$140,000. This seems like a plausible floor to permit some measures of household enflourishment. I've got the $40,000 part working for me now in 'retirement' - admittedly, I still had just enough capital at retirement age to manage a down payment on a $124,000 bungalow in a modest neighborhood, and some cash for repairs and refurb. But $140K? That is factors above what most people around me earn or have, which, in the lingo of the economista class that's selling its narrative, puts most households in desperate straits with no more than an accidental broken leg. More to digest here, and further thoughts to share, but I've a lawn to put in better order this morning out of respect for my neighbors who tend more lovingly to theirs.
I'll leave you with this duality, which I think rhymes with Doctorow and Brust, with regard to which side I choose, a couplet which I've almost committed to memory and sort out that with which I engage, and that with which I do not:
"What technology wants is really what Mammon wants: a world of context-free, responsibility-free, dependence free power, measured out in fungible, storable units of value. And ultimately what Mammon wants is to turn a world made of and stewarded by persons into a world made of and reduced to things.
God wishes to put all things into the service of persons and ultimately to bring forth the flourishing of creation through the flourishing of persons. Mammon wants to put all persons into the service of things and ultimately to bring about the exploitation of all Creation."
Andy Crouch, "The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World", 2022.
Tim Long, Just Up the Hill from Lock 15.
PS: Your father-in-law's arrest of Abbie Hoffman likely led to Nixon ending the draft, which was within 13 lottery numbers of sending me to 'Nam with a rifle.
Your $124,000 bungalow and the $40K you're making work in retirement is exactly the ground-truth a number like $140K needs and rarely gets. It's easy for that figure to float as an abstraction from what you rightly call the economista class — but most households aren't near it. They're one broken leg or an ambulance ride from the "desperate straits" you named, and the gap keeps getting called their own failure to plan.
The Crouch quote rhymes with Doctorow and Brust, maybe more than either managed. "Context-free, responsibility-free, dependence-free power" is what property-as-absolute-right becomes fully unmoored — not property in service of people, but people rendered fungible in service of property. That names the mechanism, not just the two poles.
Your PS raised my eyebrows. A single afternoon of policing rippling forward into a draft number and a rifle in Vietnam — I don't know if my father-in-law has ever considered his own small role in that chain. It's a humbling reminder of how much of any life gets shaped by strangers' decisions that had nothing to do with us. And here we are, teasing him that his son is the karmic payback.
On that note — I had a strange run-in with Henry Kissinger while I was working at Theranos. That's a story for another essay entirely.
You write that ideology behaves like a "cultural virus," and you observe that it's in the nature of ideology that a person may become a warrior for it even though it doesn't speak to the life that the person is living.
Yes: how many Confederate soldiers fought, bled, and died for an ideology—integrating a chivalric code of honor with an agrarian economy dependent on slave labor—that had little to do with their material conditions? Or was even hostile to it?
I think a lot about ideology, and I'm sympathetic to your metaphor of infectious disease. But what if ideology is simply a byproduct of what it means to be human. Suppose it's unavoidable. Not a flaw, but an aspect of human consciousness and intelligence. Then, for me, the question becomes, "In what conditions can ideology further the causes of human liberation and enlightenment? The cause of humane societies that promote human dignity?"
It strikes me (what a surprise, classicist that I am) that a handful of Greek city-states of the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries B.C., despite chattel slavery and serfdom, despite patriarchy, and despite oligarchy, generated ideas, concepts, systems, principles, and values that have had immeasurable effects on human history.
Read Herodotus. Read Pericles' funeral oration in Thucydides, then read all of Thucydides. Read the tragedies performed for ten thousand Athenians of every social class. Study the elaborate rituals of the many, many festivals that gave shape and meaning to each successive year in ancient Athens.
What emerges, for me, is that the "problem" of ideology may be not whether it's infected a society, but whether it's good or bad, sophisticated or rudimentary, subversive or complicit, meaning-making or manipulative. Does it resist easy, self-serving answers? The men in the audience for Euripides' *Medea*, some of them, recognized in the title character's code *their* code—Medea's murder of her own children as equivalent to Achilles' revenge upon his fellow Greeks for having disrespected him. Is there a movie in the Marvel Universe that does anything like that?
The Confederate soldier example undercuts my "cultural virus" framing more than anything I used. If ideology is simply unavoidable, a byproduct of consciousness, then the real question isn't whether a society is infected; it's what makes an ideology generative rather than self-serving. That's a better question than the one I asked.
On Athens: I don't dispute the achievement, but I keep returning to something I've written before — that profound thought requires unhurried time, and that time is almost always paid for by someone else's forgone time. Le Guin credited her husband with the domestic labor that freed her to write. If that's true in a modern marriage, how much more true in a system built on chattel slavery and excluded labor — the hours that let free Athenians sit in the theater and debate in the assembly?
But I want to push past "who paid for the leisure" to "who authored the thinking." Cultures don't spring from a ruling class in isolation; they steep in whatever surrounds them. Athens was full of enslaved people carrying their own languages and cosmologies into households over generations. Some of that likely shaped the material we now read as purely Athenian, uncredited. And when the enslaved appear sympathetically in the texts, it's rarely as originators of thought — it's through rescue, rapture, or violation, some device that uses them without crediting them. Cassandra haunts me most: given the truth and the foresight, and disbelieved for it. We still use her name for that pattern — the insider who sees clearly and gets dismissed because of who's speaking, not because the warning is wrong. I don't think it's a coincidence that a culture built partly on unattributed labor also gave us the archetype for the unbelieved insider.
One more thing I'd value your thoughts on: I'm re-reading the Odyssey in English, and I wonder how much of what strikes me as profound is the translator's own interpretive choices — word choice, rhythm, what becomes poetry versus what flattens into prose. Which translations do you trust as faithful? And who decides what gets canonized and translated in the first place? Even the texts we call timeless arrived through very human, very interested choices about what counts as profound.
As always, you give me much to consider in my next piece. Thank you.
In a similar way, the cause of the suffragettes in the U.S. and their goal of empowerment for women was fueled by racism. Surely, if black men can have the franchise, white women were all the more deserving of it.
Sociologist Orlando Patterson traces the origin of the West’s construction of freedom (a triad of freedoms, in his view) to the institution of chattel slavery in Greece.
Yes, Greek tragedy was a project for male citizens even when the protagonist or chorus was female.
The idea I’m working on is this: okay, then what? Does an ideology contain the seeds of its own undoing? Does it encompass a sort of creative tension that might lead the ideologue, despite himself or herself, beyond the enclosure the system has erected?
On Homer, the epics were already canonical as far back as we can see. I like Robert Fagles’ translation. On the poet’s virtuosity, I see the translator of Homer as being like an actor in a play by Shakespeare. Mostly the job is just to get out of the way of the material.
The suffragette point lands in the same shape as the Confederate soldier example — a movement organized around "empowerment" that borrowed its urgency from racial resentment rather than principle. Stanton and Anthony's own rhetoric after the Fifteenth Amendment makes that explicit: the argument wasn't just "women deserve the vote," it was "surely we deserve it more than they do."
To put a contemporary point on it, one that will sting more than it should have to: it feels like the same shape as Courtside Karen — the woman ejected from a Lakers game in 2021 for screaming at LeBron in defense of her husband's grievance, not her own, and the internet knowing instantly what it was watching. I want to say the suffragettes were doing the sanctioned, respectable, historical version of that same move — borrowing the leverage of "we're closer to power than they are" and expecting a solidarity in return that the argument's own logic never actually offered. I'm not fully sure that holds all the way through as a comparison, and you'd know better than I would where it strains.
Patterson's triad feels like the right citation for why this keeps happening, though I'm working from your summary of him more than the source itself. If Western freedom's own conceptual vocabulary was forged in relation to slavery, freedom only becomes thinkable against the backdrop of its opposite; then freedom movements keep reproducing the structure they claim to be escaping. That's a strong claim, and I'd like to know how much weight it can actually bear.
Does ideology contain the seeds of its own undoing? I'd genuinely like you to tell me where it breaks. My guess: an ideology undoes itself only when it makes a promise in language general enough to outrun the interests that coined it. "All men are created equal" was written by slaveholders to justify a tax revolt, but the sentence doesn't know who wrote it or why. It sat there until someone else picked it up and used it against the system that produced it (should have stuck with the oral tradition!). Maybe the suffragettes' own logic did something similar — the vote as a marker of full personhood outliving the racist argument that got it passed. But I suspect you'll have a counterexample that collapses this, an ideology that made just as broad a promise and never got turned against itself. If you have one, I'd rather hear it than keep building on a guess that doesn't hold.
And I like the actor-in-Shakespeare metaphor, though I wondered about it reading Emily Wilson's introduction to her Odyssey, where she's explicit that every translation is already an interpretive act and that fidelity itself is a choice about what to preserve. You'll know her work, and the debates around it, far better than I do — I'm curious whether you think she's actually breaking from "getting out of the way," or doing something that was never really in tension with what you meant by it in the first place.
"My guess: an ideology undoes itself only when it makes a promise in language general enough to outrun the interests that coined it. 'All men are created equal' was written by slaveholders to justify a tax revolt, but the sentence doesn't know who wrote it or why."
That's almost exactly what I had in mind. And maybe there are words to supplement "general." But I'm getting out of my depth.
On translation, looking back at what I wrote, I'm afraid I was being rather glib. That said, though I haven't made a study of Emily Wilson's translation, I do think some of her choices (iambic pentameter, matching Homer verse for verse, paring away metaphors in English that the Greek can't support, etc.) might be summed up that way, viz., getting out of Homer's way as much as is consistent with the limits of English and her modern readership.
I’m always out of my depth, but the questions persist. Word supplements is an interesting way to describe writing about an experience. Can any language explain a feeling?
Cory Doctorow recently offered a useful diagnostic framework, attributed to science fiction writer Steven Brust: “If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, ‘What is more important: human rights or property rights?’ If they say, ‘Property rights are a human right,’ then they are on the right.”
Endquote.
I have no doubt that both Doctorow and Brust think this is a bad thing. I would actually correct Brust, what he should have said was not “they are on the right” but “they ARE right”
Why?
Two reasons. First even animals and toddlers (but I repeat myself :) ) have strong concepts of property rights. We know instinctively that something is “ours” and are upset when someone tries to take it from us. Second, regimes that abuse property rights go on to abuse other rights too and often kill a lot of people in the process - see “collectivization of farms” as performed by many communist regimes, see the fascist insistence that private organizations do what the state tells them to do with their property. See, even, the abuse of eminent domain by local governments who frequently get kickbacks from developers and who therefore fail to ensure that buildings are built safely or factories do not emit noxious pollution.
There are cases where property rights need to be balanced with other rights (pollution is a good example) but that’s a balance between different rights and claims, and is not the same as always subordinated property rights to other human rights.
Took your pushback seriously and wrote a response into the essay — the toddler "mine!" instinct doesn't actually distinguish a legitimate claim from a good grip (kids feel it just as strongly whether they built the toy or grabbed it from someone else), and property-absolutist regimes have their own body count too (slavery, Jim Crow), so neither pole wins cleanly on harm. Appreciate you pushing on it — the essay's better for the friction.
$140,000. This seems like a plausible floor to permit some measures of household enflourishment. I've got the $40,000 part working for me now in 'retirement' - admittedly, I still had just enough capital at retirement age to manage a down payment on a $124,000 bungalow in a modest neighborhood, and some cash for repairs and refurb. But $140K? That is factors above what most people around me earn or have, which, in the lingo of the economista class that's selling its narrative, puts most households in desperate straits with no more than an accidental broken leg. More to digest here, and further thoughts to share, but I've a lawn to put in better order this morning out of respect for my neighbors who tend more lovingly to theirs.
I'll leave you with this duality, which I think rhymes with Doctorow and Brust, with regard to which side I choose, a couplet which I've almost committed to memory and sort out that with which I engage, and that with which I do not:
"What technology wants is really what Mammon wants: a world of context-free, responsibility-free, dependence free power, measured out in fungible, storable units of value. And ultimately what Mammon wants is to turn a world made of and stewarded by persons into a world made of and reduced to things.
God wishes to put all things into the service of persons and ultimately to bring forth the flourishing of creation through the flourishing of persons. Mammon wants to put all persons into the service of things and ultimately to bring about the exploitation of all Creation."
Andy Crouch, "The Life We're Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World", 2022.
Tim Long, Just Up the Hill from Lock 15.
PS: Your father-in-law's arrest of Abbie Hoffman likely led to Nixon ending the draft, which was within 13 lottery numbers of sending me to 'Nam with a rifle.
Your $124,000 bungalow and the $40K you're making work in retirement is exactly the ground-truth a number like $140K needs and rarely gets. It's easy for that figure to float as an abstraction from what you rightly call the economista class — but most households aren't near it. They're one broken leg or an ambulance ride from the "desperate straits" you named, and the gap keeps getting called their own failure to plan.
The Crouch quote rhymes with Doctorow and Brust, maybe more than either managed. "Context-free, responsibility-free, dependence-free power" is what property-as-absolute-right becomes fully unmoored — not property in service of people, but people rendered fungible in service of property. That names the mechanism, not just the two poles.
Your PS raised my eyebrows. A single afternoon of policing rippling forward into a draft number and a rifle in Vietnam — I don't know if my father-in-law has ever considered his own small role in that chain. It's a humbling reminder of how much of any life gets shaped by strangers' decisions that had nothing to do with us. And here we are, teasing him that his son is the karmic payback.
On that note — I had a strange run-in with Henry Kissinger while I was working at Theranos. That's a story for another essay entirely.
Go tend your lawn. This will keep.
You write that ideology behaves like a "cultural virus," and you observe that it's in the nature of ideology that a person may become a warrior for it even though it doesn't speak to the life that the person is living.
Yes: how many Confederate soldiers fought, bled, and died for an ideology—integrating a chivalric code of honor with an agrarian economy dependent on slave labor—that had little to do with their material conditions? Or was even hostile to it?
I think a lot about ideology, and I'm sympathetic to your metaphor of infectious disease. But what if ideology is simply a byproduct of what it means to be human. Suppose it's unavoidable. Not a flaw, but an aspect of human consciousness and intelligence. Then, for me, the question becomes, "In what conditions can ideology further the causes of human liberation and enlightenment? The cause of humane societies that promote human dignity?"
It strikes me (what a surprise, classicist that I am) that a handful of Greek city-states of the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries B.C., despite chattel slavery and serfdom, despite patriarchy, and despite oligarchy, generated ideas, concepts, systems, principles, and values that have had immeasurable effects on human history.
Read Herodotus. Read Pericles' funeral oration in Thucydides, then read all of Thucydides. Read the tragedies performed for ten thousand Athenians of every social class. Study the elaborate rituals of the many, many festivals that gave shape and meaning to each successive year in ancient Athens.
What emerges, for me, is that the "problem" of ideology may be not whether it's infected a society, but whether it's good or bad, sophisticated or rudimentary, subversive or complicit, meaning-making or manipulative. Does it resist easy, self-serving answers? The men in the audience for Euripides' *Medea*, some of them, recognized in the title character's code *their* code—Medea's murder of her own children as equivalent to Achilles' revenge upon his fellow Greeks for having disrespected him. Is there a movie in the Marvel Universe that does anything like that?
Thank you for expanding my thinking.
The Confederate soldier example undercuts my "cultural virus" framing more than anything I used. If ideology is simply unavoidable, a byproduct of consciousness, then the real question isn't whether a society is infected; it's what makes an ideology generative rather than self-serving. That's a better question than the one I asked.
On Athens: I don't dispute the achievement, but I keep returning to something I've written before — that profound thought requires unhurried time, and that time is almost always paid for by someone else's forgone time. Le Guin credited her husband with the domestic labor that freed her to write. If that's true in a modern marriage, how much more true in a system built on chattel slavery and excluded labor — the hours that let free Athenians sit in the theater and debate in the assembly?
But I want to push past "who paid for the leisure" to "who authored the thinking." Cultures don't spring from a ruling class in isolation; they steep in whatever surrounds them. Athens was full of enslaved people carrying their own languages and cosmologies into households over generations. Some of that likely shaped the material we now read as purely Athenian, uncredited. And when the enslaved appear sympathetically in the texts, it's rarely as originators of thought — it's through rescue, rapture, or violation, some device that uses them without crediting them. Cassandra haunts me most: given the truth and the foresight, and disbelieved for it. We still use her name for that pattern — the insider who sees clearly and gets dismissed because of who's speaking, not because the warning is wrong. I don't think it's a coincidence that a culture built partly on unattributed labor also gave us the archetype for the unbelieved insider.
One more thing I'd value your thoughts on: I'm re-reading the Odyssey in English, and I wonder how much of what strikes me as profound is the translator's own interpretive choices — word choice, rhythm, what becomes poetry versus what flattens into prose. Which translations do you trust as faithful? And who decides what gets canonized and translated in the first place? Even the texts we call timeless arrived through very human, very interested choices about what counts as profound.
As always, you give me much to consider in my next piece. Thank you.
In a similar way, the cause of the suffragettes in the U.S. and their goal of empowerment for women was fueled by racism. Surely, if black men can have the franchise, white women were all the more deserving of it.
Sociologist Orlando Patterson traces the origin of the West’s construction of freedom (a triad of freedoms, in his view) to the institution of chattel slavery in Greece.
Yes, Greek tragedy was a project for male citizens even when the protagonist or chorus was female.
The idea I’m working on is this: okay, then what? Does an ideology contain the seeds of its own undoing? Does it encompass a sort of creative tension that might lead the ideologue, despite himself or herself, beyond the enclosure the system has erected?
On Homer, the epics were already canonical as far back as we can see. I like Robert Fagles’ translation. On the poet’s virtuosity, I see the translator of Homer as being like an actor in a play by Shakespeare. Mostly the job is just to get out of the way of the material.
The suffragette point lands in the same shape as the Confederate soldier example — a movement organized around "empowerment" that borrowed its urgency from racial resentment rather than principle. Stanton and Anthony's own rhetoric after the Fifteenth Amendment makes that explicit: the argument wasn't just "women deserve the vote," it was "surely we deserve it more than they do."
To put a contemporary point on it, one that will sting more than it should have to: it feels like the same shape as Courtside Karen — the woman ejected from a Lakers game in 2021 for screaming at LeBron in defense of her husband's grievance, not her own, and the internet knowing instantly what it was watching. I want to say the suffragettes were doing the sanctioned, respectable, historical version of that same move — borrowing the leverage of "we're closer to power than they are" and expecting a solidarity in return that the argument's own logic never actually offered. I'm not fully sure that holds all the way through as a comparison, and you'd know better than I would where it strains.
Patterson's triad feels like the right citation for why this keeps happening, though I'm working from your summary of him more than the source itself. If Western freedom's own conceptual vocabulary was forged in relation to slavery, freedom only becomes thinkable against the backdrop of its opposite; then freedom movements keep reproducing the structure they claim to be escaping. That's a strong claim, and I'd like to know how much weight it can actually bear.
Does ideology contain the seeds of its own undoing? I'd genuinely like you to tell me where it breaks. My guess: an ideology undoes itself only when it makes a promise in language general enough to outrun the interests that coined it. "All men are created equal" was written by slaveholders to justify a tax revolt, but the sentence doesn't know who wrote it or why. It sat there until someone else picked it up and used it against the system that produced it (should have stuck with the oral tradition!). Maybe the suffragettes' own logic did something similar — the vote as a marker of full personhood outliving the racist argument that got it passed. But I suspect you'll have a counterexample that collapses this, an ideology that made just as broad a promise and never got turned against itself. If you have one, I'd rather hear it than keep building on a guess that doesn't hold.
And I like the actor-in-Shakespeare metaphor, though I wondered about it reading Emily Wilson's introduction to her Odyssey, where she's explicit that every translation is already an interpretive act and that fidelity itself is a choice about what to preserve. You'll know her work, and the debates around it, far better than I do — I'm curious whether you think she's actually breaking from "getting out of the way," or doing something that was never really in tension with what you meant by it in the first place.
"My guess: an ideology undoes itself only when it makes a promise in language general enough to outrun the interests that coined it. 'All men are created equal' was written by slaveholders to justify a tax revolt, but the sentence doesn't know who wrote it or why."
That's almost exactly what I had in mind. And maybe there are words to supplement "general." But I'm getting out of my depth.
On translation, looking back at what I wrote, I'm afraid I was being rather glib. That said, though I haven't made a study of Emily Wilson's translation, I do think some of her choices (iambic pentameter, matching Homer verse for verse, paring away metaphors in English that the Greek can't support, etc.) might be summed up that way, viz., getting out of Homer's way as much as is consistent with the limits of English and her modern readership.
I’m always out of my depth, but the questions persist. Word supplements is an interesting way to describe writing about an experience. Can any language explain a feeling?
There’s a scene in this film that describes a sense of placelessness that I experience as a third-culture kid: https://youtu.be/Qk2ubNSyRUo?si=gda3HRGZ-qX6uSlc
Quote:
Cory Doctorow recently offered a useful diagnostic framework, attributed to science fiction writer Steven Brust: “If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, ‘What is more important: human rights or property rights?’ If they say, ‘Property rights are a human right,’ then they are on the right.”
Endquote.
I have no doubt that both Doctorow and Brust think this is a bad thing. I would actually correct Brust, what he should have said was not “they are on the right” but “they ARE right”
Why?
Two reasons. First even animals and toddlers (but I repeat myself :) ) have strong concepts of property rights. We know instinctively that something is “ours” and are upset when someone tries to take it from us. Second, regimes that abuse property rights go on to abuse other rights too and often kill a lot of people in the process - see “collectivization of farms” as performed by many communist regimes, see the fascist insistence that private organizations do what the state tells them to do with their property. See, even, the abuse of eminent domain by local governments who frequently get kickbacks from developers and who therefore fail to ensure that buildings are built safely or factories do not emit noxious pollution.
There are cases where property rights need to be balanced with other rights (pollution is a good example) but that’s a balance between different rights and claims, and is not the same as always subordinated property rights to other human rights.
Took your pushback seriously and wrote a response into the essay — the toddler "mine!" instinct doesn't actually distinguish a legitimate claim from a good grip (kids feel it just as strongly whether they built the toy or grabbed it from someone else), and property-absolutist regimes have their own body count too (slavery, Jim Crow), so neither pole wins cleanly on harm. Appreciate you pushing on it — the essay's better for the friction.