it seems to me those kinds of statements would be very valuable, and if they are being made then publicizing them better would also be very valuable.

In any event, I’m very curious to hear from knowledgable readers whether Sunni authorities have ever ruled against consuming material likely to lead one to commit murder, if so in what context, and if not what the jurisprudential obstacles would be to issuing a ruling of that sort.

Five words: “God is all that matters.” If some secular liberals could grasp that a modern human can say those words and mean them, they would have a better grasp of our core predicament.

At that time of day, it was obvious that the core predicament we face is that when you take seriously the idea that one thing matters above all – the way, say, Kierkegaard did – it is hard to stop you from becoming a mass-murderer.

But then, at 2:00pm today, under the same headline, he quotes Michael Moynihan on what it’s like to spend extensive time on jihadi websites:

His big takeaway? It works – by numbing followers to violence:

The further I crawled down the extremist rabbit hole and the more caved-in skulls and headless corpses I saw, the more I found that my natural revulsion, usually an uncontrollable instinct, was easier to suppress.

Immersive theatre makes this its fundamental principle. The king of the genre is Sleep No More, which I saw a couple of years ago (I re-posted my review apropos of its imminent closing – see it while you can). But you don’t have to take over a warehouse to do this kind of theatre, as the folks at Third Rail are proving every day at the Kingsland Ward at St. Johns in Williamsburg, with Then She Fell, an immersive theatrical experience based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and, more specifically, the author’s real-life relationship with the girl, Alice Pleasance Liddell, who inspired the main character of those books.

The show is set in a hospital ward. The tiny audience – no more than 15 per night – gathers in a waiting room, and then are led into the facility one by one. And, one by one, we are introduced to the peculiar inmates of this sanatorium: Lewis Carroll (Alberto Denis on the night I saw it – the cast varies night to night), a pair of Alices (Rachel Berman and Marissa Nielsen Pincus), the White Rabbit (Niko Tsocanos), The White Queen (Jennine Willett), the Red Queen (Jessy Smith), and the Mad Hatter (Elizabeth Carena).

When they are together, they engage in ritualized dances: the Red Queen teases and torments the White Rabbit, trapping his head in a chair, decapitating his half-white, half-red roses; the White Queen releases Alice’s hair, and teaches her to release herself physically as well. The Alices mimic each other across a “mirror” of empty air, then invite us to mimic them, and then (in another scene), mimic each other again through a one-way mirror of glass. Lewis Carroll dances with Alice up and down and around a staircase, yearning to take her in his arms, then finally doing so. The culmination of the dances is a mad Tea Party that the audience perforce must join, comically failing (in my case) to mimic the rituals of tea pouring/drinking/tossing and repeatedly shifting seats, a particularly effective bit of theatrical mayhem (and one of the few bits that directly mirrors an episode in the books, as opposed to alluding them).

When they are alone with us, the characters are more inclined to speak. Sometimes they ask you to take dictation for a letter. The Mad Hatter wants her hat back; when you’ve finished her letter, she stamps it and tosses it in a drawer with dozens of other copies. Lewis Carroll wants a last chance to say goodbye to his beloved Alice; when you’ve finished his letter, he takes it, removes his shoes, steps off the slatted wooden path into the water, then rolls the letter up in a bottle and sets it down to float away. Other times they tell you stories – the White Queen may lay you down on a bed and tell you a bedtime story, about a girl who lived backwards, so that, when she first met her beloved, she knew all about their relationship to come, and was already bored of him; and by the end, when he had grown to love her deeply, had already forgotten nearly all about him, until, after their last day together, he was a stranger to her. (This last was my favorite bit from the show – possibly I like being told stories in the dark, or possibly I just like being told to lie down in bed with strangers.)

Then She Fell is more intimate than Sleep No More – only 15 members of the audience, and the action is played out in a much smaller space – but also more stately and controlled. Unlike Sleep No More, Then She Fell takes pains to make sure you actually do experience what they intend you to – you don’t wander; you are led. Which leaves you more time, as a member of the audience, to meditate on what you are seeing. You don’t have the anxiety about missing something happening elsewhere in a vast and maze-like space, but you also don’t have the urgency of needing to discover something. You can think, in real time, what does this mean?

My meditations traveled along a winding path. First, I thought about the age of the Alices. They are played, in the production, by adults. Ms. Liddell, meanwhile, was all of eleven years old when her relationship with Charles Dodgson was broken off by her formidable mother (I wondered whether the two Queens were two versions of this maternal spirit, the Red Queen fierce and domineering, the White more nurturing). That break may possibly have been occasioned by a proposal of marriage from the 31-year-old Dodgson (or there are other possibilities, such as that he was courting her governess – all answers are speculative). Within the world of the play, it’s very likely something like an inappropriate romantic overture was the cause of the rupture. By casting adult women to play Alice (though they are dressed as Alice from the books), the scandal of such a proposal is blunted, to a degree.

But the title of the piece is Then She Fell. Whether down the rabbit hole into insanity, or into love, we are concerned primarily with her trajectory, not with his. And her trajectory is towards adulthood. So I wondered: are we seeing Alice falling, well after she no longer knew Dodgson, for the man who had fallen for her before she could reciprocate? Is that the point of the “girl who lived backwards” story? Is this a theatrical counterpart to the movie, “Dreamchild,” in which Alice Hargreaves (nee Liddell) comes to grips, as an 80-year-old woman, with the story that colonized her identity as a young girl, and with the man whose love prompted him to plant that powerful seed in her young mind?

I thought about the hospital setting. What disease is being treated in this facility isn’t immediately clear – there are a lot of references to malaria on the walls, but none of the action revolves around that malady. As the tour goes on, it becomes clear that the malady being treated is, in fact, Carroll’s love for Ms. Liddell. And, after a century and a half, the cure still isn’t effective. Is this a comment on our tendency, as a culture, to medicalize abnormality? Most of us would look at a Dodgson, if we knew one, and say: he needs treatment. And we might well be right – but by how much would our understanding of his mind fall short if that was all we learned. By the same token, most of us would look at an Alice, if we knew one, and understand her in terms of trauma: how was she affected by the (emotionally) inappropriate attentions of this older man at such a young age – and is there a therapy that will help her get over it. But, again, by how much would our understanding of her mind fall short if we did not reckon with the importance, in all dimensions, that such an experience would have had for her?

Or is the piece ultimately about us and our experience (as immersive experiences are particularly apt to be)? We, the audience, are people who chose to be immersed in an Alice experience. The books already mean something to us – they have already colonized our minds. They are artifacts of our childhoods that have continued to affect us as adults, to bring us back to a state of childhood excitement, or to reflect on our distance from that state. Is that the love that we are supposed to recognize on stage, the love that this institution is trying, ineffectually, to cure us of? Are we Alice? Or, better, the Alice-Carroll duet, playing out a loving dance with our own childhoods, with childhood itself?

Then She Fell is, among other things, a hipster artifact: staged in Williamsburg, exclusive (only 15 audience members at a time), immersive, drenched in Victoriana – and, most important, in the props and signifiers of the gifted child. Because from Dave Eggers to Wes Anderson to whoever else you care to name, this culture is created by and for adults who were and still are gifted children. They were adults early, reading tougher books and understanding more than they ought of the adult world’s emotional complexities. And they remain children late, turning work into games, obsessed with the outward signs of self-creation, living by the golden rule of playing nice. And if you’re looking for a subject to exemplify that cultural nexus you can’t really beat the Alice books.

Late in the play, as I experienced it (different members of the audience go through scenes in a different order), I found myself outside a white room, gazing through a window past rows of medicine bottles. Inside the room, the Red Queen raged and fretted, throwing off her mantle with its fierce red frill, berating herself for something. Then she invited us in, and sat at a vanity where she adjusted her makeup, and told us a story – a story of how you have to control your passion to achieve any measure of power in this world. At the end of which she reassumed the mantle of the Red Queen, and led us out to exit the performance.

I had, prior to that scene, been thinking of the Red Queen as possibly a reference to Alice Liddell’s domineering mother, possibly a reference to Dodgson’s perceptions of a certain kind of female power. But now, I thought of her as a possible destination in adulthood for Alice, and for us – a reference to how one might deal with the madness of love, by subordinating it to power and control. And, as it turns out, her strategy didn’t keep her out of the same asylum where they keep the White Rabbit.

How to avoid being trapped there ourselves? I couldn’t say for certain – but I would recommend, as a first course of treatment, going to the theatre.

Then She Fell will be performed at The Kingsland Ward at St. Johns in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, through September 29th.

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- Illustrate that manifesto with reference to an exciting work of graphic narrative art.

- Interview Bob Dylan with questions taken entirely from his own song lyrics. (Do you know where I can get ride of these things? What’s the matter with your mound? When you gonna wake up? Am I wrong in thinking that you have forgotten me?)

- Write criticism so good it inspires someone else to write awesome criticism.

- Swing for the fences.

So glad you’re back.

Now, via Andrew Sullivan, I am directed to a piece by Thomas de Zengotita arguing that this won’t work. This is probably a mistake on my part, since I’m not a trained philosopher (“kids, don’t try this at home”), but I guess I can’t help going another round.

In a nutshell, Zengotita argues that the problem is that Darwinian evolution is purposeless; our natures are the result not of design but of a series of accidents. And it’s impossible (he argues) to root an ethical system in a nature that originates in accident:

No matter how advanced the natural science—the naturalistic fallacy—the assumption that something is morally good because it is natural—is philosophically secure. . . . More broadly, given the claim that “Action X is good because the genetic program that triggers it, and our approval of it, was naturally selected for,” one can still ask whether it is good to do what we are genetically inclined to do. That is, asking that question still makes sense because—even using examples favored by evolutionary psychologists—the answer would appear to be: sometimes yes (help a friend) and sometimes no (kill the “other”).

It comes down to this: we cannot find truly ethical guidance in a nature shaped by evolution. Natural selection is random—random as to the mutations that produce variation, random as to the accidents of circumstance that make one variant adaptive and another fatal. Natural selection may indeed be responsible for something like a “mother instinct” that inspires tender mammalian behaviors of which we all approve. But natural selection may also be responsible for our instinctive tendency to fear what is strange and attack what is feared, thus contributing to the pageant of slaughter that has been human history. Ethical thought must take into account what Darwinian nature has made of us, and political provision must be made for that. But nothing ethical per se—nothing good or bad or even meaningful is to be found there.

Sullivan interprets him to be saying that you can’t derive an “ought” – an ethical system – from an “is” – an explanation for why we act the way we do. But that’s not what Zengotita is saying, because his preferred ethical approach is phenomenological – rooted in the experience of psychology rather than a genealogy thereof. And this, it seems to me, also involves deriving an “ought” from an “is” – it’s just a different “is” that we care about.

(Actually, I’ve never understood what you are supposed to derive “ought” from if not “is.” What, apart from “is,” is there to derive from? Deriving “ought” from “should be” without any reference to “is” amounts to making “ought” axiomatic. Why that is better than deriving “ought” from “is” escapes me.)

The “is” that Zengotita cares about is the experience of consciousness. That is to say, he wants to derive ethical “oughts” from how people actually experience their own actions and the actions of others. But this activity itself presumes capacities that not all humans possess. Autistic individuals are often described as not being able “properly” to model other minds. In a very different way, neither are sociopaths. But both autistic people and sociopaths are conscious. So Zengotita’s phenomenology is really a phenomenology of “normal” minds – which is right and proper, but brings us back to the question of what makes such minds “normal.” And the answer to that has to be something like “working the way they were supposed to work” – which, if you drop the idea of an intelligent designer, brings us back, ultimately, to Darwinian genealogies of function.

But so what? Why is that a problem?

Zengotita describes the early modern outlook that Darwin overthrew as follows:

What early moderns saw in nature was purpose—rational purpose, divine purpose. When they looked at an equation in classical mechanics, they saw a “law” in the full sense of the word, and when they looked at the relevant experimental results, they saw something like obedience to that law. “Let there be light” made for beautiful poetry, but F = MA was the word of God. When they looked at a healthy body, early moderns also saw conformity to a designer’s intentions. But, in this realm, one also encountered mortality and disease. Here, for some reason, a sort of disobedience came to pass, a malfunctioning. Why that should be so was the subject of debate, but almost no one questioned the framework of interpretation. Modern medicine was founded on the metaphor of repairing malfunctions of bodily mechanisms.

And so it was, and all the more so, when early moderns looked upon human history—the carnage, the absurd superstitions, the institutionalized barbarities. The conclusion was inevitable. Here was disease of another order, a malfunctioning of another kind. Again, there was much debate over why this should be, but the basic framework of interpretation remained. The question became: what were the Maker’s designs for His human creatures as social beings, what were those natural laws and how could His creatures cure the diseases of history in accordance with them? Modern political and ethical thought took shape on that foundation, dependent on the idea that nature was, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, “the art whereby God hath made and governs the world.”

He then asserts that the recognition that so much order arose spontaneously out of chaos makes it impossible to think in this manner anymore. But why? Our bodies are designed to function in certain ways – designed as the result of a spontaneous process, yes, but designed nonetheless. I don’t think there’s a lot of controversy about how our lungs, say, are supposed to work, or what constitutes poor lung functionality. Why does it matter whether the lung was designed by intelligence or whether it is an orderly arrangement that emerged from chaos according to the operation of simple rules on a diverse array of molecules? The lung’s job, with respect to the human organism, remains the same, either way.

As does the role of the physician. Whether you posit a designing intelligence with a transcendent purpose for humanity or you don’t, a pulmonary surgeon will face the question of whether surgery is “worth it” in a particular case of lung disease. Factors will include the likelihood of a cure, the likelihood of complications, the life expectancy of the patient, the expense (and how that expense will be reimbursed, if at all), etc. None of those factors go away if you say that God has a transcendent purpose for the patient, as He does for every human being. Nor do they go away if you do not posit any such purpose from outside the universe. You can still tell whether an organism is functioning well or poorly even if its only “purpose” is to function well.

You may be noticing that, under the surface, I’m pretty skeptical of deontological approaches to ethics. And yes, I think Darwin’s theory makes such approaches less-credible-sounding. But not all ethics are deontological, and I don’t think deontological approaches to ethics are ultimately that much more credible even if you posit a rational agent that designed the universe, including human nature.

Aristotle understood man to be a social animal, who can only flourish within the context of a community. His ethical concern was therefore the operation of that community such that it contributes to human flourishing. That approach strikes me as entirely compatible with an understanding of human nature updated to reflect the (still infant) science of evolutionary psychology.

As, indeed, is Zengotita’s preferred phenomenological approach to psychology, and whatever ethics may be derived therefrom. Zengotita, in the last part of his essay, outlines such an approach by boiling down Jonathan Haidt’s five moral foundations “to see if there is an aspect of the phenomena that might bring ethical unity to the modules—an aspect that would not need explaining, an aspect we simply understand as the rightness or wrongness in them all.” Which sounds like a fine idea – I like starting with phenomenology just fine, even if I don’t think it’s any more “grounded” than anything else.

Here’s what he comes up with:

The regions of being-in-the-world in which “my” is justly placed are vast and varied and caught up in constant improvisation as well—for they follow the contingent logic of Wittgenstein’s language games; they are as historical as we are. People are not poeticizing, still less are they mistaken, when they speak of “my neighborhood” or “our song” or “her mother.” In all those cases, beyond the merely legal, we are talking about ways of being in the world that have property dimensions, as it were—an ethical aspect that subsists in all embodiments of mind.

This continuum highlights the aspect of human deeds and situations that we recognize as essentially ethical, and irreducibly so. In those violations, we understand wrongness immediately, and in their complements, we apprehend a rightness in the arrangement of things. The ethical aspect of the human condition emerges with consciousness itself, constitutive of Being-in-the-world and the human form of life. And where consciousness is not—in brain modules, for example—there is no ethics either.

Back to Haidt’s moral taste buds . . . it is impossible to miss what these responses have in common—and that is what actually makes them wrong. They are all violations of embodiment, of an arrangement of things “possessed” in various ways and to various degrees by the sources of the intentions that constitute them, by the agents embodied in them.

Right: that’s why arranged marriage, according to which a woman is prepared by her parents for bodily penetration by a man she just met, is wrong, while the hookup culture, according to which a woman is prepared by her classmates for bodily penetration by a man she just met, is right. Or, possibly, the other way around. Or possibly either is right, or wrong, depending on the woman’s expectations going into the encounter. Which would reduce our ethical insight to “violating someone’s understanding of what is right is wrong.” Not even “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” but “don’t make any sudden moves.” That’s not a bad ethical insight, as it happens, but I don’t think it gets us terribly far.

A naive, bloggy evol-psych approach to the same question would ask, “how have men and women evolved different strategies for sexual success?” and would look at the question, “what social arrangements will contribute to human happiness?” through the lens of the (inevitably tentative) answer to the prior question. A less-naive, more-scientific-than-bloggy approach would not jump directly from hypothesis to prescription, but would use the hypothesis as the basis for a research program. The plasticity of human nature, including our sexual nature, is neither infinite nor zero, and mapping the contours of that plasticity will help us understand the practical limits of any program to “reform” our ethics, whatever philosophical stream that program originates in.

Personally, I view much of Aristotle’s approach to ethics as relatively easy to rescue from the “death of God” – that is to say, from dropping the assumption of a single intelligence that serves as the ground of Being. For that matter, I view much of Hegel’s approach as relatively easy to rescue from the residue of eschatology implied by an “end state” to history. Most of my conversations never end (or threaten not to, anyway); why should the dialectic of history be any different? Meanwhile, a scientific study of human nature, based, as any study of biological entities must be, in an appreciation of natural selection, strikes me as not only compatible with an Aristotelean-Hegelian framework for thinking about ethics but kind of necessary to make such a framework effective in dealing with real problems.

Well, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Gregory Doran had an thought: set it in Africa, with an all black African cast. Caesar is the reigning populist dictator; Antony his energetic and good-looking right-hand man; and the conspirators are plotting a coup that will make them the new big men of the country.

At first glance, it sounds promising. Where, in a modern Western setting, the plotting and fighting would inevitably come off as metaphorical, in Africa coups and counter-coups are an all-too present reality. And then there are the supernatural elements; the soothsayer, certainly, should play better than usual. But the conceit runs into trouble almost immediately.

We open with the people celebrating Caesar’s triumph and anticipated ascension to the throne. (This process begins before the lights go down, actually – a move I always like, no matter how well-worn.) Then in come two men – “tribunes” in the text, but they are in uniform here, either gendarmes or soldiers of some sort – who chastise the people for their enthusiasm. Caesar’s triumph, after all, was over a fellow Roman – Pompei, whom once they loved. Why then do they cheer?

In the context of the play, the scene is intended to set the stage for Cassius’s entreaty to Brutus. The threat Caesar poses to the Roman constitution is potentially genuine – we know that because of the tribune scene; and the Roman people cannot be counted upon to do any more than follow the top dog – we know that from the same. Thus Brutus has a serious dilemma: the only way to save the constitution may be by violence, and yet violence may also fail. But, in this production, who do these uniformed scolders work for if not for Caesar himself? And if for Caesar, then why do they object to the public’s adoration of him? Right from the start, the African setting has muddled the politics, and that’s a huge problem for a play whose tragic hero takes politics, and political principles, very seriously indeed.

It gets worse with Cassius’s appeal to Brutus. Cassius (a bug-eyed, nervous Cyril Nri) talks his usual envious line of how he was a greater soldier than Caesar – but Brutus is supposed to be animated by some kind of noble idea. What is it? Why do these men talk about being reduced to the status of slaves by Caesar? What was their status before his rise? Who were they? Who are they? Whence comes their power? Brutus is supposed to be the reluctant conspirator, who loves Caesar but fears his ambition; if we don’t know what the idea is that animates him, then how is he any different from Cassius?

He isn’t, in this production. He’s “nobler” only in that he doesn’t take bribes and has a far more winning personality. But his trust in the nobility of Antony looks like pure political stupidity (which it is, of course, but it shouldn’t be only that) rather than principle; and his big speech before Caesar’s funeral saying that, though he loved and honored Caesar, he had serve him with “death for his ambition” falls grossly flat. What, other than ambition, has Brutus himself been fighting for?

The plus side of the conceit begins to show itself with Antony’s funeral oration, and carries through strongly into the tricky tent scene in Act IV. Ray Fearon makes an exceptionally plausible demagogue as Antony, and his segue from dictator’s right hand to would-be dictator coldly checking off names for execution has never seemed more natural. And for once, the tent scene really works. Brutus is as hot under the collar as Cassius is, and Cassius’s distress at apparently losing Brutus’s favor feels completely unfeigned. And when Brutus composes himself to “receive” the news of his wife’s death (news he already knows), it’s not a moment of chilly put-on stoicism. It’s deeply affecting.

Paterson Joseph’s Brutus turns out to be the most interesting performance in the show, as well it should be, but I can’t decide whether I finally thought it worked. This Brutus is anything but reserved – and, frankly, there’s not much about him that’s “noble” as we usually construe that word. He is honest, open-hearted, sincere; but his most shocking attribute is a sense of humor. He jokes (to the audience!) that he can read by the light of the comets and other celestial exhalations that prophecy Caesar’s doom; he laughs at his somnolent servant, Lucius (Simon Manyonda); he chuckles mordantly at his own army’s prospects in the coming fight at Philippi. He’s a very winning character – much more personally appealing than Antony, which is quite a novel reversal. For this novelty alone, the production is worth seeing.

It felt like this approach was a necessary alternative to making Brutus the noble defender of Roman liberties, because, in this production, we cannot identify what Roman liberties are to be defended, nor any obvious threat to them from this Caesar (as played by Jeffrey Kissoon, a rather out-of-touch old dictator, more Duncan than Julius, which only further suggests that Brutus is animated by ambition just like the other conspirators). But if we have nothing but personal qualities to draw us to Brutus, no higher purpose, then we can only be drawn to him if we forget, for a moment, that he’s an assassin, a traitor, a murderer. And if we forget that, then what’s left of Shakespeare’s play?

What’s left is a very affecting second half, which is not my usual reaction to productions of Julius Caesar. I don’t want to be too hard on Gregory Doran. Julius Caesar is an exceptionally tricky play. Most successful productions I have seen were actually successful only in the first half, and fell apart in Acts IV and V. This production seems consciously to have worked backwards, starting with the civil war and its end, and how to make that play effectively. As a consequence, for once the play gets stronger as it wears on. Which, come to think of it, is more fun than having a strong opening.

Julius Caesar plays at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theatre through April 28th.