THE POLITICS AND

ETHICS OF IDENTITY

We are multiple, fragmented, and changing selves who, nevertheless,

believe we have unique and consistent identities. What accounts for this
illusion? Why has the problem of identity become so central in post-war
scholarship, fiction, and the media? Following Hegel, Richard Ned Lebow
contends that the defining psychological feature of modernity is the
tension between our reflexive and social selves. To address this problem
Westerners have developed four generic strategies of identity construction
that are associated with four distinct political orientations. Lebow develops
his arguments through comparative analysis of ancient and modern liter-
ary, philosophical, religious, and musical texts. He asks how we might
come to terms with the fragmented and illusionary nature of our identities
and explores some political and ethical implications of doing so.

RICHARD NED LEBOW is Professor of International Political Theory in the

Department of War Studies of King’s College London, and James O.
Freedman Presidential Professor Emeritus at Dartmouth College. He is
also a Bye-Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. In a
career spanning six decades, he has published widely in the fields of
international relations, political psychology, methodology, and political
theory. He is the author of, among other books, of Why Nations Fight
(Cambridge University Press, 2010); A Cultural Theory of International
Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2008), which won the 2009
American Political Science Association Jervis and Schroeder Award for
the Best Book on International History and Politics as well as the British
International Studies Association Susan Strange Book Prize for the Best
Book in International Studies; and The Tragic Vision of Politics
(Cambridge University Press, 2003) which won the 2005 Alexander
George Book Award of the International Society for Political Psychology.
 THE POLITICS AND
ETHICS OF IDENTITY
In Search of Ourselves

RICHARD NED LEBOW

 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Cambridge University Press
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Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York

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© Richard Ned Lebow 2012

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2012

Printed and Bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group

A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

Lebow, Richard Ned.
The politics and ethics of identity : in search of ourselves / Richard Ned Lebow.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-107-02765-7
1. Political psychology. 2. Identity (Philosophical concept) I. Title.
JA74.5.L425 2012
320.010 9–dc23
2012015488

ISBN 978-1-107-02765-7 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to
in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such
websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
To Carol, whose support through this and earlier projects has been so
important
 CONTENTS

Preface page ix
Acknowledgments xi
1 Introduction 1

2 Narratives and identity 46

3 Homer, Virgil, and identity 78

4 Mozart and the Enlightenment 110

5 Germans and Greeks 151

6 Beam me up, Lord 183

7 Science fiction and immortality 230

8 Identity reconsidered 269

Bibliography 329
Name Index 415
Subject Index 423

vii
 PREFACE

Over the years I have occasionally taught an undergraduate seminar on identity.

In the first session I ask my students if they are unique and they all respond
affirmatively. I have them list the qualities that make them this way and, for the
most part, they write down the same constellation of qualities: intelligence,
creativity, feelings for others, sense of humor. When I read their replies aloud
they are confused, but quickly come up with a new line of argument: their life
experiences make them unique. They readily concede that these experiences are
mediated by memory, and are surprisingly confident about its accuracy. They
are initially resistant to research that reveals just how labile and socially con-
structed memory is.
The contrast between popular and scientific conceptions of identity is by no
means limited to my Dartmouth and LSE students. It is widespread in Western
societies, where it is propagated by prominent scholars and, in a more troubling
way, by therapists who urge patients to discover their “inner selves.” The enduring
belief in unique and consistent identities suggests that there are strong psycho-
logical and practical needs to understand ourselves this way. This question
encouraged me to inquire further into the problem. I read the literature on identity
in philosophy, psychology and political science and discovered that scholars tend
to err in the opposite direction. Some philosophers deny any selfhood to people,
and represent us as cognitively complex animals who live in the present and whose
reflexivity is best described as stream of consciousness. Philosophers and social
scientists who advance thicker conceptions of self overwhelmingly emphasize its
social determinants and tend to downplay human agency.
I enter this debate, but obliquely. My central question is why identity has
become so important to people in the modern era. I argue that the intellectual
and material changes associated with what has come to be known as modernity
intensified the conflict between our reflexive and social selves. Four generic
strategies of identity arose, each intended to overcome or reduce the inner
tensions generated by this conflict. Each of these strategies is associated with,
and might be said to provide the psychological underpinnings of, four modern
political orientations. These are conservatism, totalitarianism, liberalism and
anarchism. I analyze the relationships between modernity and identity and
identity and politics and assess the feasibility of different identity strategies. I
ask if we could dispense with illusion of unitary, consistent identities, how we
might do this and explore its ethical potential.
ix
x preface

I found this book harder to research and write than any other I have published.
The first reason for this has to do with the breadth of the subject; identity is an
important field of study in almost every social science and humanities discipline.
It is treated differently by these disciplines, and most of them ask different
questions about it. The biggest division is between studies that are interested in
finding out what identity is, or what people think it is, and studies intent on
fathoming its behavioral and other consequences. Many of the latter treat identity
as an unproblematic category, which it certainly is not. The concept of identity is
as fuzzy as any in the scholarly arsenal, and more troubling still, is almost
inseparable from political projects that are largely negative in their ethical
implications. Stepping outside these frameworks is difficult, as it requires a new
vocabulary, and one that makes it correspondingly more difficult to assimilate
and integrate ideas and findings from different studies.
In the course of approaching a rich and dispersed set of primary and
secondary sources I read a fascinating article in the “Science Times” about
slime molds. These single cell creatures sometimes combine by the thousands
into multicellular organisms that can send out tendrils several meters in search
of food and then reconstitute themselves into shapes that can move toward food
sources by the most efficient routes.1 I did something similar. I sent out
intellectual tendrils in different disciplinary directions, and discovered rich
lodes of thought about identity. I reconstituted my project in response to
what I found, and did so on multiple occasions. I differ from slime molds in
that there was nothing efficient about the manner in which I explored and
constructed. It was downright messy, and the problem of multiple reframings
produced a manuscript with more loose ends than I liked. Feedback from
readers, my own and those selected by the Press, provided useful criticisms
and served as the catalyst for additional rounds of revisions.
My book still incorporates tensions, and necessarily so. In the first instance,
they are attributable to the troubled relationship between the concept and
practice of identity. I am studying personhood and identity, categories to which
I concede no ontological standing. Phenomenological selves are nevertheless of
prime importance in understanding human motives and behavior. It is not easy,
and hardly intellectually seamless, to tack back and forth between the two. I use a
set of golden age, utopian and dystopic texts to study identity and the forms it has
taken in the modern era. Each of these texts provides important insights into the
general questions that drive my inquiry, and each has something interesting to
say about identity discourses and practices in a particular culture and era. This
dual focus inevitably compelled me to make difficult trade-offs within individual
chapters between the micro and macro level of analysis.

1
Carl Zimmer, “Can Answers to Evolution Be Found in Slime?,” New York Times, “Science
Times,” 4 October 2011, pp. 1, 4.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe thanks to many people and especially to Jens Bartelson, Carol Bohmer,
Martin Heisler, David Lebow, Dorry Noyes, Nick Onuf and Lucas Swaine, who
read all of my manuscript and provided insightful criticism and guidance. So
did my presidential scholar, Brittney Frankel. I am grateful to Duncan Bell,
Felix Berenskoetter, Steve Brooks, Bernd Bucher, Manu Castano, Carole Clark,
Michelle Clarke, Paul Christesen, Stefano Guzzini, Richard t’Hart, Andy Hom,
Istvan Hont, Alex Houen, Nelson Kasfir, Phyllis Katz, Fritz Kratochwil, Gert
Krell, Sascha Lohmann, Peter Machinist, Roger Masters, Sean Molloy, Ben
Mueller, Jim Murphy, Tudor Onea, Erik Ringmar, Dan Tompkins, Brian
Watchorn and Chris Zacher for providing assistance or feedback on individual
chapters. Ted Hopf and Chris Zacher also provided useful feedback in response
to a talk I gave about my project. I owe special thanks to the late Alexander
Stephan, who kindled my interest in Dispensationalism and the Left Behind
series of novels.
I wrote this book while I was James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of
Government at Dartmouth College, Centennial Professor of International
Relations at The London School of Economics and Political Science and
Visiting Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge. I made good use of the
Dartmouth Library, the British Library and that of the American Academy in
Rome. I am indebted to my colleagues at Dartmouth, the LSE and Cambridge
for numerous interesting and helpful conversations, and to the John Sloan
Dickey Center at Dartmouth, and its administrator, Christiane Wohlforth, for
arranging a seminar to critique my concluding chapter. Thanks, too, to Roger
Giner-Sorolla at the psychology department of the University of Kent for
arranging a lecture to his colleagues and graduate students, to Bertrand Badie
for doing the same at the "Sciences Po,” to Rick Herrmann and Craig Jenkins for
inviting me to speak at the Mershon Center at Ohio State and to Mike Williams
and his Oxford colleagues for the invitation to give the Rothermere lecture at
“the other place.”

xi
 1

Introduction

Everyone is a whole world of representations, Which are buried in the night

of the “I.”
G. W. F. Hegel1

Like so many of Hegel’s pithy observations, this one is suitably enigmatic. I am

drawn to it because it can be read to capture, avant la lettre, and with admirable
brevity, the implications of recent work on identity in psychology, analytical
philosophy and political theory. This research indicates just how elusive the
concept of the self is, conceptually and empirically. As many philosophers
contend, the self may be an illusion, but one that is central to the well-being
of modern people. As Hegel suggests, we appear in multiple guises by virtue of
our numerous self-identifications, but invariably think of ourselves in the
singular.2 Given the contradictions between our self-understandings and
those of science, we have a strong incentive to keep the former under wraps.
My goal in this book is to shed light on conceptions of identity and their
associated practices. Following in the footsteps of Hegel, my end goal is to
think about the relationship between identity, and politics and ethics.
Most analytical philosophers and neuroscientists question the existence of
the self.3 Some deny its existence altogether, and describe consciousness as a
never-ending stream of fleeting sensations and reflections on them. For others,
there is a “minimal” or phenomenological self, an illusion to be sure, but a
powerful one that provides meaning to our lives and guidance in our inter-
actions with others.4 If selfhood is questionable, identity, which rests upon the

1
Hegel, “Preliminary Conceptions.”
2
This insight can also be attributed to William James and George Herbert Mead. See James,
Principles of Psychology; Mead, Mind, Self and Society; Markus, “Self-Schemata and
Processing of Information about the Self.”
3
Among philosophers there are, roughly speaking, two schools of thought. The
“reductionist” view, made prominent by David Hume, and more recently associated with
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, denies the notion of a persistent core self. The “non-
reductionist” position, whose modern statement derives from John Locke, maintains that
there is a core self that persists through various stages of life.
4
Phenomenological is used here in its traditional continental sense to describe lived
experience and its subjective dimensions.

1
2 i n t r o duc ti o n

foundation of the self, is an even more dubious concept. Westerners – and

many other people – would be as shocked by the thought that they do not
possess a self as they would be by the suggestion that they are without a gender.
More remarkable still, most Westerners believe in the face of all the evidence to
the contrary that their identities are consistent and unique.
Highly respected scholars in diverse fields (e.g. Clifford Geertz, Erik Erikson,
Paul Ricoeur and Anthony Giddens) encourage this illusion, as do prominent
philosophers (e.g. Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor) who want to ground
ethical systems in such identities. They write in an era when our discourses
reveal the near-metastasis of the word self, which is now attached via a hyphen
to an almost endless list of words. These include self-image, self-seeking, self-
esteem, self-knowledge, self-consciousness, self-reference, self-preservation, all
of which have a positive valence. In part, my project is aimed at pulling the
empirical rug out from underneath such claims, but more importantly, in
understanding why they are made. What accounts for our fixation on the self
in the modern era, and more so still in the last half-century? What kinds of
identity projects has modernity spawned? What accounts for this variation, and
to whom do different constructions of identity appeal? Could we recognize
ourselves as fragmented and question the status of the alleged selfhood on
which our identities are based? If so, what would be the ethical consequences?
Identity discourses emerged in early modern Europe and became more
pronounced in the eighteenth century. The diversity they reveal indicates
that there is nothing inevitable about contemporary understandings of identity
or their relative appeal. Identity projects are a response to modernity, but
they are mediated by cultural understandings and practices. Modernity is
now a global phenomenon, and many people contend that there are important
differences between non-Western and Western identity discourses,
especially in their relative emphasis of social versus individual selves.5

5
Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values;
Triandis, Individualism and Collectivism; Markus and Kitayama, “Culture and the Self-
Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation”; Halloran and Kashima, “Culture,
Social Identity and the Individual” find significant differences with respect to individualism
and collectivism, especially between Asian and North American cultures. Tafarodi,
Marshall and Katsura, “Standing Out in Canada and Japan,” finds an emphasis on
distinctiveness in Asian cultures as well, but that its expression is more constrained by
cultural norms. Criticism of earlier studies comes from Halloran and Kashima, “Culture,
Social Identity and the Individual”; Jetten and Postmes, “‘I Did It My Way’”; Vignoles,
Chryssouchoou and Breakwell, “Distinctiveness Principle”; Takano and Osaka,
“Unsupported Common View”; Hornsey, “Ingroup Critics and their Influence on
Groups”; Moghaddam, “Interobjectivity,” who find these earlier studies, if not biased,
overly mechanical in their methods. Trafimow, Triandis and Goto, “Some Tests of the
Distinction Between the Private Self and the Collective Self”; Hong, Chiu and Kung,
“Bringing Culture Out in Front”; Matsumoto, Wessman, Reston, Brown and
Kupperbusch, “Context-Specific Measurement of Individualism–Collectivism on the
 in tr o d u c t io n 3

I will show that the variation in this regard within Western culture is at least as
great as any putative differences between it and its Asian and African
counterparts.
Modernity is the starting point of my analysis and a principal focus of
my book, so it is useful to start with a short discussion of the meaning of this
term. Bernard Yack identifies four distinct conceptions of modernity: philo-
sophic, sociological, political and aesthetic.6 Philosophic modernity repre-
sents a self-conscious break with authority, initiated by Bacon, Descartes
and later Enlightenment philosophers. The roots of these discourses can be
traced back to Petrarch and the Renaissance and the rejection of divine logos
as the foundation of political or individual order and identity.7 The socio-
logical conception of modernity describes changing social relationships and
conditions, and is generally thought to have been ushered in by the develop-
ment of capitalism in the late eighteenth century and the break it initiated
with traditional forms of authority. The political conception of modernity
emphasizes the emergence of egalitarian and democratic forms of politics
and legitimacy, and the corresponding decline of the aristocratic order. The
watershed in this transformation is the French Revolution. The aesthetic
conception of modernity is associated with styles of art and literature
that understand beauty and meaning as ephemeral, and are opposed to the
orthodoxy of the moment regardless of its content. Modernism, as this
aspect of modernity is usually called, did not appear until the late nineteenth
century.
The French poet Baudelaire, who is generally credited with coining the
term modernity, used it to describe Parisian urban life where he routinely
rubbed shoulders with different kinds of people. He reasoned that modern art,
like the modern city, required new plots and forms and openness to chance
encounters with unpredictable outcomes.8 Robert Pippin contends that mod-
ernity should also be defined by its sense of itself. It encourages the belief that
the contemporary world is distinct from, and possibly better than, its ancient
and medieval counterparts.9 This belief in progress is found in the poetry of
Petrarch in the fourteenth century. It is more pronounced in the writings of
Francis Bacon in the sixteenth century. This is also when the word “modern”

Individual Level”; Gardner, Gabriel and Lee, “‘I’ Value Freedom but ‘We’ Value
Relationships,” argue that many of the differences found between Asians and North
Americans are due to experimental priming. Recent evidence finds strong desires for
distinctiveness in Asian cultures as well.
6
Yack, Fetishism of Modernities, pp. 32–5.
7
Gillespie, Theological Origins of Modernity, pp. 44–68, on Petrarch. Masters, Fortune is a
River, dates modernity to an encounter between Leonardo and Machiavelli at the beginning
of the sixteenth century.
8
Baudelaire, “Painter of Modern Life.” 9 Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe thanks to many people and especially to Jens Bartelson, Carol Bohmer,
Martin Heisler, David Lebow, Dorry Noyes, Nick Onuf and Lucas Swaine, who
read all of my manuscript and provided insightful criticism and guidance. So
did my presidential scholar, Brittney Frankel. I am grateful to Duncan Bell,
Felix Berenskoetter, Steve Brooks, Bernd Bucher, Manu Castano, Carole Clark,
Michelle Clarke, Paul Christesen, Stefano Guzzini, Richard t’Hart, Andy Hom,
Istvan Hont, Alex Houen, Nelson Kasfir, Phyllis Katz, Fritz Kratochwil, Gert
Krell, Sascha Lohmann, Peter Machinist, Roger Masters, Sean Molloy, Ben
Mueller, Jim Murphy, Tudor Onea, Erik Ringmar, Dan Tompkins, Brian
Watchorn and Chris Zacher for providing assistance or feedback on individual
chapters. Ted Hopf and Chris Zacher also provided useful feedback in response
to a talk I gave about my project. I owe special thanks to the late Alexander
Stephan, who kindled my interest in Dispensationalism and the Left Behind
series of novels.
I wrote this book while I was James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of
Government at Dartmouth College, Centennial Professor of International
Relations at The London School of Economics and Political Science and
Visiting Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge. I made good use of the
Dartmouth Library, the British Library and that of the American Academy in
Rome. I am indebted to my colleagues at Dartmouth, the LSE and Cambridge
for numerous interesting and helpful conversations, and to the John Sloan
Dickey Center at Dartmouth, and its administrator, Christiane Wohlforth, for
arranging a seminar to critique my concluding chapter. Thanks, too, to Roger
Giner-Sorolla at the psychology department of the University of Kent for
arranging a lecture to his colleagues and graduate students, to Bertrand Badie
for doing the same at the "Sciences Po,” to Rick Herrmann and Craig Jenkins for
inviting me to speak at the Mershon Center at Ohio State and to Mike Williams
and his Oxford colleagues for the invitation to give the Rothermere lecture at
“the other place.”

xi
 in tr o d u c t io n 5

society. Millennial movements like Dispensationalism – the subject of chapter

6 – embrace this strategy, as do to varying degrees the Amish, Satmar,
Rajneeshees and some varieties of Mormons.12 A second strategy attempts to
do away with interiority and reflexivity as far as possible, as its proponents
consider them sources of alienation and social and political unrest. They want
to create a largely secular society that removes all distinctions of wealth and
honor and deprives people of privacy, free time and all forms of individual
differentiation. Thomas More’s Utopia is the quintessential expression of this
approach. The two strategies are conceptually distinct, but they share much in
common, and utopian projects have often drawn on both, as traditional
Marxism does.
Two modern strategies embrace interiority and reflexivity. Strategy three is
associated with British empiricism. It understands interiority and reflexivity as
compatible with the social order. Its advocates consider society a source of
diverse role models that people can emulate, even mix and match and trans-
form in the process of working out identities of their own. Strategy four was
pioneered by Romanticism and propagated by its successors. It condemns
society as oppressive, and encourages people to turn inwards, or to nature, to
discover and develop authentic, autonomous identities. The two modern strat-
egies encourage self-fashioning, and to varying degrees, the belief that we can
construct unitary, consistent identities. Strategy four is arguably the dominant
intellectual conception of identity in the contemporary West. There are reasons
for believing that strategy three is more common in practice.
These four strategies provide the intellectual and psychological foundations
for four kinds of political projects.13 With its effort to constrain individualism,
strategy one undergirds conservatism and its emphasis on the organic nature of
societies and their enduring wisdoms. Although the concept of totalitarianism
is no longer in vogue because of its Cold War associations, strategy two is
closely associated with political systems, real or imagined, that attempt to
suppress individual autonomy and expression, and socialize and coerce people
into committing themselves to communal values and goals. Strategy three
envisages a world in which individual and society can coexist, not without
tensions, but nevertheless, in a mutually beneficial way in part because of those
tensions. It finds political expression in liberalism. Strategy four embraces the
long-term goal of reconciliation of the individual and society, but only as
the result of a far-reaching transformation of society and individuals alike. In
the interim, it regards them as adversaries, and in contrast to strategies one
and two, unambiguously sides with the individual. It provides the justification
for anarchy. All four political movements are distinctly modern, and their
emergence can be traced to the same conditions responsible for the identity

12 13
Swaine, Liberal Conscience. I would like to thank Dorothy Noyes for this insight.
6 i n tr od uct i on

strategies that support them. They in turn aspire to create the social conditions
in which each of these identity strategies can reach fruition.
Three of the four strategies were pioneered by utopias, a genre that developed
to explore solutions to psychological and social tensions created by interiority
and reflexivity. Utopias are “subjunctive worlds,” to use Dorothy Noyes’ term,
that are critical for their assessment of the worlds in which we live.14 Critics of
utopias allege that they inspire political projects that promote more intense
conflicts between individuals and their societies or seek to overcome them by
depriving people of key features of agency commonly considered essential to
humanity. The genre of dystopia arose in part to elaborate and publicize this
critique. I will argue, in contrast to the conventional wisdom, that most utopias
are backward looking and describe societies that all but do away with external
and internal autonomy. As this overview suggests, modernity, identity strat-
egies, novel political forms and utopian and dystopic discourses are closely
related, even co-constitutive.
All efforts to resolve tensions between individual and social selves have failed, as
they inevitably must. It is impossible to turn the clock back on modernity, or
overcome its alienating features by means of individual choice or social engineering.
Somehow we must come to terms with the psychological truth that our selfhood is
largely imaginary, even though we feel it intensely. Our so-called identities, more-
over, are more socially than individually determined. We are multiple conflicted
and discontinuous selves and to the extent that we attempt to assert and develop
ourselves we must to some degree alienate ourselves from our social environment.
This reality shares much with Heidegger’s nightmare of aporia: a world in which
identities are zerstreut (fragmented, dispersed and disconnected).15 Nietzsche,
Heidegger and their French acolytes make valiant and innovative efforts to over-
come this situation and theorize higher forms of selfhood based on the very absence
of ontological stability that ordinary people crave.
I agree with these philosophers that a world in which people could move
beyond the illusion of consistent, unitary identities, even selfhood, has enor-
mous psychological and ethical potential. Indeed, this may be essential to bridge
effectively other categories maintained by logically and empirically indefensible
markers and boundaries. Such a move would not be incapacitating if we could
retain the ability to order the multiple components of our selfhood and conduct
a Bakhtinian-like dialogue across them. Multiple selves are not necessarily
incoherent selves. Such a world would nevertheless be more difficult to achieve
than even these philosophers imagine, for reasons I will explore. One of the
most serious impediments is our dependence on linear narratives, in which all
approaches to identity are currently anchored.

14
Noyes, “Subjunctive Worlds.”
15
Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 129 (German pagination in margins).
 i n tr od uct i on 7

In 1785, Thomas Reid described identity as “the foundation of all rights and
obligations, and of all accountableness.”16 Many moral philosophers agree.
Identity undeniably has important implications for ethics, but this relationship
is poorly understood and I make two radical claims about it. I challenge the
conventional wisdom that identity is somehow dependent on negative “others.”
This belief complicates, if not altogether impedes, that task of squaring ethics
with identity. It is also responsible for the major cleavage between cosmopol-
itans and communitarians. I marshal evidence from psychology to show that
identities generally form before images of others and that negative images are a
special case; they are most likely to develop when groups compete directly for
scarce resources. I turn to Homer and Virgil to show that identity construction
may require actors to draw closer to those from whom they are differentiating
themselves. It is best conceived as a dialectical process, and current approaches
examine only the separation side of the equation. I offer a more comprehensive
and, I believe, more balanced account, and explore some of its normative
implications for individuals, states and our species.
More fundamentally, I question the move to root ethics in identity. Given our
illusory and multiple selves, turning to identity for ethical guidance is like
looking for stability in a vortex. It invites great confusion and frustration, or
alternatively, a cramped focus on one form of self-identification with a corres-
pondingly restricted ethical horizon. Much might be gained from liberating
ethics from identity. Recognition of the fragmented nature of identities could
provide intellectual and emotional grounds for transcending many of the “us”
and “other” distinctions that stand in the way of implementing any ethical
commitments on a more universal basis.
The Politics and Ethics of Identity interrogates identity from macro and micro
perspectives. At the macro level, I attempt to account for four generic identity
strategies, the problems they confront, the reasons why people continue to
embrace them and the prospects for moving beyond them. At the micro level,
I analyze how discourses create and propagate identities, the dynamics of
identity construction and how identities are related to different understandings
of modernity and expectations about progress. Different identity strategies can
also be explained in part with reference to the relative strength of state and
society in different Western countries. Agency is also important. People invent
and propagate the discourses that instantiate identities. Within limits, contem-
porary people make choices about who they want to be. I am interested in both
kinds of agency, their relationship and respective dynamics.
I begin this chapter with a discussion of psychological autonomy, which is so
central to my larger argument. I then offer a critique of the concept of identity
embedded in a genealogy that begins in the ancient world and ends with
contemporary analytical philosophy. I subsequently attempt to reformulate

16
Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, p. 112.
8 i n t r od uc ti on

our understanding of identity to take into account what analytical philosophers

have to say about personhood and identity and the ways in which people form
self-identifications that are the sources of what they think of as their identities.
I conclude with an overview of the remaining chapters of the book.
To recapitulate, I start from the assumption that selfhood and unitary,
consistent identities are illusions. I am nevertheless interested in why so
many modern people and scholars believe such identities to be feasible.17
I situate my answer in a broader examination of modern identity discourses,
which I describe as a response to the uncomfortable, and for some, unaccept-
able tensions that opened up between our reflective and social selves. I identify
and evaluate four distinct identity strategies and conclude that the best we can
do is accept the existence of our multiple selves and reach some kind of partial
accommodation between our reflexive and social selves. I disagree with philos-
ophers who maintain that ethics must be anchored in identities. I believe we
might live happier and more ethical lives and societies by recognizing and
exploiting the tensions generated by our multiple, conflicted and fragmented
selves.
My arguments draw on psychology, philosophy, history and political science,
as they all have different but important things to say about identity. They offer
different takes on identity, some of them at odds, within and between disci-
plines. I give priority to history and psychology because the former describes
the different social orders and conditions in which people must live, while the
latter provides insight into universal human needs. I am particularly interested
in the ways these needs find expression in different cultures and circumstances.
Philosophy enters the picture in three important ways. It develops concepts of
identity, brings rigor to those we use to describe our world and ourselves and
exposes their logical fallacies and incompleteness. It also provides a record of
how good minds across the ages have grappled with concepts, but also with the
problems they attempt to instantiate and engage.
In many ways, Nietzsche is the jumping-off point of my empirical and
normative arguments. In Genealogy of Morals, he argues against Kant’s dual-
istic deduction of morality and attempts to develop an alternate justification for
what he considers the stifling Christian-based morality of his Europe.18
Nietzsche insists that “virtue must be our own invention.” Everyone must
“find his own virtue, his own categorical imperative.”19 The most profound
expression of Nietzsche’s anti-dualism concerns the subject himself. In a dual-
istic worldview, eternal forms exist beyond the shadow world, and one of them
is posited to be an eternal soul. With Nietzsche’s refusal to accept any

17
These claims are made by the social identity theory and self-categorization theory research
programs.
18
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Sections 10, 13, and Antichrist, Section 11.
19
Ibid., emphasis in original.
 i n t r o d u c ti o n 9

distinction between essences and appearances comes a rejection of a reified

soul. Just as there is no essence behind the appearance, there is no otherworldly
soul behind the worldly actor – no doer behind the deed. “The doer is merely a
fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything.” The “subject” – in an
abstract, metaphysical sense – is an invention of the weak, who turn to it as
part of their retreat from the worldly struggles for domination. Only the slave
“needs to make this distinction in order to create the illusion of freedom in
impotence.” This illusion encourages the organization of the world and its
actors into stable objects and identities.20
Nietzsche would have us believe that strong people, or “free spirits,” do not
need to find refuge in the illusion of stable truths and identities. Invoking
Schopenhauer’s idea of a will to power, he imagines that free spirits are
endowed with a sense of self that is too powerful to be constrained.21 They
find freedom and fulfillment in the very absence of stability of any kind. Such
people have no recourse to the fictions of a soul or transcendental unity. Absent
an underlying subject, the achievement of self is reserved for those whose words
or deeds reflect a consistency of style.22
Nietzsche grasps the link between the soul and the modern concept of
identity, a relationship I explore later in this chapter. He further recognizes
that identity projects have roots in the past and take shape within the frame-
work of Greek and Christian thought and practice. I follow Nietzsche in
believing that true agency requires us to distance ourselves from at least some
identifications that have been imposed on us and, most importantly, to
renounce the fiction of consistent and stable identities. I am, however, skeptical
of his proposed solution to Kantian dualism, and even more, of his identity
project. The perpetual energy of self-becoming, based on the tapping of some
inner power, in accord with the nature of the world, strikes me as metaphysical
nonsense.23 The variants offered by Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida are no
more convincing, for reasons I will make clear.

20
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Section 13. Also see Beyond Good and Evil, ss. 17–20, Thus
Spake Zarathustra, and Will to Power, s. 585a. Nietzsche nevertheless offers an ambivalent
account of what he calls slave morality. He clearly dislikes slave morality because it is
characterized by cleverness and ingenuity. It can nevertheless be quite powerful and shape
the world in which persons live, and accordingly have a more positive dimension. This can
be seen in Nietzsche’s fascination with St. Paul. While disapproving of his project, he was
deeply impressed by Paul’s ability to create a new religion, a new grand myth that shaped
and changed the world.
21
On Schopenhauer see Magee, Philosophy of Schopenhauer; Saffranski, Schopenhauer and
the Wild Years of Philosophy. On Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Seigel, “Problematizing the
Self.”
22
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Section 13. Also Beyond Good and Evil, ss. 17–20, Thus
Spake Zarathustra, and Will to Power, s. 585a.
23
Ibid., ss. 689, 1067 and Thus Spake Zarathustra, pp. 227, 312.
 autonomy 11

otherness.’”26 Social psychologists make similar distinctions. Deci and Ryan

distinguish between independence and autonomy; the former involves separat-
ing oneself from others, and the latter, independent volition and self-
expression.27 The standard storyline of modernity – from which I will in part
dissent – emphasizes the importance of both kinds of autonomy, and there can
be little doubt that they are to some extent mutually reinforcing.28
Interiority, the first component of internal autonomy, was to some degree
always present in people. There are hints of it in Roman literature, most notably
in Augustine, Cicero, Seneca and Terence. Self-discovery and inwardness
showed a rapid rise in medieval literature and art between 1080 and 1150,
but then largely disappeared until they resurfaced in late medieval literature in
the thirteenth century.29 Several students of medieval literature and history
maintain that the foundations of the modern individual were laid in the High
Middle Ages.30 J. B. Schneewind makes the case for the connection between
interiority and the Christian invocation of the soul. By making the soul the locus
of morality, it became possible to shift primary responsibility for control and
restraint from the state and Church to the individual.31 Michael Allen Gillespie
also emphasizes the vision of man as a creature capable of self-mastery and self-
perfection, which he attributes to Petrarch.32 By the sixteenth century, people
were understood to have an internal core that was not necessarily reflected in
their behavior. The verb “to fashion,” long in use, took on a new meaning: the
action of making or shaping things, styles, patterns and selves.33 “Self” with its
modern meaning first appeared in English in 1620, and the noun “conscious-
ness” debuted in 1630.34 Self increasingly lost its negative connotation, especially
in hyphenated constructions like self-knowledge, self-regard and self-interest.35
Self-fashioning was nevertheless associated with restless change, hypocrisy and
deception by many Renaissance commentators.36 The concern for deception was
a product of the widespread understanding, which we find in Shakespeare, that

26
Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, p. 210.
27
Deci and Ryan, “Motivational Approach to Self: Integration in Personality,” and “The
‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Goal Pursuits.”
28
Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, pp. 81–5, 184–99, for the original statement of
this argument.
29
Morris, Discovery of the Individual.
30
Haskins, Renaissance of the Twelfth Century; Gaunt, “Martyr to Love”; Southern, Making
of the Middle Ages and Medieval Humanism; Strayer, Reign of Philip the Fair and Medieval
Origins of the Modern State; Hanning, Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, pp. 2–3;
Fajardo-Acosta, Courtly Seductions, Modern Subjections, pp. 1–6.
31
Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy.
32
Gillespie, Theological Origins of Modernity, esp. pp. 44–68.
33
Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 2.
34
Oxford English Dictionary, vol. II, pp. 409–11, vol. I, p. 847.
35
Hirschman, Passions and the Interests.
36
Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, p. 1.
2 i n t r o duc ti o n

foundation of the self, is an even more dubious concept. Westerners – and

many other people – would be as shocked by the thought that they do not
possess a self as they would be by the suggestion that they are without a gender.
More remarkable still, most Westerners believe in the face of all the evidence to
the contrary that their identities are consistent and unique.
Highly respected scholars in diverse fields (e.g. Clifford Geertz, Erik Erikson,
Paul Ricoeur and Anthony Giddens) encourage this illusion, as do prominent
philosophers (e.g. Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor) who want to ground
ethical systems in such identities. They write in an era when our discourses
reveal the near-metastasis of the word self, which is now attached via a hyphen
to an almost endless list of words. These include self-image, self-seeking, self-
esteem, self-knowledge, self-consciousness, self-reference, self-preservation, all
of which have a positive valence. In part, my project is aimed at pulling the
empirical rug out from underneath such claims, but more importantly, in
understanding why they are made. What accounts for our fixation on the self
in the modern era, and more so still in the last half-century? What kinds of
identity projects has modernity spawned? What accounts for this variation, and
to whom do different constructions of identity appeal? Could we recognize
ourselves as fragmented and question the status of the alleged selfhood on
which our identities are based? If so, what would be the ethical consequences?
Identity discourses emerged in early modern Europe and became more
pronounced in the eighteenth century. The diversity they reveal indicates
that there is nothing inevitable about contemporary understandings of identity
or their relative appeal. Identity projects are a response to modernity, but
they are mediated by cultural understandings and practices. Modernity is
now a global phenomenon, and many people contend that there are important
differences between non-Western and Western identity discourses,
especially in their relative emphasis of social versus individual selves.5

5
Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values;
Triandis, Individualism and Collectivism; Markus and Kitayama, “Culture and the Self-
Implications for Cognition, Emotion, and Motivation”; Halloran and Kashima, “Culture,
Social Identity and the Individual” find significant differences with respect to individualism
and collectivism, especially between Asian and North American cultures. Tafarodi,
Marshall and Katsura, “Standing Out in Canada and Japan,” finds an emphasis on
distinctiveness in Asian cultures as well, but that its expression is more constrained by
cultural norms. Criticism of earlier studies comes from Halloran and Kashima, “Culture,
Social Identity and the Individual”; Jetten and Postmes, “‘I Did It My Way’”; Vignoles,
Chryssouchoou and Breakwell, “Distinctiveness Principle”; Takano and Osaka,
“Unsupported Common View”; Hornsey, “Ingroup Critics and their Influence on
Groups”; Moghaddam, “Interobjectivity,” who find these earlier studies, if not biased,
overly mechanical in their methods. Trafimow, Triandis and Goto, “Some Tests of the
Distinction Between the Private Self and the Collective Self”; Hong, Chiu and Kung,
“Bringing Culture Out in Front”; Matsumoto, Wessman, Reston, Brown and
Kupperbusch, “Context-Specific Measurement of Individualism–Collectivism on the
 autonomy 13

Self-naming is an important feature of their plays. In Shakespearean

tragedy, we encounter characters like Hamlet, whose rich but troubled
mental lives help drive plots forward. There is no real autobiography and
little private testimony as the sixteenth-century inner voice is not yet
strong enough to generate such a narrative.42 Montaigne’s essays are a
possible exception, as he is intent on conveying a sense of who he is and
claims not to have omitted any of his memories, as that would violate the
logic of selfhood.43 Hamlet’s soliloquy reveals a strong sense of interiority,
as does Cordelia’s insistence on speaking in her own voice in lieu of
playing a socially appropriate role. In Shakespeare, as in Machiavelli,
there is a renewed emphasis on agency and fortune. In the Bard, it is
tempered by pessimism about the traditional concern about divine justice
and the emerging commitment to meaningful agency.44
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the inner self is more
developed and explicitly revealed in the tragedies of Corneille, Racine,
Schiller and Goethe. According to Carlyle, Goethe’s characters had “a
verisimilitude, and life that separates them from all other fictions of late
ages.”45 Autobiography was made popular by Rousseau and Franklin,
although the term was not coined until 1809.46 Other forms of writing
became more personal.47 In his account of the Hebrides, James Boswell
describes island features primarily in terms of the impressions they made
on him.48 In England, what Dror Wahrman calls the ancien régime of
identity nevertheless prevailed until the last decade of the eighteenth
century. As there was not yet a strong notion of an inner core, identities
were considered malleable and socially determined. Individuals were seen
as representative of archetypes, and not in any meaningful way unique.
This understanding was manifest in portraits, masquerades, literature and
the law courts. Beginning in the 1790s, there was new emphasis on the self
and interiority, and this shift was so rapid as to constitute a radical
discontinuity. It was manifest in art as well as literature; the portraits of

42
Lyons, Invention of the Self, pp. 40–54; Bloom, Shakespeare; Morris, Discovery of the
Individual, pp. 16–17, 79–86, describes the temporary appearance of the genre in the
mini-Renaissance of 1050–1200, notably in the writings of Otloh of Saint Emmeram,
Guibert of Nogent and Peter Abelard. In English, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale qualifies as
fictional autobiography.
43
Montaigne, Essays; Olney, Metaphors of Self, pp. 51–88; Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-
Fashioning, pp. 84–7.
44
Elton, “Shakespeare and the Thought of His Age”; Bloom, Shakespeare.
45
“Goethe’s Works,” in The Works of Thomas Carlyle (London: Chapman and Hall, 1905),
vol. XXVII, p. 438, quoted in Lynch, Economy of Character, p. 3.
46
Lyons, Invention of the Self, p. 55; Freeman, Character’s Theater, pp. 189–90.
47
Lyons, Invention of the Self, pp. 55–74. 48 Boswell, Journey to the Hebrides.
14 i n t r o d u c ti o n

Sir Joshua Reynolds are strikingly different in this respect from those of
his predecessors.49
Throughout Western Europe, nineteenth-century literature, philosophy and
art is fascinated by individual character. Some novels, like Wieland’s Geschichte
des Agathon, verge on the autobiographical.50 Writers and artists speak about
their inner lives and voices to which they give rise, a phenomenon many found
unsettling. For Wordsworth, this voice was “a presence that disturbs me,” for
Shelley, an “unseen power” and for Baudelaire, a “luminous hollow.”51 By the
end of the century, Oscar Wilde could convincingly assert, as Herder had more
cautiously at that century’s outset, that “All artistic creation is absolutely
subjective.”52
We must proceed with caution here. The standard interpretation of English
novels, beginning with Richardson’s Pamela, explore interiority, at first tenta-
tively, and then more comprehensively, has recently come under attack.53
Dierdre Lynch and others argue, with merit, that the rise of interiority thesis
was imposed in retrospect on the English novel. For much of the eighteenth
century, characters were portrayed as generic types rather than unique indi-
viduals. The pragmatics of character were less about psychological selves and
more about “legibility and replicability.”54 This reading would postpone serious
interest in interiority and uniqueness until the late eighteenth century. It does
not deny that some degree of interiority was present, or that it was more evident
than it had been in Elizabethan times. Rather, what we observe is a sharp shift
toward interiority in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature,
not a gradual and continual progression.
The second component of psychological autonomy is reflexivity. It describes
our thoughts about our feelings, roles, experiences and relationships, and at
another level of reification, our thoughts about these thoughts. Kant and
Hegel were among the first to observe that reflexivity not only makes us more
aware of ourselves, it distances us from ourselves by creating a tension
between our reflective and empirical selves. Kant recognized that reflective
self-consciousness gives rise to the “I” as subject and as object. For him, the

49
Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds, pp. 60, 77 and the differences between Reynolds’ portraits of
ordinary versus prominent people; Wendorf, Sir Joshua Reynolds; Wahrman, Making of
the Modern Self, ch. 4 and pp. 268–71, on how individualized Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portraits
of members of the Society of Dilettanti (1777–9) were in comparison to an earlier portrait
by George Knapton.
50
Wieland, Geschichte des Agathon; Berman, Politics of Individualism; Norton, Beautiful
Soul; Carrithers, Collins and Lukes, Category of the Person, pp. 46–82; Buckley, Turning
Key, p. 14.
51
Quoted in Gergen, Saturated Self, p. 20. 52 Wilde, “Critic as Artist.”
53
Watt, Rise of the Novel; Steedman, Past Tenses, for the standard interpretation; Armstrong,
How Novels Think, pp. 5–6.
54
Lynch, Economy of Character; Kay, Political Constructions; Laden, Self-Imitation in the
Eighteenth Century; Freeman, Character’s Theater; Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self.
 autonomy 15

more significant duality was between the transcendent and empirical self;
people are an inseparable part of the material world, but also autonomous
beings. Much of Hegel’s philosophy revolves around the tension between these
two kinds of self and how it might be overcome. He nevertheless values this
tension because he considers it the animating principle of self. Hegel’s formu-
lation, although embedded in a highly idiosyncratic theory of history, highlights
a key psychological dynamic of modernity. Reflection and alienation may be co-
constitutive, as one often prompts the other. Not surprisingly, from Rousseau
on, alienation and the search for oneself becomes an increasingly important, if
not dominant theme, of philosophy, literature and art, especially on the
continent.
As it did for Rousseau, alienation inspired a search for authenticity, con-
ceived as the project of making ourselves whole. This task appears critical – and
more daunting – when people reject many of their society’s guiding beliefs and
behavioral conventions, as so many nineteenth-century intellectuals and artists
did. One of the key premises of the alienation literature developed by the
Romantics is the belief that society has molded people into beings who are
different from and at odds with who they would naturally want to be. Here, too,
Rousseau paved the way with his declaration in Emile that “the heart receives
laws only from itself.”55 He attributed the unhappy state of modern man to the
introduction of property, which gradually transformed society and corrupted
people by encouraging them to acquire possessions to gain esteem in the eyes of
others. This transformation for Rousseau was the product of our reflexive
capability; rather than leading us toward greater fulfillment it removed us
from our happier, more primitive state.56
The modern economy requires people to perform a greater variety of roles
than their medieval or ancient predecessors. Some of these roles involve
interactions with people never encountered face-to-face. The recognition that
we communicate different and sometimes contradictory selves to diverse audi-
ences is psychologically unsettling. It is another cause of alienation, especially
when we internalize any of these public selves. In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois
complained about his “double consciousness” and constant struggle to recon-
cile feeling black and American: “One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a
Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals
in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn
asunder.”57 Experiences of this kind can make people wonder if there is any

55
Rousseau, Emile, p. 234.
56
Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Men,
pp. 115–16.
57
Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, p. 5. Ellison, Invisible Man, makes a similar argument about
the black “invisible self” living within white society.
 in tr o d u c t io n 5

society. Millennial movements like Dispensationalism – the subject of chapter

6 – embrace this strategy, as do to varying degrees the Amish, Satmar,
Rajneeshees and some varieties of Mormons.12 A second strategy attempts to
do away with interiority and reflexivity as far as possible, as its proponents
consider them sources of alienation and social and political unrest. They want
to create a largely secular society that removes all distinctions of wealth and
honor and deprives people of privacy, free time and all forms of individual
differentiation. Thomas More’s Utopia is the quintessential expression of this
approach. The two strategies are conceptually distinct, but they share much in
common, and utopian projects have often drawn on both, as traditional
Marxism does.
Two modern strategies embrace interiority and reflexivity. Strategy three is
associated with British empiricism. It understands interiority and reflexivity as
compatible with the social order. Its advocates consider society a source of
diverse role models that people can emulate, even mix and match and trans-
form in the process of working out identities of their own. Strategy four was
pioneered by Romanticism and propagated by its successors. It condemns
society as oppressive, and encourages people to turn inwards, or to nature, to
discover and develop authentic, autonomous identities. The two modern strat-
egies encourage self-fashioning, and to varying degrees, the belief that we can
construct unitary, consistent identities. Strategy four is arguably the dominant
intellectual conception of identity in the contemporary West. There are reasons
for believing that strategy three is more common in practice.
These four strategies provide the intellectual and psychological foundations
for four kinds of political projects.13 With its effort to constrain individualism,
strategy one undergirds conservatism and its emphasis on the organic nature of
societies and their enduring wisdoms. Although the concept of totalitarianism
is no longer in vogue because of its Cold War associations, strategy two is
closely associated with political systems, real or imagined, that attempt to
suppress individual autonomy and expression, and socialize and coerce people
into committing themselves to communal values and goals. Strategy three
envisages a world in which individual and society can coexist, not without
tensions, but nevertheless, in a mutually beneficial way in part because of those
tensions. It finds political expression in liberalism. Strategy four embraces the
long-term goal of reconciliation of the individual and society, but only as
the result of a far-reaching transformation of society and individuals alike. In
the interim, it regards them as adversaries, and in contrast to strategies one
and two, unambiguously sides with the individual. It provides the justification
for anarchy. All four political movements are distinctly modern, and their
emergence can be traced to the same conditions responsible for the identity

12 13
Swaine, Liberal Conscience. I would like to thank Dorothy Noyes for this insight.
 genealogy of identity 17

rightly criticize the social sciences and humanities for their surrender to “iden-
tity.”63 They object to its use as an analytical category on three grounds. It is
defined in so many different ways as to deprive it of any rigor, which in turn
renders comparisons across empirical studies difficult, if not futile.64 The concept
is pressed into service for so many ends that it becomes “a multivalent, even
contradictory theoretical burden.”65 By attempting to explain so much it explains
nothing.66 In addition, many studies fail to distinguish adequately between
identity as a practice and a concept. Its use as an analytical concept legitimates
identity as a practice and, by extension, the political projects with which it is
associated.
To be fair, all concepts in social science are reifications and never refer to
anything real. For this reason, there is often no comparability in their definitions
and measurement. Identity the concept is more problematic by virtue of the
purposes it is intended to serve. I propose substituting the term “self-
identification” for identity. It is more defensible empirically as it starts from the
recognition that we have multiple self-identifications that constitute what we
think of as our identity. The focus on self-identification has several other advan-
tages; it forces us to recognize the malleable nature of what we call our identities
and the extent to which this composite often includes contradictory components.
As self-identifications are primarily the result of affiliations and roles, they high-
light the social nature of identities, but also recognize the importance of agency.
As a convenient shorthand, throughout this book I will speak of identities. I
believe this is justifiable to describe discourses about identity, references people
make to their alleged selfhood and its contents, and the four “identity” strategies
that attempt to make people “whole” in the face of modernity. Some readers
might consider this section and the next digressions as they analyze a concept I
reject and do not use analytically. I nevertheless think it important to address
this issue, if only to show why I deny ontological status to selfhood and spurn
the concept of identity. My alternative construction, building on self-
identifications and the impossibility of ever reconciling them grows out of
this critique and is fundamental to my empirical and normative claims.
In the mini-genealogy of identity I offer here, I pursue only its main lineage
and refer en passant to some side-branches. I want to demonstrate that identity
is the secular descendant of the soul, and was conjured up for most of the same
ends. The genealogy also exposes irresolvable tensions in current understand-
ings of identity.67

63
Brubaker and Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity.’”
64
Olson, What Are We?, finds that definitions of the cognate self are so different and
unrelated to one another to suggest the word be discarded from our vocabulary.
65
Ibid. 66 Onuf, “Parsing Personal Identity.”
67
Taylor, Sources of the Self; Seigel, Idea of the Self; Martin and Barresi, Rise and Fall of Soul
and Self, for more extensive overviews of the development of this concept.
18 in t r o d u c t io n

Some conception of self must always have been present in our species. In his
lectures on anthropology, Kant not unreasonably speculates that even before
language developed, human cognitive abilities prompted people to think of
themselves as distinct beings.68 History begins with the great civilizations of the
Near East, all of which developed understandings of self that Peter Machinist
calls the “pseudo I.” The persona behind the chronicler, historian or poet is
concealed. The “analytical I,” where authors identify themselves as individuals
with particular understandings of the questions they address, first emerged in
pre-classical Greece.69
In early Greek literature, as in its Hebrew counterpart, persons are distinct
but give little to no indication of interiority. Homer uses the term psychē to
describe a life force that drives heroes forward in lieu of thought processes. His
psychē is not located in the mind, but associated with thumos (perhaps the
liver), phrenes (the lungs), kradiē, etor and ker (the heart).70 In the fifth century
BCE, Athenians achieved legal identities, but the concept of identity remained
undefined. Tragedy became increasingly psychological in the plays of Sophocles
and Euripides, but still treated people as archetypes rather than individuals with
inner lives.71 Tragic heroes were important because of what they had in
common with other people, not what might make them unique. The Romans
also understood identity as role-determined. The Greek word proposon, which
described the mask worn by actors, entered Latin as persona, where it assumed
the wider connotation of the roles consciously assumed by people to reflect
their actual or claimed social position.72 Persona defined the self in others’ eyes,
but also in one’s mind’s eye. Cicero thought “propriety” was upheld when an
individual’s “actions and words” are “appropriate to his role.” However, he
went further than many contemporaries in recognizing individual uniqueness
and even a responsibility of each person “to resolutely hold fast to his own
peculiar gifts.”73
Christians were forced to confront identity in ways Greeks and Romans were
not because of their belief that heaven was the reward for a lifetime of piety and
suffering. If people are responsible for their behavior, their continuity and
uniqueness must somehow be established. The soul serves both needs; it
provides uniqueness because each one is different, and continuity in this
world and the next by virtue of its assumed unchanging nature and ability to
survive death.

68
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, p. 9.
69
Machinist, “Voice of the Historian in the Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean
World.”
70
Onians, Origins of European Thought, pp. 84–9.
71
Vernant, “Intimations of the Will in Greek Tragedy.”
72
Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I, xvi, p. 112, notes the derivation of persona, which he compares
to an actor on stage. Mauss, “Catégorie de Personne”; Agnew, Worlds Apart, pp. 98–103.
73
Cicero, De Offices, I, 30:107, 110, 35:126.
 g e n e a l o g y of i d e n t i t y 19

The soul is a concept with a long history.74 Its Greek form (pneuma) may
derive from the verb that signified “to cool” and “to blow.” It was used
metaphorically to describe the vital breath that testified to the life force of
humans and other animals. Psychē was distinguished from soma (body). Plato
gave the concept a new twist by describing the soul as the essence of being, as
did Aristotle, who characterized it as eternal and separable from the body.75
Plato’s body–soul dualism can nevertheless be distinguished from Aristotle’s
hylomorphism and interest in human nature rather than in individual people.
Church fathers Clement, Origen (185?–254) and Gregory of Nyssa (c.335–
c.394) borrowed the concept from the Hellenes, relying principally on
Plotinus (c.204–70), who argued that our lives would be meaningless without
“the dominant unity” provided by the soul.76 Augustine (354–430) maintained
that the same material body and immaterial soul were the basis for immortality;
both came together at the time of resurrection.77
The soul found its fullest theoretical development in the writings of Thomas
Aquinas, who described it as God’s creation and the first principle of being.
Drawing on Aristotle, he considered it to be incorporeal and to operate
separately and independently from the body. As the soul was not made of
matter, it could not be destroyed by any natural process and therefore guaran-
teed immortality.78 The insubstantiality of the soul was not a serious obstacle in
a pre-scientific age. Christians did speculate, however, about the relationship
between the body and soul and whether the two would be reunited at the Last
Judgement. Medieval literature is full of verse debates between body and soul in
which they exchange reproaches and also express gratitude to each other.79
There is no consensus among historians of political thought about when a
discourse about identity emerged, as opposed to discussions of individual
identities. René Descartes’ Passions of the Soul (1649), Thomas Hobbes’
Leviathan (1651) and John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(1690) are reasonable starting points. Descartes used the word mind (mens) in
lieu of soul (anima), and attempted to return to a Platonic understanding of the
latter. His writings in general suggested, at least implicitly, that the soul was
irrelevant to understanding the self, which was the product of sensation,
perception and imagination. Hobbes differentiated artificial from natural
selves. Locke introduced the concept of the person and the self, the latter
defined as “that conscious thinking thing . . . which is sensible or conscious of
pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself,
as far as that consciousness extends.” Locke invoked memory as the quality that

74
Snell, Discovery of the Mind, on Greek conceptions.
75
Plato, Phaedo, 70a and Republic, 608d; Aristotle, De Anima.
76
Plotinus, Enneads, pp. 295, 339. 77 Augustine, City of God, p. 248.
78
Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question 75.
79
Bossy, “Medieval Debates of Body and Soul.”
8 i n t r od uc ti on

our understanding of identity to take into account what analytical philosophers

have to say about personhood and identity and the ways in which people form
self-identifications that are the sources of what they think of as their identities.
I conclude with an overview of the remaining chapters of the book.
To recapitulate, I start from the assumption that selfhood and unitary,
consistent identities are illusions. I am nevertheless interested in why so
many modern people and scholars believe such identities to be feasible.17
I situate my answer in a broader examination of modern identity discourses,
which I describe as a response to the uncomfortable, and for some, unaccept-
able tensions that opened up between our reflective and social selves. I identify
and evaluate four distinct identity strategies and conclude that the best we can
do is accept the existence of our multiple selves and reach some kind of partial
accommodation between our reflexive and social selves. I disagree with philos-
ophers who maintain that ethics must be anchored in identities. I believe we
might live happier and more ethical lives and societies by recognizing and
exploiting the tensions generated by our multiple, conflicted and fragmented
selves.
My arguments draw on psychology, philosophy, history and political science,
as they all have different but important things to say about identity. They offer
different takes on identity, some of them at odds, within and between disci-
plines. I give priority to history and psychology because the former describes
the different social orders and conditions in which people must live, while the
latter provides insight into universal human needs. I am particularly interested
in the ways these needs find expression in different cultures and circumstances.
Philosophy enters the picture in three important ways. It develops concepts of
identity, brings rigor to those we use to describe our world and ourselves and
exposes their logical fallacies and incompleteness. It also provides a record of
how good minds across the ages have grappled with concepts, but also with the
problems they attempt to instantiate and engage.
In many ways, Nietzsche is the jumping-off point of my empirical and
normative arguments. In Genealogy of Morals, he argues against Kant’s dual-
istic deduction of morality and attempts to develop an alternate justification for
what he considers the stifling Christian-based morality of his Europe.18
Nietzsche insists that “virtue must be our own invention.” Everyone must
“find his own virtue, his own categorical imperative.”19 The most profound
expression of Nietzsche’s anti-dualism concerns the subject himself. In a dual-
istic worldview, eternal forms exist beyond the shadow world, and one of them
is posited to be an eternal soul. With Nietzsche’s refusal to accept any

17
These claims are made by the social identity theory and self-categorization theory research
programs.
18
Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, Sections 10, 13, and Antichrist, Section 11.
19
Ibid., emphasis in original.
 genealogy of identity 21

Locke’s emphasis on memory invited criticism. The Scottish philosopher

Thomas Reid offered several thought experiments to demonstrate the inad-
equacy of the link between self and memory. The best known is the brave officer
paradox. The boy Jones is flogged for stealing apples, and remembers this event
as an adult when performing a brave deed as an officer. Years later, as a general,
he has forgotten all about the flogging. By Locke’s logic, the brave officer is the
boy and the general is the brave officer, but the general is not the boy, a
conclusion that strikes us as absurd. Reid insists that memory cannot account
for personhood, which must be justified in its own terms.86 The Earl of
Shaftesbury, Locke’s pupil, argued that “Memory may be false.”87 John
Sargent, Samuel Clarke and Bishop Butler draw attention to an equally serious
logical fallacy: memory includes the concept of personal identity, so using it as
the basis for identity makes it tautological.88
Despite these problems, the soul had even less credibility as a source of
continuity in an increasingly skeptical eighteenth-century Europe.89 David
Hume dismisses soul and self alike as comforting “fictions.” He rejects the
idea of a persisting, self-identical object, distinct from our punctuated, imper-
fect impressions of it, and the corollary that time could pass without there being
change.90 The mind, he argues, is best conceived of as “a bundle or collection of
different perceptions which succeed one another with an inconceivable rapidity
and are in perpetual flux and motion.” It follows that “there is no impression
constant and invariable,” and no continuous self.91 To posit such a creature
would require us to deny its existence during all the hours when we sleep and
are insensible of ourselves.92
Hume nevertheless describes people as generally predictable in their behav-
ior, without which it would be impossible to sustain a society.93 This stability,
he believes, derives from a set of universal internal motives (e.g. ambition,
avarice, vanity, friendship, generosity) that are constantly moderated and
channeled by external constraints and opportunities.94 These motives were all
social in origin and dependent on society for their satisfaction. This under-
standing of people very clearly reflects eighteenth-century Britain’s belief that

86
Reid, Essays, p. 276; Wolterstorff, Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology.
87
Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol. II, p. 350.
88
Butler, “Human Nature and Other Sermons.”
89
Martin and Barresi, Naturalization of the Soul on the general replacement of the soul by the
self. For this process in France, Gauchet, Disenchantment of the World, pp. 162–4; Baker,
“Enlightenment and the Institution of Society”; Bell, Cult of the Nation in France, ch. 1.
90
Hume, “On the Immortality of the Soul.”
91
Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, I.1.3, Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 2 and
3; Rosenberg, “Identity and Substance in Hume and Kant.”
92
Bundle theory finds its most radical exponent in Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained,
who dismisses our sense of continuity as an illusion that we impose on our perceptions.
93
Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, VIII.1.17.
94
Hume, Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, VIII.1.7.–8.
22 in tr o d u c t io n

people were fundamentally alike and could effectively be described in terms of

archetypes.
Among the soul’s last influential defenders were the late eighteenth-century
philosophers Bishop George Berkeley and the German Jewish Aufklärer Moses
Mendelssohn. Both men insist that the soul is simple, immaterial, indestructible
and necessary to account for the unifying nature of consciousness. Without a
soul, according to Mendelssohn: “We would be able neither to remember nor to
reflect nor to compare nor to think, indeed, we would not even be the person
who we were a moment ago, if our concepts were divided among many and
were not to be encountered somewhere together in their most exact combina-
tion.”95 His argument is important because it would later be grafted onto the
secular conception of identity.
While not denying the existence of the soul, Kant challenges Mendelssohn’s
claim that it is immortal because of its indivisibility. Indivisible bodies, he
suggests, could wax and wane in their intensity. The soul could accordingly
disappear through the gradual expiration of the clarity of consciousness with-
out any violation of its simplicity.96 Like Hume, Kant moves away from the
conception of identity as a substance. He associates it instead with the “nou-
menal self,” a “supreme principle of cognition that provides unity to the
consciousness and is the basis for all reflection.” The “phenomenal self,”
which it enables, is the “I” we consciously recognize.97 In contrast to Hume,
Kant is convinced of the epistemic legitimacy of a persisting self-identical object
and of the passage of time without change. His defense is too complex to
elucidate here, but rests on the assumption that space and time are not
discursive concepts but pure intuitions and that there is a fundamental iso-
morphism between our minds and the universe.98 Following Kant, German
Idealism treats persons as continuous by virtue of their identity.99
The other great eighteenth-century influence on modern conceptions of
identity is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His Discourse on the Origin and
Foundation of Inequality Among Men lays out an historical account of the
emotional and cognitive development of humankind. In his original, savage
state, man – I use Rousseau’s gendered language – is driven by amour de soi
(love of self) and identification (pity and sympathy). Amour de soi is a pre-
rational instinct for survival, tempered by pity for the suffering of others.100

95
Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, 3/1, pp. 96–104.
96
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B413–15; Kitcher, “Kant on Self-Identity”; Rosenberg,
“Identity and Substance in Hume and Kant”; Falkenstein, “Double Edged Sword?”
97
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason; Guyer, “Transcendental Deduction of Categories,” for
an overview.
98
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A271–B327.
99
Shell, Kant and the Limits of Autonomy, p. 2.
100
Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Men,
pp. 115–16.
 g en e al o gy of id e n t i t y 23

Primitive man is distinguished from animals by his ability to think and reflect.
Comparative modifiers enter his vocabulary; he not only compares himself to
other people but recognizes that others make comparisons to him. Recognition
and esteem are conferred on those who excel in the various comparative
categories. Public standing now becomes his dominant goal, and amour propre
(the passion to be regarded favorably by others) his principal motive for acting.
Material goods are valued in so far as they contribute to this goal.101 Any
voluntary slight or insult is intolerable because it is interpreted as contempt
for one’s person and “more unbearable than the harm itself.” Vengeance
becomes terrible and men turn “bloodthirsty and cruel.” Civilized man is also
moved by amour propre, but a subtle yet important transformation occurs. His
cognitive faculties increase and his calculations and goals become more complex.
He is driven to postpone gratification for long periods of time in the pursuit of
affluence. Whereas savage man sought esteem directly, civilized man seeks it
indirectly, through the attainment and display of material possessions.102
Rousseau’s Social Contract offers a way out of the sorry state of affairs
described in the Discourse. It is impossible to return to a primitive state of
nature. However, politics and reason – which here have a positive role to play –
can restore our freedom, reconcile us to who we really are and teach us to live
together in peace. This can only happen when free and equal persons come
together and organize themselves into a community aimed at advancing the
collective welfare and make policy with reference to the “general will.”103 In the
modern world, Rousseau insists, people are doubly enslaved: they are politically
subjugated, and more troubling still, are in thrall to the artificial material and
ego needs generated by modern society. This self-enslavement is the source of
major social ills, from exploitation and domination of others to low self-esteem
and depression. Liberation can only be achieved through self-education and
self-discovery, both with the goal of recapturing the virtues dominant in the
state of nature. Identity is not a personal project but a political one.
Rousseau’s emphasis on authenticity was taken in a different direction by
nineteenth-century German philosophers. Early in the century, German
Idealists and Romantics emphasized the importance of personal and national
identity (Individualität), a quest that stressed uniqueness, originality and self-
realization (Eigentumkeit). Following Rousseau, they understood personal and
collective identities as inextricably connected. The former, while unique, could
only find healthy and creative expression within a larger, national community.
Such communities, Herder insists, have organic identities that had to be
nurtured, developed and expressed within a wider community of nations.104

101
Ibid., pp. 147–60. 102 Ibid., pp. 174–5.
103
Rousseau, Social Contract, ch. 3, pp. 252–3.
104
Herder, Herder on Social and Political Culture; Heinz, Herder und die Philosophie des
Deutschen Idealismus.
 autonomy 11

otherness.’”26 Social psychologists make similar distinctions. Deci and Ryan

distinguish between independence and autonomy; the former involves separat-
ing oneself from others, and the latter, independent volition and self-
expression.27 The standard storyline of modernity – from which I will in part
dissent – emphasizes the importance of both kinds of autonomy, and there can
be little doubt that they are to some extent mutually reinforcing.28
Interiority, the first component of internal autonomy, was to some degree
always present in people. There are hints of it in Roman literature, most notably
in Augustine, Cicero, Seneca and Terence. Self-discovery and inwardness
showed a rapid rise in medieval literature and art between 1080 and 1150,
but then largely disappeared until they resurfaced in late medieval literature in
the thirteenth century.29 Several students of medieval literature and history
maintain that the foundations of the modern individual were laid in the High
Middle Ages.30 J. B. Schneewind makes the case for the connection between
interiority and the Christian invocation of the soul. By making the soul the locus
of morality, it became possible to shift primary responsibility for control and
restraint from the state and Church to the individual.31 Michael Allen Gillespie
also emphasizes the vision of man as a creature capable of self-mastery and self-
perfection, which he attributes to Petrarch.32 By the sixteenth century, people
were understood to have an internal core that was not necessarily reflected in
their behavior. The verb “to fashion,” long in use, took on a new meaning: the
action of making or shaping things, styles, patterns and selves.33 “Self” with its
modern meaning first appeared in English in 1620, and the noun “conscious-
ness” debuted in 1630.34 Self increasingly lost its negative connotation, especially
in hyphenated constructions like self-knowledge, self-regard and self-interest.35
Self-fashioning was nevertheless associated with restless change, hypocrisy and
deception by many Renaissance commentators.36 The concern for deception was
a product of the widespread understanding, which we find in Shakespeare, that

26
Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, p. 210.
27
Deci and Ryan, “Motivational Approach to Self: Integration in Personality,” and “The
‘What’ and ‘Why’ of Goal Pursuits.”
28
Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, pp. 81–5, 184–99, for the original statement of
this argument.
29
Morris, Discovery of the Individual.
30
Haskins, Renaissance of the Twelfth Century; Gaunt, “Martyr to Love”; Southern, Making
of the Middle Ages and Medieval Humanism; Strayer, Reign of Philip the Fair and Medieval
Origins of the Modern State; Hanning, Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, pp. 2–3;
Fajardo-Acosta, Courtly Seductions, Modern Subjections, pp. 1–6.
31
Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy.
32
Gillespie, Theological Origins of Modernity, esp. pp. 44–68.
33
Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 2.
34
Oxford English Dictionary, vol. II, pp. 409–11, vol. I, p. 847.
35
Hirschman, Passions and the Interests.
36
Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, p. 1.
 i d e n t it y in t e r r o g a te d 25

This approach to identity is well represented in the scholarly literature of the

last century. In 1938, Marcel Mauss wrote about the distinct Western under-
standing of self.108 In 1984, Clifford Geertz described the Western self “as a
bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a
dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action.”109 More
recently, there have been attempts to justify Lockean continuity with reference
to life narratives. French philosopher Paul Ricoeur maintains that identity is
little more than a continuously reconstructed biography.110 According to
political theorist Charles Taylor, “to have a sense of who we are, we have to
have a notion of how we have become and of where we are going.”111 Alasdair
MacIntyre equates our identities with our “unity of life,” which is created by a
coherent life story.112 Sociologist Anthony Giddens maintains that a person’s
identity “is not to be found in behavior . . . but in the capacity to keep a
particular narrative going.” This narrative cannot be “wholly fictive” but must
draw on real world events to create a “‘story’ about the self.”113
For Erikson, Ernst Kris and Paul Ricoeur, self-narratives are a resource we
frequently reshape to meet psychological and social needs.114 Giddens, by
contrast, insists that autobiographies must to some degree be based on fact.
He represents a tradition that extends back to Rousseau and his belief that
individual uniqueness is rooted in diverse life experiences. These modern
authorities are mute on the subject of how we can create stories of ourselves
that capture our uniqueness and continuity in the face of the knowledge that
such narratives are eminently malleable in response to social cues and needs.
If our autobiographies evolve to suit circumstances and need, it is difficult to
maintain that they are either continuous or reality based. The same is true for
organizations and states, whose identities are equally unstable as their pasts
are continually rewritten to accommodate present needs. Institutional and
national markers are fluid and their boundaries porous. Consider how
“American,” “British” or “German” have become more expansive in the
post-war era and the markers of gender and sexual identity have evolved.115
This logical difficulty can be finessed by claiming that people and social units
have a strong need for continuous identities and convince themselves they
possess them.
Unity of consciousness – or the “transcendental ego,” as it is now called – was
invoked by Locke to justify the person. The assumption of diachronic and

108
Mauss, “Catégorie de Personne.” 109 Geertz, “‘From the Native’s Point of View.’”
110
Ricoeur, “Narrative Identity.” 111 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 47.
112
MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 201.
113
Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, pp. 54, 75.
114
Erikson, Childhood and Society; Ricoeur, “Narrative Identity.”
115
Theiss-Morse, Who Counts as an American?; Kessler and McKenna, Gender; Ortner and
Whitehead, Sexual Meaning; Money, Gay, Straight, and In-Between; Feinstein, Real Men
Don’t Eat Quiche.
26 i n t r o d u c ti o n

synchronic unity encounters serious empirical difficulties.116 Psychological

research indicates that memory is a highly selective, abstract recording, ordering
and reordering of experiences. It misrepresents experience in three fundamental
ways; we process only part of the stimuli received by our sense organs, remember
only a fraction of those experiences and a sharply declining percentage of them
over time. There are, moreover, distinct biases in what we remember, and we do
not necessarily recall events accurately or in proper sequence. The more often
a memory is recalled, the more likely it is to change in content. Psychologists
find it useful to distinguish among episodic memory (recall of a past event),
autobiographical memory (a recalled event that seems to play an important part
in an our lives) and life narratives, which incorporate a series of autobiographical
memories and are the important means of defining the self.117 Extensive
research on all three kinds of memory highlights their subjective and labile
character and leads prominent researchers to question the epistemological status
of “original events.” Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter suggest that historical
reality is not something out there that can be used to validate memories, but a
mental configuration created by memories.118 Identity is maintained through
illusion and frequent rewriting of the past.
The second assumption, that of uniqueness, also finds little empirical support.
Individuals are unique in the sense that everyone – identical twins aside – has a
different genetic make-up. Even twins have different life experiences that make
them different people. It is not self-evident how biological uniqueness confers
identity, and it is not the usual grounds on which people claim it. One of the most
compelling critiques of uniqueness builds on the pioneering work of Maurice
Halbwachs, a French sociologist and student of Durkheim, who, like his mentor,
maintains that individual memory is socially constructed.119 Durkheim and
Halbwachs contend that memory is “created” through communications with
other members of society. It is heavily stylized and reflects dominant discourses.
It helps people find meaning in their lives and create bonds of solidarity with
others. Collective memory and its ritualization form the core of communities.120

116
Zahavi, “Unity of Consciousness.”
117
Abelson, “Script Processing in Attitude Formation and Decision-Making”; Gergen and
Gergen, “Narrative Form and the Construction of Psychological Science”; Robinson,
“Sampling Autobiography”; Brewer, “What is Autobiographical Memory?”; Neisser,
“Self-Narratives”; Barclay, “Composing Protoselves Through Improvisation.”
118
Edwards and Potter, “Chancellor’s Memory”; Edwards, Potter and Middleton, “Toward a
Discursive Psychology of Remembering”; Gergen, “Mind, Text, and Society.” For
criticism, Baddeley, “Is Memory all Talk?”; Hyman, “Multiple Approaches to
Remembering”; Neisser, “Psychology of Memory and the Socio-Linguistics of
Remembering.”
119
Halbwachs, Cadres sociaux de la mémoire and Topographie legendaire des Evangiles en Terre
Sainte. Alexandre, ed., Mémoire collective, pp. 73–90, for Halbwachs’ work and its reception.
120
Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life; Deutsch, Nationalism and Social
Communication; and the large corpus of more recent literature on collective memory.
 i den ti ty in terr ogat ed 27

Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky and his American counterpart, F. C. Bartlett,

make similar arguments.121 Their research and numerous subsequent studies
find considerable support for the social content of memory.
At the neurological level our ability to store, recall and reconfigure verbal and
non-verbal stimuli is mediated by patterns that we learn from our social and
cultural environments.122 So, too, are the language and narratives we use to
describe memory and make it plausible and significant to others. Memory adapts
itself to the conventions of the age. In the process, more general memories are
typically simplified and condensed in their representation. Their detail is reduced
and aspects emphasized that are more readily assimilated to widely used narra-
tive schemes.123 So-called “flashbulb memories” nicely illustrate these processes.
They refer to what people assert are their most vivid memories: where they were,
what they were doing, what they thought at the time of dramatic events like Pearl
Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the events of
September 11. Although reported in exquisite detail, such memories are notori-
ously unreliable.124 This may be because “flashbulb memories” are not fully
established at the time, but only later when the significance of the event for
society has been established. For this reason, such memories, diverse at their
onset, converge as months and years pass.125
Current events more broadly affect the way in which we remember earlier
events. Commemorations of past events lead people to make upward revisions
in their importance.126 These revisions appear to help people assimilate such
events cognitively, and once this happens they have no further need to ruminate
about them. Conversely, when people talk less about an event, they remember it
more, dream about it more and feel it more intensely.127 The problem of recall
aside, narratives of the past may change with each retelling. Psychologists have
discovered multiple “remembered selves,” whose evocation depends on the
nature of the trigger and the social milieu in which the person is situated at
the time.128 To the extent that identity is socially conferred and memory socially
constructed, it is something we want to share with others. For all these reasons,
claims of uniqueness are more ideology than reality.

121
Vygotsky, Mind in Society; Bartlett, Remembering.
122
Schacter, Searching for Memory and Cognitive Neuropsychology of False Memory.
123
Allport and Postman, Psychology of Rumor; Bartlett, Remembering; Singer, Repression and
Dissociation; Rubin, Remembering Our Past; Conway et al., Theoretical Perspectives on
Autobiographical Memory; Collins, Gathercole, Conway and Morris, Theories of Memory.
124
Neisser, Memory Observed. 125 Bohannon and Symons, “Flashbulb Memories.”
126
Schwartz, “Social Context of Commemoration.”
127
Wegner, White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts; Pennebaker and Harber, “Social
Stage Model of Collective Coping.”
128
Neisser, “John Dean’s Memory”; Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth; White,
“Recall of Autobiographical Events”; Polkinghorne, “Narrative and Self-Concept”;
Neisser, Perceived Self; Neisser and Fivush, Remembering Self.
14 i n t r o d u c ti o n

Sir Joshua Reynolds are strikingly different in this respect from those of
his predecessors.49
Throughout Western Europe, nineteenth-century literature, philosophy and
art is fascinated by individual character. Some novels, like Wieland’s Geschichte
des Agathon, verge on the autobiographical.50 Writers and artists speak about
their inner lives and voices to which they give rise, a phenomenon many found
unsettling. For Wordsworth, this voice was “a presence that disturbs me,” for
Shelley, an “unseen power” and for Baudelaire, a “luminous hollow.”51 By the
end of the century, Oscar Wilde could convincingly assert, as Herder had more
cautiously at that century’s outset, that “All artistic creation is absolutely
subjective.”52
We must proceed with caution here. The standard interpretation of English
novels, beginning with Richardson’s Pamela, explore interiority, at first tenta-
tively, and then more comprehensively, has recently come under attack.53
Dierdre Lynch and others argue, with merit, that the rise of interiority thesis
was imposed in retrospect on the English novel. For much of the eighteenth
century, characters were portrayed as generic types rather than unique indi-
viduals. The pragmatics of character were less about psychological selves and
more about “legibility and replicability.”54 This reading would postpone serious
interest in interiority and uniqueness until the late eighteenth century. It does
not deny that some degree of interiority was present, or that it was more evident
than it had been in Elizabethan times. Rather, what we observe is a sharp shift
toward interiority in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literature,
not a gradual and continual progression.
The second component of psychological autonomy is reflexivity. It describes
our thoughts about our feelings, roles, experiences and relationships, and at
another level of reification, our thoughts about these thoughts. Kant and
Hegel were among the first to observe that reflexivity not only makes us more
aware of ourselves, it distances us from ourselves by creating a tension
between our reflective and empirical selves. Kant recognized that reflective
self-consciousness gives rise to the “I” as subject and as object. For him, the

49
Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds, pp. 60, 77 and the differences between Reynolds’ portraits of
ordinary versus prominent people; Wendorf, Sir Joshua Reynolds; Wahrman, Making of
the Modern Self, ch. 4 and pp. 268–71, on how individualized Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portraits
of members of the Society of Dilettanti (1777–9) were in comparison to an earlier portrait
by George Knapton.
50
Wieland, Geschichte des Agathon; Berman, Politics of Individualism; Norton, Beautiful
Soul; Carrithers, Collins and Lukes, Category of the Person, pp. 46–82; Buckley, Turning
Key, p. 14.
51
Quoted in Gergen, Saturated Self, p. 20. 52 Wilde, “Critic as Artist.”
53
Watt, Rise of the Novel; Steedman, Past Tenses, for the standard interpretation; Armstrong,
How Novels Think, pp. 5–6.
54
Lynch, Economy of Character; Kay, Political Constructions; Laden, Self-Imitation in the
Eighteenth Century; Freeman, Character’s Theater; Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self.
 id enti t y i n ter r o gat ed 29

“toxic levels of inauthenticity” that constantly barrage us in ads, emails and

blogs.135
Socialization is undeniably imperfect, and as Judith Butler notes, leaves
“wiggle room” for agency.136 Even strong social ontologists like Durkheim
acknowledge its importance. He maintains that human passions routinely
ride roughshod over socialization. This “flexibility” is responsible for positive
changes in society and pathologies like suicide.137 Berger and Luckmann con-
tend that people at the margin of society, who care the least about what society
thinks of them, are the most fertile source of social innovation.138 Agency, as
Durkheim understands, necessarily implies freedom. Throughout history peo-
ple have rebelled against the affiliations and roles their families and societies
expect them to have or fill. It is nevertheless revealing that many people who
reject their socialization affiliate with other communities and willingly assume
the roles they assign. Individuals who join countercultures are likely to find
themselves under social pressure to conform to an alternative, often no less
rigid, set of values, practices and dress codes. Chapter 6 examines this dynamic
in the context of millenarian movements. It is unclear how far we can – or
actually want to purge ourselves of external shaping in the hope of discovering
or becoming ourselves.
For ancient Greeks who, it is sometimes claimed, conceived of identities
entirely in terms of social roles, the quest of self-discovery would have appeared
nonsensical. They pitied people like slaves and the city-less who, deprived of
social roles and the status they conferred, were thought to have lost a key
component of their humanity. Thomas Hobbes, a close reader of the Greeks,
thought the quest for total autonomy chimerical. His state of nature can be read
as a thought experiment intended to demonstrate that human beings removed
from society become nothing more than a collection of raw appetites and are a
danger to themselves and everyone around them.139 Robert Musil makes the
same claim in A Man Without Qualities:

For the inhabitant of a country has at least nine characters: a pro-

fessional, a national, a civic, a class, a geographic, a sexual, a con-
scious, an unconscious, and possibly even a private character to boot.
He unites them in himself, but they dissolve him, so that he is really
nothing more than a small basin hollowed out by these many stream-
lets that trickle into it and drain out of it again, to join other such
rills in filling some other basin. Which is why every inhabitant of the
earth also has a tenth character that is nothing else than the passive
fantasy of spaces yet unfilled. This permits a person all but one thing:
to take seriously what his at least nine other characters do and what

135
Gilmore and Pine, Authenticity, p. 43. 136 Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 140–8.
137
Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method and Suicide.
138
Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality. 139 Hobbes, Leviathan.
30 in t r o d u c t io n

happens to them; in other words, it prevents precisely what should be

his true fulfillment. This interior space – admittedly hard to describe –
is of a different shade and shape in Italy from what it is in England,
because everything that stands out in relief against it is of a different
shade and shape; and yet it is in both places the same: empty,
invisible space, with reality standing inside it like a child’s toy town
deserted by the imagination.140

There are equally compelling logical objections to the self-actualization

project. If we can reshape our identity, we are no longer the same people
we were previously and our continuity is questionable. Gradual changes in
character and projects may not represent sharp ruptures but do bring
about major transformations over time, as anybody who has ever attended
a twenty-fifth or fiftieth school or university reunion recognizes. The very
possibility of transformation suggests some deeper layer of mind that
inspires and helps us accomplish this change by overcoming the identi-
fications fundamental to our current identity.141 If so, identity cannot
represent our core essence. The existence of multiple identities points to
the same conclusion. Some of our identifications are mutually supporting,
but others are not, and all of them rise and fall in salience depending on
the context. The concept of a unitary identity requires something super-
ordinate to our internal heterogeneity. In its absence, the struggle between
or among competing identifications indicates that we are deeply divided
beings. As Nick Onuf puts it, if subjectivity comes first, then “self” is “an
unexamined primitive term.”142

Rethinking identity
Contemporary philosophers address the concept of self from logical, phenom-
enological and metaphysical perspectives. They disagree about whether the self
has substance or is an illusion. I offer a short overview of this debate to
demonstrate the extent to which these thinkers for the most part disassociate
themselves from Cartesian, Lockean and Romantic selves. Some, turning to
Buddhism, deny the existence of the self. Others posit a “minimal” self, based on
the principle of self-awareness. Still others defend thicker conceptions of
embodied, narrative, pragmatic or social selves.143 These differences often
turn the classic distinction made by Aaron Gurwitsch between egological and
non-egological theories of self. The former affirms the ego as the subject of

140
Musil, Man Without Qualities, p. 30.
141
Baars, In the Theatre of Consciousness, unconvincingly draws on neuroscience to make
the case for an underlying implicit self.
142
Onuf, “Parsing Personal Identity.”
143
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; Thompson, Mind and Life.
 r et h inki ng id enti ty 31

experience, while the latter describes pre-reflective conscious experience as

ownerless.144 My other goal in reviewing this literature is to show how some
of these interpretations map nicely on to the strategies of identity I discussed
earlier in this chapter.
The strongest statement of the non-egological position is that of the no-self.
It dismisses the self as a fiction on the grounds that there is no permanence in
human physical or psychological structures. Some proponents of the non-self
nevertheless acknowledge that most people think of themselves as enduring
entities, and that there are strong psychological and practical reasons for
doing so.145 The no-self position is defended by Derek Parfit, who insists that
we are nothing more than minds and bodies. We experience the world as
streams of consciousness and live only in the present.146 Some phenomenolo-
gists offer the rejoinder that if we are nothing more than physical platforms and
changing suites of psychological attributes then what is it within us that
concludes we are persons?147 A recent and influential book by Miri Albahari
attempts to address this criticism by describing two kinds of ownership:
personal and perspectival. Experiences we believe we own qualify as personal,
and the frame of reference we bring to our experiences are the perspectival.
Buddhists and no-self advocates consider the former to foster the illusion of self
and with it, efforts to distinguish ourselves from others.148
The “minimal self” position has different starting points. Drawing on neuro-
imaging results, Dorothée Legrand and Perrine Ruby make the case for a pre-
reflective bodily awareness that fosters recognition of our boundedness and
separation from others.149 This recognition is said to promote a sense of own-
ership and distinctiveness. Others contend that bodily awareness creates a more
general self-awareness that is responsible not only for a sense of possession but
for a first-person perspective on our experiences.150 These theorists differ from
Albahari and many Buddhists in understanding the body as central to this
process, not merely a by-product. Other supporters of the “minimal self” start
from a strictly phenomenological perspective; they understand subjects as
constituted by and equal to their experiences.

144
Gurwitsch, “Nonegological Conception of Consciousness.”
145
Siderits, “Buddhist Non-Self”; Metzinger, Being No One and “No-Self Alternative”;
Zahavi, “Unity of Consciousness and the Problem of Self.”
146
Parfit, Reasons and Persons and “Unimportance of Identity”; Metzinger, “No-Self
Alternative,” for different understandings of this position.
147
Zahavi, “Unity of Consciousness and the Problem of Self”; Henry and Thompson,
“Witnessing from Here.”
148
Albahari, Analytical Buddhism; Zahavi, “Unity of Consciousness and the Problem of
Self.”
149
Legrand, “The Bodily Self”; Legrand and Ruby, “What is Self-Specific?”
150
Bermúdez, “Bodily Awareness and Self-Consciousness”; Tsakiris, “Sense of Body
Ownership”; Henry and Thompson, “Witnessing from Here.”
 genealogy of identity 17

rightly criticize the social sciences and humanities for their surrender to “iden-
tity.”63 They object to its use as an analytical category on three grounds. It is
defined in so many different ways as to deprive it of any rigor, which in turn
renders comparisons across empirical studies difficult, if not futile.64 The concept
is pressed into service for so many ends that it becomes “a multivalent, even
contradictory theoretical burden.”65 By attempting to explain so much it explains
nothing.66 In addition, many studies fail to distinguish adequately between
identity as a practice and a concept. Its use as an analytical concept legitimates
identity as a practice and, by extension, the political projects with which it is
associated.
To be fair, all concepts in social science are reifications and never refer to
anything real. For this reason, there is often no comparability in their definitions
and measurement. Identity the concept is more problematic by virtue of the
purposes it is intended to serve. I propose substituting the term “self-
identification” for identity. It is more defensible empirically as it starts from the
recognition that we have multiple self-identifications that constitute what we
think of as our identity. The focus on self-identification has several other advan-
tages; it forces us to recognize the malleable nature of what we call our identities
and the extent to which this composite often includes contradictory components.
As self-identifications are primarily the result of affiliations and roles, they high-
light the social nature of identities, but also recognize the importance of agency.
As a convenient shorthand, throughout this book I will speak of identities. I
believe this is justifiable to describe discourses about identity, references people
make to their alleged selfhood and its contents, and the four “identity” strategies
that attempt to make people “whole” in the face of modernity. Some readers
might consider this section and the next digressions as they analyze a concept I
reject and do not use analytically. I nevertheless think it important to address
this issue, if only to show why I deny ontological status to selfhood and spurn
the concept of identity. My alternative construction, building on self-
identifications and the impossibility of ever reconciling them grows out of
this critique and is fundamental to my empirical and normative claims.
In the mini-genealogy of identity I offer here, I pursue only its main lineage
and refer en passant to some side-branches. I want to demonstrate that identity
is the secular descendant of the soul, and was conjured up for most of the same
ends. The genealogy also exposes irresolvable tensions in current understand-
ings of identity.67

63
Brubaker and Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity.’”
64
Olson, What Are We?, finds that definitions of the cognate self are so different and
unrelated to one another to suggest the word be discarded from our vocabulary.
65
Ibid. 66 Onuf, “Parsing Personal Identity.”
67
Taylor, Sources of the Self; Seigel, Idea of the Self; Martin and Barresi, Rise and Fall of Soul
and Self, for more extensive overviews of the development of this concept.
 r e t hi n k in g i d e n t it y 33

cross-cutting and open-ended narratives would be necessary to describe our

multiple identities. Katherine Nelson makes a parallel argument, noting that the
self is never more than a character in a larger story. Such narratives undeniably
create extended temporal understandings of ourselves and allow us to distin-
guish ourselves from others. They appear to be an essential element in our
cognitive development.159
Daniel Dennet offers a weaker version of narrative identity that denies any
existential reality to the self. He describes it as a useful fiction, not unlike the
center of gravity, as a concept that can be mobilized to explain and predict. The
self is accordingly more the product of narrative than its originator.160 It might
be described as a kind of third-level abstraction based on the multiple,
sometimes conflicting stories we tell about ourselves over time.
Narrative identity has wide appeal to scholars with normative and scientific
agendas. For MacIntyre and Taylor, it is a source of meaning and significance
and a foundation for ethics. For Dennett and Nelson, it negotiates our cognitive
development and provides a guide for strategic behavior. The first approach
meets criticism from those who challenge the analogy between life and liter-
ature, contending that life lacks the purpose and unity of fiction as it is so often
the product of accident, contingency and constraints over which people have
little control.161 Literature can effectively convey ethical insights and role
models, but life narratives, which are highly stylized and often after-the-fact
rationalizations intended to gain social acceptance for their authors, are hardly
appropriate foundations for ethical systems. I will return to this argument in the
concluding chapter.
Another thick formulation is the “pragmatic self.” It builds on the supposi-
tion of Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey that the self forms in the
course of interactions with other people.162 For James, this implies that we have
as many social selves as people who recognize us and carry images of us in their
minds. We in turn show different selves to different people.163 This process is
far from mechanical and relies heavily on agency. Self-awareness and reflection
about our behavioral routines and how others respond to them and to us create
our understanding of ourselves. Pragmatists describe our social interactions as
largely habitual, and the product of socialization. While our habits are regular,
they are not frozen. There is leeway to act independently, and awareness of the

159
Nelson, “Narrative and the Emergence of a Conscious Self”; Donald, Origins of the
Modern Mind and Mind So Rare. See also the pioneering work of Sarbin, Narrative
Psychology; Bruner, “Life as Narrative” and Acts of Meaning; Polkinghorne, Narrative
Knowing and the Human Sciences and “Narrative and Self-Concept.”
160
Dennett, “Self as Center of Narrative Identity.”
161
Lamarque, “On the Distance between Literary Narratives and Real-Life Narratives.”
162
Menary, “Our Glassy Essence”; Hermans, “Dialogical Self” on Pragmatism and
identity.
163
James, Principles of Psychology, p. 294.
34 i n tr od uct i on

tensions between what is expected of us and what we are free to do can provide
the foundation for ethical choices.164 A variant of the narrative self thesis
incorporates the dialogism of Bakhtin. In this formulation, the self is not
regarded as in any way distinct from society, but that part of it that has been
internalized. The self is reflection of the broader society and its construction
takes the form of an internal dialogue. There is no core self, but many inner
selves who play different roles and interact with one another through dialogues
as characters in novels do.165
The “social self” is a closely allied formulation. Like pragmatism, it roots the
self and self-knowledge in social and cultural contexts. It differs in its commit-
ment to constructivism. For pragmatists, value is closely associated with beliefs
and practices that work in the sense of conferring benefits or advantages. For
constructivists, not only self-knowledge, but knowledge in general is the prod-
uct of culture, as it provides the historically situated frameworks that we employ
to make sense of the world.166 Because constructivists emphasize the social
construction of the self, most downplay the role of agency and some consider it
illusory. Constructivists are dubious about, or reject outright, the self-reflective
and partially self-directing selves of narratologists and pragmatists. Kenneth
Gergen, representative of this orientation, describes self-fashioning as highly
constrained by linguistic and social practices. They socialize individuals to
acceptable conceptions of self.167
There are also postmodern takes on the self. It is inspired by the linguistic
turn and philosophers like Foucault, who stresses the power of society to
impose identities on “subjects” that reinforce inequalities within the society.
Over the course of his writings, Foucault portrayed the self as a manifestation of
rigid constraint and a source of radical liberation. At times, he regarded this
dualism and the tensions and fluidity associated with them as a source of
freedom. On other occasions he was more pessimistic about this prospect. He
also worried that the false sense of self and autonomy that most people had had
the paradoxical effect of further enslaving them within systems of power and
their discourses. Foucault employed the term ausujettissement to describe the
constitution of an individual as a: “subject that is constituted as a subject – that
is ‘subjected’ – is one who obeys.”168 Jean-François Lyotard follows Foucault in
describing postmodern selves as divided, fluid and insubstantial selves that are
incapable of being reconciled or brought into any degree of unity through
dialogue. This aporia is encouraged by the society as it facilitates its ability to

164
Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic; Menary, “Our Glassy Essence.”
165
Holquist and Clark, Mikhail Bakhtin; Hermans, “Dialogical Self.”
166
Berger and Luckman, Social Construction of Reality.
167
Gergen, Saturated Self and “Social Construction of Self.”
168
Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge, “What is Enlightenment?” For the quote, History of
Sexuality, vol. I, p. 112.
 r e t hi n k in g i d e n t it y 35

constrain and discipline subjects.169 Society also seeks to measure, codify, and
above all, commodify the self to make it a more efficient cog within a totalizing
capitalistic economy.170 For Foucault, writers and artists could seek freedom by
transgressing the rationality of society, as did the Marquis de Sade, Nietzsche
and Van Gogh, all of whom went mad. Madness and desire, especially sexual
desire, can be destructive, but also liberating.171
Postmodern conceptions of self are a product of continental philosophy, and
particularly of the Nietzschean rejection of the self as de-humanizing. They are
a stifling straitjacket in which society wraps individuals. Louis Althusser argues
that the modern state recognizes the individual as the source of initiatives and
responsibility. But society maintains order and coherence by positioning indi-
viduals within political, social and economic categories, inducing them to
stay within their assigned statuses. The modern state accordingly encourages
autonomy while imposing subjection.172 Postmodernism differs from
its Romantic predecessor in its pessimism about the ability of people to free
themselves from psychological subjugation. Late in his life, Foucault became
marginally more optimistic. Jacques Derrida rejects the possibility of a
stable, coherent identity, but envisages deconstruction as a method of tran-
scendence. This is because language has the potential to deconstruct as well to
construct the self.173 Postmodern formulations of identity all but reject the
Romantic notion that there is some original or better self that could somehow
be brought to the fore. Like Marxists, many postmodern writers insist that
personal liberation must be the consequence of a more general transformation
of society. According to Lyotard, the long-term goal is to create a “we” that is
not totalitarian. As social bonds and identities are negotiated by narratives,
our initial task is to imagine and create a literature that can help construct a
non-totalitarian society.174
One way of making sense of this diversity is in terms of the projects that
motivate their advocates. A useful distinction in this regard is Paul Ricoeur’s
distinction between idem and ipse identities.175 The former describes the spatio-
temporal continuity of the self, and the latter, its capacity to re-describe itself
and initiate action.176 Neither the non-self nor the minimal self formulations
can account for idem or ipse identity. Many analytical philosophers, Parfit

169
Lyotard, Inhuman, p. 5.
170
Foucault, Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish; Lawlor, “Postmodern
Self.”
171
Foucault, Madness and Civilization.
172
Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”
173
Derrida, Of Grammatology, “Différance” and Speech and Phenomena.
174
Lyotard, Differend. Seigel, Idea of the Self, pp. 603–50, for an excellent discussion of
postmodernist understandings of identity.
175
Ricoeur, Oneself as Alternative.
176
Parfit, “Unimportance of Identity,” offers a parallel construction.
20 i n t r o d u c ti o n

provided continuity and distinctiveness to individual selves.80 Even more than

Descartes, Locke shifted the locus of identity from the soul to the unifying role
of consciousness. All three philosophers began the process by which the soul
became an increasingly problematic category in early modern Europe.
To the extent that people came to be understood as reflexive individuals with
legal identities, it became necessary to find an empirical basis for their con-
tinuity and uniqueness. Hobbes took an important step in this direction. His
Leviathan and De Cive drew on Cicero, Roman law and new scientific ideas to
provide a theoretical account of selfhood that distinguishes moral from natural
selves. Hobbes conceives of the former in multiple terms. Much like Sophocles
in Antigone, he depicts stable people and political orders as the result of
conscious compromises among different, conflicting identities and their asso-
ciated duties.81
John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, published in 1689,
tackles the problem of continuity. He equates the person with the self and
famously calls the former a “forensic term,” in recognition of the concept’s
legal origins, and introduces moral agency through self-consciousness. He
reasons that human beings enter the world as blank slates and become persons
as a result of their life experiences and reflections on them. Selfhood is a
complicated concept because our understanding of ourselves is incomplete
due to our imperfect and punctuated memories. We are selves to others, but
even more imperfectly, as they know less about us and have no recourse to our
reflections about ourselves. Only God understands us perfectly, he avers, and
holds out the hope that at some point might make us more transparent to
ourselves.82 Locke’s understanding of identity is not about uniqueness, but
about the supposed “identicality” that provides continuity to our lives.83
Locke sees reflexive self-consciousness and memory as the two keys to
personhood. He goes beyond Hobbes in his conception of an inner self. It is
“that conscious thinking thing” that is pre-social and always reflecting on a
person’s emotional state. It survives all efforts of society to limit it through
roles, obligations and other constraints. Locke maintains that: “Any experi-
ence I can remember being reflectively aware of, is mine, i.e., one that
happened to me.” Person-stages nevertheless belong to the same person “if
and only when the latter could contain an experience which is memory of a
reflective awareness of an experience continued in the earlier.”84 Condillac,
Diderot and Rousseau follow Locke in making memory the locus of
selfhood.85

80
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, ch. 27.
81
Hobbes, Leviathan and De Cive; Tuck, Hobbes; Garrett, “Forum: The Idea of Self.”
82
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
83
Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, p. 191.
84
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, ch. 27. 85 Ibid.
 r e t hi n k i n g i d e n t i ty 37

Most of the thick formulations understand identity as the product of inter-

action between individuals and their societies. Contemporary literature in
philosophy, psychology and political science nevertheless emphasizes the social
side of the equation. Postmodern selves leave even less room for agency as they
portray identities as understandings inscribed on people by states. At the same
time, the longer-term project of some postmodernists is to imagine – and
presumably bring into being – non-totalitarian identities.
In contrast to many social and postmodernist understandings of identity,
I give equal emphasis to agency. There is compelling evidence that even in
highly authoritarian societies individuals have some leeway in the construction
of their identities. Czesław Miłosz and others describe the considerable room
for private discourse that existed in the Soviet bloc, and even clever ways of
exploiting public fora to advance otherwise unacceptable points of view.178 I am
interested in how such agency is realized, expressed and preserved, and how it
can help to transform individual identities, and through them, the character of
societies. I find the pragmatic and narrative formulations of identity the most
relevant to this aspect of my project.
Different philosophical formulations of identity can be associated with my four
strategies of identity. Thin descriptions of identity resemble the two pre-modern
strategies in their attempt to do away with interiority and reflexivity. They do so
by analytical fiat: they dismiss identity on logical grounds and reduce human
beings to bodies and minds that live entirely in the present. Without some sense
of continuity and ability to compare the present to the past, interiority and
reflection are impossible. The pragmatic and narrative selves are emblematic of
strategy number three in their description of identity as the product of the
interaction between agents and society, mediated by reflection. This approach
is associated with liberalism, and was conceived by liberal American academics in
the late nineteenth century. Even today, it seems to find its greatest appeal among
liberals in English-speaking countries. Postmodern selves describe identities as
foisted onto people by the state and part of the totalizing project of modernity. In
characterizing society in this negative way, and making identity construction a
project to be pursued in opposition to existing societies, it is unambiguously
associated with the fourth identity strategy, which finds political expression in
anarchism. This strategy was pioneered by Germans and French thinkers,
although it finds broad support among intellectuals elsewhere. The social self is
more difficult to pin down because it comes in flavors that cut across identity
categories. Certain strong formulations – that of Kenneth Gergen, for example,
appear close to the postmodernist position in their seemingly severe restriction of
agency and jaundiced view of society.179 Weaker formulations are closer to the
narrative self and fit better within the liberal tradition.

178
Miłosz, Captive Mind, pp. 54–81.
179
Gergen, Saturated Self and “Social Construction of Self.”
38 i n tr od uct i on

These correspondences create a problem for me. By adopting any of these

formulations of identity, I am, in effect, working within, or at least parallel to, a
particular strategy of identity. This is a questionable commitment when my
goal is to explain these strategies, which, of necessity, requires a perspective
outside of any of them. My solution is inelegant but defensible. I do not embrace
any particular formulation of identity, but make use of the several thick ones.
While this does not provide an outside perspective on my problem, it does
avoid working within any one formulation to understand all of them.
There is also something positive to be said about this approach. Positivist
social science assumes that the social world can be described by our concepts
and that research allows us to refine them and accordingly improve their “fit”
with reality. More sophisticated understandings of social science reject this
conceit and start from the premise that what we discover is to a large degree a
product of the concepts we bring to our inquiry. It is possible to discover many
truths about the world, some of them conflicting, and all of them plausible in
light of the scientific standards of the day. Multiple competing perspectives
should not be regarded as a source of confusion, but of enlightenment. More
than thirty years ago, I published a book about international crisis in which
I compared it to a finely cut gem, whose complexity could only be appreciated
by examining it through its many facets.180 This is even truer for identity.
Elsewhere I elaborate a synthetic understanding of identity that starts from
the premise that we do not have identities but rather a number of roles and
affiliations.181 Those we feel positive about – and some we do not – provide a
diverse suite of self-identifications. Our self-identifications in turn provide the
basis for the stories we tell about ourselves to gain acceptance by others and to
make our lives meaningful. Roles, affiliations, self-identifications, agency and
narratives interact in complex ways. All of them are observables and readily
amenable to empirical research.182
Let me conclude by revisiting Ricoeur’s distinction between idem and ipse
identity which has become a standard binary in analytical philosophy. It is
worth considering the proposition that this distinction is symptomatic of an
illusion apparently so dear to Western philosophy. There is simply no empirical
support for the unitary and continuous self and it makes no sense for philos-
ophers to continue their search for some logically defensible construction of the
idem. People think they have such identities, but this is a phenomenon for
psychology to explain. Ipse identity is equally questionable in that many
philosophers and psychologists have advanced good reasons for questioning
its existence. At best, we have multiple forms of self-identification that shape
our evolving understandings of who we are. These understandings have impor-
tant behavioral consequences, but they are not the concern of philosophy. It

180
Lebow, Between Peace and War, “Introduction.”
181
Lebow, “Identity and Self-Identification.” 182 Lebow, “Ethics and Identity.”
 s t r u c t u r e of th e b o o k 39

may be that philosophy’s attempt to make sense of the human condition by

pure reason alone is another Enlightenment conceit.

Structure of the book

I study identity through close readings of ancient, Enlightenment and contem-
porary texts. They include elite and popular literature, philosophical tracts and
opera. These texts provide insights into the nature and evolution of interiority
and reflexivity, diverse identity strategies and the dynamics governing their
creation, propagation and stabilization, evolution and decline. Some of these
texts interrogate specific identities, and a few question the concept of identity
itself. Collectively, they allow generalizations about the theory and practice of
identity in different periods of Western history.
Identities are inseparable from the narratives that invent, instantiate and
sustain them. This is a reflection of the more general truth that the stories we tell
and hear from others are the vehicles human beings use to render the world and
our role in it more comprehensible.183 Chapter 2 expands upon this under-
standing and my decision to focus on three kinds of closely related narratives:
golden ages, utopias and dystopias. These narratives reflect different
beliefs about the possibility of progress, beliefs that have had important impli-
cations for the relative appeal of different kinds of identities. Golden ages are
theodicies that justify suffering and inequality in eras where there is little hope
of positive change. Utopias emerged and became popular at a time when belief
in progress developed and that in the soul and the afterlife declined. Most
utopias are nevertheless associated with and pioneered the two anti-modern
identity strategies. Dystopias are a reaction to utopias and their authoritarian
projects. They generally reflect and support strategy three, associated with
British empiricism and liberalism.
Existing identities become more problematic, and new ones are more likely
to emerge, in periods of upheaval and transformation. My narratives are
associated with four major eras of dramatic political and social change. I
begin with ancient Greece and Rome and the epics of Homer and Virgil.
Homer – or the rhapsodes collectively known as Homer – wrote poetry at a
time when the polis was emerging and would replace the oikos (household) as
the dominant political form. The Iliad helped to negotiate this transition by
problematizing the identities and roles associated with the older patriarchal
system. Virgil wrote at the onset of the Augustan era and envisaged his Aeneid
as the founding document of a new imperial order.

183
Winter and Sivan, War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century; Lebow, “Memory of
Politics in Postwar Europe”; Fogu and Kansteiner, “Politics of Memory and the Poetics of
History.” For overviews of the memory field, Olick and Robinson, “Social Memory
Studies”; Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory.”
40 i n tr od uct i on

These epics offer an understanding of identity construction at odds with the

modern one developed by Kant and Hegel. The German philosophers consider
the creation of negative “others” a necessary foundation for state formation and
national solidarity, as do many contemporary thinkers. To be fair to Hegel, we
must acknowledge that he also thought identity construction depended on the
self’s recognition of the “other.” Homer and Virgil believe that identities can,
and should, be built collaboratively, and that nuanced and empathetic under-
standings of others are essential to maintain these identities and what today we
call our humanity. Their shared understanding is consistent with the findings of
social psychologists, whose research indicates that identities generally form
prior to any conceptions of “others” and that negative stereotypes are most
likely to arise when groups compete for scarce resources.
From the ancient world, I move to Europe of the Enlightenment and the
response to it by Austrian and German artists and intellectuals. Chapter 4
analyzes two Mozart operas: Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte [The Magic
Flute]. My focus on opera may strike some readers as odd, but it is germane for
my purposes. Don Giovanni is a dystopia and Magic Flute combines a golden
age and utopia. Theater and opera in the late eighteenth century were among
the most important sites of social instruction and experimentation. Many
philosophers, writers and public officials sought to use them as vehicles for
propagating moral reforms. Those writing for theater and opera expressed their
creativity and engaged in aesthetic reflection upon society. Enlightenment ideas
and reforms, and resistance to them by representatives of the old regime, were
central themes of the theater. Mozart and his librettists wrote operas that can
properly be characterized as thought experiments about old and new identities
and their consequences.
The three Mozart–Da Ponte operas – Le Nozze di Figaro [The Marriage of
Figaro], Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte – build on the tradition of opera buffa,
which is set in the mundane world. Their protagonists assume a range of
stances; some are committed to existing arrangements and others to the
individual and social possibilities opened by the Enlightenment. Mozart and
Lorenzo Da Ponte throw together different kinds of individuals under charac-
teristic kinds of social opportunities and stresses. Don Giovanni explores the
binary between socially constructed and self-fashioned selves. Its plot, dialogue
and music indicate that both kinds of selves inevitably lead unhappy and
unfulfilled lives. Così fan tutte, a more optimistic opera, develops the outlines
for a happier and more stable social order.
Magic Flute is the product of Mozart’s collaboration with librettist Emanuel
Schickaneder. It uses the conventions of the popular Singspiel, with its fairytale
plot and fantastic effects, to offer a vision of a seemingly ideal social order. This
utopia can nevertheless be read as a terrifying dystopia, and one, moreover, that
offers a remarkably prescient understanding of the character and dynamics of
twentieth-century totalitarian regimes. Examined in tandem, these operas offer
24 in t r o d u c t io n

Building on this approach, Hegel created an elaborate philosophical framework

in which states were envisaged as the highest stage of historical development
and one in which the human spirit finds its fullest expression. For these
thinkers, it is impossible to separate individual from collective identity or the
personal from the political. They differed from Rousseau in making individual
identity dependent on a collective one. At the end of the nineteenth century,
Nietzsche returned to Rousseau’s emphasis on the individual, but embedded it
in a darker vision. He accuses bureaucracies, educational systems and science –
all of which rest on the application of reason – of crushing human freedom.
They make it increasingly difficult for people to develop their creative impulses.
These parallel but opposed strands of philosophical development provide
the intellectual underpinnings for nationalism, the dominant social identity
in the twentieth century, and individual authenticity, the principal individual
psychological goal in the post-war era.

Identity interrogated
My mini-genealogy highlights four questionable assumptions on which con-
ventional understandings of identity rest. First is the belief that we have a self.
Second, that we are somehow able to sustain a continuous identity even though
our personalities, affiliations and roles change in the course of our lives. Third,
that our identities are unique. Fourth is our potential to remake ourselves, or at
least to discover our “true” selves. These beliefs are deeply ingrained in the
modern Western psyche and some scholarly literature.
The continuity assumption, so central to Locke’s construction of identity, has
been described as realistic and essential to our well-being. Erik Erikson, argu-
ably the most influential post-war author on the subject of identity, maintained
that: “The conscious feeling of having a personal identity is based on two
simultaneous observations: the immediate perception of one’s selfsameness
and continuity in time; and the simultaneous perception of the fact that others
recognize one’s sameness and continuity.”105 Summarizing the conventional
wisdom among psychiatrists and psychologists in the 1960s, Milton Rokeach
noted that health professionals such as Erikson, Helen Lynd, Paul Federn, Carol
Rogers, Erich Fromm and Abraham Maslow attribute much mental illness to
“disturbance of the sense of identity.”106 In the last twenty years it has been
routine for therapists to push, even coerce, addicts, child abuse survivors and
other patients to discover their “true selves” to regain the capacity for self-
direction and purpose.107

105
Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle, vol. I, p. 22, and Identity: Youth and Crisis; Rogers, On
Becoming A Person.
106
Rokeach, Three Christs of Ypsilanti, p. 310.
107
Rice, Disease of One’s Own; Davis, “Healing and the Fragmented Self.”
42 in t r o d u c t io n

about the possibility of meaningful social progress. Their dystopias offer dia-
metrically opposed understandings of golden ages and the kinds of identities
thought appropriate to our imperfect world.
Chapter 6 explores the Left Behind novels, which aim to persuade readers to
construct new selves based on a near-total commitment to Jesus. These novels
are avowedly anti-modern, and embrace identity strategy one. The golden age
they seek to resurrect attempts to do away with interiority and reflexivity and
the autonomy they encourage. Left Behind depicts the millennium as rural, pre-
modern in its values and lifestyle, rigidly authoritarian and intolerant, not only
of diverse beliefs, but of failing to dedicate one’s life to Jesus with sufficient
ardor. It will strike secular readers as a frightening dystopia. Dispensationalism
offers an interesting comparison to the Marxism of Marx and Engels, an
ideology and movement that developed at the same time in the late nineteenth
century. Despite their many ideological differences, there are close parallels in
their style of argument, understanding of history, characterization of villains,
turn to the past for models of the future, expectations of utopia, the need to
achieve it by means of a violent upheaval, and certainty that the futures they
describe are inevitable. These similarities reflect their anti-modern identity
strategies and utopian projects that seek, as far as possible, to do away with
interiority and reflexivity.
Chapter 7 turns to post-war science fiction. One of the most pessimistic
lessons of the twentieth century is the extent to which efforts to construct
utopias are likely to produce dystopias. Soviet-style communism is the most
infamous example and did much to discredit the genre of utopia. Technology
has generated a similar progression of naïve enthusiasm and cynical disen-
chantment. The latest field to arouse great expectations is biotechnology, which,
combined with other scientific advances, might allow enhanced physical capa-
bilities and greatly extended lifespans. We already enjoy some of its benefits in
the form of replacement joints and organs and a life expectancy that increased
during the twentieth century an average of two years a decade in the developed
world. Stories, novellas and novels nevertheless depict bioengineered futures as
unambiguous dystopias. They are populated by characters anxious to flee their
societies and return to worlds like our own, characterized by mortality. Is there
something particularly threatening about biotechnology? Or is it being eval-
uated in a world that has lost faith in reason, science and secular utopias, and in
which intellectuals are particularly sensitive to the downside of technological
breakthroughs?
Unlike most forms of literature, science fiction regularly probes identity at
the species level. Its authors conjure up a range of scenarios to interrogate
humanity and its alleged uniqueness. These works reveal contradictions in
the most widespread understandings of what makes us human, and highlight
the impossibility of finding markers and boundaries that effectively distinguish
us from other life forms. Some writers take the next logical step and explore
 s t r u c t u r e of th e b o o k 43

“post-species” identities. They intentionally blur or bridge boundaries between

us and other species. Dispensationalism, by contrast, establishes clear markers
for humanity and for Christians and is deeply committed to maintaining
and strengthening them. Their differences offer insight into the challenges –
conceptual and practical – of identity construction and maintenance in the
post-industrial, postmodern world.
Chapter 8 uses my findings to revisit the questions about identity I pose
in this Introduction. I stress the dialectical nature of identity formation,
and how separation is facilitated by drawing closer to those from whom
we differentiate ourselves. I explore some of the empirical and ethical
implications of this process. I examine the role of agency in identity
construction through a comparative analysis of role playing, an activity
central to many of my texts. I explore the possibility of recognizing the
uncertainty of selfhood and the fragmented nature of our identities. In
contrast to those philosophers who want to root ethics in identity, I ask if
we could separate these projects. I moot the idea that coming to terms
with our fragmented selves might be a necessary first step toward more
inclusive understandings of community and extending the umbrella of the
“us.” It might provide a way in the longer term to overcome the differ-
ences between communitarianism and cosmopolitanism.
Social scientists tend to avoid coding on only the dependent variable, that is,
studying cases with the same kind of outcome. To learn more about the
conditions associated with the rise to golden age, utopian and dystopian
narratives we need to consider the conditions under which they did not
arise and the societies from which they are absent. My narratives are strictly
Western, and golden ages, utopias and dystopias are indigenous to the West,
although they have subsequently spread to other parts of the world. I want to
know when these three forms of narrative arose, the eras in which they had their
greatest appeal, the audiences to whom they appealed and what kinds of
identities they sought to instantiate. This much can be learned from studying
only Western texts.
As I base my study on narratives, I must pay equal attention to the protocols
developed by humanists. They warn us to be careful with the language we use to
compare “societies” and texts produced within the same society. The rules of
hermeneutics would have us search for meaning inside a text and exercise care
in comparing texts. Comparisons are nevertheless possible, and for social
scientists essential. In making them, we must guard against cultural contami-
nation. It is easy to generate what appear to be common-sense categories
based on our culture and experience. Concepts as diverse as class, stratification,
civil society, anomie, evolution and projection, which seemed appropriate
to nineteenth-century Europe, have been used to analyze Western and
non-Western societies alike. Classic examples of abuse include Marxist
efforts to describe societies as different as sixteenth-century Russia and
44 i n t r o d u c ti o n

eighteenth-century China and India as “feudal,” and the characterization of

fifth-century Greece and the post-1945 world as “bipolar.”184 Those who use or
deploy analytical constructs of this kind must also avoid “ontological gerry-
mandering,” which involves the manipulation of boundaries to make the
phenomena we study problematic, but leaves the categories we use to study
them unquestioned.185
My open-ended and broad-gauged approach to the problem of identity is the
opposite of that associated with positivism, whose advocates urge scholars to
hold context as constant as possible to test the causal power of one or a few
carefully identified and suitably isolated variables.186 This approach is not readily
applicable to identity because self-identification – our putative dependent and
independent variable – is culturally specific and context dependent, as are its
behavioral consequences. There is another serious problem that positivists tend
to ignore: the way we structure our investigation, that is, how we “operationalize”
either the concept or practice of identity, largely determines what we find. With
regard to identity, what we really need is a more general understanding of its
importance to human beings, the dynamics governing the creation and acquis-
ition of different identifications and how this process and choice is influenced by
the understanding actors themselves have of themselves and their societies and
the goals they seek. These questions are largely interpretative, and even prelimi-
nary steps toward developing a better conceptualization and understanding of
them can provide rich guidelines for future empirical research.
Although I am an international relations specialist, I concentrate primarily
on individual identity in this book. It is the most theorized level of identity and
the easiest to study. Much of the analysis of personal identity – individual and
social – is applicable to groups, larger social units and states.187 In a follow-on
article I will spell out some of the most important implications of my findings
for states and the practice of international relations.
My book makes normative as well as empirical claims, and bridges political
science, psychology, history and philosophy. In such an enterprise, there is
always the danger of spreading oneself too thin. There are, I believe, powerful
compensations. A problem like identity cuts across artificial disciplinary boun-
daries and is best approached by drawing on literature and insights from
different disciplines. Researchers in these several disciplines tend to stay within
the boundaries of their fields, although they often import relevant findings from
allied disciplines. More than most, I attempt to be interdisciplinary and to relate

184
Hall, Government and Local Power in Japan; Barshay, “Doubly Cruel,” on the case of
Japanese feudalism and capitalism.
185
Woolgar and Pawluch, “Ontological Gerrymandering.”
186
King, Keohane and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry.
187
Friedman, “Social Self and the Partiality Debate”; Erskine, Embedded Cosmopolitanism
makes some of the same points in an international context.
 i den ti ty in terr ogat ed 27

Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky and his American counterpart, F. C. Bartlett,

make similar arguments.121 Their research and numerous subsequent studies
find considerable support for the social content of memory.
At the neurological level our ability to store, recall and reconfigure verbal and
non-verbal stimuli is mediated by patterns that we learn from our social and
cultural environments.122 So, too, are the language and narratives we use to
describe memory and make it plausible and significant to others. Memory adapts
itself to the conventions of the age. In the process, more general memories are
typically simplified and condensed in their representation. Their detail is reduced
and aspects emphasized that are more readily assimilated to widely used narra-
tive schemes.123 So-called “flashbulb memories” nicely illustrate these processes.
They refer to what people assert are their most vivid memories: where they were,
what they were doing, what they thought at the time of dramatic events like Pearl
Harbor, the Kennedy assassination, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the events of
September 11. Although reported in exquisite detail, such memories are notori-
ously unreliable.124 This may be because “flashbulb memories” are not fully
established at the time, but only later when the significance of the event for
society has been established. For this reason, such memories, diverse at their
onset, converge as months and years pass.125
Current events more broadly affect the way in which we remember earlier
events. Commemorations of past events lead people to make upward revisions
in their importance.126 These revisions appear to help people assimilate such
events cognitively, and once this happens they have no further need to ruminate
about them. Conversely, when people talk less about an event, they remember it
more, dream about it more and feel it more intensely.127 The problem of recall
aside, narratives of the past may change with each retelling. Psychologists have
discovered multiple “remembered selves,” whose evocation depends on the
nature of the trigger and the social milieu in which the person is situated at
the time.128 To the extent that identity is socially conferred and memory socially
constructed, it is something we want to share with others. For all these reasons,
claims of uniqueness are more ideology than reality.

121
Vygotsky, Mind in Society; Bartlett, Remembering.
122
Schacter, Searching for Memory and Cognitive Neuropsychology of False Memory.
123
Allport and Postman, Psychology of Rumor; Bartlett, Remembering; Singer, Repression and
Dissociation; Rubin, Remembering Our Past; Conway et al., Theoretical Perspectives on
Autobiographical Memory; Collins, Gathercole, Conway and Morris, Theories of Memory.
124
Neisser, Memory Observed. 125 Bohannon and Symons, “Flashbulb Memories.”
126
Schwartz, “Social Context of Commemoration.”
127
Wegner, White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts; Pennebaker and Harber, “Social
Stage Model of Collective Coping.”
128
Neisser, “John Dean’s Memory”; Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth; White,
“Recall of Autobiographical Events”; Polkinghorne, “Narrative and Self-Concept”;
Neisser, Perceived Self; Neisser and Fivush, Remembering Self.
 2

Narratives and identity

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not ever worth glancing at,
for it leaves out the one country where humanity is always landing.
Oscar Wilde1

Individual and social identities are created, transmitted, revised and under-
mined through narratives and practices. Narratives tell people who they are,
what they should aspire to be and how they should relate to others. They are
invariably linear, as they are structured around a plot line that imposes a
progressive order on events, selecting and emphasizing those that can be
made supportive of it. Frank Kermode suggests that to make sense of the
world we “need to experience that concordance of beginning, middle and end
which is the essence of our explanatory fictions.”2 Practice is repetitive behavior
that is widely shared and culturally regulated. It can be sub-divided, as
Montesquieu famously did, into manners (manières), norms (moeurs) and
laws (lois).3
Narratives and practices are most often intended to uphold existing
social, religious, political and economic orders. Practices serve these ends
when they become habitual, as Weber and American pragmatists realized.4
Charles Taylor maintains that practice not only fulfills rules, but gives
them concrete shape in context. Practice is “a continual ‘interpretation’
and reinterpretation of what the rule really means.”5 Changes in actual or
fictionalized practice can threaten existing orders, so institutions have a
strong interest in regulating them, just as reformers and revolutionaries do

1
Wilde, Soul of Man Under Socialism, p. 24. 2 Kermode, Sense of an Ending, pp. 35–6.
3
Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, Book 19.12 and 14.
4
Weber, Economy and Society, vol. I, pp. 24–43, 212–16 and 319–25; Durkheim, Rules of
Sociological Method, pp. 51–5, argues that habits, custom and tradition account for most
behavior most of the time. They prevail because of our cognitive need for simplification.
Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct; James, Principles of Psychology; Simon,
Administrative Behavior; Turner, Brains, Practices, Relativism; Bourdieu, The Logic of
Practice; Steinmetz, State/Culture; Hopf, “Logic of Habit in International Relations.”
5
Taylor, “To Follow a Rule.”

46
 narratives and identity 47

in changing them.6 This orientation applies equally to narratives. In early

modern Europe, the Catholic Church, which had propagated Latin Vulgate
translation of the Old and New Testaments, voiced strident opposition to
vernacular translations. The first printed English language translation,
William Tyndale’s 1525, was banned in England and English clerics
visiting the continent bought and burned all copies they could find.7
Narratives and practices interact in complex and still poorly understood
ways. Narratives often describe or critique existing practices. They introduce
and encourage new practices, generate support for them or attempt to destabi-
lize existing ones. Practices sometimes reinforce existing narratives, as does the
reading of scripture in churches and synagogues. New practices encourage new
narratives, even new narrative forms. The boundaries between text and practice
are blurred and there is considerable overlap. Postmodern literary theory has
further muddied the waters by describing as texts what formerly would have
been characterized as practices.8
Narrative has long been a vehicle for social analysis. In the late eighteenth
century, David Hume insisted that history is functionally indistinguishable
from novels and epic poetry because it is made meaningful by fictional
emplotment; a mere recital of past events being nothing more than a
chronicle.9 In the nineteenth century, Wilhelm Dilthey, hoping to bridge
the growing gap between what would become known as the humanities and
social sciences, made the case for a sociology of biography.10 Social science
nevertheless developed more in opposition to the humanities than in collab-
oration with it. Margaret Sommers aptly describes narrative as social science’s
“epistemological other.”11 It is an ideographic mode of representation that is
discursive and generally atheoretical, in contradistinction to social science’s
quest for theory based on quantitatively testable propositions. Beginning in
the 1980s, researchers in psychology, legal theory, organizational theory,
anthropology and medical sociology were nevertheless drawn to narrative
because of what it revealed about the understandings people had of them-
selves and their social worlds.12 In recent years, comparative politics and

6
Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, Interaction Ritual, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
and Stigma.
7
Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 95. 8 Derrida, Of Grammatology.
9
Hume, Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, section iii, and “On the Study of
History.”
10
Dilthey, “Understanding of Other Persons and Their Life Expressions.”
11
Somers, “Narrative Constitution of Identity.”
12
Bruner, “Life as Narrative,” Acts of Meaning and “Narrative Construction of Reality”; Schank
and Abelson, Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding; White, “Value of Narrativity”;
Brooks, Reading for the Plot; Ricoeur, “Narrative Time” and Time and Narrative. Geertz,
Local Knowledge; White, When Words Lose Their Meaning; Dworkin, Politics of
Interpretation; Hales, “Inadvertent Rediscovery of Self in Social Psychology”; Bruner, “Life
48 n a r r a t iv e s a n d i d e n t it y

international relations have turned to narratives for much the same reason.
The rise of constructivism as a paradigm, parallels and reflects widespread
recognition of the importance of identity politics. As constructivism empha-
sizes the central importance of intersubjective understandings, it directs our
attention to narratives and practices as locales where such understandings
arise, spread and are challenged.
Over the course of the millennia we have witnessed dramatic shifts in
narratives and practices. At the macro level, these shifts raise problems about
the continuity of cultures, just as the reworking of life stories does about the
continuity of individuals. At the analytical level, this evolution poses conceptual
challenges. We must exercise great care about using one culture’s categories and
understandings to study identity construction and maintenance in other eras
and cultures. Variations in how people understand, construct and theorize
identity – or do not theorize it at all – are nevertheless a valuable analytical
resource. They allow us to study the present in comparative perspective and
thereby develop a more comprehensive understanding of identity narratives
and practices and the conditions that shape them.
Humanists describe different kinds of narratives, study how they work and
the projects for which they are utilized.13 My interests overlap with theirs in
part. I want to know why certain kinds of narratives are used to propagate or
probe identities, but also what they have to tell us about the process by which
people and institutions form, reconfigure and re-order their identifications.
Narratives are absolutely critical to the sense of selfhood felt by individuals and
attributed to social collectivities. People come to know themselves only indi-
rectly by means of cultural signs, most notably narratives of everyday life. To
quote Paul Ricoeur again: “Narrative mediation underlines this remarkable
characteristic of self-knowledge.”14 We may be hard-wired to think this way,
as experiments show that people will construct narratives to impose order on
unconnected events and images.15
We not only tell stories about ourselves, but about others.16 This phenom-
enon is reciprocal and generates narratives and counter-narratives. Not

as Narrative”; Sarbin, Narrative Psychology; Gergen and Gergen, “Narrative Form and the
Construction of Psychological Science”; Williams, “Genesis of Chronic Illness”; Kleinman,
Illness Narratives; Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth; Schafer, Analytic Attitude;
Daniel, Fluid Signs; Turner and Bruner, Anthropology of Experience.
13
White, “Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” On Narrative and Content
of the Form; Mink, “Autonomy of Historical Understanding” and “Narrative Form as
Cognitive Instrument”; Danto, Narration and Knowledge.
14
Ricoeur, “Narrative Identity,” p. 198.
15
Heider and Simmel, “Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior”; Michotte, Perception of
Causality.
16
Bertaux, Biography and Society; Bertaux and Kohli, “Life Story Approach”; Freeman,
“History, Narrative, and Life-Span Developmental Knowledge”; Linde, “Privates Stories
in Public Discourse.”
30 in t r o d u c t io n

happens to them; in other words, it prevents precisely what should be

his true fulfillment. This interior space – admittedly hard to describe –
is of a different shade and shape in Italy from what it is in England,
because everything that stands out in relief against it is of a different
shade and shape; and yet it is in both places the same: empty,
invisible space, with reality standing inside it like a child’s toy town
deserted by the imagination.140

There are equally compelling logical objections to the self-actualization

project. If we can reshape our identity, we are no longer the same people
we were previously and our continuity is questionable. Gradual changes in
character and projects may not represent sharp ruptures but do bring
about major transformations over time, as anybody who has ever attended
a twenty-fifth or fiftieth school or university reunion recognizes. The very
possibility of transformation suggests some deeper layer of mind that
inspires and helps us accomplish this change by overcoming the identi-
fications fundamental to our current identity.141 If so, identity cannot
represent our core essence. The existence of multiple identities points to
the same conclusion. Some of our identifications are mutually supporting,
but others are not, and all of them rise and fall in salience depending on
the context. The concept of a unitary identity requires something super-
ordinate to our internal heterogeneity. In its absence, the struggle between
or among competing identifications indicates that we are deeply divided
beings. As Nick Onuf puts it, if subjectivity comes first, then “self” is “an
unexamined primitive term.”142

Rethinking identity
Contemporary philosophers address the concept of self from logical, phenom-
enological and metaphysical perspectives. They disagree about whether the self
has substance or is an illusion. I offer a short overview of this debate to
demonstrate the extent to which these thinkers for the most part disassociate
themselves from Cartesian, Lockean and Romantic selves. Some, turning to
Buddhism, deny the existence of the self. Others posit a “minimal” self, based on
the principle of self-awareness. Still others defend thicker conceptions of
embodied, narrative, pragmatic or social selves.143 These differences often
turn the classic distinction made by Aaron Gurwitsch between egological and
non-egological theories of self. The former affirms the ego as the subject of

140
Musil, Man Without Qualities, p. 30.
141
Baars, In the Theatre of Consciousness, unconvincingly draws on neuroscience to make
the case for an underlying implicit self.
142
Onuf, “Parsing Personal Identity.”
143
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; Thompson, Mind and Life.
50 n a r r a t i ve s an d i d e n t i ty

of constitutive narratives. Fictional origins and historical events are retrospec-

tively woven into master narratives to “invent” a people and provide them with
a distinctive and uplifting past.26 In this chapter and the next, I examine two of
the earliest and most successful master narratives: the Old Testament and Iliad.
The former helped to create and sustain a strong sense of community among
Jews, and the latter among Greeks.
Narratives that construct or propagate identities often do so self-consciously.
This is true of many autobiographies and the Iliad and the Old Testament.
Augustine wrote his autobiography, and Rousseau and Goethe their novels, to
advance religious, philosophical and cultural ends. Goethe was amazed at his
success and horrified at the suicides that his novel prompted; “copy cat”
suicides are still described today as the “Werther Effect.”27 The Old
Testament and the Iliad were collaborative projects, transmitted initially by
word of mouth and not written down until centuries later. Changes in their
language, contents and style tell us something about the evolving nature of
the projects they were used to advance. Personal life narratives are equally
creative products, although we may be unaware of the extent to which we edit,
reinterpret and even invent memories to support them.
Collectively, narratives track the evolution and relative appeal of different
kinds of self-identification. This is rarely the goal of any single narrative, some
academic studies aside, but an unintended system level effect of many indi-
vidual narratives. Political theorists have studied philosophical tracts and
literature to fathom the emergence of individual identity.28 Historians have
done the same with national movements and identities. International rela-
tions scholars have relied on a variety of texts to identify and analyze com-
peting national narratives. Ted Hopf uses newspapers, official discourse,
popular novels, film reviews and memoirs to track the identity discourse in
the former Soviet Union and first years of post-Cold War Russia. He discov-
ered four distinctive narratives, each of which frames Russian relations with
the West and “Near Abroad” differently and vies for supporters among the
public and government officials.29 Stefano Guzzini analyzes the revival of
geopolitical discourse as a response to post-Cold War identity crises in Russia,
Eastern Europe and Turkey. In these countries, previously established
national identities have been challenged from within and without.
Geopolitics has been mobilized to circumscribe boundaries and provide

26
Herodotus, Histories; Freud, Moses and Monotheism; Anderson, Imagined
Communities.
27
Williams, Life of Goethe, pp. 215–16.
28
See especially, Seigel, Idea of Self. For a more widely cited but more partisan reading,
Taylor, Sources of the Self.
29
Hopf, Social Construction of International Politics; also Clunan, Social Construction of
Russia’s Resurgence, who identifies five distinct post-communist identities.
 n a r r a t i v e s a n d id e n t i t y 51

justifications seemingly more acceptable to public opinion and third parties

than narrow definitions of national interest.30
As these examples illustrate, narratives can be partisan or analytical about
identity. The most common analytical narratives track the rise, fall, uses and
consequences of particular identities. This approach was pioneered by Greek
tragedy, whose characters are constructed as archetypes. They can be consid-
ered thought experiments as they create uni-dimensional, and hence unrealistic
characters to probe the individual and social consequences of their identities.
Modern novels have characters with inner lives and distinctive personalities but
many also explore, problematize or advocate specific identities. Cervantes’ Don
Quixote, published between 1605 and 1615, and generally regarded as the
pioneering modern novel, parodies chivalry and honor-based quests. By show-
ing their absurdity, even madness, it seeks to undermine traditional aristocratic
identities, anchored in honor codes. Early English novels, notably those of
Richardson, Fielding and Steele, describe newly emerging roles and identities
that would come to be associated with the bourgeoisie. In chapter 5, I make the
case that the three operas on which Mozart and librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte
collaborated critically examine the ancien régime and the Enlightenment
identities.
Relatively few narratives probe the concept of identity itself. In chapter 1, I
noted two such works: Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and Robert Musil’s, A Man
Without Qualities. Bracketing the modern era, Hobbes and Musil make the case
that identity is a purely social construct by peeling away the roles and practices
into which people have been socialized. Underneath, both authors contend,
there is nothing but raw appetites. Several of the texts I examine implicitly
probe the concept of identity and a few do so explicitly. Most of the latter are
science fiction novels. They raise the question of what it is to be human by
questioning existing markers and boundaries between humans and other
species.
My focus on identity directs my attention to three related kinds of
narratives: golden ages, utopias and dystopias. They have been used to
construct, propagate and analyze identity. They make their respective
appearances in eras of change when new justifications for order were
required and new hopes kindled about the possibility of transforming or
even transcending traditional identities. In the West, the respective pop-
ularity of golden age, utopian and dystopic narratives is an excellent
barometer of belief in progress and the relative appeal of religious versus
secular foundations of order. I will nevertheless argue that many, if not
most, utopias are anti-modern in orientation.
Utopias are elite narratives and generally optimistic about the prospect of a
better life in this world. Dystopias, another elite narrative, are quintessentially

30
Guzzini, Geopolitics Redux?, esp. ch. 1.
52 n a r r a t i v e s a n d id e n t i t y

pessimistic. Golden ages are popular, pessimistic narratives as they trace the
irreversible decline of the human race. The Christian reading of the Garden of
Eden nevertheless embeds a deeper optimism because it holds out the prospect
of rebirth and life in heaven.
Since the ancient Greeks, a major tradition of Western thought has regarded
active participation in society as a precondition of human fulfillment. One
of the common goals of utopias, from Plato to the present, has been to design
societies that successfully integrate people into society. Utopias foster harmony
and happiness. Their critics maintain that this harmony is superficial
and socially costly as it is achieved and maintained by repression from
above and suppression from within. Critics read many utopias as dystopias,
as I do in chapter 4 with The Magic Flute. Golden ages can also be read
as dystopias, and for many of the same reasons. Chapter 5, which examines
the post-Enlightenment German reconstruction of ancient Greece as a golden
age, offers such an interpretation. In the concluding chapter I will argue
that these diametrically opposed readings can be attributed to the strategies
utopias employ to address the tensions between reflexive and social selves.
These strategies in turn reflect different understandings of what it is to be
human.
There is, I believe, an important and unexplored relationship between
utopia and identity that parallels the one I described in chapter 1 between
the soul and the person. The soul was conceived as something with a noume-
nal, pure, unitary essence. It tied the disparate parts of a human being
together, outlived the body and was a source of moral guidance and respon-
sibility. When the soul lost credibility, the person was developed to replace it
and quickly became the locus of identity for many Westerners. With mod-
ernity, it was impossible to portray the person as a unity free of inner tensions,
and certainly not one that transcended death. The first of these needs was met
in part by utopias, which emerged in early modern Europe at the same time
the soul began to lose credibility. Like the soul, utopias are invariably depicted
as unitary, perfect, and sources of both identity and moral guidance. They
overcome, at least in theory, all serious internal and external differences and
tensions. Their popularity rose as interest in religious texts declined. Through
the vehicle of utopia, society was to provide the unity and perfection the soul
no longer could.
This is the strongest claim about the connections between the soul and the
person and the person and utopia, and hence, about the importance of dis-
courses for identity. It finds some empirical support in the role golden ages
played for identity construction in the pre-modern era, and utopias in the
modern age. However, I feel more comfortable with a weaker form of this
thesis that does not assert a direct causal connection between the decline of the
soul and the rise of utopias. Rather, I see this relationship as more constitutive
than causal. In effect, there was pre-existing need, created, or perhaps,
 r e t hi n k in g i d e n t it y 33

cross-cutting and open-ended narratives would be necessary to describe our

multiple identities. Katherine Nelson makes a parallel argument, noting that the
self is never more than a character in a larger story. Such narratives undeniably
create extended temporal understandings of ourselves and allow us to distin-
guish ourselves from others. They appear to be an essential element in our
cognitive development.159
Daniel Dennet offers a weaker version of narrative identity that denies any
existential reality to the self. He describes it as a useful fiction, not unlike the
center of gravity, as a concept that can be mobilized to explain and predict. The
self is accordingly more the product of narrative than its originator.160 It might
be described as a kind of third-level abstraction based on the multiple,
sometimes conflicting stories we tell about ourselves over time.
Narrative identity has wide appeal to scholars with normative and scientific
agendas. For MacIntyre and Taylor, it is a source of meaning and significance
and a foundation for ethics. For Dennett and Nelson, it negotiates our cognitive
development and provides a guide for strategic behavior. The first approach
meets criticism from those who challenge the analogy between life and liter-
ature, contending that life lacks the purpose and unity of fiction as it is so often
the product of accident, contingency and constraints over which people have
little control.161 Literature can effectively convey ethical insights and role
models, but life narratives, which are highly stylized and often after-the-fact
rationalizations intended to gain social acceptance for their authors, are hardly
appropriate foundations for ethical systems. I will return to this argument in the
concluding chapter.
Another thick formulation is the “pragmatic self.” It builds on the supposi-
tion of Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey that the self forms in the
course of interactions with other people.162 For James, this implies that we have
as many social selves as people who recognize us and carry images of us in their
minds. We in turn show different selves to different people.163 This process is
far from mechanical and relies heavily on agency. Self-awareness and reflection
about our behavioral routines and how others respond to them and to us create
our understanding of ourselves. Pragmatists describe our social interactions as
largely habitual, and the product of socialization. While our habits are regular,
they are not frozen. There is leeway to act independently, and awareness of the

159
Nelson, “Narrative and the Emergence of a Conscious Self”; Donald, Origins of the
Modern Mind and Mind So Rare. See also the pioneering work of Sarbin, Narrative
Psychology; Bruner, “Life as Narrative” and Acts of Meaning; Polkinghorne, Narrative
Knowing and the Human Sciences and “Narrative and Self-Concept.”
160
Dennett, “Self as Center of Narrative Identity.”
161
Lamarque, “On the Distance between Literary Narratives and Real-Life Narratives.”
162
Menary, “Our Glassy Essence”; Hermans, “Dialogical Self” on Pragmatism and
identity.
163
James, Principles of Psychology, p. 294.
54 n a r r a t i v e s a n d id e n t i t y

worse outcome if another course of action had been followed. Better and worse
ultimately depend on some notion of best and worst. Normative claims accord-
ingly require ideal worlds. In Western culture, golden ages and utopias were
created in part for this purpose. In the early modern era, they were joined by state
of nature narratives and later, by the additional modes of argumentation.
State of nature narratives are counterfactual extrapolations to get at phusis
(nature) by stripping away nomos (convention). They purport to describe
human nature uncorrupted, or at least unshaped, by society, and use it as
the template to construct social orders. The legitimacy of these orders and the
principles on which they rest depend on their fit with human nature. From
Hobbes on, state of nature narratives played a powerful role in the development
of the liberal paradigm.36 Contemporary examples include Nozick’s explicit
appeal to a state of nature and Rawls’ use of the original position as a conceptual
analog.37 Following Rousseau, the state of nature is sometimes portrayed as
capturing the original historical condition of humankind. More often, states of
nature are thought experiments intended to highlight what their authors believe
to be the most fundamental attributes of human nature. Hobbes arguably fits
this model as does Rawls, who makes no claim that his original position could
exist in practice. To get to the state of nature it is essential to do away with some
features of the world in which one resides. As Hegel observed, philosophers cut
away various human traits and related behaviors and what they leave behind
and emphasize are subjective choices that reflect their cultural setting and
ideology.38 States of nature are Rorschach Tests that tell us more about their
authors than they do about humankind.
Three other modes of moral argumentation emerged in the modern era:
Kantian deontology (and its Rawlsian variant), utilitarianism and deliberative
democracy, or discourse ethics. Discourse ethics claims to be more concerned
with process than with ends, at least in a direct way. Unlike the Kantian criterion
of universalism, these normative conditions are, or are at least purported to be,
far less determinative, and accordingly do not require an ideal world. Discourse
ethics is reflexive, making rules themselves subject to argument, and thereby
hoping to encourage fairer and more open-ended dialogues. Discourse ethics
nevertheless assumes egalitarian reciprocity and universal human respect, nei-
ther of which Seyla Benhabib contends, have enough substantive content to
specify a singular ideal framework.39 The presuppositions of universal human

36
Hobbes, Leviathan; Riley, General Will Before Rousseau.
37
Nozick, Anarchy, State and Utopia; Rawls, Theory of Justice, esp. ch. 3. For critiques,
Dworkin, “Original Position”; Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, ch. 3; Kilcullen,
Rawls.
38
Hegel, Philosophy of History, Part III, 3(b). Benhabib, Critique, Norm and Utopia, pp. 42–3,
maintains that Hegel’s model of “transparent ethical life” is a “retrospective utopia.” See
also Wenning, “Hegel, Utopia, and the Philosophy of History.”
39
Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy.”
 g o l d en a g e s 55

respect and egalitarian reciprocity are themselves based on a prior, underlying

conception of the good, which, of necessity, rests on some idea of an ideal world.
The “should,” as always, requires some image of a better and attainable society.
Although states of nature, and subsequently utilitarian frames, have domi-
nated philosophical and political narratives, utopias endure. It is interesting to
ask why some authors choose to use them in lieu of other formats to advance
normative arguments. One reason may be their rhetorical potential and ability
to reach wider audiences. In the 1960s, Aldous Huxley’s Island, a critique of
contemporary society by means of a utopia, attracted considerable attention
among the well-educated general public.40 The same was true of B. F. Skinner’s
Walden Two, which became something of a bible for many young people.41
Utopias also have a subterranean existence. Many scholarly narratives – dis-
course ethics, for example – smuggle them in without acknowledgment. This is
also true of golden ages. Sociobiology’s unrealistic description of hunter-
gatherer societies and, until quite recently, anthropology’s portrayal of
Neolithic societies as largely peaceful “uncorrupted” worlds, are cases in
point.42 The American anthropological community is overwhelmingly anti-
war and evidence of a peaceful past offered some justification for the claim that
humanity could and should return to its “natural” state of existence.

Golden ages
Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas, co-authors of the classic account of golden
ages, consider them expressions of either “chronological” or “cultural primitiv-
ism.” The former describes an idyllic world that never was, while the latter
rhapsodizes about earlier, simpler societies in which life is imagined to have
been more tranquil and satisfying. Both discourses reflect discontent with
contemporary life and tend to become prominent in eras when change makes
life more difficult for people.43 Some students of golden ages insist that “cultural
primitivism” is the product of urbanization. Northrop Frye reads the story of
Cain and Abel in a similar light; the murder of Abel, a shepherd, by Cain, a
farmer, symbolizes the “blotting out of an idealized pastoral society by a more
complex civilization.”44 Moses Finley suggests that the description of the
Garden of Eden in Book Two of Genesis is an implicit critique of what
are often considered the two principal evils of society: competition for
women and wealth.45 Conflict over women must hark back to the emergence
of the species, but that over wealth, Finley insists, requires a prior division of
labor, and is accordingly associated with development and “progress.”

40
Huxley, Island. 41 Skinner, Walden Two.
42
For documentation of prehistoric warfare, Keeley, War Before Civilization.
43
Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, pp. 1–7.
44
Frye, “Varieties of Literary Utopias.” 45 Finley, “Utopianism, Ancient and Modern.”
56 n a r r a t i v es a n d i d en t i t y

It seems fair to say that golden ages reflect a desire to escape from hierarchy,
injustice and all that is understood to be confining and corrupting. Golden ages
of all kinds typically do away with technology and often dispense with private
property, laws, meat eating, money, armies and warfare. Order is maintained by
individual self-control in response to “natural” human impulses. Such worlds
are moral, but in a different sense from real worlds. Virtue, in the eyes of
Romans and Christians alike, is the avoidance of temptation.46 “Primitive”
peoples appear virtuous only because they have not been exposed to the
many temptations of civilization.
The emphasis on natural virtue may explain why golden ages are placed so
far back in the past, or so far away geographically if set in the present day.
Greeks and Romans imagined distant lands populated by peoples who lived
simple, stress-free lives. In the Iliad, Zeus turns away from the unremitting
violence of the Trojan Plain to the far north and the land of the noble mare-
milking Albii, “the most decent men alive.”47 Pliny the Elder characterizes
the land of the Hyperborians as a pastoral utopia; there are no seasons, seeds
are sown and harvested on the same day and Hyperborians die only when they
tire of life.48 Sir John Mandeville’s Blessed Isles, like the mythical Atlantis, lies
somewhere beyond the Pillars of Hercules and is inhabited by a godly and
innocent people whose virtue offers a sharp contrast with the corrupt culture
and religion of Europe. In the age of discovery, Europeans continued to imagine
paradises in uncharted seas, no doubt influencing Thomas More to place
his Utopia in this setting. Alternatively, like Rousseau and Gauguin, they
glorified the lives and virtues of the peoples that European voyagers actually
encountered.
Golden ages are common to Judeo-Christian and Greek culture and have
roots in earlier Mesopotamian myths and texts. The Greek word for paradise
(paradeisos) most likely derives from Median paidaeza, meaning “enclosure.” It
can be broken down into pari, signifying “around” and daeza, meaning “wall.”
In Persia, it was frequently used to describe enclosed gardens. Paidaeza is a loan
word in Akkadian, Hebrew and Aramaic, and best known to us from the
English word “paradise,” a synonym for the Hebrew gan Eden (Garden of
Eden) in Genesis 2–3.49 Earlier Mesopotamian texts reveal no conception of a
golden age, but do reflect the “cultural primitivism” of Lovejoy and Boas. The
Sumerian epic, Gilgamesh, describes the life of the adventures of Gilgamesh and
Enkidu. Our most complete text (in Akkadian) is from the seventh century BCE,
and Gilgamesh may have been an historical king in the twenty-seventh century
BCE. The people of Uruk are unhappy with Gilgamesh, who is a harsh ruler and

46
Seneca, Epis, 90.46. 47 Homer, Iliad, 13.3–9.
48
Pliny, Natural History, 4.88–89; Plutarch, Life of Sertorius, 8.2–3.
49
Bremmer, “Paradise”; Noort, “Gan-Eden in the Context of the Mythology of the Hebrew
Bible.”
36 in tr o d u c t io n

among them, are attracted to one or the other of these formulations because
they have the advantage of logical simplicity and a certain degree of rigor, and
are consistent with research findings in neuroscience. These formulations also
have the virtue of being scientific in the judgment of some analytical philoso-
phers and cognitive scientists because they frame the self in an entirely non-
metaphysical way and accordingly do not require invocation of unobservables.
They are also unconnected with normative or political projects. As the intel-
lectual goal of many of these researchers is to account for the self, they are
untroubled that neither formulation is of any real use in accounting for the
continuity and motivation most people attribute to themselves and their
identities.
Thicker formulations of identity are more concerned with empirical selves
and come closer to popular understandings. They differ, of course, in that there
is a widespread tendency among ordinary Westerners to exaggerate their
uniqueness and agency. The more serious analytical problem thicker formula-
tions face is their relative lack of rigor. There are multiple framings of each of
the four thick approaches, and there are few grounds for choosing among them,
or among the four approaches themselves. Each approach stresses a particular
aspect of the practice of identity. The narrative self emphasizes the role of
stories as vehicles for constructing and propagating individual and collective
identities. The pragmatic self emphasizes the importance of behavior, especially
habitual behavior, and the ways in which our actions and reflections about it
determine our understanding of who we are.177 The social and postmodernist
selves – one bleeds into the other – stress the social nature of identity even more
than the narrative and pragmatic selves. They draw our attention to the con-
straining effects of linguistic structures, discourses and social and economic
practices. Postmodern selves are also appealing in their understanding of
identities as multiple, inconsistent and fragile and a source of psychological
angst.
Scholars drawn to thick formulations of self have different objectives than
analytical philosophers and neuroscientists. They are less interested in the self
as an abstract concept and more in how ordinary people understand them-
selves. They are also concerned about the ethical or behavioral consequences of
these conceptions. Even since Locke, the idem self has been a primary focus of
many philosophers. Moral philosophers and social scientists are more con-
cerned with the ipse or qualitative identity, and thus more attracted to thicker
understandings of self. So am I, given my goal of understanding diverse
strategies of identity, the psychological needs they address and the political
projects with which they are associated.

177
Bem, “Self Perception” and “Self-Perception Theory,” for perhaps the strongest statement
of this relationship. See also Hopf, “Logic of Habit in International Relations.”
58 n a r r a t i v e s a n d id e n t i t y

reflection about the nature of the world and the human condition. There can be
little doubt that then as now, cultures were highly ambivalent about curiosity
and where it might lead. It is a primary catalyst for change, which is most often
regarded as threatening, politically and psychologically. Change inevitably gives
rise to nostalgia among those who do not share in its benefits and provides an
important motive and audience for golden age discourses. The film Goodbye
Lenin offers a powerful and comic illustration of this phenomenon in the
former East Germany.
The most conservative reading of Genesis 2–3 supports the contention that
human beings should not only bend to divine will, but to higher human authority
as well, because they neither know what is best for them nor can effectively
overcome temptation. This is the traditional Roman Catholic interpretation,
which posits original sin as the consequence of inadequate resolve in the face of
temptation. Not surprisingly, Augustine attributed such lack of resolve to curi-
osity.54 His explanation gives rise to a conundrum: why would an all-knowing
and omnipotent deity create human beings with such a flaw, and one, moreover,
that would lead them to rebel against him at the very outset of their existence?
Traditional Jewish readings of the serpent, apple and expulsion emphasize free
will and choice and are more tolerant of human failings. Eden is the first of many
examples in the Torah and Jewish liturgy in which humans succumb to intellec-
tual, sexual or material temptations but are encouraged to try yet again to live up
to higher standards of behavior. For Christians and Jews alike, the struggle for
self-improvement is understood to be a defining characteristic of human beings.
Nietzsche recognized that the wealth of texts far exceeds their authors’
intentions.55 As Oscar Wilde put it: “When the work is finished it has . . . an
independent life of its own, and may deliver a message far other than that which
was put into its lips to say.”56 More recently, Stanley Fish observes that good
texts point away from themselves to ideas and feelings they cannot capture.
They invite readers to enter into a dialogue and to create a “community”
between author and reader that transcends generations.57 Golden ages have
functioned this way from the outset. They may have been created to justify
the status quo; the Eden myth was certainly used this way for two millennia
by the Roman Catholic Church.58 Leibniz’s invention of monads and his

54
Ibid., Book XXII, 1–9, Book XIII, 12–15 and Book XIV, 12–14, who defined curiosity as
man’s desire to transform his perfect human knowledge into perfect divine knowledge and
thus become like a god.
55
Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, pp. 73–5; Vidal-Nacquet, Black Hunter, p. 252, offers the same
judgment about the last century of Hellenic studies.
56
Wilde, quoted in Kermode, Romantic Image, p. 56.
57
Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, ch. 1, and Is There a Text in the Class?, pp. 323–4, 347–8;
White, When Words Lose Their Meaning, pp. 18–20, 286–91; Iser, Implied Reader.
58
Heinberg, Memories and Visions of Paradise; Goodwin and Taylor, Politics of Utopia, on
the conservatism of golden ages.
 golden ages 59

description of his world as the best of all possible ones is a secular version of this
argument, although one advanced by a deeply religious man.59 The Garden of
Eden and Hesiod’s ages of man serve as a bridge between nature and culture,
pre-history and history and fantasy and reality. Their ability to inspire fantasy
was undoubtedly an inspiration for utopias that seek to transform the world to
recreate something as satisfying as the Garden of Eden. Golden ages, like
so many other human creations, have the potential to inspire projects
diametrically opposed to their authors’ intentions.
Traditional Jewish and Christian readings of Eden attribute the decision to
eat the apple and gain knowledge to curiosity. The Enlightenment yoked
curiosity and reason together as the driving forces of human betterment. This
shift finds its quintessential expression in Arthur C. Clarke’s clever riff on the
Garden of Eden myth. His City and the Stars depicts a utopia many millennia in
the future: a city where the conditions for human happiness, including de facto
immortality, have been provided by its founders. Human beings have been
genetically programmed to accept the city’s lifestyle, but even futuristic science
cannot rid them of curiosity and a streak of rebelliousness. The consequences of
one man’s violation of the city’s strictest taboo – avoidance of the outside
world – leads to his cleverly engineered departure from “Eden” and subsequent
adoption of a more “natural” life that includes mortality.60 Clarke provides
subtle hints throughout the novel that the city’s founders intended such
rebellion and actually programmed the periodic creation of individuals with
characters that would make them dissatisfied with paradise.
City and the Stars conveys a fundamental truth, one known to the ancient
Greeks: paradise in any form is inherently unstable because it is static. Such
societies must exist in splendid isolation, untouched and uncorrupted by
contact with the outside world. For this reason, Plato situated his Kallipolis
and Magnesia at the peripheries of Greece and the original European utopias
were located on distant and largely inaccessible islands. Even in isolation, an
ideal world would not remain stable for very long, as Plato acknowledges in his
Republic. Human curiosity and desire for material goods and higher status lead
some people to act in innovative and destabilizing ways. Adam Smith, a typical
Enlightenment thinker in this regard, maintains that this drive “comes with us
from the womb.”61 If so, no degree of socialization and stipulated order can
effectively suppress these instincts; there will always be people who are dissat-
isfied and willing to explore new experiences and arrangements. Expulsion
from the Garden of Eden, as some contemporary Christians contend, was
perhaps inevitable and beneficial.62

59
Leibniz, Theodicy. 60 Clarke, City and the Stars.
61
Smith, Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of Wealth of Nations, II.ii, p. 362.
62
Kateb, Utopia and Its Enemies, pp. 68–112.
60 n a r r a t i v e s a n d id e n t i t y

Greek myths, like their Hebrew counterparts, reveal deep ambivalence about
progress. Prometheus, whose name means “forethought” in ancient Greek, was
a Titan. He was famous for his intelligence and theft of fire from Zeus to give as
a gift to humankind. Zeus punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock in
the Caucasus where his liver was eaten every day by an eagle or vulture but
regenerated every night. Heracles ultimately killed his avian tormentor and
freed Prometheus from bondage. Early Greek texts alternatively praise or blame
Prometheus for setting humanity on the road to civilization, innovation and
technology.63 Zeus punished men more generally by having Hephaestus mold
the first woman whose descendants would henceforth torment the male of the
species. In his Theogony, Hesiod does not give this woman a name, but she may
be Pandora, whom he identifies in Works and Days. When Pandora first
appeared before gods and mortals, “wonder seized them” as they looked upon
her. But she was “sheer guile, not to be withstood by men.”64 Zeus sends
Pandora to Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus with a jar from which she releases
“evils, harsh pain and troublesome diseases which give men death.”65
Pandora is an analog to Eve in that she brings suffering to mankind, although
she does so through no failing of her own, but on the instructions of the leading
deity. The Pandora myth functioned as another prop for misogyny, although its
more fundamental purpose, as with the Garden of Eden, was to serve as a
theodicy. If the world and human beings were created by a benign god or gods
worthy of respect and worship, the existence of evil and suffering are anomalous
and require an explanation. Golden ages – at least the original Western ones –
admirably served this end. The Greeks and Jews nevertheless resolve the anomaly
somewhat differently. The Prometheus and Pandora myths suggest that humans
are the playthings of gods, not all of whom are benign. The Garden of Eden
exonerates the deity by making Adam and Eve’s expulsion and subsequent life of
hardship the result of their decision – an exercise of free will – to disregard the one
restriction imposed on them. Both sets of myths attempt to reconcile human
beings to life as they find it. The Greek myths further suggest that efforts to control
one’s environment or escape from its sufferings are only likely to produce more
suffering. They became the foundation for the tragic vision of life elaborated by
later Athenian playwrights.66
Unlike their Jewish counterparts, Greek myths distinguish contemporary
men from their predecessors. In the Iliad, Nestor refers to an earlier generation
of superior and stronger men.67 Pindar laments the old days of “superheroes.”68

63
Hesiod, Theogony, lines 42–7, 560–612, Works and Days, lines 42–105; Aeschylus,
Prometheus Bound.
64
Hesiod, Theogony, lines 560–612. 65 Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 91–2.
66
Lebow, Tragic Vision of Politics, chs. 4, 9.
67
Homer, Iliad, 1.260–80 and 5.302–4, refer to a golden age.
68
Pindar, Odae Pythiae, III, 1–6.
38 i n tr od uct i on

These correspondences create a problem for me. By adopting any of these

formulations of identity, I am, in effect, working within, or at least parallel to, a
particular strategy of identity. This is a questionable commitment when my
goal is to explain these strategies, which, of necessity, requires a perspective
outside of any of them. My solution is inelegant but defensible. I do not embrace
any particular formulation of identity, but make use of the several thick ones.
While this does not provide an outside perspective on my problem, it does
avoid working within any one formulation to understand all of them.
There is also something positive to be said about this approach. Positivist
social science assumes that the social world can be described by our concepts
and that research allows us to refine them and accordingly improve their “fit”
with reality. More sophisticated understandings of social science reject this
conceit and start from the premise that what we discover is to a large degree a
product of the concepts we bring to our inquiry. It is possible to discover many
truths about the world, some of them conflicting, and all of them plausible in
light of the scientific standards of the day. Multiple competing perspectives
should not be regarded as a source of confusion, but of enlightenment. More
than thirty years ago, I published a book about international crisis in which
I compared it to a finely cut gem, whose complexity could only be appreciated
by examining it through its many facets.180 This is even truer for identity.
Elsewhere I elaborate a synthetic understanding of identity that starts from
the premise that we do not have identities but rather a number of roles and
affiliations.181 Those we feel positive about – and some we do not – provide a
diverse suite of self-identifications. Our self-identifications in turn provide the
basis for the stories we tell about ourselves to gain acceptance by others and to
make our lives meaningful. Roles, affiliations, self-identifications, agency and
narratives interact in complex ways. All of them are observables and readily
amenable to empirical research.182
Let me conclude by revisiting Ricoeur’s distinction between idem and ipse
identity which has become a standard binary in analytical philosophy. It is
worth considering the proposition that this distinction is symptomatic of an
illusion apparently so dear to Western philosophy. There is simply no empirical
support for the unitary and continuous self and it makes no sense for philos-
ophers to continue their search for some logically defensible construction of the
idem. People think they have such identities, but this is a phenomenon for
psychology to explain. Ipse identity is equally questionable in that many
philosophers and psychologists have advanced good reasons for questioning
its existence. At best, we have multiple forms of self-identification that shape
our evolving understandings of who we are. These understandings have impor-
tant behavioral consequences, but they are not the concern of philosophy. It

180
Lebow, Between Peace and War, “Introduction.”
181
Lebow, “Identity and Self-Identification.” 182 Lebow, “Ethics and Identity.”
62 n a r r a t iv e s a n d i d e n t it y

decline; people were thought to be short-lived and short in stature in compar-

ison to their Edenic and biblical predecessors. The closing lines of King Lear
affirm that the young “Shall never see as much nor live so long.”73 In
The Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo contrasts the permanence of the moon
with the body, “this muddy vesture of decay.”74 The Enlightenment and
counter-Enlightenment reveal a similar ambivalence about progress, although
different attitudes toward progress are now associated with different schools of
thought.
Modern interpreters of Hesiod and Virgil have tried to reconcile their
seeming contradictions about progress by every obvious strategy: they sequence
positive and negative takes, suggest these authors modified or revised their
views over time, find hidden keys that reconcile apparent inconsistencies, and
describe one of the opposing positions as concessions to political pressure or
attempts to appeal to different audiences. This ambivalence, we shall see, is
equally characteristic of our world and of the future worlds that science fiction
creates.

Utopias
Utopias are forward looking and motivated by reformist, even revolutionary
projects. The distinction between utopias and golden ages is nevertheless not
hard and fast, as the Garden of Eden and Hesiod’s golden age have occasionally
been mobilized for reformist ends.75 These two kinds of narratives are con-
nected in another sense: it is difficult to imagine utopias in the absence of the
inspiration provided by golden ages.76 Utopias do not arise spontaneously in
cultures with no tradition of golden ages.
Ernst Bloch considers utopias a means of expressing the belief that some-
thing is wrong or missing in present-day life.77 Other discourses also serve this
function. In my view, what most effectively distinguishes utopias from golden
ages is their starting assumption that people can make the future better than the
present. Utopias are offered as model societies in which individual happiness
and collective harmony are achieved by means of institutions and practices that
rest on and reinforce what their authors depict as universal human traits and
aspirations. They invariably incorporate the principle of equality and de-
emphasize material goods and their use as status symbols.78 In some utopias,
property and women are held communally.79 Utopian authors often assert or
imply that their imaginary worlds are realizable in practice; this is a common
feature of nineteenth-century socialist utopias. Others are offered as ideal-type

73
Shakespeare, King Lear, 5.3.325–6. 74 Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 5.1.64.
75
Finley, “Utopianism, Ancient and Modern.” 76 Evans, Utopia Antiqua, p. 3.
77
Bloch, Principle of Hope. 78 Manuel, “Toward a Psychological History of Utopias.”
79
Dawson, Cities of the Gods, for communist utopias in ancient Greece.
 utopias 63

worlds that can provide inspiration and direction for improving, although
never perfecting, the societies in which authors and readers reside. George
Logan astutely observes that utopias, like their golden age predecessors, assume
that a world without evil is impossible so long as competition over property and
sexual partners exists.80
The first utopias are Greek. Homer’s account of Phaeacia in the Odyssey has
utopian characteristics. It is isolated, rich, at peace, offers boundless hospitality
to visitors and plies the sea in ships that do not need rudders because they are
steered by men’s thoughts.81 Plato’s Republic offers the first detailed depiction
of a utopia. His Socrates acknowledges early on that the Republic is nowhere on
earth but in heaven.82 Like most utopias, it is explicitly based on a set of
underlying assumptions about human nature, needs and motives and the
corresponding belief that they can be harmonized with the right institutions,
practices and indoctrination.
Plato’s Kallipolis is more sophisticated than many subsequent utopias in
three important ways. He addresses the problem of origins: how one gets to a
near-perfect society from the deeply flawed one in which creator and readers
reside. Plato acknowledges the difficulty of this transformation by introducing
the noble lie. To hide their society’s human design and encourage loyalty to the
city by all its citizens, the founders agree to tell subsequent generations that they
are brothers “born of the earth.”83 This lie also serves as the basis for collective
as opposed to individual identities. Plato recognizes that Kallipolis cannot be
isolated permanently from contact with the outside world and that some of
these contacts will be hostile, especially if the republic is successful, increases in
population and needs to conquer additional territory.84 Most importantly, he
understands that societies are never static and will evolve regardless of rules and
precautions introduced by their creators and enforced by their guardians.
The last two characteristics would hasten the dissolution of Kallipolis. Innate
curiosity and contact with foreigners would introduce new ideas and provide
incentives for change and corruption.
Plato’s Kallipolis is unusual in another respect. It is less a model for society
than for the individual. Plato describes a city but offers it as a collective
representation of a well-ordered human psyche, with its philosophers embody-
ing the drive of reason. The constitution Plato lays down for Kallipolis is similar
in all important respects to what he believes is best for the individual. That
constitution is derived from first principles by philosophers whose wisdom
comes from their holistic understanding of the good. They know how to order
the life of the polis to the benefit of all citizens regardless of their particular skills
and intellectual potential. They rely on guardians to impose correct opinion on
the polis and enforce its rules, including its provision of denying citizens, as far

80 81
Logan, Meaning of More’s Utopia, pp. 7–8. Homer, Odyssey, Books IX–XII.
82
Plato, Republic, 9.592b. 83 Ibid., 414b–e. 84
Ibid., 373d–e.
64 n ar r a t i v e s a n d id e n t i t y

as possible, contact with outsiders.85 Plato and Aristotle – and Rawls, if we want
a contemporary example – offer their fictional worlds as ideal ones toward
which we must aspire, individually and collectively, but which we are unlikely
ever to achieve. Their worlds serve as templates that we can use to measure how
our lives and societies live up to our principles. As Plato might put it, even
imperfect knowledge of a form can motivate citizens and cities to work toward
its actualization. Partial progress can generate enough virtue to sustain
reasonable order in both.
In antiquity, all utopias are agricultural. They have small populations, hier-
archical political structures and do little more than meet the minimum material
needs of their inhabitants.86 In other ways they are quite radical. Kallipolis
extends equality to women and does away with the traditional family. Iambulus’
Heliopolis is an island populated by almost hairless, ambidextrous giants who
live in kinship groups and are furnished with all of their needs by a bounteous
nature. In each kin group, the oldest man serves as a king and is obeyed
absolutely by his juniors.87 From our perspective, such societies are neither
ideal nor just. Lewis Mumford observes that these imaginary worlds incorpo-
rate many unpalatable features of their authors’ societies. “It was easier for these
Greek utopians to conceive of abolishing marriage or private property than of
ridding utopia of slavery, class domination and war.”88 Even Plato’s guardians
live off the involuntary labor of others, Moses Finley, a lifelong socialist,
hastened to point out.89 Utopias nevertheless provide political theory with
access to abstract realms that offer vantage points on one’s own world. Not
everyone was attracted to this strategy. The Stoics, who looked forward to the
brotherhood of all men, at least in an abstract kind of way, turned their backs on
society and utopias too for the most part.90
Modern utopias begin with Thomas More, who coined the word “utopia.”
Born in London in 1478, he became a page in the household of Henry VII’s
Lord Chancellor, John Morton. He was a lawyer, author, humanist scholar and,
in the latter connection, a friend of Erasmus. He served as Lord Chancellor
from 1529 to 1532, and in this position was responsible for ordering numerous
Protestants to be burned at the stake. He was beheaded in 1535 after refusing to
sign the Act of Supremacy recognizing Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the
Church in England. Utopia was conceived in Flanders in the summer of 1515,
where More was part of a trade mission. In Antwerp, Erasmus introduced him
to Peter Giles, and the discussions in Utopia can reasonably be assumed to be a
fictional elaboration of those between More and Giles.

85
Ibid., 506c and Statesman, 309c6–10. 86 Hexter, More’s Utopia, pp. 70–1.
87
Iambulus, Heliopolis. 88 Mumford, “Utopia.”
89
Finley, “Utopianism, Ancient and Modern.”
90
Virgil, Eclogues, IV, 37–45, for a possible exception.
 structure of the book 41

important insights into the dynamics of identity construction and the relation-
ship between identity and order in the modern era. They indicate that Mozart
and Da Ponte are responsible for one of the earliest and most prescient critiques
of ancien régime and the modern kinds of identities it encouraged. My analysis
draws on the music and libretti, as Mozart frequently uses the former to signal
meaning or to encourage us to question that of words we hear and the behavior
we observe.
Chapter 5 analyzes the rekindled interest in ancient Greece among
Europeans in the late eighteenth century. The British were fascinated by
Homer, in whom they found suitable role models for empire. Hölderlin,
Wolf, Humboldt, Kant, Schelling and Hegel constructed an image of
fifth-century Athens as a golden age in response to their ethical and philosoph-
ical projects and as a template for a German national identity. Prussia’s
authoritarianism and Germany’s situation as a late cultural and economic
developer provided additional incentives to seek refuge in this mythical
Greece. The German turn to Greek tragedy, I contend, had unexpected and
tragic consequences for Germany’s political development.
My reading of nineteenth-century German identity narratives offers a novel
perspective on the Sonderweg thesis. By comparing Germany with countries to
its east, instead of those to the west, we observe striking similarities instead of
differences. These similarities suggest the psychological utility of a particular
kind of identity discourse for late cultural developers. This chapter makes a
more general contribution to my argument by providing insight into how the
development and choice of particular strategies for coping with autonomy
reflect local traditions and conditions. It suggests that strategy four, that
associated with Romanticism, is most likely to develop in countries with weak
societies and strong states and strong class divides. It also provides additional
evidence for my argument that the liminal position in which many intellectuals
found themselves provided strong incentives for them to develop discourses
about the self that stressed personal autonomy. Finally, the German construc-
tion of Greece as a golden age and their hope that a Germany modeled on it
might become a Europe, offers a more general insight into modernity. I return
to this question in the concluding chapter.
Chapters 6 and 7 examine the contemporary world. I analyze two anti-
modern narrative genres: Christian fiction and science fiction and their under-
standings of immortality. Dispensationalism is a popular American religious
movement that finds expression in the novels and related commentaries of the
Left Behind series. The novels have sold close to seventy million copies in North
America and have a growing readership elsewhere in the world. They tell the
story of the “rapture,” a seven-year time of troubles followed by the return of
Jesus and his establishment of the Millennium. Dispensationalism and science
fiction, so different in their response to science, style of argument and reader-
ship, share a cynical and jaundiced view of the world and near-total skepticism
66 n a r r a t i v e s a n d id e n t i t y

down time. People are expected to spend their odd free hour listening to
epistolary lectures or doing volunteer labor. There are no bars, coffee houses
or private places for singles to meet. There is no sexual freedom beyond the
choice of mates and stiff punishments are imposed for adultery. Sex is consid-
ered a lowly bodily activity akin to defecation and the scratching of itches. To
travel, citizens need permission from the authorities. Everyone wears the same
simple clothing and shame is brought to bear against people who sport finery or
jewelry. This is part of the general strategy of reducing differences among
individuals to deprive them of individuality. Sameness is stressed in clothing,
food, architecture and the layout of deliberately interchangeable cities. There
are, however, hierarchical distinctions between generations and genders.
Utopus aside, we never learn the name of a single citizen. To their credit,
Utopians detest war, get on well with neighbors, but are not above colonial
conquests to accommodate their growing population. They employ foreign
mercenaries to do their fighting, indicating a double standard with regard to
citizens and outsiders and undoubtedly leading to social conflicts that never
surface in the book. More’s ethics represent something of a fusion of Stoic and
Epicurean beliefs. He relies on the epicurean rule of choosing the greater over
the lesser pleasure, for individuals and the state.
Toward the end of the book, More acknowledges that many of Utopia’s
customs are absurd and others he would “wish rather than expect to see.”92 He
does not believe that good institutions or leaders with good advisers can solve
pressing social problems, because they are manifestations of the underlying
tensions and inequalities of society. Hythloday offers the example of capital
punishment for theft, arguing that people will continue to steal as long as they
are hungry, and they will be hungry as long as aristocrats and their retainers
exploit their labor to provide income for foppish luxuries.93
Quentin Skinner was among the first to recognize that More’s Utopia is at
odds with humanist orthodoxy and “embodies by far the most radical critique
of humanism written by a humanist.”94 Utopia, and the dialogue that precedes
it, are vehicles for addressing contemporary ethical and political controversies.
One of these concerns is the relationship between morality and expediency,
which the Stoics believed could be reconciled. Machiavelli takes them to task in
The Prince, written in 1513 but not published until 1532, in which he demon-
strates that honestà is often at odds with utilitas. Only if the two could be made
fully compatible would it be possible to construct a commonwealth that would
always act morally. Utopia might be regarded as a thought experiment and its
loose ends taken as evidence – admittedly, planted by the author – that morality
and expediency can only be reconciled in part.

92
More, Utopia, p. 107. 93 Ibid., pp. 15–16.
94
Skinner, “Review Article,” and Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. I, p. 256;
Bouwsma, “Two Faces of Humanism.”
 utopias 67

Stephen Greenblatt offers a more germane reading given our concern with
identity.95 Following Burckhardt and Michelet, he argues that discourses in
early modern Europe reveal a growing self-awareness of identity as something
that can be shaped, manipulated and performed. More’s History of Richard III
indicates that role playing of this kind was widespread and that even ordinary
people were not taken in by it, even if they had to pretend that they were. More
used his notable political skills to achieve and hold onto the highest office in the
land until the religious ground shifted underneath him.96 He would have agreed
with Machiavelli that the social world was upheld by conventions in which
nobody actually believed. Humanist-inspired reforms were doomed to fail
because political life was irrational, if not insane.
Utopia reveals More’s deep unhappiness with his public and family lives
and the roles that they compelled him to perform. He built a house in
then rural Chelsea as a retreat where he could partially escape from his
roles and develop his thoughts. Utopia explores the possibility of a more
radical alternative. It takes social conditioning to a new level, leaving no
possibility of inner retreat or the private spaces that make it possible.
Privacy is prevented by the denial of free time, near-constant surveillance
and social conditioning that encourages people to feel shame for seeking
solitude or individuation in any form.97 More understands interiority and
autonomy as distinguishing features of modernity. He is most sensitive to
their negative consequences and designs a world that nips modernity in
the bud. Inner life, with its potential for alienation and social disruption,
is all but excluded. Utopia is a fantasy of self-annihilation that represents a
figurative attempt to overcome the tension between its author’s active
inner life and his confining public roles. It is a self-serving fantasy in a
second sense, as More confided to Erasmus in a 1516 letter that he
imagined that the Utopians elected him king in perpetuity. The egos of
Utopians are destroyed to inflate that of their creator.98
The seventeenth century witnessed a very different kind of utopia with the
publication of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis. Written in 1626, it builds on
Plato’s tale of the imaginary island of Atlantis.99 Bacon’s island, called
Bensalem, is set in the “Southern Ocean” and possibly influenced by tales
about the New World told by Portuguese explorers. It represents a radical
philosophical break with earlier utopias as its inhabitants use science and
engineering to conquer nature and provide a longer, healthier and happier
life. Following Bacon’s regimen of experimentation and inference, Bensalem’s
citizens have developed techniques to isolate and protect themselves from

95
Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, ch. 1. 96 Machiavelli, Prince, ch. 19.
97
Ibid., pp. 45–6. 98 Ibid., pp. 54–5.
99
Plato, Critias, 120d6–121c4 and Timaeus, 19b–d, 22a, 25a–b6. See also his Phaedrus,
278d7, Laws, 676.
68 n a r r a t iv e s a n d i d e n t it y

outsiders and to control the weather and surrounding waters. Like the ancients,
Bacon gives reason a primary guiding role, but with a different end in mind. Its
purpose is no longer to discover what constitutes the happy life, but to master
nature and improve the human condition. More’s New Atlantis and Novum
Organum are rebellions against Aristotelianism and its attempt to explain
everything by means of deduction from first assumptions.
From our vantage point, New Atlantis, like Utopia, embodies a paradoxical
ethical code. The sailors blown off course are allowed to come ashore and visit
Bensalem only after they swear that they have not killed anyone within the last
thirty days, even in self-defense. When freed from the quarantine, they encoun-
ter a generally benign and non-expansionist society that has learned to live with
its neighbors and to incorporate occasional outsiders. The authorities are
nevertheless prepared to kill anyone who does not assimilate effectively, and
would execute sailors who violate their rules. Intended or not, New Atlantis
encourages readers to conclude that science can be used “rationally” for benign
and malign human ends. Bacon’s Great Instauration published in 1620, was
intended as an introduction to the Novum Organum, his unfinished treatise on
the scientific method. It was to be a comprehensive study of how science could
produce knowledge about the physical and social world. Jerry Weinberger
rejects Bacon’s claim that it was beyond his strength to finish this work and
argues that he left clues about his method for the intelligent reader.100 This
subterfuge was allegedly motivated by Bacon’s recognition, common to authors
of later dystopias, that political science was the most dangerous science and had
to be “secret and retired.”101
In Bacon’s New Atlantis, technology is treated as an unalloyed blessing. By
the early nineteenth century, utopias offer sharply contrasting views on science
and economic development. Some condemn them as the twin curses of mod-
ernity. Their authors create utopias by going back to what they imagine was a
simpler, more satisfying, better regulated, pre-modern lifestyle. Louis Sébastien
Mercier’s L’an deux mille quatre cent quarante, published in 1771, outlaws
foreign trade on the grounds that it stimulates desire for luxuries, the thirst for
gold, sustains the slave trade and saps the health of the French people and their
society. Snuff, coffee and tea, described as “natural poisons,” are also banned.
The transfer of scientific knowledge from country to country is welcomed as an
end in itself and not understood as a spur to economic development. In
contrast, Henri Saint-Simon, in his “Sketch of a New Political System,” pub-
lished in 1819, understands that technology and economic development go
hand-in-hand. His House of Commons establishes a “Chamber of Invention,”
whose 300 members are composed of scientists, engineers, poets and other
writers, painters, sculptors, artists and musicians. Members with scientific and
technical skill are expected to introduce and oversee new public works and

100 101
Weinberger, “Introduction.” Bacon, Advancement of Learning, II.47, p. 286.
44 i n t r o d u c ti o n

eighteenth-century China and India as “feudal,” and the characterization of

fifth-century Greece and the post-1945 world as “bipolar.”184 Those who use or
deploy analytical constructs of this kind must also avoid “ontological gerry-
mandering,” which involves the manipulation of boundaries to make the
phenomena we study problematic, but leaves the categories we use to study
them unquestioned.185
My open-ended and broad-gauged approach to the problem of identity is the
opposite of that associated with positivism, whose advocates urge scholars to
hold context as constant as possible to test the causal power of one or a few
carefully identified and suitably isolated variables.186 This approach is not readily
applicable to identity because self-identification – our putative dependent and
independent variable – is culturally specific and context dependent, as are its
behavioral consequences. There is another serious problem that positivists tend
to ignore: the way we structure our investigation, that is, how we “operationalize”
either the concept or practice of identity, largely determines what we find. With
regard to identity, what we really need is a more general understanding of its
importance to human beings, the dynamics governing the creation and acquis-
ition of different identifications and how this process and choice is influenced by
the understanding actors themselves have of themselves and their societies and
the goals they seek. These questions are largely interpretative, and even prelimi-
nary steps toward developing a better conceptualization and understanding of
them can provide rich guidelines for future empirical research.
Although I am an international relations specialist, I concentrate primarily
on individual identity in this book. It is the most theorized level of identity and
the easiest to study. Much of the analysis of personal identity – individual and
social – is applicable to groups, larger social units and states.187 In a follow-on
article I will spell out some of the most important implications of my findings
for states and the practice of international relations.
My book makes normative as well as empirical claims, and bridges political
science, psychology, history and philosophy. In such an enterprise, there is
always the danger of spreading oneself too thin. There are, I believe, powerful
compensations. A problem like identity cuts across artificial disciplinary boun-
daries and is best approached by drawing on literature and insights from
different disciplines. Researchers in these several disciplines tend to stay within
the boundaries of their fields, although they often import relevant findings from
allied disciplines. More than most, I attempt to be interdisciplinary and to relate

184
Hall, Government and Local Power in Japan; Barshay, “Doubly Cruel,” on the case of
Japanese feudalism and capitalism.
185
Woolgar and Pawluch, “Ontological Gerrymandering.”
186
King, Keohane and Verba, Designing Social Inquiry.
187
Friedman, “Social Self and the Partiality Debate”; Erskine, Embedded Cosmopolitanism
makes some of the same points in an international context.
70 n a r r a t iv e s a n d i d e n t it y

craftsmanship, the simple pleasures of life and tight-knit social relations flour-
ished. His future Londoners dress in variants of medieval garb and live in
houses with thatched roofs. Morris’ utopia is modern in the sense that there
is no class system, no differences among people in their living standards, and
remarkably for a Victorian, equal opportunity for women. He is ahead of his
time in recognizing the horrendous effects of industrialization on the environ-
ment. His hero, who awakens in London in the distant future, is amazed to
discover a sparkling Thames, teeming with wildlife, in which he can safely
swim. There is a more general commitment by the society to minimize
pollution and maintain green swards throughout the metropolis.
Some British and American authors wrote utopias that envisage positive
benefits to technology and economic development, suitably regulated by rad-
ically reformed institutions. Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000–1887 is prob-
ably the most famous example of this genre. It became an instant best-seller and
inspiration for numerous societies dedicated to political and economic reform.
Its principal character, Julian West, is a young American who awakens after a
century of hypnosis-induced sleep. His native Boston has been transformed
into a quasi-suburban socialist utopia. Doctor Leete, his guide, explains how the
quality of life has been significantly improved by drastically reducing the length
of the working week. Nobody works before the age of twenty-one and everyone
retires at forty-five with a reasonable pension and other impressive benefits.
America’s industry is commonly owned and its products are distributed more
or less equally to its citizens. Technology has not only facilitated production,
but has enhanced social and cultural life. People are able to listen to live concert
performances in their homes through tubes that carry the sounds of music
across town. Much free time is devoted to socializing in a manner that has
not changed since the Victorian era. The “vacuum left in the minds of men
and women by the absence of care for one’s livelihood has been taken up
by love.”105
Like Morris, Bellamy is sensitive to environmental issues. His Boston is
unrecognizable to the recently awakened American because it is green, clean,
well laid-out and populous but uncrowded. Bellamy perpetuates female sub-
jugation. His women are brought up to be virginal, pious, domestic and
deferential. They work in their own industrial army where they perform tasks
“suitable” to their gender. They must be married and mothers to attain posi-
tions of authority, presumably because this makes them more acceptable to
men. Looking Backward nevertheless appealed to women, even suffragists, and
there were many female members of Bellamy clubs.106 Bellamy’s world is even
more a dystopia for African Americans, who are segregated and forced to
perform menial labor.

105 106
Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 261. Strauss, “Gender, Class, and Race in Utopia.”
 2

Narratives and identity

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not ever worth glancing at,
for it leaves out the one country where humanity is always landing.
Oscar Wilde1

Individual and social identities are created, transmitted, revised and under-
mined through narratives and practices. Narratives tell people who they are,
what they should aspire to be and how they should relate to others. They are
invariably linear, as they are structured around a plot line that imposes a
progressive order on events, selecting and emphasizing those that can be
made supportive of it. Frank Kermode suggests that to make sense of the
world we “need to experience that concordance of beginning, middle and end
which is the essence of our explanatory fictions.”2 Practice is repetitive behavior
that is widely shared and culturally regulated. It can be sub-divided, as
Montesquieu famously did, into manners (manières), norms (moeurs) and
laws (lois).3
Narratives and practices are most often intended to uphold existing
social, religious, political and economic orders. Practices serve these ends
when they become habitual, as Weber and American pragmatists realized.4
Charles Taylor maintains that practice not only fulfills rules, but gives
them concrete shape in context. Practice is “a continual ‘interpretation’
and reinterpretation of what the rule really means.”5 Changes in actual or
fictionalized practice can threaten existing orders, so institutions have a
strong interest in regulating them, just as reformers and revolutionaries do

1
Wilde, Soul of Man Under Socialism, p. 24. 2 Kermode, Sense of an Ending, pp. 35–6.
3
Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, Book 19.12 and 14.
4
Weber, Economy and Society, vol. I, pp. 24–43, 212–16 and 319–25; Durkheim, Rules of
Sociological Method, pp. 51–5, argues that habits, custom and tradition account for most
behavior most of the time. They prevail because of our cognitive need for simplification.
Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct; James, Principles of Psychology; Simon,
Administrative Behavior; Turner, Brains, Practices, Relativism; Bourdieu, The Logic of
Practice; Steinmetz, State/Culture; Hopf, “Logic of Habit in International Relations.”
5
Taylor, “To Follow a Rule.”

46
72 n a r r a t i v e s a n d id e n t i t y

utopias than either Marx or Engels recognized. It is well ordered, and prosper-
ous, without factories or war, yet humans have the kind of leisure and choices
that allow them to develop their potential. Engel’s language is positively uto-
pian. “With the seizing of the means of production by society,” he writes,
“production of commodities is done away with, and simultaneously, the mas-
tery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced
by systematic, definite organization. The struggle for individual existence dis-
appears. Then for the first time, man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off
from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions
of existence into really human ones.”112
Utopias spawned numerous critiques. Some emphasize the literary limita-
tions of the genre. From More’s Utopia to Huxley’s Island, utopias tend to be
didactic works with long instructional speeches or dialogues and turgid descrip-
tions of institutions. Pedagogy is given primacy over plot. Utopias are invar-
iably static; their social, economic and political institutions, practices and values
are frozen on the grounds of perfection.113 There is no conflict or dissension,
only near-universal satisfaction, and uncertainty of all kinds is replaced by
personal and collective security. This thoroughly unrealistic tranquility is based
on the belief, common to utopias, that human needs and aspirations are fully
compatible and can be satisfied or harmoniously channeled by appropriate
institutions. Utopias also rest on the all-important corollary that human beings
have the insight and political skill to design, bring into being, manage and fine
tune the array of institutions and practices that produce social harmony and
human fulfillment.
Ortega y Gasset and Karl Popper accuse utopian thinking of laying the
intellectual foundations for totalitarianism.114 Utopias can hardly be held
responsible for the social-economic conditions that enabled psychopathic
leaders like Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler to gain and consolidate power.
They have nevertheless been consistently authoritarian. They put extraordi-
nary trust in intellectuals – whether guardians, scientists or philosophers –
and severely restrict personal freedom, as it is considered a threat to order and
stability. Even post-World War II utopias, whose authors should have known
better, reveal this kind of naïveté. In B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two, published in
1948, the chief utopian planner, Frazier, rather smugly explains: “When a
science of behavior has once been achieved, there’s no alternative to a planned
society . . .. We can’t leave the control of behavior to the unskilled.”115 Judith

112
Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.”
113
Manuel, “Toward a Psychological History of Utopias”; Evans, Utopia Antiqua.
114
Ortega y Gassett, Revolt of the Masses; Popper, Open Society and Its Enemies; Ulam,
“Socialism and Utopia.” Mumford, Story of Utopias, offers a more benign judgment.
115
Skinner, Walden Two, p. 226.
 d ys t op i a s 73

Shklar aptly observes that in utopias “Truth is single and only error is
multiple.”116

Dystopias
If golden ages enabled utopias, utopias inspired dystopias. Dystopias depict
dysfunctional societies that exaggerate features of the present, like bureaucracy,
capitalism, socialism, advertising and technology, to show their truly dreadful
consequences when used for perverse ends. Evgeny Zamyatin’s We, Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984 and William Golding’s Lord
of the Flies are classic representatives of this genre. A few dystopias are counter-
factuals set in the present, as are the spate of novels premised on a German
victory in World War II.117 In the second half of the twentieth century,
dystopias far outsold utopias, and several of them (e.g. 1984, A Clockwork
Orange) became box office hits when turned into films. Utopias and dystopias
are a good barometer of the mood and expectations of intellectuals and
sometimes of the population more generally.
Dystopias were unknown in the ancient world, although utopias were a
source of parody in classical Athens. Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae,
Thesmophoriazusae and Birds ridicule them as politically and socially naïve.
In modern times, this tradition finds expression in Gulliver’s Travels, which can
be read as a parody of Bacon’s New Atlantis. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can
also be interpreted as a critique of utopian thinking. Her monster is a prescient
warning of how scientific knowledge, ostensibly intended to benefit human-
kind, can give rise to unintended horrors. Dystopia came into its own at the end
of the nineteenth century in response to industrialization, bureaucratization,
materialism and mass politics. H. G. Wells, an early master of the genre,
published six utopias and two dystopias. When the Sleeper Wakes, which first
appeared in 1899, describes the world encountered by its hero Graham, who
regains consciousness after being in a coma for two hundred years.118 In the
interim, he has inherited sizeable wealth, which has been managed astutely by a
trust – the “White Council” – established in his name. They have used the
income to establish a globe-spanning economic and political order. Graham’s
revival comes as a shock to the Council, which puts him under house arrest and
tries as far as possible to keep him ignorant of their society and the turmoil that
his awakening has provoked. He manages to discover that he is the legal owner
and master of the world and that a revolutionary movement, led by a man
named Ostrog, is trying to overthrow the established order.

116
Shklar, “Political Theory of Utopia.” On Skinner, see Kateb, Utopia and Its Enemies,
pp. 141–7.
117
Rosenfeld, World Hitler Never Made, for a review of this literature.
118
Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes. This is a substantially revised version of The Sleeper
Awakes, published in 1910.
74 n a r r a t i ve s an d i d e n t i ty

Graham is liberated by Ostrog’s agent and survives a harrowing flight across

the roofs of London’s skyscrapers while pursued by armed monoplanes. He
arrives at a massive hall where the workers and underprivileged classes have
gathered to launch an uprising and, led by Ostrog’s brother, chant the “Song of
the Revolution.” In an ensuing mêlée with the police, Graham escapes and
wanders around a London engulfed by fighting. He eventually encounters
Ostrog, leader of the now triumphant revolution, who provides him with
comfortable quarters and, at his request, flying lessons. Through his friendship
with a young woman, he learns that the people are suffering as grievously under
Ostrog as they did under the previous regime. In a subsequent confrontation
with the new leader, Graham realizes that he has no real commitment to
economic and social reforms and is interested only in power. To suppress a
growing insurrection in Paris, Ostrog uses African shock troops to get the
workers back in line. Graham demands that he keep the Africans out of
London. Ostrog agrees, but promptly breaks his promise. With the help of
the workers, Graham escapes captivity a third time and makes a beeline for his
aircraft. Ostrog’s forces hold a few landing areas to which the air armada
bringing troops in from Africa are heading. To delay the air fleet and give the
workers time to capture the landing sites, Graham uses his airplane as a
battering ram and knocks several transport airplanes out of the air. He also
brings down Ostrog’s machine, seemingly at the cost of his own life.
Wells’ novel is remarkably prescient. Coming of age in a world where the
popular press and mass electoral politics made their debuts, he recognized how
easily they could be exploited by ambitious politicians to advance parochial
ends. He envisaged politics as becoming a struggle for power divorced from any
principles or rules of the democratic game. To make successful appeals, poli-
ticians would nevertheless have to associate themselves with symbols venerated
by the masses, even create them. “The Sleeper” was the most potent symbol in
the society, and the White Council and Ostrog struggle to control the now very
much awake Sleeper while Graham attempts to assert his identity and use it for
benign ends. In contrast to Marxism, Wells understood that politics could
dominate economics because the drive for power would eclipse that for wealth,
as it does for the villains in the Sleeper novels. Wells projects the racism of his
day into the future, making it another political weapon that the elite can exploit.
The masses are enraged but cowed by widespread rumors of atrocities – which
the author is careful never to confirm – allegedly committed by African troops
in the course of their occupation of Paris. The novel can nevertheless be read as
a critique of colonialism and socialism. The “White Council,” an unambiguous
reference to a consortium of colonial powers, manages the world in its own
interest, using capital extracted from the labor of the masses. Ostrog is a
socialist revolutionary whose real goals turn out to be no different from the
exploiters he so vocally opposes.
 narratives and identity 49

infrequently, our narratives are influenced by others. We cannot understand

the various ways Jews, the Irish, African Americans or women have come to
define themselves without taking into account how others have stereotyped
them.17 Identity is thus a kind of bricolage that builds on life experiences, cues
from others and reflections on both.18 This is true for groups, institutions and
countries, not only individuals. Constructivist scholarship indicates that “great
powers” and “civilized states” are social categories, whose markers and boun-
daries have steadily evolved since their creation. The narratives that construct
these identities help to shape how people think of their countries and how they
should behave.19
Life narratives only rarely find expression as written autobiographies. The
most prominent early example was St. Augustine’s, penned in the fourth
century of the Common Era.20 Autobiography became a popular genre in the
eighteenth century. More often, life narratives are piecemeal and inchoate. They
take the form of internal dialogues and real or fictional conversations with
others.21 In modern times, novels, plays and films have also served as vehicles to
present life experiences and to construct identities. People often identify with
their characters and sometimes seek to emulate them. Romanticism and its core
project of discovering and expressing oneself was effectively propagated by
best-selling novels of Rousseau and Goethe.22
Shared experiences and common understandings of them sustain commun-
ities as well as individuals.23 Seminal works on nationalism – by Hans Kohn,
Carleton J. H. Hayes and Karl W. Deutsch – maintain that a shared past, based
on territory, language, religion, history, or some combination of them, is the
foundation of nationality.24 Deutsch defines a people as “a community of
complementary habits of communication.” Stylized representations of the
past have the potential to create a “we feeling,” and hence a sense of community
among those who internalize these narratives.25 At least as far back as
Herodotus, students of community have recognized the largely mythical nature

17
Becker, Outsiders; Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized; Goffman, Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life and Stigma; Lebow, White Britain and Black Ireland; Brodkin, How Jews
Became White Folks; Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color; Nicholson, Identity Before
Politics.
18
Beck, “Reinvention of Politics”; Lash, “Reflexivity and its Doubles.”
19
Price and Tanenwald, “Norms and Deterrence”; Reus-Smit, Moral Purpose of the State;
Klotz, Norms in International Regimes; Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations.
20
Augustine, Confessions. 21 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics.
22
Rousseau, Émile; Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther.
23
Malinowski, “The Role of Myth in Life”; Basso, “Stalking with Stories”; Herdt, Guardians
of the Flutes; Gross and Barnes, eds., Talk That Talk.
24
Hayes, Essays on Nationalism; Kohn, Prophets and Peoples; Deutsch, Nationalism and
Social Communication.
25
Ibid., p. 81.
76 narratives and identity

WATCHING YOU.” Citizens are barraged by propaganda beamed at them

from televisions and loudspeakers in public places. They endlessly hear that
“War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength.” Like contempo-
rary CCTV, television cameras monitor the population to detect social and
political deviants. The principal protagonist, Winston Smith, works for the
powerful Ministry of Truth, where he rewrites history, destroying and adding
evidence to the records of people, making some of them “unpersons” as the
need arises. The past is made totally subservient to contemporary domestic and
foreign policy goals. War is continuous, as allegedly are the victories won by
Oceania’s forces. Both justify economic hardship and the authoritarian political
regime.
In Brave New World, for which the United States was the model, people are
pacified through access to pleasure. In 1984, modeled on the Soviet Union, they
are kept in line through fear and punishment. Neil Postman observes that
Orwell and Huxley were responding to different concerns:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared
was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one
who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of
information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we
would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth
would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned
in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.
Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with
some equivalent of the Feelies, the Orgy Porgy, and the Centrifugal
Bumble-puppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the
civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose
tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for
distractions.”120

Orwell’s 1984 is closer to Zamyatin’s We in its plot and politics. The society is
hierarchical, with Big Brother at the apex, the Party in the middle and the all but
nameless “proles” at the bottom. Winston Smith lives in a drab one-room
apartment and survives on a near subsistence diet of black bread and synthetic
food supplemented by rotgut gin. He is discontented, and keeps a secret journal
which he fills with negative thoughts about the Party. He has an illicit romance,
which serves as a catalyst for his alienation from Big Brother and attempts to
join the Brotherhood underground. The Brotherhood appears to be set up and
run by the Party as a clever means of identifying dissidents. Winston is
betrayed, imprisoned, interrogated, tortured and brainwashed. He emerges,
disgusted by his former affair and with renewed love for Big Brother.
These novels indicate that dystopias are not the work of traditional conser-
vatives. Their authors do not defend capitalism, religion or Victorian values.

120
Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Foreword.
 d ys t o pi a s 77

They are not opposed to modernity, but to the dangerous political and eco-
nomic directions in which they believe it is heading. Wells was a socialist, but
broke with the Fabian Society because he considered it insufficiently radical. He
ran unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1922 and 1923 as a Labour Party candi-
date. Huxley was not directly involved in politics, but was attracted to social
experimentation, drugs and the counter-culture that emerged in California and
the American southwest, where he lived after 1937. George Orwell, born Eric
Arthur Blair, chose to experience colonialism in Burma and live in poverty in
Paris and London. He fought in the Spanish Civil War and throughout his adult
life maintained a deep commitment to social justice and intense opposition to
authoritarianism.
Bacon, More, Hegel and Marx were optimistic about the future and wrote
utopian tracts or novels. Rousseau and Nietzsche broke with this tradition and
envisaged a bleak, culturally desolate future. For many intellectuals, two World
Wars and the Holocaust appeared to confirm Nietzsche’s pessimistic view of
history. Post-structuralists like Foucault and Derrida not only reject the
Enlightenment “project,” but condemn progressive narratives of history as
dangerous falsehoods.121 Dystopia more or less triumphed over utopia in the
course of the twentieth century as intellectuals became increasingly disillu-
sioned with the allegedly liberating power of reason. The failure to achieve a
classless society, by peaceful or revolutionary means, also hastened the demise
of utopia.122 Many of us respond negatively to utopias because of their author-
itarian political structure and oppressive regulation of private life.123 In World
War II’s immediate aftermath, Scottish poet and socialist Alexander Gray
exclaimed that “no Utopia has ever been described in which any sane man
would on any conditions consent to live, if he could possibly escape.”124
Utopias flourished in the immediate post-war years and garnered wide
audiences. B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948), Robert Graves’ Seven Days in
New Crete (1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Island (1962) follow the time-worn
formula of distant island or future worlds that reject industrialism in favor of a
simple, agricultural life. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, such
idylls seem impractical and unattainable, if not undesirable. As history’s course
is never linear, it is not impossible that optimism will return at some future date.
If so, we can expect it to give new life to utopias. To be compelling, they will
have to take a new form, and as we will see in chapter 7, contemporary science
fiction is already experimenting with possible outlines.

121
Foucault, Language, pp. 153–4. 122 Shklar, After Utopia.
123
Bowman, Year 2000, p. 121. 124 Gray, Socialist Tradition, p. 62.
 3

Homer, Virgil, and identity

Then first in Delos Homer and I, the singers,

stitching together our song in novel hymns,
glorified Phoibos Apollo, gold-sworded,
Leto’s child.1

Some philosophers (e.g. Kant, Hegel) consider the creation of “others” a neces-
sary adjunct to state formation and national solidarity, and at least one (Schmitt)
welcomes it. Others (e.g. Nietzsche, Habermas) hope to transcend this dangerous
binary through dialogue. This debate, like so many in moral philosophy, takes
place in an empirical vacuum. I offer a more complex understanding of identity
and the diverse roles that “others” play in its construction and maintenance. To
do so, I draw on evidence from surveys and experiments. I also turn to Homer’s
Iliad, the founding text of a literary tradition, and Virgil’s Aeneid, in many ways
its Roman successor. The Iliad was understood by later Greeks as describing a
golden age of warriors who had personal and occasionally sexual relationships
with the gods. Virgil invoked a golden age in his aspiration that the Julian line
would transform Rome into such a world.2 Homer and Virgil frame the problem
of identity and “otherness” differently from Kant, Hegel and their successors.
Their approach is more consistent with the findings of modern psychology.

The philosophy of identity

In philosophy, political science and politics, identity construction is routinely
assumed to require the creation of “others,” if not their demonization. Perhaps
the most extreme formulation of otherness is Carl Schmitt’s assertion that political
identities can best be formed in the course of violent struggles against adversaries.3
There is some historical evidence for such a claim, beginning with the ancient
Israelites.4 In modern times, politicians and intellectuals have routinely created or

1
Scholia on Pindar 1d, quoted in Herington, Poetry into Drama, p. 173.
2
Virgil, Aeneid, 9.449. 3 Schmitt, Concept of the Political.
4
Colley, “Britishness and Otherness” and Britons; Said, Orientalism. For critiques, Mandler,
“Problem with Cultural History” and “What is ‘National Identity?’” Cannadine,
Ornamentalism.

78
52 n a r r a t i v e s a n d id e n t i t y

pessimistic. Golden ages are popular, pessimistic narratives as they trace the
irreversible decline of the human race. The Christian reading of the Garden of
Eden nevertheless embeds a deeper optimism because it holds out the prospect
of rebirth and life in heaven.
Since the ancient Greeks, a major tradition of Western thought has regarded
active participation in society as a precondition of human fulfillment. One
of the common goals of utopias, from Plato to the present, has been to design
societies that successfully integrate people into society. Utopias foster harmony
and happiness. Their critics maintain that this harmony is superficial
and socially costly as it is achieved and maintained by repression from
above and suppression from within. Critics read many utopias as dystopias,
as I do in chapter 4 with The Magic Flute. Golden ages can also be read
as dystopias, and for many of the same reasons. Chapter 5, which examines
the post-Enlightenment German reconstruction of ancient Greece as a golden
age, offers such an interpretation. In the concluding chapter I will argue
that these diametrically opposed readings can be attributed to the strategies
utopias employ to address the tensions between reflexive and social selves.
These strategies in turn reflect different understandings of what it is to be
human.
There is, I believe, an important and unexplored relationship between
utopia and identity that parallels the one I described in chapter 1 between
the soul and the person. The soul was conceived as something with a noume-
nal, pure, unitary essence. It tied the disparate parts of a human being
together, outlived the body and was a source of moral guidance and respon-
sibility. When the soul lost credibility, the person was developed to replace it
and quickly became the locus of identity for many Westerners. With mod-
ernity, it was impossible to portray the person as a unity free of inner tensions,
and certainly not one that transcended death. The first of these needs was met
in part by utopias, which emerged in early modern Europe at the same time
the soul began to lose credibility. Like the soul, utopias are invariably depicted
as unitary, perfect, and sources of both identity and moral guidance. They
overcome, at least in theory, all serious internal and external differences and
tensions. Their popularity rose as interest in religious texts declined. Through
the vehicle of utopia, society was to provide the unity and perfection the soul
no longer could.
This is the strongest claim about the connections between the soul and the
person and the person and utopia, and hence, about the importance of dis-
courses for identity. It finds some empirical support in the role golden ages
played for identity construction in the pre-modern era, and utopias in the
modern age. However, I feel more comfortable with a weaker form of this
thesis that does not assert a direct causal connection between the decline of the
soul and the rise of utopias. Rather, I see this relationship as more constitutive
than causal. In effect, there was pre-existing need, created, or perhaps,
80 h om e r , v ir gi l , a n d i d e n t it y

International relations as a zone of conflict and war was further legitimated by

international law and its understanding of international relations as intercourse
among sovereign states. In the seventeenth century, Grotius, Hobbes and
Pufendorf endowed states with moral personalities and sought to constrain
them through a reciprocal set of rights and duties. In the eighteenth century,
the state was embedded in a law of nations by Vattel. The concept of sovereignty
created the legal basis for the state and the nearly unrestricted right of its leaders
to act as they wish within its borders. It also justified the pursuit of national
interests by the use of force outside those borders so long as it was in accord with
the laws of war. Sovereignty is a concept with diverse and even murky origins,
that was first popularized in the sixteenth century. At that time, more importance
was placed on its domestic implications than its international ones. Nineteenth-
and twentieth-century jurists and historians, many of them Germans influenced
by Kant and Hegel (e.g. Heeren, Clausewitz, Ranke, Treitschke) developed a
narrative about sovereignty that legitimated the accumulation of power of central
governments and portrayed the state as the sole focus of a people’s economic,
political and social life. The ideology of sovereignty neatly divided actors from
one another, and made the binary of “us” and “others” appear a natural, if not
progressive development, as did rule-based warfare among states.8
This binary also found expression in the concept of a European or Christian
society, which initially excluded Russia and the Ottoman Empire as political and
cultural “others.” There was no conception of the “international” until the late
eighteenth century, and its development reflected and hastened the transforma-
tion of European society into an international system over the course of the next
century.9 New standards of legitimacy enlarged the boundaries of the community
of nations following the Napoleonic War.10 By 1900, non-Western states were
being admitted to the community, and the number of such units burgeoned with
decolonization in the late 1950s and 1960s. In recent decades, non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) and diverse social movements have pushed a more
cosmopolitan notion of democracy that extends to units beyond states and
challenges the legitimacy of many recognized international organizations.11
Efforts to expand the conception of self and community always meet strong
opposition. In 1859, John Stuart Mill held that it was a “grave error” to “suppose
that the same international customs, and the same rules of international
morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another, and between
civilized nations and barbarians.”12 Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations makes

8
Kant, Idea for a Universal History, pp. 44–7, and Perpetual Peace, p. 112; Bartelson,
Genealogy of Sovereignty, pp. 220–9; Osiander, “Sovereignty, International Relations, and
the Westphalian Myth”; Schmidt, Political Discourse of Anarchy.
9
Bartelson, Genealogy of Sovereignty, ch. 5; Halliday, Rethinking International Relations, p. 6.
10
Clark, Hierarchy of States, ch. 6. 11 Held, Democracy and the Global Order.
12
Mill, “A Few Words on Non-Intervention”; Onuf, Republican Legacy, p. 250; Jahn,
“Classical Smoke, Classical Mirror.”
 th e ph i l o s op h y o f i d e n t it y 81

the same kind of invidious distinctions.13 Basing their claims on Kant, but really
acting in the tradition of Mill, liberal advocates of the Democratic Peace update
his dichotomy to divide the world into liberal states and authoritarian “others.”
In sharp contradiction to Kant’s categorical imperative, some liberals justify
economic penetration or military intervention to bring the benefits of democ-
racy to these states and their peoples.14 American domestic and foreign policy
since the events of 9/11 indicate how easy it remains for political leaders to
exploit fear of “others” to create solidarity at home.15
The self–other binary also draws support from Foucault’s assertion that
order and identity are created and maintained through discourses of devi-
ance.16 Historians of ethnic and national identities have made similar claims,
beginning with Frederick Barth’s 1969 edited volume on the social organization
of cultural difference as the foundation of group identity.17 Edward Said’s
historical account of how the East became the West’s “other,” remains the
most prominent formulation of this kind of argument.18 Other examples
proliferate. In describing the formation of a British identity, Linda Colley
asserts: “Quite simply, we usually decide who we are by reference to who and
what we are not.”19
Building on Foucault’s formulation, William Connolly argues in a thoughtful
and influential study of identity that it requires “the conversion of some differ-
ences into otherness, into evil, or one of its numerous surrogates.” Identity for
Connolly is “a slippery, insecure experience, dependent on its ability to define
difference and vulnerable to the tendency of entities it would so define to
counter, resist, overturn, or subvert definitions applied to them.”20 Power is
therefore essential to maintain, even impose, identity, and gives rise to hier-
archies whose primary function is to safeguard and propagate sanctioned
discourses of identity. These hierarchies suppress or marginalize those who
question these secular truths. Connolly extends the parallel between identity
and religion by suggesting that concepts of good and evil are central to both and
find expression in the demonization and exclusion, rather than toleration and
dialogue, with those who dissent. He sees this response as a continuing “temp-
tation” for human beings, but remains hopeful that we will one day become
capable of feeling secure in our identities without demonizing others.21

13
Huntington, Clash of Civilizations, pp. 21, 129.
14
Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies, and Foreign Affairs, Parts 1 and 2,” for the most influential
statement linking Kant to the Democratic Peace. On how Democratic Peace advocates
misread Kant, Lawrence, “Imperial Peace or Imperial Method”; Jahn, “Classical Smoke,
Classical Mirror.”
15
Campbell, Writing Security. 16 Foucault, Madness and Civilization.
17
Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries. 18 Said, Orientalism.
19
Colley, “Britishness and Otherness.” 20 Connolly, Identity/Difference, p. 64.
21
Ibid., esp. pp. 4–9, 64–81, 124.
82 ho mer, vi rgil , a nd id enti t y

Not all philosophers and political scientists have accepted the need for
stereotyped “others,” although there is widespread agreement that every iden-
tity and culture is surrounded, even penetrated, by constitutive others. Johann
Herder thought that each individual and culture had a unique way of being
human, and that we become more human by understanding and appreciating
this variety.22 Drawing on Herder, Friedrich Nietzsche offered the general
proposition that the good human life is fundamentally dialogical in character.
Such dialogue rests on the premise that interlocutors embrace opposing meta-
physical truths but affirm the contestable and uncertain nature of these truths.
“Noble” adversaries learn to practice “forbearance” and “thoughtfulness” in
their relations with others.23 Nietzsche’s understanding of dialogue in turn
influenced Jürgen Habermas, for whom ethics and truth can only arise through
meaningful interactions with others based on the principle and practice of
equality.24 John Rawls also maintains that justice can only arise from dialogue
and compromise among interlocutors. While his Theory of Justice is a mono-
logical thought experiment, he nevertheless contends that liberalism can only
work in practice as a dialogue among people with opposing points of view
and metaphysical commitments.25 Influenced by Habermas and Rawls,
political philosophers have theorized extensively the conditions for open
and meaningful dialogue, making it a central project of contemporary moral
philosophy.26
Despite their numerous differences, a principal focus of Kant, Hegel and
Schmitt is on the construction of national identity. Neither Kant nor Hegel were
one-dimensional thinkers and they framed identity not only as the construction
of difference, but as encounters with pre-existing differences. Beneath super-
ficial cultural and other differences was a common humanity that might allow
the dichotomy between “us” and “others” to be overcome through a process of
mutual recognition by individuals and their collectivities. In his famous dis-
cussion of the master–slave relationship, Hegel argues that self-consciousness
can only be realized through recognition of others. Self and other develop
interactively, by means of a dynamic process in which each party becomes
aware of itself through recognition of the other. Ultimately harmony may
become possible, but only after a period of conflict and domination.27 Such
readings of Kant and Hegel, and also of Herder, surfaced in Mead and Pizzorno
and helped to inspire the projects of Gadamer and Levinas.

22
Herder, Ideen, ch. 7, s. 1.
23
Connolly, “Secularism, Partisanship and the Ambiguity of Justice.”
24
Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere and Between Facts and Norms.
25
Rawls, Political Liberalism and “Idea of Public Reason Revisited.”
26
Freeman, “Deliberative Democracy”; Coles, “Of Democracy, Discourse, and Dirt
Virtue.”
27
Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, pp. 111–19.
 g o l d en a g e s 55

respect and egalitarian reciprocity are themselves based on a prior, underlying

conception of the good, which, of necessity, rests on some idea of an ideal world.
The “should,” as always, requires some image of a better and attainable society.
Although states of nature, and subsequently utilitarian frames, have domi-
nated philosophical and political narratives, utopias endure. It is interesting to
ask why some authors choose to use them in lieu of other formats to advance
normative arguments. One reason may be their rhetorical potential and ability
to reach wider audiences. In the 1960s, Aldous Huxley’s Island, a critique of
contemporary society by means of a utopia, attracted considerable attention
among the well-educated general public.40 The same was true of B. F. Skinner’s
Walden Two, which became something of a bible for many young people.41
Utopias also have a subterranean existence. Many scholarly narratives – dis-
course ethics, for example – smuggle them in without acknowledgment. This is
also true of golden ages. Sociobiology’s unrealistic description of hunter-
gatherer societies and, until quite recently, anthropology’s portrayal of
Neolithic societies as largely peaceful “uncorrupted” worlds, are cases in
point.42 The American anthropological community is overwhelmingly anti-
war and evidence of a peaceful past offered some justification for the claim that
humanity could and should return to its “natural” state of existence.

Golden ages
Arthur Lovejoy and George Boas, co-authors of the classic account of golden
ages, consider them expressions of either “chronological” or “cultural primitiv-
ism.” The former describes an idyllic world that never was, while the latter
rhapsodizes about earlier, simpler societies in which life is imagined to have
been more tranquil and satisfying. Both discourses reflect discontent with
contemporary life and tend to become prominent in eras when change makes
life more difficult for people.43 Some students of golden ages insist that “cultural
primitivism” is the product of urbanization. Northrop Frye reads the story of
Cain and Abel in a similar light; the murder of Abel, a shepherd, by Cain, a
farmer, symbolizes the “blotting out of an idealized pastoral society by a more
complex civilization.”44 Moses Finley suggests that the description of the
Garden of Eden in Book Two of Genesis is an implicit critique of what
are often considered the two principal evils of society: competition for
women and wealth.45 Conflict over women must hark back to the emergence
of the species, but that over wealth, Finley insists, requires a prior division of
labor, and is accordingly associated with development and “progress.”

40
Huxley, Island. 41 Skinner, Walden Two.
42
For documentation of prehistoric warfare, Keeley, War Before Civilization.
43
Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, pp. 1–7.
44
Frye, “Varieties of Literary Utopias.” 45 Finley, “Utopianism, Ancient and Modern.”
84 homer, virgil, and identity

These opposing orientations cannot be overcome by Nietzschian dialogue or

Schmittian repression. They rest on different philosophical foundations and
empirical assumptions, and the latter can be evaluated by social science. In
the next section, I will review some of the key findings of social psychology
concerning the construction of “others.” The consensus in the field has evolved
away from the view that in-group solidarity inevitably necessitates stereotyped
out-groups and toward the recognition of in-group and out-group as the
products of distinct situationally-determined dynamics. I then turn to the
texts of Homer and Virgil to show that many of the insights of modern
psychology are implicit in their narratives. They are useful resources for
working our way through this aspect of identity.

In-groups and out-groups

Even in psychology, Marilynn Brewer laments, it was long the conventional
wisdom that in-group solidarity and out-group hostility were flip sides of the
same coin.34 This belief dates back to the early twentieth century and William
Graham Sumner’s foundational treatment of ethnocentrism and stereotypy.
Adopting a structural–functional perspective, he reasoned that pride, loyalty
and feelings of in-group superiority were positively correlated with contempt,
hatred and hostility toward out-groups. Group formation was a functional
response to the struggle for scarce resources and gave rise to hostility, even
violence, toward competing groups.35
More recent research on “entiativity” finds the need to construct an “other”
endemic at the group level. Henri Tajfel and co-researchers theorize that social
identities buffer anxiety and build self-esteem by allowing individuals to bask in
the reflected glory of a group’s achievements. In-group identification leads to a
bias in favor of those who are part of the in-group and prejudice against those
who are not. There is compelling evidence that people will allocate resources
across groups in response to this bias, even when it is disadvantageous to them.36
Social identity theory suggests that people join and maintain groups for varied
and reinforcing reasons.37 Among the strongest of these motives is self-esteem.
Research indicates that members of low status groups often embrace collective

34
Brewer, “Psychology of Prejudice.”
35
Sumner, Folkways, p. 12; Sherif and Sherif, Groups in Harmony and Tension; Sherif, In
Common Predicament.
36
Tajfel, Billing, Bundy and Flament, “Social Categorization and Intergroup Behavior”;
Tajfel, “Social Categorisation, Social Identity and Social Comparison” and Human
Groups and Social Categories; Tajfel and Turner, “Social Identity Theory of Intergroup
Behavior.” Brown, “Social Identity Theory” for a literature review.
37
Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories; Tajfel and Turner, “Social Identity Theory of
Intergroup Behavior”; Rubin and Hewstone, “Social Identity Theory’s Self-Esteem
Hypothesis”; Abrams and Hogg, “Comments on the Motivational Status of Self-Esteem
 i n - g r o u p s a n d ou t- g r o u p s 85

action intended to improve the standing of their group or, if possible, defect to
groups with higher standing.38 Studies using sports teams as their focus find that
people are more likely to identify with winning teams and disassociate themselves
from teams that fall in their ranking.39 Cross-cultural research reveals that people
prefer to identify with high-status groups, although patterns of group identifica-
tion (social versus political) vary across countries.40 Group and contextual
variables complicate the relationship between self-esteem and group identifica-
tion, making the choice of identity maintenance strategies extremely sensitive
to context.41 There is growing evidence that similar kinds of preferences are
exhibited by state actors.42
Gordon Allport’s pioneering study of prejudice, published in 1954, was
the first important work to suggest that in-group attachment does not require
out-group hostility.43 Allport reasoned that in-groups are “psychologically
primary” and develop before any conceptions of out-groups. In-group solid-
arity, moreover, is compatible with positive and negative affect toward out-
groups. Allport also discovered that the boundaries between in- and out-groups
were flexible; in-group identification becomes more or less inclusive depending
on the circumstances. Subsequent laboratory and cross-cultural surveys lend
weight to the proposition that in-group identification is independent of neg-
ative affect toward out-groups.44 Surveys indicate that patriotism and national
pride – both manifestations of in-group solidarity – are conceptually distinct
from stereotypes of out-groups and aggression toward them.45 “Oppositional

in Social Identity and Intergroup Discrimination,” and Social Identity Theory; Brown,
“Social Identity Theory”; Huddy, “From Social to Political Identity.”
38
Ellemers, “Individual Upward Mobility and the Perceived Legitimacy of Intergroup
Relations”; Abrams and Hogg, “Social Identification, Social Categorization and Social
Influence.”
39
Dechesne, Greenberg, Arndt and Schimel, “Terror Management and Sports.”
40
Taylor, “Multiple Group Membership and Self-Identity”; Freeman, “Liking Self and Social
Structure.”
41
Tajfel, “Social Categorisation, Social Identity and Social Comparison”; Kruglanski, Lay
Epistemics and Human Knowledge; Kruglanski, “Motivated Social Cognition: Principles of
the Interface”; Shah, Kruglanski and Thompson, “Membership Has its (Epistemic)
Rewards”; Dechesne, Janssen and van Knippenberg, “Derogation and Distancing as
Terror Management Strategies”; Brown, “Social Identity Theory”; Huddy, “From Social
to Political Identity.”
42
Johnston, “Treating International Institutions as Social Environments”; Flockhart,
“Complex Socialization”; Narlikar, “Peculiar Chauvinism or Strategic Calculation?”;
Suzuki, “China’s Quest for Great Power Status.”
43
Allport, Nature of Prejudice, p. 42.
44
Brewer and Campbell, Ethnocentrism and Intergroup Attitudes; Brewer, “Ingroup Bias in
the Minimal Group Situation”; Hinkle and Brown, “Intergroup Comparisons and Social
Identity”; Klosterman and Feshbach, “Toward a Measure of Patriotic and Nationalistic
Attitudes.”
45
Feshbach, “Nationalism, Patriotism and Aggression”; Struch and Schwartz, “Inter-Group
Aggression.”
86 h o m e r , v ir g il , a n d i d e n t i ty

consciousness,” to use Jane Mansbridge’s term for identity construction based

on hostility toward out-groups, may be much less common in practice than
generally supposed.46
Summarizing recent research, Brewer finds complicated and still poorly
understood patterns among in-group solidarity, hostility and discrimination.47
In-group bias and out-group hostility is more closely associated with prefer-
ential treatment of in-group members than it is with discrimination or violence
against out-groups.48 Even in the absence of strong negative stereotypes, studies
of ethnic and racial prejudice in the United States and Western Europe indicate
the widespread existence of “subtle racism,” defined as the absence of positive
feelings toward minority groups. Subtle racism reinforces the propensity of
in-groups to reward their members over those of out-groups.49 Discrimination
in turn does not require in-group loyalty or attachment, or even negative
stereotypes of out-groups. Survey and comparative political research indicate
that negative stereotypes and discrimination are most pronounced in condi-
tions where groups compete for physical resources or political power.50
In the early post-war decades, Sherif and Sherif theorized that loyalties to
large collectives like nations, even humankind, were compatible with those to
family, religion and region.51 They reasoned that “transcendent” identities
might actually mute feelings of hostility because they provide some basis for
common identity and empathy between in- and out-groups.52 The European
project appears to have had this effect in some long-standing national and
ethnic conflicts. However, greater interdependence with out-groups can some-
times promote intergroup conflict and hostility. As in-groups become larger
and more impersonal, the institutions, rules and customs that maintain in-
group loyalty and cooperation tend to assume the character of moral authority.
Out-groups who do not adhere to the same rules and customs are no longer
viewed indifferently, but with contempt and hostility.53 More inclusive groups,

46
Mansbridge, “Complicating Oppositional Consciousness”; Hopf, Social Construction of
International Politics, p. 263.
47
Brewer, “Psychology of Prejudice.”
48
Feshbach, “Nationalism, Patriotism and Aggression”; Struch and Schwartz, “Inter-Group
Aggression.”
49
Dovidio and Gaertner, “Stereotypes and Evaluative Intergroup Bias”; Pettigrew and
Meertens, “Subtle and Blatant Prejudice in Western Europe”; Iyengar, Sullivan and Ford,
“Affective and Cognitive Determinants of Prejudice.”
50
Sherif and Sherif, Groups in Harmony and Tension; LeVine and Campbell, Ethnocentrism;
Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict.
51
Sherif and Sherif, Groups in Harmony and Tension, p. 44.
52
Sherif, “Subordinate Goals in the Reduction of Intergroup Conflict.” Kelman,
“Interdependence of Israeli and Palestinian Identities,” and Hymans, Psychology of
Nuclear Proliferation, for more recent applications of the concept.
53
Lebow, White Britain and Black Ireland; Sidanius, “The Psychology of Group Conflict and
the Dynamics of Oppression”; Brewer, “Psychology of Prejudice.”
 t he i l i a d 87

whether sub- or supranational, also threaten the loss of distinctiveness for

individuals with strong in-group identification. In this connection, it is impor-
tant to recognize that groups strive for distinctiveness that is considered
positive by their members.54 When out-groups feel distinctive on dimensions
that matter to them, and thus superior, they can tolerate, even acknowledge, in-
group superiority in other domains.55 When they hold common standards for
worth, the mutual search for positive distinctiveness, and the higher status
associated with it, becomes more competitive.56 Any of these processes can be
intensified or dampened by leaders seeking to exploit or downplay hostile
feelings for their own political ends.
In conclusion, there is ample historical evidence that identity construction is
often, if not generally, accompanied by the creation of stereotyped “others.”
However, there is little historical or experimental evidence to support the claim
that identity or national solidarity requires “others,” let alone their violent
exclusion from domestic, regional or international communities.

The Iliad
Institutional and collective memories create and sustain group identity and
solidarity. Institutional memory refers to official constructions of the past
fostered or imposed on society by the state. The concept of collective memory
builds on the pioneering work of Maurice Halbwachs, a French sociologist
and student of Durkheim, who, like his mentor, held, in opposition to Bergson
and Freud, that individual memories are socially determined.57 Durkheim and
Halbwachs argue that memory is “created” through communications with
other members of society, and thus heavily stylized and a reflection of the
dominant discourses of society. It helps individuals to find meaning in their
lives and to form bonds of solidarity with others. Collective memory and its
ritualization in turn constitute the core of communities. Halbwachs, Russian
psychologist Lev Vygotsky and American psychologist F. C. Bartlett emphasize
the role of everyday communication in shaping memory, and thus its
dependence on language, social discourses and the relationships people have

54
Turner, “Social Comparison and Social Identity”; Taylor, “Multiple Group Membership
and Self-Identity”; Freeman, Liking Self and Social Structure; Ellemers, “Individual
Upward Mobility and the Perceived Legitimacy of Intergroup Relations”; Abrams and
Hogg, “Social Identification, Social Categorization and Social Influence.”
55
Mummendey and Schreiber, “Better or Just Different?”; Mummendey and Simon, “Better
or Different III.”
56
Mummendey and Wenzel, “Social Discrimination and Tolerance in Intergroup Relations”;
Deschamps and Brown, “Superordinate Goals and Intergroup Conflict.”
57
Halbwachs, Cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory” for
a thoughtful critique of collective memory, and Lebow, “Memory of Politics in Postwar
Europe,” for a comparative analysis of institutional, collective and individual memory.
88 ho mer, vi rgil , a nd id enti ty

established.58 Their work represents a sharp challenge to the long-standing

tradition in psychology to study adult memory as an individual, context-free
process.
Institutional and collective memory are sites of contestation, as political
authorities, institutions and intellectuals attempt to foster memories conducive
to their political projects or psychological needs. There is not only conflict
about the contents of these memories, but also between these forms of memory
when they represent different and clashing understandings. Intellectuals play
critical roles in both kinds of conflict. They create oral and written discourses
and counter-discourses that have the potential to shape both forms of memory,
although the latter requires the support of those in power. The texts I am about
to examine are quintessential examples of this process.
Epic poetry was the genre of the aristocracy, celebrating its heroic accom-
plishments. It reached its zenith in Europe just as the authority of aristocrats
was declining as a result of the centralizing efforts of kings. We know nothing
about Homer’s intentions – if there was such a person – or about the bards who
shaped or reshaped his poem until it finally assumed written form. Collectively,
they established a discourse that taught Greeks who they were. In classical
times, the sign of an educated man was his ability to recite sections of the Iliad
and Odyssey, and there were people who knew both epics by heart.59 According
to Socrates, Greeks assimilated Homeric values to such a degree that there were
people who thought they should mold their lives around the characters and
values of the epics.60 Homer’s poetry shaped not only the collective memory of
generations of Greeks, but institutional memory, as the Iliad and Odyssey
became central features of the school curricula of poleis stretching from the
Iberian Peninsula to the Black Sea. Knowledge of Greek language and culture,
propagated through these enduring works of literature, helped to create a
strong sense of Hellenic community that transcended, but did not supersede,
commitments to individual city states.
The Iliad is a fictional work that describes a fictional world. Homer, or the first
bard to contribute to this epic, lived sometime in the ninth or eighth century BCE,
some three or four hundred years after the Trojan War is supposed to have taken
place. At some stage, bards combined these stories into a larger narrative – the
Iliad is 15,000 lines. They improvised many lines in retelling them according to
a sophisticated set of rules.61 Improvisation inevitably, perhaps purposely, intro-
duced some of contemporary society’s values, ideals and practices. The bards

58
Vygotsky, Mind in Society; Bartlett, Remembering. 59 Xenophon, Symposium, 3.5.
60
Plato, Republic, 606e; Hunter, “Homer and Greek Literature”; Robb, Literacy and Paideia
in Ancient Greece.
61
Auerbach, Representation of Reality in Modern Literature; Kirk, Homer and the Oral
Tradition; Parry, Making of Homeric Verse; Nagy, Best of The Achaeans; Lord, Singer of
Tales; Fowler, “Homeric Question”; Foley, “Epic as Genre”; Dowden, “Epic Tradition in
Greece.”
60 n a r r a t i v e s a n d id e n t i t y

Greek myths, like their Hebrew counterparts, reveal deep ambivalence about
progress. Prometheus, whose name means “forethought” in ancient Greek, was
a Titan. He was famous for his intelligence and theft of fire from Zeus to give as
a gift to humankind. Zeus punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock in
the Caucasus where his liver was eaten every day by an eagle or vulture but
regenerated every night. Heracles ultimately killed his avian tormentor and
freed Prometheus from bondage. Early Greek texts alternatively praise or blame
Prometheus for setting humanity on the road to civilization, innovation and
technology.63 Zeus punished men more generally by having Hephaestus mold
the first woman whose descendants would henceforth torment the male of the
species. In his Theogony, Hesiod does not give this woman a name, but she may
be Pandora, whom he identifies in Works and Days. When Pandora first
appeared before gods and mortals, “wonder seized them” as they looked upon
her. But she was “sheer guile, not to be withstood by men.”64 Zeus sends
Pandora to Prometheus’ brother Epimetheus with a jar from which she releases
“evils, harsh pain and troublesome diseases which give men death.”65
Pandora is an analog to Eve in that she brings suffering to mankind, although
she does so through no failing of her own, but on the instructions of the leading
deity. The Pandora myth functioned as another prop for misogyny, although its
more fundamental purpose, as with the Garden of Eden, was to serve as a
theodicy. If the world and human beings were created by a benign god or gods
worthy of respect and worship, the existence of evil and suffering are anomalous
and require an explanation. Golden ages – at least the original Western ones –
admirably served this end. The Greeks and Jews nevertheless resolve the anomaly
somewhat differently. The Prometheus and Pandora myths suggest that humans
are the playthings of gods, not all of whom are benign. The Garden of Eden
exonerates the deity by making Adam and Eve’s expulsion and subsequent life of
hardship the result of their decision – an exercise of free will – to disregard the one
restriction imposed on them. Both sets of myths attempt to reconcile human
beings to life as they find it. The Greek myths further suggest that efforts to control
one’s environment or escape from its sufferings are only likely to produce more
suffering. They became the foundation for the tragic vision of life elaborated by
later Athenian playwrights.66
Unlike their Jewish counterparts, Greek myths distinguish contemporary
men from their predecessors. In the Iliad, Nestor refers to an earlier generation
of superior and stronger men.67 Pindar laments the old days of “superheroes.”68

63
Hesiod, Theogony, lines 42–7, 560–612, Works and Days, lines 42–105; Aeschylus,
Prometheus Bound.
64
Hesiod, Theogony, lines 560–612. 65 Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 91–2.
66
Lebow, Tragic Vision of Politics, chs. 4, 9.
67
Homer, Iliad, 1.260–80 and 5.302–4, refer to a golden age.
68
Pindar, Odae Pythiae, III, 1–6.
90 h om e r , v ir g i l , a n d i d e n t it y

for Achilles to kill Hector. He disfigures his body, drags him back to camp on his
chariot and slaughters twelve young Trojan boys before Patroclus’ funeral pyre.67
Close readers of the poem understand hate to be an artifact of a war that has
taken Greeks far away from their homes, exposing them to the rigors of camp
life and to mounting losses of family and friends through illness and enemy
action. Agamemnon is a greedy and authoritarian leader whose behavior
makes a mockery of the values that led Greeks to follow him to Troy.
Achilles is absolutely explicit about the focus of his hatred: “The Trojans
never did me damage, not in the least, they never stole my cattle or my horses,
never in Phthia where the rich soils breeds strong men did they lay waste my
crops.” Furious at Agamemnon for taking away his slave girl Briseis, he
exclaims: “No you colossal, shameless – we all followed you, to please you,
to fight for you, to win your honor back from the Trojans – Menelaus and you,
you dog-face!”68
After this incident, Achilles and his Myrmidons withdraw from the fight-
ing. Achilles alone has the standing to pull this off. Other warriors could not
sulk in their tents or pack up and go home without being denounced as
cowards and deserters. Nor could they complain openly; Thersites provided
an object lesson when he voiced opposition to the war. He is the only ordinary
soldier with a name and voice in the poem and is beaten into a pulp by
Odysseus for speaking out.69 Aristocratic warriors and common grunts alike
were expected to repress and redirect their pain, suffering, anxiety, anger and
fear against the Trojans.
Given the intensity of the hostility on both sides, what is truly remarkable
about the Iliad is its portrayal of Greeks and Trojans as fundamentally similar
and equally worthy peoples. This characterization reveals Greek hate as a
primarily psychological defense and gives additional poignancy to the war
and its unrelieved slaughter. Listeners and readers grieve equally for the death
of heroes on both sides, a response that generates sharp dissonance with the
initial binary the poem appears to set up.
This dissonance is enhanced in the portrayal of Greeks and Trojans as the
playthings of gods, motivated by ego, passion and jealousy. It is partially
resolved in the penultimate scene, one of the most moving in Western liter-
ature, in which emotion and reason come together to create a precarious
reconciliation between Priam and Achilles. Homer is telling us that Greeks
become Greeks through their engagement with Trojans, and that their most
distinguished warrior can only regain his humanity through the combined
efforts of the gods and the Trojan king. The self does not form so much in
opposition to the “other” as it does in conjunction with it. In doing so, the self is
not only constructed but stretched. A warrior’s identity is defined not just in
terms of the family (oikos) and ethnic group, but as part of humanity as a whole.

67 68 69
Homer, Iliad, 23.199–201. Ibid., 1.180–92. Ibid., 2.246–324.
 th e il iad 91

This widening horizon provides the ethical foundations for identity that make
it, and human existence, ultimately worthwhile.
Let us begin with Homer’s depiction of the Trojans. They are the enemy, to
be sure, but are never portrayed in stereotypic terms by either the poet or their
Greek adversaries. Hector is a warrior and a civilized man. He returns from
battle to pick up his son, who recoils in terror because he does not recognize his
father and sees only a man in a fierce war helmet with a great plume on top.
Hector takes off his helmet, laughs, holds up his son and asks the gods to grant
him glory. Andromache, his wife, takes the child from him, presses him to her
breasts and smiles through her tears.70 We know that the young Astyanax will
be thrown from the walls by victorious Greeks, the very negation of civilized
behavior. Homer appears to be telling us that warfare and killing, so central to
gaining honor, are nevertheless at odds with more fundamental relationships
that make us human and maintain our species.
Trojan heroes and their allies emerge as men of outstanding character and
quality, as do their women. King Priam and his son Hector are arguably the
most admirable figures in the epic. They are deeply committed to their families
and cities, but also to the behavioral code, shared by Greeks and Trojans, that
brings them timē, a word used by Homer and later Greeks to signify honor and
office. Their unflinching adherence to this code brings war to the city when
Priam extends guest friendship to Helen. It is also responsible for Hector’s
death when he refuses the wise advice to retreat inside the wall of Troy and
instead allows Achilles to engage him in single combat. He tells Andromache:
“I would die of shame to face the men of Troy and the Trojan women trailing
their long robes if I would shrink from the battle now, a coward.”71 There are
striking contrasts between Priam and Agamemnon, whose greed dishonors his
office, and Hector and Achilles, who becomes a raging lion without human
feelings after Patroclus is killed.
More revealing still are the contrasts between Greek and Trojan women.
Helen, the only Greek woman in the epic, is a self-hating character who laments
the day she was born, but makes every accommodation necessary to stay alive.
Priam’s queen, Hecuba, and Hector’s wife, Andromache, like Penelope in the
Odyssey, live up to the Greek ideals of womanhood. They are loyal to their
husbands, offer them emotional support, sound advice and perform valuable
services on the “home front.” They behave with exceptional restraint and
correctness toward Helen, whose presence has caused a war that is likely to
kill their husbands and make them widows and slaves.
Helen divides Greeks from Trojans, but also unites them. She is married to
Menelaus and is now the mistress of Paris. Standing on the ramparts of Troy she
identifies and describes the various Greek warriors and praises their skills and
hospitality.72 Helen is aware of how she brings the two sides together, not only in

70 71 72
Ibid., 6.556–600. Ibid., 6.523–5. Ibid., 3.200–88.
92 homer, virgil, and identity

the action of the poem, but in the “dark, folding robe” she weaves, “working into
the weft the endless bloody struggles stallion-breaking Trojans and Argives
armed in bronze had suffered all for her at the god of battle’s demands.”73
The text stresses the many similarities between Greeks and Trojans. Book
Two, a catalog of armies, describes the Greek forces and then the Trojans and
their allies. Many fewer lines are devoted to the Trojans, but the same favorable
adjectives are used to describe their leading fighters. Book Three indicates that
Greeks and Trojans worship the same gods and share common values. In Book
Four, both sides make sacrifices before the first battle and mourn in its after-
math.74 Their warriors display equal bravery and success, with Greeks and
Trojans alternating kills. Both sides act in accord with the rules of war, generally
giving quarter to disarmed men and showing civility, even kindness, to their
opponents. Homer strongly emphasizes their fundamental sameness in his
description of the battleground once the fighters have withdrawn: “That day
ranks of Trojans, ranks of Achaean fighters sprawled there side-by-side, face
down in the dust.”75 In Book Seven, the two sides agree to a truce so they can
recover the bodies of the fallen. It is hard to tell who is Greek or Trojan, but all
the bodies are washed and properly prepared for immolation.76
Book Three foregrounds the two men directly responsible for the war: Paris
and Menelaus. Paris is the least admirable man in the epic. He absconds with
Menelaus’ wife and is a coward to boot, content to let his brothers bear the brunt
of the fighting while he dallies with Helen safely within the confines of the palace.
Menelaus is forthright if tedious, and committed to getting Helen back and
destroying Troy for the succor it has given to Paris and Helen. Upbraided by
Hector, Paris agrees to fight Menelaus in a single combat, the winner to receive
Helen and all her possessions. Greeks and Trojans swear by Zeus to live in peace
ever afterwards, surely a recognition that there is no fundamental issue dividing
them beyond Helen. Even Menelaus agrees to this arrangement, although he
proclaims that “Such limited vengeance hurts me most of all – but I intend that we
will part in peace, at last, Trojans and Achaeans.”77 The two armies come together
to sacrifice a white and black ewe to symbolize their agreement, and invoke the
gods as guarantors of their promises to live in peace after the combat. The Greeks
honor Priam by asking him to seal the truce, as they do not trust his sons.78
Menelaus is the worthier opponent and the better warrior. His spear pene-
trates Paris’ shield, but Paris deftly sidesteps its bronze point. Menelaus rushes
forward and is on the verge of cleaving Paris’ skull when Aphrodite causes his
sword to shatter on his opponent’s helmet. She then cuts Paris’ helmet strap and
snatches him away to prevent Menelaus from dragging him back behind
the Greek lines.79 Paris reappears in the palace, and set aflame by Aphrodite,

73 74
Ibid., 3.150–4. Ibid., 4.502–517–630, as they do again in 6.101–18.
75 76
Ibid., 4.629–30. Ibid., 7.487–99. 77 Ibid., 3.119–21. 78 Ibid., 3.125–35.
79
Ibid., 3.98–42.
 utopias 63

worlds that can provide inspiration and direction for improving, although
never perfecting, the societies in which authors and readers reside. George
Logan astutely observes that utopias, like their golden age predecessors, assume
that a world without evil is impossible so long as competition over property and
sexual partners exists.80
The first utopias are Greek. Homer’s account of Phaeacia in the Odyssey has
utopian characteristics. It is isolated, rich, at peace, offers boundless hospitality
to visitors and plies the sea in ships that do not need rudders because they are
steered by men’s thoughts.81 Plato’s Republic offers the first detailed depiction
of a utopia. His Socrates acknowledges early on that the Republic is nowhere on
earth but in heaven.82 Like most utopias, it is explicitly based on a set of
underlying assumptions about human nature, needs and motives and the
corresponding belief that they can be harmonized with the right institutions,
practices and indoctrination.
Plato’s Kallipolis is more sophisticated than many subsequent utopias in
three important ways. He addresses the problem of origins: how one gets to a
near-perfect society from the deeply flawed one in which creator and readers
reside. Plato acknowledges the difficulty of this transformation by introducing
the noble lie. To hide their society’s human design and encourage loyalty to the
city by all its citizens, the founders agree to tell subsequent generations that they
are brothers “born of the earth.”83 This lie also serves as the basis for collective
as opposed to individual identities. Plato recognizes that Kallipolis cannot be
isolated permanently from contact with the outside world and that some of
these contacts will be hostile, especially if the republic is successful, increases in
population and needs to conquer additional territory.84 Most importantly, he
understands that societies are never static and will evolve regardless of rules and
precautions introduced by their creators and enforced by their guardians.
The last two characteristics would hasten the dissolution of Kallipolis. Innate
curiosity and contact with foreigners would introduce new ideas and provide
incentives for change and corruption.
Plato’s Kallipolis is unusual in another respect. It is less a model for society
than for the individual. Plato describes a city but offers it as a collective
representation of a well-ordered human psyche, with its philosophers embody-
ing the drive of reason. The constitution Plato lays down for Kallipolis is similar
in all important respects to what he believes is best for the individual. That
constitution is derived from first principles by philosophers whose wisdom
comes from their holistic understanding of the good. They know how to order
the life of the polis to the benefit of all citizens regardless of their particular skills
and intellectual potential. They rely on guardians to impose correct opinion on
the polis and enforce its rules, including its provision of denying citizens, as far

80 81
Logan, Meaning of More’s Utopia, pp. 7–8. Homer, Odyssey, Books IX–XII.
82
Plato, Republic, 9.592b. 83 Ibid., 414b–e. 84
Ibid., 373d–e.
94 h om e r , v ir gi l , a n d i d e n t i ty

which threatens to break through and express itself in violence against Priam.
Achilles and his retainers are restrained by the sight of Priam: “Achilles
marveled, beholding majestic Priam. His men marveled too, trading startled
glances.”89 Seeing his moment, Priam pours out his heart to Achilles:
“Remember your own father, great godlike Achilles – as old as I am, past the
threshold of deadly old age! No doubt the countrymen round him plague him
now, with no one there to defend him, beat away disaster.”90 A few lines later,
he attempts to transfer some of Achilles’ feelings about his father to himself:
“Revere the gods, Achilles! Pity me in my own right, remember your own
father!”91 Achilles softens, and Priam now suggests: “Let us put our grief to rest
in our own hearts, rake them up no more, raw as we are with mourning . . . So
the immortals spun our lives that we, we wretched men live on to bear such
torments – the gods live free of sorrows.”92 In effect, he offers Achilles a chance
to honor the gods and cheat them by returning his son and lessening his
suffering. Achilles agrees to exchange Hector for the ransom and instructs his
retainers to wash and wrap his body for its return journey to Troy. The two men
share a meal, the symbolic end to mourning for Greeks. Before they part,
“Priam the son of Dardanus gazed at Achilles, marveling now at the man’s
beauty, his magnificent build – face-to-face he seemed a deathless god . . . and
Achilles gazed and marveled at Dardan Priam, beholding his noble looks,
listened to his words.”93 The narrator suggests that together, but not individ-
ually, they have attained honor and wisdom through Achilles’ build and bravery
and Priam’s noble looks and logos, in this instance signifying wisdom. Greeks
and Trojans become who they are through their interaction.
The encounter between Achilles and Priam does not end the war. Both men
grieve for their loved ones, recognize the destructiveness, even the irrationality,
of their conflict, but lack a language they could use to construct new identities
for themselves that would allow them to terminate the conflict and escape their
preordained fates. Priam returns to Troy, knowing that it will be destroyed
and he and his family with it. Achilles knows that he must soon die and
prepares for his final battle, proleptically brooding about his father mourning
his death. The saga ends on a somber note but leaves listeners with the idea that
they, unlike Achilles and Priam, can forge new identities and use the text as a
vehicle toward this goal.
The Homeric texts – the Odyssey and the Iliad – took shape in repeated
performances in which bards, competing for honor, repeatedly adapted the
poems to local conditions and aspirations. The history of the epics reveals
a gradual synthesis of diffuse traditions and dialects, a stitching together,
as suggested by the fragment from Pindar that sets off this chapter. This process
stimulated and mediated the project of mutual self-definition by Greeks

89 90 91 92
Ibid., 24.567–8. Ibid., 24.567–73. Ibid., 24.588–9. Ibid., 24.610–14.
93
Ibid., 24.740–5.
 th e aeneid 95

speaking many dialects, giving rise to a Pan-Hellenic identity and agenda.94

Interestingly, that agenda would lead to a serious distortion of Homer’s por-
trayal of the ethical necessity of collective identity construction and mainte-
nance. Fifth-century Greeks would turn the Persians, and Asians more
generally, into negative others as a consequence of the Persian conquest of
Ionia and two subsequent invasions of mainland Greece. They read this hos-
tility back into Homer and the Trojan War in an effort to naturalize the hostility
between Europe and Asia.

The Aeneid
The Aeneid is a single-authored work by Virgil, modeled on Homer’s Iliad and
Odyssey. Like the Iliad, the Aeneid is an epic, superficially about victory and
empire. Biographical information about its author is scant. Virgil was born in
70 BCE in a small village near Mantua (Mantova) in the Po Valley. Roman
citizenship had been extended north to the Po river, but the territory north of it
was a provincia, and its inhabitants, Virgil among them, did not become citizens
until 49 BCE. Unlike many local landowners, Virgil’s family estate was not
confiscated to reward veterans of Octavian and Mark Anthony’s campaign
against Brutus and Cassius. Virgil was an Italian before he was a Roman and
his writings reveal a lifelong identification with Italy and Italians.95 In the
Georgics, there is a passage vaunting the beauties, riches and people of Italy
over those of the East.96
The Eclogues, his first great work, was published in 39 or 38 BCE. It was
patterned on Greek pastoral poetry that used Homeric hexameter to memorialize
rustic rivalries and love affairs. The Eclogues contains a thinly veiled reference
to the confiscation of northern Italian estates and the hardship that created for
their former owners and their families. These poems were an instant success;
their rhythmic patterns were widely hailed and imitated, even parodied. They
were followed by the Georgics, for which Hesiod’s Works and Days was the
model, and appealed to the traditional Roman love of the land, its crops and
animals. In 30 BCE, Virgil read it to Octavian (who was voted the title Augustus
by the Senate in 27), not long after his victory at Actium over Anthony and
Cleopatra and their subsequent suicides in Egypt. Suetonius reports that Virgil
spoke hesitatingly, almost like an uneducated man, but read his poetry in a
manner that “was sweet and wonderfully effective.” When he read the Aeneid to

94
Nagy, Pindar’s Homer and Poetry as Performance; Collins, Master of the Game; Taplin,
“The Spring of the Muses.”
95
Miles and Allen, “Virgil and the Augustan Experience”; Knox, “Introduction.” All
quotations from Virgil are from the Fagles translation.
96
Virgil, Georgics, 2.136–69.
96 h om e r , v ir gi l , a n d i d e n t it y

Augustus and his sister Octavia, she is supposed to have fainted after listening to
his lines about her dead son Marcellus.97
Virgil’s final and most ambitious work is the Aeneid. Its rhythmic pattern is
Homeric and there are numerous references to characters and scenes from the
Iliad and Odyssey. There is long-standing controversy about the meaning of
the Aeneid. Is it intended to praise Augustus, or subvert his authority? One
defensible reading is that Virgil offers the Aeneid as the founding document
of Romanitas – as Homer’s epics were for Hellas. The central figure of the poem
is Aeneas, a Trojan warrior who is the son of Aphrodite and Anchises and
survives the sack of his city by the Greeks. He carries his father from the burning
city, but is somehow separated from his trailing wife. He returns to Troy
desperate to find her and encounters her ghost who tells him that fate has a
long exile in store for him until he reaches the Hesperian Land (Italy) where the
Lydian Tiber flows through a smooth march with rich loamy fields. “There great
joy and a kingdom are yours to claim, and a queen to make your wife.”98 En
route, his armada is blown by storms to the African coast, where the Trojans are
given refuge by Queen Dido. Aeneas and Dido fall in love, with some help from
Juno, who is dead set on keeping him from reaching Italy. Aeneas settles in and
helps Dido build Carthage. Jupiter is furious and sends Mercury down to remind
Aeneas of his responsibility for founding Rome.99 Displaying pietas (loyalty
and duty to the gods, one’s family and Rome) and gravitas (seriousness in the
face of religious and civic responsibilities), Aeneas orders his fleet to set sail. The
disconsolate Dido, who has lost her lover and her authority, falls on her sword.
Arriving in Sicily, Aeneas organizes funeral games for Anchises, reminiscent
of those Achilles organizes for Patroclus in the Iliad. Juno tries and fails to burn
his armada. In a dream, his father tells him he must journey to Elysium. Guided
through its portals by Sibyl, he meets his father and witnesses a pageant of
the Romans who in coming centuries will establish the world’s greatest empire
and impose peace on the world. Back in the mortal world, Aeneas and his men
set off for the Tiber, where they establish a fortified camp on the river’s shore.
Aeneas sends an emissary to King Latinus asking for land and the hand of
his daughter Lavinia. The king is inclined to agree, but Juno sends the fury
Allecto to turn Lavinia’s mother against the marriage and to inspire outrage in
Turnus, the King of Rutulia, son of the water nymph Venilia and suitor of
Lavinia. The Rutulians declare war on the Trojans, compelling local leaders
and peoples to choose sides. The Etruscans come to the aid of the Trojans, in
part because their cruel king Mezentius, whom they have expelled, has taken
refuge with the Rutulians. As in the Iliad, the slaughter is unrelenting and hero
after hero, or heroine, in the case of Camilla, meet violent and often graphically
depicted ends.

97 98 99
Suetonius, Lives of the Caesars. Virgil, Aeneid, 2.967–72. Ibid., 2.219–37.
66 n a r r a t i v e s a n d id e n t i t y

down time. People are expected to spend their odd free hour listening to
epistolary lectures or doing volunteer labor. There are no bars, coffee houses
or private places for singles to meet. There is no sexual freedom beyond the
choice of mates and stiff punishments are imposed for adultery. Sex is consid-
ered a lowly bodily activity akin to defecation and the scratching of itches. To
travel, citizens need permission from the authorities. Everyone wears the same
simple clothing and shame is brought to bear against people who sport finery or
jewelry. This is part of the general strategy of reducing differences among
individuals to deprive them of individuality. Sameness is stressed in clothing,
food, architecture and the layout of deliberately interchangeable cities. There
are, however, hierarchical distinctions between generations and genders.
Utopus aside, we never learn the name of a single citizen. To their credit,
Utopians detest war, get on well with neighbors, but are not above colonial
conquests to accommodate their growing population. They employ foreign
mercenaries to do their fighting, indicating a double standard with regard to
citizens and outsiders and undoubtedly leading to social conflicts that never
surface in the book. More’s ethics represent something of a fusion of Stoic and
Epicurean beliefs. He relies on the epicurean rule of choosing the greater over
the lesser pleasure, for individuals and the state.
Toward the end of the book, More acknowledges that many of Utopia’s
customs are absurd and others he would “wish rather than expect to see.”92 He
does not believe that good institutions or leaders with good advisers can solve
pressing social problems, because they are manifestations of the underlying
tensions and inequalities of society. Hythloday offers the example of capital
punishment for theft, arguing that people will continue to steal as long as they
are hungry, and they will be hungry as long as aristocrats and their retainers
exploit their labor to provide income for foppish luxuries.93
Quentin Skinner was among the first to recognize that More’s Utopia is at
odds with humanist orthodoxy and “embodies by far the most radical critique
of humanism written by a humanist.”94 Utopia, and the dialogue that precedes
it, are vehicles for addressing contemporary ethical and political controversies.
One of these concerns is the relationship between morality and expediency,
which the Stoics believed could be reconciled. Machiavelli takes them to task in
The Prince, written in 1513 but not published until 1532, in which he demon-
strates that honestà is often at odds with utilitas. Only if the two could be made
fully compatible would it be possible to construct a commonwealth that would
always act morally. Utopia might be regarded as a thought experiment and its
loose ends taken as evidence – admittedly, planted by the author – that morality
and expediency can only be reconciled in part.

92
More, Utopia, p. 107. 93 Ibid., pp. 15–16.
94
Skinner, “Review Article,” and Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. I, p. 256;
Bouwsma, “Two Faces of Humanism.”
98 homer, virgil, and identity

him how his father honored a suppliant’s rights. Old Priam flings his spear at
Pyrrhus, but it fails to penetrate the boss of his shield. His shameless adversary
shouts back: “Well, then, down you go, a messenger to my father, Peleus’ son!
Tell him about my vicious work, how Neoptolemus [another name of Pyrrhus]
degrades his father’s name – don’t you forget. Now – die!” He drags Priam to
the altar through the blood and guts of his son that litter the floor, “and twists
Priam’s hair in his left hand, his right hand sweeping forth his sword – a flash of
steel – he buries it hilt-deep in the king’s flank.”104 The contrast between
Priam’s encounter with Achilles and his son could not be more striking.
Although writing about the past, Virgil’s eyes were on the present. His negative
portrayal of the Greeks would have resonated with many of his readers. In the
second century BCE, Rome had fought a bloody war with Macedonia and other
Greek states. Lucius Mummius sacked Corinth in 146 and Aemilius Paullus
routed Perseus, the Macedonian king, at Pydna in 168. The political subjugation
of Hellas opened Rome to penetration by Greek culture, a development loathed
by conservatives, for whom Greeks became the same kind of “other” they were
for the Aeneid’s Trojans. Virgil, who drew so heavily on Homer, appears, like so
many Romans, to have been steeped in Greek culture. He nevertheless suggests
that Rome’s triumph over Greece is justifiable revenge for the sack of Troy.
In Book One, he has Jove announce his proleptic pleasure in the conquest of
“Achilles’ homeland, brilliant Mycenae too,” by the house of Assaracus (one of
Aeneas’ descendants), and the enslavement of their peoples.105
The next “others” are Dido and her Tyrians. They, too, are refugees from
their homeland, having fled injustice to settle on the northern coast of Africa.
Jupiter arranges for Dido to extend hospitality to Aeneas and his followers,
although it would have been natural for the Tyrians to do this in accord with the
custom of xenia and their strategic need for allies against local adversaries.106
The two peoples get on famously and work together to build the new city of
Carthage. We can reasonably assume that Aeneas is not the only Trojan to tryst
with a local girl. Dido’s subsequent suicide is modeled on the devotio of a
defeated Roman commander who takes his life to commit the gods to take
revenge on his adversary. She issues such a curse against the city that Aeneas’
descendants will found and commits Carthage to no-holds-barred warfare
against it:
This is my prayer, my funeral cry – I pour it out
with my own lifeblood. And you, my Tyrians,
harry with hatred all his line, his race to come:
make that offering to my ashes, send it down below.
No love between our peoples, ever, no pacts of peace!
Come rising from my bones, you avenger still unknown,
to stalk those Trojan settlers, hunt with fire and iron,

104 105 106

Ibid., 2.673–86. Ibid., 1.338–41. Ibid., 1.297–304.
 the aeneid 99

now or in time to come, whenever the power is yours.

Shore clash with shore, seas against sea and sword
against sword – this is my curse – war between all
our people, all their children, endless war!107

What are we to make of this fabulous tale? It is clearly intended to provide the
basis for and prediction of the Punic Wars. It is an imperial reading in a second
sense: Dido and the Carthage imbroglio keep Aeneas from proceeding to Italy.
Erotic involvement threatens to reduce the hero to the status of an ordinary
mortal; the same danger Calypso and Circe pose to Odysseus. Like Odysseus,
Aeneas must escape from her embrace if he is to fulfill his mission. He must
learn to “love ’em and leave ’em.” Greek and Tyrian “others” accordingly
represent different kinds of threats. The masculine Greeks would cut short
Trojan lives with their spears and swords, while the “feminine” Tyrians would
deny their chance of gaining fame in Italy. For Homer and Virgil alike, the latter
threat is by far the more serious as it rules out the possibility of figurative
immortality. The Iliad can nevertheless be read as raising questions about
honor and fame as dominant values. Achilles appears to question them in the
last book, although he does not change his behavior. The Aeneid also lends
itself to a darker reading: while war and conquest generate fame, they cause
irreparable harm to humanity. Here, too, the end of the poem is significant.
In the last scene, Aeneas kills the suppliant Turnus, failing to fulfill the mandate
of Anchises in Book Six to spare the vanquished.108
In the Iliad, Helen corrupts Paris and is ultimately responsible for Troy’s
destruction. In the Odyssey, Odysseus successfully escapes entrapment by
Calypso and Circe. In the Aeneid, Dido and Cleopatra are set up as parallel
temptresses, although the former only behaves this way because of the inter-
vention of Venus. Anthony fails in his efforts to win Rome because he is in thrall
to Cleopatra, while Aeneas succeeds in laying the foundations for Rome because
he is able to exercise sufficient gravitas to tear himself away from the charms of
Dido. Empire building is a male affair. For Virgil, the struggle between mascu-
line and feminine reinforces that between West and East. The “otherness” of the
Easterner merges with the “otherness” of woman, a theme that would also be
pronounced in the Renaissance epics of Ariosto, Tasso and Milton.109
David Quint suggests that the feminization of Easterners is most evident
in Virgil’s account of the Battle of Actium, fought off the coast of Greece in
September of 31 BCE. It resulted in a rout of Anthony and Cleopatra’s forces and
the consolidation of Augustus’ authority over the Roman Empire. Barbaric
riches – wealth is another source of corruption – pay for Anthony’s fleet and
armies – as gold from the East underwrote the founding of Dido’s Carthage.

107
Ibid., 4.774–84. 108 Ibid., 6.853.
109
Ariosto’s Angelica, Tasso’s Armida and Milton’s Eve. Quint, Epic and Empire, pp. 28–9, 86.
100 h om e r , v ir g i l , a n d i d e n t it y

The West represents order and unity – Augustus (the autocratic princeps) is
supported by Agrippa, in command of disciplined Roman forces. The East is
characterized by disorder; two commanders, Anthony and Cleopatra, lead a
ragtag collection of diverse and poorly coordinated eastern forces – Egyptians,
Indians, Arabs, Sabaeans – none of whom speak mutually intelligible languages.
The West displays masculine control, with Augustus firmly at the rudder, while
the feminine East is symbolized by Cleopatra’s ship and fleet, at the mercy of
the winds. The West represents cosmic order versus disorder, Olympian versus
monster gods and permanence and reason versus flux, nature and loss of
identity. Following their suicides, Anthony and Cleopatra are absorbed by the
Nile, leaving no traces behind.110
Quint boldly asserts that the East–West, male–female, division is a funda-
mental cultural orientation that is also central to Homer. I respectfully dissent.
While the Trojans and their allies are unquestionably Asian, they are portrayed
as fundamentally similar to the Greeks in every important respect. Only Paris
represents the feminized warrior, and he is scorned by other Trojans, including
his brother Hector. The Trojans and the allies are more unified than their Greek
adversaries, whose commitment to sustain the struggle is severely threatened
by discord between Achilles and Agamemnon. Achilles defeats Hector, as the
Greeks do the Trojans – not because Hector, his countrymen and their Asian
allies lack courage and discipline – but because the gods decree these outcomes.
Even in the Aeneid, these binaries are softened. Before the intervention of
Juno and Venus, Dido is decidedly masculine in her comportment. Like
Aeneas, she has successfully brought her followers to a new land, fought and
defeated local adversaries who opposed their settlement and rules in a seem-
ingly just and decisive way. With the support of her Tyrians, she is carrying out
the same kind of project that fate has decreed for Aeneas. She is transformed
by divine intervention, which misogynists could read as an attempt to put this
feminine upstart in her place. But there is no indication of this motive in the
text, only of idiosyncratic preferences, jealousies and plots of the gods that have
nothing to do with Dido’s gender.
Juno is said to love Carthage above all other cities and to park her chariot
and armor there. Her goal from the outset was for Carthage to rule over other
nations of the earth.111 She despises Troy and Trojans for petty, personal
reasons. Their founding king was Dardanus, son of Zeus and Electra.112 Zeus
has an erotic interest in Ganymede, a beautiful boy and son of a Trojan prince,
whom he brought to Olympus to serve as his cupbearer.113 Most galling of all
for Juno was the so-called Judgment of Paris, when Juno, Athena and Venus
demanded that he admire and rank their charms. Paris names Venus the most
beautiful as she has promised him the love of Helen, wife of King Menelaus

110
Virgil, Aeneid, 8.790–859; Quint, Epic and Empire, pp. 23–31.
111
Virgil, Aeneid, 1.14–28, 3.22–38. 112 Ibid., 1.35. 113 Ibid.
 u to p ia s 69

other projects to increase France’s wealth and make the life of its citizens
healthier and more enjoyable.102
Later in the century, the Industrial Revolution was the catalyst for a series of
utopias that reveal even sharper disagreements about the benefits of technology
and economic development. Most of their authors recognize the impracticality
of small, isolated communities and many are deeply influenced by socialism.103
A little known but interesting example is Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column.
Published in 1890, it attributes all social and economic evils to borrowing with
interest. Donnelly insists that usury benefits only the lender and a small number
of borrowers, reducing all others to debt and bankruptcy. His future America
outlaws borrowing and introduces other laws to prevent the concentration of
wealth. There are still rich men, and the desire for honor is mobilized to
encourage them to dispose of excess riches in a socially productive way.
Under the guidance of the government, they donate their wealth to schools,
hospitals, libraries, parks and amusement centers for the benefit of the people.
A statue of each donor is placed in a great national gallery to honor them in
perpetuity. Donnelly’s understanding of economics is flawed, to say the least,
but his insight that honor can induce charitable giving in a capitalist society is
right on the money.
The backlash against industrialism found expression in art, architecture
and other forms of literature. William Morris’ News from Nowhere, published
in 1890, self-consciously explores these connections. Morris was a publisher,
specializing in handcrafted editions, drawn to the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
and later influenced by socialism. He used his wealth to support the news-
paper of the Social Democratic Federation. He was fascinated by the pre-
modern era, in which he convinced himself life was more purposeful and
less corrupt. Two of his historical romances are about fifth-century German
tribes and full of praise for the fellowship and community of tribal
democracy.104
News from Nowhere transforms London into a quasi-rural, pre-modern
economy run along socialist lines where everyone has access to food, education,
culture and the material possessions essential for a fulfilling life. There is no
money or credit, but a collective joy in producing goods of high artistic quality
and providing them to people who need and appreciate them. Young people
receive a fundamental education, but little emphasis is put on “book learning.”
Instead, people are taught agriculture and crafts. As people are happy, and there
is only limited foreign exchange and intercourse, there is no war and thus no
need for armies or fleets. Following the lead of the pre-Raphaelites, Morris
regards the Middle Ages as a kind of golden age. He idealizes it as a time when

102
Saint-Simon, “Sketch of a New Political System.”
103
Frye, “Varieties of Literary Utopias.”
104
Morris, House of the Wolfings and Roots of the Mountains.
102 ho mer, vi rgil , a nd id enti t y

Aeneas in a manner reminiscent of the Odyssey. The efforts of Aeneas and his
followers to found a new Troy repeatedly fail, as they must until they rid
themselves of their sense of loss and victimization. In the second half of
the poem, which takes place in Italy, Aeneas and his followers recapitulate
the Trojan War. From their fortress, they fend off Latins and engage in collective
and individual combats reminiscent of the Iliad. This time they are the victors:
Aeneas kills Turnus in a one-on-one combat that bears a striking resemblance
to his near defeat by Diomedes in the Iliad.122 As W. S. Anderson notes, the
Trojans become the Greeks and their victory paves the way for the founding of
Rome and the ultimate conquest of Greece by their descendants.123 History
comes full circle.
In the course of the Aeneid, the Trojans progress from Asian “other” to
Western “self” – and not because they have physically uprooted themselves.
They recover psychologically from their galling and costly defeat. As their self-
confidence returns, they develop “Western” qualities of order, purpose and
commitment – gravitas, in a word. They learn to spurn women and material
comforts when they stand in the way of more “serious” political goals. The
Trojan transformation is most evident in the character of Aeneas, who begins
life as a Trojan and ends it as an Italian.124 This teleology drives the epic and
is introduced relatively early in Book One when Aeneas asserts that Italy is
his true motherland (Italiam quaero patriam), although at the time he has
absolutely no idea why he is going there.125
The transformation of the Trojans is not enough to guarantee a successful
political–military outcome. The gods must make peace among themselves. To
achieve this end, Juno sets aside her hatred and proposes a compromise to
Jupiter: “Let Aeneas wed Lavinia and Trojans plight their troth to Latins, but:
never command the Latins, here on native soil,
to change their age-old name,
to become Trojans, called the kin of Teucer,
alter their language, change their style of dress.
Let Latium endure. Let Alban kings hold sway for all time.
Let Roman stock grow strong with Italian strength.
Troy has fallen – and fallen let her stay –
with the very name of Troy!126
Jupiter had earlier decreed that the kingdom of Troy would rise up again.127
Now he wisely accedes to her request and proclaims that:
Latium’s sons will retain their father’s words and ways,
Their name till now is the name that shall endure.

122
Contrast Book Five of the Iliad with the Aeneid, 12.903–14.
123
Anderson, “Virgil’s Second Iliad,” pp. 17–30, for an elaboration of this theme.
124
Cairns, Virgil’s Augustan Epic, ch. 5 for the details of this transformation.
125
Virgil, Aeneid, 1.380. 126 Ibid., 12.950–61. 127 Ibid., 1.341–3.
 learning from the ancients 103

Mingling in stock alone, the Trojans will subside.

And I will add the rites and the forms of worship,
make them Latins all, who speak the Latin tongue.128

With Juno’s assistance Aeneas now defeats Turnus and the epic comes to
an end.

Learning from the Ancients

My narratives stress numerous similarities between Homer and Virgil. Their
differences are equally striking and important for our understanding of identity
construction. To the extent that the group of bards responsible for the Iliad had
a political agenda it was class-based. The Iliad and the Odyssey are composed
for aristocrats. They vaunt their intelligence, leadership skills and willingness to
sacrifice material comforts for honor – in sharp contrast to plebian concern for
satisfying appetites, limited cognitive abilities and lack of steadfastness. In the
Iliad, common folk are set up as an “other” that justifies aristocratic privilege
and would help to maintain class divisions in the West for the next 2,500 years.
For Homer, as for nineteenth-century European nobles, class cuts across, and
often trumps, territorial, ethnic or religious divides. This may help to explain
why the Trojans share so much in common with the Greeks; more than they
do with their common folk. Greek and Trojan aristocrats need each other to
sustain and validate their common quest for aristeia and the justification it
provides for their privileges. The Trojans are nevertheless an important “other”
in the Iliad. They are represented in a nuanced way, not very differently from
the Greeks. Their character is constructed from the appearance, words and
deeds of individual actors, notably Hector, Priam, Paris, Andromache, Hecuba
and Aeneas. Like the Greeks, the Trojans reveal striking variation in their
character, courage, values and commitments. This variation is within camps,
not between them.
Identity construction in the Iliad offers a sharp contrast to the understand-
ings of Kant, Hegel and Schmitt. Trojans and Greeks are each other’s “other,”
but do not require this other to become themselves. Both groups possess strong
identities prior to the war and there is no evidence that they achieve greater
internal solidarity as a result of it. The war reveals how fragile Greek unity is,
and it is nearly destroyed by the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon.
The mutual dependence of Greeks and Trojans serves a different purpose. It
allows warrior aristocrats on both sides to compete for aristeia. This is only
possible against an adversary who shares the same values and practices. The
Trojan War is a hard-fought struggle, motivated initially by Menelaus’ need
to recover his wife and his honor. In practice, it becomes a competition for

128
Ibid., 12.967–71.
70 n a r r a t iv e s a n d i d e n t it y

craftsmanship, the simple pleasures of life and tight-knit social relations flour-
ished. His future Londoners dress in variants of medieval garb and live in
houses with thatched roofs. Morris’ utopia is modern in the sense that there
is no class system, no differences among people in their living standards, and
remarkably for a Victorian, equal opportunity for women. He is ahead of his
time in recognizing the horrendous effects of industrialization on the environ-
ment. His hero, who awakens in London in the distant future, is amazed to
discover a sparkling Thames, teeming with wildlife, in which he can safely
swim. There is a more general commitment by the society to minimize
pollution and maintain green swards throughout the metropolis.
Some British and American authors wrote utopias that envisage positive
benefits to technology and economic development, suitably regulated by rad-
ically reformed institutions. Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000–1887 is prob-
ably the most famous example of this genre. It became an instant best-seller and
inspiration for numerous societies dedicated to political and economic reform.
Its principal character, Julian West, is a young American who awakens after a
century of hypnosis-induced sleep. His native Boston has been transformed
into a quasi-suburban socialist utopia. Doctor Leete, his guide, explains how the
quality of life has been significantly improved by drastically reducing the length
of the working week. Nobody works before the age of twenty-one and everyone
retires at forty-five with a reasonable pension and other impressive benefits.
America’s industry is commonly owned and its products are distributed more
or less equally to its citizens. Technology has not only facilitated production,
but has enhanced social and cultural life. People are able to listen to live concert
performances in their homes through tubes that carry the sounds of music
across town. Much free time is devoted to socializing in a manner that has
not changed since the Victorian era. The “vacuum left in the minds of men
and women by the absence of care for one’s livelihood has been taken up
by love.”105
Like Morris, Bellamy is sensitive to environmental issues. His Boston is
unrecognizable to the recently awakened American because it is green, clean,
well laid-out and populous but uncrowded. Bellamy perpetuates female sub-
jugation. His women are brought up to be virginal, pious, domestic and
deferential. They work in their own industrial army where they perform tasks
“suitable” to their gender. They must be married and mothers to attain posi-
tions of authority, presumably because this makes them more acceptable to
men. Looking Backward nevertheless appealed to women, even suffragists, and
there were many female members of Bellamy clubs.106 Bellamy’s world is even
more a dystopia for African Americans, who are segregated and forced to
perform menial labor.

105 106
Bellamy, Looking Backward, p. 261. Strauss, “Gender, Class, and Race in Utopia.”
 learning from the ancients 105

this utopian vision in the Aeneid. They both depict a law-governed society and
envisage Augustus as a great law giver.136
In the last book of the epic, Aeneas, sensing victory, promises neither to
command defeated Italians to bow to Trojans nor seek the scepter of kingship.
“May both nations undefeated, under equal laws, march together toward an
eternal pact of peace.”137 His message is reinforced by Jove and Juno, who
command Trojans and Latins to blend into a stronger, hybrid people.138
Writing as an Italian Roman, Virgil is, in effect, urging Augustus to treat con-
temporary Roman citizens equally, regardless of their territorial origins. In this
way, the Emperor can build support through the Empire and make Jove’s
prophecy come true. Here, too, Aeneas is held up as an example. He allies with
Etruscans and various Latins and marries the Latin princess Lavinia, making it
clear that Romanitas is a multicultural project from the outset.
What do these two works tell us about the creation of “others” and the roles
they play in forming or solidifying identities? “Others” feature in both epics: the
Trojans in the Iliad and the Greeks, Tyrians, Latins, Asians, women and the
Trojans themselves in the Aeneid. They vary greatly in their degree of stereo-
typy and the extent to which the characteristics attributed to “others” are
portrayed as natural or acquired. Individuals with negative qualities can serve
as stand-ins for groups, as Pyrrhus does for the Greeks in the Aeneid. The most
negative stereotype in the Aeneid – that of the East – is associated with Anthony
and Cleopatra. The stereotype is so strong that we never really encounter them
as individual actors.
For Homer and Virgil, “others” are rarely essentialist in their characteristics.
Individuals within out-groups show considerable variation in their character,
courage, values and commitments. Achilles and Agamemnon, Hector and
Paris and Turnus and Camilla are prominent examples. As we have seen,
even the negative stereotype of women, so evident in the Aeneid, is at least in
part undercut by Dido (before she is made to fall in love with Aeneas) and
Camilla. The construction of the Trojans as their own “other,” from which they
distance themselves over the course of the epic, gives further evidence of the
possibility of transformation. Virgil appears to be suggesting by analogy that
the Easterners who are now part of Rome’s Empire have the potential to become
good Roman citizens.
Homer and Virgil reveal an understanding of identity that mirrors some of
the findings of modern psychology. Identities form and become robust in the
absence of others, as they do for Greeks and Trojans in both epics. Hostility and
discrimination arise from the competition for scarce resources but are not
necessarily accompanied by exclusion and stereotypy. In the Iliad, the compe-
tition is for honor, a more restricted and relational good than material resour-
ces. It is intense and generates mutual hatred in the course of the war, but little

136 137 138

Evans, Utopia Antiqua, p. 69. Aeneid, 12.225–8. Ibid., 12.950–71.
106 h om e r , v ir gi l , a n d i d e n t i ty

stereotypy. In the Aeneid, Trojans and Italians fight, also over honor. Turnus is
unwilling to accept Lavinia’s betrothal to Aeneas because it would relegate him
to a subordinate status. In both epics, Greeks and Trojans make attributions
about the character of their adversaries on a purely individual basis and honor
those adversaries they respect.139
Both epics emphasize distinctiveness. For Homer, Greeks and Trojans are
marked out because of the demanding code of honor they share. Their warriors
compete in displaying excellence and they are not troubled that their values
and behavior make them all but indistinguishable from one another. These
similarities are essential because they make it possible for warriors on both sides
to compete for honor. They could not do this against less worthy and coura-
geous foes or those who did not adhere to the same rules of combat. This is also
true for Virgil’s Trojans, Tyrians and Italians, but with two interesting twists.
Trojans and Tyrians get on famously at first, largely by reason of their funda-
mental sameness. The Trojans lose sight of their Italian mission by blending
with the Tyrians, symbolized by Aeneas’ relationship with Dido. They must
leave to found their own empire in Italy, creating a rupture with the Tyrians
that becomes the basis for their future historical antagonism. Ultimately, Trojan
distinctiveness derives from their gods-given “world historical” mission to
found Rome and set it on its course of world conquest. As Sherif and Sherif
suppose, personal and family loyalties can be consistent with and even suppor-
tive of those of larger collectivities. They can also threaten them. In the Iliad,
both armies are composites of independent forces beholden to local leaders.
These lords have come to the aid of Agamemnon, Menelaus or Priam because
of family or personal ties and obligations. The Greek alliance threatens to
unravel because of Achilles’ feud with Agamemnon, but it is strengthened
because of the death of Patroclus. Personal obligation in the form of revenge
brings Achilles back into the fight.
Kant, Hegel and Schmitt consider hostility to others a key component of
national identity formation and solidarity. Classical texts and research in
psychology and comparative politics cast doubt on this assumption. So does
more recent history. We have many examples of “others” being created to
facilitate identity formation and solidarity, but also many instances in which
these processes were successful in its absence. Karl Deutsch describes the
boundaries of national communities in terms of a “we feeling” based on shared
symbols and a narrative of a common past. These symbols and their associated
narratives may be shaped around opposition and resistance to others, but, he
argues, it is by no means essential.140 Nor is it clear that many negative “others”
are brought into being with identity in mind. For the United States, the Soviet
“other” may have been necessary to garner support for a large defense budget
and a quasi-imperial foreign policy during the Cold War, but was hardly

139 140
Herodotus, Histories. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication.
 learning from the ancients 107

essential, or even central, to American identity. The same is true of prominent

current “others” like illegal immigrants or international Islam, which, for many
Americans, appear to have replaced the Soviet Union as evil and others.141 They
advance the goals of particular political factions in the United States, but most
citizens would feel no less “American” in their absence.
Kant, Hegel and Schmitt use historical evidence selectively. Hegel and Schmitt
only cite cases where national identity and conflicts with external others appear
closely coupled. Their formulations have the potential to make adversarial
“others” self-fulfilling and give them the appearance of “natural kinds.” There
is a useful analogy to the realist conception of international relations as a self-help
system. Realists maintain that international relations must always have this
character, and they may be right to the extent that policymakers are socialized
to act in accord with this assumption. The demonized “other” and the naturally
antagonistic character of the international system have the potential to create –
and to some extent have created – a pernicious cycle of thought and deed. Both
conceptions are mutually supporting, if not mutually constitutive. This perni-
cious relationship constitutes strong normative grounds for opposing this kind of
othering.
Kant, Hegel and Schmitt do not effectively distinguish between the use of
“others” to construct identities and to build internal solidarity. The two projects
are not identical. Common identity must to some degree involve a feeling of
solidarity, but all three writers refer to a more intense form of solidarity,
deliberately mobilized by governments to inspire people to sacrifice money,
time and lives in wars against foreign adversaries. Hegel and Schmitt view war
and sacrifice positively. Hegel does so because he regards the state as a critical
historical development that enables the spirit to reach fulfillment. Hegel’s
and Schmitt’s formulations arise out of the crucible of European nationalism,
for which, in different ways, they are advocates and spokesmen. Recent work
on Kant and Hegel suggests that their “othering” was part and parcel of the
response by intellectuals from relatively backward parts of Europe to the
challenge posed by the French Revolution.142 Robbie Shilliam suggests that
Kant and Hegel pursued a variant of the strategy I associate with Virgil: they
sought to construct a German “self” by incorporating important elements of
the French “other.”143 They incorporate the other furtively, as it confounds
their otherwise sharp dichotomy between a community and the “others”
against which it defines itself.
There are also good grounds for questioning the political utility of identity
construction and solidarity by means of violent conflicts against stereotyped

141
Euben, Enemy in the Mirror, pp. 43–4.
142
Shilliam, “The ‘Other’ in Classical Political Theory”; Pinkard, Hegel, pp. 61–8; Dickey,
Hegel, pp. 278–81.
143
Shilliam, “The ‘Other’ in Classical Political Theory”; Keene, “Images of Grotius.”
 d ys t op i a s 73

Shklar aptly observes that in utopias “Truth is single and only error is
multiple.”116

Dystopias
If golden ages enabled utopias, utopias inspired dystopias. Dystopias depict
dysfunctional societies that exaggerate features of the present, like bureaucracy,
capitalism, socialism, advertising and technology, to show their truly dreadful
consequences when used for perverse ends. Evgeny Zamyatin’s We, Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984 and William Golding’s Lord
of the Flies are classic representatives of this genre. A few dystopias are counter-
factuals set in the present, as are the spate of novels premised on a German
victory in World War II.117 In the second half of the twentieth century,
dystopias far outsold utopias, and several of them (e.g. 1984, A Clockwork
Orange) became box office hits when turned into films. Utopias and dystopias
are a good barometer of the mood and expectations of intellectuals and
sometimes of the population more generally.
Dystopias were unknown in the ancient world, although utopias were a
source of parody in classical Athens. Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae,
Thesmophoriazusae and Birds ridicule them as politically and socially naïve.
In modern times, this tradition finds expression in Gulliver’s Travels, which can
be read as a parody of Bacon’s New Atlantis. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein can
also be interpreted as a critique of utopian thinking. Her monster is a prescient
warning of how scientific knowledge, ostensibly intended to benefit human-
kind, can give rise to unintended horrors. Dystopia came into its own at the end
of the nineteenth century in response to industrialization, bureaucratization,
materialism and mass politics. H. G. Wells, an early master of the genre,
published six utopias and two dystopias. When the Sleeper Wakes, which first
appeared in 1899, describes the world encountered by its hero Graham, who
regains consciousness after being in a coma for two hundred years.118 In the
interim, he has inherited sizeable wealth, which has been managed astutely by a
trust – the “White Council” – established in his name. They have used the
income to establish a globe-spanning economic and political order. Graham’s
revival comes as a shock to the Council, which puts him under house arrest and
tries as far as possible to keep him ignorant of their society and the turmoil that
his awakening has provoked. He manages to discover that he is the legal owner
and master of the world and that a revolutionary movement, led by a man
named Ostrog, is trying to overthrow the established order.

116
Shklar, “Political Theory of Utopia.” On Skinner, see Kateb, Utopia and Its Enemies,
pp. 141–7.
117
Rosenfeld, World Hitler Never Made, for a review of this literature.
118
Wells, When the Sleeper Wakes. This is a substantially revised version of The Sleeper
Awakes, published in 1910.
 learning from the ancients 109

Anglo-Canadians. The rhetoric of French separatism can be intense, but it

rarely affects interpersonal relations. Having spent a sabbatical year in
Montréal, I can attest that I was treated exactly the same way in shops, cafes
and social and professional encounters regardless of the language I spoke. These
cases, and others, suggest, as does psychological research, that even when
“othering” is pronounced, it need not be associated with the kind of stereo-
typing and hostility that poisons interpersonal relations.
The psychological and political science literature indicates that fundamen-
talist formulations of “others” are more ideology than reality. They are used
rhetorically to advance political projects, which in the case of Schmitt and
Huntington, must be considered nefarious. Homer and Virgil offer contrasting
understandings of identity that are associated with their very different goals.
Their conceptions are particularly germane to those who want to make inclu-
sion and tolerance the norm. Homer and Virgil offer discourses that find much
empirical support in contemporary psychological research, and whose starting
point is the understanding that national identity and solidarity are fully con-
sistent with, and even abetted by, policies of inclusion and non-stereotyped
understandings of “others.”
 4

Mozart and the Enlightenment

The modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling the most funda-
mental political and social conventions.
Socrates1

Theater and opera in the late eighteenth century were sites of social instruction
and experimentation. Many philosophers, writers and officials thought they could
be used as vehicles for propagating social reforms. Those writing for theater and
opera sought to express their creativity and engage in aesthetic reflection upon
society. Enlightenment ideas and reforms and resistance to them by representa-
tives of the old regime provided the central themes for reflection. This was
especially true of Mozart and his librettists, Lorenzo Da Ponte and Emanuel
Schickaneder, who wrote operas in which these ideas provided the basis for
what can only be described as thought experiments. Their artistic masterpieces
constitute early and prescient critiques of the Enlightenment, and this despite
their utter lack of sympathy for the ancien régime.
The three Mozart–Da Ponte operas – Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and
Così fan tutte – build on the tradition of opera buffa, which is set in the
mundane world. They probe the social consequences of values and ideas
associated with the old regime as well as the modern world, as envisaged by
philosophes. The protagonists of these dramas assume a range of stances: some
are committed to existing arrangements and others to the social and individual
possibilities opened by changing ideas. Mozart and Da Ponte construct social
experiments by throwing different kinds of individuals and tendencies together
under characteristic social stresses.
The Mozart–Da Ponte operas maintain comedy’s traditional focus on mar-
riage and social reproduction, but engage successively more extreme
Enlightenment positions. Marriage of Figaro displays the effects of
Enlightenment ideas and reforms on shifting relations between the old aristoc-
racy and its dependants. It tracks the tensions associated with the transition
from a feudal to a paternalistic agrarian regime. Don Giovanni looks at the

1
Plato, Republic, 424c.

110
 
v i v a l a l i b er t a 111

disruption produced by an individualist libertine who adheres to his way of life

regardless of its destructive consequences for himself and others. It explores the
binary between role entrapment and the Hobbesian risk of chaos when roles are
undermined. Così fan tutte provides a sophisticated social onlooker with the
opportunity to educate the young by destroying their illusions about love, and
by doing so, to lay the foundation for a new social order based on equal doses of
reason and cynicism. Lorenzo Da Ponte, frequently compared to Don Giovanni
for his rakishness, is in fact closer to the cynical pedagogue Don Alfonso, whose
experiment with the young lovers displays in miniature the procedures of
librettist and composer.
The Magic Flute is the product of Mozart and librettist Emanuel
Schickaneder. In contrast to the more realist genre of the Da Ponte operas,
Magic Flute uses the conventions of the popular Singspiel, with its fairytale plot
and fantastic effects, to offer an abstract vision of a new social order. I argue that
this seeming utopia is really a terrifying dystopia that offers a remarkably
prescient understanding of the character and dynamics of the so-called total-
itarian regimes of the twentieth century.
The Mozart–Da Ponte operas directly address the transformation of social
relations from a society of hierarchical orders to one of greater mobility and
personal choice. They are set in the present or the near-past and in the near-
abroad. The Magic Flute seems to hark back to an ancient, mystical world, in
sharp contrast to the matter-of-fact, increasingly secular world of the present.
Like the Freemasonry on which it draws, it is part of a modernizing project. Its
characters are more abstract than real and face generalized challenges. They are
defined by social position – as Naturmenschen (simple men of nature) or
aristocrats seeking honor, and respond in predictable ways. In the Mozart–Da
Ponte operas the interactions of characters and plots are contingent. In Magic
Flute, the story unfolds in the deductive manner of modern social science. The
social order does not develop, but is revealed through the instruction and
initiation of the educable characters.

Viva La Libertà
The Enlightenment held out the prospect of escaping many traditional political,
economic and social restrictions, but this was hardly possible in the Austria of
Maria Theresa, Joseph II and Leopold II. Mozart and his collaborators had to
experience the Enlightenment at some remove as an intellectual phenomenon.
Mozart was a member of a Masonic lodge, where Enlightenment-inspired
books were read and their ideas discussed. Da Ponte was familiar with the
most prominent Enlightenment authors and used Rousseau’s Discourses as a
teaching text in Treviso.2 In Salzburg, Mozart described his employer,

2
Da Ponte, Memoirs, p. 27.
76 narratives and identity

WATCHING YOU.” Citizens are barraged by propaganda beamed at them

from televisions and loudspeakers in public places. They endlessly hear that
“War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery and Ignorance is Strength.” Like contempo-
rary CCTV, television cameras monitor the population to detect social and
political deviants. The principal protagonist, Winston Smith, works for the
powerful Ministry of Truth, where he rewrites history, destroying and adding
evidence to the records of people, making some of them “unpersons” as the
need arises. The past is made totally subservient to contemporary domestic and
foreign policy goals. War is continuous, as allegedly are the victories won by
Oceania’s forces. Both justify economic hardship and the authoritarian political
regime.
In Brave New World, for which the United States was the model, people are
pacified through access to pleasure. In 1984, modeled on the Soviet Union, they
are kept in line through fear and punishment. Neil Postman observes that
Orwell and Huxley were responding to different concerns:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared
was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one
who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of
information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we
would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth
would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned
in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.
Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with
some equivalent of the Feelies, the Orgy Porgy, and the Centrifugal
Bumble-puppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the
civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose
tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for
distractions.”120

Orwell’s 1984 is closer to Zamyatin’s We in its plot and politics. The society is
hierarchical, with Big Brother at the apex, the Party in the middle and the all but
nameless “proles” at the bottom. Winston Smith lives in a drab one-room
apartment and survives on a near subsistence diet of black bread and synthetic
food supplemented by rotgut gin. He is discontented, and keeps a secret journal
which he fills with negative thoughts about the Party. He has an illicit romance,
which serves as a catalyst for his alienation from Big Brother and attempts to
join the Brotherhood underground. The Brotherhood appears to be set up and
run by the Party as a clever means of identifying dissidents. Winston is
betrayed, imprisoned, interrogated, tortured and brainwashed. He emerges,
disgusted by his former affair and with renewed love for Big Brother.
These novels indicate that dystopias are not the work of traditional conser-
vatives. Their authors do not defend capitalism, religion or Victorian values.

120
Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Foreword.
 
v i va l a l i b e r t a 113

supported conspicuous consumption, of which new musical compositions and

performances were an important component.8
In the late eighteenth century, German philosophy took up the question
of music in conjunction with its broader engagement with art.9 In his
Critique of Judgment, Kant made the case for the relationship between
aesthetic feelings and moral sense. Aesthetic judgment, he reasoned, arises
from a feeling of subjective purpose. The latter derives from our under-
standing of the harmony between an appearing form and our perceptive
powers.10 In 1800, Schlegel declared that music has “more affinity to
philosophy than to poetry.”11 Schiller praised music as the most formal
and least mimetic of arts.12 Schelling devoted a treatise to art, and in a
series of lectures delivered in Jena in 1802–3, followed Kant in arguing
that art could reconcile the real and finite with the ideal and infinite.
Novalis and Schlegel associated the inexhaustibility of interpretation with
unendliche Sehnsucht (never-ending longing) which extended from the
plastic arts to music. Kierkegaard used Mozart’s Papageno and Don
Giovanni to define and illustrate the “aesthetic” level of his “Either/Or”
dialectic.13 Later in the nineteenth century, Nietzsche developed his con-
cept of the Dionysian through his engagement with Wagnerian opera.14
Philosophical interest in music encouraged the emergence of a new musical
aesthetic in the last decade of the eighteenth century. People in German-
speaking lands began to intellectualize their musical experiences. This had
always been true to some degree with opera seria, but now extended to other
forms of opera and, early in the nineteenth century, to instrumental music as
well. Leading critics interpreted music as “sonic paradigms of an ideal soci-
ety.”15 In an influential 1810 review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, E. T. A.
Hoffmann portrayed it as a cosmopolitan state “transcending all political and
linguistic boundaries.” Others heard in it aspirations of a German national
state.16 Mozart wrote at the cusp of this era of change and could not assume that
his listeners would associate his music with particular political or philosophical
ideas. Some critics nevertheless found hidden meanings in his operas. There is
no evidence that Mozart ever intended them as coded texts, but he was
undeniably influenced by the emerging link between philosophy and music
and his own personal circumstances.
Mozart’s La finta giardiniera (K. 196), written when the composer was
eighteen years old, reveals the influence of Rousseau and Schiller. It is

8
Beales, Joseph II, vol. II, pp. 555–87. 9 Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, p. 184.
10
Kant, Critique of Judgment, §§28–9.
11
Schlegel, Philosophische Lehrjahre and Philosophy of Art.
12
Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man; Blume, Classic and Romantic Music.
13
Kierkegaard, Either/Or. 14 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy.
15
Bonds, Music as Thought, pp. xiii–xiv. 16 Ibid., pp. xiv–xv.
114 mozart and the enlightenment

prototypical Sturm und Drang. Like Schiller’s Die Räuber, written in 1781, its
hackneyed story line treats crime as a display of sincere emotion. Title and plot
highlight the tension between people and the deceptive, false roles they play.
Repression of one’s true self leads to madness in the opera, but à la Rousseau,
the garden is the venue where nature and society can be reconciled and where
Belfiore and Sandrina find sanity “to the sound of sweet music.”17 Mozart
returned to this theme in his mature operas, where some of his key characters
are doubly alienated: from the state of nature and from society, which deprives
them of their identities by compelling them to conform to false values.
Zaide (K. 344), written in 1780, draws on opera seria and buffa traditions. It is
the first evidence of Mozart using opera to express personal frustrations and
aspirations. The libretto is a common enough rescue saga that may reflect
Mozart’s sense of being a prisoner in Salzburg, where he was in thrall to
tyrannical Archbishop Colloredo. As in the later Abduction from the Seraglio,
slaves lament their fate to music based on repeated fourths. Mozart would
employ the same motif in Leporello’s opening soliloquy in Don Giovanni –
“Notte e giorno faticar” [Night and day, exhaustion] – where he expresses deep
resentment about his servitude.18 Leporello’s emphatic exclamation: “non
voglio più servir” [I no longer want to serve] likely expresses Mozart’s own
sentiments. In Zaide, Gomatz, a captive Christian slave, sings a long and
despairing aria in the final scene of the uncompleted opera, where he and
Zaide, who has forsaken the court for her love for him, are about to be severely
punished. Gomatz is strikingly similar to Romatz, an anagram Mozart often
used to represent his name. The enraged sultan is suggestive of the
archbishop.19
Mozart was educated by his progressively inclined and widely read father
who, among other things, championed the use of lightning rods despite their
condemnation by the Church.20 Wolfgang was interested in broader cultural
developments and accumulated a small library. He was exposed to Rosicrucian
and Enlightenment ideas through his membership in the Viennese Masonic
lodge Zur Wohltätigkeit. In Paris, in 1764, he met some of the key figures of the
Enlightenment. For six months he lived in the home of the mistress of Baron
Melchior Grimm, who ran a salon frequented by Encyclopedistes and Rousseau.
In Mannheim, where Mozart stopped for some time on the way home from
Paris, he was an enthusiastic theatergoer and took in plays by Beaumarchais,
Corneille, Goldsmith, Goldoni, Gozzi, Goethe, Lessing, Marivaux, Molière,
Shakespeare and Sheridan.21 He was particularly impressed by Goethe and
subsequently attracted to his and Schiller’s classicism. Goethe’s classicism of the
1780s attempted to balance individual expression and external reality. His

17
Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, p. 28. 18 Don Giovanni, Act I, scene 2.
19
Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, pp. 56–8. 20 Gutman, Mozart, pp. 26–7.
21
Ibid., p. 54.
 
v i va l a l i b e r t a 115

poem, Natur und Kunst, expressed fascination with nature, especially its ability
to impose form on all flora and fauna. The artist, too, must work within forms.
For Goethe and Schiller, classicism could help express and shape the character,
vision and order of humankind.22 Mozart responded favorably to this formu-
lation, which mirrored his approach to music. He consistently sought to
innovate without violating the general rules of the genres in which he worked.
He did the same in his private life where he improvised within, rather than
rebelling against, the rules of society.
Viennese musical classicism was an offshoot of Weimar literary classicism.
It developed from the earlier galant style associated with Johann Stamitz,
François Couperin, C. P. E. Bach and the naturalism of Gluck. Haydn and
Mozart were familiar with both styles and proponents of the latter. Like
Gluck, Mozart wrote music intended to express the feelings of the characters
on stage.23 In contrast to Gluck, he never abandoned form, but sought to work
within it, or to modify it to suit his dramatic ends. He remained faithful to the
guiding concept that individual elements should be subordinated to the whole
by homogeneity in rhythm and tempo. His individualism would find expres-
sion in counterpoint, orchestral coloring and melodic themes that allowed him
to transform a genre while adhering to its formal rules. His most significant
structural innovation was the ensemble, which he developed into a complex
musical form in its own right.24 In Idomeneo (K. 366) the integration of voices
in its ensembles aroused opposition from soloists, who saw them as under-
mining their star status and with it, the possibility of being the unchallenged
center of attention.25
The most revealing statement of Mozart’s aesthetics is contained in a letter to
his father about Die Entführung aus dem Serail [The Abduction from the
Seraglio]. He explains how he has captured Osmin’s rage and desire for revenge
by going from F, the key of the aria, to A minor, a related key. “Passions,
whether violent or not, must never be expressed in a way as to disgust, and
music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear.”26 Like
Goethe, Mozart came to believe that freedom was best achieved through
mastery of the rules – of all forms of music and opera. Rules should be exploited
imaginatively, even bent, but rarely, if ever, violated.
Although his librettists were important, Mozart is the central figure of this
chapter. In baroque and absolutist Salzburg, he was treated as a servant. In
Vienna, he was sometimes compelled to take his meals in servants’ quarters, but

22
Ibid., p. 174.
23
Strohm, Essays on Handel and Italian Opera, pp. 93–5; Cotticelli and Maione,
“Metastasio,” on the evolution and conventions of opera seria.
24
Charlton, “Genre and Form in French Opera.”
25
Ibid., p. 177; Clark, “Ensembles and Finales.”
26
Wolfgang Mozart to Leopold Mozart, 26 September 1781, Anderson, Letters of Mozart,
pp. 768–70.
 t h e ph i l o s op h y o f i d e n t it y 79

exploited dichotomies between “us” and “others” to advance racist and author-
itarian political agendas. A recent and prominent example is Samuel Huntington’s
Clash of Civilizations, which constructs Hispanic immigrants as an unassimilable
“other” and Islam as the external “other” that threatens our economic primacy and
physical security.5 Following the events of 9/11, the Bush administration had
notable success in mobilizing support for its “war on terror” and invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq by convincing many Americans that the world was divided
into good “freedom loving peoples” and evil “cowardly terrorists.”
The “us” and “other” binary has a long and distinguished lineage. It was first
conceptualized in the eighteenth century in response to efforts by Western
European governments to promote domestic cohesion and development by
means of foreign conflict. Immanuel Kant theorized that the “unsocial soci-
ability” of people draws us together into societies, but leads us to act in ways that
threaten their survival. He considered this antagonism innate to our species
and an underlying cause of the development of the state. Warfare drove people
apart, but their need to defend themselves against others compelled them to
band together and submit to the rule of law. Each political unit has unrestricted
freedom in the same way individuals did before the creation of societies, and
hence, are in a constant state of war. The price of order at home is conflict
abroad. The “we” is maintained at the expense of “them.” Kant nevertheless
looked forward to a time when this antagonism could be overcome.6
Hegel built on this formulation, and brought to it his understanding that
modern states differed from their predecessors in that their cohesion does not
rest so much on pre-existing cultural, religious or linguistic identities as it does
on the allegiance of their citizens to central authorities who provide for the
common defense. Citizens develop a collective identity through the external
conflicts of their state and the sacrifices it demands of them. “States,” he writes
in the German Constitution, “stand to one another in a relation of might,” a
relationship that “has been universally revealed and made to prevail.” In
contrast to Kant, who considers this situation tragic, Hegel rhapsodizes about
the life of states as active and creative agents who play a critical role in the
unfolding development of the spirit and humankind. Conflict among states, he
contends, helps each to become aware of itself by encouraging self-knowledge
among citizens. It can serve an ethical end by uniting subjectivity and objec-
tivity and resolving the tension between particularity and universality. Hegel
reinforced the understanding, already in circulation, that peace was a negoti-
ated agreement between and among European states and not the result of some
civilizing process.7

5
Huntington, Clash of Civilizations.
6
Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” and “Perpetual
Peace.”
7
Hegel, “German Constitution” and Elements of the Philosophy of Right.
 don giovanni 117

librettist and composer. As closely as the music reflects the text, there are
nevertheless tensions between scores and text and within the texts themselves.
They should be regarded as largely deliberate and serve as useful entry points
for analysis.34

Don Giovanni
Don Juan had long been a favorite dramatic figure for exploring sexual passion.
The character dates back at least to 1630 and Tirso de Molina’s El burlador de
Sevilla. Molière produced a version in 1665, his famous Dom Juan, oú le festin
de pierre. In 1736, Carlo Goldoni published Don Giovanni Temorio, ossia
il dissoluto, from which Da Ponte borrowed lines and subtitle. By the late
eighteenth century, Don Juan had become a staple; eight operas were based
on it in the decade leading up to the Mozart–Da Ponte Don Giovanni of 1787.35
In the nineteenth and twentieth century, it would be taken up by Byron,
Pushkin and Richard Strauss, among others.
In 1787, Pasquale Bondini and Domenico Guardasoni, owners of the Nostitz
Theater in Prague, commissioned the opera from Mozart following a successful
run of Marriage of Figaro. This was fortunate for Mozart and Da Ponte, because
Don Giovanni could probably not have been produced in Vienna where its text
would have been problematic for Joseph II, who acted as his own censor for the
court theater.36 Da Ponte relied on an earlier libretto by Bertati, which he
reworked extensively, and drew freely on other versions of the story as well.
The opera premiered in Prague on 29 October and was very well received.37
It opened in Vienna in May 1788, where it was also successful.
Don Giovanni mixes opera seria and buffa. Donna Anna, Donna Elvira,
Ottavio and the Commendatore are seria characters and Leporello, Zerlina
and Masetto are straight out of buffa. The aristocrats proclaim their higher
concerns and motives while the commoners respond to what Marx would later
call “need and greed.” The contrasting status of the seria and buffa characters
finds resonance in the music. The three noble avengers – Anna, Elvira and
Ottavio – are not given true da capo arias, typical of opera seria, but often two
tempo rondos with many opera seria features.38 The lower-class characters sing
arias with more informal structures reminiscent of popular ballads. They mock

33
Branscombe, Die Zauberflöte, p. 89.
34
Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, pp. ix–x, for a somewhat different view that asserts
that parallel narratives emerge in music and text indicating that the “‘plot’ is not the real
‘story.’”
35
Russell, Don Juan Legend Before Mozart, p. 78.
36
Da Ponte, Memoirs, pp. 149–51, 159–61; Beales, Mozart and the Habsburgs, p. 11; Heartz,
Mozart’s Operas, pp. 133–8; Joubert, “Genre and Form in German Opera.”
37
Heartz, Mozart’s Operas, pp. 158–61, 164–8.
38
Webster, “Aria as Drama,” on aria types.
118 mozart and the enlightenment

the pretensions of aristocrats. Leporello remarks that Donna Elvira talks more
like a book than a person.39 Don Giovanni observes ironically that “the nobility
has honesty written all over its face.”40
As Kierkegaard noted, the Don has no singing style of his own and precious
few arias.41 He resorts to recitatives, short ariettas or inserts himself in ensem-
bles of others. Like a chameleon, he adapts his singing to their conventions.42
He introduces himself with a champagne aria “fin ch’ han vino,” which conveys
his consuming passion for the physical pleasures of life. His serenade, “Deh
vieni” is a cantilena that ends with strophic repetition. “Metà di voi” is little
more than an attempt to incite violence. Don Ottavio is the mirror opposite of
Don Giovanni. He is honest and honorable and loves only one woman. He lacks
passion and is indecisive and ineffective. His arias, which foreground reflection
in lieu of action, heighten the contrast with Giovanni, who acts rather than
sings. Ottavio’s arias reveal the signal importance he places on the judgments of
others. His singing and comportment suggest that honor and revenge are
questionable goals and stand in the way of what he really wants: time in the
sack with Donna Anna. If Don Giovanni frightens us, Don Ottavio bores us.
Donna Elvira’s arias also undercut her claim for sympathy. Having thwarted
Giovanni’s seduction of Zerlina, she sings “A fuggi il traditor” [Flee from the
traitor], and this after she has given herself to the Don and is trying to convince
herself of the seriousness of his promise of marriage. Donna Elvira’s opening
aria, “Ah chi me dice mai” [Ah, who will tell me], drips noble arrogance and
deprives her of any appeal. Mozart’s accompanying music is reminiscent of an
organ grinder, signaling that Donna Elvira is something of a puppet. By
contrast, Masetto, whose buffa arias are comic but cantabile, communicates
tenderness and sincere love for Zerlina. Hers in turn reveal lust and concern for
Masetto.43
Opera seria and buffa characters interact, as does their music. The wedding
banquet in Act I is masterful in this regard. Three bands simultaneously play
three different kinds of dance music with different rhythms. Donna Anna and
Don Ottavio dance a menuetto in 3/4 time, Leporello, following the Don’s
instructions, compels Masetto to do a follia or contradanza in 2/4 and
Don Giovanni entices Zerlina into an alemana in 3/8. The first two dances
are associated respectively with the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, while the last is
free of class associations. It creates a neutral zone where different classes can
mix, as they often did in practice for amorous purposes. Using counterpoint
effectively, Mozart harmonizes these dances and their different rhythms.
Following the Don’s attempted rape of Zerlina, this elaborate structure breaks
down and the music becomes cacophonous. It shifts from the key of G to an

39
Don Giovanni, Act I, scene 2. 40 Ibid. 41 Kierkegaard, Either/Or, p. 62.
42
Nagel, Autonomy and Mercy, p. 52.
43
Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, pp. 16–17, 201.
 don giovann i 119

allegro assai in E flat while Don Giovanni comes on stage and attempts to blame
everything on Leporello.44 A different but equally striking example of class
mixture is the arrival of the Commendatore at Don Giovanni’s dinner table.
Throughout the dramatic encounter between these two aristocratic figures, the
terrified lower-class Leporello acts the buffoon, and somehow succeeds in
intensifying the drama rather than undercutting it. This is, of course, a time-
honored trope of comedy, exploited effectively by Shakespeare, Cervantes and
Molière.
Mozart’s choice of keys and other musical forms offers cues for the listener
about the meaning of Don Giovanni and its component parts. The opening bars
in D minor announce the dystopic theme of the opera and return to herald the
arrival of the Commendatore in the penultimate scene of Act II. In contrast to
the often complex da capo arias of the other aristocrats, the Commendatore’s
are structurally and tonally simple; they consist of fifths and octaves alternating
between dominant and tonic. This is fitting, as the Commendatore is more a
posture than a person. The duel with swords between the Don and the
Commendatore in the opening scene is recapitulated in their last encounter
in a duel over keys. This time the Commendatore is triumphant and success-
fully restricts the Don’s tonality, compelling him to sing his last notes in
D minor. This is the key that opens the overture and ends the drama as the
Commendatore now drags the Don down to the underworld. D major, by
contrast, is the key of reflection. It is used for Leporello’s “Madamina, il catalogo
é questo,” Donna Elvira’s “Ah fuggi il traditor” and Donna Anna’s “Or sai chi
l’onoré.” Each of these arias provides information about its singer and Don
Giovanni.
Some of Mozart’s contemporaries created continuity by writing arias and
ensembles around melodies.45 Mozart relies instead on multiple, short, rela-
tively simple phrases that play off one another to create a larger, more complex
but nevertheless symmetrical whole. This works well in an opera like Don
Giovanni where short phrases, often punctuated by dialogue, move the action
along at a brisk pace. Continuity is also maintained by keeping reflexive arias to
a minimum and for the most part avoiding music or singing not essential to the
plot. Charles Rosen maintains that Mozart creates frames of reference
that bracket individual and multiple sections of dialogue, aria and ensembles.
In Don Giovanni, the initial frame begins with Leporello’s opening aria in F
major and finishes before the first secco recitative in F minor, following the
death of the Commendatore.46 A larger grouping, built around the key of D,

44
Hoffman, “Don Juan,” is the classic analysis of the blending of and confrontation between
the worlds of comic and seria opera.
45
Clark, “Ensembles and Finales.”
46
What Leporello sings is not technically an aria, and the whole scene is an introduzione
made up of four different sections that run together like a finale.
82 ho mer, vi rgil , a nd id enti t y

Not all philosophers and political scientists have accepted the need for
stereotyped “others,” although there is widespread agreement that every iden-
tity and culture is surrounded, even penetrated, by constitutive others. Johann
Herder thought that each individual and culture had a unique way of being
human, and that we become more human by understanding and appreciating
this variety.22 Drawing on Herder, Friedrich Nietzsche offered the general
proposition that the good human life is fundamentally dialogical in character.
Such dialogue rests on the premise that interlocutors embrace opposing meta-
physical truths but affirm the contestable and uncertain nature of these truths.
“Noble” adversaries learn to practice “forbearance” and “thoughtfulness” in
their relations with others.23 Nietzsche’s understanding of dialogue in turn
influenced Jürgen Habermas, for whom ethics and truth can only arise through
meaningful interactions with others based on the principle and practice of
equality.24 John Rawls also maintains that justice can only arise from dialogue
and compromise among interlocutors. While his Theory of Justice is a mono-
logical thought experiment, he nevertheless contends that liberalism can only
work in practice as a dialogue among people with opposing points of view
and metaphysical commitments.25 Influenced by Habermas and Rawls,
political philosophers have theorized extensively the conditions for open
and meaningful dialogue, making it a central project of contemporary moral
philosophy.26
Despite their numerous differences, a principal focus of Kant, Hegel and
Schmitt is on the construction of national identity. Neither Kant nor Hegel were
one-dimensional thinkers and they framed identity not only as the construction
of difference, but as encounters with pre-existing differences. Beneath super-
ficial cultural and other differences was a common humanity that might allow
the dichotomy between “us” and “others” to be overcome through a process of
mutual recognition by individuals and their collectivities. In his famous dis-
cussion of the master–slave relationship, Hegel argues that self-consciousness
can only be realized through recognition of others. Self and other develop
interactively, by means of a dynamic process in which each party becomes
aware of itself through recognition of the other. Ultimately harmony may
become possible, but only after a period of conflict and domination.27 Such
readings of Kant and Hegel, and also of Herder, surfaced in Mead and Pizzorno
and helped to inspire the projects of Gadamer and Levinas.

22
Herder, Ideen, ch. 7, s. 1.
23
Connolly, “Secularism, Partisanship and the Ambiguity of Justice.”
24
Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere and Between Facts and Norms.
25
Rawls, Political Liberalism and “Idea of Public Reason Revisited.”
26
Freeman, “Deliberative Democracy”; Coles, “Of Democracy, Discourse, and Dirt
Virtue.”
27
Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, pp. 111–19.
 don giovanni 121

readings. Brigid Brophy attributes the plot of the opera to the trauma of
Mozart’s father’s death and his fear of retribution for rebellion against him.52
Irving Singer says that the opera represents death in general, and cites a
Mozart letter in which he describes death as “the true goal of our existence.”53
Nicholas Till makes the best case for the most common psychological thesis:
Don Giovanni’s sexual conquests are an expression of some other sublimated
need.54
Mary Hunter rightly complains that Don Giovanni has suffered from heavy-
handed psychological interpretations and “decodings.”55 The turn to psycho-
analysis is nevertheless invited by his self-destructive behavior. His pursuit of
women exceeds any natural drive for release; sex for him must be an expression
of something else. Paradoxically, he never actually seduces any women during
the opera despite his long list of past successes. In his unsuccessful quest he
violates a series of social conventions and in the process seems to lose, not gain,
an identity. He appears to inhabit the state of nature as described by Hobbes, a
thought experiment intended to show that people outside of society would lead
an animal-like existence and be driven by their appetites. Don Giovanni has an
unquenchable lust for food and drink, not only for sex. Even so, he remains
enigmatic because, unlike Hobbesian man, he displays a carefree approach to
survival. Life gets increasingly risky for him during the course of the opera. At
the outset, he confronts the Commendatore in mortal combat. Later, a posse of
peasants and notables hunt him down and he barely escapes by means of a
clever subterfuge. Having failed in his sexual quests, and at risk of his life, why
does he foolishly hang around Seville? Could it be because his more funda-
mental goal – of which he may have only a dim awareness – is disruption of
society by violation of its most sacred conventions?
To complicate our interpretive task, Don Giovanni, as Kierkegaard pointed
out, is not at all reflective.56 The closest he comes to offering an explanation for
his lust is to attribute it to “an overabundance of sentiment.” “If a man remains
faithful to one,” he opines, “he is cruel to all the others.”57 Borrowed almost
directly from Moliere’s Don Juan, these lines are patently self-serving. Don
Giovanni clearly has no conscience. Leporello describes him as having a “soul of
bronze” and “heart of stone,” an ironic reference, as it is the stone figure of the
Commendatore that will prove his undoing. The Don’s encounters with the
Commendatore and Leporello reveal him to be impervious to rational argu-
ment. The only behavioral account we have of him, from Leporello, is a list by
country of his 1,003 sexual conquests. This multicultural accounting, kept by

52
Brophy, Mozart the Dramatist, pp. 242–65.
53
Russell, Don Juan Legend Before Mozart, pp. 407–43.
54
Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, pp. 198–9, 201.
55
Hunter, Mozart’s Operas, pp. 151–7. 56 Kierkegaard, Either/Or.
57
Don Giovanni, Act II, scene 1; Molière, Don Juan.
122 m o z a r t a n d th e e n l i g h t e n m e n t

Leporello at his master’s insistence, includes aristocrats and peasants, young

and old, fat and thin, tall and short, blondes and brunettes. It is a quintessential
Enlightenment document in its effort to reduce everything – women in this
instance – to a set of interchangeable numbers.58 But they are not all equivalent
because, Leporello explains, “Sua passion predominante, È la giovin princi-
pante” [his overriding passion is for the young virgin].59 What better way to
strike at the core of the social, economic and political order?
The principal impediment to understanding Don Giovanni is to assume that
he is a person. This approach reflects nineteenth-century understandings of
literature and people that stress their interiority and uniqueness.60 In ancient
Greece and Rome – the venues of opera seria – characters did not have inner
lives or even personalities. They represented mixes of traits that drove their
behavior. The audiences of Greek tragedies were supposed to connect these
traits with particular ways of behaving and outcomes, but not to focus on the
individual, who was only a vehicle for the narrative. Characters in Greek
tragedies are intentionally constructed as archetypes; to the extent they are
distinctive it is a result of the combination of social roles they embody and
the skill with which they enact them.61 Philosophy, art and literature in the
Renaissance and early modern Europe became vehicles for constructing the
individual and exploring and problematizing their potential. Don Giovanni,
although he is the central character of an opera buffa, is in part a throwback to
the classical world. As with characters in Greek tragedies, we need to look
outwards, not inwards, to understand him. In other ways, the Don can be read
as quintessentially modern. One of the distinguishing features of the modern
state – and of its handmaiden, social science – is the categorization and
numbering of everything, people included.62 Toward this end, the objects of
attention must be made interchangeable and their distinctive, even unique
features ignored, if not suppressed. What is emphasized instead is what they
share in common with others, even if these communalities are superficial or
stretched.
At the heart of my interpretation are the related concepts of Libertà and
libertinage. My story, like Don Giovanni’s, begins in Spain in the second half of
the eighteenth century, with the accession of Carlos III in 1759. Low-level
aristocrats – like intendants in Louis XIV’s France – were recruited by the
king and a few rose to become chief ministers. They ran the gamut from
straight-laced moralists like Gaspar Melcior de Jovellanos, a distinguished

58
Don Giovanni, Act I, scene 2; Nagel, Autonomy and Mercy, p. 36. On this Enlightenment
fascination with numbers, see Scott, Seeing Like a State, pp. 76–83.
59
Don Giovanni, Act I, scene 2.
60
Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, and Division of Labor in Society;
Berman, Politics of Individualism; Norton, Beautiful Soul; Carrithers, Collins and Lukes,
Category of the Person, pp. 46–82.
61
Lebow, Tragic Vision of Politics, ch. 8. 62 Scott, Seeing Like a State.
 don giovanni 123

diplomat and neo-classical author, to the libertine José Cadalso, a colonel,

poet and playwright. Most were committed to bringing Spain up to
Enlightenment standards of discipline, work and classification. They imme-
diately ran afoul of the Church and aristocracy. The Church feared loss of
control and considered it better for people to beg and get its charity than to
become economically, politically and intellectually independent. The aris-
tocracy was overwhelmingly a rentier class relatively content with its lot as
long as their estates provided enough income for a life of luxury in Madrid.
Modernization would require aristocrats to return to the provinces to take
an active role in managing their estates. The peasantry had little reason to
believe it would benefit from reforms; they rightly understood them only to
involve more work. Moreover, in eighteenth-century Madrid, as in Mozart’s
Vienna, ordinary people were largely dependent on the consumption indus-
try; the economy of both cities was based on servicing resident aristocrats
and their lavish lifestyles.63
Reformers sought to rein in theaters and popular pleasure sites like gardens
and bullrings, which they perceived as sites of disorder. They recognized that
intimate contacts occurred in these venues among aristocrats, prosperous
artisans, foreigners and the lower classes. They outlawed capes and large
hats – of the kind Don Giovanni wears – on the grounds that they made their
wearers invisible to the law. They had in mind not only poor criminals, but
aristocrats who went to gardens and bullfights to seduce lower-class women.
Such adventures were very much in vogue and aristocrats routinely mixed with
the lower classes for purposes of entertainment and sex. This became known as
majismo, a local expression of libertinage, that was immortalized in Goya’s
maja vestida (clothed maja). It involved upper-class mimicry of lower-class
manners. Madrid’s lower orders commonly wore capes and hats, which were
traditional seventeenth-century garb. The upper classes had for the most part
adopted the French mode of dress. But when they went out for fun they
changed into lower-class attire, although generally made of better material
and more elaborate in design and decoration. In 1797, Francisco de Goya
painted a portrait of Maria del Pilar de Silva, the thirteenth Duchess of Alba
“slumming” as a maja. Queen Maria Louisa, wife of Charles IV, was also known
to dress this way.64
The reforming ministers were concerned with crime but also objected to the
social confusion, loss of legibility, libertinage, laziness and bad hygiene they
thought promoted by capes and hats. Anti-majismo legislation aroused resist-
ance and led to a popular revolt in 1766, known as the esquilache riot (riot of the
cape and hat), after the Italian marquess who was chief minister at the time. The

63
Noyes, “La Maja Vestida.”
64
Ortega y Gassett, Goya; Cruz, Sainetes, pp. 77, 132; Boucher, Histoire du costume, p. 319;
Noyes, “La Maja Vestida.”
 i n - g r o u p s a n d ou t- g r o u p s 85

action intended to improve the standing of their group or, if possible, defect to
groups with higher standing.38 Studies using sports teams as their focus find that
people are more likely to identify with winning teams and disassociate themselves
from teams that fall in their ranking.39 Cross-cultural research reveals that people
prefer to identify with high-status groups, although patterns of group identifica-
tion (social versus political) vary across countries.40 Group and contextual
variables complicate the relationship between self-esteem and group identifica-
tion, making the choice of identity maintenance strategies extremely sensitive
to context.41 There is growing evidence that similar kinds of preferences are
exhibited by state actors.42
Gordon Allport’s pioneering study of prejudice, published in 1954, was
the first important work to suggest that in-group attachment does not require
out-group hostility.43 Allport reasoned that in-groups are “psychologically
primary” and develop before any conceptions of out-groups. In-group solid-
arity, moreover, is compatible with positive and negative affect toward out-
groups. Allport also discovered that the boundaries between in- and out-groups
were flexible; in-group identification becomes more or less inclusive depending
on the circumstances. Subsequent laboratory and cross-cultural surveys lend
weight to the proposition that in-group identification is independent of neg-
ative affect toward out-groups.44 Surveys indicate that patriotism and national
pride – both manifestations of in-group solidarity – are conceptually distinct
from stereotypes of out-groups and aggression toward them.45 “Oppositional

in Social Identity and Intergroup Discrimination,” and Social Identity Theory; Brown,
“Social Identity Theory”; Huddy, “From Social to Political Identity.”
38
Ellemers, “Individual Upward Mobility and the Perceived Legitimacy of Intergroup
Relations”; Abrams and Hogg, “Social Identification, Social Categorization and Social
Influence.”
39
Dechesne, Greenberg, Arndt and Schimel, “Terror Management and Sports.”
40
Taylor, “Multiple Group Membership and Self-Identity”; Freeman, “Liking Self and Social
Structure.”
41
Tajfel, “Social Categorisation, Social Identity and Social Comparison”; Kruglanski, Lay
Epistemics and Human Knowledge; Kruglanski, “Motivated Social Cognition: Principles of
the Interface”; Shah, Kruglanski and Thompson, “Membership Has its (Epistemic)
Rewards”; Dechesne, Janssen and van Knippenberg, “Derogation and Distancing as
Terror Management Strategies”; Brown, “Social Identity Theory”; Huddy, “From Social
to Political Identity.”
42
Johnston, “Treating International Institutions as Social Environments”; Flockhart,
“Complex Socialization”; Narlikar, “Peculiar Chauvinism or Strategic Calculation?”;
Suzuki, “China’s Quest for Great Power Status.”
43
Allport, Nature of Prejudice, p. 42.
44
Brewer and Campbell, Ethnocentrism and Intergroup Attitudes; Brewer, “Ingroup Bias in
the Minimal Group Situation”; Hinkle and Brown, “Intergroup Comparisons and Social
Identity”; Klosterman and Feshbach, “Toward a Measure of Patriotic and Nationalistic
Attitudes.”
45
Feshbach, “Nationalism, Patriotism and Aggression”; Struch and Schwartz, “Inter-Group
Aggression.”
 don giovanni 125

In eighteenth-century Europe, libertinage was equated with free thinking and

secularism. The life and writings of the Marquis de Sade offered contemporaries
powerful and disturbing evidence of this association. So did Casanova, famous
for seducing women on his grand tour of Europe and sometimes connected to
Don Giovanni in opera productions. By the last decades of the century there
was a circle of European writers on libertinage who knew one another, if not
personally, then through their works. Beaumarchais was at the center of this
circle and set Barber of Seville and Marriage of Figaro in Spain because it was an
acceptable proximate other. As Montesquieu did with Persia, Beaumarchais
displaced French practices and controversies on to Spain. This was a common
convention in the late eighteenth century, and Seville became the accepted
venue for stories about Don Juan. Removing a play or opera from one’s own
locale made it more acceptable to the censors, although Beaumarchais and
Mozart still encountered difficulties in this regard. Spain was considered back-
ward and pre-Enlightenment in its values and practices and thus a perfect locale
to contrast Enlightenment modernity with the past. One of the ways
Enlightenment writers developed their critiques of earlier periods, John
Lukács observes, was to project at least some Enlightenment values back on
to key personages in earlier eras.70 Many of the characters in Figaro, Don
Giovanni and Così fan tutte have inappropriately advanced Enlightenment
expectations about justice, class and marriage.
Mozart’s three operas with Da Ponte explore different facets of libertinage.
Count Almaviva in The Marriage of Figaro is the productive libertine. He lusts
after Susannah and gropes the adolescent Barbarina. He is also interested in
improving his estate and advancing his career. He is a typical representative of
early plantation capitalism. Socially speaking he can be described as an incor-
porated libertine, as his behavior is relatively constrained and goal-oriented. He
is a seducer, but within strict limits. He does not force himself on women; he
offers Susannah a contract in the form of money for sex. He renounces the
custom – historically a fiction – of the droit de seigneur.71 When society guides
him toward better conduct, he lets himself be persuaded to go along because of
his economic and political interests. He wants to preserve, not undermine, the
order that sustains his privileges, wealth and lifestyle.
This is not true of Don Giovanni, who is a nihilistic libertine.72 He takes
pleasure in subverting all values – traditional and Enlightenment – that might
sustain a social order. He corrupts and exploits his manservant Leporello, kills a
prominent authority figure and beloved father, disrupts multiple marital and
romantic relationships through attempted seduction and rape. The Don has no

70
Lukács, Historical Novel, pp. 19–20.
71
Most contemporary audiences would have recognized this as a fiction popularized by
Voltaire’s play (1762) of the same name.
72
Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, pp. 212–14, for a similar argument.
126 mozart and the enlightenment

regrets about his behavior or its consequences. He has no desire to fight the
Commendatore but when challenged, runs him through with his sword. When
the Commendatore’s statue speaks to him at the cemetery, the nonplussed Don
dismisses him as a vecchio buffonissimo (big old clown).73 Don Giovanni’s life is
an assertion of will, but a will not subservient to broader goals. As he is being
dragged to the underworld, he refuses to repent because that would violate his
persona, which is all about nihilistic self-assertion. His encomium to freedom –
the “Viva la Libertà” ensemble – celebrates all kinds of freedom, not just sexual.
It is a mocking aria because the Don’s freedom depends on the subjection or
disruption of everyone else. The other characters seem unaware of this irony,
and join in the singing with strong voices free of any hint of uncertainty.74
The third variant is Don Alfonso in Così fan tutte. He differs from his
predecessors in his social detachment. He neither tries to preserve the existing
order nor subvert it. His is unengaged sexually, although in some productions
he weds Despina, thereby meeting the lieto fine convention of comedy in which
all major eligible characters marry in the final scene.75 Alfonso opens up space
for the intellectual and pedagogue. He has a decidedly libertine view of peda-
gogy that is outside the classic and modern orders because enlightenment
comes through play, not via dialogue à la Plato and Habermas. He is never-
theless a quintessentially Enlightenment figure in his effort to stage a social
experiment. His goal to debunk, demystify and constrain emotions by reason,
which he expects to produce a better, more stable order. His theatrical experi-
ment is nevertheless risky because it could have destroyed two relationships.
Theater was controversial in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Spectacle was regarded as corrupting and subversive. Rousseau wanted to
shut it down, even though he wrote for it. Other figures, among them Joseph
II, were more pragmatic and sought only to reform theater. As noted earlier,
this orientation reflects the late eighteenth century turn to art as vehicle for
philosophy, pedagogy and self-enlightenment. Don Alfonso represents this
school of thought in his apparent belief that theater is more effective than
regulation in stimulating moral and intellectual development. He becomes a
stage manager, and not merely metaphorically, as Jovellanos and Joseph II
aspired to be. Despina, his co-conspirator, is a disabused and utterly pragmatic
figure. She understands love and marriage as a power game. Her two arias are
distinctly instructional; they tell her rather naïve employers not to expect
fidelity in men, let alone in soldiers. “Don’t make me laugh,” she sings in “Di
pasta simile, son tutti quanti,” men are all alike, “they are all made of the same
paste.” The Don Alfonso–Despina partnership is another cross-class alliance,
but between people with no illusions about their relationship. Despina does it

73
Don Giovanni, Act II, scene 3. 74 Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, p. 35.
75
Allanbrook, “Mozart’s Happy Endings” on lieto fine.
 don giovanni 127

for the money, and so, in a way, does Alfonso, to win his bet. But more
importantly, he represents the libertine as pedagogue.
Marriage is central to all three operas, and the key noun in the title of one of
them. Marriage is important in a double sense. It was the foundation of the
traditional social order, but also attractive to Enlightenment philosophers and
the emerging bourgeoisie because of its contractual basis. The marriage of
Figaro and Susannah approximates the bourgeois ideal. Their relationship
appears stable and equal, based on love but relatively free of romantic illusions,
although each partner expects the other to remain faithful. The problems the
couple face are external: Count Almaviva wants Susannah as a sexual partner
and attempts to subvert her impending marriage, and Marcellina insists on
marrying Figaro unless he can repay his debt. Despite their seeming affirmation
of modernity, the aristocrats in this opera have not given up the practice of
exploiting the lower orders and they only fail in the end because of Figaro’s
cleverness and Susannah’s cross-class alliance with the countess. In the final
scene, Figaro and Susannah prepare to marry and the count and countess are
reconciled, at least temporarily. Order is restored but remains precarious
because the count is unlikely to mend his ways in the longer term.
Order is restored in a second respect. Figaro, the servant, has outwitted his
master the count. Figaro is representative of late classical works that present
non-aristocrats as capable and self-conscious personalities.76 His successful
cunning has revolutionary implications that are softened by having him
revealed as the long-lost illegitimate son of Don Basilo and Marcellina. This
deus ex machina not only changes his class identity but cleverly removes the
principal obstacle in the way of his marriage to Susannah.
In Don Giovanni, marriage – and every other contract – is undermined. The
opera opens with Leporello’s aria, “Notte e giorno faticar,” in which he com-
plains of his master’s abuse. Worse still, the Don compels him to change places
and plants in his head the idea of becoming a gentilhoumo.77 As this trans-
formation is impossible in the circumstances, Leporello, who allows himself to
fantasize about it, becomes unhappier still. While Leporello sings, the Don
makes his move on Donna Anna. He then kills her father, who arrives on the
scene intent on saving her honor. The Commendatore’s murder puts on hold
Donna Anna’s marriage to Ottavio.78 The revenge-seeking Elvira announces
that she too has been seduced, even though she was preparing to take vows and
enter a convent. Don Giovanni next disrupts the relationship of Masetto and
Zerlina. In effect, he derails three weddings: Donna Anna to Ottavio, Donna
Elvira to Christ and Zerlina to Masetto. We might add a fourth because, if Elvira
is to be believed, he promised to marry her. His exploitation of Leporello and
his seduction, or attempted seduction, of Anna, Elvira and Zerlina are based on

76
Kerman, Opera as Drama, p. 46. 77 Act I, scene 1.
78
Campana, “To Look Again (at Don Giovanni).”
128 m o z a r t a n d th e e n l i g h t e n m e n t

false promises. The Don tries to get Zerlina to violate her marriage vows on the
day of her marriage. “That promise means nothing,” he tells her.79
Così fan tutte disrupts but then restores romantic relationships and sexual
harmony. Count Almaviva and Despina stage a mock departure for war by
Guglielmo and Ferrando, the lovers respectively of Fiordiligi and Dorabella.
They return, disguised as Albanians, and move in on each other’s mistress. The
women are torn between commitments to their long-standing lovers and
growing attraction to their exotic and charming Albanian suitors. The men
are at first amused but ultimately troubled by their success at seduction. When
their original lovers “return” from the wars, they “discover” their women
preparing to marry other men and reveal themselves to have been the
Albanians all along. A much sobered foursome is reconciled with the help of
Count Almaviva and Despina. The last line of the opera celebrates the bella
calma that now prevails and is expected to characterize the marriage of the two
pairs of lovers. If so, it can be attributed to the count’s successful use of theater
to teach his young male friends and their women something about the realities
of life.
For Rousseau, the masquerade, and the theater more generally, was emblem-
atic of social deceit and deception. The very art of acting consists of “counter-
feiting oneself.”80 Following Spanish practice and Beaumarchais’ Figaro, all
three Mozart–Da Ponte operas freely deploy double deception. Characters
disguise themselves in masks and capes to facilitate the social encounters across
classes that drive their plots forward. Classes were supposed to remain distinct,
a convention reflected in their specific musical forms. In the later Mozart
operas, classes and forms mix, even blend. In Figaro, costume and associated
gestures allow Cherubino to cross the gender divide, a stage transformation
made more mind bending by the audience’s knowledge that his role is sung by a
soprano. In Act II, Spain meets the Enlightenment when Susannah and the
countess exchange costumes to rendezvous with the count and Figaro – and
unexpectedly, Cherubino – in a half-wood, half-garden (boscetto). They intend
to entrap the count, but quickly lose control of events. In Don Giovanni, the
Don and Leporello exchange costumes with seduction in mind. Don Giovanni
also uses a mask and costume to escape his pursuers, leaving Leporello exposed
to their nearly fatal wrath. In Così fan tutte, as noted, disguises allow Guglielmo
and Ferrando to seduce each other’s mistress and expose them as unfaithful. As
with Spanish aristocrats and majas, solicitation of sex is the central feature of
these encounters.
In a deeper sense, the escapades facilitated by masks, capes and disguises
permit people to escape their identities and associated roles. They reveal that
identities are fragile, social creations. Recognition of this social truth by

79
Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, pp. 207–15, on broken promises.
80
Rousseau, “Letter to M. d’Alembert.”
 don giovanni 129

characters has divergent effects. Some, like the count in Figaro, are momentarily
humbled, while others, like the two couples in Così, are enlightened. Identities
are unstable in another sense: they cannot be sustained as simple, readily
defensible binaries. Figaro and Don Giovanni are “middle characters” who
violate the traditional division in opera between benign, rational and well-
intentioned aristocrats and foppish peasants driven by crude appetites.81
Seemingly lower-class Figaro is intelligent and calculating, always one step
ahead of his aristocratic employer and uses his talents to preserve his and
others’ relationships. The aristocratic Giovanni is also cunning, and undeniably
courageous, but mobilizes these resources for disruptive, libidinal ends. In an
interesting twist, capes and cloaks permit common folk to display noble values
and the nobility to shed honor and social responsibility.
Aristocrats are supposed to be motivated by honor, which can only be
achieved and maintained in a robust society where there is a consensus about
what constitutes honor, the rules by which it is won and the means by which it is
celebrated.82 Figaro, a commoner who, by definition, can never gain honor,
nevertheless exploits the traditional honor code to frustrate the count’s sexual
designs on Susannah and peasant girls. The Don is out to destroy honor in all its
forms without realizing just how dependent he is on it. He needs the constraints
propriety imposes on sexual behavior to make seduction difficult and corre-
spondingly rewarding. He derives equal pleasure from shocking society and
this, too, would be impossible in an era of sexual freedom.
Critics have difficulty with Don Giovanni’s final sextet. It is frequently said
that the opera should end, as it does dramatically, with Don Giovanni’s
departure for the underworld in the firm grip of the Commendatore’s cold
hand. The scene that follows – reflections by the others on Don Giovanni’s fate
and their own – is lackluster and anti-climactic. It is also musically anomalous,
as Mozart began and closed his operas in the same key. Don Giovanni’s overture
opens with a sustained D-minor chord and the Don’s descent to the under-
world ends on this chord. This is deliberate, as the overture was about the last
part of the opera Mozart wrote.83 Some have speculated that the sextet was
tacked on to appease the censors. In a 1788 Vienna production staged by
Mozart, the final ensemble may have been dropped. It has been omitted by
many subsequent conductors; Gustav Mahler refused to include it in his
productions due to its “repressive morality.”84
There are equally compelling reasons for performing the controversial sextet.
Finales go back to the Goldoni libretti and were widely used by the 1760s. At the
time of Don Giovanni they were considered an essential component of dramma

81
Nagel, Autonomy and Mercy, pp. 51–2.
82
Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations, ch. 2.
83
Heartz, Mozart’s Operas, p. 175.
84
Conrad, “Libertine’s Progress”; Kunze, Don Giovanni vor Mozart, pp. 55–8, 120–7.
130 mozart and the enlightenment

giocoso and the appropriate means of providing closure. Finales encompassed all
the music from the last secco recitative to the end of the act and could range from
one to ten numbers.85 Mozart finales generally alternate between solos and duets
or trios, and all work up to tuttis (sections in which everyone on stage sings). The
final tutti is in a faster tempo, signaling the end is in sight.86 Da Ponte plans for
this pattern in his libretti and often employs consecutive entrances of characters
to build up to the tutti. Eighteenth-century finales served a broader social
purpose: they restore social order through dramatic resolution of a collective
nature. In comic operas of the early Enlightenment, the most common resolu-
tion is marriage. Così fan tutte, although written later, conforms to this pattern.
In Don Giovanni, the finale, while not accurately described as a lieto fine, does re-
establish the equilibrium between tragedy and farce.87
The sextet fulfills contemporary musical expectations. All the characters,
minus the Don and the Commendatore, appear on stage. Each describes the
outcome from his or her perspective, followed by a final tutti: “Questo è il fin di
chi fa mal.” The sextet fails to provide the emotional satisfaction of Figaro or the
intellectual closure of Così. Don Ottavio and Donna Anna reaffirm their plans
to marry, but not for another year, as Donna Anna insists she needs more time
to mourn. One suspects that a year hence she will find another excuse for
putting off her remarkably patient fiancé. Donna Elvira will finally marry
Christ, as she prepares to take her vows. Her willing entry into the convent
represents an iconic rejection of the Enlightenment, which sought to free
women from what philosophes considered imprisonment by the Church.
Leporello envisions a master who will treat him with respect and is going off
to the tavern in the hope of finding one. There is no reason to think his new boss
will meet his expectations. Zerlina and Masetto still have each other and look
forward to supper and presumably, a roll in the hay. Everyone else is roughly
the same as they were before the opera, although Donna Anna has lost her
father and Donna Elvira her virginity.
Don Giovanni’s last scene and the final sextet pose as many problems as they
appear to resolve. They begin to make more sense when understood as compo-
nents of one of Mozart’s many larger organizing frames, or “brackets,” to use
Charles Rosen’s term. Let us start with the Don’s final encounter with the
Commendatore.
Da Ponte claimed to have written Don Giovanni with Dante’s Inferno in
mind.88 However, the Commendatore does not drag the Don down to Christian
hell, but to the realm of “Proserpine and Pluto.” This may be because the
Enlightenment rejected hell and damnation as silly superstitions, and while

85
Rosen, Classical Style, p. 302; Clark, “Ensembles and Finales.”
86
Hunter, Mozart’s Operas, pp. 14–15; Clark, “Ensembles and Finales.”
87
Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart, pp. 322–5, and “Mozart’s Happy Endings.”
88
Da Ponte, Memoirs, p. 152.
 th e il iad 89

constructed what Max Weber would call an ideal type: a mental construct that
will never be encountered in practice but nevertheless offers insights into real
worlds.62
According to Greek myth, the Trojan War is the direct result of Paris’
elopement with Helen, wife of King Menelaus of Sparta. This was a violation
of Menelaus’ honor and of guest friendship (xenia), a convention common to
most traditional societies.63 In Greece, the obligation to receive guests was
considered so important that hospitality was made one of the suffixes of the
father of the gods: Zeus Xenios.64 In return, guests must not abuse their hosts’
hospitality or overstay their welcome. Menelaus defends his honor by attempt-
ing to punish Paris and regain Helen. He asks Zeus to grant him revenge “so
that any man born hereafter may shrink from wronging a host who has shown
him friendship.”65 The Greek conception of honor required those connected to
Menelaus by ties of obligation, family or guest friendship to come to his aid.66
On the Trojan side, guest friendship moves King Priam to offer refuge to his son
Paris and the woman he has run off with, even though he and most Trojans
thoroughly disapprove of the pair and recognize that their presence is certain to
provoke war with the Greeks.
The principal focus of the Iliad is the conflict between Achilles and
Agamemnon, which is also driven by honor. In an act of moral blindness (atē),
the greedy Agamemnon takes a slave girl from Achilles to replace the one he
must return to her father. Achilles is furious, withdraws from the struggle and
refuses gifts subsequently offered to him by Agamemnon. He only returns to the
fighting to avenge the death of his beloved Patroclus. Homer ends his tale while
the war is still raging, but his listeners know that Troy will be captured and its
inhabitants slaughtered or enslaved, but not before Achilles, Hector and many
other Greek and Trojan heroes die. Menelaus will return home with Helen, but
his brother Agamemnon will be murdered by his unfaithful wife Clytemnestra,
who has never forgiven his sacrifice of their daughter.
The Trojans give the superficial appearance of being the principal “other” for
the Greeks. The war against them, already in its tenth year, has rallied Greeks
from all over Hellas and helped to build a common Greek identity – just
as reading Homer’s description of the war would do for later generations of
Greeks who considered themselves descendants of these warriors. The Greeks
are filled with hate (misei) for their Trojan adversaries, and Achilles in particular
rages against them – but only after Patroclus is killed by Hector. It is not enough

62
Weber, “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy.”
63
Kant, Perpetual Peace, pp. 105–8, describes xenia as probably the most universal form of
conduct.
64
Finley, World of Odysseus, pp. 99–101, on guest friendship in the Homeric world.
65
Homer, Iliad, 3.351–4. All quotes from the Fagles translation.
66
Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual, pp. 13–25, on gift exchange in the Iliad. Taplin, Homeric
Soundings, pp. 56–8, on the problematic nature of these obligations.
132 mozart and the enlightenment

can know.”91 Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre takes the argument a step
further by suggesting that individual moral development is the foundation for
social harmony and collective self-realization. The emphasis on introspection
and internal governance led to an upgrade in the status of art, and music in
particular, was regarded as a source of moral insight. In the words of Lessing,
the purpose of art is “to extend our capacity for feeling pity.”92 Mozart and Da
Ponte used their art to undermine this claim. Their Don Giovanni suggests that
turning inwards was only likely to expose an empty core. The real effect of
removing constraints is to put people more in touch with their appetites,
including the drive for power.
Don Giovanni elaborates the contradiction between the Enlightenment’s
commitment to personal liberation and its likely consequences.93 To a lesser
extent, Cherubino in Marriage of Figaro points to the same pessimistic con-
clusion and might be considered a Don Giovanni in training. At their core,
Enlightenment philosophers were a conservative lot. French philosophes,
Scottish empiricists and German idealists looked for new justifications for
traditional social values for fear that they would otherwise be overwhelmed
by skepticism. Sexual morality was particularly important because, like their
more traditional counterparts, they associated sexual license with social chaos.
Sex could only by constrained through the institution of marriage.94 Don
Giovanni’s assault on marriage is no accident.
Earlier, I attributed the Don’s lack of reflection to his formulation as a
classical archetype rather than a modern person. A darker and more challeng-
ing reading would see his superficiality as a product of modernity itself.
Liberation, Da Ponte and Mozart may be telling us, does not so much encour-
age retrospection as it does the outward deflection of reason. It becomes “the
slave of the passions,” in the famous phrase of David Hume.95 Instrumental
reason, to use Weber’s term, takes priority over more inward-looking reason –
what Aristotle calls phronesis – and makes it less likely.96 This state of affairs
directly contradicts the expectations of Adam Smith, who describes the market
as a catalyst for reflection. He reasons that it can teach self-interested people
prudence and discipline and lead us to defer short-term gratification for longer-
term, more substantial rewards. Don Giovanni is a fictional, dysfunctional but
highly effective counter-example.
Modernity has undeniably produced both kinds of people. Neoliberals would
have us believe that Smithian figures are the norm and Don Giovannis the

91
Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther, p. 85.
92
Lessing, Literaturbrief, cited in Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, p. 23.
93
Bokina, Opera and Politics, p. 41. 94 Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. I, p. 116.
95
Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, 2.3.3.4, and Inquiry Concerning the Principles of
Morals, Appendix I, p. 163.
96
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1139a29–30, 1139a29–1142a; Smith, Theory of Moral
Sentiments, I.1.5, VI.1.
 die zauber flöt e 133

exception. Even if they are right – and this is an empirical question – these
personality types are not distributed randomly. The history of the last two
hundred years suggests that Don Giovannis are over-represented in the leader-
ship of democratic and authoritarian regimes. Don Giovanni could
convincingly be set during the Napoleonic Wars with Napoleon filling in for
our Spanish aristocrat. Like Giovanni, he used his intelligence and magnetism
for utterly self-serving ends. He had an active sex life, but was less intent on
pursuing women than in conquering every country in reach. Both quests are
assertions of power and successes described as “conquests.” They reflect the
same pathology: conquest of women or territory never provides more than
temporary satisfaction and acts as a spur to further adventures. Leporello, cast
as one of Napoleon’s aides de camp, could complain about his endless service on
and off the battlefield and Napoleon’s utter disregard for his life. He could
serenade those being courted by Napoleon with a long list of his conquests.
They include large and small countries, those nearby and far away, Catholic and
Protestant, kingships, dukedoms and city states, authoritarian regimes and
quasi-democracies. For sure, Napoleon would insist on an up-to-date and
expanding list kept ready at hand.
Napoleon’s exploits, like Don Giovanni’s, provoked a powerful coalition
against him, which he, too, outwitted in the short term. Close escapes do not
prompt caution in characters like these, but more risky behavior that inevitably
leads to their downfall. Napoleon initially fared better in this respect. His
Commendatore, the Congress of Vienna, only sent him into comfortable exile
in Elba. He outwitted his captors and returned to Paris for his final glorious, if
utterly destructive, “100 days.” Who knows how long Don Giovanni stayed put
in the realm of “Proserpine and Pluto?” Perhaps he, too, staged a comeback, in
cape, mask or other suitable disguise?

Die Zauberflöte
The Magic Flute (K. 620) was written in 1791 in the shadow of the French
Revolution. This upheaval and the events that followed were extensively cov-
ered in the Viennese press. In Austria, the Revolution strengthened the hands of
conservatives; in 1790 Joseph II imposed more rigid censorship and backed
away from some of the more important reforms of his earlier years. Political
and satirical themes all but disappeared from the theater and books and
conversation in Vienna’s famed coffee houses as people become more cautious
and pessimistic.
The Magic Flute involved Mozart in a collaboration with Emanuel
Schickaneder. It was first performed in September 1791 at Freihaus-Theater
auf der Wieden. The opera drew a full house and had over one hundred
performances. Mozart expressed his delight at its success in his last three letters
to his wife, in Baden bei Wien with her sister. He went almost every night with
134 m o za r t a n d th e e n l ig h te n m en t

friends and relations to hear his opera.97 Magic Flute is a Singspiel, which is itself
an amalgam of different traditions: Jesuit drama in southern Germany and
Austria, Hanswurst comedies in the Viennese Theater and commedia dell’arte,
brought to Vienna by touring troupes from elsewhere in Europe.98 Joseph II
was favorably disposed to German-language theater and opera and created the
Deutsches Nationaltheater in 1776. He hoped that comedy would engage more
serious and ethical themes. Singspiel moved to cheaper suburban theaters,
closer to its audience. Schickaneder’s Theater auf der Wieden competed with
the rival Leopoldstädter Theater, and his involvement in Magic Flute may have
been motivated in the first instance by commercial considerations.99
The Magic Flute’s libretto had its roots in Jakob Liebeskind’s Lulu, oder Die
Zauberflöte. It was based in turn on Christoph Martin Wieland’s Dschinnistan,
a collection of fairytales. In this latter work, a prince enters the realm of the
“radiant fairy” who inspires him to rescue her daughter and capture an evil
sorcerer. She provides him with a magic flute to help in accomplishing both
tasks. The queen is benign and the story is pure entertainment.100 Schickaneder
also drew on Jean Terasson’s Egyptian tale Sethos, written in about 1777.101 The
eponymous hero is subjected to trials of fire and water and emerges through a
passageway flanked with statues of Isis, Osiris and Horus. Papageno, presumably
a play on Papagei, the German word for parrot, is Schickaneder’s invention.
Schickaneder was born in Straubing, a small Danube port, in 1751. His father
died when he was young and his mother supported them by selling devotional
objects in front of the Regensburg Cathedral. Emanuel was sent to a Jesuit
school for several years, but ran off with a traveling acting troupe. He was a
versatile singer, dancer and impresario, and had a flair for managing people and
money. He was widely read and a man of sophisticated taste. He learned by
heart and performed most of the classics of German theater, but his first love
was Shakespeare, and especially Hamlet. He was very much into gadgets and
special effects, including dramatic lighting, elevators, fires, waterfalls and flight
machines. Schickaneder worked in the ensemble at the Burgtheater and was
later able to open his own theater with money his wife inherited from the man
with whom she had earlier absconded. When her lover died, she returned to
Vienna and went into partnership with Schickaneder, who, with additional
backers, built the 2,200-seat Theater auf der Wieden.102
Magic Flute breaks new ground musically. Mozart no longer relies on
harmonic color, so prominently exploited in his other mature operas;

97
Mozart to his wife, 7–8, 8–9, 14 October 1791, Anderson, Letters of Mozart, pp. 966–71.
98
Cicali, “Roles and Acting”; Joubert, “Genre and Form in German Opera.”
99
Hunter, Mozart’s Operas, pp. 77–82; Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, pp. 95–6;
Warrack, German Opera, pp. 128–31; Link, National Court Theatre in Mozart’s Vienna.
100
Abert, Mozart, pp. 1248–50. 101 Dent, Mozart’s Operas, pp. 337–44.
102
Braunbehrens, Mozart in Vienna, pp. 372–8.
 die zauber flöt e 135

chromatic inflexions are confined within a transparent diatonic framework (the

standard seven-note musical scale of whole and half notes comprising an
octave). The overture, with its fugal design, is simple but achieves a remarkable
degree of local and overall coherence.103 It opens with three solemn chords in
E-flat major. This triadic structure is taken up in sequence by trombones, cellos,
basses and finally, the violins. They establish a mystical aura and return in the
same form later in the opera to herald the arrival of the priests. They also
reappear as dotted triads that are developed in diverse ways. As in Don
Giovanni, the dialogue, singing and music are mutually supportive, move the
plot forward and explore the core themes of the opera. Mozart moves away
from the standard arrangement of distinct recitative and singing, allowing voice
and song to flow into one another as the action requires. Because it is a Singspiel,
there are strophic songs, three of them sung by Papageno. These innovations
reflect Mozart’s gradual move away from classical form after 1786.104
Since its premiere, The Magic Flute has been considered the most enigmatic
of Mozart’s operas. Critics contend that it changes course in mid-stream.
Tamino encounters a mother – the Queen of the Night – mourning her
daughter, who has been abducted by a seemingly evil wizard. Later we learn
that Sarastro, who is not exactly a wizard, is wise and the Queen of the Night
evil, leading Tamino to switch sides, but without losing his romantic interest in
Pamina. Hero and heroine are cardboard characters who fall in love at first
sight, or in the case of Tamino, from merely viewing a portrait. They undergo
an ordeal of water and fire and are subsequently united by Sarastro. We witness
a confrontation between the Queen of the Night and Sarastro, Papageno’s quest
for a wife, a Moorish palace guard stalker and would-be rapist, various priests,
lady attendants, slaves, boys, men in armor, a frightening but ineffectual dragon
and wild animals made tame by magic flute or bells. An early twentieth-century
music historian proclaimed: “To go through the opera taking the libretto simply
at its face value is to justify all the unintelligent criticisms of the last hundred
years.”105 This may be one reason why from the beginning Mozart aficionados
have treated the libretto as an allegory and have looked behind its plot and its
characters for deeper meanings.
By the early nineteenth century, Austro-German commentators had discov-
ered conservative, revolutionary and Masonic Deutungen in the opera. The
Masonic reading continued to find support in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries.106 The most extreme formulation of this thesis, by Jacques Chailley,
finds Masonic symbolism in every detail of the libretto and insists that Tamino
and Pamina must be understood in terms of the duality represented by Sarastro

103
Bauman, “At the North Gate.” 104 Rosen, Classical Style, p. 254.
105
Dent, Mozart’s Operas, p. 395.
106
Brophy, Mozart the Dramatist, pp. 132–9; Chailley, Magic Flute; Thomson, Masonic
Thread on Masonic interpretations.
136 m o z a r t a n d th e e n l i g h t e n m e n t

and the Queen of the Night.107 Many twentieth-century readings are influenced
by psychoanalysis. Joscelyn Godwin deploys the Jungian archetypes of animus
and anima to understand the opera as an allegory about esoteric organiza-
tions.108 Michael Levey makes the case for Pamina as the focal point of the
opera and radically different from Mozart’s other women. In Act I she is largely
passive and offered by her mother as Tamino’s reward for an heroic quest. In
Act II, she becomes a figure in her own right by embracing an abstract, even
Platonic form of love. It becomes a vehicle for her personal growth, while
Tamino loses stature as his fate merges with hers.109
Pursuing a parallel line of inquiry, Dorothy Koenigsberger constructs
Tamino and Pamina, and all the principal characters, as constituent compo-
nents of one psyche and soul.110 Bauman treats Tamino and Pamina as co-
equal personalities that ultimately merge. In contrast to many earlier readings,
that rely entirely on the libretto, Bauman complements textual with musical
argument. He finds special meaning in the ritornelli (an instrumental interlude
after each stanza in a vocal work) used to establish the principal characters.111
Nicholas Till, also drawing on music and libretto, sees the opera as Rosicrucian
allegory.112 Feminist readings have recently proliferated. Brigid Brophy
maintains that despite all its sexist stereotypes, Magic Flute is actually
feminist because Pamina symbolizes women’s independence.113 Kristi
Brown-Montesano portrays the Queen of the Night as an über-antiheroine.114
Rose Subotnick builds her interpretation around the Queen and her “unnatural”
role in an opera that otherwise stresses the natural.115
In the hermeneutic tradition, E. D. Hirsch maintains that a valid interpreta-
tion should be reproducible, stable over time and capture its creator’s inten-
tions.116 Contemporary scholars have moved away from the idea of definitive
interpretations and are more inclined to expose multiple “layers of mean-
ing.”117 They also recognize, as Nietzsche observed, that the wealth of texts
far exceeds the intentions of the authors and cultures that produced them.118
Although deciphering a text at temporal distance is a difficult exercise, there are
compensating advantages. Generations of engagement with a written or

107
Chailley, Magic Flute. Brophy, Mozart the Dramatist, pp. 132–9, made an earlier case for
the Masonic meaning of Magic Flute. Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, pp. 117–30, for
an intelligent discussion.
108
Godwin, “Layers of Meaning in The Magic Flute.”
109
Levey, “Aspects of Mozart’s Heroines.”
110
Koenigsberger, “New Metaphor for Mozart’s Magic Flute.”
111
Bauman, “At the North Gate.”
112
Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, pp. 294–301.
113
Brophy, Mozart the Dramatist, p. 164.
114
Brown-Montesano, Understanding the Women of Mozart’s Operas, pp. 84–98.
115
Subotnick, Deconstructive Variations. 116 Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, ch. 2.
117
Bauman, “At the North Gate.” 118 Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, pp. 73–5.
94 h om e r , v ir gi l , a n d i d e n t i ty

which threatens to break through and express itself in violence against Priam.
Achilles and his retainers are restrained by the sight of Priam: “Achilles
marveled, beholding majestic Priam. His men marveled too, trading startled
glances.”89 Seeing his moment, Priam pours out his heart to Achilles:
“Remember your own father, great godlike Achilles – as old as I am, past the
threshold of deadly old age! No doubt the countrymen round him plague him
now, with no one there to defend him, beat away disaster.”90 A few lines later,
he attempts to transfer some of Achilles’ feelings about his father to himself:
“Revere the gods, Achilles! Pity me in my own right, remember your own
father!”91 Achilles softens, and Priam now suggests: “Let us put our grief to rest
in our own hearts, rake them up no more, raw as we are with mourning . . . So
the immortals spun our lives that we, we wretched men live on to bear such
torments – the gods live free of sorrows.”92 In effect, he offers Achilles a chance
to honor the gods and cheat them by returning his son and lessening his
suffering. Achilles agrees to exchange Hector for the ransom and instructs his
retainers to wash and wrap his body for its return journey to Troy. The two men
share a meal, the symbolic end to mourning for Greeks. Before they part,
“Priam the son of Dardanus gazed at Achilles, marveling now at the man’s
beauty, his magnificent build – face-to-face he seemed a deathless god . . . and
Achilles gazed and marveled at Dardan Priam, beholding his noble looks,
listened to his words.”93 The narrator suggests that together, but not individ-
ually, they have attained honor and wisdom through Achilles’ build and bravery
and Priam’s noble looks and logos, in this instance signifying wisdom. Greeks
and Trojans become who they are through their interaction.
The encounter between Achilles and Priam does not end the war. Both men
grieve for their loved ones, recognize the destructiveness, even the irrationality,
of their conflict, but lack a language they could use to construct new identities
for themselves that would allow them to terminate the conflict and escape their
preordained fates. Priam returns to Troy, knowing that it will be destroyed
and he and his family with it. Achilles knows that he must soon die and
prepares for his final battle, proleptically brooding about his father mourning
his death. The saga ends on a somber note but leaves listeners with the idea that
they, unlike Achilles and Priam, can forge new identities and use the text as a
vehicle toward this goal.
The Homeric texts – the Odyssey and the Iliad – took shape in repeated
performances in which bards, competing for honor, repeatedly adapted the
poems to local conditions and aspirations. The history of the epics reveals
a gradual synthesis of diffuse traditions and dialects, a stitching together,
as suggested by the fragment from Pindar that sets off this chapter. This process
stimulated and mediated the project of mutual self-definition by Greeks

89 90 91 92
Ibid., 24.567–8. Ibid., 24.567–73. Ibid., 24.588–9. Ibid., 24.610–14.
93
Ibid., 24.740–5.
138 m o z a r t a n d th e e n l i g h t e n m e n t

ill-gotten power of the dissemblers!” Before the curtain comes down, the chorus
turns to Pamina and Tamino and sings:
Hail to you on your consecration!
You have penetrated the night,
thanks be given to you,
Osiris, thanks to you, Isis!
Strength has triumphed, rewarding
beauty and wisdom with an everlasting crown!

This dénouement and chorus’s fulsome praise of Sarastro should leave us with
an uncomfortable feeling. It is one of many entry points that encourage reading
the opera as a dystopia, and it is this darker side on which I concentrate. Mozart,
and possibly Schickaneder, were undoubtedly aware of many of the contra-
dictions in their libretto. Sarastro deprives a mother of her child and maintains
a sadistic, would-be rapist as head of his palace guard. When Sarastro discovers
Monostatos’ evil doings, he subjects him to the bastinado, a punishment at odds
with progressive thought of the day. Any self-professed eighteenth-century
Aufklärer (disciple of the Enlightenment), let alone a Freemason, would recog-
nize these and other contradictions between ideology and practice. I contend
these contradictions are neither incidental nor arbitrary, but inescapable fea-
tures of a political system whose rulers are unconstrained by elections, checks
and balances, courts and other institutions. The Magic Flute envisages an
authoritarian, even quasi-totalitarian society, that effectively undermines the
Enlightenment vision of a reason-based order.
Schiller, in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, maintains that
purely rational plans for reform in a society where citizens have not yet
achieved moral maturity are certain to lead to oppression. His Don Carlos
(1783–7) which Verdi, among others, set to music, shows how reforms auth-
ored by the best intentioned of men can result in despotism. Mozart and
Schickaneder clearly had a precursor, if not a model, but neither they nor
Schiller could possibly have imagined the true horrors of modern, so-called
totalitarian, regimes. We who have experienced the twentieth century can read
between the lines – or beyond the lines, if necessary – to grasp the darker
features of their libretto and see disturbing parallels between the dictatorship of
Sarastro and those of Hitler, Stalin and Mao. These leaders – and they are not
alone – have made us painfully aware of the baneful consequences of the cult of
personality. We can accordingly approach libretto and music with sensitivities
and foreknowledge unavailable to Mozart, Schickaneder and their contempo-
raries. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, Magic Flute can be
read as a dystopia in which the seeming order, tranquility and happiness of its
finale is more apparent than real and the product of brainwashing and coercion.
The best way of illuminating the dark side of Magic Flute is by direct
comparison with one of the horrendous regimes of the past century. If we can
 d ie za u ber f löt e 139

map the characters and plot of the opera on to one of these regimes without
doing injustice to them or sacrificing the magic, color and slapstick features of
the libretto, we can make a credible case that Sarastro’s world presages theirs.
I accordingly ask readers to participate in a thought experiment: the staging of
Magic Flute in China during the Cultural Revolution. This setting – intended as
the quintessential totalitarian regime – encourages a novel but, I believe,
compelling interpretation of the three principal dramas of the opera: the
struggle between Sarastro and the Queen of the Night, Tamino’s quest for
love and enlightenment and Papageno’s longing for a wife.
Sarastro is presented as the personification of a wise and benevolent ruler. He
dispatches the evil Queen of the Night and her co-conspirators to the under-
world and unites Tamino and Pamina in marriage after they prove themselves
worthy. Papageno gets the consolation prize of Papagena and the promise of a
family. Sarastro is a philosopher-king, unlike any ruler of Mozart’s day, and
Schickaneder and Mozart appear to be suggesting that the wisdom and justice
that distinguish Sarastro’s domain can only be achieved in a world where men
are enlightened and ruled by selfless leaders. There is considerable evidence that
Mozart was drawn to this vision of human perfectibility; he was a Mason, and
Magic Flute is filled with Masonic symbolism. Many Masons and other
Aufklärers believed that properly constructed governments could use laws
and education to bring out the best qualities of human beings. Marxism
would become the most powerful institutional expression of this vision, and
for the most part brought to power leaders who governed in their own interest,
not that of the masses. The cult of the personality – which leaders like Stalin,
Mao and Kim Il Sung imposed by fiat and maintained by terror – led to
suffering on an unprecedented scale.
Viewed in this light, the opening scenes of Act II are absolutely chilling.
Sarastro, followed lock step by uniformed priests, marches into the temple
where, with unbridled arrogance, he declares “with clear conscience
[reiner Seele] that today’s gathering is one of the most important of our
time.” He praises Pamina as gentle and virtuous but denounces her mother as
an enemy of the state. She is a proud woman who “hopes by delusion
[Blendwerk] and superstition to destroy the firm structure of our temple.” A
priest arises to acknowledge this pronouncement as more words of wisdom
from our dearly beloved “Great Sarastro.” Such a scene could have taken place
at any party congress in the days of Stalin or Mao.
If Sarastro represents Mao Zedong, the Queen of the Night and her three
assistants are the “Gang of Four.” Like Madame Mao, the Queen had a familial
relationship with the Great Leader, but was purged. She is hatching a plot to
gain power; and, like Madame Mao, attempts to enlist disgruntled members of
the palace guard to stage a murderous coup. The Queen of the Night has a great
sense for drama; her entrances are elaborately staged, her dialogue is emotional
and her gestures theatrical. But then, Madame Mao was a film actress.
140 mozart and the enlightenment

In most productions of Magic Flute, the Queen of the Night is cast as a villain
who rebels against the legitimate and admirable rule of Sarastro and ends up
with the punishment she so richly deserves. But the Queen of the Night has a
legitimate grievance, even if her methods of redress are extreme. Sarastro has
banished her, abducted her daughter and is trying to “brainwash” Pamina into
accepting his authority and severing any ties to her mother. The perverse
character of Sarastro is equally apparent in his need to maintain a phalanx of
vicious “Red Guards,” headed by the notorious Monostatos. He uses them to
guard Pamina and keep her prisoner within the walls of his “Forbidden City.”
Sarastro is aware of Monostatos’ abuse of his authority, but turns a blind eye
when it is convenient. Like many dictators, this is how he guarantees the loyalty
of his palace guard. Only after Monostatos’ second attempt to rape Pamina does
Sarastro order him punished – tortured, actually – with no more than seventy-
seven lashes on the soles of his feet. There is little to distinguish Sarastro from
the Queen of the Night. Their conflict, like that between Mao’s successors and
the Gang of Four, is nothing more than a power struggle.
Pamina has been successfully “re-educated” by Sarastro. Caught by
Monostatos while attempting to escape, she confesses to Sarastro: “I am a
criminal; I wanted to escape from your power.”122 She nevertheless retains
her bond with mom and does not refuse outright to join her plot against
Sarastro. Pamina accepts a dagger from her mother’s hand but cannot bring
herself to plunge it into Sarastro’s heart. Her strongest feelings are for Tamino
and she risks her life to lead him through his ordeals of fire and water – more
about these in a moment. Sarastro has, of course, planned their relationship; it is
all part of his well-conceived strategy to weaken or break Pamina’s ties with her
mother. He has reduced Pamina to such a state of emotional dependence that
she contemplates suicide when Tamino, sworn to silence by Sarastro, will not
speak to her. Sarastro triumphs in the end. Pamina is so overjoyed at being
reunited with Tamino that she accepts Sarastro’s authority and does not utter a
peep when her mother is sent off to the underworld, the equivalent of some
awful communist gulag.
Tamino’s and Pamina’s enchanting duet, “Mann und Weib und Weib und
Mann” celebrates spiritual as well as physical union; the music soars to suggest a
higher level of relationship. They are wed to the Party and its ideals, not just to
each other. Their relationship provides an interesting contrast to non-Party
members Papageno and Papagena, who share an ordinary physical union.
Tamino is the most enigmatic figure in the opera. He first appears on stage
fleeing a dragon and faints from fright. Three women Valkyries conveniently
appear, kill the monster and inform the revived Tamino that he has been chosen
to rescue the Queen of the Night’s daughter. They show him Pamina’s picture;
he falls immediately in love and sets off to save her from the evil Sarastro. As for

122
Magic Flute, Act I, scene 18.
 t he a e n e i d 97

Venus persuades Vulcan to forge arms and a shield for Aeneas – as he did for
Achilles in the Iliad – with the story of “Rome in all her triumphs” blazoned
across the face of the shield.100 The plot in many ways parallels that of the Iliad.
Turnus attacks the Trojan camp and wreaks havoc. Jupiter convenes the gods
and listens to Venus and Juno plead their respective cases. He decides to let
Aeneas and Turnus resolve the affair in a one-on-one combat. After still more
bloodshed in which several Trojan champions die, Aeneas kills Mezentius and
his son while Camilla is laid low by an Etruscan arrow. In the final book, Turnus
challenges Aeneas, but Juno intervenes to save him and Aeneas is wounded by
an arrow. Venus supplies a drug to restore his health and inspires him to burn
Latinus’ city. Jupiter restrains Juno, but agrees to her request that Latium
endure and never adopt the Trojan name, manners or language. Aeneas and
Turnus now confront one another, and Turnus, bested by his rival, lies at his
feet and pleads for his life. Aeneas spies the sword belt of his boon companion
Pallas, son of Evander, whom Turnus has killed and taken from him to wear as a
trophy. Enraged, he thrusts his sword deep into Turnus’ heart.
Virgil spent the last three years of his life in Greece revising the Aeneid, which
he never completed to his satisfaction. In 19 BCE, he was persuaded by Augustus,
in Greece on his way back from Egypt, to return to Rome with him. On the
voyage, Virgil contracted a fever and died on 21 September. His Aeneid had a
long afterlife. It became a standard text in Roman schools and later, in medieval
Europe. As Virgil had hoped, his poetry became the point of reference for
subsequent Roman writers; Latin poetry and prose quote and make frequent
allusions to his works, as do later Renaissance writers like Dante, Ariosto, Tasso
and Milton.101 The Aeneid achieved oracular status. The Emperor Hadrian, like
many Romans, sought to learn his future by opening the book at random and
reading the first passage that struck his eye.102 The Sortes Virgilianae, as this
practice was known, survived into the modern era, where it was used by Horace
Walpole as a parlor game and taken more seriously by Charles I of England.
The Aeneid differs from the Iliad in many important ways, one of them being
the multiplicity of peoples with whom the Trojans interact, ally and fight. The
list of “others” begins with the Greeks, and their sack of Troy in Book Two. This
is the cause of Trojan suffering, the death of Aeneas’ wife and his flight to Italy.
Virgil’s negative depiction of the Greeks as booty-seeking barbarians stands in
sharp contrast to Homer’s more positive account of them. In the attack on Troy,
Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, “crazed with carnage,” wounds Polites, one of King
Priam’s sons. He flees to the altar in his parents’ house where he vomits out his
life blood in front of them, before Pyrrhus, his sword drawn, rushes in and runs
him through.103 An enraged Priam denies Pyrrhus’ parenthood, reminding

100
Ibid., 8.738–9.
101
Thomas, Virgil and the Augustan Reception; Quint, Epic and Empire.
102
Knox, “Introduction,” pp. 36–7. 103 Virgil, Aeneid, 2.620–59.
142 mozart and the enlightenment

instructed, and the following year, when Polina was arrested, he abstained in
the vote against her. He further abased himself by writing a note to the Central
Committee acknowledging the wisdom of their decision and that it was “in the
interests of the Party and the State.” Polina was liberated only after Stalin’s
death in 1953. Sarastro is more benign – or simply more secure and smarter
than Stalin – and reunites the lovers as soon as he has established mastery over
them. Has Tamino found enlightenment? Or, like so many idealistic twentieth-
century intellectuals, has he foolishly committed his life to the Party and its
Leader, who will ultimately betray him and his ideals? If so, Tamino is not the
hero of the opera, but its dupe.
Papageno offers a striking contrast. A simple Naturmensch, he wants nothing
to do with politics or enlightenment. He is nevertheless drawn into a relationship
with the Queen of the Night because she provides the necessities of life in return
for the birds he catches. Papageno is an informer; his colorful, singing birds
being allegorical references to anyone who stands out, speaks his or her mind or
acts independently and thereby constitutes a threat to the system, or at least that
part of it controlled by the Queen of the Night. Papageno’s hopes and energies
are focused on obtaining a wife and living with her free of the queen’s inter-
ference. He helps Tamino to liberate Pamina only because he cannot afford to
antagonize the queen. He subsequently keeps Tamino company during the first
of his ordeals because of his sense of loyalty to his new-found friend. We are
supposed to pity Papageno because he lacks the intelligence, imagination and
moral fiber to become one of the Consecrated Band. But in the land of Sarastro
and party discipline, caught in the midst of a no-holds-barred power struggle, the
upwardly mobile man is the fool. During Stalin’s purges and Mao’s Cultural
Revolution, workers and peasants were much more likely to survive than Party
members, and mortality was highest among those in leadership positions.
Papageno is wise in another way. Food, drink, companionship, sex and access
to the beauty of nature – the simple pleasures of life – may be the most
profound. Love and loyalty, and the thoughtfulness and self-sacrifice they
encourage, may constitute the real road to enlightenment. If so, the world
needs more Papagenos and fewer Taminos, a judgment with which Mozart
would almost certainly have agreed. His operas consistently reveal a preference
for lower-class figures over aristocrats, in large part because they are without
pretension and more in touch with their emotions and needs. This realization
casts the final scene of the opera in an even more jaundiced light. Having foiled
the plot against him and condemned the conspirators to their fate, Sarastro
proclaims in front of everyone else that the rays of sunshine – the sevenfold
circle of the sun is the symbol of Sarastro’s power – have driven out the night
and destroyed the hypocrites who obtained their power by fraud (“Die Strahlen
der Sonne vertreiben die Nacht, zernichten der Heuchler erschlichene
Macht!).” All we are missing is a show trial.
 d ie za u ber f löt e 143

Papageno also offers a nice contrast with Pamina. He, too, contemplates
suicide because he is deprived of love, and life without love has become
intolerable. He yearns for a Papagena, a boon companion, with whom he
can make love, cuddle at night and raise children. Papageno is never-
theless reluctant to throw away his life; after putting his head in a noose,
he desperately prolongs his count to three in the hope his fortune will
miraculously change. Sarastro has toyed with Papageno by initially send-
ing him Papagena in the form of an old hag and then snatching her away
when she reveals herself to be a young, voluptuous and hot-blooded
woman. Only when Papageno is willing to sacrifice himself is he rewarded.
The three young boys intervene at the last moment, and Papageno gets his
Papagena. They sing their joyous duet celebrating their love and politically
incorrect commitment to a large family.
The boys deserve a sidebar. They are prepubescent, sing with as yet
unchanged voices, provide sustenance and advice to Tamino and Papageno
and save Papageno from suicide. Their noble behavior, presumably inspired by
Sarastro, is intended as a counterpoint to the three women who work for the
Queen of the Night, lust after Tamino, send him on his quest for love, punish
Papageno by locking up his lips and assist the queen in her attempted assassi-
nation and coup. A distinguishing feature of communist regimes has been their
effort to indoctrinate children from a young age, infuse them with loyalty to the
state and even turn them against their parents. It is no surprise that Sarastro
uses young, impressionable minds to do his bidding.
Papageno’s fate can be read as a cautionary political message. Sarastro may
be an absolute ruler, but even he requires the acquiescence of the masses.
Toward this end, he must provide them with the necessities of life – as the
Queen of the Night does for Papageno – and also some hope of joy in their
personal lives. Pushed to extremes, the masses will take dramatic steps, even
rebel. But when their needs are satisfied, they are generally too focused on their
own lives to become truly loyal and self-sacrificing supporters of the system.
They will do what is expected of them as part of a calculated strategy to
minimize the intrusion of authority into their daily lives.
In a production of this kind a few changes must be made in the text. An
obvious example is early in Act I when Tamino tells Papageno that he is of
princely blood, and that his father rules over many lands and peoples.
References to gods and royalty would never do in Maoist China, so Tamino’s
father must become a regional party secretary. In Act II, the priest-speaker, now
a member of the Central Committee, will describe Tamino as a worker’s son.
Sarastro’s castle in the mountains will become the Forbidden City, and some
party-appropriate substitution must be found for the temple of trials. Appeals
to Isis and Osiris will be to Marx and Lenin. The odd reference to Red Guards,
imperialist enemies and the toiling masses can be inserted where appropriate.
And then, of course, there is the famous duet of Papageno and Papagena where
144 m o z a r t a n d t he en l i gh t e n m e n t

they imagine producing a score of little Papagenos and Papagenas. In one-

child-only China, this is strengst verboten, and Party officials must quickly put
an end to this joyous but politically incorrect fantasy.
Costumes offer considerable opportunity to reinforce the theme and message
of the production. The orchestra will wear Mao suits. Most of the cast will also
don Mao suits, drab uniformity being a central feature of China in the 1960s.
Sarastro and his Central Committee will do the same. Sarastro will be distin-
guished by the color of his suit – gray rather than blue – and the large Order of
Lenin on his chest. Members of the Central Committee will carry red Mao
books at their side at all times. Monostatos and his henchmen will dress as Red
Guards. So will the Queen of the Night and her three women assistants. As
Sarastro and the Queen of the Night are sworn adversaries but fundamentally
alike, it is important that they wear the same garb. Like Sarastro, the Queen of
the Night will sport a gray Mao suit to distinguish her from her assistants, but
might have a red silk scarf in lieu of an Order of Lenin, and a black veil, to hide
her face, in her opening aria.
Visual contrast will be provided by Papageno, Papagena and the dragon. The
bird catcher and his future bride will be clad in the usual brightly colored finery,
replete with requisite feathers. Papageno, of course, needs a birdcage. The
“running dragon of imperialism” must be a long, slinky dragon of the kind
featured at Chinese New Year’s celebrations. It will have some additional
distinguishing features. Its scales should be colored to reveal the patterns of
the American and Taiwanese flags. Elsewhere, it should have clearly visible
logos (e.g. Coca Cola, SONY, Mercedes) representing the kinds of products
Chinese with materialist inclinations aspire to own. Portable radios might hang
from the dragon’s scales and swing back and forth as it slithers across the stage.
At the risk of historical anachronism, it might even sport a baseball cap with a
Nike swoosh.
Removing Magic Flute from its make-believe, pseudo-Egyptian context and
staging it in a real and recent setting makes it possible to show the universality
of its underlying themes. Chief among these are the conflicts between freedom
and authority, and loyalty to friends and family versus allegiance to the state.
Schickaneder and Mozart, like Rousseau and Marx, hoped that these conflicts
were not innate to human existence; that they could be resolved in a just social
order upheld by an enlightened authority. Marx and Lenin nevertheless
expected these conflicts to be more acute during the period of building social-
ism; those with a vested interest in the old order would resist any change and
mobilize support by appealing to family ties and the base instincts of the
corrupt. This is what happens in Magic Flute. Marx and Lenin – neither was
known as an opera lover – would be cheered to learn that the Queen of the
Night, Monostatos and their accomplices end up in the dustbin of history. My
interpretation suggests that these conflicts are neither so one-sided nor so
readily resolved.
100 h om e r , v ir g i l , a n d i d e n t it y

The West represents order and unity – Augustus (the autocratic princeps) is
supported by Agrippa, in command of disciplined Roman forces. The East is
characterized by disorder; two commanders, Anthony and Cleopatra, lead a
ragtag collection of diverse and poorly coordinated eastern forces – Egyptians,
Indians, Arabs, Sabaeans – none of whom speak mutually intelligible languages.
The West displays masculine control, with Augustus firmly at the rudder, while
the feminine East is symbolized by Cleopatra’s ship and fleet, at the mercy of
the winds. The West represents cosmic order versus disorder, Olympian versus
monster gods and permanence and reason versus flux, nature and loss of
identity. Following their suicides, Anthony and Cleopatra are absorbed by the
Nile, leaving no traces behind.110
Quint boldly asserts that the East–West, male–female, division is a funda-
mental cultural orientation that is also central to Homer. I respectfully dissent.
While the Trojans and their allies are unquestionably Asian, they are portrayed
as fundamentally similar to the Greeks in every important respect. Only Paris
represents the feminized warrior, and he is scorned by other Trojans, including
his brother Hector. The Trojans and the allies are more unified than their Greek
adversaries, whose commitment to sustain the struggle is severely threatened
by discord between Achilles and Agamemnon. Achilles defeats Hector, as the
Greeks do the Trojans – not because Hector, his countrymen and their Asian
allies lack courage and discipline – but because the gods decree these outcomes.
Even in the Aeneid, these binaries are softened. Before the intervention of
Juno and Venus, Dido is decidedly masculine in her comportment. Like
Aeneas, she has successfully brought her followers to a new land, fought and
defeated local adversaries who opposed their settlement and rules in a seem-
ingly just and decisive way. With the support of her Tyrians, she is carrying out
the same kind of project that fate has decreed for Aeneas. She is transformed
by divine intervention, which misogynists could read as an attempt to put this
feminine upstart in her place. But there is no indication of this motive in the
text, only of idiosyncratic preferences, jealousies and plots of the gods that have
nothing to do with Dido’s gender.
Juno is said to love Carthage above all other cities and to park her chariot
and armor there. Her goal from the outset was for Carthage to rule over other
nations of the earth.111 She despises Troy and Trojans for petty, personal
reasons. Their founding king was Dardanus, son of Zeus and Electra.112 Zeus
has an erotic interest in Ganymede, a beautiful boy and son of a Trojan prince,
whom he brought to Olympus to serve as his cupbearer.113 Most galling of all
for Juno was the so-called Judgment of Paris, when Juno, Athena and Venus
demanded that he admire and rank their charms. Paris names Venus the most
beautiful as she has promised him the love of Helen, wife of King Menelaus

110
Virgil, Aeneid, 8.790–859; Quint, Epic and Empire, pp. 23–31.
111
Virgil, Aeneid, 1.14–28, 3.22–38. 112 Ibid., 1.35. 113 Ibid.
146 m o z a r t a n d t h e e n l i g h t en m e n t

claims, but their critique is a powerful one, and all the more so because of the way in
which drama and music act on the intellect and emotions of the audience.
Don Giovanni is a dystopia that exposes the inability of either the old order or
an Enlightenment-inspired one to fulfill human needs. The former relies on a
class-based hierarchy, superstition and oppression. Commoners have few
choices and must suffer the whims of those upon whom they depend for
sustenance or support. Aristocrats are not necessarily any freer. To the degree
they have internalized the moral codes of their society they must enact their
assigned roles and suppress their emotions and defer, or forever postpone,
gratification of ordinary human desires. Most lead crabbed, unfulfilled, unenvi-
able lives. This may be one reason why the women are open to seduction by
Don Giovanni. Zerlina aside, who is a lusty peasant, they are pathetic figures
who generally oscillate between passivity and hysteria.
Don Giovanni is an aristocrat cut loose from these traditional moorings and
associated constraints. He is a danger to himself, those around him and the
wider social order. He is usefully compared to Count Almaviva in Marriage of
Figaro, another Spanish aristocrat intent on imposing his political and sexual
will on others. Almaviva nevertheless adheres to most of the norms that sustain
his authority; he never uses violence or forces himself on anyone and accepts
defeat gracefully. He is an improving landlord, with a serious interest in his
estate and career, in contrast to the shiftless and unconstrained Giovanni, who
has no interest in his property beyond the income and venue it provides to
enable a life devoted to sexual adventure. An aristocrat and landowner in
backwards Spain, Don Giovanni is in other ways a modern figure. He has
liberated himself from religion, superstition and communal norms and is
unconstrained in pursuit of his appetites. He is intelligent, but his reason is
purely instrumental and never used to interrogate the ends he seeks.
Part of Mozart and Da Ponte’s thought experiment is to remove all organs of
coercion; there are no police or other authorities anywhere in sight in Don
Giovanni. Freed of internal and external constraints, they suggest that human
beings are unlikely to use reason to transform themselves into ethical beings, as
so many philosophers and writers from Rousseau on hope, and even predict.
Reason is more likely to be directed outwards, with the goal of satisfying
unconstrained and therefore more urgent appetites. This will not lead to a
more harmonious society, but one in which a minority assert its will and exploit
everyone else. This seemingly successful minority will not be happy, merely
driven. Don Giovanni embodies the fears of the Austrian counter-
Enlightenment and represents the precursor of modern buccaneers who pursue
à outrance, not only women, but economic wealth and political power. Some of
them, like the Don, Napoleon or Bernie Madoff, act in ways that are ultimately
self-destructive.
Magic Flute draws on golden age and utopian discourses to imagine a future
world that incorporates many golden age features. The latter are drawn from
 l ib e r a t io n ? 147

Masonic rituals and Jean Terasson’s Egyptian tale, Sethos. They lend color,
help conjure up the power of reason and ritual and allow utopia to be set in a
far-off locale and a distant time. There is no expectation that such utopias
are attainable in practice. In Magic Flute, there is no visible economy
beyond exchanging birds for food and wine, and nothing that hints at any
institutional structure. Tamino hails from some out-of-sight kingdom and has
entered the realm of the Queen of the Night, who appears to rule by fiat, as does
Sarastro.
Most utopias invoke fantasy to showcase values and practices their authors
would like to see emphasized or imported into their world. Magic Flute is no
different. It appears to offer Sarastro as the embodiment of an Enlightenment
ruler, whose directives derive from his mastery of reason and himself. His
subjects are compliant because they admire and respect him and expect to
improve themselves by following his example. Sarastro consults them on key
decisions, as he does when he considers making Tamino a novitiate.
Deliberating with reference to the general will, they offer unanimous and wise
counsel. Sarastro’s seemingly offers a stark contrast to the Queen of the Night’s.
She is ruled by emotion rather than reason, seeks selfish rather than collective
ends, is unduly interested in pomp and display – creating a market for those
birds and their feathers – exploits her underlings and teaches them by punish-
ment rather than by example. Worse still, she perverts motherly love by
pressuring her daughter to commit murder. In an extraordinary act of
Realpolitik, she allies with unscrupulous dissidents with whom she shares no
interest other than a putsch against Sarastro and takeover of his realm. It is
unfair to see the Queen of the Night as Empress Maria Teresa, as some have
suggested, but not unreasonable to see her as a personification of the ancien
régime. Her gender is a reflection of eighteenth-century stereotypes. It is a
vehicle for another charge against the ancien régime: effeminate rule by self-
interested and emotional male princes and kings who waste public funds on
frippery and display.
Schickaneder and Mozart have transformed Liebeskind’s innocent entertain-
ment, Lulu, oder Die Zauberflöte, into a powerful political allegory. It does not
so much point the way to a new order as show what is wrong with the present
one. What really makes the opera interesting is its subtle but compelling
critique of its own utopia. As we have seen, all is not sunshine in Sarastro’s
realm. It has many dark corners and when illuminated, they reveal troubling
parallels between Sarastro’s state and twentieth-century totalitarian regimes.
Political orders that claim to base themselves on reason and the common good
can end up more frightening than the self-serving and haphazard governance of
traditional eighteenth-century would-be absolutist monarchies. Don Giovanni
and Magic Flute interrogate two key aspirations of the Enlightenment: libera-
tion and reason. They reveal how each in different ways leads us down the road
to disorder or tyranny.
148 mozart and the enlightenment

Mozart’s operas tell us important things about identity. They reveal how
unstable identities are and how they depend on pomp, props and peer group
pressure. Clothes, gestures and behaviors encode specific identities. Aristocrats
in eighteenth-century operas, as in real life, were expected to dress and behave
in specific ways. They were wary of members of the lower orders who sought to
pass themselves off as nobility by mimicking its clothes and behavior. They
relied on face and name recognition and letters of introduction, but also laws to
prevent breaches of class barriers. In Europe, China and Japan, clothes were an
important marker of status. Numerous sumptuary laws offer testimony that
people everywhere wanted to improve their status and many sought to do so by
adopting the dress and manners of those higher up the social ladder.124
Sumptuary laws proved difficult to enforce, as Louis XIV discovered, but stayed
on the books in some Western European countries into the nineteenth
century.125
Very few lower-class characters in Mozart operas attempt to cross class lines.
In Figaro and Don Giovanni, where this does occur, it is at the insistence of an
aristocrat with a nefarious goal. Aristocrats routinely employ disguises. Don
Giovanni wraps himself in a cloak when he attempts to seduce or rape Donna
Anna, and later exchanges clothes with Leporello for purposes of seduction and
escape. Guglielmo and Ferrando adopt different national costumes and
Cherubino engages in cross-gender dressing, all with seduction in mind.
Following the tradition of aristocrats and majas in Spain, Mozart’s aristocrats
don masks, capes and other disguises to step “out of character.” For critics of the
Enlightenment, and for Mozart and Da Ponte, this kind of license almost
invariably threatens the social order, as it does most dramatically in Don
Giovanni. It can also promote greater sophistication that reaffirms, or at least
enables, the social order, as it appears to do for Guglielmo, Ferrando and their
mistresses in Così fan tutte.
By assuming disguises and practicing deception, at least some people come to
recognize that identities are malleable and not innate features of their being. If
restraint can be shed by changing one’s outward appearance, why not go a step
further and jettison associated manners, practices, affiliations and beliefs? By
this means people can remake themselves and their identities. Play, initially
motivated by sexual desire, can prove the catalyst for reflection and personal
transformation. Liberated, or partly liberated, people can choose to return to
their original costumes, manners, affiliations or beliefs in circumstances where
they consider it useful, but now do so in the form of a disguise. Da Ponte was a
master of reverse masking. Born Emmanuel Conegliano in the Veneto, the son

124
Hurlock, “Sumptuary Law”; Clunas, Superfluous Things, pp. 8–39, 151; Pomeranz, Great
Divergence, p. 131; Yamamura, Study of Samurai Income and Entrepreneurship, pp. 41–7.
125
Voltaire, Age of Louis XIV, p. 93; Le Roy Ladurie, Saint-Simon and the Court of Louis XIV,
pp. 28–32, 54–5; Elias, Court Society, pp. 120–1, 127, 146.
 learning from the ancients 103

Mingling in stock alone, the Trojans will subside.

And I will add the rites and the forms of worship,
make them Latins all, who speak the Latin tongue.128

With Juno’s assistance Aeneas now defeats Turnus and the epic comes to
an end.

Learning from the Ancients

My narratives stress numerous similarities between Homer and Virgil. Their
differences are equally striking and important for our understanding of identity
construction. To the extent that the group of bards responsible for the Iliad had
a political agenda it was class-based. The Iliad and the Odyssey are composed
for aristocrats. They vaunt their intelligence, leadership skills and willingness to
sacrifice material comforts for honor – in sharp contrast to plebian concern for
satisfying appetites, limited cognitive abilities and lack of steadfastness. In the
Iliad, common folk are set up as an “other” that justifies aristocratic privilege
and would help to maintain class divisions in the West for the next 2,500 years.
For Homer, as for nineteenth-century European nobles, class cuts across, and
often trumps, territorial, ethnic or religious divides. This may help to explain
why the Trojans share so much in common with the Greeks; more than they
do with their common folk. Greek and Trojan aristocrats need each other to
sustain and validate their common quest for aristeia and the justification it
provides for their privileges. The Trojans are nevertheless an important “other”
in the Iliad. They are represented in a nuanced way, not very differently from
the Greeks. Their character is constructed from the appearance, words and
deeds of individual actors, notably Hector, Priam, Paris, Andromache, Hecuba
and Aeneas. Like the Greeks, the Trojans reveal striking variation in their
character, courage, values and commitments. This variation is within camps,
not between them.
Identity construction in the Iliad offers a sharp contrast to the understand-
ings of Kant, Hegel and Schmitt. Trojans and Greeks are each other’s “other,”
but do not require this other to become themselves. Both groups possess strong
identities prior to the war and there is no evidence that they achieve greater
internal solidarity as a result of it. The war reveals how fragile Greek unity is,
and it is nearly destroyed by the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon.
The mutual dependence of Greeks and Trojans serves a different purpose. It
allows warrior aristocrats on both sides to compete for aristeia. This is only
possible against an adversary who shares the same values and practices. The
Trojan War is a hard-fought struggle, motivated initially by Menelaus’ need
to recover his wife and his honor. In practice, it becomes a competition for

128
Ibid., 12.967–71.
150 mozart and the enlightenment

Romanticism gave this metaphor a new twist. By positing something inherently

unique about individuals, it followed that everyone had a responsibility to
discover, develop and express their inner selves. Donning a mask and playing
a role was no longer a means of entering society and making meaningful
associations, but rather an impediment to internal discovery and self-
expression. Everyday dress and roles were reconceived as masks that society
foisted upon people. This compulsion was now a source of conflict between the
individual and society and set the stage for multiple projects intended to over-
come this tension or exploit it for positive ends. The next chapter, about the
German turn to the Greeks, explores one perceived solution to this problem and
its tragic consequences.
 5

Germans and Greeks

The Greeks are what we were; they are what we shall become again.
Schiller1

Like Mozart and his librettists, many German writers and philosophers were
drawn to the Enlightenment by virtue of its liberating potential, but they were
also frightened by the threat to order it posed. German intellectuals sought to
benefit from the Enlightenment, but also to tame it. Both tasks had to be
accomplished within a politically fragmented Germany ruled almost every-
where by conservative aristocrats. Given their goals and these constraints, they
turned to lost traditions, which they sought to reformulate and bring back to
life. This was manifest in the German obsession with ancient Greece, the
Brothers Grimm, von Arnim, Brentauo and Eichendorff ’s turn to folk culture
in the hope of recapturing wisdom from the past, the search for the Aryan
prototype for Christianity by religious scholars and philologists, the prolifer-
ation of stories, poetry and frescoes based on the medieval Nibelungenlied,
Wagner’s appropriation of the Edda for the theme of his Ring Cycle and
Nietzsche’s invocation of the Persian Zarathustra for his culminating philo-
sophical work.2 For nineteenth-century Germans, myths were templates for
building a national identity that would transcend regional, religious and class
differences.
Nostalgia for imagined pasts was not limited to Germany; it was a continent-
wide phenomenon, as intellectuals everywhere sought to cope with the con-
sequences of the Napoleonic Wars and, later, industrialization.3 The deeply-felt
German affinity for a highly idealized Greece must nevertheless be understood
as a response to the country’s late political, economic and cultural development
and the sense of inferiority it engendered. In practice, the turn to Golden Age
Greece would have profoundly negative consequences for Germany’s political
development.

1
Schiller, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, p. 84.
2
Marchand, Down from Olympus; Chytry, Aesthetic State; Ferris, Silent Urns; Williamson,
Longing for Myth in Germany, all make this point. Münkler, Deutschen und ihre Mythen.
3
Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present, p. 204.

151
152 g e r m a n s a n d g r ee k s

Greece rediscovered
Early modern Europe was largely ignorant of ancient Greece. The burning
of the library in Alexandria (417 BCE) destroyed much literature, including
many Greek tragedies. We have only seven of Sophocles’ 123 known plays.
Extant Greek writings made their way back to Europe via the Arabs, and
often in Arabic translation. Making use of these texts, the Renaissance
revived an interest in tragedy. The first staging of Sophocles’ Oedipus took
place in 1585 in Vicenza.4 Monteverdi wrote his two operas with Greek
mythological storylines in the first half of the seventeenth century. Opera
was intended to reproduce tragedy on the questionable assumption that
tragic characters sang their lines.5 Chapman, and later Pope, produced
good English translations of Homer and by the nineteenth century trans-
lating Homer had become something of a national pastime. Hobbes’
translation of Thucydides was central to his philosophical development.
But it was not until the nineteenth century that Greek texts become a core
component of the English university curriculum.6
In the United States, there was a general interest in Athens beginning in
the late eighteenth century, much of it connected to the country’s experi-
ment with democracy. If the pilgrims envisaged their colony as the new
Jerusalem, democrats understood America to be the new Athens. This
belief was reflected in place names and in the Greek revival in architec-
ture. The founding fathers were nevertheless more influenced by Rome
and English writings and political practices. They rejected the Athenian
model because they opposed direct democracy, and thought the experience
of a small city state not very relevant to the vast expanse of the thirteen
colonies. Following British practice, Latin and Greek nevertheless became
important subjects in the educational system.7
In Germany, Hellenophilia reached a level unequaled anywhere else. The
first German translations of Homer appeared in the second half of the eight-
eenth century. The poet and playwright Hölderlin authored widely read
translations of Sophocles in the early nineteenth century. The Germans
were unique in their efforts to rejuvenate tragedy, not as a genre, but as a
means of nourishing ethical and political sensibilities appropriate to the time.
This project had its roots in Kant, but really began with the publication in
1795 of Schelling’s Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism. Tragedy as used by
German philosophers, among them Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger,

4
Burian, “Tragedy Adapted for Stages and Screens.” 5 Ibid.
6
Turner, Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain; Stern, Rise of Romantic Hellenism in English
Literature; Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece; Porter, “Homer.”
7
Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece; Jenkyns and Turner, The Greek Heritage in
Victorian Britain; Turner, “Why the Greeks and not the Romans in Victorian Britain?”
106 h om e r , v ir gi l , a n d i d e n t i ty

stereotypy. In the Aeneid, Trojans and Italians fight, also over honor. Turnus is
unwilling to accept Lavinia’s betrothal to Aeneas because it would relegate him
to a subordinate status. In both epics, Greeks and Trojans make attributions
about the character of their adversaries on a purely individual basis and honor
those adversaries they respect.139
Both epics emphasize distinctiveness. For Homer, Greeks and Trojans are
marked out because of the demanding code of honor they share. Their warriors
compete in displaying excellence and they are not troubled that their values
and behavior make them all but indistinguishable from one another. These
similarities are essential because they make it possible for warriors on both sides
to compete for honor. They could not do this against less worthy and coura-
geous foes or those who did not adhere to the same rules of combat. This is also
true for Virgil’s Trojans, Tyrians and Italians, but with two interesting twists.
Trojans and Tyrians get on famously at first, largely by reason of their funda-
mental sameness. The Trojans lose sight of their Italian mission by blending
with the Tyrians, symbolized by Aeneas’ relationship with Dido. They must
leave to found their own empire in Italy, creating a rupture with the Tyrians
that becomes the basis for their future historical antagonism. Ultimately, Trojan
distinctiveness derives from their gods-given “world historical” mission to
found Rome and set it on its course of world conquest. As Sherif and Sherif
suppose, personal and family loyalties can be consistent with and even suppor-
tive of those of larger collectivities. They can also threaten them. In the Iliad,
both armies are composites of independent forces beholden to local leaders.
These lords have come to the aid of Agamemnon, Menelaus or Priam because
of family or personal ties and obligations. The Greek alliance threatens to
unravel because of Achilles’ feud with Agamemnon, but it is strengthened
because of the death of Patroclus. Personal obligation in the form of revenge
brings Achilles back into the fight.
Kant, Hegel and Schmitt consider hostility to others a key component of
national identity formation and solidarity. Classical texts and research in
psychology and comparative politics cast doubt on this assumption. So does
more recent history. We have many examples of “others” being created to
facilitate identity formation and solidarity, but also many instances in which
these processes were successful in its absence. Karl Deutsch describes the
boundaries of national communities in terms of a “we feeling” based on shared
symbols and a narrative of a common past. These symbols and their associated
narratives may be shaped around opposition and resistance to others, but, he
argues, it is by no means essential.140 Nor is it clear that many negative “others”
are brought into being with identity in mind. For the United States, the Soviet
“other” may have been necessary to garner support for a large defense budget
and a quasi-imperial foreign policy during the Cold War, but was hardly

139 140
Herodotus, Histories. Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication.
154 germans and greeks

Germans were different from British and Americans in their fascination with
tragedy and the degree to which it and ancient Athens became central to their
efforts to construct a national identity. Following the post-Napoleonic political
repression in Prussia, ancient Greece also became the foundation on which
alienated intellectuals attempted to construct an alternative cultural identity. In
this chapter, I ask why Germans became so fascinated with Greece, and with
Greek tragedy in particular. I examine the political consequences of this
involvement for Germany and Europe. In doing so, I distinguish philosophers
from publicists, as their motives and influence, while they overlap considerably,
are best analyzed separately. With the philosophers, the consequences of their
thought are diverse and cross-cutting. On the positive side, the development of
German philosophy and its progression from Kant through Heidegger, and
beyond to Gadamer, Benjamin, Arendt, Habermas represents one of the great
intellectual achievements of the modern era. This philosophical edifice may
nevertheless have had negative political consequences for Germany. It provided
the intellectual justification for what German historians refer to as the special
path (Sonderweg) of Germany’s political development in the nineteenth and
first half of the twentieth centuries and subsequently helped to alienate German
intellectuals from the Weimar Republic. The German fascination with tragedy
illustrates one of the most powerful truths of this ancient genre. Greek play-
wrights knew that the world is bigger than we are, that its dynamics will always
remain to a large degree opaque and that the consequences of our actions are
unpredictable. Like Oedipus, we never know when we are at a critical cross-
roads, or when actions, whose consequences appear transparent, will produce
outcomes diametrically opposed to those intended. It is no stretch of the
imagination to read the German fascination with tragedy as a tragedy in its
own right.
In considering the unfortunate and unintended consequences of Germany’s
intellectual trajectory in the nineteenth century, I want to disassociate myself
from those scholars and critics who have launched a broader critique against
modernity. Leo Strauss, a conservative political theorist, sociologist Zygmunt
Bauman and postmodernist philosopher and literary theorist Jean-François
Lyotard, attribute the worst political horrors of the twentieth century to the
Enlightenment and its unqualified faith in reason. Such a sweeping accusation
reflects the ideological assumptions of these authors more than it represents any
reasoned argument. It exaggerates the triumph of reason over tradition and
superstition and ignores the many benefits of reason, including modern science
and medicine, economic development and the gradual spread of racial, religious
and gender tolerance.
My argument is different and, I hope, more nuanced. Some of the
Germans in question, most notably Kant, are prominently associated with
the Enlightenment, but also with the emerging counter-Enlightenment.
Others, like Schelling and Hölderlin, are leading figures of the
 greece rediscovered 155

counter-Enlightenment.12 The Enlightenment elevated reason as the source of

all knowledge and science as its most perfect expression. History, art, poetry
and the world of feeling were deeply suspect and dismissed as props of the
church and aristocracy.13 Voltaire, following a line of argument that stretches
back to Plato, condemned poetry as a form of dangerous “figurative” lan-
guage.14 The counter-Enlightenment portrayed reason as a pernicious force
that divided man from nature and sought to reverse this trend by restoring
respect for feeling and art as its principal form of expression. Some of its
principal advocates envisaged art as providing an absolute standard of beauty
and the basis for the individual cultivation of the self. For Kant, the experience
of beauty is one in which imagination is harmonized with understanding
without the intervention or constraint of concepts, including those concerning
the moral good.15
Much of the German philosophical enterprise from Kant on must be under-
stood as a reaction to science and the skepticism and materialism it encouraged.
Schelling, Fichte and Hegel refused to concede that everything outside of
science was mere poetry and a lesser form of knowledge. Inspired by
Rousseau and Jacobi, Novalis lauds “feeling” as a mode of consciousness
distinct from conceptual knowledge and suggests that the negation of reflection
can put us on the path to being.16 Many of these philosophers and writers who
rejected the emerging model of science as the benchmark for knowledge,
developed the alternative conception of Geisteswissenschaft – which became
the “Humanities” or “interpretative sciences” of the English-speaking world.
They sought to provide philosophical foundations for it as well as appropriate
standards for its evaluation. This was a goal of Kant’s Critique of Judgment and
Schiller’s essay on “Aesthetic Education of Man,” and a major theme of Hegel’s
Phenomenology.17 Hans-Georg Gadamer observes that “Only when philosophy
and metaphysics came into crisis in relation to the cognitive claims of the
sciences,” did philosophers have the incentive to “discover again their
proximity to poetry which they had denied since Plato.”18
I am not the first to see a dark side to German philosophical idealism.
German cultural historians theorize a connection between German idealism
and fascism. German idealism drew on earlier esthetic ideals and moral con-
cerns. It emphasized the cultivation of Innerlichkeit (inner development) and

12
Larmore, “Hölderlin and Novalis”; Sturma, “Politics and the New Mythology”; Schmidt,
On Germans and Other Greeks, pp. 122–64; Beiser, German Idealism, pp. 391–6.
13
Kateb, “Utopia and the Good Life”; Dupré, Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations
of Modern Culture, pp. 187–228, on new approaches to history.
14
Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary. 15 Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.
16
Frank, “Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism.”
17
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 7, puts equal emphasis on reason, and rejects sentiment as a
guide.
18
Gadamer, Ästhetik und Poetik I, quoted in Bowie, “German Idealism and the Arts.”
156 germans and greeks

did not encourage political participation or even concern with political issues
and outcomes.19 Germany’s intellectual elite “tended to become estranged from
reality and disdainful of it. It lost the power to deal with practical matters in
practical terms.”20 Fritz Ringer maintains that German universities fanned this
sense of idealistic insulation and with it, an opposition to change on the
grounds that it represented a moral decline.21 Several generations of generally
apolitical Germans expressed alarm over the economic and social changes
associated with modernity, among them Thomas Mann, Ernst Troeltsch,
Friedrich Naumann and Christian Morgenstern. For some Germans, this
sense of alienation helped to nourish an anti-intellectual, anti-Semitic right-
wing discourse.22 The negative consequences of German idealism are all the
more poignant when we recognize the extraordinary intellectual contribution
of German idealism and its offshoots and the cosmopolitanism of the early
Romantics. The influence of German idealism has been so profound and
influential in how we have come to think about the modern world that it is
almost impossible to imagine ourselves and our world in its absence.
The great innovator and founder of the Idealist tradition was Kant, who
straddled the Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment. He employed rea-
son in the form of powerful, logical arguments to demonstrate its inability to
understand our relation to the universal, which he thought human beings
nevertheless struggled to comprehend. However, he also attributed great
power to beauty and nature and their ability to shape the self through their
apprehension by non-reflexive means; the intuition and creativity they
inspired could lead to understandings inaccessible to the theoretical sciences.
Reason and feeling, two parts of the self, could be brought into harmony and
provide a firm basis for morality. This belief was based on the more funda-
mental assumption of an isomorphism between man and nature and, as the
Critique of Judgment suggested, a purposive principle in nature. Kant and his
successors struggled to find new foundations for ethics, sought them in
human drives and capabilities that went beyond logical inquiry, brought
nature and beauty back into the purview of philosophy, and provided a
novel way of understanding the Greeks and Western history more generally.
Marxism, Freudian psychiatry and existentialism are direct outgrowths of
German idealism or dependent on them in important ways.
As my subject is complex, I adopt a layered approach. Each layer captures
one reason for German interest in Greek tragedy and ancient Greece more
generally. I begin with philosophy as an ethical project, then explore political
motivations, and finally explain the turn to tragedy with reference to Germany’s
situation as a late cultural developer. These three layers might also be conceived

19
Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, pp. 15–17. 20 Ibid., p. 15.
21
Ringer, Decline of the German Mandarins, p. 29.
22
Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair, pp. 15–17.
 learning from the ancients 109

Anglo-Canadians. The rhetoric of French separatism can be intense, but it

rarely affects interpersonal relations. Having spent a sabbatical year in
Montréal, I can attest that I was treated exactly the same way in shops, cafes
and social and professional encounters regardless of the language I spoke. These
cases, and others, suggest, as does psychological research, that even when
“othering” is pronounced, it need not be associated with the kind of stereo-
typing and hostility that poisons interpersonal relations.
The psychological and political science literature indicates that fundamen-
talist formulations of “others” are more ideology than reality. They are used
rhetorically to advance political projects, which in the case of Schmitt and
Huntington, must be considered nefarious. Homer and Virgil offer contrasting
understandings of identity that are associated with their very different goals.
Their conceptions are particularly germane to those who want to make inclu-
sion and tolerance the norm. Homer and Virgil offer discourses that find much
empirical support in contemporary psychological research, and whose starting
point is the understanding that national identity and solidarity are fully con-
sistent with, and even abetted by, policies of inclusion and non-stereotyped
understandings of “others.”
158 germans and greeks

the subject. His work pointed to the end of the philosophy of the metaphysical
and made tragedy appear an appropriate vehicle for reflection. Subsequent
German philosophers envisaged tragedy as a means of overcoming metaphy-
sics, understanding the course of history and preparing the way for a cultural
revolution. These philosophers also theorized about tragedy itself and sought to
evaluate it as an art form.

Art versus philosophy

Kant’s philosophical project was above all a response to Humean skepticism.
He sought to provide an alternative foundation for ethics that did not rely on
telos or natural law. His starting point was the assumption that it was impos-
sible for us to cognize our relation to the universal, but we could grasp our
moral need for understanding. Human nature compels us to seek universals.
We find them through faith, which is reason’s form of moral thinking and
allows us to affirm that which is real but inaccessible to theoretical cognition.
Kant effectively challenged a philosophical tradition that had dominated
Western thought since Plato had substituted philosophy for literature as
the appropriate means for exploring the human condition. Kant restored
literature’s role, giving it coequal status with philosophy.
Kant’s successors sought to build on his belief about the isomorphism
between the world and the self by providing firmer foundations for the nou-
menal self and its relationship to the empirical world. The attempt to overcome
Kantian dualism – noumenal and empirical selves – led some philosophers and
writers to aesthetics in the hope it would serve as an effective bridge between the
worlds of spirit and matter. Novalis and Hölderlin took this road, as did
Schelling and Hegel – all of whom were fellow students at the Tübingen Stift
(theological seminary).25 Hölderlin and Novalis imagined a level of being prior
to consciousness in which subject and object are not yet divided. This level of
being was not accessible to consciousness, only to art. Artistic genius, which
they thought arose directly from our being, was therefore the true route to
knowledge. Kant emphasized the role of genius in this connection in his
Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.26 Art opens up a realm to us that is unavailable
to reflection.
Hegel alone among the German philosophers would resist this move, insist-
ing that only abstract reflection can generate moral truths. Hegel reversed Kant,
who had defined freedom and its limitations in terms of the self’s rational
understanding of the noumenal world. For Hegel, it was the empirical world
that provided this guidance. In his imagined polis, ethical life (Sittlichkeit) arose
from civic interaction because the Greek world was still naïve in the sense that it

25
Nauen, Revolution, Idealism, and Human Freedom; La Vopa, Fichte, pp. 200–4.
26
Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, §§ 41–54.
 t he g r e e k s a n d p hi l o s o ph y 159

was not darkened by the shadows of individual self-reflection in search of

meaning and identity.27
Schelling and Kierkegaard followed Kant’s lead, as did Nietzsche and
Heidegger. Schelling’s Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (1795) – which
precede Hegel’s first major publication by a decade – reintroduced tragic art
into the philosophical discourse. Schelling describes tragedy as the highest form
of art and suggests that philosophy can be transformed through engagement
with it. His System of Transcendental Idealism (1800), speaks of philosophy
flowing back into the supreme art of poetry.28 Nietzsche would use the same
trope in the Birth of Tragedy (1872), where he wrote that: “Philosophy, which
was born and nurtured by poesy in the childhood of science, and which
accompanied all those sciences and brought them into maturity and comple-
tion in their sundry individual streams, now flows back into the universal ocean
of poesy, whence they all originated.”29 His approach to tragedy stands in sharp
contrast to W. A. Schlegel and the British classicist George Grote, both of whom
linked tragedy to democratic politics.30
Kant’s turn to literature occurred within his broader engagement with the
problem of judgment, specifically ethical judgment. He describes art as an
expression of the “free play” inherent in our nature. Here Kant takes a cue
from Aristotle, who understood art as a natural impulse and source of learning.
For Aristotle, however, art is defined by its mimetic character; it is an imitation
and distillation of real-life experience, although it also draws on other natural
impulses like harmony and rhythm.31 For Kant, as for Aristotle, art is education
in the most fundamental sense, and something only accessible to ethical beings.
Kant was nevertheless committed to renegotiating the relationship of the truths
generated by art and science. This required the liberation of the imagination
from any rules governing particular art forms. To reveal truths about the world,
art must go beyond mimesis to poisēs, the act of creation itself.32 Despite their
many differences, Hölderlin, Hegel and Nietzsche follow Kant in their recog-
nition of the force of art in human affairs. They do not envisage writing, style,
performance, pictorial images and rhythm as recherché academic concerns, but
as fundamental concerns of philosophy. Art and language are media in their
own right, that exist beyond and independent of concepts. They are – and here
forgive me for resorting of necessity to the kind of tortured language that
pervades German philosophy – the idiom of the idiom that eludes capture by

27
Especially, Phenomenology of the Spirit.
28
Schelling, Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism, and System of Transcendental Idealism,
3.627–8.
29
Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, section 3, 629.
30
Silk and Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy, pp. 297–331.
31
Aristotle, Poetics, 1448b7–1449a18.
32
Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment; Pinkard, German Philosophy, pp. 66–81; Schaper,
“Taste, Sublimity and Genius.”
160 germans and greeks

concepts. Art and language have the ability to speak to us directly. They can lead
us to new understandings of the world rather than merely express known
realities.33
Kant’s successors understood that philosophy and its concepts were embed-
ded in language. It encouraged the turn to art as an alternative to language, but
also the search for a new language for philosophy. Schelling developed the
notion of Bildungstrieb, the impulse to make art. Hölderlin, who declared that
“man is born for art,” initiated this move with his translations of Sophocles,
Greek poetry and an attempt to write his own tragedy.34 He followed the poetic
imperative in the hope that it would reveal the deepest possibilities of language
and thereby enable the rebirth of ethical human beings. Hölderlin aspired to
reconstruct the German language to make it more like Greek, and to speak and
write it with the syntax, word order and sensibility of that language. Although
German idealism rejected mimesis, Hölderlin engaged in what can only be
described as a kind of linguistic mimesis, and struggled to bring out the
“oriental” character of Greek life in his written work.35
Romanticism made artistic creation the vehicle of self-discovery, and the
artist the model human being. In 1788, Friedrich Schiller published “Die Götter
Greichenlands” (“The Gods of Greece”), which quickly became one of his most
influential poems. It contrasted the allegedly happy, harmonious and beautiful
world of the Greeks with the somber, materialist and anti-creative spirit of the
present day.36 In this poem and other writings Schiller propounded the idea of
self-realization through the aesthetic; life and form must come together in the
beauty of the living form (lebende Gestalt).37 “If man is ever to solve the
problem of politics in practice,” he wrote, “he will have to approach it through
the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes
his way to freedom.”38 In 1798, Friedrich Schlegel made a similar plea: “One has
tried for so long to apply mathematics to music and painting; now try it the
other way around.”39 For both writers, and German idealists more generally,
the relationship of the subject to the world is better mediated by feelings than
concepts. Schiller also had a political agenda. The French Revolution had

33
Taylor, Hegel, ch. 1.
34
Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, vol. II, p. 62, quoted in Schmidt, On Germans and Other
Greeks, p. 53.
35
Larmore, “Hölderlin and Novalis”; Sturma, “Politics and the New Mythology”; Schmidt,
On Germans and Other Greeks, pp. 122–64; Chytry, Aesthetic State, pp. 115–77; Ferris,
Silent Urns, pp. 158–200.
36
Schiller, “Die Götter Greichenlands,” first published in Wieland’s Der Teutsche Merkur in
1788.
37
Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp; Taylor, Hegel, pp. 17–20, 36–40.
38
Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man and Essays, p. 90.
39
Schlegel, Kritische Schriften und Fragmente 1–6 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1988), V, p. 41,
quoted in Bowie, “German Idealism and the Arts.” On Novalis, Kneller, “Poetic Science of
Moral Exercise in Early German Romanticism.”
112 m o z ar t a n d t h e e n l i g h t e n m e n t

Archbishop Colloredo, as an “inhuman villain,” and was kicked down the stairs
by his chamberlain for resigning his post.3 In Vienna, he mocked aristocratic
pretensions, sometimes signing his letters “Elder von Schwantz [Lord Pigtail].”4
Mozart and his collaborators were painfully aware of the creative, economic
and social constraints they faced. To maintain their psychological equilibrium,
Mozart and his librettists had to limit their economic and social aspirations.
Aristotle insists that the powerless cannot allow themselves to feel anger
because they are not in a position to satisfy the accompanying desire for
revenge. They can, however, experience this pleasure vicariously when
offenders receive their comeuppance.5 Mozart and Da Ponte sought such
satisfaction in their art by creating worlds in which they would like to reside
or in which aristocrats and kings were powerless, parodied and punished. In
Marriage of Figaro, Figaro’s opening cavatina, “Se vuol ballare” [If you want to
dance] asserts his equality, indeed, his superiority, over his employer the count.
It is sung to an aristocratic minuet, but one with second-beat accents that
suggest, at least metaphorically, that on this occasion Figaro is kicking the count
down the stairs.6 Happiness, Mozart wrote his father, “consists simply in
imagination.”7
Mozart was a liminal figure in a second sense. He had a strong positive self-
image as a musical genius but was treated as a servant and repeatedly humili-
ated by Archbishop Colloredo of Salzburg and his steward Count Arco. Mozart
fared better in Vienna. Through the salon of Count Franz-Joseph Thun he
made extensive contacts with the court and became friends with Gottfried von
Swieten, a major reform figure and leading representative of the Viennese
Aufklärung (Enlightenment). Mozart still struggled to make a living and rise
in status. His ambitions were ahead of his time. In the late eighteenth century,
poets were increasingly lionized as philosophers who propagated the concept of
artistic genius. Enlightenment philosophes looked to imagination to make
individuals unique. In 1768, Rousseau, in his Dictionnaire de musique, made
a plea for granting higher status to musicians. Beethoven would be the first
composer to cash in on growing public respect for, if not awe of, musical genius.
Mozart’s Vienna witnessed declining aristocratic support of musical establish-
ments and did not have a large enough middle class to support them. Nor were
there effective copyright laws. To make matters worse, Joseph’s war with the
Ottoman Empire brought to a quick end the economic boom that had

3
Mozart to his father, 24 March, 4, 8, 11, 18, 28 April and 9, 12, 16, 19 May 1781, Anderson,
Letters of Mozart, pp. 716–35.
4
Ibid., p. 37. 5 Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1370b11–12, 1379b17–19.
6
Cairns, Mozart and his Operas, p. 120.
7
Anderson, Letters of Mozart, Wolfgang Mozart to Leopold Mozart, 29 November 1777,
pp. 395–6.
162 ge r m a n s a n d g r e e k s

have failed. “How sad,” he lamented, “that I did not attempt to say what I had to
say as a poet.”42

Beauty and suffering

German philosophy’s interest in tragedy as art was inseparable from its con-
ception of beauty. Here, too, Kant is central because he emphasized the
importance for beauty and its relationship to ethics. Kant conceived of beauty
as the non-conceptual representation of a sensus communis. His successors
went beyond him in rejecting bourgeois conceptions of beauty. Art should not
be pleasing and soothing, but arresting and disquieting, like Greek tragedy.
Hegel, whom Heidegger called the last Greek, conceived of beauty as a finite
glimmer of the infinite.43 For Rilke, bourgeois beauty was stifling. It was
“nothing but the beginning of the terror that threatens to destroy us.”44 The
fascination with the darker side of beauty reaches its apotheosis in Nietzsche,
who was initially drawn to Wagner because of the latter’s use of dissonance in
his music. In Birth of Tragedy (1872), whose first edition was dedicated to the
Bayreuth composer, he called for the withdrawal of the beautiful from
consideration in art.
To nineteenth-century ears, musical dissonance was generally painful, which
provided another link to tragedy. Pain is a central feature of tragedy, and
knowledge, as the chorus in Agamemnon affirms, is won through suffering.45
Aristotle was also the first to theorize about this connection. He argues in his
Poetics that tragedy communicates knowledge by simultaneously evoking fear
and pity. This emotional state can bring about a catharsis: a purge of the soul
that restores its balance. Catharsis is a greatly diluted form of praxis, something
akin to an inoculation that gives us immunity by infecting us with a mild and
tolerable form of a pathogen. For Aristotle, the quintessential cathartic moment
in tragedy comes when we see ourselves as the blind Oedipus.46
Hölderlin is the first German to pick up on this theme. He declared true pain
inspiring and tragedy the highest art form because it celebrated suffering.
Tragedy brings us knowledge more through affect than reason, and emotions
that take us outside of ourselves. Hölderlin cryptically observes that Oedipus
“has an eye too many perhaps.”47 This extra eye is presumably his extraordinary
intellect that enables him to solve the riddle of the Sphinx, and every other
riddle, including that of his identity. His intellect is also his undoing. Only after

42
Nietzsche, Will to Power, “Aphorism” 822. See also Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spake
Zarathustra and Human, All Too Human.
43
Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit and Lectures on Fine Art; Schmidt, On Germans and
Other Greeks, pp. 89–121.
44
Rilke, Duino Elegies, First Elegy, p. 151. 45 Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 176–83.
46
Aristotle, Poetics, 1450a–b, 1452a1–10, 1453b1–2. 47 Hölderlin, “In lovely blueness.”
 the greeks and philosophy 163

he becomes blind does Oedipus learn from suffering and is ultimately able to
see and understand in ways he could not when he had two eyes. Blindness was a
time-honored trope in Greek culture and literature. The Greeks associated light
with life, and blindness with death. Blindness is also associated with wisdom.
Perhaps for this reason, Homer is always represented as blind, and the only
person who can see in the underworld is the blind prophet Teresias.

Tragedy and freedom

Tragedy reveals the power of destiny which in turn points to a new conception
of freedom. Tragedies teach us that we live in a world not of our making, one we
cannot control, but to which we are ultimately answerable. Schelling thought
tragedy offered insight into how human beings can confront the seeming
contradiction between freedom and necessity. His Tenth Letter opens with
the observation that mortals succumb to the power of the world, but do not
do so without a struggle. Like Oedipus, we must be punished for our struggle
against destiny, but that punishment brings recognition of our freedom. “It was
by allowing tragedy to struggle against the superior power of fate that Greek
tragedy honored freedom.” By trying to escape his fate and accepting his
punishment when he inevitably fails, man “demonstrates his freedom precisely
through the loss of this freedom.”48
Schelling, Hegel and Nietzsche are all convinced that tragic art can teach us
something essential about our position in a world larger and more complex
than any we can conceive. The quest for understanding is essential because
modernity demands new conceptions of self. The Enlightenment and
Romanticism inspired the goal of autonomous individuals who seek to express
their inner selves; people who have thoughts and feelings that distinguish them
from others. This is, of course, my fourth strategy of identity. This quest
widened the already existing tension between the individual and the group.
However, solitude and solidarity on the one hand, and self-expression and
group identification on the other, are not mutually exclusive binaries. One of
the overarching goals of German philosophy was to elaborate this truth, and its
protagonists turned to tragedy because of its ability to frame and present it so
effectively.

History and ethics

Beginning with Hölderlin, German philosophers considered themselves to be
living in an age of intellectual and ethical crisis. They attributed this crisis to the
failure of metaphysics, which for over two millennia had been the philosophical
basis of Western civilization. Humean skepticism proved the last nail in the

48
Schelling, “Tenth Letter.”
164 g e r m a n s a n d gr e e ks

coffin of Christian metaphysics, and the Kantian project was at its core an
attempt to find a new foundation for ethics based on reason and sentiment.49
Kant’s German successors were in awe of his philosophical innovation, but saw
problems with his attempted solution. They sought better answers and turned
to tragedy for their framework.
Destiny was critical to their proposed solutions. Greek tragedies are driven by
destiny, but it is the destiny of individual human beings that lies hidden within
them. Oedipus is once again the paradigmatic case. His fate is obvious to us at
the outset, in due course to those around him, and finally, to himself. Warned of
his destiny as a young man, he uses his impressive physical and emotional
powers to prevent it, and by virtue of his agency, brings this terrible prophecy to
fruition. The Germans depart from the Greeks in conceiving of destiny in
collective terms. It is not individuals, but history that reveals the collective
destiny of a people as it unfolds. Hegel and Nietzsche employ tragedy in a
double sense: to make sense of history, and through this understanding, to
provide a new foundation for ethics. Their starting point is classical Greece, the
last historical moment before philosophy and metaphysics became the
dominant intellectual framework.
Hume and Gibbon – typical representatives of the Enlightenment – scorned
history as a record of folly, although they became deeply engaged in its writing.
Kant, by contrast, approached history with reverence because he read it as the
story of humanity’s struggles to uplift itself morally. Hegel followed Kant and
was drawn to tragedy as a model for thinking about historical development. In
it he found hidden dynamics that moved social interactions at every level of
analysis. He reasoned that history was driven by the same dialectic of conflict
and recognition, and came to understand it as the efforts of the spirit to
recognize its individuality, by comprehending the universality in terms of
which it could come to know and differentiate itself. Like Schelling, he consid-
ered history tragic in its inexorability. Central to its development is the tragic
moment, which always takes the form of a confrontation with death in which
the truth is summoned or revealed. In such crises, the spirit faces the pure
singularity exposed by death, and comes to recognize itself and its
potentialities.50
Nietzsche interprets tragedy’s relationship to history differently. His start-
ing point is his well-known distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian.
There is a perpetual struggle between the Dionysian drive for self-
forgetfulness and the Apollonian one toward self-individuation. Classical
Greece was unique in its willingness to recognize, even celebrate, the irresolv-
able conflict between these drives, and the suffering it causes. Nietzsche

49
Shell, Kant and the Limits of Autonomy, on Kant’s commitment to God and Christian
morality.
50
Hegel, Philosophy of History.
 
v i va l a l i b e r t a 115

poem, Natur und Kunst, expressed fascination with nature, especially its ability
to impose form on all flora and fauna. The artist, too, must work within forms.
For Goethe and Schiller, classicism could help express and shape the character,
vision and order of humankind.22 Mozart responded favorably to this formu-
lation, which mirrored his approach to music. He consistently sought to
innovate without violating the general rules of the genres in which he worked.
He did the same in his private life where he improvised within, rather than
rebelling against, the rules of society.
Viennese musical classicism was an offshoot of Weimar literary classicism.
It developed from the earlier galant style associated with Johann Stamitz,
François Couperin, C. P. E. Bach and the naturalism of Gluck. Haydn and
Mozart were familiar with both styles and proponents of the latter. Like
Gluck, Mozart wrote music intended to express the feelings of the characters
on stage.23 In contrast to Gluck, he never abandoned form, but sought to work
within it, or to modify it to suit his dramatic ends. He remained faithful to the
guiding concept that individual elements should be subordinated to the whole
by homogeneity in rhythm and tempo. His individualism would find expres-
sion in counterpoint, orchestral coloring and melodic themes that allowed him
to transform a genre while adhering to its formal rules. His most significant
structural innovation was the ensemble, which he developed into a complex
musical form in its own right.24 In Idomeneo (K. 366) the integration of voices
in its ensembles aroused opposition from soloists, who saw them as under-
mining their star status and with it, the possibility of being the unchallenged
center of attention.25
The most revealing statement of Mozart’s aesthetics is contained in a letter to
his father about Die Entführung aus dem Serail [The Abduction from the
Seraglio]. He explains how he has captured Osmin’s rage and desire for revenge
by going from F, the key of the aria, to A minor, a related key. “Passions,
whether violent or not, must never be expressed in a way as to disgust, and
music, even in the most terrible situations, must never offend the ear.”26 Like
Goethe, Mozart came to believe that freedom was best achieved through
mastery of the rules – of all forms of music and opera. Rules should be exploited
imaginatively, even bent, but rarely, if ever, violated.
Although his librettists were important, Mozart is the central figure of this
chapter. In baroque and absolutist Salzburg, he was treated as a servant. In
Vienna, he was sometimes compelled to take his meals in servants’ quarters, but

22
Ibid., p. 174.
23
Strohm, Essays on Handel and Italian Opera, pp. 93–5; Cotticelli and Maione,
“Metastasio,” on the evolution and conventions of opera seria.
24
Charlton, “Genre and Form in French Opera.”
25
Ibid., p. 177; Clark, “Ensembles and Finales.”
26
Wolfgang Mozart to Leopold Mozart, 26 September 1781, Anderson, Letters of Mozart,
pp. 768–70.
166 g e r m a n s a n d gr e ek s

this project as the means by which Germany could gain honor in the modern
world. There was no single image of this idealized Greece; multiple and cross-
cutting depictions were advanced by German writers. Enlightenment-inspired
reformers like Winckelmann and Humboldt conjured up a rational, ordered
society that would enable human beings to discover their full intellectual and
artistic potential. There was a darker, “oriental” Greece, first invoked by
Hölderlin, and later elaborated historically by Jacob Burckhardt. It was not a
land of Enlightenment values, but a world of intense conflict, where construc-
tive and liberating forces struggled with destructive and tyrannical ones, all
within the confines of the family and polis. As Greece was generally assumed to
have given birth to Western civilization, the strangeness of this darker formu-
lation suggested – and it was intended to – the extent to which we are strangers
to ourselves.

Tragedy and politics

In pre-revolutionary France, literature was a vehicle for opening up space
where the “discourse of self, blocked by social prohibitions and the absence of
an interlocutor,” could unfold.55 Something similar happened in late eight-
eenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany. Kant’s Germany was divided
into a myriad of political units, most of which were ruled by unimaginative
princes and aristocrats, increasingly jealous of the commercial classes and
actively hostile to intellectuals. The conflict between the old and the new grew
more acute by reason of the French Revolution, French occupation and
annexation of the left bank of the Rhine, Napoleonic conquest of much of
Germany and the post-Napoleonic repression by German rulers of reform
and reformers.56
I previously alluded to the Kantian project and how it led German philoso-
phers to the Greeks. They were not the only Germans of the period to look to
tragedy for renewal. German intellectuals did so more generally, and one reason
for this had to do with the German aristocracy and its heavy investment in
baroque architecture and decoration. Many German intellectuals found it
suffocating in form and substance and another expression of the confining
political systems in which they lived. The baroque was intensely decorative, left
no space untouched and drew primarily on religious and pastoral themes.
More importantly, it helped to sustain a discourse that sought to reconcile the
population to the aristocratic order. This order and its artistic projects became
increasingly anathema to many progressive intellectuals, and all the more so

55
Jean M. Goulemot and Didier Masseau, “Naissance des lettres addressé à l’écrivain,” in
Écrire à l’écrivain, Textes rèunis par Josè-Luis Diaz, Textual, no. 217 (February 1994), p. 10,
quoted in Seigel, Idea of the Self, p. 235.
56
Pinkard, German Philosophy, pp. 82–5; Blanning, French Revolution in Germany.
 t r a g e dy a n d p o li ti cs 167

after the French Revolution.57 In the first instance, therefore, the rediscovery of
Greece was part of the search for freshness, balance, reason and limits –
politically as well as artistically. This may help explain why the Greece
embraced by German intellectuals was not the historical Greece – about
which little was known in any case – but a highly idealized Greece of reason
and “noble simplicity.” Such an image could serve as a model and lodestone for
alienated intellectuals committed to restructuring their society through a
cultural and educational revolution.
Many German intellectuals initially welcomed the French Revolution, as they
considered it a challenge and opportunity for the “German nation.” Enthusiasm
soured when the revolution gave way to the Terror, Napoleonic Empire and
French universalism was superseded by cultural and political imperialism. As
the French Revolution claimed to embody Enlightenment principles, the vio-
lent course of the revolution and its foreign conquests brought about disen-
chantment among many German intellectuals with the Enlightenment and, for
some, with democracy more generally. Reason, unshackled from traditional
restraints, appeared to have produced the very opposite of a just, ordered and
secure society.58 As we observed in the previous chapter, this perspective is
evident in Don Giovanni, which premiered two years before the French
Revolution, and Die Zauberflöte, which had its first performance two years
afterwards.
German intellectuals were increasingly drawn to the counter-Enlightenment,
a catch-all term for diverse movements and intellectual orientations, including
conservatism, critical philosophy, historicism, idealism, nationalism, revivalism
and holism. Counter-Enlightenment thinkers rejected the expectations of the
Enlightenment as naїve and dangerous; they saw the world as complex,
contradictory, composed of unique social entities in a state of constant
flux. They rejected the Lockean conception of a human being as a tabula
rasa, and the mere sum of internal and external forces, and its emphasis on
body over soul, reason over imagination and thought over the senses. They
insisted on a holistic understanding that incorporated and overcame these
dichotomies, and understood that individuals and social collectivities alike
were attempting to discover and express their authenticity.59 The counter-
Enlightenment had begun in France before the Revolution and gained a
wider European audience through the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It
found German spokesmen in the 1770s, among them Hamann, Herder, and
Lavater and Möser, the young Goethe, the dramatists of Sturm und Drang and

57
Honour, Neoclassicism.
58
Pinkard, German Philosophy, pp. 82–4; Sturma, “Politics and the New Mythology.”
59
Frank, Einführung in der früromantische Ästhetik; Boyle, Goethe; Beiser, “Enlightenment
and Idealism”; Dahlstrom, “Aesthetic Holism of Hamann, Herder, and Schiller”; Behler,
German Romantic Literary Theory; Pinkard, German Philosophy.
168 g e r m a n s a n d g r e e ks

Schiller.60 In literature it found expression in the early Romanticism

(Frühromantik) of Novalis (Friedrich Hardenberg), the Schlegel brothers and
Christian Friedrich Tieck, in religion with Friedrich Schleiermacher, and in
philosophy with Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg F. W. Hegel.
Tragedy captured, or allowed the expression of, the principal concerns of the
counter-Enlightenment. It balanced reason with feeling, and physical sensa-
tions with cognition, rooted individuals in their society and its historical
development. It conceived of human beings and their societies as having
made fragile, ultimately indefensible and ever evolving accommodations with
the irreconcilable polarities of social existence. Hegel revolutionized the study
of tragedy by directing attention away from tragic heroes to tragic collisions.
Tragedies, he observed, place their characters in situations where they must
choose between competing obligations and associated conceptions of justice.
Their choices propel them into conflicts with characters who have made differ-
ent choices. The polarities included family versus civic commitments, freedom
and authority, and above all else, individual assertion and the certainty of death
and oblivion. Conflicts arise not only as a result of these choices, but even more
from the inability of tragic characters to empathize. They understand the
other’s position as a reality without justification (rechtlose Wirklichkeit).61 In
Antigone, the eponymous heroine’s loyalty to her brother and the gods bring
her into conflict with Creon, who is just as committed to upholding civic order
and his authority as head of the family. There are lesser collisions between
Antigone and her sisters, Creon and his son and Creon and Teresias, each of
them emblematic.
Although they looked askance at autocratic German governments, many
German intellectuals nevertheless felt humiliated by Prussia’s defeat, all the
more so as they had become deeply invested in the idea of the German nation.
German writers and philosophers were not immune to nationalism and
encouraged the idea that Germany could become the midwife of a spiritual
revolution that would succeed where the political revolution of France
had failed. Schiller, Fichte, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Schelling and Hegel
were committed to this project. The writings of Nietzsche, although scornful
of nationalism, were also infused with the idea of the special mission of
Germany.
The hopes of German philosophers, writers and political liberals were dashed
by the reaction that set in once the Napoleonic threat receded. This was
particularly significant in Prussia, the most powerful German political unit
after Austria. Following the twin defeats of Jena and Auerstädt in October 1806,
a reluctant Prussian king turned to reform-minded officials (e.g. Hardenberg,

60
Dahlstrom, “The Aesthetic Holism of Hamann, Herder, and Schiller.”
61
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 332; Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy, pp. 201–2;
Taylor, Hegel, p. 175; Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks, pp. 89–121.
 tragedy and politics 169

Boyen, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau) to restructure and rebuild his army and

mobilize national support for the war effort. They imposed universal conscrip-
tion, opened the officer corps to qualified commoners, removed incompetent
officers from command and limited the arbitrary and even draconian military
system of control and punishment. They expected these reforms to go hand-in-
hand with abolition of serfdom and estate privileges and improvements in the
general education system. In the words of Gneisenau, Prussia had to be
restructured as a “triple alliance of arms, science and constitution.”62 Political
and moral renewal was incompatible with absolute monarchy. Prussian Junkers
(members of the landowning aristocracy) felt threatened by the reforms, and
after Waterloo, the king became increasingly receptive to their complaints. For
their part, the reformers overplayed their hand, quarreled among themselves,
and by 1819, had been driven from office. German liberals and reformers were
shut out of Prussian politics until the revolution of 1848 briefly put them center
stage.63 Excluded individuals and groups not infrequently seek alternative
means of expressing themselves. They may create what Johannes Fabian has
called “terrains of contestation,” where they are free to maneuver and create
narratives that may ultimately influence a wider audience, and through them,
the dominant groups in the society.64 As early as 1801, Schiller described
Germany as an “inward Empire.”65 After 1820, conceptualization of Greece
and Greek tragedy became increasingly widespread.
This situation was not unique to German intellectuals. John Locke’s commit-
ment to individualism might be understood as a reaction to the hierarchical
nature of seventeenth-century English social relations and his dependence on
powerful patrons. His letters to his patron Alexander Popham are positively
fawning, in accord with conventional practice. The elaborate etiquette, unima-
ginative thinking and cramped cultural life of the court were offensive to Locke
and all the more painful given the openness and intellectual vitality of his circle
of friends. This contrast may have provided a strong motive to invent a
conception of the person that encouraged people to reject the model of the
courtier in favor of the noble character.66 Locke imagined a world in which he
would feel at home and fulfilled.
Chapter 4 depicts Mozart and Da Ponte in a similar light. Mozart was
humiliated by his Salzburg employer and struggled to make a living in Vienna

62
Quoted in Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to Bismarck, p. 38.
63
Simon, Failure of the Prussian Reform Movement; Nipperdey, Germany from Napoleon to
Bismarck, pp. 237–80; Kosselleck, Preussen zwischen Reform und Revolution, pp. 318–32;
Levinger, Enlightened Nationalism.
64
Fabian, Moments of Freedom.
65
Conze, “‘Deutschland’ und ‘deutsche Nation’ als historische Begriffe.”
66
Yolton, Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding; Dunn, Locke, “From Applied
Theology to Social Analysis” and “Individuality and Clientage in the Formation of Locke’s
Social Imagination”; Seigel, Idea of Self, p. 88.
170 g e r m a n s a n d g r e e ks

and rise in status. His ambitions were ahead of his time. Beethoven would be the
first composer to cash in on growing public respect for, if not awe of, musical
genius.67 Like Locke, Mozart and Da Ponte had little choice but to reach an
uneasy and clearly uncomfortable accommodation with highly-placed represen-
tatives of the existing order. This made it possible for them to practice their
respective arts and achieve a limited degree of independence.68 Rebellion was
restricted to their art, where they were inspired to create imaginary worlds in
which they or others might express themselves.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth century, many German intellectuals faced a
similar problem and it had important implications for literature and philoso-
phy. This problem existed at the individual as well as the collective level. The
biography of Johann Gottlieb Fichte offers insight into the constraints faced by
individuals from non-aristocratic backgrounds. By dint of his phenomenal
memory and ability to recite sermons verbatim, he escaped from his family’s
Saxon village and weaving trade. In 1770, a local aristocrat sponsored his
education with the idea that he would become a minister. Fichte’s unorthodox
religious views, combative posture and insistence on being treated as an equal,
alienated sponsors and employers and consigned him to professional limbo for
some years. So did his plebian origins, regional speech inflection and aristo-
cratic prejudices against people of lower-class origins. He was denied entry into
the system of patronage that reserved the best educations and positions for the
sons, deserving or not, of well-born families. The frustrated Fichte described
himself at “ceaseless war” against “a host of prejudices, obstructions, and
insolences of all sorts.”69
In 1792, Fichte published his first major publication, which instantly made
him the most prominent of Kant’s disciples. However, this work and subse-
quent ones earned him an undeserved reputation as a Jacobin, and he was
fortunate to secure a teaching post at Jena in 1794. There, he tried and failed to
secure academic freedom for the staff, an involvement that cost him his job. Of
all the German thinkers of his era, Fichte was arguably the most committed to
the construction of the self as a fully autonomous moral agent. Before the end of
the eighteenth century he had drawn on his reflexive premise to show how the
self might be developed and situated in a modern world characterized by the
increasing importance of what Hegel would call civil society. Fichte conceived
of the self very much in terms of its public presentation and stressed its
rhetorical nature, somewhat akin to self-fashioning through role playing. This

67
Beales, Joseph II, vol. II, pp. 555–87.
68
Da Ponte would emigrate to New York where he could lead a freer amorous and
professional life.
69
La Vopa, Fichte, pp. 2–3, 10, 13, 17–18, 30. Quote on p. 49, citing Fichte to Weisshuhn, 20
May 1790.
120 m o za r t a n d t he en li gh t e n m e n t

opens with the overture and concludes with the arias of Donna Anna and Don
Ottavio, also in D.47
Mozart assigns each character a tonal range and set of musical inflections.
When he is not dissimulating, Don Giovanni sings in D and B-flat major, as he
does in “Fin ch’ han dal vino” and “Deh vieni all finestra.” When he confronts
adversaries, beginning with the Commendatore, he sings in D major.48 This
structure, and that of individual numbers, conveys insight into the characters and
their emotions. In “Là ci darem la mano” [There we shall clasp hands], Mozart
uses a variation of the traditional sonata form – A–B–A’ – by opening with a
double exposition in the form of A–A’. The exposition is repeated with some new
material before the aria moves to its development and recapitulation phases. The
double exposition and its repeat give first Don Giovanni and then Zerlina the
opportunity to sing about their mutual attraction. There are slight differences in
their perspectives, but the sonata form alerts us to the likelihood that they will be
resolved in the development section, as indeed they are. Zerlina nevertheless
remains ambivalent, and Mozart signals her hesitation by slurred notes and
chromaticism (the use of pitches, chords, and keys not associated with diatonic
collections). The Don is given a major key to pursue Zerlina. Horns warn of his
duplicity but woodwinds provide an erotic line that facilitates seduction. The
voices of the Don and Zerlina, which start out alternating, gradually come
together and merge as Zerlina appears to give in to his advances.49
Tirso de Molina’s original version of Don Juan was a simple morality tale; the
Don receives eternal damnation for his sins; the subtitle of the opera is Il
dissoluto punito [The dissolute punished]. By the eighteenth century, the play
had become something of a farce, and Don Juan was generally portrayed as a
buffoon, as he was in the Bertati-Gazzaniga opera of 1787. An earlier version by
Goldoni makes sure that the Don is hit by lightning and dies of natural causes.
Mozart’s contemporaries found Don Giovanni an enigmatic opera. Some
objected to its mix of seria and buffa or to the challenging complexity of its
score. Others were repelled by the character of Don Giovanni and the forceful,
even favorable way he is presented. There was also the problem of a nodding,
perambulating and speaking statue, leading one incredulous reviewer to
remark: “A shame it does not eat too.”50 Later Romantics idolized the Don
for his daemonic qualities and unwavering pursuit of sexual conquests. E. T. A.
Hoffmann and Kierkegaard, and subsequently, George Bernard Shaw and
Richard Strauss, described him as a Faustian figure or superman and expression
of a primitive life force.51 Twentieth-century critics lean toward psychological

47
Ibid., pp. 186–7, 302. 48 Kivy, Osmin’s Rage, p. 203.
49
Singer, Mozart & Beethoven, p. 18, on the merging of voices.
50
Cited in Gutman, Mozart, p. 685; Campana, “To Look Again (at Don Giovanni).”
51
Kierkegaard, Either/Or, p. 91; Russell, Don Juan Legend Before Mozart, pp. 407–43;
Eldridge, “Hidden Secrets of the Self.”
172 germans and greeks

German turn to a romanticized medieval past was a response to widespread

recognition that they could not otherwise compete with the French revolu-
tionary myth.72
Germany’s sense of special mission and glorification of the state were neither
arbitrary nor unique. Measured against Western values and accomplishments
in the eighteenth century, Germany was an under-achiever. It had failed to
unify, and its leading states (Prussia and Austria) performed poorly on the
battlefield, having been defeated decisively by Napoleon at Jena, Auerstädt and
Austerlitz. Subsequent coalition victories against Napoleon (e.g. Leipzig and
Waterloo) did not eradicate the sense of humiliation felt by many German
aristocrats, military officers, intellectuals and members of the emerging middle
class. A world view that offered different criteria of excellence, that stressed
German intellectual and artistic creativity, and the solidarity and the world
mission of the Volk, and downgraded the value of commerce and constitutional
government, served to buttress the self-esteem of Germans of all classes. By
emphasizing the role of the state as both the instrument and expression of
this mission – a theme developed by Fichte that received its fullest expression
in the philosophy of Hegel – power could be concentrated in ways that
facilitated unification and the emergence of imperial Germany as the dominant
military power on the continent. This power would ultimately enable Germany
to compete for standing in more traditional ways. Even Nietzsche, who came
to despise Prussian militarism, hoped that art could help the elite raise the
masses above the “dirt” of daily politics.
Russia, an even later developer, developed an ideology based on the same
anti-Western orientation. Russian nationalism stressed moral over material
forces and contrasted the holy mission of the Russian people to Western
rationalism and materialism. Slavophil ideology was völkisch, emphasized the
communal life of the Rus in contrast to the individualism of the West. Aleksei
S. Khomiakov, Konstantin S. Aksakov and Fyodor Dostoevsky were among
those who propagated the belief that Russia had inherited the Christian ideal of
universal spiritual unification from Byzantium, while the decadent West,
formed in the crucible of Roman Catholicism, preserved the old Roman
imperial tradition.73 Russia was the self-described “big brother” to Slavs else-
where in Europe, an ideology that prompted provocative policies in the Balkans
where Russia increasingly came into conflict with Austria by virtue of its nearly
unqualified support of expansionist Bulgaria and Serbia.74

72
Münkler, Deutschen und ihre Mythen.
73
Walicki, Slavophile Controversy; Riasanovsky, Russia and the West in the Teaching of the
Slavophiles; Pipes, Russian Intelligentsia; Gleason, European and Muscovite.
74
Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War, pp. 141–2; Jelavich, Russia’s Balkan
Entanglements, pp. 248–65; Schroeder, “World War I as Galloping Gertie.”
 t he t r a g e d y o f g e r m a n ph i l o s op h y 173

In Germany, romantic nationalism was always at odds with traditional

conservatism, but had less difficulty in blending with more modern approaches
to politics, including socialism. The Nazi Party appealed to romantic nationalist
and völkisch strands of opinion, but made only limited inroads with workers,
and at best gained the tacit support of the traditional conservative elite by virtue
of its successful economic and foreign policies. In Russia, these different strands
of opinion found expression in different political movements, although there
was considerable overlap. In pre-war Russia, Slavophil sentiment was most
prevalent within the aristocracy, but found some support among intellectuals,
Dostoevsky being a case in point.75 Liberal constitutionalism was represented
by the Kadet Party, the largest party in the National Assembly (Duma).
Socialism blended with nationalism and gave rise to a series of movements,
including Zemlya i Volya (land and liberty), which, in the 1880s, sent students,
without notable success, to live with peasants and mobilize their support.76
More Marxist socialists envisaged the workers as the vanguard of the revolu-
tion. The avowedly internationalist Bolshevik faction emerged as the dominant
force in post-war Russia, renamed the Soviet Union.77 Despite its strong anti-
nationalist ideology, part of the appeal of revolutionary socialism to Russian
intellectuals had to do with their expectation that it would accelerate Russian
development and gain new respect for their country as both a great power and
model for the rest of the world.78
As in Germany, this form of cultural nationalism assumed racist form and
gave rise to extreme xenophobia and anti-Semitism. In both countries, cultural
nationalism was fed by deep insecurity. In Germany, it was the result of late
cultural and economic development, defeat and occupation by France and
delayed political unification. In Russia, much the same situation prevailed. It
had been unified and a great power for some time, but was economically and
technologically backwards, and had barely avoided defeat by Napoleon. Even
more than in Germany, the indigenous political elite feared the consequences of
the spread of Western values and ideas.

The tragedy of German philosophy

The German–Russian comparison is revealing in two ways. It supports the
claim of causal links between late development on the one hand and insecurity,
xenophobia and racism on the other. Elsewhere I have argued that this pattern
is not limited to Germany and Russia; late developers on the whole tend to have
influential segments of their intelligentsia that adopt xenophobic, anti-Western

75
Pipes, Russian Intelligentsia; Gleason, European and Muscovite.
76
Venturi, Roots of Revolution, esp. pp. 253–84, 469–506.
77
Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence, pp. 12–31.
78
Pipes, “Historical Evolution of the Russian Intelligentsia”.
174 ge r m a n s a n d g r e e k s

discourses that stress the alleged superiority and communal orientation of their
cultures.79 Japan is particularly interesting in this connection. It was another
late developer where a discourse of xenophobic nationalism became trium-
phant. Japanese intellectuals were drawn to German philosophy and tragedy,
which, suitably integrated with existing traditions, helped to define a special
path for Japan.
Early and superficial efforts to connect German philosophy to fascism
emphasized the collaboration of Heidegger, who briefly served as rector of
the University of Freiburg under the Nazis, and the writings of his mentor
Nietzsche, whose call for nihilism and the rise of an Übermensch (superman)
seemed to provide a link to Hitler. Nietzsche also introduced the concept of
race into his discourse, although it is clear that he conceived of it in a cultural,
not a biological sense. The link was made more explicit by Heidegger’s inau-
gural speech, which welcomed Hitler’s rise to power as a positive development,
and the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche – with the willing aid of his sister – as
an ideological prop for their regime. In fairness to poor Nietzsche, we
should note his unwavering public opposition to German nationalism and
anti-Semitism.
Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch was very different from Hitler’s and
motivated by benign concerns. Nietzsche aspired to develop a new aesthetic
consciousness to free people from the limitations of conventions and accepted
discourses, of which Christianity and science were the most deeply entrenched
and constraining. Such a consciousness would enable and facilitate self-
expression and self-knowledge, although it, too, would have to be challenged
and replaced before it solidified and became life-restricting. Humanity, its art
and other creations – as Greek tragedy recognized – could at best hope to
achieve a precarious balance between perfect form and utter chaos. To achieve
this recognition, it was first necessary to approach chaos, and Nietzsche looked
forward to the arrival of a Zarathustra-like superman who would lead the way
to a new barbarism. Unlike the savage life of the prehistoric past, the new
barbarism would free the human spirit and empower man to lead a more
creative life.80
A more compelling line of argument linking German philosophy and fascism
focuses on the consequences of German philosophy, not the political ideas of
individual philosophers. German idealism helped to create conditions favorable
to German imperialism in World War I and fascism in the 1930s. This was due
to its underlying values and aspirations. Kant’s philosophical corpus was
abstruse, and the philosophy of his successors was even more divorced from
everyday language, events and concerns. The corpus of German philosophy

79
Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations, ch. 8.
80
Ascheim, Nietzsche Legacy in Germany; Golomb and Wistrich, Nietzsche, Godfather of
Fascism?
 don giovanni 123

diplomat and neo-classical author, to the libertine José Cadalso, a colonel,

poet and playwright. Most were committed to bringing Spain up to
Enlightenment standards of discipline, work and classification. They imme-
diately ran afoul of the Church and aristocracy. The Church feared loss of
control and considered it better for people to beg and get its charity than to
become economically, politically and intellectually independent. The aris-
tocracy was overwhelmingly a rentier class relatively content with its lot as
long as their estates provided enough income for a life of luxury in Madrid.
Modernization would require aristocrats to return to the provinces to take
an active role in managing their estates. The peasantry had little reason to
believe it would benefit from reforms; they rightly understood them only to
involve more work. Moreover, in eighteenth-century Madrid, as in Mozart’s
Vienna, ordinary people were largely dependent on the consumption indus-
try; the economy of both cities was based on servicing resident aristocrats
and their lavish lifestyles.63
Reformers sought to rein in theaters and popular pleasure sites like gardens
and bullrings, which they perceived as sites of disorder. They recognized that
intimate contacts occurred in these venues among aristocrats, prosperous
artisans, foreigners and the lower classes. They outlawed capes and large
hats – of the kind Don Giovanni wears – on the grounds that they made their
wearers invisible to the law. They had in mind not only poor criminals, but
aristocrats who went to gardens and bullfights to seduce lower-class women.
Such adventures were very much in vogue and aristocrats routinely mixed with
the lower classes for purposes of entertainment and sex. This became known as
majismo, a local expression of libertinage, that was immortalized in Goya’s
maja vestida (clothed maja). It involved upper-class mimicry of lower-class
manners. Madrid’s lower orders commonly wore capes and hats, which were
traditional seventeenth-century garb. The upper classes had for the most part
adopted the French mode of dress. But when they went out for fun they
changed into lower-class attire, although generally made of better material
and more elaborate in design and decoration. In 1797, Francisco de Goya
painted a portrait of Maria del Pilar de Silva, the thirteenth Duchess of Alba
“slumming” as a maja. Queen Maria Louisa, wife of Charles IV, was also known
to dress this way.64
The reforming ministers were concerned with crime but also objected to the
social confusion, loss of legibility, libertinage, laziness and bad hygiene they
thought promoted by capes and hats. Anti-majismo legislation aroused resist-
ance and led to a popular revolt in 1766, known as the esquilache riot (riot of the
cape and hat), after the Italian marquess who was chief minister at the time. The

63
Noyes, “La Maja Vestida.”
64
Ortega y Gassett, Goya; Cruz, Sainetes, pp. 77, 132; Boucher, Histoire du costume, p. 319;
Noyes, “La Maja Vestida.”
176 ge r m a n s a n d g r e e k s

for the Weimar Republic to build legitimacy and comparatively easier for its
right-wing opponents to win support in the name of nationalism. Hitler was
particularly adept at playing on the desires of the middle class for self-esteem.
The Nazi emphasis on the Volksgemeinschaft held out the promise of a higher
purpose to be achieved through unity, sacrifice and struggle in a showdown
with the nation’s internal and external enemies. Hitler’s defiance of the Western
powers and the Treaty of Versailles was widely popular with the middle classes,
who were his largest supporters at the polls.82
Some scholars see the collapse of the Weimar Republic as inevitable.
Theodore Hamerow attributes not only the failure of Weimar, but World
War I, the rise to power of the Nazis and World War II to the failure of the
German liberals in 1848 to develop constitutional democracy as an effective
alternative to the conservative authoritarianism of Prussia. “The penalty for the
mistakes of 1848 was paid not in 1849, but in 1918, in 1933, and in 1945.”83
Hamerow’s argument is a quintessential expression of the Sonderweg thesis,
which attempts to explain the Nazi period as the inevitable, or at least the most
likely, outcome of earlier developments in German history that mark it off from
that of its Western neighbors. Ironically, the Sonderweg thesis originated with
conservatives in the imperial era to justify Germany’s constitution as a reason-
able compromise between the inefficient authoritarianism of Russia and the
decadence of Western democracy.84 It was given new meaning by left-leaning
historians in the post-World War II period. Fritz Fischer and Hans-Ulrich
Wehler mobilized it to combat the claims of their conservative-nationalist
counterparts that the Hitler period was an extraordinary development, unre-
lated to past German history.85
A few historians argue for the contingency of Nazi Germany. In an early but
still highly regarded history of the Weimar Republic, Erich Eyck makes a
credible case that the synergism between the economic downturn and bad
leadership brought Hitler to power.86 In a weak version of the Sonderweg thesis,
Wolfgang Mommsen maintains that the collapse of Weimar was inevitable, but
Hitler’s rise to power was not.87 Henry Turner uses counterfactuals to argue
that Hitler’s survival of World War I trench warfare and a later automobile

82
Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich, pp. 1–2; Dahrendorf,
Society and Democracy in Germany, p. 404.
83
Krieger, German Idea of Freedom; Hamerow, Restoration, Revolution, Reaction, p. viii;
Puhle, Von der Agrarkrise zum Präfaschismus; Dahrendorf, Society and Democracy in
Germany, p. 398.
84
Kocka, “German History before Hitler.”
85
Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War; Wehler, Der deutsche Kaiserreich;
Winkler, The Long Shadow of the Reich and Der lange Weg nach Westen, who attributes
Germany’s special character to developments in the Middle Ages.
86
Eyck, History of the Weimar Republic.
87
Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy.
 t he t r a g e d y o f g e r m a n p h i lo s o p h y 177

accident were remarkable, and that without Hitler, Weimar’s failure would
likely have led to a conservative, authoritarian regime with revanchist goals in
the east but no stomach for another continental war. It would have been
anti-Semitic, but unlikely to have carried out draconian measures against
Jews.88
The determinists sensitize us to the serious impediments that stood in the
way of the success of the Republic, while those who emphasize contingency
alert us to the need to separate the fate of the Republic from the question of
what kind of regime might have succeeded it. The forces arrayed against the
Republic were on both ends of the political continuum. The communists on the
left opposed a constitutional bourgeois order. Led by intellectuals, their base
consisted of workers, whose support waxed and waned as a function of the
economic situation.89 By 1928, there was very little inclination on the part of the
conservatives to cooperate with the socialists, and the pro-Republican parties
did not have enough seats to sustain a left-center coalition. The grand coalition
lasted less than six months, the victim of Gustav Stresemann’s death and the
stock market crash.90 The nationalist-conservative opposition was divided
among several parties, and in the last years of the Republic, the National
Socialists (Nazis) became by far the strongest of these parties. In July 1932,
the Nazis won 38.2 percent of the overall national vote, making anti-Republican
forces a majority in the Reichstag. Government had to be conducted by
emergency decree, which shifted power to President Paul von Hindenburg,
and paved the way for the appointment of Hitler after the failure of the short-
lived von Papen and Schleicher regimes.91 Hindenburg could have used his
emergency power to support a pro-Republican government, but preferred to
rule through a conservative fronde that excluded the socialists from power. He
set in motion a chain of events that had an outcome very different from what
he imagined.92 So did the communists. On instructions from Moscow, they
made a fatal error in refusing to support the grand coalition, composed of the
socialists, Zentrum (Center Party) and moderate parties on the right. The
communists welcomed the Nazi regime in the expectation that it would quickly
fail and pave the way for a worker’s revolution.93

88
Turner, Geissel des Jahrhunderts.
89
Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, pp. 456, 494–5; 535–7.
90
Eyck, History of the Weimar Republic, vol. II, pp. 203–52; Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse
of Weimar Germany, pp. 94–115.
91
Eyck, History of the Weimar Republic, vol. II, pp. 350–488; Dorpalen, Hindenburg and the
Weimar Republic, pp. 301–446. Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany,
pp. 115–49; Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, pp. 357–432.
92
Dorpalen, Hindenburg and the Weimar Republic, pp. 302–3, 316–17, 472; Mommsen, Rise
and Fall of Weimar Democracy, pp. 357–432; Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar
Germany, pp. 80–81.
93
Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, pp. 456, 494–95; 535–7.
178 germans and greeks

The years between 1919 and 1933 were ones in which intellectual commit-
ment to the Republic could have made a difference. It is not unreasonable to
think that greater support for the Republic by intellectuals would have reduced
support for the communists and possibly have enabled the grand coalition to
have survived the early years of the Great Depression. If so, President
Hindenburg would not have been in a position to invoke the emergency clause
of the constitution and Hitler would not have come to power through the back
door. As there is reason to believe that the Nazi vote had peaked, the Republic
could have weathered the Nazi challenge, although it still would have been
under severe pressure from the right and the left. In 1928, the Nazis garnered a
mere 2.6 percent of the vote. Once the depression set in, this figure rose to
18.1 percent. In the March 1933 elections, held two months after Hitler took
office, the Nazis still received considerably less than half of the vote, but more
votes than any party had in the Weimar era.94

German and European identity

I am not alone in arguing that one of the fundamental causes of the Third Reich
was the deep schism between German and Western political thought that
opened up in the late eighteenth century.95 It resulted in a special German
sense of destiny with strong anti-Western overtones. This outlook, we have
seen, found expression in Kant’s effort to discipline French individualism with
German enlightened corporatism and in Fichte’s Address to the German
Nation. Written in response to the French occupation, Fichte praised the
“German spirit,” whose ideals transcended the selfish goals of Western culture,
and described Germans as the only Europeans capable of profound and original
thought. Anti-Western diatribes became a constant theme of German literature
and intellectuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thomas
Mann’s Reflections of a Non-Political Man, written toward the end of
World War I, praises Germany’s musical and metaphysical culture, which he
contrasts with the more skeptical, analytic and political culture of the West. He
rejects democracy as “foreign and poisonous to the German character” and
endorses the Obrigkeitstaat (authoritarian state) as most suitable.96 In the
1920s, writing in the aftermath of another defeat and partial French occupation,
Oswald Spengler advanced a variant of this argument in his best-selling Decline
of the West. Western thought, he wrote, was “merely rational,” and the

94
Berend Stöver, ed., Bereichte über die Lage in Deutschland. Die Meldungen der Gruppe Neu
Beginnen as dem Dritten Reich 1933–36 (Bonn, 1996), p. 2, cited in Frei, “People’s
Community and War”; Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, pp. 314–17.
95
Lukács, Destruction of Reason; Plessner, Verspätete Nation; Mosse, Crisis of German
Ideology; Stern, Politics of Cultural Despair; Holborn, “Origins and Political Character of
Nazi Ideology”; Herf, Reactionary Modernism.
96
Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, p. 16 for quote.
126 mozart and the enlightenment

regrets about his behavior or its consequences. He has no desire to fight the
Commendatore but when challenged, runs him through with his sword. When
the Commendatore’s statue speaks to him at the cemetery, the nonplussed Don
dismisses him as a vecchio buffonissimo (big old clown).73 Don Giovanni’s life is
an assertion of will, but a will not subservient to broader goals. As he is being
dragged to the underworld, he refuses to repent because that would violate his
persona, which is all about nihilistic self-assertion. His encomium to freedom –
the “Viva la Libertà” ensemble – celebrates all kinds of freedom, not just sexual.
It is a mocking aria because the Don’s freedom depends on the subjection or
disruption of everyone else. The other characters seem unaware of this irony,
and join in the singing with strong voices free of any hint of uncertainty.74
The third variant is Don Alfonso in Così fan tutte. He differs from his
predecessors in his social detachment. He neither tries to preserve the existing
order nor subvert it. His is unengaged sexually, although in some productions
he weds Despina, thereby meeting the lieto fine convention of comedy in which
all major eligible characters marry in the final scene.75 Alfonso opens up space
for the intellectual and pedagogue. He has a decidedly libertine view of peda-
gogy that is outside the classic and modern orders because enlightenment
comes through play, not via dialogue à la Plato and Habermas. He is never-
theless a quintessentially Enlightenment figure in his effort to stage a social
experiment. His goal to debunk, demystify and constrain emotions by reason,
which he expects to produce a better, more stable order. His theatrical experi-
ment is nevertheless risky because it could have destroyed two relationships.
Theater was controversial in the second half of the eighteenth century.
Spectacle was regarded as corrupting and subversive. Rousseau wanted to
shut it down, even though he wrote for it. Other figures, among them Joseph
II, were more pragmatic and sought only to reform theater. As noted earlier,
this orientation reflects the late eighteenth century turn to art as vehicle for
philosophy, pedagogy and self-enlightenment. Don Alfonso represents this
school of thought in his apparent belief that theater is more effective than
regulation in stimulating moral and intellectual development. He becomes a
stage manager, and not merely metaphorically, as Jovellanos and Joseph II
aspired to be. Despina, his co-conspirator, is a disabused and utterly pragmatic
figure. She understands love and marriage as a power game. Her two arias are
distinctly instructional; they tell her rather naïve employers not to expect
fidelity in men, let alone in soldiers. “Don’t make me laugh,” she sings in “Di
pasta simile, son tutti quanti,” men are all alike, “they are all made of the same
paste.” The Don Alfonso–Despina partnership is another cross-class alliance,
but between people with no illusions about their relationship. Despina does it

73
Don Giovanni, Act II, scene 3. 74 Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, p. 35.
75
Allanbrook, “Mozart’s Happy Endings” on lieto fine.
180 g e r m a n s a n d gr e e ks

spiritual renewal, as superior to the French principles of liberty, fraternity and

equality.103 During World War I, Werner Sombart praised “the ancient
German hero’s spirit,” which was rescuing Germany from becoming another
corrupt capitalist nation and would make the German Volk the “chosen people”
of the twentieth century.104
National neuroses – if we can use this term – are no more readily palliated by
success than their individual counterparts. They are, however, greatly exacer-
bated by failure, which is what happened in Germany after its defeat in World
War I. Defeat prompted denial, a search for scapegoats and an intense desire for
revenge, emotions that made it difficult, if not impossible, for the Weimar
Republic to gain legitimacy. To create a different political-psychological out-
look, it took another round of war that left Germany defeated, in ruins and
occupied and divided by powers intent on imposing their respective political
and economic systems and reshaping the country’s culture.
A principal thesis of this chapter is that the Sonderweg was not unique. German
historians who advance this claim make the mistake of comparing Germany to its
Western neighbors. Facing west, German intellectual and political development
does appear anomalous and in need of special explanation. Facing east, Germany
looks more “normal.” Poland, Russia and Japan developed similar ideologies;
intellectuals stressed the uniqueness and superiority of their cultures to the West
by virtue of their preservation of traditional values. Although they did this in
somewhat different ways, their cultural claims were similar, as were the key
arguments mobilized in their support. These similarities, I contend, reflect under-
lying similarities in circumstance. They suggest the extent to which identity,
national as well as personal, is an important means of building self-esteem.
For late developers the West was the model to emulate. A state could not
become or remain great, and its people claim status, in the absence of economic
development and the panoply of other status markers that wealth allowed. In
the nineteenth century these included victory in war, colonies, beautification of
one’s capital, and excellence in the arts, sciences and sports.105 Copying the
West conferred status, but the need to emulate other countries and their
accomplishments was a palpable admission of one’s relative backwardness
and inferiority. The way around this dilemma was to assert superiority on the
basis of a more traditional, less materialistic culture, which, when combined
with the economic development and technology of the West, would result in a
superior synthesis. This was precisely the claim made by advocates of German
Volksgemeinschaft and Kultur, Russian communalism and Japanese depictions
of their country as a “family nation” (kazoku sei kokka).

103
Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat.
104
Sombart, Händler und Helden, pp. 125, 143.
105
Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations, chs. 2 and 7 for elaboration.
 g e r m a n a n d e u r o p e a n id e n t i t y 181

All these identities were Janus-faced; they looked to the past and to the
future. The backward looking component was reminiscent of golden age dis-
courses and their invocation of imaginary pasts. German and Russian intellec-
tuals imagined a conflict-free, communally oriented past that never was.
Dissatisfied Japanese intellectuals idealized the spirit of wa (harmony) and
the community (kyōdōtai), that had no place for individualism or profit mak-
ing.106 All three discourses differed from golden age narratives in that they
invoke the past to help transform the present. By stressing communal solidarity
and artistic creativity and denigrating the value of commerce and constitutional
government they aimed to buttress the self-esteem of those classes who sup-
ported the regime. By emphasizing the role of the state as the instrument and
expression of the nation’s mission – as did the Germans and Japanese – power
could be concentrated in ways that would sooner or later facilitate successful
competition with the leading powers of the day.
To come back to the German case, it is apparent that identity construction by
intellectuals came full circle. The turn to Greeks and tragedy in the late eight-
eenth century was motivated in part by the belief that Germans could become
Greeks. By modeling themselves on the progenitors of Western culture they
could recapture its essence, emulate its accomplishments and forge an identity
superior to those associated with the Enlightenment and revolutionary France.
This project was flawed in fundamental ways: it created a highly idealized image
of the Greeks, assumed unrealistically that intellectuals would remake them-
selves in accord with this image, and that other Germans would follow their
lead. German philosophers and writers were on the whole supporters of reform
and hoped that German governments would work with them toward common
goals. Instead, intellectuals were marginalized by repressive regimes, especially
in Prussia. The Greeks now provided an alternate cultural space where intel-
lectuals could live in a world of their making, divorced from contemporary
politics, but still hopeful of one day influencing government and society. In
reality, the arrow of influence began to work in reverse. Writers, philosophers,
and above all, professors and civil servants, became colonized by the state,
which employed most of them. Intellectual discourses ended up strengthening
the kind of state that was the enemy of the values to which writers and
philosophers from Hölderlin and Kant to Hegel and Nietzsche aspired. Post-
Napoleonic generations of Germans faced the choice of abandoning the
cultural-political project of German idealism or deluding themselves into
believing that the Prussian state and German empire somehow facilitated
their aspirations. Most chose accommodation. A few, like Nietzsche, faced the
truth that either option was unpalatable and unworkable. He found escape in
madness, which in retrospect was not altogether an irrational choice.

106
Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths; Vlastos, “Tradition,” and “Agrarianism Without
Tradition”; Kimio, “The Invention of Wa”; Scheiner, “The Japanese Village.”
182 g er m a n s a n d g r e e k s

German thinkers and modernity

German idealists were frustrated by Kant’s dualism and struggled to overcome
it. One can read Hegel’s turn to transcendentalism as a strategy toward this end,
made more imperative by the increasingly visible divide between the natural
and moral worlds. Marx, Weber and Arendt respond to the same problem.
Their philosophical writings are a response to modernity, and very much
connected to identity. Hegel distinguishes between the social and reflexive
selves, between Moralität and Sittlichkeit. His turn to the Greeks is a way to
bring back the world of community into one characterized by heightened
individualism. The state might reconcile the two by providing a higher sense
of purpose. Marx’s materialism is another variant. The solutions of Hegel and
Marx are forms of utopia, although Marx was hostile to the concept. Nietzsche
offers his own solution, the Übermensch. Weber is the first thinker in this
tradition not to provide an answer of how the division between social and
reflexive selves can be overcome. For him, the process of rationalization is
actualized in the separation of the value spheres: morality, science, art, law and
politics. The answer, to the extent there is one, is not to be found in a social
utopia, but in the sovereign self. People must embrace some Ur principle to
structure their lives, arrived at possibly through, or leading to, a choice of a
vocation. Weber’s strategy is one of arbitrary unity and repression. While this
can hardly be regarded a satisfactory solution, only Weber among the German
intellectuals of his era accepts the modern caesura and wants us to recognize
and learn to live with it.
I will return to this problem in the concluding chapter. Here, let me say that
I admire Weber for being willing to confront reality, but differ from him in
several important respects. He regarded modernity in largely negative terms
and emphasized its negative consequences in his writings. For me modernity
has a dual valence. It is responsible for practical and psychological problems,
but also for a kind of freedom that was never before available, and certainly not
to ordinary men and women. Like Nietzsche, Weber considered his project an
elite one, and here, too, I dissent. Nietzsche and Weber made these choices in
imperial Germany, in an era characterized by authoritarian rule, a rigid class
structure and acute national tensions. From the vantage point of the twenty-
first century, the crisis of modernity appears more behind than in front of us,
and we have more and better choices.
 don giovanni 129

characters has divergent effects. Some, like the count in Figaro, are momentarily
humbled, while others, like the two couples in Così, are enlightened. Identities
are unstable in another sense: they cannot be sustained as simple, readily
defensible binaries. Figaro and Don Giovanni are “middle characters” who
violate the traditional division in opera between benign, rational and well-
intentioned aristocrats and foppish peasants driven by crude appetites.81
Seemingly lower-class Figaro is intelligent and calculating, always one step
ahead of his aristocratic employer and uses his talents to preserve his and
others’ relationships. The aristocratic Giovanni is also cunning, and undeniably
courageous, but mobilizes these resources for disruptive, libidinal ends. In an
interesting twist, capes and cloaks permit common folk to display noble values
and the nobility to shed honor and social responsibility.
Aristocrats are supposed to be motivated by honor, which can only be
achieved and maintained in a robust society where there is a consensus about
what constitutes honor, the rules by which it is won and the means by which it is
celebrated.82 Figaro, a commoner who, by definition, can never gain honor,
nevertheless exploits the traditional honor code to frustrate the count’s sexual
designs on Susannah and peasant girls. The Don is out to destroy honor in all its
forms without realizing just how dependent he is on it. He needs the constraints
propriety imposes on sexual behavior to make seduction difficult and corre-
spondingly rewarding. He derives equal pleasure from shocking society and
this, too, would be impossible in an era of sexual freedom.
Critics have difficulty with Don Giovanni’s final sextet. It is frequently said
that the opera should end, as it does dramatically, with Don Giovanni’s
departure for the underworld in the firm grip of the Commendatore’s cold
hand. The scene that follows – reflections by the others on Don Giovanni’s fate
and their own – is lackluster and anti-climactic. It is also musically anomalous,
as Mozart began and closed his operas in the same key. Don Giovanni’s overture
opens with a sustained D-minor chord and the Don’s descent to the under-
world ends on this chord. This is deliberate, as the overture was about the last
part of the opera Mozart wrote.83 Some have speculated that the sextet was
tacked on to appease the censors. In a 1788 Vienna production staged by
Mozart, the final ensemble may have been dropped. It has been omitted by
many subsequent conductors; Gustav Mahler refused to include it in his
productions due to its “repressive morality.”84
There are equally compelling reasons for performing the controversial sextet.
Finales go back to the Goldoni libretti and were widely used by the 1760s. At the
time of Don Giovanni they were considered an essential component of dramma

81
Nagel, Autonomy and Mercy, pp. 51–2.
82
Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations, ch. 2.
83
Heartz, Mozart’s Operas, p. 175.
84
Conrad, “Libertine’s Progress”; Kunze, Don Giovanni vor Mozart, pp. 55–8, 120–7.
184 be a m m e u p, l or d

of a millennial kingdom, the final judgment and the entry into heaven of the
remaining faithful and resurrected dead. Left Behind books have received local
support in church sermons and study groups and have generated a successful
companion children’s series, a board game and computer game, and three
feature films, all of which spread their message. Left Behind’s plot realizes the
prophecies of “dispensationalist premillennialism,” a religious movement that
developed in the United States in the late nineteenth century. The movement
and Left Behind novels are apt subjects for my inquiry because they build on
golden age and utopian narratives. They look back to the Garden of Eden as a
model for their future utopias of the millennium and heaven. They foster a
Christian identity to supersede other forms of self-identification.
For almost 150 years Dispensationalists have repeatedly predicted rapture
and Christ’s return. RaptureReady.com maintains a frequently updated
Rapture Index, not unlike the famous clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists. Since 2004, the Index has moved from “heavy prophetic activity” to
“fasten your seatbelts.”4 On September 9, 2011, it stood at 183, one short of its
all-time high. Dispensationalists speak of their movement as a short-term effort
to prepare people for the rapture and ensuing time of tribulation. They
are nevertheless building networks and institutions that are clearly based on
the premise that the world as we know it will be here for some time to come.
There is an obvious tension between their proclaimed goal and institutional
activities; one that can only become more acute when no rapture occurs. Early
Christianity found itself in this kind of crisis when Jesus did not return in the
lifetime of his disciples or of their successors. Christianity successfully trans-
formed itself into an institutionalized religion and postponed expectations of
Christ’s return into the ever-distant future. It is too soon to know how
Dispensationalism will respond to the failure of its latest predictions or the
extent to which this will cause a problem for believers.
To date, Dispensationalism and Left Behind books have been remarkably
successful in propagating a religious-based anti-modern identity – my strategy
two – and their achievement must be acknowledged. Tim LaHaye, who con-
ceived of the Left Behind series, attributes their success to a rapidly changing
and frightening world in which “people are looking for answers.”5 The Book of
Revelation makes it self-evident, he insists, that “Christ and Christians are the
ultimate winners in the game of life.”6 Left Behind “offers confident hope in a
hopeless age.”7 At the outset of the Reformation in England, William Tyndale
(c.1494–1536) intended his English translation of the bible to be absorbed by
readers and shape their inner life, break society’s hold over them and help them

4
RaptureReady.com Rapture Index, www.raptureready.com/rap2.html.
5
Rachel Madow Show, “Left Behind Authors Meet Madow,” MSNBC, 27 February 2010,
www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29496421.
6
LaHaye, Revelation Unveiled, p. 10. 7 La Haye, Understanding Bible Prophecy, p. 20.
 b e a m m e up , l or d 185

forge new identities.8 Rage against this society and its corruption was to be
transformed into a redeeming certainty about deliverance through access to
unquestioned truths. Left Behind is a contemporary instantiation of this project
and its novels are intended to facilitate a different kind of interiority and
identity formation.
Left Behind must be put in theological context. I accordingly begin with a
discussion of American millennialism, of which Dispensationalism is now its
dominant expression. This sets the stage for my examination of the Left Behind
novels, which dramatize dispensationalist prophecy. I read their utopia as a
dystopia and find striking parallels between its Millennium and the “Oceania”
of George Orwell’s 1984. I conclude with a comparative analysis of
Dispensationalism and the founding texts of Marxism, where I also find
remarkable similarities. Both comparisons prompt some generalizations
about the nature of anti-modern identities and discourses.
This chapter differs from its predecessors in important ways. The texts
I analyzed in chapters 3–5 were great works of literature, music or philosophy.
They were elaborate in structure and rich in ideas, allowing, if not demanding,
creative and complex readings. The Left Behind novels are simple in concept
and writing. They combine adventure with Christian eschatology, and make no
original contributions to either genre. They are full of factual errors, some of
them indicative of their authors’ naïveté about corporate life, technology,
warfare and international affairs. Their turgid prose and poorly developed
characters reflect the limited talent of Jerry Jenkins, the principal author.
Errors and undistinguished prose make its commercial success that much
more impressive and challenging to explain.
Left Behind is a mass-market enterprise and must be analyzed less on its
literary or artistic merits and more on its message and its appeal. I suspect that
one of the principal reasons for its success, and for that of Dispensationalism
more generally, is the way the movement and its novels encourage people to
derive satisfaction from the very developments that most depress and frighten
them. Barack Obama is a synecdoche for these developments.9 Many Left
Behind readers are so opposed to his presidency and policies that they brand
him the Antichrist. LaHaye and Jenkins reject this characterization, but
describe the president as a “committed socialist” whose goal is to bring about
a world socialist dictatorship. This outcome will “fulfill biblical prophecy” and
hasten the rapture and second coming.10 Moral corruption, war and the

8
Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 84–5.
9
Boyer, When Times Shall Be No More, pp. 178, 275–6, notes that a slew of other figures have
periodically been identified as the Antichrist, among them Juan Carlos of Spain, Moshe
Dayan, Mikhail Gorbachev, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, Sun Myung
Moon and Saddam Hussein.
10
“Left Behind Authors Meet Madow.”
186 be a m m e up , l or d

breakdown of order are evidence that Christ will shortly return. The “good
news,” LaHaye and Jenkins proclaim, “is that the world will not end in chaos as
the secularists predict.”11 But life on earth will get much worse before redemp-
tion is possible.

American millennialism
The big divide in millennialism is between those who believe that Christ will
return before the millennium and those who expect him only at its conclusion.
Postmillennialism, the older of the two traditions, stipulates that with God’s
help, Americans, and perhaps humanity as a whole, will achieve a thousand-
year period of peace and prosperity that will end with the return of Christ and
his saints. Premillennialism puts the second coming before the millennium.
This difference reflects its deeply pessimistic view of human affairs and con-
comitant belief that moral and political reform is meaningless. For
Premillennialism, churches that make accommodations with modern science
and society are ignorant, corrupt and part and parcel of the existing moral
decay. The only hope for humanity is Christ’s immediate intervention in an
increasingly wicked and violent world.12 Both doctrines draw their theological
legitimacy from biblical prophecies and look to “signs of the times” for evidence
that divine intervention of some kind is likely in the near-term.13
Postmillennialism dominated evangelical theology between the Revolution
and the Civil War.14 During the so-called Great Awakening (1730–60) it was
popularized by Jonathan Edwards, who maintained that Revelation’s prophe-
cies about the Antichrist were being fulfilled and would soon lead to the
millennium. The pope was identified as the Antichrist and Catholicism and
other false faiths were expected to lose adherents as people around the world
were converted to the true teachings of the gospel. William Miller used numer-
ical references in the book of Daniel to calculate that Christ would return in
1844.15 His followers founded their own denomination, Seventh-Day
Adventism, and subsequently updated Christ’s return to 1914.16
Premillennialism originated in Britain and became prominent in the United
States after the Civil War, giving rise to the movement known as

11
LaHaye and Jenkins, Are We Living in the End Times?, p. 26.
12
Clouse, ed., Meaning of the Millennium; Blackstone, Jesus is Coming; Sandeen, Roots of
Fundamentalism, pp. xv–xviii, 162; Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming,
pp. 15–17.
13
Ibid., pp. 9–11 for the varieties of millennialism.
14
Hatch, “Millennialism and Popular Religion in the Early Republic.”
15
Newport, Apocalypse and Millennium, pp. 163–4; Weber, Living in the Shadow of the
Second Coming, pp. 13–16.
16
Newport, Apocalypse and Millennium, p. 166; Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second
Coming, pp. 43–4.
132 mozart and the enlightenment

can know.”91 Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre takes the argument a step
further by suggesting that individual moral development is the foundation for
social harmony and collective self-realization. The emphasis on introspection
and internal governance led to an upgrade in the status of art, and music in
particular, was regarded as a source of moral insight. In the words of Lessing,
the purpose of art is “to extend our capacity for feeling pity.”92 Mozart and Da
Ponte used their art to undermine this claim. Their Don Giovanni suggests that
turning inwards was only likely to expose an empty core. The real effect of
removing constraints is to put people more in touch with their appetites,
including the drive for power.
Don Giovanni elaborates the contradiction between the Enlightenment’s
commitment to personal liberation and its likely consequences.93 To a lesser
extent, Cherubino in Marriage of Figaro points to the same pessimistic con-
clusion and might be considered a Don Giovanni in training. At their core,
Enlightenment philosophers were a conservative lot. French philosophes,
Scottish empiricists and German idealists looked for new justifications for
traditional social values for fear that they would otherwise be overwhelmed
by skepticism. Sexual morality was particularly important because, like their
more traditional counterparts, they associated sexual license with social chaos.
Sex could only by constrained through the institution of marriage.94 Don
Giovanni’s assault on marriage is no accident.
Earlier, I attributed the Don’s lack of reflection to his formulation as a
classical archetype rather than a modern person. A darker and more challeng-
ing reading would see his superficiality as a product of modernity itself.
Liberation, Da Ponte and Mozart may be telling us, does not so much encour-
age retrospection as it does the outward deflection of reason. It becomes “the
slave of the passions,” in the famous phrase of David Hume.95 Instrumental
reason, to use Weber’s term, takes priority over more inward-looking reason –
what Aristotle calls phronesis – and makes it less likely.96 This state of affairs
directly contradicts the expectations of Adam Smith, who describes the market
as a catalyst for reflection. He reasons that it can teach self-interested people
prudence and discipline and lead us to defer short-term gratification for longer-
term, more substantial rewards. Don Giovanni is a fictional, dysfunctional but
highly effective counter-example.
Modernity has undeniably produced both kinds of people. Neoliberals would
have us believe that Smithian figures are the norm and Don Giovannis the

91
Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther, p. 85.
92
Lessing, Literaturbrief, cited in Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment, p. 23.
93
Bokina, Opera and Politics, p. 41. 94 Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. I, p. 116.
95
Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, 2.3.3.4, and Inquiry Concerning the Principles of
Morals, Appendix I, p. 163.
96
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1139a29–30, 1139a29–1142a; Smith, Theory of Moral
Sentiments, I.1.5, VI.1.
188 be a m m e u p, lo r d

specific revelation of the will of God.”22 The Scofield–Gaebelein “pretribula-

tionists” insisted that the rapture would lift true believers into heaven before the
tribulation, and won a majority for this doctrine at the Niagara Bible
Conference of 1901.23 The Scofield Reference Bible introduced footnotes in
lieu of separate commentary and used them to mark and interpret prophecies.
Distributed with funds provided by philanthropist Lyman Stewart, it became
the core text of Dispensationalism.24
Dispensationalism differs from other variants of millennialism in a second
important respect: it maintains that God has separate plans for Jews
and Christians. According to Dispensationalists, God’s design for the Jews is
spelled out in Genesis (12:2–3), where he promises to create a great nation from
Abraham’s seed. Dispensationalists maintain that God punishes the Jews peri-
odically for not honoring the terms of their contract with him, but has never lost
faith in his chosen people. He will honor his promise that David’s true son, the
messiah, will return to rule over the earth on the basis of a new covenant that
will replace Mosaic Law. Until then, Jews must suffer Christian domination in
what Daniel (7–9) calls the “times of the gentiles.” This era, or dispensation, will
consist of four successive empires. One of the leaders of the last empire will
order the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s temple, which will trigger the return of the
messiah and his restoration of David’s throne. Daniel measures these last events
in weeks; Jerusalem will be rebuilt in seven weeks, sixty-two weeks later the
messiah will appear and will meet a week of violent resistance during which the
last emperor tries unsuccessfully to destroy the Jews.25
This chronology causes a major problem for Dispensationalists because these
prophecies should have been realized in the era of the historical Jesus. Finding
wiggle room in the double meaning of the Hebrew word for week, which also
means “seven,” Dispensationalists engaged in what can only be described as a
wildly figurative reading of Daniel’s text to argue that “seventy weeks” actually
meant seventy “sevens” of years. According to this scheme the messiah would
appear 490 years after a decree to rebuild Jerusalem. Dispensationalists turned
to Nehemiah 2:1–8 and rather freely interpreted a reported decree of Artaxerxes
to allow some Jews to return to Jerusalem to do repair work on its crumbling
walls as an order to rebuild the temple. Jesus was executed 483 years later.
He should have returned seven years after that to establish his kingdom, but this
did not happen, so Dispensationalists invented “postponement theory” to explain

22
Scofield, Scofield Reference Bible, and Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth, p. 18.
23
Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, p. 93.
24
Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, pp. 191, 222; Marsden, Fundamentalism and
American Culture, pp. 55–62.
25
McCain, Daniel’s Prophecy, pp. 12–15; Scofield Reference Bible, p. 915; Weber, Living in the
Shadow of the Second Coming, pp. 17–24; Clouse, ed., Meaning of the Millennium; Glass,
“Fundamentalism’s Prophetic Vision of the Jews”; Ross, So It Was True; Carpenter, Revive
Us Again, pp. 97–100; Cooper, Prophetic Fulfillments in Palestine.
 american millennialism 189

his non-appearance. It holds the Jews responsible for the failure of Daniel’s
prophecy. Because they rejected Jesus as their messiah, he directed his ministry
to the gentiles, ushering in the “church age.”26 According to C. H. Mackintosh, a
major popularizer of dispensationalist theology, “The Messiah, instead of being
received, is cut off. In place of ascending the throne of David, He goes on the
cross . . . God signified His sense of this act by suspending for a time His dispensa-
tional dealings with Israel. The course of time is interrupted.”27
Postponement theory created as many problems as it solved. All relevant
prophecies were now Jewish, leaving Christians without any of their own and
putting their church outside of God’s initial plans. The so-called church age is a
kind of suspended existence, intended to fill the gap between Israel’s rejection of
Jesus and the ultimate conversion of the Jews. Dispensationalists argue that God
was unable or unwilling to put his plans for Jews and gentiles into effect at the
same time. It was necessary to remove the church from the scene before God could
move forward with his plan for the Jews. To bring this about, Dispensationalists
moved the rapture forward to Daniel’s seventieth week and the reign of the
Antichrist. All of God’s saints would disappear from the earth, in effect removing
the church, thereby allowing God to initiate the tribulation and the rise of the
Antichrist, setting in motion his plan for the Jews. God would return at the end of
the tribulation with his saints in tow to establish the millennium.28
Dispensationalists quickly became a laughing stock among more sophisti-
cated Christians for their inventive theology, constant efforts to map current
events on to biblical prophecies and repeated failed predictions of second
comings. The first decades of the twentieth century were difficult years for
millenarians and conservative Christians, more generally.29 They enjoyed
some early successes in opposing the teaching of evolution, which culminated
in their pyrrhic victory at the 1925 Scopes trial in Tennessee. Efforts by
conservatives – now known as “fundamentalists” – to enforce orthodoxy in
churches and seminaries generated heated conflicts, especially in the
Northern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church. This catch-all
term “fundamentalist,” coined in 1920 by Baptist journalist Curtis Lee Laws, is
almost invariably applied to churches and movements that do not question
the historicity of the bible.30

26
Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, pp. 19–20.
27
Mackintosh, Papers on the Lord’s Coming, pp. 101–2.
28
Haldeman, Coming of Christ, pp. 297–325; Munhall, Lord’s Return, pp. 179–80;
Mackintosh, “Double Phase of the Second Advent”; Weber, Living in the Shadow of the
Second Coming, pp. 19–24.
29
Ibid., pp. 16–17.
30
Laws, “Convention Side Lights”; Carpenter, Revive Us Again, pp. 4–5; Marsden,
Fundamentalism and American Culture, p. 4 and “Fundamentalism”; Sandeen, Roots of
Fundamentalism, pp. xiii–xvi.
190 b e a m m e up , lo r d

Fundamentalists and premillenarians left to found their own churches,

leaving them increasingly isolated from the religious mainstream and public
life.31 On the defensive, they came to believe that American Christians were
rejecting God, leaving them the “faithful remnant.” Local pastors built reli-
gious schools as well as churches and enterprising fundamentalists reached
wider audiences through their use of radio. New bible schools, the Dallas
Theological Seminary and Bob Jones University, became centers of the move-
ment, as did Wheaton College in Illinois. Bible conferences and youth move-
ments proved effective vehicles for building community and spreading
millennial beliefs.32
Dispensationalists are more radical than conservative in their theology. They
rely on what can only be called primitivist readings of the bible that are ahistorical
and supernaturalist. They depart from traditional practice by deriving predic-
tions from prophecies.33 They insist that the bible is full of hidden meaning, but
maintain, without acknowledging any contradiction, that these meanings are
readily accessible to ordinary readers. In the words of one premillenarian, “the
Scriptures were not [written] for the erudite, but for the simpleminded.”34
Believers are encouraged to read the bible and take what it says at face value.35
This approach appeals to the intellectually unsophisticated and those attracted to
simplicity and certainty. Not surprisingly, Dispensationalism increasingly found
its audience among rural and small town Protestants from northern European
backgrounds with little education and the products of families with Victorian
values.36 Today, judging from public opinion polls and the sales of Left Behind, it
reaches far beyond this demographic.
Dispensationalists have always been the voice of cultural pessimism, if not
downright doom, in contrast to most other evangelicals. In the early decades of
the twentieth century, their most prominent spokesman was Arno
C. Gaebelein, a German immigrant, Methodist minister, editor of Our Hope
and author of Revelation, among other books. He taught himself Hebrew and
Yiddish so he could debate with rabbis on the Lower East side and proselytize
its heavily Jewish population. Not meeting success, he turned to writing
against the Jews.37 Another leading figure, Isaac M. Haldeman, was pastor of

31
Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 164–84.
32
Ibid., pp. 193–4; Carpenter, Revive Us Again, pp. 33–88, 206.
33
Noll, Princeton Defense of Plenary Verbal Inspiration; Marsden, Fundamentalism and
American Culture, pp. 63–5; Carpenter, Revive Us Again, pp. 70–1.
34
Mauro, Seventy Weeks and the Great Tribulation, pp. 9–12; Weber, Living in the Shadow of
the Second Coming, pp. 9–24, 36–42; Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, pp. 48–66;
Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, p. 108.
35
Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, pp. 36–7.
36
Carpenter, Revive Us Again, pp. 9–10.
37
Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, pp. 214–15; Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second
Coming, pp. 143–4.
 american millennialism 191

the First Baptist Church in Manhattan. His The Signs of Our Times was a steady
bestseller within the Dispensationalist community. It described earthquakes,
military buildups and unheralded displays of luxury as evidence of the coming
end of the world. It develops a convoluted argument typical of premillenarian
tracts. The world is literally going to hell, and attempts to reform it will
inevitably fail because they are inspired by the devil. Satan, Haldeman illogically
insists, “would be glad to see prohibition successful” even though his real
objective is to lead Christians “into a drunken orgy of sin and shame and
outbreaking vice.” Haldeman hoped that moral decay would have the unin-
tended effect of producing a religious revival.38
Preachers expanded on the political–religious arguments of Moody,
Gaebelein and Haldeman. Sermons in dispensationalist churches con-
demned more liberal churches for their apostasy, which was said to explain
their declining membership and the corresponding rise of immorality and
crime. LaHaye and Jenkins blame Satan for the move away from “true”
readings of the bible in the late nineteenth century. “The devil knew the best
way to inject his apostate doctrine into the churches was to infiltrate the
seminaries, indoctrinate young ministers, and send them into the churches
to spread his false concepts across the land.” The devil’s allies were the “pro-
communist” Federal Council of Churches and its successor, the National
Council of Churches.39
Dispensationalists are fond of citing Jeremiah 30:7, which describes “the time
of Jacob’s trouble,” widely interpreted by them to mean intensified persecution
of the Jews. Beginning in the late nineteenth century Dispensationalists began
to predict that anti-Semitism would prompt Jewish immigration to Palestine
and the creation of the state of Israel. Working with Satan, the Antichrist would
unify the world’s religions, re-establish the Roman Empire, dramatically extend
its domain and make a friendship pact with Israel he would later disavow. The
rapture would come, followed by the seven-year tribulation, during which
millions of people would die, but many Jews would recognize Jesus as the
messiah. Armageddon in Israel would become the site of history’s last great
battle, where the Antichrist would face down his last earthly rivals. Christ would
intervene, annihilate both armies, save the Jews and establish the millennium.
Allenby’s entrance into Jerusalem, Mussolini’s rise to power, the Great
Depression, World War II, Shoah, and the creation of Israel were each offered
as proof of these prophecies.40

38
Haldeman, Signs of the Times, p. 128; Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture,
pp. 125–7.
39
LaHaye and Jenkins, Are We Living in the End Times?, p. 74.
40
Clouse, Meaning of the Millennium; Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming,
pp. 9–24, 128–9; Glass, “Fundamentalism’s Prophetic Vision of the Jews”; Ross, So It Was
True; Carpenter, Revive Us Again, pp. 97–100; LaHaye and Jenkins, Are We Living in the
End Times?, pp. 95–120.
192 be a m m e u p, l or d

From the beginning, dispensationalist anti-modernism was associated

with reactionary social and political views. Premillenarians opposed
Progressivism, which they condemned as the work of the devil.41 In the
Great Depression, Dispensationalists described the blue eagle symbol of
the National Recovery Act as “the mark of the beast,” and the New Deal
as paving the way for the Antichrist.42 During the Cold War, fundamen-
talist preachers Fred Schwartz, Carl McIntire and Billy James Hargis led
rabid anti-communist crusades. The Cold War and its aftermath spawned
efforts to read the rapture and end of history in the tea leaves of current
events. In 1982, Pat Robertson, not a strongly identified millenarian,
predicted an apocalyptic war between the superpowers that would bring
the world to an end.43 In 2006 he made repeated predictions of storms
and tsunamis that God would send against America’s west coast.44 The
most important voice of doom was the dispensationalist novel The Late
Great Planet Earth. Published in 1970, it offered a fictional account of the
world’s destruction.

Left Behind
The first dispensationalist novel was published in 1905.45 Prophetic literature
began to sell well in the 1970s. Hal Lindsey and Carole Carlson’s The Late Great
Planet Earth was distributed largely through Christian bookstores and churches
and had sold over thirty million copies by the end of the century. In 1978, a
documentary film about the book played in commercial theaters across the
country. Drawing freely on Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelation, The Late Great
Planet Earth predicted the return of Christ sometime in the 1980s. In line with
the dispensationalist world view, it portrays humanity in a state of moral
decline that will lead to the collapse of law, order, the economy and military
organizations. Churches coalesce to form “religious conglomerates” and the
pope is increasingly active politically as a world church and world government
merge. “Real Christians” are openly persecuted by the Antichrist, head of the
European Economic Community. The EEC dramatically expands its member-
ship and power and comes to resemble a modern-day Roman Empire. The only
hope for America, Lindsey and Carlson insist, is “a widespread spiritual

41
Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, pp. 94–7.
42
Carpenter, Revive Us Again, pp. 93–4, citing Louis Bauman, “The Blue Eagle and Our Duty
as Christians,” Sunday School Times, 16 September 1933, pp. 583–4; Walter P. Knight,
“The Mark of the Beast, or is the AntiChrist at Hand?” Moody Monthly 34 (July 1934), 493,
and “The Blue Eagle,” Revelation 3 (September 1933), 329.
43
“A Brief History of the Apocalypse,” www.abhota.info/end3.htm.
44
“God is Warning of Big Storms, Robertson Says,” Seattle Times, 19 May 2006, http://
seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003004452_pat19.html.
45
Burroughs, Titan, Son of Saturn.
 left behind 193

awakening.”46 In 1980, Lindsey, a graduate of the Dallas Theological Seminary,

authored a second book in which he argued that the 1980s could represent the
last decade of history.47 Judging from the sales of his books, readers appear
unperturbed by apparent contradiction between Lindsey’s deterministic belief
in the end of the world and the hope it might be prevented by a spiritual
reawakening.
The Left Behind series copies and expands on Lindsey and Carlson’s scenario
and has been an ever bigger success. To date, Left Behind consists of sixteen novels,
several volumes of commentary, a series for the military and a mini-series for
children. The authors maintain an active website that solicits commentary and
questions from readers. The project was conceived by Tim LaHaye, a self-
described “prophecy scholar,” minister and educator. He was active in the John
Birch Society in the 1960s, was an original board member of the Moral Majority
and a founder of or active in a score of right-wing social and political organiza-
tions. His wife Beverly is co-founder of Concerned Women for America, a
prominent anti-feminist organization. LaHaye is convinced that the Chinese
communists bought the 1996 election for Bill Clinton.48 The series principal
author, Jerry B. Jenkins, claims to have authored over a hundred books.
Following Lindsey and Carlson, Left Behind is based on prophecies elabo-
rated by Ezra, Daniel and Revelation. Their prophecies provide the plot for all
the volumes, which opens with the rapture, moves forward through the tribu-
lation, Christ’s return and establishment of the Millennium and resurrection of
the dead and the final ascent to heaven. Like all good Dispensationalists, the
authors believe that we are living in “the final days” because of humanity’s
corruption and loss of faith in God. Traditionally, Dispensationalists look for
correspondence between contemporary events and biblical prophecies. Left
Behind does the reverse; it writes a history of the near future to make it conform
to its authors’ readings of selected prophecies. Judging from website posts,
many readers find this approach appealing.49

The plot
The Left Behind novels have an integrated if elaborate plot that realizes the
prophecies of the Book of Revelation, as understood by LaHaye and Johnson.
Volume I opens with the rapture, which lifts some half-million believers to
heaven at the same moment. Those aboard airplanes simply disappear, with
God thoughtfully leaving their clothes neatly folded on their seats. The sudden
disappearance of so many people comes as a shock to those “left behind” and

46
Lindsey, Late Great Planet Earth, and The 1980s; Boyer, When Times Shall Be No More,
p. 5; “The Great Cosmic Countdown: Hal Lindsey and the Future,” Eternity, January 1977,
p. 21.
47
Lindsey, 1980s. 48 Radosh, Rapture Ready!, p. 81. 49 Ibid., p. 13.
194 be a m m e up , l or d

only a few have the intelligence and faith to recognize what has happened.
Among the first of these is Rayford Steele, a senior pilot at TransCom Airlines.
He is contemplating an affair with a cabin attendant, an attractive woman who
has signaled her availability. The rapture puts this plan on hold as Rayford’s
wife and younger son have disappeared, drawing him closer to his daughter
Chloe and soon to God. Father and daughter make the acquaintance of Buck
Williams, a virile, socially adept, worldly-wise and phenomenally successful
New York journalist who has somehow never had sex with a woman. He and
Chloe, another virgin, fall in love, marry, and become part of the “Tribulation
Force” organized by Rayford’s Illinois pastor Bruce Barnes. Its goal is to win
people to Christ, oppose the Antichrist and simply survive the tribulation.50
Pastor Barnes is killed in the earthquake. Following the rapture, and while
still alive, he becomes an assiduous student of the Book of Revelation and leaves
extensive notes for the faithful about what to expect.51 He predicts the opening
of the seven seals and bowls and their respective judgments and chaos to which
this leads. One quarter of the earth’s population will die, as it soon does, from
earthquakes, war, famine, pestilence and meteor impact. Thanks to Bruce’s
notes and his own belief in scripture, Rayford and other members of the
Tribulation Force know just what to expect and this gives them a leg up in
the survival game.52
From time to time the heroes reflect on the relationship between prophecy
and the narrative it instantiates. They quote Revelation to illuminate the plot
and presumably to demonstrate how the developments they confront should be
taken as evidence of its prophecies. Bruce quotes Revelation 6:9–11 to the effect
that the fifth of the seven seal judgments concerns martyrs who plead with God
for vengeance but are required to wait because more martyrs will join them. He
reasons that these martyrs are Christians who will die during the tribulation
and its catastrophes.53
As the Jews and Israel are central to Dispensationalist theology, so they are to
Left Behind. Revelation describes “two witnesses” and the novels depict two
Jewish messengers in Jerusalem who preach the return of the messiah and the
conversion of 144,000 Jews (1,000 times the twelve tribes of Israel squared). To
make conversion possible, the authors create the character of Rabbi Tsion
Ben-Judah. After lengthy study of the old and new testaments he concludes
that Jesus fulfilled all the requirements of the messiah. He was about “to receive”
Jesus when the rapture occurred.54 He subsequently goes on television to make
his pitch for Jesus, is forced to flee Israel and with Buck’s help succeeds in
converting many Jews. In one of the later volumes, he meets archangel Michael
and hears the voice of God.55

50
LaHaye and Jenkins, Left Behind.
51
LaHaye and Jenkins, Rise of the Antichrist Nicolae, pp. 319–20. 52 Ibid., p. 108.
53
Ibid., p. 324. 54 Ibid., p. 144. 55 LaHaye and Jenkins, Indwelling, pp. 242–5.
 die zaub erflöte 137

musical work identify anomalies, draw out allegedly hidden meanings and find
new questions that can promote more complex readings. Over time, these
interpretations, which include commentary and criticism of earlier interpreta-
tions, establish a tradition that provides readers with insights and understand-
ings unavailable to their creators.119 The claim that we might understand a text
better than its authors sounds arrogant, but rests on solid ground. Historical
distance put authors and their creations into perspective by allowing us to
situate them along broader trend lines and to see implications of their argu-
ments, art or music that they not have envisaged or intended. “Depth herme-
neutics” acknowledges that authors may purposely embed meanings for readers
to tease out, as so many interpreters of Magic Flute allege. Such a process can
also be unconscious, or only partially deliberate, and reflect tensions in the
creator’s mind or culture. Paul Ricoeur advocates a “hermeneutics of suspicion”
to ferret out meanings buried deeply in authors’ unconscious but accessible
through their texts.120 Contemporary hermeneutic philosophers are divided in
their opinion about whether the search for hidden meanings can lead to better
understandings, as Apel and Habermas suggest, or merely, as Gadamer insists,
a plurality of interpretations.121
Following Ricoeur, I offer a reading of The Magic Flute consistent with text
and music, but not necessarily reflective of all their authors’ conscious inten-
tions. I start from the uncontroversial assumption that Schickaneder and
Mozart produced a libretto – it was very much a joint effort – that drew on
existing texts to create a world that incorporated features of golden age and
utopian discourses. The world of Sarastro and his priests was utopian in its
embodiment of Enlightenment principles, above all the role of reason as the
vehicle for individual growth and maturation and the basis for a just society. It
qualifies as a golden age because it was set in the past, seemingly in an ancient
Egypt that never was; historical Egypt was ruled by kings, not priests selected on
the basis of their moral wisdom. On a superficial level, Magic Flute represents
the triumph of light over darkness and reason over emotions. Sarastro
personifies reason and the Queen of the Night destructive emotion. This
male–female characterization builds on age-old gender stereotypes, and the
association of light with reason and darkness with disruptive emotions is also
deeply rooted in Western culture. This symbolism is most evident in the final
scene when the Queen of the Night and her henchmen are dispatched to the
underworld and Pamina and Tamino united by reason-informed love. As dawn
breaks, Sarastro proclaims “The sun’s rays drive out the night, destroy the

119
Schafer, Analytic Attitude.
120
Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, pp. 32–5; Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests,
pp. 214–45; Lacan, Ecrits.
121
Habermas, Truth and Method; Apel, “Szientismus oder Transzendentale Hermeneutik?”
196 be a m m e up , l or d

from the dead proves an enormous political asset that allows him to further
consolidate his power.59
The Millennium is brought about by the return of Jesus. He casts Carpathia,
his advisers and all their henchmen into the Lake of Fire, where they will suffer
for all eternity. Satan emerges from Carpathia’s body and is compelled to kneel
before Christ and acknowledge him as Lord. He confesses that everything he
ever did was for personal gain and that his entire life was a waste. A thousand
years later we have a glimpse of Carpathia still writhing in agony as he is
tortured by fire and sulphur, repeating his new mantra that Jesus is Lord. All of
these events, beginning with Carpathia’s improbable rise to world power, are
necessary to make the world resemble Dispensationalist readings of biblical
prophecy.
Left Behind is more about adventure than character development. There is
endless description of the mayhem caused by the Antichrist, the human and
physical disruption and destruction to which this leads and the efforts of the
tribulation force to survive and win converts to Christ. Little effort is made to
demonstrate the spiritual rewards heroes derive from their commitment to
Jesus. They occasionally speak of these benefits, but this is not a convincing
method of demonstrating them. It is, of course, much easier to describe chaos
and destruction than it is to portray spiritual evolution and its psychological
and behavioral consequences.

Theology
Dispensationalists claim to read God’s word directly without introducing any
interpretation. Here, too, Dispensationalism harks back to the early days of
English Protestantism when William Tyndale insisted that the bible should be
understood in what he calls “its literal sense.” Like Tyndale, Dispensationalists
assert that meaning lies directly in front of us and requires no special education
or search for hidden meanings.60
Texts never speak for themselves and the bible least of all. Old and new
testaments are composites of multiple texts written by many people, in some
cases over many generations. Most of these books existed in different textual
versions, making it impossible to reconstruct an “original.” Editors subse-
quently decided which texts, and which versions of them, to include in the
scriptures.61 The Old Testament is written in Hebrew and the new in Greek.
Spinoza, one of the fathers of hermeneutic readings, confessed how difficult it
was to make sense of the Old Testament, as it is written in a language no longer

59
LaHaye and Jenkins, Indwelling, pp. 364–8.
60
Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 100.
61
Morgan, “New Testament”; Davies, “Qumran Studies”; Elwolde, “Language and
Translation of the Old Testament.”
 lef t b ehind 197

in daily use, in a script that has no vowels or diacritical marks and with a
grammar that does not consistently indicate tense or mood.62 Fundamentalists
read the bible in English translation, and there are over 500 translations
available. The translation problem is exacerbated by the fact that many
Hebrew and Greek words and phrases have lost their original meanings or
taken on new ones. Words and phrases intended to evoke specific responses
from contemporaries are unlikely to do this with modern readers.63 This is
particularly true of Revelation, which makes free use of fanciful metaphors and
symbols. Do swords really come out of mouths or millions of giant horsemen
race across the face of the earth? Is the lamb simply an animal or a symbol for
Jesus? Most readings, including those of Dispensationalists, opt for the latter
understanding, which, of course, represents a figurative, not literal reading.
Fundamentalists try to get around the first of these problems by insisting that
the bible was written and edited under the direct guidance of God, so perfectly
reflects his intentions. They do not answer the question of how we can fathom
God’s meaning from words that conjure up diverse meanings. Left Behind
defends literalism, quite a challenge for a movement whose bible readings are
remarkably imaginative and labored. The journalist Verna Zee, one of the
minor characters, plays devil’s advocate by suggesting that Revelation resem-
bles Nostradamus: “Can’t these prophecies be read into?,” she asks. “Can’t they
mean anything you want them to mean?” Chloe responds by telling her about
pastor Bruce’s predictions based on his reading of Revelation. “If the treaty
between the United Nations and Israel was the covenant referred to in the bible,
it would usher in the seven-year tribulation period. First there would be the
seven Seal Judgments. The four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would be the
horse of peace – for eighteen months – the horse of war, the horse of plague and
famine, and the horse of death.”64 Verna Zee a disbeliever, who has been further
discredited by being outed as lesbian, says that nothing that has happened so far
has convinced her of Chloe’s interpretation. For some unexplained reason she
volunteers that the predicted earthquake would do this.65 As the plots of the
novels are based on Revelation, the earthquake, like the other prophecies of this
book of the bible, comes to pass. Proof is provided tautologically.
Another defense of literalism is offered by Rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah. “For
centuries,” he tells us, “scholars believed prophetic literature was figurative,
open to endless interpretation. That could not have been what God intended.
Why would he make it so difficult? I believe when the Scriptures say the writer

62
Spinoza, Political Treatise, ch. 1, p. 287.
63
Elwolde, “Language and Translation of the Old Testament”; Gibson, Language and
Imagery in the Old Testament; Knibb, “Language, Translation, Versions, and Text of the
Apocrypha”; Porter, “Language and Translation of the New Testament”; Norton, “Ancient
Versions and Textual Transmission of the Old Testament”; Birdsall, “Textual
Transmission and Versions of the New Testament”; Van der Kooij, “Textual Criticism.”
64
LaHaye and Jenkins, Rise of the Antichrist Nicolae, pp. 347–8. 65 Ibid., p. 348.
198 be a m m e u p, l or d

saw something in a vision, it is symbolic of something else. But when the writer
simply says that certain things happen, I take those literally. So far I have been
proven right.”66 He later explains that John, Revelation’s author, saw 200
million horsemen in a vision, so they will not be literal, but that something
will happen with an equivalent impact.67 To his surprise, the horsemen appear,
but are only visible to their faithful. They are giant horses with flames shooting
out of their nostrils and mouths and kicking up thick yellow smoke. Their giant
riders are ten feet tall and are said to weigh 500 pounds. Horses and riders
destroy non-believers, conveniently allowing Rayford and his party to escape
being shot by irate guards.68
Tsion confesses he was wrong in assuming the horsemen would be spiritual,
not physical creatures.69 Reconfirmed in the value of prophecy, he now looks to
Revelation for numbers that allow him to calculate how many people will
survive tribulation.70 Such an approach violates long-standing rabbinical
approaches to the bible. They are based on the concept of Peshat, which literally
means “to strip away” to reveal the underlying meaning, which cannot always
be equated with the literal meaning. The Talmud makes it evident that this
process is based on the recognition that “The words of the Torah are expressed
in human language.”71 Interpretation accordingly requires historical and philo-
logical awareness, because meanings are almost always culture- and time-
specific.72
Like Chloe, Rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah relies on fiction – the novel’s plot – to
confirm prophecy. His arguments and Chloe’s require correspondence between
some prophecy and real world events or developments. Chloe reveals Bruce’s
predictions that the treaty between Israel and the UN will trigger the
Tribulation, and it therefore must be the covenant described in Revelation.
LaHaye and Jenkins defend this parallel in a separate co-authored defense of
prophecy, in which they read these and other developments as evidence that we
are living in “the end times.” These other developments include the hatred of
Israel by Russia and its Arab allies, the emergence of China and the increasingly
frenetic nature of modern society. The importance of Russia for prophecy is
deduced from Ezekiel, who says:

Son of man, set your face against Gog, of the land of Magog, the prince of
Rosh, Meschech, and Tubal, and prophesy against him, and say, ‘Thus says
the Lord God: “Behold, I am against you, O Gog . . .. I will turn you around,
put hooks into your jaws, and lead you out, with all your army, horses, and
horsemen, all splendidly clothed, a great company with bucklers and
shields, all of the handling swords. Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya are with

66
LaHaye and Jenkins, Assassins, p. xv. 67 Ibid., p. 90. 68 Ibid., pp. 127–31.
69
Ibid., p. 173. 70 Ibid., pp. 173–4. 71 Berakhot 31b; Sanhedrin 85a; Nedarim 3a.
72
Kasher, “Interpretation of Scripture in Rabbinic Literature”; Magonet, “Jewish Interpretation
of the Bible”; Gibson, Language and Imagery in the Old Testament.
140 mozart and the enlightenment

In most productions of Magic Flute, the Queen of the Night is cast as a villain
who rebels against the legitimate and admirable rule of Sarastro and ends up
with the punishment she so richly deserves. But the Queen of the Night has a
legitimate grievance, even if her methods of redress are extreme. Sarastro has
banished her, abducted her daughter and is trying to “brainwash” Pamina into
accepting his authority and severing any ties to her mother. The perverse
character of Sarastro is equally apparent in his need to maintain a phalanx of
vicious “Red Guards,” headed by the notorious Monostatos. He uses them to
guard Pamina and keep her prisoner within the walls of his “Forbidden City.”
Sarastro is aware of Monostatos’ abuse of his authority, but turns a blind eye
when it is convenient. Like many dictators, this is how he guarantees the loyalty
of his palace guard. Only after Monostatos’ second attempt to rape Pamina does
Sarastro order him punished – tortured, actually – with no more than seventy-
seven lashes on the soles of his feet. There is little to distinguish Sarastro from
the Queen of the Night. Their conflict, like that between Mao’s successors and
the Gang of Four, is nothing more than a power struggle.
Pamina has been successfully “re-educated” by Sarastro. Caught by
Monostatos while attempting to escape, she confesses to Sarastro: “I am a
criminal; I wanted to escape from your power.”122 She nevertheless retains
her bond with mom and does not refuse outright to join her plot against
Sarastro. Pamina accepts a dagger from her mother’s hand but cannot bring
herself to plunge it into Sarastro’s heart. Her strongest feelings are for Tamino
and she risks her life to lead him through his ordeals of fire and water – more
about these in a moment. Sarastro has, of course, planned their relationship; it is
all part of his well-conceived strategy to weaken or break Pamina’s ties with her
mother. He has reduced Pamina to such a state of emotional dependence that
she contemplates suicide when Tamino, sworn to silence by Sarastro, will not
speak to her. Sarastro triumphs in the end. Pamina is so overjoyed at being
reunited with Tamino that she accepts Sarastro’s authority and does not utter a
peep when her mother is sent off to the underworld, the equivalent of some
awful communist gulag.
Tamino’s and Pamina’s enchanting duet, “Mann und Weib und Weib und
Mann” celebrates spiritual as well as physical union; the music soars to suggest a
higher level of relationship. They are wed to the Party and its ideals, not just to
each other. Their relationship provides an interesting contrast to non-Party
members Papageno and Papagena, who share an ordinary physical union.
Tamino is the most enigmatic figure in the opera. He first appears on stage
fleeing a dragon and faints from fright. Three women Valkyries conveniently
appear, kill the monster and inform the revived Tamino that he has been chosen
to rescue the Queen of the Night’s daughter. They show him Pamina’s picture;
he falls immediately in love and sets off to save her from the evil Sarastro. As for

122
Magic Flute, Act I, scene 18.
200 b e a m m e up , lo r d

Continuity
Regardless of genre, most fiction authors make an effort to get their facts right.
James Michener was the first of many best-selling novelists to have an army of
researchers to dig out and check facts for him. Given the financial success of
Left Behind, this option is readily available, but has not been exploited. Left
Behind novels are full of factual errors and unrealistic situations, most of
them avoidable without undercutting the plot line or authors’ commitment to
biblical prophecy. Actual errors aside, the authors offer wildly
unrealistic portrayals of warfare and the workings of the media, corporations,
governments and the UN.
Much of the narrative is about the conversion and subsequent adventures of
leading pilot Rayford Steele. The novel begins aloft, and air travel features
prominently in almost every volume. The authors are ill-informed about its
commercial and technical aspects. Buck, an accomplished world traveler, asks
his assistant to book him a flight – which she does – to London from LaGuardia,
an airport that only handles short- and medium-range flights. Buck makes sure
he has his passport and United Kingdom visa – the latter unnecessary for US
tourists.78 Rayford flies his Learjet 60 west to Easton, Pennsylvania to take on
fuel for a non-stop flight to Tel Aviv.79 The Learjet 60 has less than half that
range. In one of Buck’s many escapes, he flees Israel, taking Rabbi Ben-Judah
with him to Egypt. Pursued by Egyptian police in a James Bond-like chase, they
shake off their pursuers by setting fire to their vehicle and hop onto the same
Learjet, waiting to taxi down the runaway. It now flies non-stop to Illinois,
which would qualify as another miracle.80
Other howlers include references to the “Common Market.” The Common
Market was founded in 1958 and generally referred to as the European
Community after its enlargement in 1967. The European Community became
the European Union in 1993. Left Behind, published in 1995, is left behind in its
terminology as it still refers to the European Common Market and implies,
incorrectly, that it embraces all the continent save Russia.81 In Left Behind,
Israeli teenagers go to Hebrew school.82 They have no need to learn Hebrew, as
it is their native language, immigrants aside. Most Israelis are in any case secular
and those who are religious, especially boys, would begin their studies well
before their teenage years in preparation for bar mitzvah at age thirteen.
Less forgivable is the incipient racism and stereotypes that pervade the text.
Antichrist Nicolae Carpathia of Romania has blond hair and blue eyes because,
we are told, Romanians are descendants of the Romans, who were “Aryans,” as

78
LaHaye and Jenkins, Left Behind, pp. 159, 171.
79 80
LaHaye and Jenkins, Rise of the Antichrist Nicolae, p. 133. Ibid., p. 273.
81
LaHaye and Jenkins, Left Behind, p. 274.
82
LaHaye and Jenkins, Rise of the Antichrist Nicolae, p. 145.
 left behind 201

were the Romanians “before the Mongols affected their race.”83 This is utter
nonsense. So, too, is the claim that before the conversion of the 144,000 Jewish
witnesses from around the world, and the millions of additional converts they
bring to Christianity, “most [people] assumed they could identify a Christian.
Now, of course, only true believers know each other on sight, due to the mark
visible only to them.”84 Could the authors really be so parochial as not to know
that members of their faith are drawn from every race and ethnic group? Their
observation also assumes that Jews are identifiably different in appearance from
Christians of European origin.
Early in the first volume we learn that Israeli scientist Chaim Rosenzweig has
developed a synthetic fertilizer that enables deserts to bloom like a greenhouse
without any need of irrigation. With its newly acquired wealth Israel makes
peace with its neighbors and becomes the world’s richest state when it licenses
the formula for export.85 With this fertilizer Russia grows grain in Siberia and
destitute African nations become net exporters of food.86 It has not occurred to
the authors that if every nation can grow its own food, none will require
imports. In a subsequent volume, it rains in Jerusalem, bringing joyous
Israelis outside to scream in delight and stick out their tongues to taste the
falling water. They are so happy because of “what this miracle will mean for
their crops.”87 Rain and snow are hardly novel to Jerusalem, which is in an arid
climate, but not a desert. More importantly, as Israel’s economic success is
attributed to its ability to raise crops without irrigation, why would a rain
shower be significant?
The rebellion against the Antichrist is led by the most unlikely coalition of
American patriotic militias, England and Egypt.88 England presumably means
at least Britain, if not the United Kingdom. Egypt, otherwise an unlikely ally, is
included because in Dispensationalist readings of prophecy it joins with a
northern confederacy during the tribulation to attack Israel. With an eye to
practical politics, North Korea, Iran or other states unlikely to buckle under to
UN diktats would have made more realistic rebels. So-called patriotic militias
despise the UN, as some claim it is trying to take over the United States with the
covert assistance of government officials. The Left Behind series builds on this
belief, although it never suggests complicity on the part of office holders. The
president is portrayed as a decent enough if not terribly clever fellow, who is
deftly outmaneuvered and marginalized by Nicolae Carpathia. The UN estab-
lishes its authority over the United States once it and all the other countries of

83
LaHaye and Jenkins, Left Behind, pp. 70, 436.
84
LaHaye and Jenkins, Assassins, p. 103.
85
LaHaye and Jenkins, Left Behind, pp. 7–8, Rise of the Antichrist Nicolae, p. 140.
86
Ibid., p. 143. 87 LaHaye and Jenkins, Soul Harvest, pp. 419–20.
88
LaHaye and Jenkins, Rise of the Antichrist Nicolae, p. 143.
202 be a m m e u p, l or d

the world agree, quickly and inconceivably, to turn over most of their weapons
to the world body.
The patriotic militias nevertheless get their hands on sophisticated assault
weapons, nuclear warheads, their delivery systems and the tightly-held codes
necessary to arm their warheads. More unrealistic still, they possess the trans-
porters, radars, computers, communications and trained personnel necessary
to transport and fire missiles with nuclear and conventional warheads against
Carpathia and his forces. They are overwhelmed, although it is just as unreal-
istic to imagine that in the short time the UN has acquired its vast and diverse
arsenal it has been able to recruit and train forces capable of using its weapons
effectively. Carpathia, whose intelligence system also materializes from
nowhere, is forewarned and able to escape the missile meant to vaporize him
and his aircraft. He retaliates massively and many American and other cities are
hit by conventional and nuclear weapons. Incredibly, America continues to
function normally outside these circles of destruction.
The authors have little understanding of the destructiveness of nuclear
weapons. London’s Heathrow Airport is destroyed by a 100-megaton hydrogen
bomb, but the rest of London is unscathed. The largest nuclear explosion on
record is a 50-megaton device the Soviet Union detonated on the Arctic island
of Novaya Zemlya in October 1961. In later decades the superpowers built large
arsenals of relatively low-yield weapons in the kiloton range because of the
greater accuracy of their delivery systems. If a 100-megaton bomb had some-
how been built and exploded over Heathrow Airport, it would have destroyed
Greater London and done considerable damage well beyond the metropolitan
area. The smaller weapons dropped on New York and Chicago would also have
been devastating. In the Big Apple, we are told, nobody knows if the bomb
dropped on Manhattan was conventional or nuclear. This is also unrealistic
given the nature of the nuclear and conventional weapons of the 1990s.
Historical detail lends verisimilitude to fiction, but is not necessary for all
genres. For readers of Christian fiction, as for readers of romance, it may be the
rhetorical value of detail that counts; the very fact that it is there, accurate or
not, makes the narrative credible. Counterfactual narratives illustrate the val-
idity of this rhetorical truth; the more vivid they are the more credible they
become to readers.89 This is in sharp contrast to science fiction, whose writers
must invest time and effort to get their detail right to satisfy a more knowl-
edgeable audience.90 Star Trek can readily be distinguished from Star Wars in
this respect. The latter is more fantasy than science fiction, even though it is set
in space and the future. It can get away with such gross anomalies as Luke

89
Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky, Judgment Under Uncertainty, p. 226, and “Extensional
versus Intuitive Reason”; Koehler, “Explanation, Imagination, and Confidence in
Judgment”; Lebow, Forbidden Fruit, ch. 6.
90
Jones, Deconstructing the Starships, p. 16.
 d ie za u ber f löt e 143

Papageno also offers a nice contrast with Pamina. He, too, contemplates
suicide because he is deprived of love, and life without love has become
intolerable. He yearns for a Papagena, a boon companion, with whom he
can make love, cuddle at night and raise children. Papageno is never-
theless reluctant to throw away his life; after putting his head in a noose,
he desperately prolongs his count to three in the hope his fortune will
miraculously change. Sarastro has toyed with Papageno by initially send-
ing him Papagena in the form of an old hag and then snatching her away
when she reveals herself to be a young, voluptuous and hot-blooded
woman. Only when Papageno is willing to sacrifice himself is he rewarded.
The three young boys intervene at the last moment, and Papageno gets his
Papagena. They sing their joyous duet celebrating their love and politically
incorrect commitment to a large family.
The boys deserve a sidebar. They are prepubescent, sing with as yet
unchanged voices, provide sustenance and advice to Tamino and Papageno
and save Papageno from suicide. Their noble behavior, presumably inspired by
Sarastro, is intended as a counterpoint to the three women who work for the
Queen of the Night, lust after Tamino, send him on his quest for love, punish
Papageno by locking up his lips and assist the queen in her attempted assassi-
nation and coup. A distinguishing feature of communist regimes has been their
effort to indoctrinate children from a young age, infuse them with loyalty to the
state and even turn them against their parents. It is no surprise that Sarastro
uses young, impressionable minds to do his bidding.
Papageno’s fate can be read as a cautionary political message. Sarastro may
be an absolute ruler, but even he requires the acquiescence of the masses.
Toward this end, he must provide them with the necessities of life – as the
Queen of the Night does for Papageno – and also some hope of joy in their
personal lives. Pushed to extremes, the masses will take dramatic steps, even
rebel. But when their needs are satisfied, they are generally too focused on their
own lives to become truly loyal and self-sacrificing supporters of the system.
They will do what is expected of them as part of a calculated strategy to
minimize the intrusion of authority into their daily lives.
In a production of this kind a few changes must be made in the text. An
obvious example is early in Act I when Tamino tells Papageno that he is of
princely blood, and that his father rules over many lands and peoples.
References to gods and royalty would never do in Maoist China, so Tamino’s
father must become a regional party secretary. In Act II, the priest-speaker, now
a member of the Central Committee, will describe Tamino as a worker’s son.
Sarastro’s castle in the mountains will become the Forbidden City, and some
party-appropriate substitution must be found for the temple of trials. Appeals
to Isis and Osiris will be to Marx and Lenin. The odd reference to Red Guards,
imperialist enemies and the toiling masses can be inserted where appropriate.
And then, of course, there is the famous duet of Papageno and Papagena where
204 be a m m e up , l or d

commit crimes but non-believers, even those who have led virtuous lives.
LaHaye and Jenkins send to hell Christians who do not internalize their belief
to the point where they have fully committed themselves to Jesus. The authors
offer their Millennium as a close approximation of paradise; their Jesus will
recreate the Garden of Eden.95 This Millennium is obviously expected to appeal
to readers and provide another incentive for them to give themselves over to
Jesus. LaHaye and Jenkins’ vision of the Millennium is disturbingly reminiscent
of George Orwell’s 1984.
One of the most striking features of Orwell’s dystopia is the extent to which
Big Brother demands loyalty beyond outward conformity to state directives.
People must believe in Big Brother and his cause, and the state uses propaganda
and more nefarious methods of mind control to achieve this goal. Oceania is the
quintessential totalitarian regime. In Kingdom Come, Jesus is a Christian
version of Big Brother. His presence, actual or depicted, is everywhere and
completely dominates social and personal life. He demands total loyalty from
citizens and, like Big Brother, attempts to achieve it through mind control.
Children attend nursery schools where they are indoctrinated by true believing
teachers who function as a mind police. Buck’s son Kenny, who runs such a
school, helps a little girl of ten find Jesus and pledge herself to him. Nursery
teachers are summarily dispatched to hell if they do not perform their proselyt-
izing mission conscientiously and successfully. Young men – in the
Millennium, this can mean 80 or 90 years of age – who refuse to participate
in activities designed to indoctrinate children are eliminated by lightning strikes
in front of their friends.96 In 1984, the Party constantly reminds citizens that
“Thought crime does not entail death. Thought crime is death.” This is also true
of Jesus World.
In 1984, there is opposition to Big Brother and some citizens believe there is
an underground. Winston Smith gradually becomes disillusioned with Big
Brother and falls in love with Julia, who gives the appearance of being a fanatical
member of the Junior Anti-Sex League and is adorned with its red sash.
They have an affair, are caught in flagrante delicto by the Love Police and
Winston is hauled off to prison where he is systematically beaten and brain-
washed and ultimately betrays Julia. In Kingdom Come, sex is equally verboten
and there is a Love Police of sorts, authorities who snoop on young people and
arrest them for various crimes that include going to underground night clubs,
rumored to exist in France and Turkey. There are alleged to be black markets
and brothels.97 As in 1984, it is unclear if such things actually exist or are
inventions of the regime intended to entrap the Winston Smiths of this world.
Emmanuel Goldstein, Big Brother’s wily enemy, has his counterpart in Left
Behind’s Satan. Goldstein fled Oceania and may be dead, and Satan is tightly
bound and locked up in the nether world. But his evil, like Goldstein’s, still

95 96 97
Ibid., p. 119. Ibid., pp. 79, 111–12. Ibid., pp. 52–4.
 left behind 205

suffuses the society and takes the form of sin; people are tempted by sex and
material goods.98 There are rumors of an underground anti-Jesus movement
known as the “Other Light,” whose proponents allegedly claim that study of the
scriptures has made them “fans of Lucifer and not Jesus.”99 The plot of the
novel, to the extent there is one, revolves around the efforts of Kenny and his
friends to form a “Millennium force,” modeled on his father’s earlier “tribu-
lation force.” Its goal is to win over the faithless before they cause more trouble
and are zapped by Jesus’ lightning bolts. All crimes, which include blasphemy,
are punishable by death.100
Other Light supposedly produces a manifesto in which they do not deny
Jesus, but object to his theocracy and mind control. “He has left men and
women no choice but to believe in Him and serve Him, denying our free will.”
They favor pluralism, insisting that they “have no quarrel with those who
believe and follow Him and consider themselves devout. We simply insist on
the right to decide for ourselves.” They lament that Jesus “will not countenance
an alternate point of view.”101 Left Behind portrays Other Light as a pack
of thugs with a few deliciously evil leaders and a coterie of easily misled
followers. Rumors spread that they tried to rape a “glorified” (see below)
woman to impregnate her in the hope of producing a mongrel race of converts
who would survive beyond the age of one hundred. The rapist, we learn, was
destroyed by lightning, while the woman, who resisted him, was unharmed.102
Other Light dissenters are seemingly undeterred by knowledge that they will
with certainty die at age one hundred, if not before. They hope, or so we are told,
to find enough recruits to pass the opposition along to subsequent generations
and have large forces at the end of the Millennium to join up with Satan against
Jesus.103 The rebels Rayford encounters in Egypt consider themselves freedom
fighters against Jesus, who they describe as heading an “occupying army.”
Although outnumbered they will not give up hope. Egypt is once more the
rotten apple in the bunch. On this occasion it makes the mistake of electing
some young people as judges and they vote against sending representatives to
honor God at the feast of the tabernacles. King David reports that the lord is
mighty miffed and intent on destroying all the wicked of the land.104 His
revenge, which includes a drought, seems to punish everyone, not just a few
perpetrators, but this overkill conveniently helps Rayford to proselytize.105
The Millennium gives a new twist to the meaning of opposition. The
population is divided into two groups: the “glorified,” who were raptured and
spent time in heaven before the Millennium, and “naturals,” who were left
behind but have since seen the light. The glorified have been genetically altered
and do not age.106 For some reason, the authors feel the need to come up with a

98 99
Ibid., pp. 50–3. Ibid., p. 53. 100 LaHaye and Jenkins, Kingdom Come, p. xlii.
101 102
Ibid., p. 120. Ibid., pp. 122–3, 232. 103 Ibid., pp. 71–2. 104 Ibid., pp. 89–90.
105 106
Ibid., p. 144. Ibid., p. 61.
206 be a m m e up , lo r d

physical account for this phenomenon. They devise the fanciful notion that just
like the long-lived biblical patriarchs, the Millennium’s population lead long,
healthy lives because “The world actually exists now, as it did back then, under a
canopy of water that blocks the most harmful effects of the sun.”107
True believers, whether glorified or natural, are allowed to remain alive
through the Millennium and afterwards gain eternity in heaven. Those who
do not follow the rules, or fail to make an inward commitment to Jesus, not only
die at age one hundred, they spend eternity in the Lake of Fire.108 Cendrillon
Jospin, a young woman of French origin, is the first person to die following the
purge of millions of non-believers at the outset of the Millennium. She gave
every appearance of being a believer, but must have inwardly rejected Jesus.109
Left Behind ’s Big Brother is truly omniscient.
The Millennium resembles totalitarian regimes in other ways, not the least
of which are its leader’s architectural plans. Jesus goes in for large, kitschy
temples and squares of the kind found on Cecil B. De Mille bible movie sets,
presumably to impress people with his power. He rebuilds Jerusalem on a
monumental scale with lengthy causeways, large esplanades and off-scale
buildings reminiscent of Hitler’s plans for post-war Berlin. The quarter reserved
for priests and Levites encompasses an area of forty by fifty miles, “more than
six times the size of greater London and ten times the circumference of
the original ancient, walled city.”110 According to the authors, this megalopolis
is more than ten times the circumference of the original walled city of
Jerusalem.111 Such a city would, in fact, have a circumference thousands of
time larger.
Heaven is tackier still. Following Revelation 21.12–14 and 21, it has a great
high wall with twelve gates and with an angel positioned in front of each. Every
gate is inscribed with the name of a tribe of Israel. The wall of the city has twelve
“foundations,” each with the name of an apostle. The city is laid out as a perfect
square with jasper walls adorned with precious stones. Each of the twelve gates
is fashioned from a giant pearl. The streets, we are told in a description that
makes no visual sense, were “also pure gold, like transparent glass.”112 Jesus
rivals Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein in his architectural pretension.
More frightening still is Jesus’ callous disregard for life. Here too, compar-
isons to Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot spring to mind. Collectively, these
dictators killed somewhere in the range of 100 million people. Chaim
Rosenzweig tells us that half a billion people were raptured, and that half the
remaining population was killed during the Seal and Trumpet Judgments, more
were lost during the Vial Judgments and millions were subsequently martyred.
Only one-quarter survived the seven years of tribulation. This would put the
death toll, directly or indirectly attributable to God and Jesus, in the billions.

107 108 109 110

Ibid., p. 156. Ibid., p. 59. Ibid., pp. 46–7. Ibid., pp. xlii–xliv.
111 112
Ibid, p. xliv. Ibid., p. 353.
146 m o z a r t a n d t h e e n l i g h t en m e n t

claims, but their critique is a powerful one, and all the more so because of the way in
which drama and music act on the intellect and emotions of the audience.
Don Giovanni is a dystopia that exposes the inability of either the old order or
an Enlightenment-inspired one to fulfill human needs. The former relies on a
class-based hierarchy, superstition and oppression. Commoners have few
choices and must suffer the whims of those upon whom they depend for
sustenance or support. Aristocrats are not necessarily any freer. To the degree
they have internalized the moral codes of their society they must enact their
assigned roles and suppress their emotions and defer, or forever postpone,
gratification of ordinary human desires. Most lead crabbed, unfulfilled, unenvi-
able lives. This may be one reason why the women are open to seduction by
Don Giovanni. Zerlina aside, who is a lusty peasant, they are pathetic figures
who generally oscillate between passivity and hysteria.
Don Giovanni is an aristocrat cut loose from these traditional moorings and
associated constraints. He is a danger to himself, those around him and the
wider social order. He is usefully compared to Count Almaviva in Marriage of
Figaro, another Spanish aristocrat intent on imposing his political and sexual
will on others. Almaviva nevertheless adheres to most of the norms that sustain
his authority; he never uses violence or forces himself on anyone and accepts
defeat gracefully. He is an improving landlord, with a serious interest in his
estate and career, in contrast to the shiftless and unconstrained Giovanni, who
has no interest in his property beyond the income and venue it provides to
enable a life devoted to sexual adventure. An aristocrat and landowner in
backwards Spain, Don Giovanni is in other ways a modern figure. He has
liberated himself from religion, superstition and communal norms and is
unconstrained in pursuit of his appetites. He is intelligent, but his reason is
purely instrumental and never used to interrogate the ends he seeks.
Part of Mozart and Da Ponte’s thought experiment is to remove all organs of
coercion; there are no police or other authorities anywhere in sight in Don
Giovanni. Freed of internal and external constraints, they suggest that human
beings are unlikely to use reason to transform themselves into ethical beings, as
so many philosophers and writers from Rousseau on hope, and even predict.
Reason is more likely to be directed outwards, with the goal of satisfying
unconstrained and therefore more urgent appetites. This will not lead to a
more harmonious society, but one in which a minority assert its will and exploit
everyone else. This seemingly successful minority will not be happy, merely
driven. Don Giovanni embodies the fears of the Austrian counter-
Enlightenment and represents the precursor of modern buccaneers who pursue
à outrance, not only women, but economic wealth and political power. Some of
them, like the Don, Napoleon or Bernie Madoff, act in ways that are ultimately
self-destructive.
Magic Flute draws on golden age and utopian discourses to imagine a future
world that incorporates many golden age features. The latter are drawn from
208 be a m m e up , l or d

do not. Abstinence is another sacrifice Jesus imposes on his subjects to test their
loyalty to him. It is a practice entirely at odds with Jewish tradition, which Left
Behind’s Millennium in other ways tries to instantiate. It appears to reflect the
hostility to sex of Pauline Christianity and American Puritanism. The ban on
sex also contradicts the novel’s narrative, as children continue to be born
throughout the Millennium, and there is no hint that they are the result of
virgin births. Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany and Orwell’s 1984 were
also markedly puritanical.
Other forms of recreation are proscribed. When not working with children,
Buck spends his time praising Jesus with psalms and hymns and spiritual
songs.124 There is no hint of sports, children’s games aside. Teenagers rightly
complain they cannot have any fun. As one of them puts it, we want to go
“Somewhere where people like this nursery guy won’t condemn you to hell if
you [don’t] do anything but worship.”125 The authors cannot allow such
complaints to go unanswered, so try to depict the youths who voice these
complaints as irrational. They allegedly want to become martyrs because
“They find that glamorous.”126 Stalin and Hitler were far more astute than
LaHaye and Jenkins; their regimes made major efforts to organize highly
regimented outdoor and sporting activities for youth to keep them off the
streets, indoctrinate them ideologically and distract them from sex.
When the Millennium ends, Satan is unbound and gathers his armed
supporters around him. This is a dumb strategy in light of what happened to
the massed armies at Armageddon. David and Jesus observe Satan from an
undisclosed location. At a critical moment, Jesus steps out from his hiding
place, raises his hand and opens his palm. “A seam in the cosmos opened before
Satan. Flames and black smoke poured from where the Beast and False Prophet
writhed on their knees screaming.” Satan belatedly acknowledges that “‘Jesus is
Lord.’” Jesus is understandably unmoved, closes his fingers and Satan and his
host disappear into the abyss which swallows them up and muffles their
screams. Surviving Christians are instantly clothed in gleaming white robes
and fly up to heaven. They are joined by all the dead faithful, who are
resurrected.127

The Jews
Throughout the nineteenth century millenarians predicted the return of the
Jews to Palestine, although not their conversion. They were fascinated by
Zionism and General Allenby’s conquest of Jerusalem during World
War I.128 Millenarians expect Jews to play a major, if not decisive, role in the
events leading up to the rapture, tribulation and second coming. In the

124
Ibid., p. 4. 125 Ibid., p. 65. 126 Ibid, p. 95. 127
Ibid, p. 319.
128
Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, p. 234.
 left behind 209

1920s, Charles Trumbull, a bible teacher and contributor to the Fundamentals,

declared that “God’s greatest sign through the ages has been, and will continue
to be the Jews.”129 Fellow millenarian Arthur Brown proclaimed that “the Jew
enables us to tell time on God’s clock.”130 Some Dispensationalists were
decidedly less friendly to Jews. Arno Gaebelein, influenced by the “Protocols
of the Elders of Zion,” associated communism with Jews in his widely circulated
books. This was after his failure to convert them.131 In the Millennium,
Christians are at the bottom of the pecking order.132 Tsion Ben-Judah, the
leading Jew for Jesus, finds this situation amusing, but not surprising. He
explains that the New Testament says that the government starts with Christ
and extends through his prince, King David, to the apostles, now judges over
the twelve tribes, to counselors and finally, to “foreigners.” Gentile Christians
count as foreigners, as they are the adopted children of God.133
Dispensationalists are especially interested in Jews because they read the Old
and New Testaments as parts of a unified scripture and expect God to fulfill his
promises to his chosen people. God’s relationship with the Jews they believe to
have been put on hold once Christianity emerged. The so-called church age,
from Jesus to the present, represents a “parenthesis,” a dispensation in which
the gospels are offered to Jew and gentile alike. Following the rapture, God’s
continued love for the Jewish nation will be evident and many Jews will accept
Jesus as their messiah. All of Israel’s enemies will be defeated and Jesus will sit
on the throne of David.134
Left Behind’s authors have been excoriated for their fictional exploita-
tion of Jews. Tim LaHaye responded in a special preface to Kingdom
Come in which he asserts that “it should be plain from our treatment of
this great future period that we are the opposite of anti-Semites. Indeed,
we hold that the entire Bible contains God’s love letter to and plan for His
Chosen people. If Israel had no place within the future Kingdom of God,
we could no longer trust the bible.”135 LaHaye and Jenkins are not anti-
Semites in the traditional sense, but the Left Behind series is offensive to
Jews. Its fictional Jews willingly convert in large numbers, something they
have never done in the historical past, and often in the face of extreme
pressures to do so. An imaginary Israeli biblical scholar validates biblical
prophecy and Christ as the Messiah. Abraham, Sarah, Moses and David
are made to kneel humbly before Jesus and acknowledge his divinity.136
Noah, Abraham and David become part of Jesus’ entourage and David

129
Trumbull, Prophecy’s Light, p. 67. 130 Brown, Light on the Hills, p. 21.
131
Gaebelein, Conflict of the Ages, pp. 72–99. 132 Ibid., pp. 35–6.
133
Ibid., pp. 35–6, 68.
134
Isaiah 9:6–7, 11, 65:17–25, 66:22–4, Zechariah 14:9, Acts 1:6–7, Matthew 25:31–4,
Revelation 5:10, 20:4–6; LaHaye and Jenkins, Are We Living in the End Times?, pp. 45–63.
135
LaHaye, “Note” to LaHaye and Jenkins, Kingdom Come, p. xv.
136
LaHaye and Jenkins, Kingdom Come, p. xxix.
210 be a m m e up , l or d

sends Noah out to lecture on the Sabbath.137 Despite the high positions
and respect accorded historical Jews and modern converts, the bottom line
is terrifying: Jews who do not convert are sent directly to hell. Left
Behind’s self-proclaimed philo-Semitism is hollow; as has happened so
often in the past, Jews are confronted with the choice of conversion or
death. And those who die, moreover, do not merely cease to exist, they
burn in hell for all eternity.
Anti-Semitism is compounded by other forms of racism. Earlier I noted the
description of Nicolae Carpathia as an “Aryan.” Throughout the Left Behind
series, we do not encounter virtuous representatives of minority groups or non-
Christians, the odd Jew aside. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants lead the
Tribulation Force while African Americans, Arabs and Asians convert or go
to hell. Some conversions can only be read as humiliating portrayals of
capitulation.138

Gender
Amy Johnson Frykholm notes that women are the first to be taken into heaven
in traditional rapture narratives. They are women who have proved their faith,
steadfastness and loyalty to alcoholic and abusive husbands. They are stereo-
typic, long-suffering and forgiving women. They sustain the church, are theo-
logically privileged but socially powerless. Once they are raptured, their
disbelieving spouses commit suicide or descend further into sin. Every so
often, rapture is the catalyst for a sinful husband to repent and embrace
Jesus.139 Left Behind adheres to this tradition in important ways, but is
more modern in others. Rayford’s first wife, Irene, whom we do not meet
until the Millennium, is devout, domestic and loyal. She and her youngest
son Raymie are raptured. Rayford found her intense faith annoying when they
lived together, but her rapture opens his eyes to Christianity, which is the first
step toward his rebirth. Throughout the series men make decisions and act
courageously, while women maintain the faith, perform domestic chores and
sustain their men emotionally.
Much of Left Behind takes place in the largely masculine world of aviation.
Planes are portrayed as phallic objects. In the opening scene of Left Behind,
Rayford, piloting a “fully loaded 747” fantasizes about the sexual flight he
intends to have in London with a cabin attendant. Unlike most husbands of
raptured wives, Rayford rises to the challenge emotionally and part of his
journey involves bridging traditional gender roles. He shops, cooks and

137
Ibid., p. 141.
138
LaHaye and Jenkins, Appollyon, pp. 110–13; The Mark, pp. 24–8, The Indwelling,
p. 70.
139
Frykholm, Rapture Culture, pp. 30–1.
 li be r a t io n ? 149

of a Jewish tanner and shoemaker, he was educated a Catholic and became a

priest, but was expelled from Venice for his sexual hijinx. He settled in Gorizia,
and then in Vienna, used the title “Abbate” (abbé) and wore the clerical collar to
maintain status and an aura of respectability. He continued to pursue women
and was privately a free thinker. Mozart did something similar, if less dramatic.
He weaned himself, not from his religious beliefs, but from his assigned role in
class structure. He was fiercely committed to his autonomy and beside himself
with rage when he had to assume a subordinate, let alone a subservient role. Da
Ponte, unlike Mozart, appeared to lead his double life without observable
tension, anxiety or noticeable feelings of constraint.
The modern world and urbanization, one of its distinguishing features,
would soon provide almost everyone with previously unimaginable anonymity.
People could shed and assume figurative masks at will, raising all kind of
possibilities for transformation and multiple identities. Once taken for granted,
identity, like clothing and related practices, became a subject much discussed
and conceptualized in the late eighteenth century. Such discourses in turn
facilitated further experimentation and change.
None of the characters in Mozart operas who adopt disguises appear fully
capable of returning to who they were when they once again don their accus-
tomed garb. In Così, the two officers cannot regain their distinctive musical
voices, and although they restore their original relationships, they have lost
their innocence and with it, some of their potential for romance. They have
unwittingly turned themselves into somewhat different people. Emile Durkheim
was among the first to emphasize that we are products of our practices. Following
in his footsteps, Erving Goffman documented the extent to which everyday life is
structured by an astonishing variety of rituals that construct and reinforce
identities and render the very notion of an autonomous inner self highly prob-
lematic.126 These rituals and practices help determine who we are and shape our
conceptions of ourselves when these rituals and associated practices change.
Daryl Bem maintains that we revise our understandings of ourselves to bring
them in line with our behavior.127 Even people who have no intention of
constructing new identities may nevertheless do so in the course of role playing.
In the ancient world a person was considered the sum of the roles that he or
she performed in society. Person derives from “persona,” the Latin word for
mask, so there is nothing new or unsettling in the idea of role playing.
Shakespeare’s memorable line that “All the world’s a stage, And all the men
and women merely players” reflects a common understanding of this social
reality in Elizabethan England and early modern Europe.128 Modernity and

126
Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Behavior in Public Places and Stigma.
127
Bem, “Self-Perception” and “Self-Perception Theory.”
128
Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, scene 7; Beck, Actor and Spectator; Onuf, “Parsing
Personal Identity: Self, Other, Agent.”
212 b e a m m e up , lo r d

than the bible during the last two years. Women, college graduates and church
members were over-represented among these readers. Dan Brown’s The Da
Vinci Code topped the list, followed by Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life.
Volumes of the Left Behind series come third. Left Behind attracts a surprisingly
broad base of Protestant readers from churches of all sizes. More women than
men are drawn to the series and most readers of both genders described
themselves as politically conservative and born-again Christians.143 A May
2001 study of 1,008 adults conducted by pollster George Barna found that
Left Behind has its greatest following among adults in the 35 to 55 age group,
born-again Christians and residents of the south and west. The people least
likely to read these books were Catholics, non-Christians and adults in the
northeast.144 Left Behind may have something of a cross-over effect as one
study, published in Christian Century, indicates that almost half its readers are
non-evangelicals.145
We have no survey data on the political views of Left Behind readers, but it is
reasonable to assume that they are similar to those of self-identified “evangel-
icals.” A 2006 Barna survey indicated that 66 percent of evangelicals favored a
constitutional amendment to make Christianity the official religion of the
United States and that 67 percent described themselves as politically conserva-
tive.146 This figure is substantially higher when adjusted for race. This is because
two-thirds of African Americans identify themselves as evangelical or born
again, and most are Democrats. White American evangelicals are significantly
more conservative than indicated by the Barna survey.
One way we make sense of narratives is to classify them by genre. Each genre
has its own set of conventions governing content, characters and narrative style
that help us understand and evaluate individual texts. Genre represents an
implicit contract between author and readers that the former will adhere to a set
of conventions when writing and the latter when reading.147 Tragedies are
expected to end with all their principal characters dead. In comedies, they
must marry, as they do in Cosi fan tutte.148 Readers and viewers generally
develop an intuitive understanding of these conventions, and if not, find
guidance in the labeling of sections (e.g. crime, travel, adventure) in libraries,

143
Barna Group Research Report, 28 June 2005, “Religious Books Attract a Diverse Audience
Dominated by Women and Boomers,” www.barna.org/barna-update/article/5-barna-
update/176-religious-books-attract-a-diverse-audience-dominated-by-women-and-
boomers?q=left+behind.
144
Barna Group Research Report, “Different Groups Follow Harry Potter, Left Behind and
Jabez,” 22 October 2001, www.barna.org/barna-update/article/5-barna-update/61-
different-groups-follow-harry-potter-left-behind-and-jabez?q=left+behind.
145
Dart, “‘Beam Me Up’ Theology.” 146 Cited in Radosh, Rapture Ready!, p. 7.
147
On this point, Burridge, “Gospels.”
148
This is one reason why some productions of the opera marry off Don Alfonso and
Despina in addition to the two couples.
 left behind 213

bookstores and CD rental shops. Creative authors mix or bridge genres, as

Homer does in the Odyssey, Mozart and Da Ponte in Don Giovanni and Philip
Roth in A Plot Against America.149 Left Behind also bridges genres and the first
challenge is identifying those it represents. This in turn depends on the
assumptions we bring to these texts.
Left Behind is undeniably Christian literature. Like other books of its kind it
encourages people to make a commitment to Jesus and to live a Christian life.
Contemporary Christian texts generally approach this goal in a positive way by
telling inspirational stories that encourage readers to embrace Jesus because of
the spiritual and other benefits they will receive. Early Christians pioneered this
strategy; they offered membership in a community and the promise of eternal
afterlife in heaven. Throughout the Middle Ages, and until quite recently, the
Roman Catholic Church and many Protestant denominations relied more on
deterrence than reassurance; they aimed to frighten people to obey their
dictates – or at least conform outwardly to them – or suffer the fire and
brimstone of eternal damnation. Left Behind deploys carrots and sticks in the
hope of making converts and strengthening the commitments of believers. Like
many contemporary Christian books, its characters find meaning in their lives
through their religious commitments. The novels offer graphic portrayals of the
dreadful fate in store for those who spurn Jesus.
Left Behind can be described as an adventure series. Tales of this kind are
populated by three distinct kinds of characters: admirable heroes, hateful
villains and ordinary folk. Hero and heroine must display pluck and skill to
surmount life-threatening challenges and generally come to the aid of the
downtrodden. Adventure tales have an ancient provenance; the Iliad, Odyssey
and Aeneid are early examples. Christianity adapted the genre to its own ends,
as in its elaboration of the myth of St. George and later stories about chivalry.150
Such tales come in varying degrees of sophistication. Nancy Drew novels,
Superhero comics, The Seven Samurai and early James Bond movies are
straightforward exemplars aimed at mass audiences. The Magic Flute, today
considered high culture, nevertheless includes a stereotypical hero and heroine
and life-threatening challenges for them to overcome. More sophisticated
adventure tales, like John Le Carré spy novels, blur distinctions between
good and evil characters and highlight conflicts within the camps of good and
bad guys, not only between them. They meet the criteria for page turners but
make us wonder if their contests have any broader meaning or moral
significance.
Left Behind follows the format of classic, unsophisticated adventure novels.
Its novels string together episodes, many of which involve narrow escapes from
death. At the outset, the “believers” confront the rapture, which takes away

149
On Roth, see Lebow, Forbidden Fruit, ch. 8.
150
Hanning, Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance, pp. 11–15.
214 be a m m e u p, l or d

family members without explanation. During the tribulation that unfolds in the
first nine novels, they face an escalating series of life-threatening challenges
from the forces of “evil,” represented by corrupt capitalists and the Antichrist
and his followers. Star journalist Cameron “Buck” Williams and senior pilot
Rayford Steele have enough close escapes – from cops, border guards, assassins,
thugs, bombs, missiles, radiation and the Antichrist himself – to make Bruce
Willis jealous. Unlike Buck and Rayford, not all the heroes survive, but those
who do prove their mettle and move closer to one another and Jesus. In some
adventure tales heroes receive help from supernatural figures (e.g. the Lady of
the Lake in Arthurian legend) or humans with extraordinary powers
(e.g. Merlin in the same saga). In Left Behind, God himself lurks in the back-
ground waiting to provide assistance. Like Billy Batson shouting “Shazzam”
so Zeus will transform him into Captain Marvel, its characters mouth quick
prayers for God to make them capable of otherwise incredible feats and escapes.
Left Behind qualifies as counterfactual history. When its first novel appeared
in 1995, the rapture was set in the near future, as was the tribulation and second
coming. They are depicted in the follow-on novels that appeared in the course
of the next decade. Like all previous predictions of rapture or Jesus’ return, these
failed to materialize. Although not conceived as counterfactual history, with the
passage of time these novels have become counterfactual history. There has
been no rapture or second coming, no amalgamation of religions and states and
no World War III. Our corrupt world staggers on affected by nothing as
dramatic as the events described in these novels.
Left Behind violates key conventions of counterfactual history. Novels in this
genre most often employ “minimal rewrites” of history: small, credible changes
(antecedents) that bring about major changes (consequents) in the world. The
antecedent is connected to the consequent by a chain of logic that shows how
the former ineluctably leads to the latter. Credible counterfactuals involve
believable rewrites of history and provide compelling chains of logic consistent
with the evidence and our expectations about how people behave.151 A quin-
tessential example is the prevention of World War I by forestalling the assas-
sination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo. The archduke should never
have come to Sarajevo in light of warnings of trouble and should certainly have
been whisked out of town when the first assassination attempt against him on
the Appel Quay failed. As he was the major spokesman within Austria-Hungary
for peace with Russia, and the Emperor Franz Josef only became bellicose
because of his assassination, the archduke’s survival would have prevented
war in the short term and quite possibly in the longer term as well.152
A variant of counterfactual history uses so-called miracle counterfactuals,
that make inherently implausible changes in reality.153 Some novels use miracle

151
Lebow, Forbidden Fruit, for elaboration. 152 Ibid., ch. 3 for this case.
153
Tetlock and Belkin, “Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics.”
152 g e r m a n s a n d g r ee k s

Greece rediscovered
Early modern Europe was largely ignorant of ancient Greece. The burning
of the library in Alexandria (417 BCE) destroyed much literature, including
many Greek tragedies. We have only seven of Sophocles’ 123 known plays.
Extant Greek writings made their way back to Europe via the Arabs, and
often in Arabic translation. Making use of these texts, the Renaissance
revived an interest in tragedy. The first staging of Sophocles’ Oedipus took
place in 1585 in Vicenza.4 Monteverdi wrote his two operas with Greek
mythological storylines in the first half of the seventeenth century. Opera
was intended to reproduce tragedy on the questionable assumption that
tragic characters sang their lines.5 Chapman, and later Pope, produced
good English translations of Homer and by the nineteenth century trans-
lating Homer had become something of a national pastime. Hobbes’
translation of Thucydides was central to his philosophical development.
But it was not until the nineteenth century that Greek texts become a core
component of the English university curriculum.6
In the United States, there was a general interest in Athens beginning in
the late eighteenth century, much of it connected to the country’s experi-
ment with democracy. If the pilgrims envisaged their colony as the new
Jerusalem, democrats understood America to be the new Athens. This
belief was reflected in place names and in the Greek revival in architec-
ture. The founding fathers were nevertheless more influenced by Rome
and English writings and political practices. They rejected the Athenian
model because they opposed direct democracy, and thought the experience
of a small city state not very relevant to the vast expanse of the thirteen
colonies. Following British practice, Latin and Greek nevertheless became
important subjects in the educational system.7
In Germany, Hellenophilia reached a level unequaled anywhere else. The
first German translations of Homer appeared in the second half of the eight-
eenth century. The poet and playwright Hölderlin authored widely read
translations of Sophocles in the early nineteenth century. The Germans
were unique in their efforts to rejuvenate tragedy, not as a genre, but as a
means of nourishing ethical and political sensibilities appropriate to the time.
This project had its roots in Kant, but really began with the publication in
1795 of Schelling’s Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism. Tragedy as used by
German philosophers, among them Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger,

4
Burian, “Tragedy Adapted for Stages and Screens.” 5 Ibid.
6
Turner, Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain; Stern, Rise of Romantic Hellenism in English
Literature; Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece; Porter, “Homer.”
7
Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece; Jenkyns and Turner, The Greek Heritage in
Victorian Britain; Turner, “Why the Greeks and not the Romans in Victorian Britain?”
216 be a m m e u p, l or d

universal near-disarmament, unification of the world’s religions, the creation of

a worldwide dictatorship and the appearance at the Wailing Wall of two Jewish
Christians with supernatural powers who destroy adversaries by breathing fire
on them. LaHaye and Jenkins resort to these and additional counterfactuals to
tell a story that follows biblical prophecy. As miracle counterfactuals are by
definition unrealistic, Left Behind’s use of multiple miracle counterfactuals
makes its narrative redundantly unrealistic.
The determination of what constitutes a realistic versus a miracle counter-
factual is a matter of interpretation. We can all probably agree that supraliminal
travel is a miracle counterfactual because the laws of physics, as currently
understood, prohibit velocities beyond the speed of light. Most of us would
also concur that providing laser-guided, stand-off weapons to Napoleon at the
Battle of Waterloo is a miracle counterfactual because it violates many times
over the scientific and engineering capabilities of the era. The rapture, a multi-
lived Antichrist, unification of the world’s religions and political units are
equally problematic for anyone like me – a secular international relations
scholar. For a true believer, the rapture would be a miracle but not a miracle
counterfactual. Such people believe that miracles (e.g. the parting of the Dead
Sea, the virgin birth, resurrection) have occurred in the past and will happen
again. True believers readily acknowledge the unrealism of religious and polit-
ical unification, but attribute these developments to divine intervention. For
Dispensationalists, the only incredible miracle counterfactuals are those that
untrack the historicity of the bible or what they believe are God’s plans for the
future. Left Behind considered in counterfactual terms is a religious Rorschach
Test.
Left Behind might also be characterized as science fiction or fantasy. Rod
Serling, creator of the TV series Twilight Zone, is alleged to have said that
“Science fiction consists of improbable possibilities, fantasy of plausible impos-
sibilities.”158 A laudable bon mot, it does not provide the basis for a good
working definition, because science fiction routinely employs impossibilities
like supraliminal velocities, hyperspace, time travel and immortality. Guy Kay
may be closer to the mark with his characterization of fantasy as “the literature
of longing; instead of writing about the world as it might someday become, it
writes about the world as we wish it could be or have been.”159 Michael
Swanwich identifies another important feature of fantasy; more often than
not it is a morality tale in which good conquers evil, order is restored and
wise and benign rulers returned to power.160 Unlike science fiction, fantasy,
affectionately known as “sword and sorcery,” routinely features characters with

158
Wikipedia, “Science Fiction,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fantasy.
159
Guy Gavriel Kay, “Fiction versus Fantasy,” www.treitel.org/Richard/sf/fantasy.html.
160
Nick Gevers, “The Literary Alchemist: An Interview with Michael Swanwick,” www.
infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intms.htm.
 left behind 217

special powers or heroes who gain such powers through their mastery of arcane
lore or texts that are safeguarded, interpreted and shared by their guardians.
From this lore or texts heroes often learn the true names of people and things,
which can be invoked for their protection. In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, men
and dwarves are aided by wizards in their cosmic struggle against evil.161
Science fiction characters, by contrast, gain power or authority by means of
their pluck, but almost always combined with an impressive use of reason and
understanding of natural laws.162
Left Behind nicely meets the conditions of fantasy. It is an adventure tale that
takes place in four fictional worlds, which for the scientifically minded, could
never exist. First, there is our world, but made counterfactual by God’s visible
intervention in wars, rapturing of some half-million people and unification of
the world’s religions and government through the machinations and near-
magical powers of the Antichrist. The second world is the millennial kingdom,
inhabited by the faithful, who live forever, and others who make it only to one
hundred. Serious evil doers (including drinkers, dancers, adulterers) are
eliminated by lightning strikes. The third world is heaven, to which the faithful
ascend at the end of the Millennium. Hell, the fourth world, has the standard
lakes of fire and other unpleasant venues where people suffer for an
eternity without dying or losing consciousness from the pain and hopelessness
of it all.
The starting point of all fantasy is serious departure from reality, and here
there are undoubtedly differences of opinion about what is unrealistic and
qualifies as a miracle counterfactual. For people awaiting the rapture, Left
Behind is not fantasy, and they may constitute the majority of its readers. For
the secular among us, believers and novels alike inhabit a fantasy world.
Left Behind is unquestionably a morality tale. At the individual level, the
good are rewarded handsomely, the evil suffer terribly and the faithful who die
in wars, plagues and earthquakes are reincarnated and ascend to heaven.
Following the rapture, corrupt religions and godless regimes give way to the
more horrendous dictatorship of the Antichrist. At the onset of the Millennium,
the Antichrist and his empire are swept away and replaced by the kingship of
Jesus. At the cosmic level, God triumphs over Satan. Left Behind also qualifies as
fantasy because of its invocation of special powers. God, Satan, the Antichrist
and Jesus all have such powers and use them to protect their followers and
advance their goals. These powers range in scope from mass hypnosis, mind
reading, telepathy and teleportation to the ability to knock bombers and
missiles out of the sky to the even more impressive capability to trigger earth-
quakes and meteor strikes, terraform the earth, reconfigure human physiology
and confer immortality. Ordinary humans do not possess these powers, but
Nicolae Carpathia, the Antichrist, can manipulate human minds and memories

161 162
Tolkien, Lord of the Rings. Kay, “Fiction versus Fantasy.”
218 b e am m e up , lo r d

through hypnosis and has more than one life. In a prequel, we learn that he is
the genetically engineered offspring of two gay men. The truly awesome super-
powers are reserved for the three divines: Jesus, God and Satan.
Fantasy has incredible plots in a double sense: they involve supernatural feats
and preordained storylines. We never doubt that Prince Valiant or Superman
will triumph in the end and this is true of Jesus in Left Behind. For thoughtful
readers, these novels raise the question of why we must reach happy endings by
circuitous routes that entail so much suffering. There is an obvious commercial
answer: suspense and adventure sell books. There is also a psychological
answer: people enjoy suspense and adventure all the more when they know
the good guys ultimately emerge triumphant. For many Christians, there is a
theological answer. Our beliefs and behavior determine our fate; temptation
and suffering confront us with moral choices and provide the opportunity to
accept or reject Jesus in a meaningful way.
Fantasy’s good and evil characters are readily identifiable. There are no
shades of gray, although characters of uncertain allegiance are allowed, as are
those who switch sides as the plot unfolds. Left Behind is true to form. Some of
its volumes include a glossary up front that identifies characters under headings
of “believers,” “enemies” and “undecided.”163 Left Behind is stereotypic in that
its good characters are very good and its bad characters very bad. The Antichrist
and Satan are evil incarnate, just as God and Jesus are portrayed as entirely
benign. So are our panoply of mortal heroes, who are chaste, generous, self-
effacing and put their families at risk to serve Jesus. Their morality is all the
more impressive given the “wickedness” of society. Non-believers, who make
up the lion’s share of society, “worship idols and demons, commit murder,
sexual immorality and theft.” Rabbi Tsion Ben-Judah, one of the heroes,
explains that “demon worship, sorcery, and illicit sex are applauded in the
new tolerant society of the West.”164

Making sense of Dispensationalism

American millenarians have little in common with their Roman, medieval and
early modern European precursors beyond their confidence that Christ will
soon reappear. Many medieval and early modern premillenarian sects were
proto-socialist; they believed that property and other forms of wealth, including
women for some, should be held in common. Some of these movements
engaged in direct political action that took the form of violence against local
authorities. Contemporary premillenarians are conservative in their social
values, decidedly non-violent and many are apolitical. This is not true of Tim
LaHaye, co-author of the Left Behind series, who is a co-founder of the Moral

163
LaHaye and Jenkins, Indwelling, for example.
164
LaHaye and Jenkins, Assassins, pp. 174–5.
 greece rediscovered 155

counter-Enlightenment.12 The Enlightenment elevated reason as the source of

all knowledge and science as its most perfect expression. History, art, poetry
and the world of feeling were deeply suspect and dismissed as props of the
church and aristocracy.13 Voltaire, following a line of argument that stretches
back to Plato, condemned poetry as a form of dangerous “figurative” lan-
guage.14 The counter-Enlightenment portrayed reason as a pernicious force
that divided man from nature and sought to reverse this trend by restoring
respect for feeling and art as its principal form of expression. Some of its
principal advocates envisaged art as providing an absolute standard of beauty
and the basis for the individual cultivation of the self. For Kant, the experience
of beauty is one in which imagination is harmonized with understanding
without the intervention or constraint of concepts, including those concerning
the moral good.15
Much of the German philosophical enterprise from Kant on must be under-
stood as a reaction to science and the skepticism and materialism it encouraged.
Schelling, Fichte and Hegel refused to concede that everything outside of
science was mere poetry and a lesser form of knowledge. Inspired by
Rousseau and Jacobi, Novalis lauds “feeling” as a mode of consciousness
distinct from conceptual knowledge and suggests that the negation of reflection
can put us on the path to being.16 Many of these philosophers and writers who
rejected the emerging model of science as the benchmark for knowledge,
developed the alternative conception of Geisteswissenschaft – which became
the “Humanities” or “interpretative sciences” of the English-speaking world.
They sought to provide philosophical foundations for it as well as appropriate
standards for its evaluation. This was a goal of Kant’s Critique of Judgment and
Schiller’s essay on “Aesthetic Education of Man,” and a major theme of Hegel’s
Phenomenology.17 Hans-Georg Gadamer observes that “Only when philosophy
and metaphysics came into crisis in relation to the cognitive claims of the
sciences,” did philosophers have the incentive to “discover again their
proximity to poetry which they had denied since Plato.”18
I am not the first to see a dark side to German philosophical idealism.
German cultural historians theorize a connection between German idealism
and fascism. German idealism drew on earlier esthetic ideals and moral con-
cerns. It emphasized the cultivation of Innerlichkeit (inner development) and

12
Larmore, “Hölderlin and Novalis”; Sturma, “Politics and the New Mythology”; Schmidt,
On Germans and Other Greeks, pp. 122–64; Beiser, German Idealism, pp. 391–6.
13
Kateb, “Utopia and the Good Life”; Dupré, Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations
of Modern Culture, pp. 187–228, on new approaches to history.
14
Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary. 15 Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.
16
Frank, “Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism.”
17
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 7, puts equal emphasis on reason, and rejects sentiment as a
guide.
18
Gadamer, Ästhetik und Poetik I, quoted in Bowie, “German Idealism and the Arts.”
220 be a m m e u p, l or d

class, although generally from its less prosperous and less well-educated sec-
tions. These movements nevertheless attract proportionately more followers
from the working class and less from the professional classes than do main-
stream Protestant churches.171
Timothy Weber contends that turn of the century premillenarians
had much in common with the Progressives. Both sought versions of the
millennium, although millenarians believed this would occur through the
personal intervention of Christ and accordingly regarded reform move-
ments as distractions.172 I find this a forced comparison, as the Progressive
movement encompassed a wide range of groups with quite diverse goals. Its
left wing had the most far-reaching ambitions, but they were still relatively
cautious in the expectations, hoping at best to ameliorate conditions for the
poor and introduce other positive changes in society. They believed in progress
but had few illusions about any figurative millennium lurking around the
corner.173
A more appropriate comparison is to Marxism. This is not all that surprising,
as both movements have roots in Christianity. Marxism has often been
described as a secularized version of Christianity as it seeks to regain paradise,
in secular form and by political means.174 Jesus’ teachings and early
Christianity had a strong anti-wealth ideology and medieval millennial move-
ments frequently had proto-socialist ideologies. Some nineteenth- and
twentieth-century Christian political movements and parties built on this
tradition and offered a blend of Christianity and socialism. This is certainly
not true of Dispensationalism, which is strongly conservative. If we look beyond
these obvious political differences, we encounter striking similarities in outlook
and style of argument between Dispensationalism and the brand of socialism
espoused by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Both ideologies describe the world
as impossible to reform, expect and espouse violent upheavals, advance argu-
ments with the same kinds of contradictions and confront the problem of failed
predictions. There is some evidence to suggest that they attract similar person-
ality types: people who feel threatened by ambiguity and are drawn to move-
ments that offer a comprehensive, black-and-white view of the world and
demand submission to authority from on high.

171
Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 202–4.
172
Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, pp. 102–4, for this parallel.
173
Lippmann, Drift and Mastery; Croly, Promise of American Life; Hofstadter, Age of Reform;
Eisenach, Lost Promise of Progressivism.
174
Löwith, Meaning in History; Popitz, Entfremdete Mensch, p. 99; Wackenheim, Faillité de la
religion d’après Karl Marx, p. 200, contends that via Hegel, Marx links up with the
soteriological schema underlying the Judeo-Christian tradition. McLellan, Marx, pp. 96–7,
rejects these comparisons to Christianity,
 m a k i n g s e n s e o f di s p e n s a t i o n a l i s m 221

Christianity and Marxism have a parallel view of history. The world was good
at the outset, quickly became corrupt, but has the potential to become good
again. For Christians, Eden was a paradise without sin, until the devil, through
his agent Eve, encouraged Adam to eat from the tree of knowledge. This led to
the expulsion of the couple from Eden and all the misery that followed.
Through commitment to Jesus, Eden can be regained in the form of an eternal
afterlife in heaven. In the Marxist narrative people once enjoyed a happy life,
living under a primitive form of communism. Society was corrupted by the
introduction of property, the equivalent of original sin, which brought increas-
ing misery to humankind. The situation became worse under capitalism. The
young Marx declared that “it is only [Germany’s] desperate situation that fills
me with hope.”175 Redemption is possible through socialist revolution as it will
lead us away from private property and to a form of communism in which
human fulfillment and happiness are again possible.
Marxism was never a monolithic ideology or movement, and by the late
nineteenth century had many variants. A principal cleavage was between those
who believed that socialism could be achieved through the ballot box – so-called
revisionists – and those who insisted that only revolution could attain this end.
The latter were convinced that the condition of the working class in industrial
countries was deteriorating, not improving, and that compromise with capital-
ism was a dead end. American evangelicals experienced a similar split.
Postmillenarians assumed the role of revisionists; they supported reforms and
many believed that the millennium could be realized in America through
continued reform of the country’s moral and economic life. Premillenarians,
of whom Dispensationalists became the dominant faction, believed the world
was becoming ever more corrupt and impossible to reform. Just as Lenin
condemned the revisionism of Eduard Bernstein as a sell-out to capitalism,
Dispensationalists like Gaebelein and Haldeman condemned evangelical
involvement in reform as the devil’s work.
For Marx, and for his Bolshevik successors, socialist revolution was necessary
to overthrow capitalism, transfer power to the proletariat and institute the
transformation of people and society that would pave the way to communism.
Marx and Engels never fully elaborated their understanding of the post-
revolutionary era or their plans for this transitional period, but expected it to
be violent and turbulent, as capitalist resistance would survive the revolution.176
Dispensationalists also look forward to a turbulent era, the seven-year-long
tribulation, during which the devil and his supporters will extend their control
over the earth and persecute true believers. Even the millennium would not put

175
Karl Marx to A. Ruge, in P. Nerrlich, ed., Briefwechsel (Berlin, 1886), p. 295, cited in
McLellan, Karl Marx, p. 63.
176
Marx, “After the Revolution”; Engels, “On Morality.”
222 b e a m m e up , lo r d

an end to their opposition because the devil will return at its conclusion to make
a final and unsuccessful bid at world domination.
Marxism and Dispensationalism foreground clever villains with no saving
graces. Satan and capitalists are fiendishly clever but myopically shortsighted.
They can imagine and execute complex plans and conspiracies but cannot see
how counterproductive they are in the long run. For capitalists, this contra-
diction is made more difficult to fathom by virtue of Marx’s writings and the
rise of a socialist movement. If socialists can see the end of history in sight
as well as the means by which this will assuredly come about, clever capitalists
ought to be able to do the same. At the very least they could profit from insights
of their socialist adversaries and figure out ways of preserving the economic
order just as they came up with advertising and planned obsolescence as a
means of sustaining production of often unnecessary goods. Indeed, such
learning may have occurred and provides a partial explanation for why socialist
revolutions did not occur in most developed countries. Satan is even smarter
and more scheming than capitalist plutocrats and for millennia has been
successfully leading much of the human race astray. He is nevertheless blind
to the inevitable outcome of his resistance to God, and this despite
Dispensationalist efforts to decode biblical prophecy and publicize just what
will happen during the tribulation and millennium. The poor devil must be
defeated at Armageddon and then again at the end of the millennium, and on
both occasions as the result of the same unsuccessful military strategy.
Marxists and Dispensationalists differ somewhat in their assignment of
agency. Marx and Engels believed that socialist revolution was the inevitable
outcome of capitalism and in a deeper sense the product of historical develop-
ments that began with the introduction of property. The revolution has to be
man-made, so agency is important, but it can only succeed when conditions are
ripe. Capitalism must reach its most mature stage of development.
Dispensationalists see the millennium as inevitable and in a deeper sense the
outcome of a moral decline that began with the introduction of sin in the
Garden of Eden. The millennium will not be man-made, but come about
through the direct intervention of Jesus. Emphasis on inevitability creates the
same conundrum for both movements. If socialist revolution is inevitable, why
is it necessary to organize the vanguard of the proletariat and an international
socialist movement? If the millennium was inevitable, why invest huge resour-
ces in revival meetings and conversion? Bolsheviks believed that organization
and agitation could make socialist revolution happen sooner rather than later.
Billy Graham, who accepted the premillennial eschatology, justified his
crusades for Christ by suggesting that good Christians might hasten the
millennium along a bit.
Dispensationalists and Marxists make parallel arguments about history. For
both, the world is full of seeming contradictions, but contradictions that can be
reconciled at a deeper level of understanding. For Marxists, the dialectic
158 germans and greeks

the subject. His work pointed to the end of the philosophy of the metaphysical
and made tragedy appear an appropriate vehicle for reflection. Subsequent
German philosophers envisaged tragedy as a means of overcoming metaphy-
sics, understanding the course of history and preparing the way for a cultural
revolution. These philosophers also theorized about tragedy itself and sought to
evaluate it as an art form.

Art versus philosophy

Kant’s philosophical project was above all a response to Humean skepticism.
He sought to provide an alternative foundation for ethics that did not rely on
telos or natural law. His starting point was the assumption that it was impos-
sible for us to cognize our relation to the universal, but we could grasp our
moral need for understanding. Human nature compels us to seek universals.
We find them through faith, which is reason’s form of moral thinking and
allows us to affirm that which is real but inaccessible to theoretical cognition.
Kant effectively challenged a philosophical tradition that had dominated
Western thought since Plato had substituted philosophy for literature as
the appropriate means for exploring the human condition. Kant restored
literature’s role, giving it coequal status with philosophy.
Kant’s successors sought to build on his belief about the isomorphism
between the world and the self by providing firmer foundations for the nou-
menal self and its relationship to the empirical world. The attempt to overcome
Kantian dualism – noumenal and empirical selves – led some philosophers and
writers to aesthetics in the hope it would serve as an effective bridge between the
worlds of spirit and matter. Novalis and Hölderlin took this road, as did
Schelling and Hegel – all of whom were fellow students at the Tübingen Stift
(theological seminary).25 Hölderlin and Novalis imagined a level of being prior
to consciousness in which subject and object are not yet divided. This level of
being was not accessible to consciousness, only to art. Artistic genius, which
they thought arose directly from our being, was therefore the true route to
knowledge. Kant emphasized the role of genius in this connection in his
Critique of Aesthetic Judgment.26 Art opens up a realm to us that is unavailable
to reflection.
Hegel alone among the German philosophers would resist this move, insist-
ing that only abstract reflection can generate moral truths. Hegel reversed Kant,
who had defined freedom and its limitations in terms of the self’s rational
understanding of the noumenal world. For Hegel, it was the empirical world
that provided this guidance. In his imagined polis, ethical life (Sittlichkeit) arose
from civic interaction because the Greek world was still naïve in the sense that it

25
Nauen, Revolution, Idealism, and Human Freedom; La Vopa, Fichte, pp. 200–4.
26
Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, §§ 41–54.
224 b e am m e up , lo r d

Marxists and Dispensationalists are very different kinds of people ideologi-

cally and demographically. Historically, in Europe and North America at least,
Marxists have been more educated, secular, urban and intellectual than the
general population. Minority groups were overrepresented among their fol-
lowers. This was particularly true of Jews, who also tended to be better educated,
more secular, urban and intellectual than their fellow citizens. Jewish partic-
ipation was greatest in countries where they were rejected or marginalized by
the national culture. Dispensationalists are less well-educated than the popu-
lation as whole, more religious and rural, and decidedly non-intellectual. In
contrast to Dispensationalists, who shun modern culture, Marxists found many
recruits among the culture producing and consuming classes and the intellec-
tual elite. Very few professors are attracted to Dispensationalism, and those
who are almost invariably teach in church-run institutions that are millenarian
in their orientation.
In personality type there may be more similarity. There is some research
indicating that people attracted to extremist movements of all kinds have a need
for psychological closure. They need, or want, to believe that the world is
ordered and predictable, and are receptive to ideologies based on totalizing
and determinist visions of society.178 Research suggests that left- and right-wing
authoritarians differ from other people in their cognitive styles and motiva-
tional needs. Else Frenkel-Brunswick, who did pioneering work on this subject
in conjunction with the development of the authoritarian personality concept,
found that authoritarians display low tolerance for ambiguity and have a
preference for simplistic clichés and stereotypes.179 Summarizing subsequent
research on intolerance of ambiguity, Furnham and Ribchester report that it is
associated with a portfolio of related tendencies, including refusal to believe that
individuals can have both good and bad traits, rigid dichotomization of people
and practices, need for certainty and premature closure in information search
and decision making.180

178
Sorrentino and Roney, Uncertain Mind; Schaller, Boyd, Yohannes and O’Brien,
“Prejudiced Personality Revisited”; Webster and Kruglanski, “Individual Differences in
Need for Cognitive Closure”; Jost et al., “Are Needs to Manage Uncertainty and Threat
Associated With Political Conservatism or Ideological Extremity?”; Jost, Glaser,
Kruglanski and Sulloway, “Political Conservatism as a Motivated Social Cognition,” for
a review of the literature on the the cognitive styles and motivated needs of conservatives.
179
Frenkel-Brunswick, “Tolerance Toward Ambiguity as a Personality Variable,”
“Intolerance of Ambiguity as an Emotional Perceptual Personality Variable,” and
“Personality Theory and Perception.”
180
Furnham and Ribchester, “Tolerance of Ambiguity”; Budner, “Intolerance of Ambiguity
as a Personality Variable”; Wilson, “Dynamic Theory of Conservatism”; Sorrentino and
Roney, Uncertain Mind; Hofstede, Culture’s Consequences. For critiques, see Turner,
“Prejudiced Personality and Social Change”; Verkuyten and Hagendoorn, “Prejudice
and Self-Categorization”; Reynolds, Turner, Haslam and Ryan, “Role of Personality and
Group Factors in Explaining Prejudice.”
 m a k i n g s e n s e of di s p e n s a t i o n a l i s m 225

Other researchers maintain that cognitive closure is a means of reducing fear,

anxiety, dissonance, uncertainty and instability.181 Webster and Kruglanski
developed a forty-two-item “Need for Closure Scale” that purports to capture
five elements of closure: preference for order and structure, emotional discom-
fort arising from ambiguity, impatience and impulsivity with regard to decision
making, desire for security and predictability and closed-mindedness.182 I have
no data on Dispensationalists as a whole, but the Christians in Left Behind
display all five elements of closure. The society Jesus creates in its envisaged
Millennium clearly appeals to people in need of closure. It is fair to assume that
LaHaye and Jenkins have an astute understanding of their readership and have
tried to create characters that they will find appealing because they can readily
identify with them.
Similarities in cognitive style and motivated belief may account in part for
why many disillusioned communists became Catholics or joined conservative
movements. Premillennialism has had the same appeal for some former polit-
ical activists. The poster child may be Christabel Pankhurst, the principal
strategist and leader of the British suffragist movement in the early twentieth
century. She initially believed the problems of the world would be solved once
women were enfranchised. World War I and its aftermath disabused her of
these expectations and the hope that a secular paradise was around the corner.
She found, as she put it, a “refuge” in the promised return of Jesus. In the early
1920s, she became a speaker for the premillennial movement.183
Marx and Engel’s version of socialism and Dispensationalism are hostile to
modernity. In this respect, they differ sharply from most socialists and many
other Christians. Socialists and Christians criticized what they saw as the
negative economic and social consequences of industrialization, the self-
centered and materialistic values of the bourgeoisie and the anomie of indus-
trial society. Non-revolutionary socialists have tended to be optimistic about
the future and committed to political action intended to improve the conditions
of the working class. Some Christian movements shared this outlook, including
American evangelicals up to 1914. They espoused reformist agendas and
sponsored a variety of educational and charitable initiatives. Revolutionary
Marxists and Dispensationalism spurn reform programs because they consider
society utterly corrupt and incapable of reform. Both aspire to destroy it and
replace it with something that is fundamentally pre-modern in its values and
practices.
I say pre-modern because, while Marxist images of communism vary, the
future envisaged by Marx and Engels rolls back history by doing away with the

181
Lane, “Fear of Equality”; Nias, “Attitudes to the Common Market.”
182
Sorrentino and Roney, Uncertain Mind; Webster and Kruglanski, “Individual Differences
in Need for Cognitive Closure.”
183
Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, pp. 103–4; Pankhurst, Lord Cometh!, p. 9.
226 b ea m m e u p, lo r d

Industrial Revolution and most of its consequences. Factories are replaced by

workshops and artisanal production restores the intimate relationship between
workers and their products that capitalism destroyed. Bureaucracy is never
mentioned and can be assumed to have disappeared. Social relations are face-
to-face and a high value is put on leisure and recreational activities.184 In
chapter 2, I described how William Morris, a reform-oriented socialist, picked
up and fleshed out this vision in his utopian writing. Like the pre-Raphaelites,
he imagined a socialist London that is medieval in its economy, customs and
costumes.185 From its inception, Dispensationalism envisaged a millennium
that also does away with industrialization and its consequences. The political
order of Left Behind’s Millennium is a hierarchy with a leader surrounded by a
coterie of faithful followers. Christ is at its apex but, in contrast to the Soviet
Union, and more like Morris’s utopia, there is no bureaucracy or any form of
government beyond councils. Laws, religion and social values are based strictly
on the Old Testament and civil society in all its manifestations is eliminated.
All forms of modern entertainment are expressly forbidden. There is no hint
of an educational system beyond nurseries whose primary job is not so much to
teach as to indoctrinate children. We are told nothing about the economic
underpinnings of the society and must assume it rests on the produce of
small, independent farmers. Differences about religion aside, Marx and
Dispensationalists have a surprisingly similar vision of paradise.
Marxism and Dispensationalism make silk purses out of sows’ ears. The very
features of modernity they abhor – capitalism and moral decline respectively –
are offered as evidence that revolutionary change is around the corner. For both
movements, conditions need to get worse before they can get better. Workers
must become poorer and more desperate, but also brought together in larger
productive units for the socialist revolution to break out. People must become
corrupt and greedy enough for the Antichrist to establish his dominion over
them if biblical prophecies are to be fulfilled. This is a psychologically sophis-
ticated strategy because it encourages followers to take pleasure in the very
developments that would otherwise frighten and depress them.

Escaping modernity
It is no coincidence that Marxism and Dispensationalism arose in the second
half of the nineteenth century. This was the time when the Industrial
Revolution had revealed its worst features but not yet its positive promise. It
is significant, too, that Dispensationalism experienced a remarkable surge in its
appeal in the aftermath of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union
and its informal empire. The communist enemy that Americans held respon-
sible for so much evil and suffering disappeared, but evil and suffering did not.

184 185
Marx, “After the Revolution.” Morris, News from Nowhere.
 th e g r e e ks a n d ph i l o s op h y 161

convinced him of the inability of ordinary people to live in freedom. The

destructive potential of humanity might best be controlled, even transformed,
through the development of Spiel and aesthetic sensitivity.
This project finds its most forceful statement in the writings of
Nietzsche, where it became the basis for his radical critique of
Christianity and science. Nietzsche posits a sharp opposition between the
Apollonian art of sculpture and the non-plastic Dionysian art of music.
The world of the intellect is Apollonian, and, he insists, has dominated
Western philosophy and culture since the time of Socrates. For the
Apollonian, everything must be intelligible to be beautiful. Nietzsche
held the triumph of the Apollonian responsible for the ills of Western
culture. It spawned science, defined as “the belief in the explicability of
nature and in knowledge as a panacea.” Science and reason are “seductive
distractions” that solidify knowledge into concepts that stifle creativity.
The Enlightenment and the nineteenth century had greatly accelerated this
process. For Nietzsche, the task of art is to interrogate and undermine all
perspectives to keep them from hardening into life-restricting concepts.
He advocates a project of liberation to distance oneself from the dominant
values of the age, and with it a self-cancelation (selbstaufhebung) of morals
to attempt to regain the instinct of life. He urges readers to “frolic in
images” and recognize that creative life consists of replacing one set of
metaphors and illusions with another. Whereas Aristotle understood art as
an imitation of nature, for Nietzsche, it is “a metaphysical supplement,
raised up beside it to overcome it.” Tragic art in particular creates and
destroys its own illusions. In doing so, it destroys old dreams and makes
way for new ones.40
Nietzsche, like Kant and Schelling, understood that not all knowledge is
accessible to reason. The highest forms of wisdom, he maintained, are achieved
by intuition, seeing and feeling. This is what makes art and music so important.
Language and the concepts it spawns can never capture the cosmic symbolism
of music, because language itself is a symbol. It can have superficial contact with
music – words can describe its structure, rhythm, instrumentation and evolu-
tion – but cannot disclose its innermost heart. That speaks to us directly,
unmediated by language.41 Intelligence beyond the intelligible finds expression
in emotions, communal solidarity and “oneness” with nature, all made possible
by Dionysian ecstasy. Dionysian art convinces us of the joy of existence, and
we come to this realization by grasping the truth that lies behind its represen-
tation. “We must have art,” Nietzsche implored, “lest we perish of the truth” –
by which he means the sterile truths of philosophy. Perhaps for this
reason, Nietzsche judged his own efforts to discover and convey wisdom to

40
Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, ss. 2, 18 and 23.
41
Ibid., ss. 1 and 3; Kaufmann, Nietzsche; White, Metahistory, pp. 331–74.
228 b e a m m e up , lo r d

no longer simply means of bringing people together. Company, associa-

tion, entertainment which also has society as its aim, are sufficient for
them; the brotherhood of man is no empty phrase but a reality, and the
nobility of man shines forth upon us from their toil-worn bodies.187

Dispensationalists are convinced that the world is coming to an end in the near
future but until then, like their socialist predecessors, encourage believers to
find solace in their Christian community. Such a strategy is emotionally
rewarding but can only be sustained by maintaining a faith strong enough to
deny threatening, if not disconfirming, external realities. In 1960, psychologist
Milton Rokeach warned of the dilemma of dogmatism:

All belief-disbelief systems serve two powerful and conflicting sets of

motives at the same time: the need for a cognitive framework to know
and to understand and the need to ward off threatening aspects of reality.
To the extent that the cognitive need to know is predominant and the need
to ward off threat is absent, open system should result. . . . But as the need
to ward off threat becomes stronger, the cognitive need to know should
become weaker, resulting in more closed belief systems.188

Dispensationalism provides assurances against threat and offers immediate

emotional rewards and promises of even greater ones following the return of
Jesus. Repeated failures of the rapture or second coming – including that
predicted by Left Behind – do not seem to have shaken the conviction of
many believers. The most recent prophetic failure is Harold Camping’s well-
publicized insistence that the rapture would come on 21 May 2011. The
following day, a sixty-year-old retiree who spent his life savings to buy billboard
space announcing the end of the world told reporters: “I do not understand
why. . . . I do not understand why nothing has happened.” Other believers
expressed bewilderment, but many insisted it was God’s test of their faith.189
Having studied a similar failed prophecy in 1954, Leon Festinger and colleagues
found that some members of the sect in question developed more intense
missionary zeal in the aftermath. They interpreted this as a response to the
cognitive dissonance brought about by the stark contrast between belief and
reality, which encouraged increased proselytism because: “If more and more
people can be persuaded that the system of belief is correct, then clearly it must
after all be correct.”190

187
Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State.”
188
Rokeach, Open and Closed Mind, p. 67.
189
Guardian, “‘Rapture’: Believers Perplexed after Prediction Fails,” 22 May 2011, www.
guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/21/apocalypse-not-now-rapture-fails-materialise; Fox
News reporting from the Associated Press, “Believers’ Reactions Mixed to Unfulfilled
Doomsday,” 22 May 2011, www.foxnews.com/us/2011/05/22/believers-reactions-mixed-
unfulfilled-doomsday/.
190
Festinger, Riecken and Schachter, When Prophecy Fails.
 e sc a p in g m o de r n it y 229

Judging from the history of Marxism, repeated failure ultimately brings

disillusionment in its wake. Those most likely to remain true believers are
people for whom belief has become a way of life. Renouncing their faith
would necessitate extracting themselves from a community with which they
strongly identify and from which they derive positive emotional and other
rewards. Dispensationalists have tried hard to build and sustain such commun-
ities. It remains to be seen how long and by what means the pull of identity will
succeed in the face of repeated predictive failures.
 7

Science fiction and immortality

Man comes and tills the earth and lies beneath

And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world.
Alfred Lord Tennyson1

Science fiction and religious fundamentalism appear to have little in

common. The former is a secular elite discourse, the latter a popular
religious discourse. Science fiction is most appealing to intellectually
sophisticated teen- and college-age students with some interest and back-
ground in science.2 Readers of I Robot or Dune, despite the latter’s quasi-
religious theme, are hardly likely to read Left Behind, and vice versa.
Although “sci-fi” fans and Dispensationalists represent two distinctive
and largely unrelated communities, they share some things in common.
They are alienated from society and drawn to texts that hold out the
prospect of radical transformation. The two communities of readers see
themselves as members of select groups because of their access to higher
truths about the world, if not the universe. This feeling is reinforced by
the varying degrees of scorn they and their preferred texts meet from
others. The two discourses share parallel origins, as Dispensationalism and
science fiction emerged in the late nineteenth century as a response to
modernization and its consequences. Both literatures, albeit in different
ways, represent strong, negative reactions to modernity and its dominant
values.
Dispensationalism and science fiction have complex relationships with sci-
ence. Protestant evangelicals were initially pro-science; their leaders welcomed
scientific advances as additional evidence of God and his design for humanity.
A minority incorporated evolution into this progressive framework, but most
rejected it as incompatible with Genesis’ account of the creation of the earth and
its inhabitants. So-called fundamentalists, Dispensationalists among them,
increasingly came to regard science as the devil’s work and another sign of
the moral corruption of modern society. In contrast to anti-modern Victorian

1 2
Tennyson, “Tithonus.” Disch, Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, pp. 1, 5.

230
164 g e r m a n s a n d gr e e ks

coffin of Christian metaphysics, and the Kantian project was at its core an
attempt to find a new foundation for ethics based on reason and sentiment.49
Kant’s German successors were in awe of his philosophical innovation, but saw
problems with his attempted solution. They sought better answers and turned
to tragedy for their framework.
Destiny was critical to their proposed solutions. Greek tragedies are driven by
destiny, but it is the destiny of individual human beings that lies hidden within
them. Oedipus is once again the paradigmatic case. His fate is obvious to us at
the outset, in due course to those around him, and finally, to himself. Warned of
his destiny as a young man, he uses his impressive physical and emotional
powers to prevent it, and by virtue of his agency, brings this terrible prophecy to
fruition. The Germans depart from the Greeks in conceiving of destiny in
collective terms. It is not individuals, but history that reveals the collective
destiny of a people as it unfolds. Hegel and Nietzsche employ tragedy in a
double sense: to make sense of history, and through this understanding, to
provide a new foundation for ethics. Their starting point is classical Greece, the
last historical moment before philosophy and metaphysics became the
dominant intellectual framework.
Hume and Gibbon – typical representatives of the Enlightenment – scorned
history as a record of folly, although they became deeply engaged in its writing.
Kant, by contrast, approached history with reverence because he read it as the
story of humanity’s struggles to uplift itself morally. Hegel followed Kant and
was drawn to tragedy as a model for thinking about historical development. In
it he found hidden dynamics that moved social interactions at every level of
analysis. He reasoned that history was driven by the same dialectic of conflict
and recognition, and came to understand it as the efforts of the spirit to
recognize its individuality, by comprehending the universality in terms of
which it could come to know and differentiate itself. Like Schelling, he consid-
ered history tragic in its inexorability. Central to its development is the tragic
moment, which always takes the form of a confrontation with death in which
the truth is summoned or revealed. In such crises, the spirit faces the pure
singularity exposed by death, and comes to recognize itself and its
potentialities.50
Nietzsche interprets tragedy’s relationship to history differently. His start-
ing point is his well-known distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian.
There is a perpetual struggle between the Dionysian drive for self-
forgetfulness and the Apollonian one toward self-individuation. Classical
Greece was unique in its willingness to recognize, even celebrate, the irresolv-
able conflict between these drives, and the suffering it causes. Nietzsche

49
Shell, Kant and the Limits of Autonomy, on Kant’s commitment to God and Christian
morality.
50
Hegel, Philosophy of History.
232 s c i e n c e fi c t io n a n d i m m o r t a l i ty

Immortality
Mortality is the fate of all life forms. Human beings appear to be the only
terrestrial species aware of this truth and immortality has accordingly long been
a human dream. Adam and Eve were said to have begun life as immortals, but
they and their descendants lost it when they were expelled from Eden.
Christianity holds out the prospect of resurrection, which undoubtedly
accounts for much of its appeal in the ancient and modern worlds. Greek
gods were immortal, but not people who worshipped them. Even in Hesiod’s
Golden Age, where humans intermingled with the gods and did not have to
work for their food, they lived in good health, but only, like biblical patriarchs,
to a ripe old age.
Western culture offers us numerous accounts of mythical or real figures who
sought immortality. Eos, the Titan goddess of dawn, bargained with Zeus for
the immortality of her lover, the Trojan, Tithonus. She failed to insist on the
additional conditions of good health and a young body and Tithonus suffered
all the frailties of age, ending up a pitiable figure. Endymion was given the gift of
perpetual youth by Jupiter, but experienced it as perpetual sleep. Arachne, who
outperformed Athena at the loom, was rewarded with eternal life as a spider.
Jonathan Swift offers a variant of this myth in Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver hears
tales about the immortal Struldbruggs on the islands of Paluta and Balnibardi
and begins to fantasize about how much he would enjoy eternal life. He then
learns that Struldbruggs age like ordinary mortals and are denied the privileges
often reserved for the elderly. They are unable to communicate with subsequent
generations because their society’s language evolves so quickly. He concludes
that they are the least fortunate of beings and he considers bringing some back
to England to help his countrymen overcome their fear of death.
The Fountain of Youth, a more optimistic legend, describes a spring that
restores the youth of anyone who drinks its waters. Accounts appear in
Herodotus, the Alexander romance, the medieval Travels of Sir John
Mandeville and Christian tales about the mythical Prester John.3 Stories
about restorative powers of the water of the mythical land of Bimini circulated
among indigenous Caribbean peoples and excited Spanish explorers. In 1513,
Ponce de León, governor of Puerto Rico, searched for the Fountain of Youth in
Florida. We have very few stories of people who have rejected the gift of
immortality. In Western culture the outstanding example is Odysseus, who
rejects Calypso’s offer of immortality if he remains with her and instead chooses
to continue his voyage home.4 Mythical figures who achieve immortality, like
Semele, daughter of Cadmus, invariably do it through the intervention of a god.
As mortality is seemingly inescapable and a greatly feared feature of human
existence, it is only natural that people fantasized about escaping death. Ever the

3 4
Herodotus, Histories, 3: 22–4. Homer, Odyssey, 5: 152–7.
 immortality 233

realists, ancient Greeks conceived of immortality in an abstract metaphorical

way; the best one could do was win fame through glorious deeds that were
celebrated down through the ages. In a modern variant, William Faulkner
observed: “Really the writer doesn’t want success. He knows he has a short
life span. The day will come that he must pass through the wall of oblivion and
he wants to leave a scratch on the wall – Kilroy was here – that someone a
hundred or a thousand years later will see.”5 By the classical era, figurative
immortality could be achieved vicariously through the fame of one’s city.
Christianity was one of several Middle Eastern sects that held out the prospect
of a more literal form of immortality through the post-death survival of the
soul. The Church fathers envisaged immortality as a form of spiritual survival
although there can be no doubt that many Christians – then and now – hope
for, even expect, some kind of physical existence in heaven. A third strategy,
more prevalent in the east, and central to the Hindu–Buddhist tradition,
conceived of reincarnation as a form of immortality. Hindus believe that one
dies but is reborn in another body or life form. For Hindus and Buddhists this
cycle is less a blessing than a curse and can ultimately be transcended.
A fourth and obvious strategy is pursuit of continuous life in one’s own body.
The Spanish search for the fabled fountain of youth is a case in point. It proved
as fanciful as the quest for the philosopher’s stone with its ability to transform
base elements into gold. Widespread recognition that such quests were unre-
alistic came on the cusp of the era in which longevity and transmutation finally
became possible. Advances in nuclear physics allowed scientists to turn one
element into others through fission or fusion, although in minute quantities
and at too high a cost for any commercial purpose. Medical progress greatly
extended life spans over the course of the twentieth century, allowing men and
women in developed countries to live on average into their late seventies. In
Japan, which tops the list, life expectancy for women has reached 86.1 years.6
Future advances have the potential to add decades to our lives by slowing the
aging process and preventing or repairing many of the problems associated
with old age.
As the ancient hope of extended life became a reality, it has understandably
inspired reflection about the potential of even longer lives to transform the
character of human life and society. Science fiction has been at the forefront of
this enterprise. Much of its engagement is inspired by the negative precedent of
nuclear weapons. Atomic weapons were “invented” by science fiction authors a
decade before any serious effort by physicists was made to build them. Leo
Szilard says that he was alerted to the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction

5
Faulkner, “Address upon Receiving the Andrés Bello Award.”
6
Wikipedia, “List of Countries by Life Expectancy,” using data from the United Nations,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy.
234 s c i e n c e f ic ti o n a n d im m o r ta l it y

by H. G. Wells’ 1914 novel The World Set Free.7 The US bomb was developed
secretly and used against Japan in the absence of any public debate.
Leading scientists responsible for “fat man” and “little boy” favored a peaceful
demonstration of atomic destructive power in the hope that it would prompt
Japanese surrender before it became necessary to destroy any of their cities.
Their memorandum to President Truman was never delivered and is unlikely
in any case to have had its intended effect.8 Future technology could have an
even more damning downside and it is therefore important to explore its
possible consequences before irrevocable decisions are made. Science fiction
author Orson Scott Card insists: “We have to think of them so that if the worst
does come, we’ll already know how to live in that universe.”9
Science fiction has been uniformly negative in its assessment of immortality.
In the first instance, this is attributable to recognition of its authors that so
many twentieth-century scientific developments have been used for dehuman-
izing and destructive ends. There is widespread fear – that extends beyond the
science fiction community – that breakthroughs that allow longevity or some-
thing approaching immortality would be no different in their consequences.
Such pessimism reflects a more general turn against modernity and its founda-
tional belief in the power of reason to bring about a better life. Science fiction
authors are equally dubious about the social benefits of other scientific advan-
ces, among them information and nanotechnology, robotics and genetics. Not
every author regards science and its social consequences negatively, but it is
undeniable that science fiction has evolved from a pro-science, pro-modern
discourse into one that has a distinctly anti-science and anti-modern flavor.
Further evidence for this assertion is provided by the emergence and extra-
ordinary popularity of fantasy. In the late nineteenth century, science fiction
and fantasy were largely inseparable in the form of pulp fiction. Fantasy, as I
noted in the previous chapter, is characterized by the adventures of larger-than-
life characters, often with superpowers or access to magic.10 Its imaginary
worlds are pre-modern in conception and often inhabited by princes and
princesses or imaginary creatures who interact in kingdoms where war,
honor and romance are principal activities. If science fiction initially

7
Wells, World Set Free; Lanouette, Genius in the Shadows, pp. 107, 134.
8
Interview with Leo Szilard, “President Truman Did Not Understand,” US News & World
Report, 15 August 1960, pp. 68–71; Petition to the President of the United States, signed by
Leo Szilard and 69 co-signers, 17 July 1945, www.dannen.com/decision/45-07-17.html.
Glenn T. Seaborg to Ernest O. Lawrence, 13 June 1945, Nuclear Files, http://nuclearfiles.
org/menu/library/correspondence/seaborg-glenn/corr_seaborg_1945-06-13.htm.
9
Card, Xenocide, p. 35. Also, Stapledon, Last and First Men, p. 11; Joy, “Why the Future
Doesn’t Need Us.”
10
Guy Gavriel Kay, “Fiction versus Fantasy,” www.treitel.org/Richard/sf/fantasy.html; Nick
Gevers, “The Literary Alchemist: An Interview with Michael Swanwick,” www.
infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intms.htm.
 t r a g e dy a n d p o li ti cs 167

after the French Revolution.57 In the first instance, therefore, the rediscovery of
Greece was part of the search for freshness, balance, reason and limits –
politically as well as artistically. This may help explain why the Greece
embraced by German intellectuals was not the historical Greece – about
which little was known in any case – but a highly idealized Greece of reason
and “noble simplicity.” Such an image could serve as a model and lodestone for
alienated intellectuals committed to restructuring their society through a
cultural and educational revolution.
Many German intellectuals initially welcomed the French Revolution, as they
considered it a challenge and opportunity for the “German nation.” Enthusiasm
soured when the revolution gave way to the Terror, Napoleonic Empire and
French universalism was superseded by cultural and political imperialism. As
the French Revolution claimed to embody Enlightenment principles, the vio-
lent course of the revolution and its foreign conquests brought about disen-
chantment among many German intellectuals with the Enlightenment and, for
some, with democracy more generally. Reason, unshackled from traditional
restraints, appeared to have produced the very opposite of a just, ordered and
secure society.58 As we observed in the previous chapter, this perspective is
evident in Don Giovanni, which premiered two years before the French
Revolution, and Die Zauberflöte, which had its first performance two years
afterwards.
German intellectuals were increasingly drawn to the counter-Enlightenment,
a catch-all term for diverse movements and intellectual orientations, including
conservatism, critical philosophy, historicism, idealism, nationalism, revivalism
and holism. Counter-Enlightenment thinkers rejected the expectations of the
Enlightenment as naїve and dangerous; they saw the world as complex,
contradictory, composed of unique social entities in a state of constant
flux. They rejected the Lockean conception of a human being as a tabula
rasa, and the mere sum of internal and external forces, and its emphasis on
body over soul, reason over imagination and thought over the senses. They
insisted on a holistic understanding that incorporated and overcame these
dichotomies, and understood that individuals and social collectivities alike
were attempting to discover and express their authenticity.59 The counter-
Enlightenment had begun in France before the Revolution and gained a
wider European audience through the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It
found German spokesmen in the 1770s, among them Hamann, Herder, and
Lavater and Möser, the young Goethe, the dramatists of Sturm und Drang and

57
Honour, Neoclassicism.
58
Pinkard, German Philosophy, pp. 82–4; Sturma, “Politics and the New Mythology.”
59
Frank, Einführung in der früromantische Ästhetik; Boyle, Goethe; Beiser, “Enlightenment
and Idealism”; Dahlstrom, “Aesthetic Holism of Hamann, Herder, and Schiller”; Behler,
German Romantic Literary Theory; Pinkard, German Philosophy.
236 sc ien ce f ic ti on and im m or tal it y

their bodies, hopping from body to body as the need arose. In Robert Heinlein’s
Fear No Evil, an aging rich man achieves a new life by having his brain
substituted for that of his secretary, but is disturbed to find her thoughts and
dispositions are still present. Other stories allow substitution or entry into new
bodies without this difficulty, as in A. E. van Vogt’s The World of Null-A and
The Players of Null-A. Leaving aside the technical problems involved, body
hopping creates ethical dilemmas that reincarnation does not, because it
deprives existing beings of their mental lives. I will return to this question in
my discussion of Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon.
One alternative to multiple bodies requires preservation of the body with
which we were born. In 1816, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann resorts to
alchemy to preserve our bodies. Many later writers turned to eugenics as a
means to this end. H. G. Wells uses natural selection to improve humanity and
extend its lifespan in Time Machine, A Modern Utopia and Men Like Gods. In
The Shape of Things to Come, published in 1933, this process is accelerated by
eugenics. Wells was a committed Lamarckian, and somehow convinced himself
that acquired characteristics could be transmitted to one’s progeny. George
Bernard Shaw, another Lamarckian, employed eugenics to achieve longevity in
Back to Methuselah, published in 1932. In the post-war era, Robert Heinlein’s
Methuselah’s Children describes a eugenics program that breeds disease out of
the gene pool. In Frank Herbert’s Eyes of Heisenberg, eugenics produces a
super-intelligent and immortal race.
Those authors who meddled metaphorically with biology were often quick to
disavow their creations. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein set the pattern by treating
bioengineering as an unacceptable act of hubris. In John Taine’s Seeds of Life,
published in 1931, and John Russell Fearn’s The Intelligence Gigantic, which
appeared two years later, artificially enhanced humans with superpowers are
regarded as a menace that must be destroyed. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series,
written in the early 1950s, echoes this position. Its chief villain, the “Mule,” is a
genetic freak, as Nicolae Carpathia would be in the Left Behind series. He has
the ability to reach into the minds of others and rearrange their emotions to suit
his ends. He establishes a short-lived empire but is ultimately defeated and
rendered harmless by the Second Foundation.
Many post-war novels, among them, Arthur C. Clarke’s Cities of Light, Frank
Herbert’s Dune, C. J. Cherryh’s Cyteen, Bob Shaw’s One Million Tomorrows,
James Blish’s Cities in Flight and Richard Cowper’s Tithonian Factor, use drugs
to transform people and achieve immortality. Larry Niven’s World Out of
Time and C. J. Cherryh in Exile’s Gate employ teleportation to rid the body of
poisons that would otherwise lead to death. Some authors rely on fortuitous
mechanisms. In Algis Budry’s The End of Summer, the earth passes through a
field that promotes cellular regeneration and repairs aging and injured cells. In
Jeffrey Ford’s The Physiognomy, a rare white fruit bestows endless life. Brian
Stableford conjures up a newly evolved virus for the same purpose, as does
 be c om in g im m o r t a l 237

Larry Niven in his Protector and Ringworld Engineer novels.16 In James Gunn’s
The Immortals, extended life is achieved through transfusions from people with
a rare blood group that somehow keeps them from aging. In Reefs of Space,
Frederick Pohl infects humans with “transrevolutionary” cells to give them
extraordinary powers.17 Other novels turn to mutations.18 Some genetic
changes are described as natural and others the result of nuclear fallout or the
byproducts of other human activities. Almost any conceit is allowed in science,
but as Stephen Clark rightly notes, many of these stories rest on the false
premise that a single drug or mutation could dramatically change a species or
bring a new one into being.19
Bio- and nanotechnology offer a more recent route to immortality and
with it, greatly enhanced “human” mental and physical capabilities. In
David Marusek’s Counting Heads, nanotechnology can manufacture any
body part people need while medical science maintains youthful physique
and vigor. In Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire, medicine and technology combine
to extend life. Ben Bova’s The Immortality Factor relies on organ regen-
eration. In Jeremy Carver’s From a Changeling Star, the main character is
infected with intelligent, human-engineered nano-agents that change his
appearance, memory and DNA.
In the 1970s, science fiction began to assume that bioengineering might
soon become a reality. Naomi Mitchison’s Solution Three, Samuel R.
Delany’s Triton and John Varley’s The Ophiuchi Hotline feature biotech-
nological experiments or enhancements that somehow go astray, invoking
memories of Frankenstein. In some novels people combine with plants. In
Needle, Hal Clement describes a symbiosis between humans and an
amoeboid life form, initiated by the latter. Anne McCaffery tells a macabre
tale about handicapped children whose appendages and body parts are
gradually replaced by man-made ones in preparation for their merger with
spaceships that will be controlled by their long-lived brains.20 In Scott
Orson Card’s Wyrms, living heads are preserved with the help of genet-
ically engineered worms.
Early in the 1950s, Norbert Wiener speculated about the theoretical possi-
bility of telegraphing a human being.21 In 1988, Hans Moravec characterized
human identity as an informational construct, reducing the role of body to that
of a supporting platform.22 Marvin Minsky suggested that brains might be

16
Stableford, Empire of Fear, 17 Simmons, Hyperion, for something similar.
18
Gunn, Immortals; Anderson, Boat of a Million Years; Kuttner and Moore, Fury; Zelazny,
This Immortal; Jones, Crown of Dalemark; Van Vogt, Slan; Shiras, Children of the Atom.
19
Clark, How to Live Forever, pp. 26–7. 20 McCaffery, Ship Who Sang.
21
Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings, pp. 103–4.
22
Moravec, Mind Children, pp. 109–10.
168 g e r m a n s a n d g r e e ks

Schiller.60 In literature it found expression in the early Romanticism

(Frühromantik) of Novalis (Friedrich Hardenberg), the Schlegel brothers and
Christian Friedrich Tieck, in religion with Friedrich Schleiermacher, and in
philosophy with Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Georg F. W. Hegel.
Tragedy captured, or allowed the expression of, the principal concerns of the
counter-Enlightenment. It balanced reason with feeling, and physical sensa-
tions with cognition, rooted individuals in their society and its historical
development. It conceived of human beings and their societies as having
made fragile, ultimately indefensible and ever evolving accommodations with
the irreconcilable polarities of social existence. Hegel revolutionized the study
of tragedy by directing attention away from tragic heroes to tragic collisions.
Tragedies, he observed, place their characters in situations where they must
choose between competing obligations and associated conceptions of justice.
Their choices propel them into conflicts with characters who have made differ-
ent choices. The polarities included family versus civic commitments, freedom
and authority, and above all else, individual assertion and the certainty of death
and oblivion. Conflicts arise not only as a result of these choices, but even more
from the inability of tragic characters to empathize. They understand the
other’s position as a reality without justification (rechtlose Wirklichkeit).61 In
Antigone, the eponymous heroine’s loyalty to her brother and the gods bring
her into conflict with Creon, who is just as committed to upholding civic order
and his authority as head of the family. There are lesser collisions between
Antigone and her sisters, Creon and his son and Creon and Teresias, each of
them emblematic.
Although they looked askance at autocratic German governments, many
German intellectuals nevertheless felt humiliated by Prussia’s defeat, all the
more so as they had become deeply invested in the idea of the German nation.
German writers and philosophers were not immune to nationalism and
encouraged the idea that Germany could become the midwife of a spiritual
revolution that would succeed where the political revolution of France
had failed. Schiller, Fichte, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Schelling and Hegel
were committed to this project. The writings of Nietzsche, although scornful
of nationalism, were also infused with the idea of the special mission of
Germany.
The hopes of German philosophers, writers and political liberals were dashed
by the reaction that set in once the Napoleonic threat receded. This was
particularly significant in Prussia, the most powerful German political unit
after Austria. Following the twin defeats of Jena and Auerstädt in October 1806,
a reluctant Prussian king turned to reform-minded officials (e.g. Hardenberg,

60
Dahlstrom, “The Aesthetic Holism of Hamann, Herder, and Schiller.”
61
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 332; Kaufmann, Tragedy and Philosophy, pp. 201–2;
Taylor, Hegel, p. 175; Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks, pp. 89–121.
 becoming immortal 239

Yet another possibility is the collective mind. The ancient Greeks imagined
figurative immortality on this basis. The individual was mortal but the culture
was not – or was at least long-lived – so narratives, transmitted orally or in
writing, could carry down through the generations the names and deeds of
famous individuals. A modern variant stresses becoming part of the “great
chain of being.”28 Science fiction improves on this scenario by giving people
direct access to their ancestors. The sentient beings in Herbert’s Dune and God-
Emperor of Dune are born with the memories of the ancestors.29 Their “I” is a
collective one that represents, if not the species, a very long lineage that is a
representative sample of it. In Greg Bear’s Blood Music, human minds are
downloaded into “intelligent leukocytes” that transform them into a greater
planetary mind. Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide imagines a collective mind
modeled on the anthill or beehive. His insect-like “Buggers” have a queen
who controls all the members of her hive through something akin to telepathy.
The Pequininos, or “piggies,” another species in the novel, go through several
stages of existence and finally morph into trees in adulthood. They can com-
municate with one another and to some degree think collectively. Human
beings in contact with both species on the world of Lusitania learn some of
these communication skills with the help of Jane, a sentient being who resides in
humanity’s computer network.
The most amusing conceit, admittedly more fantasy than science fiction,
makes death itself, not human beings, responsible for immortality. In José
Saramago’s Death at Intervals, set in an unidentified South American country,
people stop dying because death initiates a moratorium. Most folks are over-
joyed, except for those who must continue to care for relatives at death’s door.
The Roman Catholic Church is another big loser and starts a campaign of
prayer to bring death back because its authority all but disappears because
people who expect to live forever lose all fear of damnation. Death finally writes
a letter to be read aloud on national television. She explains that she wanted to
give people a sense of what immortality was like so they could see for them-
selves just how loathsome it would be. Death acknowledges her mistake and
announces that at midnight people will begin to die again, as the prime minister
does as the three hands of the clock converge.30
Immortality, which I equate with enduring life, must be distinguished from
longevity, which is prolonged life. In practice, the two categories differ more in
degree than in kind. Immortality is always tenuous because, as George Bernard
Shaw noted, people can still be killed by accidents or violence.31 Although the
chances of this happening may be low, they increase significantly over millennia

28
Lifton, Future of Immortality, p. 3.
29
Wilson, Philosopher’s Stone, for another variant of species memory.
30
Saramago, Death at Intervals. 31 Shaw, Back to Methuselah.
240 s c i e n c e f ic t io n a n d im m o r t a l i ty

of existence.32 In Algis Budry’s The End of Summer, the planet’s population

gradually declines for this reason. Other novels surmount this problem through
reincarnation or simulacra. In Philip Farmer’s Riverworld, people who are
killed are reborn and relocated somewhere else along the river. In Jack
Vance’s To Live Forever, as in Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon, analog or
digital copies are kept in storage and brought into being only as needed.33 The
biggest barrier to immortality may be the demise of the solar system, and much
later, of our universe, through its possible contraction. True immortality would
require some way of repeatedly going back into time to avoid termination, or
some means of transportation into other star systems or successor universes.
James Blish imagines a frightful conflict as the universe is on the verge of
destroying itself through contraction in which humans kill one another off in
the hope of contributing some of themselves to the bubbles that will form new
universes.34

Science fiction and progress

There is no consensus about the origins of science fiction. One aficionado
unconvincingly traces it back to ancient Greece.35 More commonly it is thought
to have arisen in the nineteenth century and reached the apex of its popularity
in the latter half of the twentieth.36 By then science fiction had expanded
beyond novels and stories to comic books, graphic novels, films, TV programs
and movies, video games and even music and poetry.37 Brian Aldiss considers
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818, the first true work of science
fiction. Darko Suvin dates its emergence to the turn of the twentieth century,
when time travel joins space travel as a major theme of pulp novels.38 Samuel
Delany offers the later date of 1926, when American publisher Hugo Gernsback
coined the term science fiction.39
Science fiction arose in Britain for two reinforcing reasons. It is the country in
which the Industrial Revolution originated and where its effects were most
deeply felt. Almost from the beginning the British intellectual and artistic elite
was sensitive to its dehumanizing consequences. In 1829, Thomas Carlyle
warned that the “Moral Age,” was in the process of giving way to the
“Mechanical Age,” which was transforming not only the “external and

32
Anderson, Boat of a Million Years, makes this point.
33
Vance, To Live Forever; Zelazny, Today We Choose Faces. 34 Blish, Clash of Symbols.
35
Roberts, History of Science Fiction, pp. 1–20.
36
Luckhurst, Science Fiction, pp. viii, 1–12.
37
Disch, Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, p. 11.
38
Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, p. 89.
39
Roberts, History of Science Fiction, ch. 1 for a review of definitions. Luckhurst, Science
Fiction, pp. 1–12, on the development of the genre.
 s ci e n ce f ic ti o n an d p r o gr e s s 241

physical” life of Britain but its “internal and spiritual” life.40 In 1867–8, in a
series of influential essays, Matthew Arnold condemned machinery and its
culture as harsh, inflexible and dehumanizing.41 On the continent, reaction
against the machine age found resonance in the early writings of Karl Marx and
later, in Max Weber’s account of bureaucracy.42 High modernists T. S. Eliot and
D. H. Lawrence worried that human beings would become cogs in machines or
otherwise made to act and think like machines. Later British writers, among
them, Evelyn Waugh, Osbert Sitwell, George Orwell and Wyndham Lewis,
expressed similar fears.
Because high culture in Britain and France rejected technology and the
mechanization it promoted, its representatives were hostile to those who
regarded these developments favorably. These writers developed science fiction
to convey their optimism to a wider, non-elite audience. It is a genre well suited
to this end as the payoffs of science lay in the future.43 Writers could imagine
worlds in which the Industrial Revolution was much further advanced and
showcase its potential to produce a better world. Some early science fiction
authors, like their socialist counterparts, believed that science and technology
had the potential to overcome poverty and class divisions.44 Gothic writing was
another form of rebellion against the literary establishment and became the
natural ally of science fiction. The two genres maintained an active dialogue and
it is often difficult to distinguish between them, as in Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein.45 Recent readings of H. G. Wells, especially of The Island of Dr.
Moreau, attempt to place him in the Gothic tradition.46 Jules Verne’s long-
suppressed manuscript, Paris in the Twentieth Century, written in 1863, but not
published until 1994, reveals his dark side. The future metropole has gas-
powered vehicles – stuck in traffic jams – telephones, fax machines and electric
chairs, but citizens must learn English to function in the wider world and search
the Seine bookstalls in vain for copies of Victor Hugo.
The rise of science fiction coincided with the development of the train and
steamship, quickly followed by the automobile, airplane and submarine.
Authors imagined rockets as the next feasible development, and with them,
travel to the moon and beyond. Jules Verne exploited these possibilities in a
series of best-selling novels.47 They are pure adventure tales, but with a concern
for the inherent plausibility of their technological conceits. Verne’s heroes and
villains are rudimentary, their adventures have no impact on their societies and,

40
Carlyle, “Signs of the Times.” 41 Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, pp. 33–4, 47.
42
Weber, “On Bureaucracy.” This title is not Weber’s, but his translator’s.
43
Luckhurst, Science Fiction, p. 48.
44
Roberts, Science Fiction,” p. viii; Luckhurst, Science Fiction, pp. 2–3.
45
Ibid., p. 5; Miles, Gothic Writing, p. 2; Aldiss, Billion Year Spree, p. 8.
46
Dryden, Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles; Hurley, Gothic Body.
47
On this point, Unwin, “The Fiction of Science”; Harris, “Measurement and Mystery in
Verne.”
242 s c ie n c e fi c t i on a n d i m m or t a l i t y

as a gesture of solidarity with the status quo, their miraculous conveyances are
destroyed at the end of these adventures.48 Stories about time travel soon
augmented those about space travel. Both make use of futuristic inventions
such as robots and ray guns. Writing of this kind reinforced the establishment’s
dismissal of science fiction as a low, if not juvenile, literary form.49 Not
surprisingly, a few writers aspired, as some critics still do, to make science
fiction more literary. Most scorn these pretensions.50
Even H. G. Wells, one of the most popular Victorian British authors, was
unable to bridge the divide between literature and science fiction. He came from
a working-class background and was the product of a new institute of technol-
ogy that would later become Imperial College. He was the bête noire of many
literary figures, who were appalled by his embrace of the machine age and belief
in its utopian possibilities. Like many Victorians, Wells subscribed to the grand
narrative of progress.51 But, like Verne, he was sensitive to the darker side of
technology. He published six utopias, but also two dystopias. In War from the
Air, airships destroy the heart of Paris and intimidate its panicked citizens. So
do foreign occupation troops, flown in from Africa. In France, Jules Verne’s
novels provoked a similar reaction. His stories cut against the grain of the
established literary culture because they seemed to vaunt technology and
appealed to a mass audience.52 The reaction of the American literary establish-
ment to science fiction was similar and enduring. Thomas Disch tells of an
exchange with the well-known writer and professor Morris Dickstein at a PEN
conference in New York City. Dickstein told him of the “heresy” he had just
encountered: someone had described George Orwell as a science fiction writer.
Dickstein insisted that an intellectual of Orwell’s stature could not, by defini-
tion, have written science fiction.53
Science fiction broadened its scope after World War I, and even more after
1945. Many stories and novels retained the genre’s fascination with science, but
engaged it in a more serious way. Arthur C. Clarke’s Islands in the Sky, The
Sands of Mars, Earthlight, Rendezvous with Rama and 2061 base their plots on
scientific laws or principles. Other writers explore the potential of science and
technology to transform people and their societies. They reach out to history
and the social sciences for insights and plots. Science fiction also became
increasingly political. Prominent works like Zamyatin’s We and Huxley’s
Brave New World and Music at Night sought to expose the tyranny of commu-
nism and its desire to reduce men to pliant machines. In the immediate post-

48
Capitano, “‘L’ici-bas’ and ‘l’Au-delà’.”
49
Williams, Keywords, on high and low literary forms.
50
Suvin, Positions and Suppositions, p. 10; James, Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century,
p. 48; Luckhurst, Science Fiction, p. 7.
51
Wells, Short History of the World.
52
Evans, “Jules Verne and the French Literary Canon.”
53
Disch, Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, p. 4.
 s c ie n c e fi ct io n a n d p r o g r e s s 243

World War II years, Orwell’s 1984 explored the generic features of totalitarian
regimes. These several works were not so different in their assumptions from
Victorian critics of the Industrial Revolution.
In the McCarthy era, American science fiction became a refuge for some
writers who used the genre to voice criticisms that might otherwise have
prompted their blacklisting.54 In Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, Ray
Bradbury lashed out against censorship and book burning. The Cold War
engaged science fiction writers across the political spectrum.55 Philip Wylie,
Frederick Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, and above all, Robert Heinlein, were commit-
ted Cold Warriors. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, published in 1959, glorified the
American military and its culture.56 Juan “Johnnie” Rico and his mobile
infantry do combat with an arachnoid species, known as “the bugs,” which
represents a thinly veiled Soviet Union. More novels were anti-war. Walter
Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz emphasized the risk to humanity posed by
nuclear weapons and the Cold War. In James Blish’s A Case of Conscience, a
lengthy arms race compels people to live underground in tomb-like complexes.
Murray Leinster’s Operation Terror describes what appears to be an alien
invasion but turns out to be a clever cover for a US pre-emptive nuclear strike
against the Soviet Union. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest,
written during the Vietnam War, is a thinly veiled polemic. Papers Found in a
Bathtub, by Polish author Stanislaw Łem, the Soviet bloc’s most prominent
science fiction writer, is a biting parody of the US Defense Department and
military, but can be read as an equally damning critique of its Soviet
counterparts.
Science fiction underwent a similar evolution with respect to utopias. Early
novels embraced them. Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, which
appeared in 1872, looks forward to a time when immortal “pure and radiant
beings” would look back with pity on contemporary humans.57 Mary
E. Bradley’s Mizora, published in 1880–1 under the pseudonym Princess
Vera Zoranovitch, envisages an age of peace once aggression was overcome
by eliminating men and relying on an alternate means of reproduction. Jules
Verne employs many utopian features in his novels.58 Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward, published in 1889, imagines a peaceful, happier future
organized along socialist lines. Today, these novels strike us as naïve. So does
the more recent 1948 Walden Two, of B. F. Skinner, which relies on “behavioral
engineering” to construct a better world.59 Given the contemporary mood,

54
Luckhurst, Science Fiction, p. 115; Disch, Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, pp. 92–3.
55
Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War; Disch, Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of,
pp. 163–84.
56
Ibid., pp. 83–7, 164–70, on Heinlein. 57 Reade, Martyrdom of Man, p. 433.
58
Capitano, “‘L’ici-bas’ and ‘l’Au-delà’,” for a discussion.
59
See chapter 2 for a discussion of these novels.
 t he t r a g e d y o f g e r m a n ph i l o s op h y 173

In Germany, romantic nationalism was always at odds with traditional

conservatism, but had less difficulty in blending with more modern approaches
to politics, including socialism. The Nazi Party appealed to romantic nationalist
and völkisch strands of opinion, but made only limited inroads with workers,
and at best gained the tacit support of the traditional conservative elite by virtue
of its successful economic and foreign policies. In Russia, these different strands
of opinion found expression in different political movements, although there
was considerable overlap. In pre-war Russia, Slavophil sentiment was most
prevalent within the aristocracy, but found some support among intellectuals,
Dostoevsky being a case in point.75 Liberal constitutionalism was represented
by the Kadet Party, the largest party in the National Assembly (Duma).
Socialism blended with nationalism and gave rise to a series of movements,
including Zemlya i Volya (land and liberty), which, in the 1880s, sent students,
without notable success, to live with peasants and mobilize their support.76
More Marxist socialists envisaged the workers as the vanguard of the revolu-
tion. The avowedly internationalist Bolshevik faction emerged as the dominant
force in post-war Russia, renamed the Soviet Union.77 Despite its strong anti-
nationalist ideology, part of the appeal of revolutionary socialism to Russian
intellectuals had to do with their expectation that it would accelerate Russian
development and gain new respect for their country as both a great power and
model for the rest of the world.78
As in Germany, this form of cultural nationalism assumed racist form and
gave rise to extreme xenophobia and anti-Semitism. In both countries, cultural
nationalism was fed by deep insecurity. In Germany, it was the result of late
cultural and economic development, defeat and occupation by France and
delayed political unification. In Russia, much the same situation prevailed. It
had been unified and a great power for some time, but was economically and
technologically backwards, and had barely avoided defeat by Napoleon. Even
more than in Germany, the indigenous political elite feared the consequences of
the spread of Western values and ideas.

The tragedy of German philosophy

The German–Russian comparison is revealing in two ways. It supports the
claim of causal links between late development on the one hand and insecurity,
xenophobia and racism on the other. Elsewhere I have argued that this pattern
is not limited to Germany and Russia; late developers on the whole tend to have
influential segments of their intelligentsia that adopt xenophobic, anti-Western

75
Pipes, Russian Intelligentsia; Gleason, European and Muscovite.
76
Venturi, Roots of Revolution, esp. pp. 253–84, 469–506.
77
Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence, pp. 12–31.
78
Pipes, “Historical Evolution of the Russian Intelligentsia”.
 th e co n s e qu e n c e s o f im m o r t al it y 245

piped into their home through air tubes because there has been no electronic
revolution, let alone one in information technology. In Wells’ Sleeper novels, set
in the twenty-second century, “aeronauts” pilot sluggish canvas-covered mono-
planes. Utopias and dystopias alike use the future to shed light on the present,
and often do so unwittingly by including features of the present that contem-
poraries take for granted but are jarringly archaic to generations of subsequent
readers.

The consequences of immortality

I concentrate on, but do not entirely limit myself to, post-war Anglo-American
science fiction. A few earlier writers, like Besant, Wells and Shaw, address
immortality, but it is much more a post-war concern. This is in part a statistical
artifact; science fiction is primarily a late twentieth-century enterprise. More
works were published in each of the last five decades of that century than in all
decades prior to 1945. Most of these stories, novellas and novels, and almost all
of the films based on them, are in English. Writing in other languages tends to
be derivative or represents only a small fraction of the total output.62 However,
some of these non-English authors, among them, Stanislaw Łem, Italo Calvino
and José Saramago, are internationally acclaimed and I refer to their works.
In earlier chapters I analyzed one or several related texts at considerable
length. In this chapter, I discuss multiple texts and organize my treatment of
them around analytical categories. I do this for two reasons. No single text
explores all the ways science fiction considers immortality problematic in its
implications. Collectively they offer insight into the zeitgeist of the post-war era
and arguably helped to shape it. As Steven Connor remarked in the context of
the English novel, fiction “is not just as passively marked with the imprint of
history, but also as one of the ways in which history is made, and remade.”63
My analytical categories reflect different objections science fiction raises to
immortality, and with few exceptions, its authors have regarded immortality
with a jaundiced eye. Two of the most frequently voiced objections, boredom
and envy, are ancient concerns, although they have been given new twists by
contemporary authors. Other objections are modern, among them the like-
lihood that immortality will be exploited for selfish or perverse purposes by
governments, big business or crime syndicates. Some see it as having the
potential to destroy society or the human race. Opinion is divided on the last
question, as some authors believe that leaving the human condition behind is
the only road to progress.

62
Disch, Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, p. 2, notes that Japanese sci-fi is largely derivative.
Frongia, “Cosmifantasies,” on Italian science fiction.
63
Connor, English Novel in History, p. 1.
246 s c i e n c e fi c t io n a n d i m m o r t a l i ty

A caveat is in order before proceeding. Not every science fiction novel or

story that has immortal characters is about immortality. Some authors incor-
porate immortality merely to provide additional evidence of advanced levels of
science and technology. Others use it as a necessary conceit for their plot, and
do not explore its consequences for individuals or their society. Alfred Bester’s
The Computer Connection is a futuristic adventure story about a band of
immortal eccentrics who recruit a new member, a distinguished Cherokee
physicist. The banal plot revolves around group efforts to produce a super-
race, but their efforts go awry and to save the earth they must find a way to kill
the much-loved but now immortal Cherokee physicist. In James Blish’s Cities in
Flight, Earth has become a wasteland and its citizens, exploiting anti-gravity,
leave for space where they become nomadic traders and specialists of various
kinds. Immortality provides continuity of characters across the trilogy. It is
made possible by “anti-agathics” that derive from an extra-terrestrial plant.
The drug is in short supply and only given to people deemed essential to a
city’s prosperity or survival. It replaces money as currency and cities and
individuals must decide how much of it to consume or trade. The economics
of immortality are described at some length, but little is said about the political,
social or psychological consequences of the competition for extended or
eternal life.
In the ancient world, the human lifespan was severely limited, as were the
variety of diversions available to even the wealthiest people. Roman Emperor
and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius (121–80 CE) believed that a well-
traveled forty-year-old had done and seen everything.64 Contemporary writers
speculate that we would tire of life if we lived anywhere from several hundred to
several thousand years. In Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love, Lazarus
Long has kept boredom at bay for some two thousand years, but only by
constant changes of profession. Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to
the Galaxy describes an immortal who gets his kicks from living dangerously
and outlasting everyone else. Boredom inevitably sets in. “In the end it was
Sunday afternoons that he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness
which starts to set in at about 2.55 p.m., when you know that you have had all
the baths you can usually have that day, that however hard you stare at any
given paragraph in the newspapers you will never actually read it . . . and that as
you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and
you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul.”65
Joe Haldeman’s Old Twentieth describes a world in which immortal people
are driven to seek new experiences and pleasures to keep sane. Computers allow
them to visit earlier times and the most popular destination is the twentieth
century, the last era of mortality, where they are fascinated by people facing

64
Cited in Clark, How to Live Forever, pp. 14–15.
65
Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything, p. 9.
 t he co n s e q u e n c e s o f i m m o r t a l i ty 247

death. In Greg Egan’s Permutation City, some characters are seven thousand
years old and confess to great weariness. One of them warns that “immortality
is a mirage no human should aspire to.”66 In Frank Herbert’s Heaven Makers,
the Chem are an immortal species whose greatest problem is ennui. They
entertain themselves by voyeurism; they watch holographs of real-life stories,
many about human beings who are being manipulated by the Chem to provide
artistic and violent plot lines. The leading producer of these holographs
exclaims: “With such poor creatures, we insulate ourselves from lives that are
endless series events. Aii, boredom! How you threaten the infinite.”67 Poul
Anderson’s Boat of a Million Years describes the diverse lives of ten people who
for some reason are born immortal in varying places and times. They search out
one another and become a kind of family. At a certain point, they share their
secret with humanity only to discover that it stimulates the development of new
culture to which they can no longer relate. In desperation, they leave earth to
explore other civilizations and find novelty and excitement in their search for a
new home. In Wellstone, Wil McCarthy feels the need to invent a disability –
neurosensory dystrophia – that arises from the boredom associated with
longevity. Pathways are worn smooth in the brain through repetitive stimula-
tion when daily routines are unchanged, incapacitating individuals and entire
villages.68
Envy is another emotion well known to ancients, who attributed it to the
comparisons people constantly make between themselves and others with
regard to wealth and honor. Aristotle opposed democracy because he thought
the masses, driven by envy of the rich, would use its power to appropriate their
wealth.69 If disparity of wealth has been a cause of envy and conflict through the
ages, imagine the envy likely to be aroused in ordinary mortals by a minority of
their fellow citizens who possess prolonged or eternal life. This kind of demo-
graphic hierarchy would give stratification new meaning. Science fiction is very
much alive to this possibility, in part because so many of its authors assume that
capitalism will be the dominant economic form for eons to come. In a capitalist
world, money equals power, and immortality, if a scarce good, will be available
primarily, perhaps only, to the rich. In Robert Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children,
Lazarus Long is 224 years old and the beneficiary of a genetic experiment
among the Howard families that has given them on average a lifespan of 150
years. They have lived secretly, changing identities when necessary, to avoid
arousing the envy of others. When ten percent of the Howards decide to
acknowledge openly their good fortune, public opinion turns against
them, their legal rights are ignored and, Lazarus aside, family members are
arrested.

66
Egan, Permutation City, p. 284. 67 Herbert, Heaven Makers, p. 22.
68
McCarthy, Wellstone, p. 9. 69 Aristotle, Rhetoric, II, Chapter 10.
248 s c ie n c e fi c t i on an d i m m o r t a l i t y

In Jack Vance’s To Live Forever one city on the planet possesses a high degree
of civilization and with it, immortality. Only a small number of its citizens gain
immortal life and do so on the basis of competition so intense that most people
refuse to engage in it and many of those who do go mad or commit suicide. For
some reason, the society has not escaped from the Malthusian population
dilemma, and every time immortality is granted, the lives of non-mortals
must be reduced by some period of time. When sixty-two new immortals are
created to compensate for a series of murders, ordinary citizens must give up
months of their lives. This provokes a popular uprising. In James Gunn’s
Immortals, the rich and powerful seek eternal life and hunt down Marshall
Cartwright and his offspring to gain it at their expense.
Frederick Pohl’s The Age of the Pussyfoot, published in 1969, explores
another unpalatable feature of immortality under capitalism: it not only costs
money to gain immortality, but even more to sustain it. Charles Forrester has
been cryogenically preserved and is revived in the year 2527. His insurance has
matured nicely, paid for his revival and left him with an additional $250,000,
which he thinks of as a small fortune. He enjoys the luxuries of twenty-sixth
century life only to run out of funds very quickly. He needs to land a high-
paying job and finds employment as a guide to Terran culture for an alien. He is
fired when he cannot answer promptly one of the alien’s questions. He sub-
sequently finds what he considers a sinecure, a job overseeing some machinery,
but quickly discovers that all of his predecessors have died from radiation
poisoning. He makes the mistake of quitting in the middle of his shift and his
remaining funds go to pay the resulting fine. Without money, he becomes
vulnerable to bored immortals looking for cheap thrills and drawn to killing
unemployed people, for whom they do not have to pay high revival costs. Sirian
the alien temporarily saves him, but he is later confronted by and must kill the
man who has been hunting him down. The plot gets even more convoluted at
this point and is no longer germane to the question of immortality.
By far the most cynical take on capitalism and immortality is Richard
Morgan’s Altered Carbon. Data storage and processing nano- and biotechnol-
ogy have progressed to the stage where people are implanted with a small
“stack” in the back of their necks at birth. It stores their relevant genetic and
other information, including memories, and can periodically broadcast this
information to secure terminals where it is stored for future use. It can guar-
antee immortality by repeated uploading into new “sleeves,” generally the
bodies of young adults. These bodies often “belong” to people who could not
afford to have themselves called out of storage. For additional money, bodies
can be enhanced and equipped with all kinds of high-tech features, including a
“neurachem” suite that provides lightning-fast reflexes, great strength and other
bells and whistles like total recall, superhearing and carbon fiber bones and
ligaments that feel no pain and are much more difficult to damage or destroy.
Such options are available to the wealthy, but only the very wealthy can afford
 t he t r a g e d y o f g e r m a n p h i lo s o p h y 177

accident were remarkable, and that without Hitler, Weimar’s failure would
likely have led to a conservative, authoritarian regime with revanchist goals in
the east but no stomach for another continental war. It would have been
anti-Semitic, but unlikely to have carried out draconian measures against
Jews.88
The determinists sensitize us to the serious impediments that stood in the
way of the success of the Republic, while those who emphasize contingency
alert us to the need to separate the fate of the Republic from the question of
what kind of regime might have succeeded it. The forces arrayed against the
Republic were on both ends of the political continuum. The communists on the
left opposed a constitutional bourgeois order. Led by intellectuals, their base
consisted of workers, whose support waxed and waned as a function of the
economic situation.89 By 1928, there was very little inclination on the part of the
conservatives to cooperate with the socialists, and the pro-Republican parties
did not have enough seats to sustain a left-center coalition. The grand coalition
lasted less than six months, the victim of Gustav Stresemann’s death and the
stock market crash.90 The nationalist-conservative opposition was divided
among several parties, and in the last years of the Republic, the National
Socialists (Nazis) became by far the strongest of these parties. In July 1932,
the Nazis won 38.2 percent of the overall national vote, making anti-Republican
forces a majority in the Reichstag. Government had to be conducted by
emergency decree, which shifted power to President Paul von Hindenburg,
and paved the way for the appointment of Hitler after the failure of the short-
lived von Papen and Schleicher regimes.91 Hindenburg could have used his
emergency power to support a pro-Republican government, but preferred to
rule through a conservative fronde that excluded the socialists from power. He
set in motion a chain of events that had an outcome very different from what
he imagined.92 So did the communists. On instructions from Moscow, they
made a fatal error in refusing to support the grand coalition, composed of the
socialists, Zentrum (Center Party) and moderate parties on the right. The
communists welcomed the Nazi regime in the expectation that it would quickly
fail and pave the way for a worker’s revolution.93

88
Turner, Geissel des Jahrhunderts.
89
Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, pp. 456, 494–5; 535–7.
90
Eyck, History of the Weimar Republic, vol. II, pp. 203–52; Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse
of Weimar Germany, pp. 94–115.
91
Eyck, History of the Weimar Republic, vol. II, pp. 350–488; Dorpalen, Hindenburg and the
Weimar Republic, pp. 301–446. Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar Germany,
pp. 115–49; Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, pp. 357–432.
92
Dorpalen, Hindenburg and the Weimar Republic, pp. 302–3, 316–17, 472; Mommsen, Rise
and Fall of Weimar Democracy, pp. 357–432; Broszat, Hitler and the Collapse of Weimar
Germany, pp. 80–81.
93
Mommsen, Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, pp. 456, 494–95; 535–7.
250 s c ie n c e fi ct i o n a n d i mm or t a l it y

The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley, published in 1977, opens on the moon,
where the rebel geneticist Lilo faces execution for illegal experiments with
human DNA. She receives a visit from Boss Tweed, Luna’s most powerful
politician, accompanied by his formidable bodyguard and Lilo’s clone, who
has just emerged from a growth tank with all of Lilo’s memories implanted in
her. Tweed offers Lilo a deal: he will arrange her escape, the clone will die in her
place and she will help him in his struggle against the Invaders. Like all
Lunarians, she periodically records her memories for insertion into a clone if
her body dies. The first time she does this with Tweed, she discovers that she has
actually been killed twice, both times for trying to escape from his control. Lilo
is sent to an asteroid and put in charge of maintaining the food supply. A
complicated storyline ensues in which multiple Lilos come into existence and
one of them leads a successful revolt against Boss Tweed.
In The Illuminatus! Trilogy, published between 1975 and 1980, Robert Shea
and Robert Anton Wilson offer an even more bizarre and convoluted tale about
secret societies that appear responsible for the assassinations of the Kennedy
brothers and Martin Luther King. Two Gotham detectives are drawn against
their will into the eternal struggle between the Discordians and the Illuminati,
the latter a conspiratorial society that secretly controls the world. We learn that
the US government has developed a virulent strain of anthrax that has been
accidentally released, meet Howard the talking porpoise from Atlantis who
does battle with the Illuminati and move to the offshore African island of
Fernando Po where a Cold War crisis draws in the United States, Soviet
Union and China. Late in the novel, a plot is exposed that aims to encourage
mass human sacrifice to release the “life energy” necessary to provide immortal-
ity to a select group of people that includes Adolf Hitler. Behind this plot is the
American Medical Association, a rock-and-roll band composed of four of the
five “Illuminati Primi.” The sacrifice is to take place at the first European
Woodstock festival at Ingolstadt, Bavaria and bring back to life hibernating
Nazi battalions at the bottom of the nearby Lake Totenkopf. The plot is foiled
by the porpoises with the help of aliens and a reincarnated John Dillinger! The
victors take refuge in a submarine, where they are threatened by a sea monster
hundreds of millions of years old. The plot not surprisingly encourages some of
the characters to wonder if they are in an absurdist novel. Threat and spec-
ulation alike subside when the on-board computer allows them to open a line of
communication with the pursuing sea monster, who, it turns out, is merely
lonely and desperate to talk.
Other writers suspect that immortality will give rise to gerontocracy. Human
societies benefit from constant renewal and change, something made possible
by a turnover of leaders in every sphere of endeavor. Immortality could freeze
elites and lead to stagnation. In Jack Vance’s To Live Forever, it all but paralyzes
society, even though individuals compete fiercely for the rewards of longer life
and immortality. A character in Wil McCarthy’s Wellstone complains bitterly
 th e co n s e qu e n c e s of im m o r ta l it y 251

to his mother the queen about the consequences of immortality: “There’s no

changing of the guard, no retirement of old ideas. Every error gets entrenched,
until a shock to the system is necessary to effect any change at all.”70 He is one of
a score of teenagers who are resentful of their immortal parents, whose wealth
they will never inherit. They escape from a “summer camp” on an outlying
“planette” to which they have been banished for bad behavior. In Holy Fire,
published in 1997, Bruce Sterling describes a late twenty-first century world
that has been transformed into a near-paradise by science and technology. Vice
and illness have not disappeared, but arise from the failure of well-to-do
individuals to control their appetites or look after themselves properly.
Society is governed by a gerontocracy and life-extension technology is its
leading growth industry. Mia Ziemann, a 94-year-old medical economist,
uses her life savings to restore her body to the state it was when she was twenty.
She quickly discovers that youth does not provide meaning and fulfillment, but
makes her more unhappy. She gives up her comfortable existence for life on the
European streets with powerless artists and intellectuals and others unable to
afford life-enhancing surgery. She becomes increasingly sympathetic to radical
schemes to change the world.
Opposition to gerontocracy reflects a widespread belief in the need for
renewal and change as essential to the survival and success of individuals,
groups and species. Immortality is understood to constitute a multi-pronged
threat to this renewal. People participate in society because it helps to fulfill
powerful needs, and their engagement sustains the social order and helps it to
evolve. To the extent that people no longer need society the social order will
petrify. Aldous Huxley was among the first to warn of this danger. His Brave
New World makes use of novel reproductive technology to remove child rearing
as a source of social bonding. So do the “feelies” and the ready availability of
mind-altering drugs, both of which allow people to experience pleasures in
isolation that formerly required social contact, if not intimacy. Soma, an over-
the-counter hallucinogen that offers hangover-free “holidays,” releases people
from tensions and frustrations that might otherwise be directed against the
political order. The feelies, drugs and readily available one-night stands all but
eliminate the need for religion, clubs, families and any other aspect of civil
society. Stability is further guaranteed by a rigid class structure that begins at the
hatcheries and conditioning centers where fetuses selected to join the lower
castes are chemically treated to limit their intelligence and shape their phy-
siques for specialized tasks. Higher-caste “alphas” and “betas” are more care-
fully nurtured to internalize the values and ideals considered appropriate by
World State leaders.
Huxley’s evocation of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in his characters of “Lenina,”
“Bernard Marx” and “Sarojini Engels,” and Mussolini and the Fascists in

70
McCarthy, Wellstone, p. 71.
252 s c i e n c e fi c t io n a n d i m m o r t a l i ty

“Benito Hoover,” were more telling than he realized at the time. When Brave
New World was written, Soviet-style communism was in its heyday and was
regarded by many European intellectuals as a viable alternative to American-
style capitalism. Italian fascism also had its admirers, especially in Britain.
Huxley’s characters prove powerless and inept in their respective rebellions,
just as communism and fascism would in their struggle against capitalism. John
the Savage, presumably the personification of Rousseau’s noble savage, hangs
himself at the end of the novel. As Rousseau feared, property and its conse-
quences deprive people of the features that make them human and their society
tolerable.
In a prescient review of Brave New World, G. K. Chesterton theorized that
Huxley was revolting against the “Age of Utopias,” those decades in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, when H. G. Wells, George Bernard
Shaw and other British intellectuals looked forward to the possibility of a
democratic, socialist and even universalizing state:

After the Age of Utopias came what we may call the American Age, lasting
as long as the Boom. Men like Ford or Mond seemed to many to have
solved the social riddle and made capitalism the common good. But it
was not native to us; it went with a buoyant, not to say blatant optimism,
which is not our negligent or negative optimism. Much more than
Victorian righteousness, or even Victorian self-righteousness, that opti-
mism has driven people into pessimism. For the Slump brought even
more disillusionment than the War. A new bitterness, and a new bewilder-
ment, ran through all social life, and was reflected in all literature and
art. It was contemptuous, not only of the old Capitalism, but of the old
Socialism. Brave New World is more of a revolt against Utopia than against
Victoria.71

Huxley was attracted to America but also repelled by it. Like so many
Englishmen of his era he failed to grasp that what he disliked most about the
United States had more to do with its advanced state of capitalism than its
national culture. Post-war writers, English and American, were more sensitive
to this distinction and more explicitly anti-modern in their orientation. Pace
Huxley, their dystopic stories and novels feature alternative reproductive tech-
nology, recreational sex, drugs and virtual reality. In Brave New World, most
people die at age sixty. For post-war writers longevity and immortality became
more plausible and something of a synecdoche for scientific and technological
progress.
Huxley wrote at a time when advertising, mass entertainment and central-
ized governments with powerful bureaucracies were relative novelties. In the
post-war era they were accepted features of modern life. By the 1970s, drugs and

71
G. K. Chesterton, “Review of Brave New World, Illustrated London News, 4 May 1935.
180 g e r m a n s a n d gr e e ks

spiritual renewal, as superior to the French principles of liberty, fraternity and

equality.103 During World War I, Werner Sombart praised “the ancient
German hero’s spirit,” which was rescuing Germany from becoming another
corrupt capitalist nation and would make the German Volk the “chosen people”
of the twentieth century.104
National neuroses – if we can use this term – are no more readily palliated by
success than their individual counterparts. They are, however, greatly exacer-
bated by failure, which is what happened in Germany after its defeat in World
War I. Defeat prompted denial, a search for scapegoats and an intense desire for
revenge, emotions that made it difficult, if not impossible, for the Weimar
Republic to gain legitimacy. To create a different political-psychological out-
look, it took another round of war that left Germany defeated, in ruins and
occupied and divided by powers intent on imposing their respective political
and economic systems and reshaping the country’s culture.
A principal thesis of this chapter is that the Sonderweg was not unique. German
historians who advance this claim make the mistake of comparing Germany to its
Western neighbors. Facing west, German intellectual and political development
does appear anomalous and in need of special explanation. Facing east, Germany
looks more “normal.” Poland, Russia and Japan developed similar ideologies;
intellectuals stressed the uniqueness and superiority of their cultures to the West
by virtue of their preservation of traditional values. Although they did this in
somewhat different ways, their cultural claims were similar, as were the key
arguments mobilized in their support. These similarities, I contend, reflect under-
lying similarities in circumstance. They suggest the extent to which identity,
national as well as personal, is an important means of building self-esteem.
For late developers the West was the model to emulate. A state could not
become or remain great, and its people claim status, in the absence of economic
development and the panoply of other status markers that wealth allowed. In
the nineteenth century these included victory in war, colonies, beautification of
one’s capital, and excellence in the arts, sciences and sports.105 Copying the
West conferred status, but the need to emulate other countries and their
accomplishments was a palpable admission of one’s relative backwardness
and inferiority. The way around this dilemma was to assert superiority on the
basis of a more traditional, less materialistic culture, which, when combined
with the economic development and technology of the West, would result in a
superior synthesis. This was precisely the claim made by advocates of German
Volksgemeinschaft and Kultur, Russian communalism and Japanese depictions
of their country as a “family nation” (kazoku sei kokka).

103
Meinecke, Weltbürgertum und Nationalstaat.
104
Sombart, Händler und Helden, pp. 125, 143.
105
Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations, chs. 2 and 7 for elaboration.
254 s c i e n c e f ic ti o n a n d im m o r ta l it y

Immortality and identity

When people live for many centuries, continuity becomes problematic. In
many stories and novels people accumulate more experiences and memories
than they can store in their brains. In Asimov’s Foundation series, this is also
true of androids. People and robots alike must periodically wipe clean or
severely edit their memories to make room for new ones. It did not occur to
Asimov and most of these early authors that memories might be stored
externally on hard drives or in data banks, making them accessible at will.
Endless new experiences and repeated purges of memory are expected to make
these beings very different than they were at earlier stages of life. The problem of
edited memory is, of course, a special case of the age-old philosophical question
of the relationship between sameness and change that I touched on in the
introductory chapter.
If people change physically and emotionally, and if their memories fade, alter
or disappear, they become “successive selves” unable to claim a core continuous
identity.73 One solution to this problem is to recognize that we are not the same
people over time. Defensible as this proposition appears, it is deeply unsatisfy-
ing to most people on psychological grounds. No doubt, some individuals
would be happy to put distance between themselves and unpleasant or unsuc-
cessful pasts and welcome the idea of becoming different persons over time.
Most of us feel a strong need for continuity, as it is commonly understood to be
an essential condition for a stable identity. Identity is valued for a suite of
emotional and practical reasons. Society also insists on continuity if marriages
and other contracts are to have meaning and if people are to be held responsible
for past behavior.
Research indicates that people feel unique and base this claim on their
character, capabilities, life experiences and how the latter are mediated by
memories. As we observed in chapter 1, this claim encounters serious problems,
because memory is a resource that we constantly reshape to help us confront
contemporary challenges. Our inability to remember these changes and to insist
that our memories are stable can be taken as more evidence of our emotional
need to defend a continuous identity. Our only enduring characteristics are
such things as fingerprints, retinal patterns, mitochondria and DNA. These
forms of continuity allow physical identification, but do not provide the basis
for psychological or emotional continuity.
Longevity and immortality intensify the continuity problem in two ways.
They greatly extend our life experiences while shortening and distorting, if not
eliminating, many memories. If we consider science fiction stories about lon-
gevity as thought experiments, they illustrate the inadequacy, even absurdity, of

73
Jonas, “Philosophical Reflections on Experimenting with Human Subjects”; Glannon,
“Identity, Prudential Selves and Extended Lives,”
 i m m o r t a l i t y a n d i d e n ti ty 255

using memory as the basis of personal continuity and identity. Continuity also
depends on the body, a point made by philosophers who reject Cartesian
dualism.74 Minds cannot exist without bodies and our identity is linked to
our body in important ways. Science fiction allows us to explore this relation-
ship in novel ways, because it can provide people with new or different bodies,
of the same or different gender and on a temporary or long-term basis. It can
also put us in multiple bodies, which may confront one other, as Takeshi
Kovacs and his double do toward the climax of Altered Carbon.
Gender is another important characteristic of humanity, although not a
distinguishing one, as it is shared with many other species. In some stories
and novels, gender is blurred or altogether disappears. Science fiction also
allows various mixes of gender, boutique bodies and body shapes, combinations
of humans and other species and mind implantation into different species.
Advanced computer networks do away with bodies altogether. Through such
stories we can explore, or at least imagine, some of the possible consequences of
these transformations for individual and species identity. The central question,
which science fiction raises but makes no serious attempt to answer, is how
much physical change we can undergo and still feel ourselves.
Interestingly, science fiction has not chosen to explore the option of giving
up the demonstrably problematic belief in continuity and enduring identity.
Multiple identities also get short shrift, even though many of us recognize that
we have different understandings of ourselves, not always compatible, that
coexist and vary in importance depending on the circumstances. Novels
that create multiple versions of the same person, like Jack Vance’s To Live
Forever, John Varley’s Ophiuchi Hotline and Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon
shy away from investigating the ensuing psychological consequences, although
this would be an ideal context in which to do so. Altered Carbon goes further
than most. In a new sleeve as a ninja, Takeshi Kovacs meets himself, in the
sleeve of the former lover of the police sergeant with whom he has teamed up.
The two selves are not quite sure how to relate to one another and get into an
argument about their father and his effect on their lives that represents a kind of
the internal Bakhtinian dialogue. They then face the unenviable task of deciding
which one of them can survive after they perform their required tasks, because
simultaneous duplication is against the law. Unable to find any compelling
argument in favor of the survival of one over the other, they agree to leave the
outcome to chance.75
Altered Carbon also offers some thoughts about relationships. Kristin Ortega,
the police sergeant, is drawn to Kovacs because he is wearing the sleeve of her
former lover. They have a satisfying sexual encounter, but then Kristin feels
unfaithful because the person inside the sleeve is not her lover. Kovacs is drawn
to her, but not when wearing his ninja sleeve, leading him to conclude that

74 75
See chapter 1 for discussion and citations. Morgan, Altered Carbon, pp. 443–51.
256 sc ien ce f ic ti on and im m or tal it y

attraction is primarily a matter of pheromones. This conclusion is undercut by

the experience of another couple in which the wife returns home after years of
storage in another body. She and her husband resume their relationship
without a problem, but she feels uncomfortable in the new sleeve. Other
changes put people of one “race” into a sleeve of another, but these alterations
are unproblematic for the characters and most of those with whom they
interact.
Many novels introduce consecutive identities, as opposed to continuous
ones. This is most often accomplished through reincarnation. Those who
experience rebirth can enter the world in a new body with all but their most
recent memories, as in Altered Carbon and Jack Vance’s To Live Forever. Or
they can be blank slates in new bodies, a condition that rules out continuity. In
other novels, people are allowed varying degrees of recall of past lives, providing
them with multiple temporal identities in addition to those they go on to
develop in the present. More dramatic possibilities include the co-sharing of
bodies in a way that allows a mind to enter and remain in the mind of another
person or life form and share their experiences and thoughts. In Greg Egan’s
Permutation City, humans inhabit the bodies of animals. People continually
rebuild and reinvent themselves and custom-design children if they like. Any of
these mixed situations pose interesting problems for the nature and meaning of
identity, and only some of them related to the difficulty of sustaining continuity.
Egan’s novel – and it is not unique in this regard – problematizes the meaning
of humanity and its boundaries. Are we still human if we inhabit computers or
the bodies of animals, or if we create ourselves rather than being the product of
so-called “normal” biological processes? If we are not human, what are we?
Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide suggests that we achieve our humanity through
our empathy for and relationships with others. There is no better way to achieve
empathy than to share a body or a mind with someone else, whether human or
alien life form or some version of artificial life. So breaking down barriers, not
erecting and enforcing them, enhances, rather than diminishes, our humanity.
This approach has much in common with Plato’s understanding of dialogue
and friendship. His Republic suggests that it is not argument and the sharing of
views that brings order to society, but the friendships such exchanges encour-
age. They build empathy, and with it, the ability to see ourselves through the
eyes of others. Looking at ourselves from the outside, we recognize that our
understandings of justice and everything else is parochial and begin to take
others’ opinions more seriously. Most importantly, we treat them as ontological
equals.
Like Plato, Card implicitly argues against humanity as an attribute of our
physical or intellectual uniqueness, but of our ability to develop and live by
ethical codes that accord equal status to others with whom it is possible to
communicate. Empathy arises from a blurring and overcoming of personal
boundaries. For Card, this interaction is played out at the personal and species
 6

Beam me up, Lord

At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow

Your trumpets, Angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of soules, and to your scattered bodies go.
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow,
All whom warre, death, age, agues, tyrannies,
Despaire, law, chance, hath slaine, and you whose eyes
Shall behold God, and never taste death’s woe.
John Donne1

Protestant fundamentalism is a powerful cultural and political force in the

United States, and more so since the end of the Cold War. Its political tide
may have crested with the rise and decline of the Moral Majority and the Bush
administration. Its cultural power continues to grow, as witnessed by the
phenomenal sale of the Left Behind series of books. The first eponymously
named volume appeared in 1995 and by 2010 its publisher claims that its
sixteen volumes had sold over 65 million copies. Volume 7 was the first
Christian novel to make the New York Times bestseller list. The books sell at
Christian bookstores and mass retail outlets like Costco and Sam’s Club, but
also at Barnes and Noble. Christian popular culture is a $7 billion growth
industry. Wal-Mart carries something in the range of 1,200 religious titles
and over 500 inspirational albums, many of which reach the bestseller lists
and pop charts.2 A 2009 Pew Foundation poll indicated that 79 percent of
American Christians await the second coming and that 20 percent believe Jesus
will return in their lifetime. Thirty-four percent of American Christians are
convinced that the world situation will worsen before the second coming and
that it will unfold in accord with biblical prophecy.3
The belief of so many Americans that they are living in “the end of times” and
the success of Left Behind novels are undoubtedly related. These novels portray
the rapture – the lifting to heaven of the most faithful – the subsequent rise of
the Antichrist, a seven-year period of “tribulation,” Christ’s return and creation

1
Donne, “Divine Poems,” § 7. 2 Radosh, Rapture Ready!, p. 3.
3
Pew Research Center Publications, When Will Jesus Return?

183
258 s c i e n c e f ic t io n a n d im m o r t a l i ty

strong nor too weak, are where innovation is most likely to occur.78 AL research-
ers describe first order emergence as properties generated by interaction among
the components of a system. Second order emergence, a rarer phenomenon, is the
product of system properties that give the system the ability to evolve. Marvin
Minsky speculates that humans may have developed this way. If so, computation
would offer us a novel perspective on human beings and their intelligence.79
Science fiction has begun to explore this understanding of life and its impli-
cations for human identity. In Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide, one of its key
characters, “Jane,” is an extraordinarily powerful and sympathetic mind. She
has somehow come into existence in humanity’s supraliminal communication
network to which computer systems on every planet and spaceship are con-
nected. When Jane realizes that the central government has sent a fleet to destroy
the planet Lusitania and its diverse life forms, she prevents transmissions from
the government to the fleet to prevent them from sending the go-ahead order. By
doing so, she risks exposure and destruction if the government shuts down the
ansible system, even temporarily. Jane is desperately trying to figure out if she is
alive or merely the artifact of a complex software program, whose instructions
she is executing. The humans with whom she is in contact conspire with her to
help save the planet and try hard to convince her that she is a sentient being on
the grounds that she has an emotional life and will to live.
Identity, as Hegel argues in his analysis of the master–slave relationship,
requires a conception of self which in turn requires a conception of others. They
need not be regarded unfavorably in any way, just somehow different.
Difference is marked off by a boundary and identities are sustained by boun-
dary maintenance. As we observed in the introductory chapter, these bounda-
ries can be porous and shifting, and usually are in practice. Science fiction
authors are interested in the boundaries of the bioengineered humans and other
life they create. They are caught in a revealing contradiction. To bring about
their diverse life forms they must, of necessity, bridge traditional and long-
standing boundaries, including those separating different species and organic
from inorganic matter.80 Most authors are nevertheless keen to defend the
integrity of humanity and deploy various strategies toward this end.
To distinguish humankind from machines many authors invoke affect. The
term has a broad lexical field and is used in the science fiction literature to
encompass not only feeling but vitality, imagination and the desire for free play,
none of which machines are thought to possess. Jane violates this distinction, as

78
von Neumann, Theory of Self-Replicating Automata; Kaufmann, Origins of Order;
Wolfram, “Universality and Complexity in Cellular Automata,” and “Computer
Software in Science and Mathematics”; Langton, “Computation at the Edge of Chaos.”
79
Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby, Adapted Mind; Minsky, Society of Mind, pp. 17–24; Hayles,
How We Became Post-human, pp. 241–4.
80
Ibid., pp. 279–82, on how boundaries are routinely broached in postmodern fiction.
 b e a m m e up , l or d 185

forge new identities.8 Rage against this society and its corruption was to be
transformed into a redeeming certainty about deliverance through access to
unquestioned truths. Left Behind is a contemporary instantiation of this project
and its novels are intended to facilitate a different kind of interiority and
identity formation.
Left Behind must be put in theological context. I accordingly begin with a
discussion of American millennialism, of which Dispensationalism is now its
dominant expression. This sets the stage for my examination of the Left Behind
novels, which dramatize dispensationalist prophecy. I read their utopia as a
dystopia and find striking parallels between its Millennium and the “Oceania”
of George Orwell’s 1984. I conclude with a comparative analysis of
Dispensationalism and the founding texts of Marxism, where I also find
remarkable similarities. Both comparisons prompt some generalizations
about the nature of anti-modern identities and discourses.
This chapter differs from its predecessors in important ways. The texts
I analyzed in chapters 3–5 were great works of literature, music or philosophy.
They were elaborate in structure and rich in ideas, allowing, if not demanding,
creative and complex readings. The Left Behind novels are simple in concept
and writing. They combine adventure with Christian eschatology, and make no
original contributions to either genre. They are full of factual errors, some of
them indicative of their authors’ naïveté about corporate life, technology,
warfare and international affairs. Their turgid prose and poorly developed
characters reflect the limited talent of Jerry Jenkins, the principal author.
Errors and undistinguished prose make its commercial success that much
more impressive and challenging to explain.
Left Behind is a mass-market enterprise and must be analyzed less on its
literary or artistic merits and more on its message and its appeal. I suspect that
one of the principal reasons for its success, and for that of Dispensationalism
more generally, is the way the movement and its novels encourage people to
derive satisfaction from the very developments that most depress and frighten
them. Barack Obama is a synecdoche for these developments.9 Many Left
Behind readers are so opposed to his presidency and policies that they brand
him the Antichrist. LaHaye and Jenkins reject this characterization, but
describe the president as a “committed socialist” whose goal is to bring about
a world socialist dictatorship. This outcome will “fulfill biblical prophecy” and
hasten the rapture and second coming.10 Moral corruption, war and the

8
Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 84–5.
9
Boyer, When Times Shall Be No More, pp. 178, 275–6, notes that a slew of other figures have
periodically been identified as the Antichrist, among them Juan Carlos of Spain, Moshe
Dayan, Mikhail Gorbachev, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, Sun Myung
Moon and Saddam Hussein.
10
“Left Behind Authors Meet Madow.”
260 s c i e n c e f ic ti o n a n d im m o r ta l it y

follow the three laws of robotics, making them true Kantian figures.83 Andrew
Martin, another of Asimov’s robots, becomes creative by virtue of a flaw in his
program. He earns a fortune from his artistic works, buys his freedom and
petitions the government to recognize him as human, which they refuse to do
because of strong public opposition. Andrew finally gives up his immortality,
accepts death and is posthumously recognized as human.84 Data in Star Trek:
The Next Generation, has similar yearnings. Not all novels portray androids
favorably. In Philip K. Dick’s, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, published
in 1966, androids are used as workers and sex objects in Martian colonies and
many escape to Earth. Constructed from organic materials and indistinguish-
able from humans in appearance, they are nevertheless considered objects. As
with slaves in the antebellum South, they are pursued by bounty hunters, who
seek to “retire” (kill) them.
The need for boundary maintenance is more pronounced in the case of
androids than it is with computers because the former not only have the
potential to rival humans in intelligence, but in appearance. Unlike computers,
androids, who combine AL with robotics and nanotechnology, are mobile and
might one day be constructed to make them outwardly indistinguishable from
human beings. The very name “android” derives from the Greek word for man.
Androids and “gynoids” (female robots) could further blur human–machine
distinctions by being engineered with sexual organs and given an erotic appear-
ance and comportment. There would almost certainly be a market for such
robots, as many people would be drawn to the prospect of safe, “low main-
tenance” sex partners. They might purchase or lease replicas of celebrities –
manufactured under license, of course – or younger versions, of current, former
or deceased partners. Sex generates enormous business on the internet and so it
would on the android market.85 Only a few science fiction writers have gone
down this road. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was the basis for the
movie Blade Runner, in which all three of the important female characters are
gynoids, two of whom use their sexual appeal to attempt to manipulate or kill
the protagonist. The third acts as a submissive female, even after the protagonist
forces himself on her. “Sexbots” are already on the market. A German company
called First Androids sells what it insists is the world’s most advanced sex doll
for a mere $3,820. She is alleged to have a remarkably realistic face and body, a
“heavy breathing” function and a G-spot.86 Japanese and American companies
make similar claims for their products.87

83
On this last point, Roberts, History of Science Fiction, pp. 199–200.
84
Asimov, Complete Robot.
85
Levy, Love and Sex with Robots, for a celebration of these possibilities.
86
“The Girl Below is Actually an Android Sex Doll,” The Frisky, www.thefrisky.com/post/
246-the-girl-below-is-actually-an-android-sex-doll/.
87
Check out RealDoll, www.realdoll.com/.
 i m m or tal it y a nd id enti ty 261

Boundary maintenance becomes more problematic when we examine it in

historical perspective. Ancient Greeks distinguished human beings from ani-
mals on the basis of their intelligence. People could speak and cook their food.
Down to the present, people distinguish themselves from animals on this basis,
although it has become somewhat more difficult to do as zoologists have
discovered that other primates are more intelligent than previously supposed.
At best, there is a sliding scale of intelligence, with humanity at the high end
distinguished from other higher life forms more by degree than kind. With
intelligent androids this gap would be closed; humans might be surpassed in
intelligence. This recognition is troubling for some science fiction writers and
raises challenging questions for others. As Asimov realized in Caves of Steel,
android intelligence would almost certainly provoke a “racist” response from
many people, and especially from those with low self-esteem or whose jobs or
livelihood were threatened by cheaper and more reliable androids.
The shift from intelligence to affect as the defining feature of human beings
may not succeed in differentiating us from computers and androids if they
become advanced enough to develop feelings. This move runs up against
knowledge that animals are capable of emotion, vitality and free play.
Recognizing this similarity, the Greeks posited intellect as the unique human
possession. In practice, neither intelligence nor affect will effectively differ-
entiate us from animals and artificial life forms. Boundary maintenance
encounters additional problems when we consider “transhumans.” Following
Kafka, some science fiction writers envisage human minds embedded in the
bodies of other species, not all of them animals.88 Some consider melding,
whereby we enter into symbiotic relationships with other terrestrial or alien
species. If any of these possibilities ever come to pass it will require us to make
even more fundamental adjustments in our understandings of what it is to be
human.
In today’s world, boundary maintenance is primarily a problem of groups,
not species. In chapter 4, I offered evidence that group boundaries are porous
and fluid. For various reasons, people are sometimes admitted to “membership”
even when they have qualities that would otherwise exclude them. The Nazis
recognized some otherwise objectionable peoples and individuals as “honorary
Aryans (Ehrenarier)” for political reasons. For economic reasons, the Japanese
were made “honorary Aryans” by the Republic of South Africa during the era of
apartheid. People routinely sneak into privileged categories, as did many
African Americans whose physical features allowed them to pass for white.
Boundaries change in the sense that people who were once excluded can
subsequently be incorporated into the group. As noted in chapter 3, the New
Zealand Maori have not only been made fellow “Kiwis” by the dominant white
culture, but provide cultural practices and associations that whites have

88
Kafka, Metamorphosis.
262 s c ie n c e fi c t i on an d i m m o r t a l i t y

adopted to define their identities and distinguish themselves from the

Australians and the British.
Individuals have multiple identities and specific ones assume primacy as a
function of the information people receive and the situations they confront.
Some kinds of multiple identities interfere with group efforts at boundary
maintenance. Groups often look the other way, because conflict is disruptive.
In some circumstances, however, they compel individuals to choose between or
among competing affiliations and expel or kill those who do not comply.
During the Inquisition, Jews were forced to flee Spain or convert to
Catholicism. Many “conversos” discovered that conversion was insufficient to
assuage the need for purity demanded by the Spanish government and church.
More than a few were burned at the stake, without any evidence, for allegedly
practicing their former religion.89
In today’s world, shared bodies are uncommon among twins, but happen
often enough for us to have coined the term “Siamese twins.”90 Less often
children are born with two heads, or two children with conjoined heads. Any of
these people are fortunate to survive, but increasingly do so thanks to modern
surgery.91 Figurative links between people are the staple of social life. Long-
married couples often read each other’s minds without the aid of telepathy and
may think of themselves as a unit. Many families feel the same kind of bond,
one that submerges the individual into the collective. Less healthy individuals
can suffer from “multiple personality disorder” and report being different
people at different times.92
If boundary maintenance is impossible on the grounds of intelligence or
affect, those who feel the need to distinguish themselves from intelligent
computers and androids, biologically enhanced humans and symbiots, must
look elsewhere for markers and borders. This may be a principal reason why
agency features so prominently in post-war science fiction stories and novels.
The genre began as future-based adventure tales. Such stories, as noted in the
previous chapter, feature heroes who prove their mettle, and often their virtue,
through a series of dangerous encounters in which they triumph over adversa-
ries who most often represent the forces of evil. Fantasy continues this format.
For true science fiction, agency should be problematic. Its authors portray

89
Kamen, Spanish Inquisition.
90
“Doctors Separate Conjoined Benhaffaf Twins, BBC, 8 April 2010, http://news.bbc.co.uk/
1/hi/northern_ireland/8610399.stm.
91
“Op to Remove Baby’s Second Head,” BBC, 21 February 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/
health/4285235.stm; “Separated Twins Come Face-to-Face,” BBC, 25 October 2003, http://
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3209210.stm; “Conjoined Twins Operation Goes
Ahead in London,” Guardian, 7 April 2010, www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/apr/07/
conjoined-twins-separated-london.
92
Web MD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, www.webmd.com/mental-health/dissociative-
identity-disorder-multiple-personality-disorder.
188 be a m m e u p, lo r d

specific revelation of the will of God.”22 The Scofield–Gaebelein “pretribula-

tionists” insisted that the rapture would lift true believers into heaven before the
tribulation, and won a majority for this doctrine at the Niagara Bible
Conference of 1901.23 The Scofield Reference Bible introduced footnotes in
lieu of separate commentary and used them to mark and interpret prophecies.
Distributed with funds provided by philanthropist Lyman Stewart, it became
the core text of Dispensationalism.24
Dispensationalism differs from other variants of millennialism in a second
important respect: it maintains that God has separate plans for Jews
and Christians. According to Dispensationalists, God’s design for the Jews is
spelled out in Genesis (12:2–3), where he promises to create a great nation from
Abraham’s seed. Dispensationalists maintain that God punishes the Jews peri-
odically for not honoring the terms of their contract with him, but has never lost
faith in his chosen people. He will honor his promise that David’s true son, the
messiah, will return to rule over the earth on the basis of a new covenant that
will replace Mosaic Law. Until then, Jews must suffer Christian domination in
what Daniel (7–9) calls the “times of the gentiles.” This era, or dispensation, will
consist of four successive empires. One of the leaders of the last empire will
order the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s temple, which will trigger the return of the
messiah and his restoration of David’s throne. Daniel measures these last events
in weeks; Jerusalem will be rebuilt in seven weeks, sixty-two weeks later the
messiah will appear and will meet a week of violent resistance during which the
last emperor tries unsuccessfully to destroy the Jews.25
This chronology causes a major problem for Dispensationalists because these
prophecies should have been realized in the era of the historical Jesus. Finding
wiggle room in the double meaning of the Hebrew word for week, which also
means “seven,” Dispensationalists engaged in what can only be described as a
wildly figurative reading of Daniel’s text to argue that “seventy weeks” actually
meant seventy “sevens” of years. According to this scheme the messiah would
appear 490 years after a decree to rebuild Jerusalem. Dispensationalists turned
to Nehemiah 2:1–8 and rather freely interpreted a reported decree of Artaxerxes
to allow some Jews to return to Jerusalem to do repair work on its crumbling
walls as an order to rebuild the temple. Jesus was executed 483 years later.
He should have returned seven years after that to establish his kingdom, but this
did not happen, so Dispensationalists invented “postponement theory” to explain

22
Scofield, Scofield Reference Bible, and Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth, p. 18.
23
Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, p. 93.
24
Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, pp. 191, 222; Marsden, Fundamentalism and
American Culture, pp. 55–62.
25
McCain, Daniel’s Prophecy, pp. 12–15; Scofield Reference Bible, p. 915; Weber, Living in the
Shadow of the Second Coming, pp. 17–24; Clouse, ed., Meaning of the Millennium; Glass,
“Fundamentalism’s Prophetic Vision of the Jews”; Ross, So It Was True; Carpenter, Revive
Us Again, pp. 97–100; Cooper, Prophetic Fulfillments in Palestine.
264 s c i e n c e fi c t io n a n d i m m o r t a l i ty

on the frontiers of civilization, at the limits of, or altogether beyond, the writ of
authority, in parts of the universe which are sparsely settled and inhabited largely
by adventurers. As on all frontiers, agency has more leeway and individual actions
can have far-reaching consequences. The beginning of the novel is a kind of
Horatio Alger story. Cities leave the desolate earth to engage in interstellar trading
and key citizens are kept alive through the use of drugs. The hero, a young boy,
who hunts squirrels on the outskirts of Scranton, Pennsylvania, stows away when
the city goes into space. The several volumes of the series describe his rise to
authority and critical role in saving humanity from aliens.
Agency is an essential feature of narratives and helps to make science fiction
marketable. There is an analogy to history where biographies are the bestsellers.
They, too, exaggerate the role of agency, and this may be one reason why they
are so appealing to readers. As with science fiction and fantasy, readers of
biography may welcome the heightened depiction of agency as a refreshing
contrast to their own feelings of impotence and insignificance. Reaffirmation of
the myth of agency buttresses their self-esteem and sense of humanity.
All species die, but of terrestrial species, only humans are aware beforehand
of their inevitable fate. Various writers and philosophers have argued that
recognition of our mortality is what makes us human. Some science fiction
writers oppose immortality for this reason, suggesting it would make it impos-
sible to lead a meaningful and balanced life. This theme runs through Tolkien.
His elves are long-lived but less than human, and creatures who live greatly
extended lives, like Frodo and the Ringwraiths, suffer from alienation or pain.93
For Olaf Stapledon there is no beauty without death and no drive to excel in life
in the absence of a ticking clock.94 In Last and First Men, his Fifth Men, who live
50,000 years, develop a “Cult of Evanescence” to preserve the contact with the
primitive, and through it, their humanity. Ursula K. Le Guin’s, The Furthest
Shore, presents death as a necessary means of balance. This is also a central
theme of Frank Herbert’s Dune series. Every life form lives in balance with every
other and human immortality would unsettle this relationship with unforeseen
consequences. Drawing on the Greek understanding of tragedy, Herbert’s
novels suggest that longevity, like every other power carried to excess, is certain
to produce consequences the opposite of those intended.95

Conclusion
Post-war Anglo-American science fiction represents a sharp break with
Western tradition in its portrayal of immortality as a cause of dystopia.
Immortality brings boredom and intensifies stratification as only the rich can
afford the drugs or treatments that confer longevity. It prompts resentment

93
Crossley, “A Long Day’s Dying.”
94 95
Smith, “Olaf Stapledon and the Immortal Spirit.” McLean, “Question of Balance.”
 c o n cl us io n 265

among the poor who must life short lives. Anomie increases as social relation-
ships decline, or vanish altogether, and with it, the possibility of progress and
change. Immortality also lends itself to exploitation by tyrannical governments,
greedy corporations and criminals.
In no post-war science fiction novel of which I am aware does immortality
help to create or sustain a utopia. Hero, heroine, or both, often find societies in
which immortality is a feature unsatisfying. Some rebel or leave, as in Clarke’s
City and the Stars, to return to a mortal world, and often one of lower
technology. Here they hope to find happiness. This outcome, and the frequency
with which it appears in science fiction stories and novels, suggests that it
should be regarded as something of a mantra intended to protect us against
impending changes and their expected consequences. Ancient Greeks and
medieval Christians were also wary of utopias, but for different reasons. The
Greeks considered immortality an attribute of the gods. They lived forever and
could foresee the future. Humans must accept their limitations and not confuse
themselves with the gods; aspirations of immortality were considered a form of
hubris and likely to lead to greater unhappiness, if not punishment. For most of
its history, Christianity has also judged immortality negatively. The present life
is a dystopia, a kind of hell, in contrast to the afterlife that awaits the faithful.
Immortality would only prolong this world and its suffering and deny good
Christians their coveted and well-deserved reward.
Greek and Christian understandings find some resonance in science fiction.
Hubris is a central theme in some immortality novels, even if the concept is not
explicitly deployed. The diverse scientific and medical advances that lead to
longevity and immortality are occasionally accidental, but more often the result
of deliberate efforts by human scientists and their societies. Most of the actors
responsible are well-intentioned. The consequences of their discoveries and
improvements invariably differ from what they had hoped or expected, making
life worse, not better. The Greek playwrights and Thucydides make clear that
hubris is a pathology of the powerful. Actors who have been successful in the
past become overly impressed by their own cleverness and power and pursue
increasingly ambitious and complicated strategies. For many post-war science
fiction writers, who echo Enlightenment critics, science is the ultimate form of
hubris, and immortality the ultimate goal of science. Science fiction has
come full-circle. It began as a rebellion against the Victorian literary elite, but
in the course of the twentieth century developed an equally pessimistic view
about the social consequences of science and technology.
In some ways, science fiction’s take on immortality resonates with traditional
Christian understandings. For both, real utopia can only come about through
outside intervention. For Christians, God is the active agent, for science fiction
writers it is generally aliens. The most upbeat science fiction novels, the ones
that come closest to being utopian, have humans transcend their nature by
evolving into a new species or going into partnership with a more developed
266 s c i e n c e fi c t io n a n d i m m o r t a l i ty

and wiser one. The first novel to make this move is British author Olaf
Stapledon’s The Last and First Men, published in 1930. It describes the evolu-
tion of humanity through eighteen successor species over the course of two
billion years. Influenced by Marx and his dialectic, each species produces a high
civilization but inevitably declines by virtue of its success and gives rise to a
successor.
In the post-war era, Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 Childhood’s End is undoubtedly
the most influential evolutionary novel. Clarke follows Stapledon in making
telepathy the key to transformation. It allows assimilation to the “Overmind,” a
collective alien being that absorbs human children, bringing the human race to
a higher level, but at the price of losing individual minds and personalities. The
Overmind arrives on a spacecraft, imposes world peace and prohibits space
exploration. The Overmind’s goal is to reach out and incorporate sentient
species. It is served by slave-like “Overlords” who are incapable of being
submerged and yearn for their freedom. A cult variant is the sci-fi movie, The
Day the Earth Stood Still, released in 1951. An alien spaceship lands in the
Washington DC Mall and the space visitor is met with hostility but is
befriended by a curious boy and his mother. The alien demonstrates his awe-
some powers in an attempt to convince humans to live peacefully with one
another but is shot and taken back to his spaceship by his loyal android Gort.
This film is redolent with Christian symbolism, culminating in the death and
rebirth of its alien “savior.”96
A more recent and sophisticated exemplar is Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide. It
relies on a form of telepathy to link, in this case, multiple species. The “Bugger”
hive queen communicates with its workers this way and with humans and
Pequininos, a species that spends its mature state as rooted but sentient trees.
Then there is Jane, the sentient being who lives in the “ansible” network
connecting all the computers on all the worlds inhabited by human beings
and uses telepathy to communicate with selected humans. Our species does not
merge or become transformed but becomes wiser and more understanding of
its place in the universe through its contact with other species. Xenocide is one
of several novels in a series that begins with humanity’s life-and-death struggle
with aliens, in this instance the “Buggers,” an insectoid race of whom the hive
queen represents that last survivor. In the first two novels each species attempts
to eliminate the other and humanity destroys its adversary by making use of
young combat game savvy teenagers as strategists. In Speaker for the Dead it
becomes apparent that the war was a tragedy because it might have been averted
by communication between the species. All the universe’s sentient beings can be
divided into species with whom humans can communicate and those with
whom they cannot. It is theoretically possible to live in peace with all of the

96
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).
 american millennialism 191

the First Baptist Church in Manhattan. His The Signs of Our Times was a steady
bestseller within the Dispensationalist community. It described earthquakes,
military buildups and unheralded displays of luxury as evidence of the coming
end of the world. It develops a convoluted argument typical of premillenarian
tracts. The world is literally going to hell, and attempts to reform it will
inevitably fail because they are inspired by the devil. Satan, Haldeman illogically
insists, “would be glad to see prohibition successful” even though his real
objective is to lead Christians “into a drunken orgy of sin and shame and
outbreaking vice.” Haldeman hoped that moral decay would have the unin-
tended effect of producing a religious revival.38
Preachers expanded on the political–religious arguments of Moody,
Gaebelein and Haldeman. Sermons in dispensationalist churches con-
demned more liberal churches for their apostasy, which was said to explain
their declining membership and the corresponding rise of immorality and
crime. LaHaye and Jenkins blame Satan for the move away from “true”
readings of the bible in the late nineteenth century. “The devil knew the best
way to inject his apostate doctrine into the churches was to infiltrate the
seminaries, indoctrinate young ministers, and send them into the churches
to spread his false concepts across the land.” The devil’s allies were the “pro-
communist” Federal Council of Churches and its successor, the National
Council of Churches.39
Dispensationalists are fond of citing Jeremiah 30:7, which describes “the time
of Jacob’s trouble,” widely interpreted by them to mean intensified persecution
of the Jews. Beginning in the late nineteenth century Dispensationalists began
to predict that anti-Semitism would prompt Jewish immigration to Palestine
and the creation of the state of Israel. Working with Satan, the Antichrist would
unify the world’s religions, re-establish the Roman Empire, dramatically extend
its domain and make a friendship pact with Israel he would later disavow. The
rapture would come, followed by the seven-year tribulation, during which
millions of people would die, but many Jews would recognize Jesus as the
messiah. Armageddon in Israel would become the site of history’s last great
battle, where the Antichrist would face down his last earthly rivals. Christ would
intervene, annihilate both armies, save the Jews and establish the millennium.
Allenby’s entrance into Jerusalem, Mussolini’s rise to power, the Great
Depression, World War II, Shoah, and the creation of Israel were each offered
as proof of these prophecies.40

38
Haldeman, Signs of the Times, p. 128; Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture,
pp. 125–7.
39
LaHaye and Jenkins, Are We Living in the End Times?, p. 74.
40
Clouse, Meaning of the Millennium; Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming,
pp. 9–24, 128–9; Glass, “Fundamentalism’s Prophetic Vision of the Jews”; Ross, So It Was
True; Carpenter, Revive Us Again, pp. 97–100; LaHaye and Jenkins, Are We Living in the
End Times?, pp. 95–120.
268 s c i e n c e fi c t io n a n d i m m o r t a l i ty

immortality. Procreation is, of course, a traditional means of achieving figu-

rative immortality by passing down one’s name and genes. Christianity has
tended to treat immortality and procreation as something of an either–or
choice. Jesus fathered no children, Augustine became celibate because he
considered sex a form of loss of control and Origen castrated himself to better
serve God and the nuns with whom he worked. For Christianity, spiritual
commitment has always been associated with chastity and other forms of
physical denial. Modern secular thinkers also frame an inverse relationship
between immortality and childlessness, albeit for different reasons. There is the
Malthusian constraint in which immortality combined with procreation would
quickly overpopulate the earth unless people settled other worlds. Such a
problem should be nugatory for science fiction novels in which space travel is
a standard conceit. Economic and psychological constraints loom more impor-
tant. In some novels characters are loath to produce children because they must
share their fortunes with them. Children may be less satisfying emotionally if
we no longer need them to achieve a merely figurative form of immortality. In
the twentieth century, the birth rate dropped dramatically throughout the
industrial world as wealth and lifespans increased.
Some science fiction novels – Greg Egan’s Schild’s Ladder is a case in point –
feature characters who derive pleasure from multiple generations of children.
More commonly, extended life goes together with infertility, as it does for the
Mule in Asimov’s Foundation series, Barjavel’s Le Grand Secret, Damon
Knight’s Dio and William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. Howard Hendrix speculates
that science fiction reproduces Christian tradition in secular form. Immortality
stops physical maturation in youth, in a stage of life where mortal people
would generally marry and start families. Eternal youth interrupts the cycle of
birth, growth, reproduction and death. It recovers the prelapsarian state of
Adam and Eve as “immortal flowers” that bear no fruit.99 In Christianity, this
allows identity to become other-directed and focused on eternal life. In science
fiction, it becomes more inner-directed as the self becomes the end-all of a life
in this world.

99
Hendrix, “Dual Immortality, No Kids.”
 8

Identity reconsidered

Où est donc ce moi?

[Where is this me?]

Blaise Pascal1

In this conclusion I draw on my readings of diverse texts to reflect upon the

questions I raised in the Introduction. I adhere to the distinction I made at
the outset between macro-historical and micro-process features of identity. The
former refer to the conditions responsible for modern identity strategies and
the widespread faith that people have in their possession of consistent and
unique identities. The latter describe the dynamic of identity construction, by
which I mean the variety of self-identifications that constitute our identity and
the critical role agency plays in this process. I treat these questions consecutively
and bridge the two domains toward the end of the chapter where I discuss the
normative implications of my findings.
My opening move was to distinguish the practice of identity from the concept.
By practice, I mean our understandings of ourselves and their behavioral impli-
cations. These understandings have three dimensions: physical, social and reflec-
tive.2 They also entail some narrative of our lives that incorporates bodily, social
and reflective experiences. All three dimensions are essential to the self. Science
fiction stories aside, we cannot live without bodies, and the bodies we have differ
from those of others. Our appearance, capabilities and limitations help shape our
lives, the reactions of others to us and our understanding of ourselves. The social
self is equally critical because so much of what we think we are is determined by
our relations with other people and our position in society. The reflective
component is a product of consciousness. It enables us to grasp our distinctness
from others, but also our fundamental similarity. It helps us “make sense” of our
experiences and feelings. Collectively, these dimensions and our understandings
of them constitute the phenomenological self.
The most fundamental problem with the concept of identity is that it describes
something that has no ontological existence. Work in analytical philosophy calls
personhood into question; at best, a claim can be made for the so-called “minimal

1 2
Pascal, Pensées, vol. I, p. 187. Seigel, Idea of the Self, on this point.

269
 left behind 193

awakening.”46 In 1980, Lindsey, a graduate of the Dallas Theological Seminary,

authored a second book in which he argued that the 1980s could represent the
last decade of history.47 Judging from the sales of his books, readers appear
unperturbed by apparent contradiction between Lindsey’s deterministic belief
in the end of the world and the hope it might be prevented by a spiritual
reawakening.
The Left Behind series copies and expands on Lindsey and Carlson’s scenario
and has been an ever bigger success. To date, Left Behind consists of sixteen novels,
several volumes of commentary, a series for the military and a mini-series for
children. The authors maintain an active website that solicits commentary and
questions from readers. The project was conceived by Tim LaHaye, a self-
described “prophecy scholar,” minister and educator. He was active in the John
Birch Society in the 1960s, was an original board member of the Moral Majority
and a founder of or active in a score of right-wing social and political organiza-
tions. His wife Beverly is co-founder of Concerned Women for America, a
prominent anti-feminist organization. LaHaye is convinced that the Chinese
communists bought the 1996 election for Bill Clinton.48 The series principal
author, Jerry B. Jenkins, claims to have authored over a hundred books.
Following Lindsey and Carlson, Left Behind is based on prophecies elabo-
rated by Ezra, Daniel and Revelation. Their prophecies provide the plot for all
the volumes, which opens with the rapture, moves forward through the tribu-
lation, Christ’s return and establishment of the Millennium and resurrection of
the dead and the final ascent to heaven. Like all good Dispensationalists, the
authors believe that we are living in “the final days” because of humanity’s
corruption and loss of faith in God. Traditionally, Dispensationalists look for
correspondence between contemporary events and biblical prophecies. Left
Behind does the reverse; it writes a history of the near future to make it conform
to its authors’ readings of selected prophecies. Judging from website posts,
many readers find this approach appealing.49

The plot
The Left Behind novels have an integrated if elaborate plot that realizes the
prophecies of the Book of Revelation, as understood by LaHaye and Johnson.
Volume I opens with the rapture, which lifts some half-million believers to
heaven at the same moment. Those aboard airplanes simply disappear, with
God thoughtfully leaving their clothes neatly folded on their seats. The sudden
disappearance of so many people comes as a shock to those “left behind” and

46
Lindsey, Late Great Planet Earth, and The 1980s; Boyer, When Times Shall Be No More,
p. 5; “The Great Cosmic Countdown: Hal Lindsey and the Future,” Eternity, January 1977,
p. 21.
47
Lindsey, 1980s. 48 Radosh, Rapture Ready!, p. 81. 49 Ibid., p. 13.
 identity reconsidered 271

research on children, suggest that autonomy is best achieved in the context of close
relationships. We need to pay as much attention to integration as to separation, a
dimension of identity that is all but ignored in the literature. I elaborate this
understanding and explore some of its behavioral and normative implications.
Identity construction is an interactive social and individual process. Even
social determinists like Marx, Durkheim and Mead agree that actors have
choices about their identities at the individual, institutional and national levels.
My texts offer some insight into how this works. People are most influential
when they construct discourses that change cultural orientations responsible
for social identities. Influence is not the same as agency, which is best described
as the freedom to make choices about social roles and their performance. In
some circumstances, people can pioneer new roles or assume those previously
closed to them. Role playing is the principal enabling mechanism of agency. It
allows people to test out alternative identifications, and perhaps to transform
these identifications and themselves in the process. Role playing facilitates
collective transformations when it generates discourses that allow people to
examine and reflect upon themselves.
My texts represent three kinds of discourses: golden ages, utopias and
dystopias. The first two are important vehicles for identity construction.
Golden ages were initially theodicies, but in the modern era were reworked as
utopias to provide the justification for anti-modern identity projects. Dystopias
probe the behavioral implications of identities and are generally authored by
people committed to strategy three. Chapter 2 offers a comparative analysis of
the three genres, demonstrates their interdependence and how they reflect
different responses to modernity and the prospect of social and scientific
progress. The project of the autonomous self is closely associated with and
sustained by belief in progress. Expectations of social, economic and political
progress became evident in the Renaissance and peaked in the West in the
twentieth century. In recent decades, belief in progress appears to have dimin-
ished throughout much of the developed world. This loss of faith is already
having important implications for the kinds of identities people find attractive.
It has stimulated renewed interest in anti-modern, but also in postmodern
identities. Our convictions about progress also help determine how we respond
to utopias and dystopias. In contrast to the conventional wisdom, I read most
utopias as anti-modern in the kinds of identities they construct.
Golden ages, utopias and dystopias are linear narratives; they tell stories with
beginnings and endings. These stories are not always in temporal sequence, but
readers must be able to impose a linear structure on them. This is also true of
autobiographical narratives, with the difference that they tell an ongoing story.
Like histories, life stories – even those of the most informal kind – impose
ex post facto order on events, emotions and reflections about them. We tend to
think of linear narrative as a “natural” form of expression that captures the
essence of the world and ourselves. Such Kantian-style isomorphism is
272 id e n ti t y r e co n s id e r e d

unwarranted; linear structure is no more natural to narratives than it is to the

visual arts. Both gestalts reflect and support particular cultural configurations.
Linear structure and perspective facilitated the emergence of the autonomous
self and became more deeply embedded in Western culture as a result.3 In the
twentieth century, non-linear perspectives became prominent in art and archi-
tecture and more recently, in music videos and computer games. A move away
from linearity may be a precondition of freeing ourselves from the illusion of
unique and coherent identities.
Identifications are central to individuals but also to groups, organizations
and nations. We even attribute an identity to our species. Science fiction is
interested in species identity and some of its authors ask whether it would
continue to have any meaning in a world of intelligent and feeling androids,
symbiots and body-free human intelligence. Some see benefits to discarding
markers of identity and bridging boundaries between our species and other life
forms. Their position is rooted in a philosophical tradition that goes back to
Protagoras and Plato and offers an appropriate vantage point from which to
rethink the relationship between identity and ethics. In doing so, I disassociate
myself from political theorists like Leo Strauss, Eric Vogelen, Alasdair
MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, who maintain that ethical codes derive from
identities, and that these in turn must be rooted in some kind of cosmic order. I
go further and challenge the very idea of rooting ethics in identities, as the latter
are multiple, fragmented, inconsistent and labile.
Modern scientific and philosophical thinking encourages skepticism about
heaven and hell and divine sanction of conventional moral codes. Kant and his
successors struggled without success to anchor these values and practices in
reason and sentiment. In developed countries, most people no longer believe in
a deity and have no interest in moral philosophy. Social and political behavior
nevertheless appears to be at least as rule-based as in the past. If we can live
without god, we can probably lead orderly and meaningful lives without the
illusion of unitary, consistent identities. Divorcing ethics from identity might
have positive benefits if it helps us to recognize our own inner tensions, if not
incoherence. As this psychological state is a universal attribute of modern
people, it provides the basis for mutual recognition and respect, and the
extension of our circle of those we consider in some way like ourselves.

Modern selves
My first question is why so many Westerners believe they have unique and
consistent identities. The short answer is that we have been socialized to think
of ourselves this way. Late eighteenth-century German idealists theorized about
Identität (identity) and the concept gradually moved from philosophy into the

3
Lebow, Constructing Cause in International Relations, for elaboration.
 m o de r n s e lv e s 273

public discourse. It burst upon the American scene in the 1960s through the
writings of Danish-American psychiatrist Erik Erikson. Erikson was a
Freudian, and Freud was steeped in German idealism.
Historians of political thought provide a more satisfying answer by putting
discourses about the self into historical context; they portray them as the
product of a long-term intellectual and political project to construct the auton-
omous individual.4 An early move was to transfer responsibility for enforcing
moral codes from church, state and family to individuals. Another key objective
was to give individuals more choice about their identities, rather than allowing
society to impose roles and statuses. This required shifting the basis of status
away from birth and toward merit. Autonomy is generally thought to have a
long history, with origins that might be traced back to ancient Greece, but really
only manifest in the modern era, where it was the product of religious skepti-
cism, state building and industrialization.5 The construction of the autonomous
self is undeniably a modern phenomenon, although some of its fiercest advo-
cates like Rousseau and the Romantics envisaged it as a reaction against
modernity. By the twentieth century, the autonomous self came to be regarded
by many intellectuals as a means of escaping from what Weber called the
“stahlhartes Gehäuse” (iron cage) and Foucault the “disciplinary society.”6
My reading of autonomy differs from the conventional wisdom in important
ways. As noted, I emphasize the extent to which two major identity strategies
are anti-modern in their goals as they seek to limit individual autonomy by
reducing, or doing away with, interiority and reflexivity. I challenge the sharp
distinction that is routinely made between modern and ancient selves. Greeks and
Romans are said to have derived their identities and moral compasses from the
roles they performed and to have been incapable of thinking of themselves
divorced from them and their societies.7 Modern people are said to look more
to themselves for definition, routinely described as “self-definition.” This distinc-
tion originates with the nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt.8 In
sociology, it finds an influential statement in Durkheim’s distinction between
mechanical and organic solidarity. It is based on the idea that the replacement

4
MacIntyre, After Virtue; Taylor, Sources of the Self; Yack, Fetishism of Modernities; Seigel,
Idea of the Self; Martin and Barresi, Naturalization of the Soul.
5
MacIntyre, After Virtue; Taylor, Sources of the Self; Seigel, Idea of the Self. Taylor attempts to
find some sense of self in the Greeks, most notably in Plato, but it is a very thin self. See
Blumberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age; Gilson, Études sur le rôle de la pensée médiévale dans
la formation du système cartésien; Löwith, Meaning in History; Gillespie, Theological Origins
of Modernity for arguments that Christianity contributed to the emergence of modernity.
6
Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The
Weber translation is by Talcott Parsons and has been criticized by Peter Baehr, “‘Iron Cage’
and the ‘Shell as Hard as Steel’,” who suggests that “shell hard as steel” better captures
Weber’s intentions.
7
Mauss, “Catégorie de Personne.” 8 Burckhardt, Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy.
196 be a m m e up , l or d

from the dead proves an enormous political asset that allows him to further
consolidate his power.59
The Millennium is brought about by the return of Jesus. He casts Carpathia,
his advisers and all their henchmen into the Lake of Fire, where they will suffer
for all eternity. Satan emerges from Carpathia’s body and is compelled to kneel
before Christ and acknowledge him as Lord. He confesses that everything he
ever did was for personal gain and that his entire life was a waste. A thousand
years later we have a glimpse of Carpathia still writhing in agony as he is
tortured by fire and sulphur, repeating his new mantra that Jesus is Lord. All of
these events, beginning with Carpathia’s improbable rise to world power, are
necessary to make the world resemble Dispensationalist readings of biblical
prophecy.
Left Behind is more about adventure than character development. There is
endless description of the mayhem caused by the Antichrist, the human and
physical disruption and destruction to which this leads and the efforts of the
tribulation force to survive and win converts to Christ. Little effort is made to
demonstrate the spiritual rewards heroes derive from their commitment to
Jesus. They occasionally speak of these benefits, but this is not a convincing
method of demonstrating them. It is, of course, much easier to describe chaos
and destruction than it is to portray spiritual evolution and its psychological
and behavioral consequences.

Theology
Dispensationalists claim to read God’s word directly without introducing any
interpretation. Here, too, Dispensationalism harks back to the early days of
English Protestantism when William Tyndale insisted that the bible should be
understood in what he calls “its literal sense.” Like Tyndale, Dispensationalists
assert that meaning lies directly in front of us and requires no special education
or search for hidden meanings.60
Texts never speak for themselves and the bible least of all. Old and new
testaments are composites of multiple texts written by many people, in some
cases over many generations. Most of these books existed in different textual
versions, making it impossible to reconstruct an “original.” Editors subse-
quently decided which texts, and which versions of them, to include in the
scriptures.61 The Old Testament is written in Hebrew and the new in Greek.
Spinoza, one of the fathers of hermeneutic readings, confessed how difficult it
was to make sense of the Old Testament, as it is written in a language no longer

59
LaHaye and Jenkins, Indwelling, pp. 364–8.
60
Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 100.
61
Morgan, “New Testament”; Davies, “Qumran Studies”; Elwolde, “Language and
Translation of the Old Testament.”
 m o de r n s e lv e s 275

enraged animal. At the end of the Odyssey, when its eponymous hero kills the
suitors and brings peace to Ithaca, we observe the man of many devices, the
skilled fighter and canny conjuror who must be chastised in the last line because
of his increasingly dominant interiority. Virgil’s Aeneas is guided and assisted
by the gods, but near the end of the epic he kills Turnus in an act of rage and
vengeance that arises from within. The Aeneid’s ending lends itself to multiple
interpretations. Most commonly, it has been read to symbolize Rome’s unwill-
ingness to share power with other political units, as evidence that Aeneas has
lost the humanity that Achilles regained, or as a warning about the complexities
of political life. All three readings indicate interiority, and alert us to some of its
dangers.
The Iliad valorizes warrior-based honor societies.14 Archetypes are well
suited to this purpose because they create role models that listeners or readers
are encouraged to emulate or shun. Homer provided a model for the Greeks,
and the Greeks for the Romans. I am not persuaded that interiority emerged
with Augustine, as is sometimes claimed.15 Other readings of his autobiography
are possible, including one that interprets it as a pre-modern attempt to
suppress the independent inner self.16 I surmise that his proselytizing goal led
him to emphasize a long pre-existing but rarely articulated interiority. His
incentive was to contrast secular pleasures with spiritual fulfillment to demon-
strate the superiority of the latter, but also to describe the internal conflict they
generated and how appetite could be overcome by will power and faith.
Interiority is not the same as self-fashioning, and traditional Christian views
of autonomy remained unreservedly negative. “Hands off yourself,” Augustine
warned. “Try to build up yourself, and you build a ruin.”17
The presence of interiority in the ancient world raises the prospect that
alienation was also present and should be considered a trans-historical prob-
lem. It is thus wrong to make such a sharp divide between pre-modern and
modern, which is so central to the concept of modernity. The seeming need, or
at least, attraction, of this distinction suggests that modernity is itself a form of
utopianism that masquerades as history. It is nevertheless true that autonomy
and self-fashioning are undeniably products of the modern era. In the
Introduction, I described how the two components of internal autonomy –
interiority and reflexivity – became more visible in the Renaissance art and
literature and even more pronounced subsequently. These texts were catalysts
for self-fashioning, which frequently found initial, even hesitant, expression in
role playing. Role playing was an outlet and an experiment in a world where

14
Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations, chs. 3–4.
15
Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography.”
16
Freccero, “Autobiography and Narrative.”
17
Augustine, “Sermon 169,” quoted in Brown, Religion and Society in the Age of Saint
Augustine, p. 30.
276 i de n t i ty r e c on si d er e d

changing roles in practice was much more difficult. It heightened interiority

and reflexivity – and also alienation to the degree that people felt more
comfortable in their assumed roles than those they were compelled to perform
on a daily basis.
Discourses and autonomy were to a significant degree co-constitutive.
Charles Taylor rightly reminds us that the modern self is not simply the
creation of the mind. It is the product of numerous changes in religious, social,
political, economic, family and artistic practices. Some of these practices were
supportive of discourses valorizing external and internal autonomy.18 Others
were distinctly at odds with them, so we must avoid being drawn into a
narrative of linear progress. The sixteenth century, where the narrative of
modernity so often begins, witnessed little change in external autonomy as
religious and state institutions became better organized and more capable of
disciplining middle-class and aristocratic subjects alike.19 For this reason,
Stephen Greenblatt maintains, Renaissance self-fashioning was highly con-
strained. Subjectivity is “not an epiphany of identity freely chosen but a cultural
artifact.” The self can only be constructed and maneuver within collectively
prescribed practices and codes. The power to shape oneself is also dependent on
tolerance or support offered by the society.20 This latter point is also made by
Natalie Zemon Davis in the context of sixteenth-century French villages. She
finds considerable evidence of a normative ideal of self-expression and
autonomy, although not nearly as pronounced as in nineteenth-century
France. She attributes this difference to the confining nature of traditional
religious obligations and patriarchal family structures. Individuality and its
expression, she insists, require the external autonomy of agents.21
Tensions between individuals seeking freedom and states attempting to
regulate the lives of their citizens intensified in the modern era. Some of the
philosophers, writers and artists who pioneered the concept of self found
themselves severely constrained by this process. In chapter 5, I argued that
John Locke’s commitment to individualism might be understood as a reaction
to the hierarchical nature of seventeenth-century English social relations and
his dependence on powerful patrons. Locke imagined a world in which he
would feel at home and personally fulfilled.
Chapter 4 depicts Mozart and Da Ponte in a similar light. Given the political,
economic and social restrictions of the Austria of Maria Theresa, Joseph II and
Leopold II, Mozart and his librettists had to experience the Enlightenment
vicariously. In Salzburg, Mozart was repeatedly humiliated by his patron,
Archbishop Colloredo. In Vienna, he was treated better, but still came up
against serious creative, economic and social constraints. In their operas,
Mozart and Da Ponte created worlds in which aristocrats and kings were

18
Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 206. 19 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 1.
20
Ibid., p. 256. 21 Davis, “Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France.”
 m o de r n s e l v es 277

powerless, parodied or even punished. Mozart’s ambitions were ahead of his

time. Beethoven would be the first composer to cash in on growing public
respect for, if not awe of, musical genius.22 Like Locke, Mozart and Da Ponte
had little choice but to reach an uneasy and clearly uncomfortable accommo-
dation with highly placed representatives of the existing order. This made it
possible for them to practice their respective arts and achieve a limited degree
of independence.23 Rebellion was restricted to their art, where they were
inspired to create imaginary worlds in which they or others might express
themselves.
Chapter 5 explores yet another variation on this theme: the liminal position
of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German intellectuals and its implica-
tions for literature and philosophy. In the various German states the public
sphere (Öffentlichkeit) was relatively undeveloped until well into the nineteenth
century and aristocratic elites were more parochial in their thinking than their
French and British counterparts. As Kant observed, it was the age of
Enlightenment, but in Germany it was not yet an enlightened age.24
Centralizing authorities drew support from local nobles and many urban elites
who were anxious to protect their local economic and social privileges. German
intellectuals had little recourse but to accept the limitations imposed by the
states that employed them as ministers, professors, teachers and other kinds of
civil servants. For much of the nineteenth century they remained dependent on
the support and toleration by the very princes and bureaucrats whom they
believed stood in the way of cultural progress and national rebirth and with it,
the possibility of developing identities in harmony with this imagined society.
German intellectuals turned to a highly idealized ancient Greece as a source
of freshness, balance and reason. The golden age of Athens they invented was
intended as a model for restructuring German society through Bildung (self
improvement) in lieu of direct political action. Following the Napoleonic Wars,
Prussia and other German states turned their backs on reforms and liberal
thinking and Greece increasingly became a fantasy world where intellectuals
and artists could dream and create in personally fulfilling ways. As early as
1801, Schiller described Germany as an “inward Empire.”25
Given Germany’s situation as a late economic and cultural developer,
its intellectuals faced working conditions not dissimilar from those of pre-
commercial and industrial Britain. In both societies, artists and intellectuals
were dependent on patrons and constrained by their subservient positions. The
German situation was far more intolerable by virtue of the readily available

22
Beales, Joseph II, vol. II, pp. 555–87.
23
Da Ponte would relocate to New York where he could lead a freer amorous and
professional life.
24
Kant, “Answer to the Question ‘What is Enlightenment?’”
25
Conze, “‘Deutschland’ und ‘deutsche Nation’ als historische Begriffe.”
 left behind 199

them, all of them with shield and helmet; Gomer and all its troops; and
house of Togarmah from the far north and all its troops – many people are
with you.”’73

LaHaye and Jenkins insist that “etymologically,” Gog and Magog “can only
mean modern-day Russia. Magog was the second son of Japeth who, the Roman
[sic. Jewish] historian Josephus reports, settled along the northern coast of the
Black Sea. The tribes from this area were known to Greek historians as
Scythians. As for an army from the north, “Any map will show that Russia
is indeed north of Israel.” What is more remarkable, LaHaye and Jenkins insist,
is Ezekiel’s identification of Gog’s allies – Persia, Libya, Gomer (which they
infer is Turkey), Ethiopia and Togarmar [?] – “are all Arab countries.”74 This
reading of Ezekiel is anything but literal, as it nowhere mentions the then non-
existent Russia. The connection between Japeth and the Scythians is tenuous
and that between the Scythians and Russians historically absurd, as they are two
different peoples. Russia is indeed north of Israel, but so are Lebanon, Syria and
Turkey. LaHaye and Jenkins err in describing Ethiopia as a Muslim country, as
its population is largely Christian. Their equation of Gomer with Turkey is
without support, and another indication of the authors’ ignorance as Muslim
Turkey, until recently, had been quietly pro-Israel.
There is no way around the fact that any parallels between prophecy and the
real world are based on a figurative reading, as the bible makes no mention of
international treaties, let alone of Russia and the UN. Reading biblical tea leaves
is no different from interpreting Nostradamus. It is also no more successful, as
every prediction of Jesus’ return, from the first century onwards, has failed to
materialize. Dispensationalist predictions of doomsday and the second coming,
which began in the nineteenth century, only extend their zero batting average.
LaHaye and Jenkins offer the lame defense that people who made these failed
predictions were at least attentive to scripture. They acknowledge that “reading
the times” is difficult and will not succeed, according to Daniel, until “many
shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”75 They then leap to the
conclusion that the increase in secular knowledge in the twentieth century has
fulfilled this condition and that “The ability to rightly evaluate the signs in our
times is increasing almost daily.” They acknowledge that they “cannot guaran-
tee that Christ will come in our generation,” but we have more reason than ever
before to believe that he will.76 Fundamentalists and Dispensationalists, LaHaye
and Jenkins among them, are guilty of eisegesis: the reading of one’s own ideas
into a text.77

73
Ezekiel 38:8. 74 LaHaye and Jenkins, Are We Living in the End Times?, pp. 83–7.
75
Ibid., pp. ix–x; Daniel 12:4.
76
LaHaye and Jenkins, Are We Living in the End Times?, pp. x–xi, 23–4.
77
Bauckham, Theology of the Book of Revelation, p. 152; Currie, Rapture; Rossing, Rapture
Exposed.
 m a k in g s e lv e s 279

It is important to clarify what I mean by society. In Britain, in the mid-

eighteenth century, society still referred to associations that brought like-
minded people together. It also had a contractual connotation, so had gradually
come to be used to describe a polity. In the early nineteenth century, society
began to assume an autonomous existence in peoples’ minds, an understanding
that is widespread today. This understanding is evident in Jane Austen novels,
which depict individuals who find themselves enmeshed in society but never-
theless feel alienated from it. Increasingly, in Britain and elsewhere in Western
Europe, society came to be seen as driven by its own laws, even if changes in
manners and customs were understood to be the result of individual initia-
tives.30 This new understanding of society heightened tension between reflec-
tive and social selves. Novels once again led the way. The Austen synthesis gave
way to a representation that portrayed society as dominant and individualism
as something that had to be restrained to maintain stability. In contrast to
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century heroes and heroines, who stretched
the limits of freedom, their Victorian successors directed their energies more
toward containment and self-management.31
In strong states, like France and the newly unified Germany, civil society was
regarded negatively, or at the very least with deep ambivalence. A few thinkers
like Helvétius described civil society as a vehicle for personal and cultural
development, but many more continental intellectuals eyed it warily as an
uncontrolled space where people could easily be led astray. Rousseau was
among the first to characterize society as Janus-faced; it corrupted human
beings but also had the potential to restore their humanity. Diderot insisted
that society wears away individuality instead of fostering it. Throughout the
nineteenth century French thinkers warned that individuals who wiggle free of
state-imposed social controls indulge their selfish interests at the community’s
expense.32 Even Durkheim, who considered the French state a tyranny, felt
compelled to bow to the conventional wisdom by distinguishing two kinds of
self, one positive, the other committed to individuality with selfishness.33 In
Germany, where society was weaker still, it was regarded with correspondingly
greater suspicion. Chapter 5 describes how German philosophers, writers and
educators denigrated commercial activities and sought to focus the ambitions
of the young on grand collective projects. Most envisaged identity construction
as a national rather than individual enterprise and the state as the appropriate
focus of individual identification and fulfillment.

30
Lynch, Economy of Character, pp. 107–51; Armstrong, How Novels Think, pp. 7, 16–18,
43–59.
31
Ibid., pp. 54–6, 79–80. 32 Jaume, L’individu effacé; Lukes, Individualism, ch. 1.
33
Seigel, Idea of the Self, pp. 472, 485, 493, 504.
280 identity reconsidered

Making selves
Identity is a first order concern of human beings. It begins in childhood with the
recognition that we are physically distinct from others no matter how closely we
resemble them. With maturity, we come to understand that we are responsible
for our behavior and goals in ways that more instinct-driven species are not. All
forms of social identification – from family to species – involve differentiation
from others. They also require us to draw closer to other members of the social
units with which we affiliate or identify. A meaningful sense of self is greatly
facilitated by close relations with those from whom we differentiate ourselves.
Discourses about identity largely ignore this second dynamic, although to be
fair to Kant and Hegel, they do not. I noted in the introduction how Kant and
Hegel describe identity construction as involving differentiation and struggle,
but envisage this as only a first step. Kant imagines a time when people and
nations can respond positively to one another and move away from rivalry by
developing dialectical egos capable of recognizing and overcoming internal and
external differences and thus able to recognize others without the kind of
differentiation association with hostility. Hegel makes a parallel argument in
his treatment of the master–slave relationship. With some important excep-
tions, many modern students of identity, drawing superficially on Kant and
Hegel, recognize only one kind of integration: affiliation and bonding with
others in the same family, group, nationality, state or religion.34
This one-sided understanding arises from the conception of the autonomous
self, which is endemic to social science and contemporary conceptions of
identity. It is the foundation of economic and rational choice theories, both of
which build on the myth of autonomous, egoistic individuals making decisions
on the basis of self-interest. Scholars, intellectuals and politicians generally
assume that identities form and solidarity is built and enhanced by emphasizing
how we differ in positive ways from others. This emphasis on autonomous
actors directs our attention to markers of identity and the boundaries we create
to distinguish us from others. It is commonly assumed that boundary main-
tenance is facilitated by negative stereotypes of others.
Chapter 3 turned to Homer and Virgil for a different understanding of
identity, one based on empathetic and nuanced understandings of others. In
the Iliad, Greeks and Trojans possess strong identities prior to their war, and
there is no evidence that they enhance group solidarity as a result of the conflict.
Greek unity turns out to be fragile and is nearly destroyed by the intense
antagonism between Achilles and Agamemnon. The Trojan War highlights
the mutual dependence of Greeks and Trojans, as warrior aristocrats on both
sides yearn to compete for aristeia. This is only possible against an adversary

34
Chapter 3 noted Levinas, Pizzorno, Honneth and recent literature in international
relations.
 m a k in g s e l ve s 281

who has similar values and practices. Warriors respect one another and have
strong incentives to acknowledge publicly the outstanding qualities of their
opponents. War nevertheless involves death and sacrifice and the anger they
arouse threatens to undermine the norms governing relations between adver-
saries and among Greeks. Cooperation between the warring camps reaches its
climax in Priam’s successful ransom of his son’s body from Achilles. Through
this encounter, Achilles regains his humanity and identity.
In the Aeneid, Virgil implies that the Trojans must expand their identity to
gain empire. On the verge of victory, Aeneas promises the defeated Italians that
they will never have to bow to Trojans. “May both nations,” he proclaims, “live
under equal laws, march together toward an eternal pact of peace.”35 His
message is reinforced by Jove and Juno, who command the Trojans and
Latins to blend into a stronger, hybrid people.36 Writing as an Italian Roman,
Virgil is, in effect, urging Augustus to treat contemporary Romans equally,
regardless of their territorial origins. By this form of identity stretching,
Augustus can marshal support through the Empire and realize Jove’s prophecy.
Aeneas is offered as a prototype. He allies with Etruscans and various Latins and
marries the Latin princess Lavinia, making clear that Rome is a multicultural
project from the outset.
Homer’s approach to identity differs from Kant’s and Hegel’s in that it does
not frame identity construction in stages. Nor does it begin with differentia-
tion and hostility and theorize the possibility of subsequent reconciliation
through internal transformations. Rather, it envisages identity construction as
facilitated by positive interactions at the outset. This understanding receives
support, as noted, from work on children, and also from recent research in
social psychology on group formation. It indicates that the creation of
“others” and negative stereotypes about them are not necessary for group
formation and solidarity. Such images are a special case and most likely to
develop when groups compete for scarce resources.37 This understanding of
identity is shared in part by psychiatrists who study child development. Freud
maintained that the ego emerges as a consequence of identification with
others, and that the self arises from the resulting tensions within the child.
Contemporary psychiatrists describe identity formation as biologically pro-
grammed and manifested early in life when infants struggle to understand
themselves as beings in their own right distinct from parents and other
caregivers.38 Such recognition usually develops by the age of four.39 Robust,

35
Virgil, Aeneid, 12.225–8. 36 Ibid., 12.950–71. 37 Chapter 3 for references.
38
Mahler, On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation, pp. 8–10; Mahler, Pine
and Bergman, Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, p. 11; Nelson, “Self in Time”;
Rochat, “What is it Like to be a Newborn?”; Gallup, Anderson and Platek, “Self-
Recognition.”
39
Martin and Baresi, Naturalization of the Soul; Bermudez, Marcel and Elan, Body and the
Self; Gallup, Anderson and Platek, “Self-Recognition.”
202 be a m m e u p, l or d

the world agree, quickly and inconceivably, to turn over most of their weapons
to the world body.
The patriotic militias nevertheless get their hands on sophisticated assault
weapons, nuclear warheads, their delivery systems and the tightly-held codes
necessary to arm their warheads. More unrealistic still, they possess the trans-
porters, radars, computers, communications and trained personnel necessary
to transport and fire missiles with nuclear and conventional warheads against
Carpathia and his forces. They are overwhelmed, although it is just as unreal-
istic to imagine that in the short time the UN has acquired its vast and diverse
arsenal it has been able to recruit and train forces capable of using its weapons
effectively. Carpathia, whose intelligence system also materializes from
nowhere, is forewarned and able to escape the missile meant to vaporize him
and his aircraft. He retaliates massively and many American and other cities are
hit by conventional and nuclear weapons. Incredibly, America continues to
function normally outside these circles of destruction.
The authors have little understanding of the destructiveness of nuclear
weapons. London’s Heathrow Airport is destroyed by a 100-megaton hydrogen
bomb, but the rest of London is unscathed. The largest nuclear explosion on
record is a 50-megaton device the Soviet Union detonated on the Arctic island
of Novaya Zemlya in October 1961. In later decades the superpowers built large
arsenals of relatively low-yield weapons in the kiloton range because of the
greater accuracy of their delivery systems. If a 100-megaton bomb had some-
how been built and exploded over Heathrow Airport, it would have destroyed
Greater London and done considerable damage well beyond the metropolitan
area. The smaller weapons dropped on New York and Chicago would also have
been devastating. In the Big Apple, we are told, nobody knows if the bomb
dropped on Manhattan was conventional or nuclear. This is also unrealistic
given the nature of the nuclear and conventional weapons of the 1990s.
Historical detail lends verisimilitude to fiction, but is not necessary for all
genres. For readers of Christian fiction, as for readers of romance, it may be the
rhetorical value of detail that counts; the very fact that it is there, accurate or
not, makes the narrative credible. Counterfactual narratives illustrate the val-
idity of this rhetorical truth; the more vivid they are the more credible they
become to readers.89 This is in sharp contrast to science fiction, whose writers
must invest time and effort to get their detail right to satisfy a more knowl-
edgeable audience.90 Star Trek can readily be distinguished from Star Wars in
this respect. The latter is more fantasy than science fiction, even though it is set
in space and the future. It can get away with such gross anomalies as Luke

89
Kahneman, Slovic and Tversky, Judgment Under Uncertainty, p. 226, and “Extensional
versus Intuitive Reason”; Koehler, “Explanation, Imagination, and Confidence in
Judgment”; Lebow, Forbidden Fruit, ch. 6.
90
Jones, Deconstructing the Starships, p. 16.
 a g e n cy 283

Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas.45 For Gadamer, dialogue “is the
art of having a conversation, and that includes the art of having a conversation
with oneself and fervently seeking and understanding of oneself.”46 Such con-
versations put us in touch with ourselves and others. Experiencing the other
through dialogue can lead to exstasis, or the experience of being outside of
oneself. Dialogue can be understood as a means of extending our personal
horizons and identities and by this means allows us to escape in part from the
confines of culture and power structures.47 Critical hermeneutics of the kind
advocated by Gadamer implicitly assumes that in the modern world with all its
diverse interlocutors, in contrast to Achilles and Priam, we can find a language
that promotes empathy and helps to construct new identities.
The Homeric understanding of identity suggests that separation need not
involve alienation or antagonism. This is true for individuals, groups and
nations. Collaborative identity construction confers many benefits. It provides
the basis for continuing good relations with others, serves as a corrective for
unhealthy and destructive forms of self-involvement and is the foundation for a
still wider circle of relationships. Arguably, these kinds of relationships make us
human, or at least bring out and develop those qualities many of us associate
with the best side of human nature. I return to this question when I address
identity at the species level.

Agency
In traditional societies where there were few roles and most of them ascribed,
people knew who they were as their identities were confirmed on a daily basis.
People may have been unhappy about being serfs or peasants, but for the most
part did not deny their status to others or themselves. Attempts to do so would
have been difficult and likely to meet resistance.48 James Scott contends that it is
not all that much easier in the modern world, as states have invented multiple
categories of identification to which they assign people.49 Modernity is never-
theless characterized by widespread attempts – many of them successful – to

45
Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics; Holquist and Clark, Mikhail Bakhtin; Wertsch,
Voices of the Mind; Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action; Moon,
“Practical Discourse and Communicative Ethics.”
46
Gadamer, “Reflections on My Philosophical Journey”; Fabian, “Ethnographic Objectivity
Revisited.”
47
Gadamer, Truth and Method, “Plato and the Poets” and “Reflections on My Philosophical
Journey”; Warnke, Gadamer; Arendt, “Crisis in Education.”
48
Berger and Luckmann, Social Construction of Reality, pp. 184–8; Davis, “Boundaries and
the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France.”
49
Scott, Seeing Like a State; Money, Gay, Straight, and In-Between; Kessler and McKenna,
Gender; Ortner and Whitehead, Sexual Meaning. See also special issues of Social Problems
devoted to labeling theory.
284 identity reconsidered

escape, finesse or otherwise transgress these categories and their associated

roles. One example is the success Americans have had in recent years in
compelling bureaucrats to reformulate, loosen or drop long used so-called
racial categories of identification in the national census.50
Meaningful agency requires some possibility of choice and self-fashioning,
and this was made possible in the modern era by changes in both material and
ideational conditions. These included a more complex division of labor, pro-
liferation of roles and the emergence of discourses that questioned existing roles
and identities and theorized alternatives. Isaiah Berlin describes the “apotheosis
of the will” as a defining feature of modernity.51 For Romantics, agency became
an end in itself, even if its consequences were understood by some to be
destructive, as they are for Turgenev’s Zinaida and Yeats’ aviator.52
Agency is a deeply problematic concept for conceptual and empirical rea-
sons. It is widely used to signify different, sometimes contradictory things. A
recent review of the literature by two psychologists finds the concept to have
“maintained an elusive, albeit resonant, vagueness.”53 In rational choice and
strategic interaction models, agency refers to the ability of actors to make
calculations and decisions. Social scientists who use such models explain
choices in two ways: as reflecting actor preferences or as responses to environ-
mental incentives and constraints. The former puts more emphasis on agency
because individual preferences are considered of prime importance. The latter
rules out meaningful agency by treating actors as more as less interchangeable if
their circumstances are similar, an assumption without which these models
would have no traction.
Political philosophers have advanced more expansive notions of agency.54
Many refuse to consider actions taken in response to either internal or external
pressures as evidence of real agency or freedom. Plato insists that rule by one’s
appetites is the worst form of tyranny and that agency begins with the individ-
ual or city learning to restrain and educate appetite and spirit alike.55 Kant
offers a critique of external agency in his distinction between Wille (the
manifestation of reason in its practical form) and Willkür (the faculty of choice,
a manifestation of practical reason). He contends that real freedom, or rational
agency, is the capacity to act for oneself independently of the causality of nature

50
Anderson and Feinberg, “Race and Ethnicity and the Controversy over the US Census,”
http://factfinder.census.gov/home/en/epss/glossary_r.html for “race” on the 2010 US
Census.
51
Berlin, “Apotheosis of the Romantic Will.”
52
Turgenev, First Love; Yeats, “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.”
53
Emirbayer and Mische, “What Is Agency?”
54
For a discussion, Pockett, Banks and Gallagher, Does Consciousness Cause Behavior?;
Sebanz and Prinz, Disorders of Volition; Siegel, “Symposium on the Phenomenology of
Agency”’ Pacherie, “Self-Agency.”
55
Plato, Republic, 562–5.
 a g e n cy 285

or society.56 He roots this capacity in his transcendental idea of freedom. It

provides “a complement of sufficiency” that is based on “absolute spontaneity
of the will.”57 Hegel comes at the problem from an altogether different per-
spective. In Phenomenology of the Spirit, he emphasizes the behavioral con-
formism imposed by the conventions of language and how this limits the
spontaneity of the self. Mead offers a third take on external constraints. For
him, social categorization and its associated attributions constitute the principal
external constraint to our freedom. They give rise to the “me” – that part of the
self that internalizes the attitudes and expectations of others. However, the “I” –
the actor’s response to others – can provide a sense of freedom and initiative “as
it is never entirely calculable or merely a response to situational demands.”58
The point here is not to catalog what different theorists say about agency, but to
stress the widely shared understanding that true agency requires something
beyond simple choice and behavior based on it.59 It must be free choice, a
choice that is anchored in one’s so-called identity or rationally constructed
agenda, not merely a response to appetite, socialization or other social pres-
sures. Logically and empirically, claims of free choice are notoriously difficult to
establish. As Durkheim, among others, observed, individuals nevertheless have
a strong illusion of agency.60
Agency drives social change of all kinds, but we know relatively little about
the various mechanisms by which this happens. In some circumstances, for
example, African Americans fighting segregation, it required conscious, and
often courageous, rejection of existing social, institutional or legal realities.
Other changes are the result of countless, small, mostly unrecorded acts.
Consider how the practice of professor has changed since the 1960s.
Publishing has replaced teaching as the most important criterion for hiring
and promotion at universities, sexual relationships with students are verboten
and the boundaries of the professorial role have been redefined. The profes-
soriate has become open to qualified Ph.Ds regardless of race, religion, gender
or sexual preference and the status of professors has declined relative to many
other professions. Some of these changes were initiated from above but most
came about through practices – inside and outside the university – and in
response to value shifts in the profession and society at large.
My texts draw our attention to role playing as an important form of
agency and one that can be a powerful catalyst for changes in identities and
their associated practices. Role playing is a form of play that invites subjunctive

56
Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 19.
57
For an elaboration, Alison, “Spontaneity and Autonomy in Kant’s Conception of the Self.”
Lewis Beck, Commentary on Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason” and “Five Concepts of
Freedom on Kant.”
58
Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, pp. 175–8.
59
Mele, “Causation, Action, and Free Will.”
60
Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method, p. 54.
 left behind 205

suffuses the society and takes the form of sin; people are tempted by sex and
material goods.98 There are rumors of an underground anti-Jesus movement
known as the “Other Light,” whose proponents allegedly claim that study of the
scriptures has made them “fans of Lucifer and not Jesus.”99 The plot of the
novel, to the extent there is one, revolves around the efforts of Kenny and his
friends to form a “Millennium force,” modeled on his father’s earlier “tribu-
lation force.” Its goal is to win over the faithless before they cause more trouble
and are zapped by Jesus’ lightning bolts. All crimes, which include blasphemy,
are punishable by death.100
Other Light supposedly produces a manifesto in which they do not deny
Jesus, but object to his theocracy and mind control. “He has left men and
women no choice but to believe in Him and serve Him, denying our free will.”
They favor pluralism, insisting that they “have no quarrel with those who
believe and follow Him and consider themselves devout. We simply insist on
the right to decide for ourselves.” They lament that Jesus “will not countenance
an alternate point of view.”101 Left Behind portrays Other Light as a pack
of thugs with a few deliciously evil leaders and a coterie of easily misled
followers. Rumors spread that they tried to rape a “glorified” (see below)
woman to impregnate her in the hope of producing a mongrel race of converts
who would survive beyond the age of one hundred. The rapist, we learn, was
destroyed by lightning, while the woman, who resisted him, was unharmed.102
Other Light dissenters are seemingly undeterred by knowledge that they will
with certainty die at age one hundred, if not before. They hope, or so we are told,
to find enough recruits to pass the opposition along to subsequent generations
and have large forces at the end of the Millennium to join up with Satan against
Jesus.103 The rebels Rayford encounters in Egypt consider themselves freedom
fighters against Jesus, who they describe as heading an “occupying army.”
Although outnumbered they will not give up hope. Egypt is once more the
rotten apple in the bunch. On this occasion it makes the mistake of electing
some young people as judges and they vote against sending representatives to
honor God at the feast of the tabernacles. King David reports that the lord is
mighty miffed and intent on destroying all the wicked of the land.104 His
revenge, which includes a drought, seems to punish everyone, not just a few
perpetrators, but this overkill conveniently helps Rayford to proselytize.105
The Millennium gives a new twist to the meaning of opposition. The
population is divided into two groups: the “glorified,” who were raptured and
spent time in heaven before the Millennium, and “naturals,” who were left
behind but have since seen the light. The glorified have been genetically altered
and do not age.106 For some reason, the authors feel the need to come up with a

98 99
Ibid., pp. 50–3. Ibid., p. 53. 100 LaHaye and Jenkins, Kingdom Come, p. xlii.
101 102
Ibid., p. 120. Ibid., pp. 122–3, 232. 103 Ibid., pp. 71–2. 104 Ibid., pp. 89–90.
105 106
Ibid., p. 144. Ibid., p. 61.
 agency 287

versions of this trope. By the end of the Middle Ages it was used, together with
such popular images as the Dance of Death and the Ship of Fools, to symbolize
the insignificance of the secular world.63 Like Hobbes’ invocation of theatrum
mundi, Shakespeare’s famous description of the world as a stage and people as
actors who strut across it is sharply at odds with the classical understanding in a
double sense. It is secular in that people are the impresarios, directors, specta-
tors and actors, and those on stage have some leeway in the roles they perform
and how they present themselves. The metaphor is now being used to signify
the human potential for and practice of, self-reflection and self-fashioning.
With self-fashioning comes the possibility not only of representing ourselves
as we think we are, but of portraying ourselves as we know we are not.
Elizabethan England not surprisingly witnessed a rising concern with unmask-
ing deception.64
Deception was encouraged by society’s reliance on roles and their outward
markers as signs of status. Clothes were especially important, and emerged as a
primary marker of standing in the Middle Ages.65 From our perspective it is
hard to grasp the power of clothing, which was understood by many contem-
poraries to “transnature” the wearer. This reflected the traditional understand-
ing of the self as determined by outwardly assigned roles and markers, but also
medieval practice and belief.66 With even minimal wealth, it now became
possible for an Elizabethan to dress in a way that made it possible to cross
class barriers.67 By the eighteenth century, clothes were increasingly under-
stood as purely commercial products throughout most of Western Europe, but
patents of nobility were up for sale in many countries, and possession of one
legitimated and encouraged the crossing of boundaries.68 As society grew larger
and interactions more impersonal, it became easier for people to adopt higher
status roles than it was in days when people knew one another. In London,
Richard Sennett distinguishes between strangers who could be placed by their
language, occupational markers, ethnicity and neighborhood, and an increasing
number of those who cannot be placed.69 Chapter 4 describes how Spanish

63
Agnew, Worlds Apart, pp. 14–16.
64
Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, pp. 14–25; Wilshire, Role Playing and
Identity, pp. 6–75; Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play; Orgel, Impersonations.
65
Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory; Orgel,
Impersonations.
66
Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, pp. 1–4; Orgel,
Impersonations, pp. 103–4.
67
I use the word “class” with caution, because it was not until the nineteenth century that the
term became widely used, and not surprisingly, at a time when traditional barriers among
“classes” were increasingly difficult to maintain. On this point, Wahrman, Imagining the
Middle Class.
68
Ibid., p. 178; Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, p. 105; Dipper, “Orders and
Classes”; Buford, Germany in the Eighteenth Century, p. 61.
69
Sennett, Fall of Public Man.
288 i d e n t i t y r ec o n s i d e r e d

nobles in search of sexual adventures donned capes and masks to mix with
lower-class women. Beaumarchais witnessed this practice in Madrid and
incorporated it into Marriage of Figaro. Mozart and Da Ponte feature this
practice not only in their opera based on the Beaumarchais play, but in Don
Giovanni, where Giovanni compels Leporello to exchange costumes with him
for purposes of seduction.
In Così fan tutti, the two male suitors adopt disguises to seduce each other’s
inamorata. Critics at the time, and many since, consider its libretto morally
corrupt and entirely unsuitable to Mozart’s genius. Così fan tutti appears
to legitimate role playing for erotic ends, and worse still, to undermine
the institution of marriage by showing the arbitrary and fickle nature of the
romantic attachments on which it was increasingly based. I argue in chapter 4
that the plot facilitates the intellectual goals of composer and librettist as it
was part of their thought experiment to probe the consequences of ancien
régime and Enlightenment identities under widely varying circumstances. It
also provides the opportunity for the more sophisticated Don Alfonso
and Despina to educate the young couples by destroying their illusions about
love. By doing so, Don Alfonso advances the case for a social order based
on equal doses of reason and cynicism. Così fan tutti is an epistolary, even
revolutionary opera.
As the reaction to Così fan tutti indicates, traditionalists focused on the
perceived immorality of role playing and did their best to limit it through
regulation of dress, theater and other amusements. Chapter 4 describes how
Spanish authorities sought to suppress role playing and social mixing. The
reforming ministers wanted to reduce crime, but also objected to the social
confusion, loss of legibility, libertinage, laziness and bad hygiene they believed
capes and hats to promote. Anti-majismo legislation aroused resistance and led
to a popular revolt in 1766, known as the esquilache riot (riot of the cape and
hat). The government suppressed the demonstrations, which in retrospect
came to be regarded as the first collective revolt against Enlightenment-inspired
reforms.70 The riot had the immediate effect of politicizing habits, which in
turn encouraged their conceptualization by journalists and writers. Majismo
became more self-conscious and culturally elaborated and a principal subject of
popular theater, literature, music and art, especially inexpensive prints.
Sumptuary laws also backfired. Louis XIV was frustrated in his attempt to
regulate clothing, as were similar efforts in seventeenth-century Italy, Spain,
England and Holland.71 Diderot observed that everyone at court tried to

70
Jovellanos, Obras escogidas; Casanova, Memoirs, vol. VI, p. 73; Herr, Eighteenth Century
Revolution in Spain, pp. 184–5; Noyes, “La Maja Vestida.”
71
Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, pp. 2–3; Sennett,
Fall of Public Man, pp. 72–147; Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions, pp. 29, 374–5.
 a ge n c y 289

resemble people above them and in the process blurred social distinctions.72
Norbert Elias found that court gradations intensified the struggle for prestige
because they made it possible to define, as with money, the value of every
increment of social standing with respect to every other.73 This only accelerated
efforts by the rich to move upwards in status. Censorship and theater reforms
also had unintended consequences. The kind of theater encouraged by moral
reformers like Jovellanos in Madrid and Joseph II in Vienna actually helped to
undermine the social order by encouraging people to regard roles as conven-
tions sustained by performance. It also encouraged the social mixing of differ-
ent classes and religions that horrified conservatives.
Theater and opera were not the only fora in which role playing was encouraged
and explored. Epistolary novels, that bridged the boundary between fact and
fiction, were very influential, as people strongly identified with their characters.
Richardson’s Pamela, Rousseau’s Julie and Goethe’s Werther are the best-known
examples. Literature opened up a space where the self could be explored without
the usual social constraints. Abbé de Condillac was among the first eighteenth-
century writers to recognize that people remade themselves by emulating con-
secutive role models. They mix and match attributes of real and fictional char-
acters to become “a different combination of borrowed traits and habits.”74
Literature, role playing and practice went hand-in-hand. As early as the late
seventeenth century, fashionable women in public spaces began to hide their
identity behind masks. In the 1720s, the masquerade become a popular form of
entertainment in London, appealing to all classes.75 Horace Walpole, who was
not alone in identifying masquerades as symptomatic of social decline, believed
that they occupied people’s thoughts at least as much as national events.76 One
of the key attractions of masquerades – as would later be the case in Spain,
Austria and Germany – was the opportunity it provided for classes to mix and
people to pass for others of higher status or of the opposite sex. Peasants and
laborers gatecrashed masquerades in disguise.77 Henry Fielding, Samuel
Johnson, Tobias Smollett and Oliver Goldsmith characterized the world as a
masquerade, and one in which, according to Goldsmith, “a meer chaos, in
which all distinction of rank is lost.”78 Johnson’s 1738 poem “London,” is highly

72
Diderot, Réfutation d’Helvétius, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. I, p. 863, cited in Seigel, Idea of
Self, p. 204.
73
Elias, Court Society, pp. 120–1, 127, 146.
74
Quoted in Knight, Geometric Spirit, p. 126, citing Condillac, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. III,
pp. 402–3.
75
Castle, Masquerade and Civilization and Female Thermometer; Heyl, “When They Are
Veyl’d on Purpose to Be Seene.”
76
Horace Walpole to Horace Mann, 10 March 1755, quoted in Castle, Masquerade and
Civilization, p. 3; Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, pp. 158–9.
77
Russell, Theatres of War, p. 39.
78
Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self, pp. 166–8, 202–11.
208 be a m m e up , l or d

do not. Abstinence is another sacrifice Jesus imposes on his subjects to test their
loyalty to him. It is a practice entirely at odds with Jewish tradition, which Left
Behind’s Millennium in other ways tries to instantiate. It appears to reflect the
hostility to sex of Pauline Christianity and American Puritanism. The ban on
sex also contradicts the novel’s narrative, as children continue to be born
throughout the Millennium, and there is no hint that they are the result of
virgin births. Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany and Orwell’s 1984 were
also markedly puritanical.
Other forms of recreation are proscribed. When not working with children,
Buck spends his time praising Jesus with psalms and hymns and spiritual
songs.124 There is no hint of sports, children’s games aside. Teenagers rightly
complain they cannot have any fun. As one of them puts it, we want to go
“Somewhere where people like this nursery guy won’t condemn you to hell if
you [don’t] do anything but worship.”125 The authors cannot allow such
complaints to go unanswered, so try to depict the youths who voice these
complaints as irrational. They allegedly want to become martyrs because
“They find that glamorous.”126 Stalin and Hitler were far more astute than
LaHaye and Jenkins; their regimes made major efforts to organize highly
regimented outdoor and sporting activities for youth to keep them off the
streets, indoctrinate them ideologically and distract them from sex.
When the Millennium ends, Satan is unbound and gathers his armed
supporters around him. This is a dumb strategy in light of what happened to
the massed armies at Armageddon. David and Jesus observe Satan from an
undisclosed location. At a critical moment, Jesus steps out from his hiding
place, raises his hand and opens his palm. “A seam in the cosmos opened before
Satan. Flames and black smoke poured from where the Beast and False Prophet
writhed on their knees screaming.” Satan belatedly acknowledges that “‘Jesus is
Lord.’” Jesus is understandably unmoved, closes his fingers and Satan and his
host disappear into the abyss which swallows them up and muffles their
screams. Surviving Christians are instantly clothed in gleaming white robes
and fly up to heaven. They are joined by all the dead faithful, who are
resurrected.127

The Jews
Throughout the nineteenth century millenarians predicted the return of the
Jews to Palestine, although not their conversion. They were fascinated by
Zionism and General Allenby’s conquest of Jerusalem during World
War I.128 Millenarians expect Jews to play a major, if not decisive, role in the
events leading up to the rapture, tribulation and second coming. In the

124
Ibid., p. 4. 125 Ibid., p. 65. 126 Ibid, p. 95. 127
Ibid, p. 319.
128
Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, p. 234.
 a g en cy 291

reveals an abiding optimism in the prospect of individual improvement

through social interaction.
The embrace of civil society and role playing as a vehicle for identity
construction is the quintessential expression of strategy three, the first in a
temporal sense of our two modern strategies of identity construction. Both
strategies welcome interiority and reflexivity, but regard society differently.
Boswell, Smith, Hume and Mill believed that society and individual identity
were compatible, even mutually constitutive. Society provides useful role mod-
els, and people – not just rich and powerful ones – have the freedom to emulate
them, create new mixes of selves and thus new role models for others to
emulate.
The anti-Enlightenment and Romantic movements gave the metaphor of
role playing a new and darker meaning. By positing something inherently
unique about individuals, they made it incumbent upon people to discover
and express their inner selves. Donning a mask and playing a role was consid-
ered a serious impediment to internal discovery and self-expression. Rousseau
insisted that the art of acting was nothing less than “counterfeiting oneself.”84
Rousseau and the Romantics developed the second modern strategy of identity
construction. They welcomed interiority and reflexivity, but rejected society
and its roles as sources of oppression. Their frame of reference set the stage, so
to speak, for multiple philosophical and political projects intended to overcome
this tension through a radical focus on and assertion of individual uniqueness
and identity.
Mozart’s operas explore these different understandings of role playing
and identity construction. Don Giovanni appears to reflect Rousseau’s con-
demnation of acting as a form of counterfeiting oneself. All of Giovanni’s roles
are equally superficial, and none of them achieve the benefits described by
Hobbes, Smith, Kant or Mill. The opera can also be read as a critique
of Rousseau’s assumption that human character will improve once purged
of the false roles and values imposed by society. Don Giovanni, who sheds
these roles and their associated conventions, appears to validate the contention
of the Greeks, Hobbes and Musil that without social roles people quickly lose
the attributes of civilization.
Role playing is equally central to Marriage of Figaro. Count Almaviva, like
Don Giovanni, dons a cloak for purposes of seduction. Cherubino disguises
himself as a woman for the same end. Figaro, Susannah and the Countess
assume disguises in the night-time rendezvous scene to foil the Count’s plans.
Their characters are not undermined but strengthened by this ruse, unintention-
ally in the case of the Count, who, for at least the time being, is compelled to act
more responsibly and is emotionally reunited with his wife. The most interesting
figure is Figaro who is under deep cover as a servant; he suspects, but does

84
Rousseau, “Letter to M. d’Alembert.”
292 i d e n t i ty r e c on si d er e d

not know, that he is the illegitimate offspring of nobles. His origins are ultimately
revealed and he readily assumes the role of gentleman, one we perceive that will
give more range to his talents. Figaro’s reversal – the very opposite of an
Aristotelian peripeteia in that his situation improves – was undoubtedly used
by Beaumarchais to defuse whatever concerns the censors might have had about
an intelligent, uppity and successful servant. To his audiences, however, it
suggests that character is independent of roles, quite contrary to the assertions
of the ancien régime. Even more radically, it makes clear the scope people have to
exercise that character is very much dependent on class.
Così fan tutti offers more insight into role playing. Guglielmo and Ferrando
assume disguises, once again for purposes of seduction. When they succeed,
they reappear as their original selves only to “discover” that they have been
betrayed by their mistresses. Suitably chastened, the couples are reconciled.
Guglielmo and Ferrando resume their original costumes, but Mozart will not let
them return to their original voices. Role playing changes people, seemingly
along the lines that Hegel would soon suggest. The role provides an alternative
vantage point – a reflective self, as it were – through which the empirical, or
social, self can be interrogated. In his autobiography, Goethe repeatedly adopts
disguises and resorts to dreams to disappear into other versions of himself.85
More than Goethe, Hegel emphasizes cognition at the expense of affect, but role
playing, like good acting, requires putting oneself into the spirit as well as
the mind of the person being mimicked. This involves emotional commitment,
not merely reflection. The gap they collectively open between the stage and
other self has the potential to create a new person, and hence the inability to
return to the “home” key. This change has the potential to drive further
experimentation and change.
In Marriage of Figaro, Cherubino not only disguises himself in pursuit of a
sexual conquest, he crosses the gender divide by dressing as a woman. His
deception is made more amusing by the audience’s knowledge that his role is
sung by a soprano. Science fiction picks up on this theme and explores cross-
overs that are still impossible in today’s world. People readily assume other
bodies, transgressing age, race, gender and the species divide. Even more
interesting for probing identity are novels that create multiple versions of the
same person, as do Jack Vance’s To Live Forever, John Varley’s Ophiuchi
Hotline and Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon. None of them go very far in
examining the consequences of such doubling. In Altered Carbon, Takeshi
Kovacs, in his new ninja “sleeve” or body, meets himself, in the sleeve of the
former lover of the police sergeant with whom he has now teamed up. The two
selves have no idea how to relate to one another and begin to argue about their
father and his effect on their lives, conducting a kind of Bakhtinian dialogue.

85
Goethe, Aus einem Lebe.
 agency 293

They must decide which one of them can survive after they perform their
required tasks because the same person is not allowed to exist in more than
one form at any given time. Unable to find any logical way to resolve this
problem they agree to leave the decision to chance.86 As Locke long ago
realized, thought experiments that switch bodies or produce multiple ones
have the potential to explore cognitive and affective components of identity.87
Earlier, I associated different perspectives on society with the relative
strength of the state and society. Those who welcome role playing, like Smith,
Hume and Mill, invariably reside in strong societies, and those who oppose it
for the most part live in strong states. Different takes on role playing provide
different entry into the question of identity. When the starting point is the
individual, as it is with the empirical and liberal English thinkers from Hobbes
and Locke on, society is envisaged as the stage on which actors learn to perform
roles as part of the process of becoming themselves. Those with the experience
of strong states and weak societies tend to oppose role playing and view civil
society in a more jaundiced light because of its assumed propensity to free
people from necessary restraints. Alternatively, like Rousseau, they reject civil
society because of its assumed ability to force people into confining and alien-
ating roles and identities.
A few thinkers from strong states, most notably Nietzsche, adopt an indi-
vidual perspective and theorize routes for people to free themselves from the
double bind of state and society. Most, however, maintain a state- or society-
oriented perspective, as arguably does Rousseau, for whom people can only
regain their humanity through their integration in a just society that brings out
the general will. German idealists, Hegel and Marx, develop variants of this
envisaged solution. The emergence of the self is a defining feature of modernity,
but one that has taken diverse forms. This variety cannot be understood
independently of the social and political conditions in which thought about
the self arose. Most social scientists respond favorably to arguments that
explain behavioral diversity in terms of so-called structural attributes of soci-
eties. We should, however, consider the opposite possibility: that the emergence
of different intellectual traditions helps to explain different structures, like weak
and strong societies and states.
Modernity is invariably described as a Western innovation that spread to the
rest of the world as part of the ongoing process of globalization. This perspec-
tive ignores the extent to which modernization was perceived as a foreign
import in much of the West. It was rarely seen as indigenous, and less so the
further east in Europe one travels. Even where modernization was recognized as
at least in part a local development as, say, in France, it was regarded by many as
something foisted upon the country by urban elites or foreigners in one’s midst.

86
Morgan, Altered Carbon, pp. 443–51.
87
Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, II.xxvii.15.
 lef t b ehind 211

performs other routine domestic chores and increasingly identifies with his
former wife and his daughter. He becomes gentler, kinder and more expressive,
traits encouraged by the Christian men’s movement. Rayford nevertheless
remains engaged in the world of business and power, which violates traditional
portrayals of Christian heroes and martyrs. His daughter Chloe also undergoes
a transformation in the course of the novels. When we first meet her she is a
feisty Stanford graduate with a quick wit and able to hold her own in con-
versation with men. She softens in the course of her relationship with Buck and
becomes increasingly domestic and deferential. She submits to her husband,
but asserts herself behind the scenes in ways acceptable to conservative
Christianity. She finds the perfect compromise as director of the Christian
Cooperative, which she runs from the underground bunker built by the
Tribulation Force in Illinois. Later on, however, she undertakes a mission in
Greece while Buck stays home with their child.140

Who reads Left Behind?

Amy Johnson Frykholm conducted thirty-five in-depth interviews, primarily in
the American South. Roughly the same number were conducted in and around
Columbus, Ohio by Alexander L. Stephan. The most typical readers are self-
identified “evangelicals” who sought out, and generally found, churches in
which they felt “at home.” They are relatively unconcerned with the denomi-
nation or theological orientation of these churches. Most are uncomfortable
with the label “fundamentalist,” and do not feel the need, as did many earlier
Dispensationalists, to separate themselves from the broader society. They read
non-Christian fiction and watch a wide range of television programs, but are
deeply concerned about what they consider the moral decline of America. They
identify homosexuality and crime as leading indicators of this decline.
Frykholm reports men and women equally attracted to Left Behind, and the
novels tend to appeal across racial and class divides.141 Frykholm and Stephan
both find their church-going readers to be embedded in dense social-religious
networks where common reading and worship are important ways of building
and sustaining community. Left Behind is read aloud in churches and fre-
quently on Christian radio stations. Church members pass copies around and
buy additional ones to give to family members, friends and other people they
identify as possible recruits.142
A May 2005 study of 1,008 randomly selected American adults by the Barna
Group found that nearly half of all Americans had read a religious book other

140
Ibid., pp. 32–3, on gender roles in Left Behind.
141
Frykholm, Rapture Culture, pp. 24–6; Alexander L. Stephan, conversations with the
author, March 2007.
142
Ibid., pp. 39–40, 77–8; Alexander L. Stephan, conversations with the author, April 2007.
 i d e n t it y a n d or d e r 295

acknowledged the “foolishness” of thinking that it might be a model for Europe.

William Tyndale, responsible for the first printed English language bible, was a
dissenting Protestant who helped to develop the second strategy. He rejected
society as hypocritical and corrupt, in large part because people were forced to
assume false roles. By leading an honest Christian life based on the bible, the
tension between identity and society might be finessed to the extent that
true believers could withdraw from or create their own society as the pilgrims
would later do.
These choices had diametrically opposed implications for order. More
sought identity in society through active participation in its roles and rituals.
Tyndale and his followers sought an identity outside of and against the con-
ventions of existing society. Both strategies are equally problematic as evi-
denced by the fate of their proponents. More left office to become a private
person because he could not accept Henry VIII’s rupture with the Catholic
Church, but was arrested and executed. Ironically, the inner self he sought to
deny rebelled against the public role he would have had to play in an anti-
Catholic regime. Tyndale’s rejection of the state and its religion made
him appear a double danger to the authorities and he was burned at the stake
in 1536.
Tyndale’s project – and strategy two in general – requires a great strengthen-
ing of the inner self if believers are to turn away from society and face the
tribulations and persecution such a life generally involves. While the inner self
is strengthened, individual identity is nevertheless limited by anchoring it in a
particular interpretation of the Bible. Identity is regarded as a communal
phenomenon and individual differences are muted as far as possible as they
are considered relatively unimportant in comparison to one’s relationship to
God. Strategy two attempts to limit interiority and reflexivity, but encourages
aspects of them that can be made compatible with a Christian social order. A
negative “other” is very helpful, if not essential, to this enterprise, because it
provides the role model against which the inner self is defined and solidified.
For Tyndale and early Protestants, the Antichrist served as this “other” – as it
does for contemporary Dispensationalists. For the latter, the Antichrist takes
the form of homosexuals, atheists, socialists and liberal politicians. More’s
Utopia did not require an external “other” because its subjects found expression
and purpose in social roles. To the extent More and strategy one needs an
“other,” it is an internal one that feels hemmed in and yearns for oblivion.
These strategies are generic because they were adopted by other thinkers and
movements with anti-modern agendas. Chapter 2 documents how More’s
underlying philosophical project was the template for many subsequent uto-
pias. These utopias embed their citizens in social orders that allow little to no
individual distinction in wealth or honor, and only limited privacy and free
time. They do away with politics and thereby deny the possibility of independ-
ent thinking and legitimate opposition. They kill, expel, discipline or brainwash
296 identity reconsidered

citizens who raise objections, and some of them would do this to those who are
merely contrarian. Rousseau is very much in this tradition. He regards interior-
ity and reflection as the principal sources of human corruption because they
encourage the desire for distinction and give rise to amour propre. The society
of his social contract is a variant of More’s Utopia in that reflection is encour-
aged, but only about the community, never about the self, in the expectation
that it will give rise to the general will.89 The triumph of the general will depends
on the nearly complete stifling of individual differences, even if some interiority
is preserved. Marx and Engels develop another version, which arguably reduces,
if not does away with, interiority through the near-total social integration of the
worker in his or her enterprise and society. Alienation (Aufhebung), considered
a product of exploitation, is ruled out by definition. In contrast to More’s
Utopia, workers have considerable freedom in how they spend their time, and
great emphasis is put on free time.90 However, there will be no distinctions of
wealth or status among them and a collective identity has largely replaced
individual ones.91 Engels, at least, recognizes that this shift in self-identification
will not be easy to effect.92
Strategy two builds on previous efforts by medieval millennial sects to bring
the social order in line with their understanding of Christianity. Many of these
sects embraced violence toward this end.93 However, the primary objective was
control exercised through the reduction and restructuring of interiority to make
it reflect the social and religious values of the community. Left Behind novels
follow the Tyndale model closely. Interiority is encouraged only so far as it is
necessary to build an identity around a total commitment to Jesus. Rather than
withdrawing from society, Left Behind’s authors destroy the corrupt society
through war, famine and natural disasters. Jesus returns to create a Millennium
where the faithful can live a Christian life. Believers are integrated into a new
society that is described as a religious utopia. Inhabitants – they can hardly be
called citizens – possess little real interiority and reflexivity. Their life and
thoughts are focused on Jesus and what reflections they have are encouraged
to take the form of love and admiration for their savior. Those who fail to reach
this level of inner commitment are zapped by lightning, regardless of their
outward conformity. There is no meaningful wealth, and the distraction of
profane interpersonal relations is greatly reduced by doing away with the
hormones that arouse sexual desire. Residents are, in effect, neutered. Some
opposition is allowed, but only to set an example for others when they are hit by
lightning bolts and sent to hell to roast for eternity.
Secular and religious utopias do away with interiority and reflection or limit
and direct it toward desirable ends. This is a principal reason why their critics

89
Rousseau, Contrat Social. 90 Marx, Communist Manifesto, Grundrisse, pp. 121–3.
91
Marx, “After the Revolution.” 92 Engels, “On Morality.”
93
Cohen, Pursuit of the Millennium.
 identity and order 297

characterize them as dystopias. Dystopias are more diverse than utopias in their
horrors, but some very prominent works (e.g. Zamyatin’s We, Orwell’s 1984)
achieve their most chilling effects by reducing interiority and reflexivity.
Zamyatin and Orwell follow More in their regimentation, uniformity, propa-
ganda and surveillance. In Huxley’s “soft” dystopia, carrots more or less replace
sticks, but reduce interiority and reflection just as effectively by hooking
individuals on drugs and sex. People are enticed to lull themselves into a
numbing but pleasurable form of mindlessness.
Utopias and dystopias alike deprive human beings of meaningful freedom. In
Don Giovanni, Mozart and Da Ponte explore the other side of this equation: the
consequences of near total freedom. This is, of course, an instrumental goal in
strategy four. People must free themselves of all social roles and conditioning to
discover and express their inner selves. Don Giovanni suggests that efforts to
liberate oneself in this fashion would deprive us of our humanity by reducing us
to beasts governed by raw appetites. Don Giovanni is presented as the inevitable
outcome of the Enlightenment project: a man liberated from external and
internal restraints who constitutes a danger to himself and everyone around
him.94 He is intended to rebut the idealistic expectation that human beings will
use freedom and reason to make themselves into more ethical beings, as Kant
and so many Enlightenment thinkers hoped. Mozart and Da Ponte believe that
reason is more likely to be directed outwards, with the goal of satisfying
unconstrained and therefore more urgent appetites. Untrammeled reason will
not lead to a more harmonious society, but one in which a minority effectively
assert their will and exploit everyone else. This powerful minority will not be
any happier, merely driven. Die Zauberflöte further elaborates this theme. It
suggests that political orders that pretend to be based on reason and love for
humanity are really tyrannies. From our vantage point, Sarastro’s realm, like
Schiller’s Spain in Don Carlos, is a precursor of the totalitarian regimes that
plagued the twentieth century.
Don Giovanni is more an archetype than a person and the Commendatore
takes him to the underworld, not to hell. This Greek framing is appropriate
because Giovanni behaves the way Greeks expect of someone who frees himself
of social constraints. The opera can be interpreted as an avant la lettre critique
of the fourth strategy of identity construction associated with Romanticism.
Mozart and Da Ponte suggest that the project of autonomy is as dangerous as it
is hollow. Conservatives still read Don Giovanni as a warning about individual
assertion run amok, but the opera should be understood as an equally powerful
critique of the ancien régime and more traditional approaches to identity.
Mozart and Da Ponte have no sympathy for the class-based hierarchy that
sustains itself through superstition and oppression. Commoners like Leporello,

94
Adorno and Horkeimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 90–1, make a similar argument
about the Marquis de Sade.
214 be a m m e u p, l or d

family members without explanation. During the tribulation that unfolds in the
first nine novels, they face an escalating series of life-threatening challenges
from the forces of “evil,” represented by corrupt capitalists and the Antichrist
and his followers. Star journalist Cameron “Buck” Williams and senior pilot
Rayford Steele have enough close escapes – from cops, border guards, assassins,
thugs, bombs, missiles, radiation and the Antichrist himself – to make Bruce
Willis jealous. Unlike Buck and Rayford, not all the heroes survive, but those
who do prove their mettle and move closer to one another and Jesus. In some
adventure tales heroes receive help from supernatural figures (e.g. the Lady of
the Lake in Arthurian legend) or humans with extraordinary powers
(e.g. Merlin in the same saga). In Left Behind, God himself lurks in the back-
ground waiting to provide assistance. Like Billy Batson shouting “Shazzam”
so Zeus will transform him into Captain Marvel, its characters mouth quick
prayers for God to make them capable of otherwise incredible feats and escapes.
Left Behind qualifies as counterfactual history. When its first novel appeared
in 1995, the rapture was set in the near future, as was the tribulation and second
coming. They are depicted in the follow-on novels that appeared in the course
of the next decade. Like all previous predictions of rapture or Jesus’ return, these
failed to materialize. Although not conceived as counterfactual history, with the
passage of time these novels have become counterfactual history. There has
been no rapture or second coming, no amalgamation of religions and states and
no World War III. Our corrupt world staggers on affected by nothing as
dramatic as the events described in these novels.
Left Behind violates key conventions of counterfactual history. Novels in this
genre most often employ “minimal rewrites” of history: small, credible changes
(antecedents) that bring about major changes (consequents) in the world. The
antecedent is connected to the consequent by a chain of logic that shows how
the former ineluctably leads to the latter. Credible counterfactuals involve
believable rewrites of history and provide compelling chains of logic consistent
with the evidence and our expectations about how people behave.151 A quin-
tessential example is the prevention of World War I by forestalling the assas-
sination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo. The archduke should never
have come to Sarajevo in light of warnings of trouble and should certainly have
been whisked out of town when the first assassination attempt against him on
the Appel Quay failed. As he was the major spokesman within Austria-Hungary
for peace with Russia, and the Emperor Franz Josef only became bellicose
because of his assassination, the archduke’s survival would have prevented
war in the short term and quite possibly in the longer term as well.152
A variant of counterfactual history uses so-called miracle counterfactuals,
that make inherently implausible changes in reality.153 Some novels use miracle

151
Lebow, Forbidden Fruit, for elaboration. 152 Ibid., ch. 3 for this case.
153
Tetlock and Belkin, “Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics.”
 identity and order 299

accept in practice. The opera encourages these compromises through role

playing, which it reframes in an interesting way. We have examined role playing
as something that people are either forced to do to achieve their external goals
or sought to do to express and develop their inner selves. The former involves
conscious dissimulation, which is likely to provoke tension between reflective
and social selves, while the latter often confronts external constraints and social
disapproval. Mozart and Da Ponte put a positive spin on dissimulation and use
it to smooth social frictions and allow people expanded freedom within a social
order that must, of necessity, be to some degree constraining. The kind of
dissimulation that characterizes the last scene of the opera stands in sharp
contrast to that which drives its plot. Guglielmo and Ferrando’s charade to test
the fidelity of their mistresses is egocentric and threatening to the social order,
but their willingness to overlook their unfaithfulness by pretending that it never
happened has the potential to uphold the institution of marriage and restore the
happiness of the two couples. Their charade is based on recognition of the rigid
social conventions of the existing order, while their marriage accepts the
inevitable tensions between that order and individual frailties and needs for
self-expression.
Do reflective and social selves need to be harmonized? Mozart and Da Ponte
clearly regard such a project as fatally flawed, if not downright dangerous. Some
prominent political theorists disagree. In contrast, Leo Strauss and Charles
Taylor, and many conservatives and communitarians, believe that transcendent
moral orders are essential and obtainable. Taylor maintains that only people
who live in societies where there is consensus about the moral order are capable
of developing identities in harmony with their surroundings. He conceives of
identity as the site of our moral compass and denies that adequate foundations
for moral choices can be found within ourselves, in nature or created through
social engineering.96 Taylor’s communitarian account is infused with unreal-
istic nostalgia for an Aristotelian universe in which identity was defined with
reference to cosmic understandings of the good, which is alleged to have
promoted harmony between people and their society. He offers highly idiosyn-
cratic readings of Locke and later philosophers to argue that contemporary
people face two equally unpalatable choices. We must lose what little inde-
pendence we have by becoming quasi-objects in the web of material relations or
wallow in pure subjectivity, deluding ourselves that it will provide the basis for
an independent and meaningful self.
Secularism and cynicism have certainly increased in the modern world, but
Taylor’s argument fails to acknowledge that transcendent orders are no longer
possible, or could only be achieved at horrendous human cost. In the West,
traditional forms of Christianity compete with other visions of the cosmos.
Westerners, moreover, live in pluralistic societies where there is no consensus

96
Taylor, Sources of the Self.
300 identity reconsidered

about religion or the social order – perhaps less than there formerly was. In the
absence of consensus, we confront acute conflicts over beliefs and practices.97
Dispensationalism nicely illustrates this problem. Like all forms of Christianity,
it claims legitimacy on the basis of its understanding of the cosmic order, but
believers find the larger society bemused by, or downright hostile to, their
eschatology. Their response – the only one possible aside from hermit-like
withdrawal – is to insist that Jesus will soon prove their truth by rapturing
the faithful. This demonstration is expected to prompt mass conversions and,
after a period of tribulation, the advent of the millennium. Dispensationalists
maintain that Jesus will impose harmony between individual identities and the
social order.
Taylor may be correct in insisting that in the absence of an accepted cosmic
order there is no firm foundation for moral choices.98 But it does not follow that
people will stop making moral choices or give up their commitment to identity.
Throughout this book I have argued that continuous and unified identities are
impossible under any circumstances and belief or disbelief in cosmic orders
does not affect this reality. Toward the end of this chapter I explore alternative
ways of thinking about self-identifications. In the paragraphs that follow I
connect ethical behavior to identity in a very different way than Taylor.
Traditional European conceptions of order relied on enforcement of moral
codes by family, church and state. During the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, there was a general assault on these authorities and their self-serving
claims that they were essential to maintain order.99 Philosophers conceived of
morality as self-governance, which in turn provided the justification for people
to assume control of their lives in a wide range of domains. It also served as a
justification for the bourgeoisie to claim a higher social position on the grounds
that internal mastery of this kind is a better claim to status than birth. Locke,
Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Reid, Bentham, Rousseau, Wolff and Kant are all
major figures in this intellectual project. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe can
be read as a demonstration of how self-governance is possible. He transforms
himself from a lone castaway to a self-governing subject. He curtails his
acquisitive impulses and learns to live with others with similar impulses.100
From Locke to Kant, many philosophers nevertheless doubted that moral codes
could effectively be enforced by reason-induced self-restraint. More and
Voltaire considered belief in a vengeful god necessary to maintaining order
because those who would commit misdeeds had to expect judgment and
punishment.101 Kant thought belief in God and a “world not now visible”

97
Swaine, Liberal Conscience, for a thoughtful discussion of this problem.
98
Rist, Real Ethics, for a more detailed defense of this position.
99
Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, p. 4; Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 83.
100
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Armstrong, How Novels Think, pp. 36–7.
101
More, Utopia; Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, p. 54.
 i den t i t y a n d o r d er 301

absolutely essential if reason is to lead people to morality, as its apprehension

depends on receptivity to “objects of emulation and awe” as incentives and
sources of resolve.102 While writing this paragraph, Pope Benedict XVI
addressed an estimated 70,000 people a mile away in Hyde Park and repeated
his shopworn and offensive message that morality is impossible without reli-
gion and that atheism is responsible for the Nazis and other twentieth-century
horrors.
These fears are groundless. Public opinion polls reveal that the percentage of
people who believe in God in the developed world, the United States aside, is
somewhere in the range of 30–40 percent.103 It is lower still in Scandinavia and
Japan, places with relatively low crime rates and a high degree of voluntary
compliance to social norms. By contrast, Eastern Europe and Latin America,
with significantly higher religious beliefs and church attendance, are demon-
strably less law-abiding and more violent. There are many reasons for these
differences, and most political scientists would contend that they have little to
do with religion. This is my point. Ethical behavior and political order are not
dependent on acceptance of cosmic orders and their transcendental moralities.
Believers and non-believers alike routinely obey laws, practice honesty, behave
considerately toward one another and not infrequently, display altruism.
When asked to justify their behavior, some religious people refer to the Ten
Commandments or other religious principles or teachings. But many will
simply assert, as most non-believers do, that they do what is right. Concern
for divine sanction or logical foundations for ethical systems troubles a very
narrow circle of intellectuals. Some of them err in thinking that the vast
majority of people require or desire incontrovertible warrants for good behav-
ior. The absence of such warrants does not even trouble most intellectuals who
are aware of the problem. They are prepared to accept many kinds of ethical
compromises, but nevertheless feel capable in most instances of distinguishing
between right and wrong, even though they recognize they cannot possibly
demonstrate the validity of their judgments. For many people, I suspect, ethical
behavior helps them to construct and maintain identities. If so, the arrow of
causation works in the opposite direction than Strauss, MacIntyre and Taylor
suppose.
Even if cosmic orders were universally accepted, they could not provide the
kind of ethical guidance expected by these philosophers. Among people who
believe in a deity – or any form of cosmic order – there are, and always have been,
enormous controversies about the proper application of accepted principles to
specific issues and problems. The ordination of female or homosexual ministers

102
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, “Introduction.”
103
Association of Religious Data Archives, www.thearda.com/internationalData/compare.
asp; Pfaff, “Religious Divide,” for higher figures on European beliefs in a deity and a
breakdown by country.
 left behind 217

special powers or heroes who gain such powers through their mastery of arcane
lore or texts that are safeguarded, interpreted and shared by their guardians.
From this lore or texts heroes often learn the true names of people and things,
which can be invoked for their protection. In Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, men
and dwarves are aided by wizards in their cosmic struggle against evil.161
Science fiction characters, by contrast, gain power or authority by means of
their pluck, but almost always combined with an impressive use of reason and
understanding of natural laws.162
Left Behind nicely meets the conditions of fantasy. It is an adventure tale that
takes place in four fictional worlds, which for the scientifically minded, could
never exist. First, there is our world, but made counterfactual by God’s visible
intervention in wars, rapturing of some half-million people and unification of
the world’s religions and government through the machinations and near-
magical powers of the Antichrist. The second world is the millennial kingdom,
inhabited by the faithful, who live forever, and others who make it only to one
hundred. Serious evil doers (including drinkers, dancers, adulterers) are
eliminated by lightning strikes. The third world is heaven, to which the faithful
ascend at the end of the Millennium. Hell, the fourth world, has the standard
lakes of fire and other unpleasant venues where people suffer for an
eternity without dying or losing consciousness from the pain and hopelessness
of it all.
The starting point of all fantasy is serious departure from reality, and here
there are undoubtedly differences of opinion about what is unrealistic and
qualifies as a miracle counterfactual. For people awaiting the rapture, Left
Behind is not fantasy, and they may constitute the majority of its readers. For
the secular among us, believers and novels alike inhabit a fantasy world.
Left Behind is unquestionably a morality tale. At the individual level, the
good are rewarded handsomely, the evil suffer terribly and the faithful who die
in wars, plagues and earthquakes are reincarnated and ascend to heaven.
Following the rapture, corrupt religions and godless regimes give way to the
more horrendous dictatorship of the Antichrist. At the onset of the Millennium,
the Antichrist and his empire are swept away and replaced by the kingship of
Jesus. At the cosmic level, God triumphs over Satan. Left Behind also qualifies as
fantasy because of its invocation of special powers. God, Satan, the Antichrist
and Jesus all have such powers and use them to protect their followers and
advance their goals. These powers range in scope from mass hypnosis, mind
reading, telepathy and teleportation to the ability to knock bombers and
missiles out of the sky to the even more impressive capability to trigger earth-
quakes and meteor strikes, terraform the earth, reconfigure human physiology
and confer immortality. Ordinary humans do not possess these powers, but
Nicolae Carpathia, the Antichrist, can manipulate human minds and memories

161 162
Tolkien, Lord of the Rings. Kay, “Fiction versus Fantasy.”
 ut op i a s a n d p r o gr e ss 303

allegorical and fantastic. They depend on the prior existence of golden ages.
Both kinds of narratives appear to be Western innovations.
Utopias are offered as model societies in which individual happiness and
collective harmony are achieved by seemingly well-designed institutions
and practices. They invariably incorporate the principle of equality and de-
emphasize material goods and their use as status symbols. Most utopias are
agricultural, valorize artisanship and all are to a significant degree author-
itarian. They invariably restrict personal freedom, which they consider a threat
to order and stability. The Magic Flute is very much in this tradition. There is no
visible economy beyond exchanging birds for food and wine and nothing that
hints at any institutional structure. The Queen of the Night rules by fiat while
Sarastro relies on a kind of carefully managed Politburo. My reading of the
opera emphasizes the extent to which Sarastro exercises power by means of
psychological manipulation and coercion and, like his adversary, the Queen of
the Night, seeks power for its own sake. Utopias put extraordinary and totally
misplaced trust in intellectuals – whether guardians, scientists or philosophers –
and their ability to rule by reason.
By raising false expectations, utopias made it more likely that people disillu-
sioned by transformative projects will regard the existing world as more of a
dystopia. Even before attempts to create utopias brought about such attitudes,
dystopia emerged as a genre. It was a reaction in the first instance to industri-
alization and its human costs, and secondarily, to still imaginary utopian
projects that sought to transcend it through social engineering, revolution
and the creation of harmonious communal societies. Dystopia encourages
cultural pessimism. H. G. Wells’ When the Sleeper Wakes, Zamyatin’s We,
Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World suggest that the future has the
potential, even the likelihood, of being worse than the present.
The Magic Flute drives home the extent to which a work written in one genre
can be read in another. The opera appears to be a blend of golden age and utopia
but upon closer inspection is better understood as a dystopia. Other golden ages
can be read as dystopias for some of the same reasons. Chapter 5 offers the
example of the German reconstruction of ancient Greece as a golden age and
intended model for German identity. In retrospect, it was an idealistic project
that had tragic real world consequences. Chapter 6 offers the example of the
Millennium, as described in the Left Behind series. It is a utopia modeled on a
biblical golden age, but its depiction of Jesus and the world he rules shares much
in common with Big Brother and his Oceania. Dystopias are more difficult to
put a positive spin on, and I am unaware of serious efforts to do so. The closest
we come may be science fiction’s treatment of immortality. It leads to dystopias
from which heroes and heroines seek to escape and return to mortal societies.
From their perspective, our society, if not a relative utopia, is certainly more
desirable by comparison.
304 identity reconsidered

When texts are read against later ones they can be put in broader literary and
political contexts and encourage readings that were not available to their authors
or contemporaries. Toward this end, I compare Magic Flute with Communist
China during the Cultural Revolution and the texts of Dispensationalism with
those of Marx and Engels. Marxism has often been described as a secularized
version of Christianity as it seeks to regain paradise, but on earth and by political
means. Marxism and Dispensationalism, which developed at the same time,
embrace revolutionary change – one man-made, the other divinely inspired.
They advance parallel arguments about the unfolding of history, the future course
of which is described in their respective texts. Both understand the world as full of
seeming contradictions that can be reconciled at a deeper level of understanding.
They foreground villains with no saving graces, unless it is their myopia. Satan
and capitalists are fiendishly clever but strangely shortsighted. They imagine and
execute complex conspiracies but cannot foresee how counterproductive they
will turn out to be. Revolutionary Marxists and Dispensationalists consider
society utterly corrupt and incapable of reform. They aspire to replace it with
something fundamentally pre-modern in its values and practices. From its
inception, Dispensationalism envisaged a Millennium that does away with
industrialization and all of its consequences. Left Behind fleshes out this vision.
It has a political hierarchy that Lenin would recognize as a variant of democratic
centralism.
Marxism and Dispensationalism nevertheless represent different paths for
escaping modernity and finding human fulfillment. Dispensationalists believe
the world is coming to an end in the near future and that in the meantime
believers can find some solace in their solidarity. This belief and affiliation, and
the identity they provide, help Dispensationalists cope with the larger, in their
view, repugnant society. It is significant that this cult experienced a phenomenal
surge after the Cold War’s and communism’s collapse. The communist enemy
that Americans held responsible for so much evil and suffering all but disap-
peared, but evil and suffering did not, and, if anything, are believed by many to
be on the rise. So, too, many believe, are practices abhorrent to religious social
conservatives, including sexual freedom, homosexuality and abortion. The
devil has replaced Lenin as the villain.
My typology of identity helps to explain why Marxism and Dispensationalism
have so much in common. They both embrace anti-modern approaches to
identity to address the tensions generated by conflicts between reflective and
social selves. Dispensationalism embraces the second strategy, which seeks to
recreate a world dominated by a religious-based cosmic order in the expectation
that it will effectively reconcile individuals to their society. Marxism – in the form
developed by Marx and Engels and practiced in Maoist China, Pol Pot’s
Cambodia and North Korea – is representative of strategy one as it attempts to
suppress, if not eliminate, interiority and reflexivity. Marx is adamant that
communism will do away with alienation by creating a communal identity.
 ut op i a s a n d p r o gr e ss 305

The two strategies share much in common. They seek to obliterate individualism,
one by religious, the other by secular means, and dispense, as far as possible, with
individual identities by having people define themselves with reference to a
collective and its mission.
Anti-modernism in both projects finds further expression in negative
attitudes toward role playing. The Left Behind novels portray it as a form of
deception for evil ends. There is a long tradition in Christianity of the devil
adopting disguises to better corrupt people and win their souls. In Left
Behind, the devil’s disciple, Nicolae Carpathia, pursues this strategy with
great initial success, convincing his countrymen, and then the world, that
he is a man of peace and the right choice for Secretary General of the United
Nations. He quickly persuades most countries to disarm and give him dicta-
torial powers. Much of the plot of the Left Behind series concerns Carpathia’s
use of his false persona to accumulate enormous power and the efforts of a
small group of Christians, who make no pretence about who they are, to
expose him.
Most of the science fiction texts I analyzed are anti-modern in a different
sense. They offer a more nuanced but still largely negative view of role playing.
In Altered Carbon, it is done primarily for nefarious purposes. Criminals
regularly assume sleeves that make them more powerful and enhance their
reflexes or facilitate subterfuge. They give no indication of being uncomfortable
in their new bodies. By contrast, our hero Takeshi Kovacs only assumes sleeves
in the hope of returning to his original self, and never feels comfortable in any of
these other bodies. The same is true of the woman he brings back from
electronic storage and reunites with her partner. They feel estranged until she
resumes her original form.
Beginning in the Renaissance, individuals gradually had more choices
about their lives. Role playing is central to the development and exercise of
these choices as it is a vehicle for trying out roles, and sometimes by this
means, assuming or creating new identities. Certain kinds of discourses
accelerated this process. Utopias that create visions of better worlds helped
to inspire efforts to bring them about, as did Bellamy’s Looking Backward and
Herzl’s Altneuland. Dystopias depict negative features of change and efforts to
escape them through utopian projects. By the second half of the twentieth
century, they all but displaced utopias in Western literature. Dystopia is the
dominant genre in science fiction, whose authors see little hope of escaping
the inequality, corruption and alienation of the modern era. Many see these
afflictions becoming more pronounced. In contrast to utopias in which
science often helps to build a better world, dystopias uniformly portray the
social consequences of science in a negative light. Immortality is the gold
standard of scientific breakthroughs because it has been an enduring human
dream, and one seemingly beyond the reach of science until quite recently. In
science fiction, it often develops as part of a suite of scientific, engineering and
220 be a m m e u p, l or d

class, although generally from its less prosperous and less well-educated sec-
tions. These movements nevertheless attract proportionately more followers
from the working class and less from the professional classes than do main-
stream Protestant churches.171
Timothy Weber contends that turn of the century premillenarians
had much in common with the Progressives. Both sought versions of the
millennium, although millenarians believed this would occur through the
personal intervention of Christ and accordingly regarded reform move-
ments as distractions.172 I find this a forced comparison, as the Progressive
movement encompassed a wide range of groups with quite diverse goals. Its
left wing had the most far-reaching ambitions, but they were still relatively
cautious in the expectations, hoping at best to ameliorate conditions for the
poor and introduce other positive changes in society. They believed in progress
but had few illusions about any figurative millennium lurking around the
corner.173
A more appropriate comparison is to Marxism. This is not all that surprising,
as both movements have roots in Christianity. Marxism has often been
described as a secularized version of Christianity as it seeks to regain paradise,
in secular form and by political means.174 Jesus’ teachings and early
Christianity had a strong anti-wealth ideology and medieval millennial move-
ments frequently had proto-socialist ideologies. Some nineteenth- and
twentieth-century Christian political movements and parties built on this
tradition and offered a blend of Christianity and socialism. This is certainly
not true of Dispensationalism, which is strongly conservative. If we look beyond
these obvious political differences, we encounter striking similarities in outlook
and style of argument between Dispensationalism and the brand of socialism
espoused by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Both ideologies describe the world
as impossible to reform, expect and espouse violent upheavals, advance argu-
ments with the same kinds of contradictions and confront the problem of failed
predictions. There is some evidence to suggest that they attract similar person-
ality types: people who feel threatened by ambiguity and are drawn to move-
ments that offer a comprehensive, black-and-white view of the world and
demand submission to authority from on high.

171
Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture, pp. 202–4.
172
Weber, Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming, pp. 102–4, for this parallel.
173
Lippmann, Drift and Mastery; Croly, Promise of American Life; Hofstadter, Age of Reform;
Eisenach, Lost Promise of Progressivism.
174
Löwith, Meaning in History; Popitz, Entfremdete Mensch, p. 99; Wackenheim, Faillité de la
religion d’après Karl Marx, p. 200, contends that via Hegel, Marx links up with the
soteriological schema underlying the Judeo-Christian tradition. McLellan, Marx, pp. 96–7,
rejects these comparisons to Christianity,
 narratives 307

Morris’ socialist London. With few exceptions, utopias turn the clock back on
individual autonomy. Marx and Engel’s vision of communism, William Morris’
News from Nowhere and B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two are cases in point. Even
in utopias like Skinner’s, where futuristic technology is given prominence, it
is generally used for anti-modern and undemocratic ends. Relatively few
utopias are unqualifiedly modern, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis being a notable
exception. Some utopias straddle past and future, as does Bellamy’s Looking
Backward. It envisions central planning and mass distribution centers, but
freezes gender and racial stereotypes. It all but does away with politics, and
turns Boston into a leafy, Victorian paradise.
Our reaction to utopias hinges on our understanding of modern. If we
think modernity is characterized by individual autonomy, economic develop-
ment, civil society, democracy and tolerance, then most utopias are unambig-
uously anti-modern. If, however, we stress the downside of modernity –
economic inequality, state centralization, nationalism, imperialism and dehu-
manization of people through workplace regimentation, propaganda and
advertising – then utopias predict key features of our world. If the future
comes even more to resemble the dark side of modernity – as so much of
science fiction expects – we will have to revise our reading of utopias. Their
books will have created worlds that our descendants may regard wistfully, if
they are allowed to read them.

Narratives
Golden age, utopian and dystopic discourses tell stories with beginnings and
endings. Not all these stories are presented with a linear timeline; they may
incorporate flashbacks or present the perspectives and adventures of multiple
characters. Readers must nevertheless be able to impose a linear structure on
their overall narratives. Linearity is equally evident in autobiographical narra-
tives that are essential components of our identities. Like all works of history,
they impose order and progression on events that was rarely evident at the time
and may not be justified in retrospect.104 They do so by playing up certain
strands of development at the expense of others and interpreting them in a
manner consistent with their plot line.
Students of narrative like Hayden White and Louis Mink describe narra-
tives as imaginary creations that we impose on the world.105 However, most

104
Abelson, “Script Processing in Attitude Formation and Decision-Making”; Pennington
and Hastie, “Explaining the Evidence”; Gergen and Gergen, “Narrative Form and the
Construction of Psychological Science”; Robinson, “Sampling Autobiography”; Brewer,
“What is Autobiographical Memory?”; Neisser, “Self-Narratives”; Barclay, “Composing
Protoselves Through Improvisation.”
105
White, “Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”; Mink, “Narrative Form as
Cognitive Instrument.”
308 i d e n t i ty r e c on si d er e d

people think of linear narratives as “natural” forms of expression that capture

the essence of the world and ourselves. Some philosophers in the phenom-
enological tradition contend that narratives are central to our being because
they allow us to incorporate the past into the present in meaningful ways.106
Kantian-style isomorphism between our minds and the world is highly ques-
tionable, although it is deeply entrenched in Western philosophy and culture.
Efforts by novelists from James Joyce to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Italo Calvino
to break free of linear structure do not appeal to mass audiences because of the
difficult demands they make on readers accustomed to linear narratives.
There is nevertheless nothing “natural” or superior about linear structure.
Such beliefs are based on the false understanding of causation and its
representation.
Linearity is distinguished by its causal understanding of the physical and
social worlds. In such narratives, earlier events or developments are assumed to
be responsible for later ones and constitute the thread that ties stories together.
Other forms of representation are available, and some have a long history in
Western culture. Aristotle, while aware of efficient, or preceding causes, also
emphasizes telos, the ends objects and living things are intended to serve. The
purpose of the acorn is to give rise to an oak, and a story about it would work
backwards from this end to explain various stages of transformation and
growth.107 The New Testament is framed this way, as are Marxist accounts of
history; their respective oak trees are the second coming and communism.
Greek tragedy and some modern fiction employ archetypes, as Mozart and Da
Ponte do in Don Giovanni. While telos-driven stories and archetypes are often
embedded in linear plots, causation is external to them. Depending on how we
read Sophocles, Oedipus’ actions are attributable to fate or his character, either –
or both – drive the plot forward.
Modern understandings of linear causation build on the pioneering work of
David Hume. He reasoned that “X” could be considered the cause of “Y” if there
was a constant conjunction between them and “X” precedes “Y” temporally.108
This “thin” approach to causation undergirds positivism and its search for
regularities. In the course of the twentieth century, non-linear models have
become prominent in the physical and biological sciences. They assume that the
physical and biological worlds are complex, open-ended systems in which
initial conditions, accident and confluence are important. So-called variables
often interact in non-additive ways, and their effects depend on the presence or
absence of other factors. Even linear systems with known feedback loops can
quickly become non-linear and unpredictable when some of their parameters

106
Carr, Time, Narrative, and History, pp. 51–2, for a strong statement of this position.
107
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 2.2 and Physics 7.2, 8.5, 256a4–256b27.
108
Hume, Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, pp. 26–7, 41–5.
 n a r r a ti v es 309

have high values.109 Elsewhere, I make the case for the social world as an open-
ended non-linear system; by non-linear, I mean a system that does not satisfy
the superposition principle so that its output is not necessarily proportional to
its input.110 I further contend that many, if not most, social and political
transformations are the product of non-linear confluences. If so, linear narra-
tives cannot capture the complexity of the social world, or even of our individ-
ual lives as they also involve transformations, some of which are triggered by
accidents and confluences.
Hume describes causation as a product of the human mind, not as a feature of
the world.111 This understanding is accepted by many physical scientists, some of
whom reject the concept of cause as inappropriate to their field of inquiry.112
Causation and its linear formulation are social constructions that we take for
granted because they are so deeply embedded in our culture. Linear perspective in
art is a telling example. In the 1920s, Erwin Panofsky suggested that each epoch of
Western civilization had its own “perspective” that was consonant with and
helped to negotiate a particular Weltanschauung. Linear perspective was not a
scientific advance over medieval representations of space; it came no closer than
its predecessors in capturing reality, but did express more effectively the world
view of Renaissance Italians.113 Panofsky’s ideas initially met with great resist-
ance, if not incredulity, from art historians and scientists, as even intelligent,
sophisticated people are often loath to recognize the limited and parochial nature
of their understandings of the world.114 Panofsky’s insight that linear perspective
is above all a convention no longer seems so radical as it parallels similar moves
toward constructivism in anthropology, philosophy and political science.
Could we move away from linearity in our life narratives? The occasional use
of other forms of narration in Western culture indicates that it is at least a
theoretical possibility. Non-linear forms of representation have made their
greatest inroads in art and architecture. Such art nevertheless remains an elite
fascination, and most Westerners remain uncomfortable with it. Post-war
popular culture is more promising because it has consciously sought to blur,
stretch and blend traditional genres and create new ones. Television is partic-
ularly adventurous in this regard. Programming has moved away from grand,
linear, narratives. The forty-five episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus,
which began in 1965, broke new ground in this regard. Even more influential
were music videos, which came a decade later with the advent of MTV in 1977.
Music videos violate most aesthetic boundaries and routinely present people

109
Bak and Chen, “Self-Organized Criticality”; Gleick, Chaos, pp. 59–80.
110
Jervis, System Effects; Lebow, Forbidden Fruit.
111
Hume, Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1.3, 6.3; Treatise on Human Nature,
1.3. 8, 13–14. For different readings, see Reed and Richman, New Hume Debate.
112
Lebow, Constructing Cause in International Relations, ch. 1.
113
Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, pp. 7–24.
114
Edgerton, Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective, pp. 157–61.
 m a k i n g s e n s e of di s p e n s a t i o n a l i s m 223

provides the analytical tool to make sense of contradictions and to show how
the tensions they generate move history forward. Contradictions are welcome
for this reason. Dispensationalists do not employ the dialectic, but they resort to
a kind of dialectical reasoning. They revel in contradictions and see them as
signs of change. Like Marxists, they believe that the world must get much worse
and seemingly more inexplicable because of its contradictions before any trans-
formation is likely. Again like Marxists, they see few, if any, events as purely
accidental. Everything, no matter how disturbing or perplexing, serves a general
and higher purpose.177
Dispensationalists and Marxists make predictions based on their study
of prophecy. They infer the unfolding and end of history from current
events and their respective texts. Both sets of predictions have been
confounded by events and both movements have responded to failure in
somewhat similar ways. Early Christians expected Christ to return in their
lifetime and were forced to revise their expectations. Later Christians came
to accept the idea that Christ’s return was in the more distant future.
Millennial sects periodically arose in troubled times, their participants
convinced that the current events were fulfilling biblical prophecies. For
many thoughtful Christians the millennium has come to represent a vision
that should not be taken literally but, rather, used as a source of guidance
for confronting everyday life. Like their millennial predecessors,
Dispensationalists reject figurative readings of the second coming and
expect Christ to return in the near term, and are undeterred by repeated
failures of their past predictions. There is no hint in their writings that
these failures should prompt a rethinking of their position. Imminent
rapture, followed by the tribulation and Millennium remains the message
propagated in their churches and the Left Behind series.
Marxism has a shorter history than Christianity, but its predictions of world
revolution in 1918 and 1945 were unsuccessful, as were later expectations by
Chinese, North Korean and Vietnamese communists of at least an East that was
Red. These failures, and more importantly, the collapse of the Soviet Union and
China’s embrace of capitalism, encouraged remaining socialists to rethink their
understanding of a world transformation. Many became disillusioned while
others came around to an understanding, not unlike their sophisticated
Christian counterparts, that envisages a socialist paradise as a long-term goal
and benchmark for present-day political behavior and judgment. In sharp
contrast to Dispensationalism, relatively few Marxists, to my knowledge, pre-
dict imminent revolution. It may be that after repeated setbacks, there will be
fewer Dispensationalists or a move among them to defer the rapture to a more
distant future.

177
Harding, Book of Jerry Falwell, p. xi.
 w h a t m a k e s us hu m a n ? 311

Some efforts at distinguishing humanity from “lesser” species emphasize

other consequences of intelligence. Homo faber, the toolmaker, was commonly
used to distinguish homo sapiens from earlier hominids and other animals. For
Karl Marx, toolmaking and the choices it conferred were critical features of
agency and humanity.121 We now know that Neanderthals, once considered
culturally inferior, made musical instruments and tools and even interbred with
humans.122 Various monkeys, other mammals and birds like magpies fashion
tools, and recent research suggests that border collies can develop 1,000-word
vocabularies.123 The distinction between humans and others, like so many
others binaries, as Hume realized, is better considered one of degree, not of
kind.124 At best, there is a sliding scale of intelligence with humanity at the high
end. Science fiction authors violate this order by imagining worlds with intelli-
gent androids in which people are equaled or surpassed in intelligence by
machines. This challenge to human superiority would be threatening under
any circumstances, but all the more so in the modern era where intelligence as a
human marker has taken on new significance due to the progress of science and
decline in religious beliefs.
The possibility of machine intelligence has led some science fiction writers
to turn to affect as the defining feature of human beings. It differentiates us
from machines, unless or until computers and androids become advanced
enough to develop feelings. The move to affect is questionable for a more
important reason: it cannot distinguish humanity from other mammals who
have emotions, display vitality and engage in free play. Psychologists recognize
that humans and animals share what they call primary emotions (e.g. anger,
fear, pleasure) but some insist that only humans have secondary emotions
(e.g. honor, hope, nostalgia, shame).125 Aristotle and some modern students
of emotion insist that all emotions are cognitively mediated.126 In practice,
neither intelligence nor affect effectively differentiate us from animals and
advanced, artificial life forms.
Over the millennia, many philosophers and writers have suggested that
recognition of our mortality not only makes us human but shapes our behavior
in ways it does not for other animals. The Greeks explained the striving for

121
Marx, “Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of Career.”
122
Richard Alleyne, “Humans Share Neanderthal Genes from Interbreeding 50,000 Years
Ago,” The Telegraph (London), 6 May 2010, www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7685610/
Humans-share-Neanderthal-genes-from-interbreeding-50000-years-ago.html.
123
Nicholas Wade, “Sit. Stay. Parse. Good Girl!,” New York Times, 18 January 2011,
pp. D1, 4.
124
Hume, Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 9.2.
125
Leyens et al., “Emotional Side of Prejudice.”
126
Schachter, “Interaction of Cognitive and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State,”
Lutz, Unnatural Emotions; Konstan, Emotions of the Ancient Greeks.
312 identity reconsidered

honor as figurative means of transcending death.127 Heidegger’s philosophy

and Terror Management Theory are based on similar assumptions.128 Some
philosophers, and many science fiction and fantasy writers, among them
Tolkien, oppose immortality on the grounds that it would deprive us of the
ability to lead a meaningful and balanced life.129 Other science fiction authors
allege that immortality would produce boredom, destructive envy, increased
exploitation of the poor and a gerontocracy that would marginalize the young
and forestall change. Their novels and stories tap long-standing, if infrequently
articulated, beliefs about the core constituents of humanity.
Religious people have a different answer to the question of what makes us
human: it is our relationship to God. Genesis says that human beings are made
in His image and given control over other animals.130 Christians add another
marker: our potential to achieve salvation. These claims have diminishing
credibility in the West, although secularized versions find wide resonance.
Most of us believe we have the potential to live more ethical lives and that
such striving is unique to the human race, on this planet, at least. For religious
science fiction authors, immortality is a form of lèse majesté, a slighting of God
and his authority. This assertion is the latest iteration of an argument used by
conservative Christians to oppose a string of human improvements that include
smallpox vaccination, organ transplants and stem cell research.
Secular objections to immortality are more interesting, although some of them
are indirectly rooted in religious texts. In chapter 2, I noted that the concern
about agency and boredom hark back to time-honored Jewish readings of the
Garden of Eden myth; they emphasize the desire to become master of our own
fates as such a powerful drive that it could not be constrained by the deity.
Sophocles arguably offers a similar take in his treatment of Oedipus, whose
curiosity and intelligence is unconstrained by dire warnings and whose agency
brings about his downfall and that of his family. Augustine also attributes Adam’s
lack of resolve to curiosity.131 In a clever riff on the Garden of Eden, Arthur
C. Clarke describes a city state paradise where the conditions for human happi-
ness – including de facto immortality – have been provided by its ancient
founders. They programmed humans genetically to accommodate to the city’s
lifestyle, but even futuristic science does not rid them of their curiosity and
rebelliousness. The hero’s violation of the society’s strictest taboo – never to

127
Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations, chs. 2–3.
128
Heidegger, Being and Time; Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski, “Cultural Animal,” for
an overview of Terror Management Theory.
129
Tolkien, Lord of the Rings.
130
Genesis, 1.26; Kant, “Conjectural Beginning of Human History,” makes a similar
argument about humans choosing to rise above nature.
131
Augustine, City of God, XIII, 12–15, XIV, 12–14 and XXII, 1–9. who defined curiosity as
man’s desire to transform his perfect human knowledge into perfect divine knowledge
and thus become like a god.
 w h a t m a k es u s h u m a n ? 313

attempt to look outside the city – leads to his self-willed departure from Eden and
discovery that a “natural” life, that includes mortality, is more satisfying.132
Most of the characteristics people attribute to our species portray it in a
good light, which is typical of almost all “us” and “other” distinctions. There is
a darker tradition that foregrounds negative qualities. Thucydides and Greek
tragedy give equal billing to this side of human nature, and Christianity makes
it dominant with its doctrine of original sin. Dispensationalism takes pessi-
mism a step further in its assertion that people are irredeemably corrupt and
most are destined to roast in hell for eternity. Only a small minority of true
believers will be raptured, and a somewhat larger, but still minute, proportion
of humanity, will make it to the millennium. And not all of them will gain
entrance into heaven. Dispensationalism’s jaundiced view of humanity stands
in sharp contrast to that of early Christians – and many contemporary
Christians – who are optimistic about the moral potential of their fellow
beings.
These understandings of human nature confront different problems with
respect to boundaries. Optimists for the most part take boundaries seriously as
they are anxious to distinguish humanity from other forms of life. Pessimists are
generally more relaxed as they emphasize fundamental similarities between
humans and other animals. For optimists, boundary maintenance relies on
intelligence or affect. This kind of differentiation will become increasingly diffi-
cult to maintain in a world we share with intelligent computers and androids,
biologically enhanced humans and real or virtual symbiots. People may react by
developing and deploying objectionable stereotypes about androids and other
threatening forms of intelligence. Asimov’s I Robot series is undoubtedly presci-
ent in its portrayal of anti-robot prejudice as a new form of racism.
Psychologists tell us that people exaggerate their differences with other
animals. We rely on equally indefensible attributions to determine who
among us count as fully human.133 Gaita finds that people we stereotype are
said to lack the inner depth that most people believe characterizes their group
and make them human.134 Nick Haslam suggests that we can dehumanize
others in two ways: we can see them as less intelligent or less complex in their
emotions. The former deprives them of culture, refinement, morality and
nationality, making them childlike and underdeveloped. The latter attributes
coldness, rigidity and passivity to them, making them robot-like.135 In White
Britain and Black Ireland, I show how both strategies were used to justify
colonialism.136 Racists offer another twist on boundaries: they bridge those
between humans and animals to make those whom they demonize appear
closer to animals. In the 1840s, the decade in which racist stereotypes began

132
Clarke, City and the Stars. 133 Goldenberg et al., “I am Not an Animal.”
134
Gaita, Common Humanity. 135 Haslam, “Dehumanization.”
136
Lebow, White Britain and Black Ireland.
226 b ea m m e u p, lo r d

Industrial Revolution and most of its consequences. Factories are replaced by

workshops and artisanal production restores the intimate relationship between
workers and their products that capitalism destroyed. Bureaucracy is never
mentioned and can be assumed to have disappeared. Social relations are face-
to-face and a high value is put on leisure and recreational activities.184 In
chapter 2, I described how William Morris, a reform-oriented socialist, picked
up and fleshed out this vision in his utopian writing. Like the pre-Raphaelites,
he imagined a socialist London that is medieval in its economy, customs and
costumes.185 From its inception, Dispensationalism envisaged a millennium
that also does away with industrialization and its consequences. The political
order of Left Behind’s Millennium is a hierarchy with a leader surrounded by a
coterie of faithful followers. Christ is at its apex but, in contrast to the Soviet
Union, and more like Morris’s utopia, there is no bureaucracy or any form of
government beyond councils. Laws, religion and social values are based strictly
on the Old Testament and civil society in all its manifestations is eliminated.
All forms of modern entertainment are expressly forbidden. There is no hint
of an educational system beyond nurseries whose primary job is not so much to
teach as to indoctrinate children. We are told nothing about the economic
underpinnings of the society and must assume it rests on the produce of
small, independent farmers. Differences about religion aside, Marx and
Dispensationalists have a surprisingly similar vision of paradise.
Marxism and Dispensationalism make silk purses out of sows’ ears. The very
features of modernity they abhor – capitalism and moral decline respectively –
are offered as evidence that revolutionary change is around the corner. For both
movements, conditions need to get worse before they can get better. Workers
must become poorer and more desperate, but also brought together in larger
productive units for the socialist revolution to break out. People must become
corrupt and greedy enough for the Antichrist to establish his dominion over
them if biblical prophecies are to be fulfilled. This is a psychologically sophis-
ticated strategy because it encourages followers to take pleasure in the very
developments that would otherwise frighten and depress them.

Escaping modernity
It is no coincidence that Marxism and Dispensationalism arose in the second
half of the nineteenth century. This was the time when the Industrial
Revolution had revealed its worst features but not yet its positive promise. It
is significant, too, that Dispensationalism experienced a remarkable surge in its
appeal in the aftermath of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union
and its informal empire. The communist enemy that Americans held respon-
sible for so much evil and suffering disappeared, but evil and suffering did not.

184 185
Marx, “After the Revolution.” Morris, News from Nowhere.
 w h a t m a k es u s h u m a n ? 315

and Aristotle all insist that friendship, based on empathy, is the foundation of
the polis.140
In modern times, Adam Smith makes a similar argument with his emphasis
on sympathy. He reasons that “we have no immediate experience of what other
men feel” so we need to exercise our imaginations to conceive of how “we
ourselves should feel in the like situation.” Sympathy is a cognitive process, but
also an emotional one because we must understand how someone feels, not
only what they may think. According to Smith, empathy is almost like entering
another’s body.141 What these and other formulations have in common is the
recognition that ability to experience the pain and pleasure of others, and our
desire to have them experience ours, keeps us from being entirely selfish.
Feelings are responsible for ethics because they provide the incentive to under-
stand and evaluate our behavior as others see and experience it.142 The reverse
is probably also true. Hannah Arendt maintains that the absence of philia, and a
resulting inability to see the world through the eyes of other people, is what
made Adolf Eichmann into “one of the greatest criminals” of the twentieth
century.143 Rousseau makes a somewhat similar point in Emile, where he
reasons that a person who entered the world as an adult, without all the benefit
of prior friendships and the feelings and reflection they encourage, would be a
self-centered imbecile.144
Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide builds on this Platonic and Smithian insight.
Ender Wiggin, the novel’s hero, has propagated this understanding through a
bestselling biography of the last hive queen. This is in the aftermath of an all-out
war of extermination between humanity and the insect-like species, called the
“Buggers,” who have attacked earth. The plot concerns the efforts of Ender,
Jane – a life form that has arisen in a computer network – and their allies to
prevent earth’s fleet from destroying the one planet where empathy has allowed
humans to develop meaningful friendships with other species. Xenocide can be
read as a parable about the age-old struggle between those committed to
security at all costs and those worried that such a commitment will destroy
the way of life security is supposed to preserve. As it is our ability to empathize
that makes us human, the Starways Congress, our heroes believe, would destroy
humanity to protect it. Empathy also extends to machine intelligence. Card
implicitly follows Norbert Wiener’s plea for “cyborg metaphysics,” which
involves the bridging of traditional boundaries between humans and machines
on the basis of what they share in common.145
Separation and boundary maintenance might be considered a first and
necessary step in personal and species development. The sense of self it enables

140
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1155a14, 26–8, 32, 1159b25, 1161a23, 1161b12.
141
Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, vol. I, 1, 1–2. 142 Ibid., chs. 1–2, vol. II, ch. 4.
143
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, pp. 287–8. 144 Rousseau, Emile, pp. 116–17.
145
Mirowski, “Cyborg History and the WWII Regime.”
316 i d e n t i t y r ec o n s i d e r e d

is a key requirement of mental health. People with multiple or entirely imag-

inary identities do not function well in society. Hallucinogenic drugs like LSD
and Salvia divinorum can create states that mimic psychosis by creating out of
body experiences and the feelings of multiple selves and realities. Jared
Loughner, responsible for the 2011 Tucson massacre, was a habitual user of
Salvia divinorum.146 The sense of self is the foundation for subsequent integra-
tion with others without loss of identity. Relationships of this kind are essential
to our individual and collective identity because they are the basis for intimacy,
widen our emotional and intellectual horizons and deepen our understanding
of and contentment with ourselves. The process of integration begins in child-
hood with the family, but has the potential to become ever more inclusive,
moving up the ladder of social aggregation through groups and nationalities to
the species and even beyond. Herder thought along these lines, with his con-
ception of all life as part of a “colossal organism” constituted by interactions
among its separate parts.147 His “colossal organism” might be considered an
early version of the Gaia hypothesis. Peter Singer invokes evolutionary biology
to infer an ethical imperative to extend our circle to animals and guarantee
some of them the rights we have.148
I understand empathy as a two-way street. For us to empathize successfully
with other beings, they must be capable of empathizing with us. Empathy is
different from sympathy, which we routinely feel toward animals and people,
including those in comas who cannot reciprocate our feelings. Empathy, as
Plato understood, is a product of friendship, and this is based on communi-
cation. Not all communication must be verbal, and we have many stories of
friendships among people – even erstwhile adversaries – who share no
common language. Hell in the Pacific, a 1968 movie starring Toshiro
Mifune and Lee Marvin as shipwrecked Japanese naval captain and downed
American aviator, makes this point nicely. Deeper friendships require more
meaningful communication, and for this reason, language or telepathy is
essential. The blind Helen Keller characterizes her mind and sense of self as
undeveloped, and her relationships with people superficial, until she could
communicate with them via symbols.149 In Xenocide, Orson Scott Card
distinguishes between species with whom humans can communicate and
those with whom they cannot. The war between humanity and the Buggers
was a tragedy because afterwards they discovered that communication,
and hence, accommodation, was possible. Communication seems a sensible

146
A. G. Sulzberger and Jennifer Medina, “Shooting Suspect Had Been Known to Use Potent,
and Legal, Hallucinogen,” New York Times, 18 January 2011, p. A16.
147
Beddow, Fiction of Humanity, p. 65.
148
Singer, Animal Liberation and Expanding Circle. For other arguments for animal rights,
see Sapontzis, “Moral Community and Animal Rights”; Bernstein, “Towards a More
Expansive Moral Community.”
149
Keller, Story of My Life; Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, p. 149.
 w ha t m a k e s us hu m a n ? 317

rule of thumb and a good basis for determining how we respond to others and
how far out we extend our circle of inclusion. I believe we have a moral
responsibility to all animals, but would limit rights to species with whom
we can communicate at the same level of cognitive complexity we can with
fellow humans.
For Kant and Hegel, in-group solidarity is achieved through antagonism to
outsiders, although, as noted in chapter 3, both philosophers believe this
conflict might ultimately be overcome. Psychologists have demonstrated that
stereotyped out-groups and hostility to them are unnecessary to identity for-
mation. There is much to be gained from pursuing an approach to social
relations that removes, or at least eases, markers and boundaries we have
erected to separate us from others. Open psychological borders would make it
easier to extend our moral circle to include even people Onora O’Neill describes
as “distant strangers.”150
There is undeniable movement in this direction in Western culture, more
pronounced – and accordingly, more resisted – in the twentieth century. It
received a big boost from anthropology, biology and sociology, which indicate
common human origins and that all meaningful differences among people are
social in nature. In international relations, the Eurocentric system has given
way to an international one in which non-Western, non-Christian actors have
gained legal as well as de facto equality. As Jens Bartelson observes, the political
imagery has increasingly raised the idea of a global community as a counter and
alternative to national ones.151 Phil Cerny suggests that structural changes have
rendered the distinction between international relations and domestic politics
all but meaningless. The sovereign state has not withered away, but its borders
have become increasingly porous and less significant as political, economic and
social relations extend beyond them and are better described as a set of over-
lapping and expanding webs of relationships and identities.152 Future histor-
ians may look back upon the most fundamental conflict of the twentieth
century as being between advocates of greater inclusion and those imposing
and defending diverse forms of exclusivism. The political pendulum has swung
back and forth between these goals, and at the moment seems to be moving in
the direction of those favoring exclusion. Both sides of this debate represent
different responses to modernity.
With respect to rights and obligations, there are two principal competing
schools of thought in moral philosophy. There is a cosmopolitan approach to
ethics that minimizes human differences and insists we treat all people as moral
equals. It requires an “impartialist response” from an impersonal standpoint
that gives equal consideration to those with whom we have no personal or

150
O’Neill, Bounds of Justice. 151 Bartelson, Visions of World Community, p. 46.
152
Cerny, Rethinking World Politics, esp. ch. 2.
 e sc a p in g m o de r n it y 229

Judging from the history of Marxism, repeated failure ultimately brings

disillusionment in its wake. Those most likely to remain true believers are
people for whom belief has become a way of life. Renouncing their faith
would necessitate extracting themselves from a community with which they
strongly identify and from which they derive positive emotional and other
rewards. Dispensationalists have tried hard to build and sustain such commun-
ities. It remains to be seen how long and by what means the pull of identity will
succeed in the face of repeated predictive failures.
 w h a t m a k e s us h um a n ? 319

outsiders.160 Tolstoy describes the preference for one’s own people and the
patriotism it generates as “the root cause of war.”161
In Xenocide, Card rests his appeal for a universalism on the evident harm –
extermination of at least two sentient species – that a communitarian perspec-
tive is likely to bring about. Some international relations scholars make similar
arguments, contending that those who we can harm should have equal moral
standing.162 In recent years, an attempt has been made to devise formulations
that build on local loyalties but extend the circle of moral standing beyond
them. They rest on the premise that we can develop and retain loyalties to both
polis and cosmopolis.163 In his constitutive theory of individuality, Mervyn Frost
argues that a person is constituted as an ethical self by a state, but the state is
constituted by the system of states, and citizens and states alike have responsi-
bilities to others.164 Toni Erskine develops the concept of “embedded cosmo-
politanism,” also based on the assumption that community membership is
morally constitutive. However, various communities transcend territorial bor-
ders, rendering them fuzzy, indefinite, overlapping or dispersed. Such inter-
penetration provides the basis for bridging conventional boundaries and
widening ethical horizons.165
My approach to international ethics, while also committed to bridging the
universalist-cosmopolitan divide, approaches this goal differently. I reject the
binary between local and universal values and ethical systems. All ethical
systems begin as very local creations but extend out to differing degrees to
embrace other people or communities with shared interests or values. We
should be very careful in our use of the concept of community. It is never
something inclusive, although some members may make claims to this effect.
We are members of as many communities as we have affiliations and roles and
the self-identifications to which they give rise. It is a great mistake to allow
politicians, religious leaders or others to define us as members of one com-
munity or convince us or others that any one community is the most important.
Rather, we should come to understand our society, state, region and the world
as a network of multiple and often interlocking communities that are within
and cut across these levels of social, institutional or geographic aggregation.
Horizontal links that cut across ethnic, religious and national communities
have important political and ethical benefits. They build friendships that allow
us to look at ourselves and our other affiliations from the outside. This
perspective hastens recognition of our multiple selves and works against

160
Benhabib, Situating the Self, p. 188; Erskine, Embedded Cosmopolitanism, pp. 8–23.
161
Tolstoy, “Patriotism or Peace.”
162
Shue, “Exporting Hazards”; Linklater, Transformation of Political Community and “Harm
Principle and Global Ethics”.
163
Walzer, “Spheres of Affection”; Linklater, Men and Citizens, p. 16; Erskine, Embedded
Cosmopolitanism, pp. 39–42.
164
Frost, Ethics in International Relations. 165 Erskine, Embedded Cosmopolitanism.
320 i d e n t i t y r ec o n s i d e r e d

essentializing any of them. It encourages tolerance of and respect for others who
share something in common with us.
This understanding is at odds with univeralism and communitarianism. The
former works from the top down, in the sense of propagating a set of values and
associated practices that are assumed to apply to everyone. It assumes rather
than builds a global community. It is only likely to work to the degree that the
values in question are shared and the practices thought to be beneficial. But the
world, and most of its divisions, contain multiple, conflicting value systems.
This means that any value or practice is less likely to be shared the higher up the
level of social aggregation we move. Top-down ethics are unrealistic, and so is
the belief that we can work up to universal acceptance of any set of values and
practices.
Communitarianism assumes that all values are local and the cement holding
together individual communities. It is a Burkean reaction to Enlightenment
universalism. It rests on a false notion of community as a closed, or at least
closely defined social grouping. Such vertical communities are ideological
fictions. They are never unified in values, memberships or loyalties. Multiple
affiliations and roles make their members part of multiple communities. These
horizontal links always existed, but have arguably become much more pro-
nounced in the modern world due to the division of labor, globalization and
with it, the spread of English.
Multiple identifications sensitize us to a diversity of ethical perspectives and
the communities in which they are anchored. Social, religious, professional,
regional, athletic and other identifications that cross national boundaries
encourage us to question the value and legitimacy of these boundaries. They
should also make us more susceptible to arguments that other members of these
diverse communities should be incorporated into our moral sphere. This
process is as much emotional as cognitive, as it rests on the personal ties we
create with such people, which makes it easier, if not natural, to see them as
friends and ontological equals. In effect, the tensions generated by multiple
identifications and the loyalties they demand can be a source of angst, but also
of integration. They provide the emotional and cognitive foundations for
extending our moral sphere, and by doing so, of subsuming our diverse
identifications into more general ones.
To this point, I have emphasized only one benefit of recognizing our multiple
identities: the potential of discovering more similarities with others, building
relationships with them and including them in the circle of the “us.” There is
another, reinforcing ethical benefit of confronting our multiple identities: it
constitutes a barrier to, or escape from, what Adorno calls “identitarian”
thinking. By this he means the conflation of our conceptual categories with
the real world. Reason invents categories, imposes them on the world and
minimizes or ignores all the differences among the actors, objects and processes
 w ha t m a k e s us hu m a n ? 321

it places in the same category.166 Fred Dallmayr observes that identitarian

thinking makes “unlike things like.”167 Roland Bleiker asserts that the act of
subsuming the particular to the general collapses “subjective and idiosyncratic
identities into one unitary system of thought, one universal point of reference,
one truth that silences all others.”168 Adorno and Horkheimer attribute this
process to the Enlightenment, and to modernity more generally.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s identification of reason with the modern world
draws too stark a contrast with the past, as does the claim that interiority is an
entirely modern phenomenon. Identitarian thinking has unquestionably been a
mainstay of nationalism and lies at the core of the distinction between “us” and
“others.” It suppresses diversity within both categories to create an all-
important distinction between them. Recognition of our multiple and frag-
mented identities would bring this diversity to the fore and make it correspond-
ingly more difficult to ignore or even repress for the sake of constructing unitary
identities at the individual or social levels. It has the potential to overcome the
“identitarian” thinking that is the basis for categories of exclusion.
Put another way, our multiple, inconsistent, labile and evolutionary selves
have the potential to provide a new and critical perspective on the traditional
binary between us and others. Recognition of our multiplicity and conflicting
identification can lead to the recognition that the self–other dichotomy lies at
least as much within us as it does between us and others. Whichever self-
identifications we highlight, of necessity, relegates other self-identifications to
the status of “others.” As the hierarchy of identifications is unstable in the short
term and evolves in the medium and longer terms, we have every incentive to
respect these alter egos and to think of them as part of our identity. Recognition
of the need to include some of our own “others” as part of ourselves provides
the foundation for extending this process to others. The more we think about
the nature of our selves, the more we are likely to realize that other people and
collectivities resemble us in having multiple, fragmented identities. They, too,
contain alter and ego within themselves in the form of diverse identifications,
some of which are central to them at any given moment and others peripheral.
Mutual incoherence is an important communality that might help to bridge
other differences. Toward this end, it must be theorized and widely accepted as
a social reality. People would almost certainly discover that they share self-
identifications with other actors. These identifications arise, of course, from
their roles and affiliations. They provide the basis for communication, friend-
ship and empathy, and as a result, the stretching of our horizons to include
other actors within the circles of memberships that we think of as defining

166
Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectics of Enlightenment, p. 3; Adorno et al., Positivist
Dispute in German Sociology, pp. 121–2.
167
Dallmayr, “Phenomenology and Critical Theory.”
168
Bleiker, Popular Dissent, Human Agency and Global Politics, p. 140.
232 s c i e n c e fi c t io n a n d i m m o r t a l i ty

Immortality
Mortality is the fate of all life forms. Human beings appear to be the only
terrestrial species aware of this truth and immortality has accordingly long been
a human dream. Adam and Eve were said to have begun life as immortals, but
they and their descendants lost it when they were expelled from Eden.
Christianity holds out the prospect of resurrection, which undoubtedly
accounts for much of its appeal in the ancient and modern worlds. Greek
gods were immortal, but not people who worshipped them. Even in Hesiod’s
Golden Age, where humans intermingled with the gods and did not have to
work for their food, they lived in good health, but only, like biblical patriarchs,
to a ripe old age.
Western culture offers us numerous accounts of mythical or real figures who
sought immortality. Eos, the Titan goddess of dawn, bargained with Zeus for
the immortality of her lover, the Trojan, Tithonus. She failed to insist on the
additional conditions of good health and a young body and Tithonus suffered
all the frailties of age, ending up a pitiable figure. Endymion was given the gift of
perpetual youth by Jupiter, but experienced it as perpetual sleep. Arachne, who
outperformed Athena at the loom, was rewarded with eternal life as a spider.
Jonathan Swift offers a variant of this myth in Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver hears
tales about the immortal Struldbruggs on the islands of Paluta and Balnibardi
and begins to fantasize about how much he would enjoy eternal life. He then
learns that Struldbruggs age like ordinary mortals and are denied the privileges
often reserved for the elderly. They are unable to communicate with subsequent
generations because their society’s language evolves so quickly. He concludes
that they are the least fortunate of beings and he considers bringing some back
to England to help his countrymen overcome their fear of death.
The Fountain of Youth, a more optimistic legend, describes a spring that
restores the youth of anyone who drinks its waters. Accounts appear in
Herodotus, the Alexander romance, the medieval Travels of Sir John
Mandeville and Christian tales about the mythical Prester John.3 Stories
about restorative powers of the water of the mythical land of Bimini circulated
among indigenous Caribbean peoples and excited Spanish explorers. In 1513,
Ponce de León, governor of Puerto Rico, searched for the Fountain of Youth in
Florida. We have very few stories of people who have rejected the gift of
immortality. In Western culture the outstanding example is Odysseus, who
rejects Calypso’s offer of immortality if he remains with her and instead chooses
to continue his voyage home.4 Mythical figures who achieve immortality, like
Semele, daughter of Cadmus, invariably do it through the intervention of a god.
As mortality is seemingly inescapable and a greatly feared feature of human
existence, it is only natural that people fantasized about escaping death. Ever the

3 4
Herodotus, Histories, 3: 22–4. Homer, Odyssey, 5: 152–7.
 f u t u r e o f i d e n t it y 323

requires facing up to contradictions of all kinds, especially internal ones. We

mature by coping with such tensions and their related uncertainties as openly as
we can. Such an approach to life cannot be logically grounded but reflects how
many of us think we should lead our lives. It is nicely captured by Gahan
Wilson’s New Yorker cartoon in which an avuncular, middle-aged man looks
up from the book he is perusing and exclaims with an obvious sense of relief:
“My god, for a minute there, it suddenly all made sense.”
There is more to identity than ethics, and more to ethics than identity. It is
self-evident that we find ethical guidance from many sources. Most people take
their cues from people they respect, and are likely to follow them – for better
and worse – given our strong desires for social acceptance. Elsewhere, I have
attempted to explain foreign policies in terms of the need of people to build self-
esteem and maintain it at almost any cost.171 Self-esteem usually involves
winning the approval of one’s peer group or society, and provides another
powerful incentive to conform to group norms. Peer group and political
pressure have the potential to direct our behavior in almost any direction. As
memoirs, diaries and novels from Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union and
some very nasty post-Soviet regimes make tragically clear, it is very difficult,
although by no mean impossible, to respond to the ethical imperatives of
identity under the thumb of intrusive tyrannies.172 This is by no means a
novel insight as the Book of Revelation – greatly distorted and misused by
Dispensationalists – is read by sophisticated biblical authorities as an attempt to
buttress the identities of Anatolian Christians in the face of Roman
persecution.173
The problem of ethical cross-pressure will not go away. In the best of worlds,
conflicts among internal identifications, and between them and external social
pressures, make us more aware of multiple ethical perspectives. Such awareness
intensifies our decisional dilemmas and unsettles our sense of self. This is
beneficial to the extent it fosters the realization that our ethical anchors are
parochial and context dependent. Such recognition can make us more tolerant
of the moral benchmarks of others, and tolerance must rank among our
principal ethical commitments in a world where there are multiple, competing
ethical perspectives.
Ethics might accordingly be facilitated by a certain incoherence of identity.
Rather than taking refuge in imaginary and indefensible cosmic orders, or
searching in vain for a single self within us, in nature or our institutions, we
must attempt to transcend the illusion of coherent identity and live, albeit never
comfortably, with the conflicts and tensions within ourselves and between us

171
Lebow, Cultural Theory of International Relations.
172
Klemperer, I Will Bear Witness; Akhmatova, Journals; Martinovich, Paranoia.
173
Bauckham, Theology of the Book of Revelation, p. 108; Gibson, Language and Imagery in
the Old Testament.
324 identity reconsidered

and our societies. If we are multiple fragmented selves, just what part of us is
capable of recognizing this psychological truth? As noted earlier, some philos-
ophers consider this a conundrum because recognition appears to presuppose a
core self that lurks somewhere underneath our multiple selves. This metaphys-
ical supposition and the infinite regress it points to can be avoided if we think of
this self not as an identity or collection of them, but as a process of reflection
that lives only in the present and can function and detach itself, at least partially
and temporally, from the various affiliations and roles that collectively con-
stitute one’s so-called identity.
Let me close by returning to my four categories of identity. They are
associated with modern and anti-modern social, religious or political projects
of varying degrees of practicality. I think it self-evident that strategies one and
two, that seek to reduce, or do away with, interiority and reflexivity, have not
succeeded. These constituents of internal autonomy have become more prom-
inent in the last hundred years and more central to popular literature and the
media. Efforts to substitute collective for individual identities have failed
despite the phenomenal success and spread of nationalism. The Soviet Union
collapsed, and Communist China and Vietnam have evolved into different
kinds of political units. North Korea is the only regime still committed to a
totalitarian form of identity construction. Religious efforts to reduce interiority
and reflexivity have been more successful. Fundamentalist movements of all
major religions have created tight-knit communities in which members are told
what to think, how to dress and behave and encouraged to commit their lives
and resources to movement goals. Totalitarian regimes and fundamental reli-
gions are parallel projects, and by their nature intolerant of dissent. They appeal
to people anxious to forego their autonomy for whatever reason and often
pressure others to accept their values and practices. To the extent that these
movements come to wield political power they are a serious threat to people
seeking to develop and express their autonomy.
Strategies three and four, which embrace reflexivity and interiority, have fared
better. The initially British project of reconciling individuals and society though
imitation and role playing has become more common practice. It has taken root
in countries like France and Germany, where there has been a significant
evolution toward the acceptance of individual autonomy. Socialist movements
everywhere in Europe have moved away from a traditional Marxist commitment
to strategy one, and have for the most part come to embrace strategy three. The
promise of socialism is now more in keeping with the writings of the early Marx,
which appear more concerned with constructing a society that encourages
individual autonomy and expression. Strategy three also has wide appeal in
non-Western countries, especially those along the Pacific Rim, that have experi-
enced significant increases in their standard of living.
The division of labor and growth of pluralism and tolerance have generated
more role models that have made more choices available to more people.
 f u t u r e o f i d e n t it y 325

Strategy three might be considered the most realistic of the four strategies
because it is the only one that does not aim to overcome the tension between
reflexive and social selves, only to reduce it. Marxists and postmodernists have a
ready rejoinder: people emulate role models for the wrong reasons, largely in
response to advertising, peer group pressure and other powerful social cues.
This is not the kind of freedom envisaged by Kant, Hegel or Mead, and it does
not reflect the progressive evolution of society assumed by Smith, Hume and
Mill. Liberals and their critics are making different wagers. The former expect
that wealth and diversity will facilitate autonomy and free choice, and the latter
that commercialization and intensive forms of socialization will make a mock-
ery of autonomy. If meaningful freedom is available, many science fiction
novels imagine that it will be restricted to a small, well-educated and resource-
rich elite.174 Pessimists might point to television for evidence of how wider
access to society does not necessarily lead to more choices. Cable and satellite
TV have allowed hundreds of channels to proliferate, but in the United States
especially, there is a restricted range of programming as most channels carry the
same junk. For critics of liberalism, the role models society offers may have
narrowed rather than expanded.
Strategy three is the only one of the four not associated with utopias or
utopian projects. It emerged as a practice before it was theorized, and the first
discourses about it were the work of British empiricists and writers with positive
attitudes toward their society. They recognized identity as something of a
pastiche, but put a positive spin on bricolage. As the Boswell quote indicates,
he understands himself to be a different person through role playing that has
allowed him to imitate and internalize the manners and values of others. He
does not foreclose the possibility of wearing multiple faces at the same time.
Smith and Hume, and Mill appear to anticipate and welcome this prospect.
Strategy three expresses the optimism of the Georgian and early Victorian eras
in its belief that the tension between individuals and society was beneficial to
both.
Strategy three nevertheless confronts serious problems. It assumes that
society will become open and accessible to all, that positive role models will
proliferate and be recognized as such, and that people will have the desire,
psychological resources and external freedom to exploit these role models and
use them to make and remake their identities. Students of English literature
maintain that the incentive to engage in self-fashioning was propagated by
novels; they invalidated certain notions of the subject and replaced them with
the conception of the individual as someone who existed beyond social roles.
They did this by creating dissatisfied characters who actively sought to, and
often succeeded in, changing their positions in society, revealing in the process

174
Bauman, “Self in Consumer Society,” offers this judgment.
 b e c o m i n g i m m o r ta l 235

represented a form of escapism into the future, fantasy is escapism into the past
motivated by dislike, even fear, of the present.

Becoming immortal
Immortality is generally understood to be endless life, ideally with a young,
healthy body. In an influential essay, Bernard Williams maintains that eternal
life would have to meet two conditions to be worthwhile. There must be
continuity; people should recognize themselves as the same people during the
course of their lives. There must be satisfaction; people should enjoy their lives
and look forward to their continuation, in contrast to a punishing life of aging
(Tithonus) or hard work (Sisyphus).11 Science fiction has come up with various
conceits to meet these conditions. John M. Fischer and Ruth Carol offer an
elaborate typology to capture this diversity, one that includes the possible
immortality of our cosmos, not only of individuals.12
Continuity is the central concern for Williams and many science fiction
writers, as it is for many philosophers. Unlike philosophers, writers take con-
tinuity for granted in our normal lives, but consider it deeply problematic once
immortality comes on line. Some give their characters endless but unconnected
lives in which they have no memories of earlier incarnations. In Star Diaries,
Stanislaw Łem creates a world in which everyone looks alike and plays a game of
musical chairs involving different roles. Every midnight people switch roles
with no memory of who they were before. They consider themselves immortal
because their roles endure, an assertion the author knows his readers will find
unconvincing.13 Other variants of reincarnation create characters who retain
enough memories from past lives to have a sense of who they were.14 In The
City and the Stars, Arthur C. Clarke imagines a society whose citizens sooner or
later get bored with their lives and turn themselves in to the central computer to
be copied and stored and then terminated. They are recreated at some random
future moment to live again with a random mix of fellow citizens. Memories of
their earlier lives gradually return as they mature.
Reincarnation involves repeated rebirth and use of consecutive bodies as
platforms for our minds. Descartes reasoned that we could, in theory, exist
independently of our bodies, a view that is shared by some contemporary
philosophers.15 We could, in theory, be placed in the minds of others and use

11
Williams, Makropulos Case, pp. 82–100.
12
Fischer and Carl, “Philosophical Models of Immortality in Science Fiction.”
13
Lem, Star Diaries. Also Farmer’s Riverworld series.
14
Clarke, City and the Stars; Herbert, Dune and God-Emperor of Dune; Card, “Thousand
Deaths.”
15
Cassam, “Embodied Self.” Olson, Human Animal, for contrary arguments.
 fu tur e o f i den ti ty 327

by Tocqueville, who feared that it would encourage a tyranny of the

majority.177
Postmodernism offers a political-psychological explanation for the illusion
of unitary, consistent identities. Foucault, Lyotard and Derrida are astute in
their diagnosis of the problem and belief in the almost certain failure of
individual efforts to construct coherent and consistent identities in the absence
of fundamental changes in society. They bring us close to a psychological and
political dead-end. We are victims of society and efforts to bring about funda-
mental change are unlikely to succeed without mimicking the goals, methods
and organization of the society they reject. This leaves us only the Nietzschean
strategies of flirtation with transgression and madness – advocated by
Foucault – or frolicking in images – Lyotard’s plea to imagine non-totalizing
identities. These are elite options, and, at best, represent a form of disengage-
ment from society.
Not surprisingly, strategy four is associated with anarchism. Nineteenth-
century political anarchism never gained many adherents and was successfully
repressed. Most expressions of contemporary anarchism are more sophisti-
cated and, unlike many postmodern philosophers, seek compromises with the
existing order. A prominent example is the alternative globalization movement,
exemplified in the Porto Alegre “Another World is Possible” summit that was
set up as an alternative to Davos. Throughout the West, “locavore” movements
are increasingly popular, and some have attempted to revive local barter
economies and models of joint ownership. A few have introduced local curren-
cies. European municipalities and non-profit groups have pioneered a variety of
self-organizing or sharing schemes with bicycles and automobiles. On a more
global basis, open-source and open-access movements in technology and pub-
lishing have emerged, some of them established as self-regulating coopera-
tives.178 The “Occupy Wall Street” protests, which spread to almost every
continent, also have an anarchical component in their rejection of hierarchical
organization and specific political goals. For the time being, these developments
are peripheral but not without potential.
My approach to identity shares much in common with strategies three and
four. Like postmodernists, my starting point is the fragmented self, which I
also understand as a product of modernity. Romantics and postmodernists
envisage wholeness and authenticity as the “natural” state of humans and as
goals toward which we should individually work. The deep divisions and
illusions of contemporary people they consider dehumanizing and enslaving,
but starting points for some kind of individual or collective transformation. I
reject wholeness and authenticity as entirely illusory and accept fragmented,
conflicting identities as the inevitable and inescapable state of modern

177
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.1.2., pp. 409–10.
178
Weber, Success of Open Source.
328 identity reconsidered

humans, if not of humanity in any era. I accordingly differ from Rousseau and
most formulations of modernity that regard it as a sharp break with and
qualitatively different from what went before. Like Foucault and Lyotard, I see
positive benefits from dispelling deeply ingrained illusions concerning our
identities. By recognizing what we are, we might come to see that we share
many self-identifications in common with others and that they might provide
the basis for at least in part bridging the markers and boundaries that keep
people divided.
Postmodernism reflects the pessimism of the post-World War II Western
world. It offers a stark contrast to the optimism of liberalism. Both outlooks
on identity and politics are expressions of particular times and cultures and
we must be wary of universalizing them. At the outset, I contrasted my project
to that of Heidegger, who sought a way toward a holistic identity. His project
rests on Nietzsche’s belief that real change is only possible in epochal
moments when the collapse of meaning and legitimacy open an abyss that
encourages thoughtful people to search for new ways of thinking that have the
potential to reshape the world. The last several centuries can be considered
such an era of change, and Rousseau, Nietzsche, Heidegger and so-called
postmodernists are right in making close connections among meaning, iden-
tity and human fulfillment. Like them, I advocate a reconstruction of identity,
but urge us to move in the opposite direction: to accept and exploit the ethical
possibilities of fragmented selves rather than trying to overcome them.
Rousseau, Nietzsche and Heidegger were unreasonably optimistic about the
possibility of a unified identity and insufficiently attentive to the very real
downside of their projects. In worlds that have lost meaning, there is a
temptation, to which all too many people succumb, to give allegiance to
movements like communism, fascism or Dispensationalism that appear to
restore meaning but at the cost of giving up the very features of humanity that
these followers sought to encourage. The project I advocate might encounter
the same problem, as people unwilling, or lacking courage, to confront the
truth about their identities may turn to authoritarian movements for assur-
ance. However, I believe it has an even greater potential of liberating the most
positive kinds of creative energies.
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as a gesture of solidarity with the status quo, their miraculous conveyances are
destroyed at the end of these adventures.48 Stories about time travel soon
augmented those about space travel. Both make use of futuristic inventions
such as robots and ray guns. Writing of this kind reinforced the establishment’s
dismissal of science fiction as a low, if not juvenile, literary form.49 Not
surprisingly, a few writers aspired, as some critics still do, to make science
fiction more literary. Most scorn these pretensions.50
Even H. G. Wells, one of the most popular Victorian British authors, was
unable to bridge the divide between literature and science fiction. He came from
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in its utopian possibilities. Like many Victorians, Wells subscribed to the grand
narrative of progress.51 But, like Verne, he was sensitive to the darker side of
technology. He published six utopias, but also two dystopias. In War from the
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appealed to a mass audience.52 The reaction of the American literary establish-
ment to science fiction was similar and enduring. Thomas Disch tells of an
exchange with the well-known writer and professor Morris Dickstein at a PEN
conference in New York City. Dickstein told him of the “heresy” he had just
encountered: someone had described George Orwell as a science fiction writer.
Dickstein insisted that an intellectual of Orwell’s stature could not, by defini-
tion, have written science fiction.53
Science fiction broadened its scope after World War I, and even more after
1945. Many stories and novels retained the genre’s fascination with science, but
engaged it in a more serious way. Arthur C. Clarke’s Islands in the Sky, The
Sands of Mars, Earthlight, Rendezvous with Rama and 2061 base their plots on
scientific laws or principles. Other writers explore the potential of science and
technology to transform people and their societies. They reach out to history
and the social sciences for insights and plots. Science fiction also became
increasingly political. Prominent works like Zamyatin’s We and Huxley’s
Brave New World and Music at Night sought to expose the tyranny of commu-
nism and its desire to reduce men to pliant machines. In the immediate post-

48
Capitano, “‘L’ici-bas’ and ‘l’Au-delà’.”
49
Williams, Keywords, on high and low literary forms.
50
Suvin, Positions and Suppositions, p. 10; James, Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century,
p. 48; Luckhurst, Science Fiction, p. 7.
51
Wells, Short History of the World.
52
Evans, “Jules Verne and the French Literary Canon.”
53
Disch, Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, p. 4.
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 th e co n s e qu e n c e s o f im m o r t al it y 245

piped into their home through air tubes because there has been no electronic
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readers.

The consequences of immortality

I concentrate on, but do not entirely limit myself to, post-war Anglo-American
science fiction. A few earlier writers, like Besant, Wells and Shaw, address
immortality, but it is much more a post-war concern. This is in part a statistical
artifact; science fiction is primarily a late twentieth-century enterprise. More
works were published in each of the last five decades of that century than in all
decades prior to 1945. Most of these stories, novellas and novels, and almost all
of the films based on them, are in English. Writing in other languages tends to
be derivative or represents only a small fraction of the total output.62 However,
some of these non-English authors, among them, Stanislaw Łem, Italo Calvino
and José Saramago, are internationally acclaimed and I refer to their works.
In earlier chapters I analyzed one or several related texts at considerable
length. In this chapter, I discuss multiple texts and organize my treatment of
them around analytical categories. I do this for two reasons. No single text
explores all the ways science fiction considers immortality problematic in its
implications. Collectively they offer insight into the zeitgeist of the post-war era
and arguably helped to shape it. As Steven Connor remarked in the context of
the English novel, fiction “is not just as passively marked with the imprint of
history, but also as one of the ways in which history is made, and remade.”63
My analytical categories reflect different objections science fiction raises to
immortality, and with few exceptions, its authors have regarded immortality
with a jaundiced eye. Two of the most frequently voiced objections, boredom
and envy, are ancient concerns, although they have been given new twists by
contemporary authors. Other objections are modern, among them the like-
lihood that immortality will be exploited for selfish or perverse purposes by
governments, big business or crime syndicates. Some see it as having the
potential to destroy society or the human race. Opinion is divided on the last
question, as some authors believe that leaving the human condition behind is
the only road to progress.

62
Disch, Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, p. 2, notes that Japanese sci-fi is largely derivative.
Frongia, “Cosmifantasies,” on Italian science fiction.
63
Connor, English Novel in History, p. 1.
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248 s c ie n c e fi c t i on an d i m m o r t a l i t y

In Jack Vance’s To Live Forever one city on the planet possesses a high degree
of civilization and with it, immortality. Only a small number of its citizens gain
immortal life and do so on the basis of competition so intense that most people
refuse to engage in it and many of those who do go mad or commit suicide. For
some reason, the society has not escaped from the Malthusian population
dilemma, and every time immortality is granted, the lives of non-mortals
must be reduced by some period of time. When sixty-two new immortals are
created to compensate for a series of murders, ordinary citizens must give up
months of their lives. This provokes a popular uprising. In James Gunn’s
Immortals, the rich and powerful seek eternal life and hunt down Marshall
Cartwright and his offspring to gain it at their expense.
Frederick Pohl’s The Age of the Pussyfoot, published in 1969, explores
another unpalatable feature of immortality under capitalism: it not only costs
money to gain immortality, but even more to sustain it. Charles Forrester has
been cryogenically preserved and is revived in the year 2527. His insurance has
matured nicely, paid for his revival and left him with an additional $250,000,
which he thinks of as a small fortune. He enjoys the luxuries of twenty-sixth
century life only to run out of funds very quickly. He needs to land a high-
paying job and finds employment as a guide to Terran culture for an alien. He is
fired when he cannot answer promptly one of the alien’s questions. He sub-
sequently finds what he considers a sinecure, a job overseeing some machinery,
but quickly discovers that all of his predecessors have died from radiation
poisoning. He makes the mistake of quitting in the middle of his shift and his
remaining funds go to pay the resulting fine. Without money, he becomes
vulnerable to bored immortals looking for cheap thrills and drawn to killing
unemployed people, for whom they do not have to pay high revival costs. Sirian
the alien temporarily saves him, but he is later confronted by and must kill the
man who has been hunting him down. The plot gets even more convoluted at
this point and is no longer germane to the question of immortality.
By far the most cynical take on capitalism and immortality is Richard
Morgan’s Altered Carbon. Data storage and processing nano- and biotechnol-
ogy have progressed to the stage where people are implanted with a small
“stack” in the back of their necks at birth. It stores their relevant genetic and
other information, including memories, and can periodically broadcast this
information to secure terminals where it is stored for future use. It can guar-
antee immortality by repeated uploading into new “sleeves,” generally the
bodies of young adults. These bodies often “belong” to people who could not
afford to have themselves called out of storage. For additional money, bodies
can be enhanced and equipped with all kinds of high-tech features, including a
“neurachem” suite that provides lightning-fast reflexes, great strength and other
bells and whistles like total recall, superhearing and carbon fiber bones and
ligaments that feel no pain and are much more difficult to damage or destroy.
Such options are available to the wealthy, but only the very wealthy can afford
 b i b l i og r a p h y 347

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 th e co n s e qu e n c e s of im m o r ta l it y 251

to his mother the queen about the consequences of immortality: “There’s no

changing of the guard, no retirement of old ideas. Every error gets entrenched,
until a shock to the system is necessary to effect any change at all.”70 He is one of
a score of teenagers who are resentful of their immortal parents, whose wealth
they will never inherit. They escape from a “summer camp” on an outlying
“planette” to which they have been banished for bad behavior. In Holy Fire,
published in 1997, Bruce Sterling describes a late twenty-first century world
that has been transformed into a near-paradise by science and technology. Vice
and illness have not disappeared, but arise from the failure of well-to-do
individuals to control their appetites or look after themselves properly.
Society is governed by a gerontocracy and life-extension technology is its
leading growth industry. Mia Ziemann, a 94-year-old medical economist,
uses her life savings to restore her body to the state it was when she was twenty.
She quickly discovers that youth does not provide meaning and fulfillment, but
makes her more unhappy. She gives up her comfortable existence for life on the
European streets with powerless artists and intellectuals and others unable to
afford life-enhancing surgery. She becomes increasingly sympathetic to radical
schemes to change the world.
Opposition to gerontocracy reflects a widespread belief in the need for
renewal and change as essential to the survival and success of individuals,
groups and species. Immortality is understood to constitute a multi-pronged
threat to this renewal. People participate in society because it helps to fulfill
powerful needs, and their engagement sustains the social order and helps it to
evolve. To the extent that people no longer need society the social order will
petrify. Aldous Huxley was among the first to warn of this danger. His Brave
New World makes use of novel reproductive technology to remove child rearing
as a source of social bonding. So do the “feelies” and the ready availability of
mind-altering drugs, both of which allow people to experience pleasures in
isolation that formerly required social contact, if not intimacy. Soma, an over-
the-counter hallucinogen that offers hangover-free “holidays,” releases people
from tensions and frustrations that might otherwise be directed against the
political order. The feelies, drugs and readily available one-night stands all but
eliminate the need for religion, clubs, families and any other aspect of civil
society. Stability is further guaranteed by a rigid class structure that begins at the
hatcheries and conditioning centers where fetuses selected to join the lower
castes are chemically treated to limit their intelligence and shape their phy-
siques for specialized tasks. Higher-caste “alphas” and “betas” are more care-
fully nurtured to internalize the values and ideals considered appropriate by
World State leaders.
Huxley’s evocation of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in his characters of “Lenina,”
“Bernard Marx” and “Sarojini Engels,” and Mussolini and the Fascists in

70
McCarthy, Wellstone, p. 71.
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254 s c i e n c e f ic ti o n a n d im m o r ta l it y

Immortality and identity

When people live for many centuries, continuity becomes problematic. In
many stories and novels people accumulate more experiences and memories
than they can store in their brains. In Asimov’s Foundation series, this is also
true of androids. People and robots alike must periodically wipe clean or
severely edit their memories to make room for new ones. It did not occur to
Asimov and most of these early authors that memories might be stored
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Endless new experiences and repeated purges of memory are expected to make
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edited memory is, of course, a special case of the age-old philosophical question
of the relationship between sameness and change that I touched on in the
introductory chapter.
If people change physically and emotionally, and if their memories fade, alter
or disappear, they become “successive selves” unable to claim a core continuous
identity.73 One solution to this problem is to recognize that we are not the same
people over time. Defensible as this proposition appears, it is deeply unsatisfy-
ing to most people on psychological grounds. No doubt, some individuals
would be happy to put distance between themselves and unpleasant or unsuc-
cessful pasts and welcome the idea of becoming different persons over time.
Most of us feel a strong need for continuity, as it is commonly understood to be
an essential condition for a stable identity. Identity is valued for a suite of
emotional and practical reasons. Society also insists on continuity if marriages
and other contracts are to have meaning and if people are to be held responsible
for past behavior.
Research indicates that people feel unique and base this claim on their
character, capabilities, life experiences and how the latter are mediated by
memories. As we observed in chapter 1, this claim encounters serious problems,
because memory is a resource that we constantly reshape to help us confront
contemporary challenges. Our inability to remember these changes and to insist
that our memories are stable can be taken as more evidence of our emotional
need to defend a continuous identity. Our only enduring characteristics are
such things as fingerprints, retinal patterns, mitochondria and DNA. These
forms of continuity allow physical identification, but do not provide the basis
for psychological or emotional continuity.
Longevity and immortality intensify the continuity problem in two ways.
They greatly extend our life experiences while shortening and distorting, if not
eliminating, many memories. If we consider science fiction stories about lon-
gevity as thought experiments, they illustrate the inadequacy, even absurdity, of

73
Jonas, “Philosophical Reflections on Experimenting with Human Subjects”; Glannon,
“Identity, Prudential Selves and Extended Lives,”
 b ib li og r a p h y 355

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 imm or tal it y a nd id enti t y 257

levels. It requires a commitment to bridge species boundaries. Only then can

friendships blossom with representatives of other species and evoke the kind of
empathy that leads to expanded ethical horizons. Card’s hero, Ender Wiggin,
has tried, not unlike Plato, to make this understanding more widely available
through a text – a biography he has written of the last hive queen. Unlike Plato,
book and author are well received, in a fictional world, of course. But not
everyone is sympathetic or convinced. One of the principal plot lines of the
novel concerns the efforts of Jane, Ender and others to prevent the fleet
dispatched by the Starways Congress – the supreme human authority – from
receiving orders to destroy the one planet where humans have learned to mix
empathetically with other species. Xenocide can be read as a parable about the
age-old struggle between those committed to security at all costs and those
worried this commitment will ride roughshod over and possibly destroy those
values security is supposed to protect. As it is our values and empathy with
others that make us human, the Starways Congress would destroy our humanity
in order to protect it.
Another approach to immortality comes through artificial intelligence (AI)
and its successor program, artificial life (AL). Both research programs encour-
age us to think about life, especially human life, in connection with its ability to
perform complex cognitive tasks and how these tasks depend on information
and its processing. AI sought to establish this claim by building machines that
could ultimately rival humans in intelligence. This proved far more difficult
than early researchers envisaged, although they devised sophisticated computer
programs like Deep Blue, which in May 1997 won a six-game match against
world chess champion Garry Kasparov.76 AL researchers have reversed
the causal arrow and think of human beings as machines whose neural systems
are capable of performing complex tasks. They describe consciousness as an
emergent property and thus an epiphenomenon.77
The basis for this claim is John Von Neumann’s insight that neural systems
could be treated as Turing machines. With the help of Stanislas Ulam, he
conceived of cellular automata governed by simple rules. Depending on the
placement of agents, complex patterns develop that reproduce themselves, or
evolve into new patterns, often with indefinite life spans. This “game of life”
generated the intuition that emergent properties might explain similar develop-
ments in the natural world. Subsequent work by Stuart Kaufmann suggests that
boundary areas, where order and chaos intersect, where order is neither too

76
Hsu, Behind Deep Blue.
77
Doyle, On Beyond Living; Levy, Artificial Life; Emmeche, Garden in the Machine; Kampis
and Cansyi, “Life, Self-Reproduction, and Information”; Steels and Brooks, Artificial Life
Route to Artificial Intelligence; Brooks, “Intelligence without Representation”; Hayles, How
We Became Post-human, pp. 237–9.
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258 s c i e n c e f ic t io n a n d im m o r t a l i ty

strong nor too weak, are where innovation is most likely to occur.78 AL research-
ers describe first order emergence as properties generated by interaction among
the components of a system. Second order emergence, a rarer phenomenon, is the
product of system properties that give the system the ability to evolve. Marvin
Minsky speculates that humans may have developed this way. If so, computation
would offer us a novel perspective on human beings and their intelligence.79
Science fiction has begun to explore this understanding of life and its impli-
cations for human identity. In Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide, one of its key
characters, “Jane,” is an extraordinarily powerful and sympathetic mind. She
has somehow come into existence in humanity’s supraliminal communication
network to which computer systems on every planet and spaceship are con-
nected. When Jane realizes that the central government has sent a fleet to destroy
the planet Lusitania and its diverse life forms, she prevents transmissions from
the government to the fleet to prevent them from sending the go-ahead order. By
doing so, she risks exposure and destruction if the government shuts down the
ansible system, even temporarily. Jane is desperately trying to figure out if she is
alive or merely the artifact of a complex software program, whose instructions
she is executing. The humans with whom she is in contact conspire with her to
help save the planet and try hard to convince her that she is a sentient being on
the grounds that she has an emotional life and will to live.
Identity, as Hegel argues in his analysis of the master–slave relationship,
requires a conception of self which in turn requires a conception of others. They
need not be regarded unfavorably in any way, just somehow different.
Difference is marked off by a boundary and identities are sustained by boun-
dary maintenance. As we observed in the introductory chapter, these bounda-
ries can be porous and shifting, and usually are in practice. Science fiction
authors are interested in the boundaries of the bioengineered humans and other
life they create. They are caught in a revealing contradiction. To bring about
their diverse life forms they must, of necessity, bridge traditional and long-
standing boundaries, including those separating different species and organic
from inorganic matter.80 Most authors are nevertheless keen to defend the
integrity of humanity and deploy various strategies toward this end.
To distinguish humankind from machines many authors invoke affect. The
term has a broad lexical field and is used in the science fiction literature to
encompass not only feeling but vitality, imagination and the desire for free play,
none of which machines are thought to possess. Jane violates this distinction, as

78
von Neumann, Theory of Self-Replicating Automata; Kaufmann, Origins of Order;
Wolfram, “Universality and Complexity in Cellular Automata,” and “Computer
Software in Science and Mathematics”; Langton, “Computation at the Edge of Chaos.”
79
Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby, Adapted Mind; Minsky, Society of Mind, pp. 17–24; Hayles,
How We Became Post-human, pp. 241–4.
80
Ibid., pp. 279–82, on how boundaries are routinely broached in postmodern fiction.
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 i m m or tal it y a nd id enti ty 261

Boundary maintenance becomes more problematic when we examine it in

historical perspective. Ancient Greeks distinguished human beings from ani-
mals on the basis of their intelligence. People could speak and cook their food.
Down to the present, people distinguish themselves from animals on this basis,
although it has become somewhat more difficult to do as zoologists have
discovered that other primates are more intelligent than previously supposed.
At best, there is a sliding scale of intelligence, with humanity at the high end
distinguished from other higher life forms more by degree than kind. With
intelligent androids this gap would be closed; humans might be surpassed in
intelligence. This recognition is troubling for some science fiction writers and
raises challenging questions for others. As Asimov realized in Caves of Steel,
android intelligence would almost certainly provoke a “racist” response from
many people, and especially from those with low self-esteem or whose jobs or
livelihood were threatened by cheaper and more reliable androids.
The shift from intelligence to affect as the defining feature of human beings
may not succeed in differentiating us from computers and androids if they
become advanced enough to develop feelings. This move runs up against
knowledge that animals are capable of emotion, vitality and free play.
Recognizing this similarity, the Greeks posited intellect as the unique human
possession. In practice, neither intelligence nor affect will effectively differ-
entiate us from animals and artificial life forms. Boundary maintenance
encounters additional problems when we consider “transhumans.” Following
Kafka, some science fiction writers envisage human minds embedded in the
bodies of other species, not all of them animals.88 Some consider melding,
whereby we enter into symbiotic relationships with other terrestrial or alien
species. If any of these possibilities ever come to pass it will require us to make
even more fundamental adjustments in our understandings of what it is to be
human.
In today’s world, boundary maintenance is primarily a problem of groups,
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and fluid. For various reasons, people are sometimes admitted to “membership”
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apartheid. People routinely sneak into privileged categories, as did many
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Boundaries change in the sense that people who were once excluded can
subsequently be incorporated into the group. As noted in chapter 3, the New
Zealand Maori have not only been made fellow “Kiwis” by the dominant white
culture, but provide cultural practices and associations that whites have

88
Kafka, Metamorphosis.
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266 s c i e n c e fi c t io n a n d i m m o r t a l i ty

and wiser one. The first novel to make this move is British author Olaf
Stapledon’s The Last and First Men, published in 1930. It describes the evolu-
tion of humanity through eighteen successor species over the course of two
billion years. Influenced by Marx and his dialectic, each species produces a high
civilization but inevitably declines by virtue of its success and gives rise to a
successor.
In the post-war era, Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 Childhood’s End is undoubtedly
the most influential evolutionary novel. Clarke follows Stapledon in making
telepathy the key to transformation. It allows assimilation to the “Overmind,” a
collective alien being that absorbs human children, bringing the human race to
a higher level, but at the price of losing individual minds and personalities. The
Overmind arrives on a spacecraft, imposes world peace and prohibits space
exploration. The Overmind’s goal is to reach out and incorporate sentient
species. It is served by slave-like “Overlords” who are incapable of being
submerged and yearn for their freedom. A cult variant is the sci-fi movie, The
Day the Earth Stood Still, released in 1951. An alien spaceship lands in the
Washington DC Mall and the space visitor is met with hostility but is
befriended by a curious boy and his mother. The alien demonstrates his awe-
some powers in an attempt to convince humans to live peacefully with one
another but is shot and taken back to his spaceship by his loyal android Gort.
This film is redolent with Christian symbolism, culminating in the death and
rebirth of its alien “savior.”96
A more recent and sophisticated exemplar is Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide. It
relies on a form of telepathy to link, in this case, multiple species. The “Bugger”
hive queen communicates with its workers this way and with humans and
Pequininos, a species that spends its mature state as rooted but sentient trees.
Then there is Jane, the sentient being who lives in the “ansible” network
connecting all the computers on all the worlds inhabited by human beings
and uses telepathy to communicate with selected humans. Our species does not
merge or become transformed but becomes wiser and more understanding of
its place in the universe through its contact with other species. Xenocide is one
of several novels in a series that begins with humanity’s life-and-death struggle
with aliens, in this instance the “Buggers,” an insectoid race of whom the hive
queen represents that last survivor. In the first two novels each species attempts
to eliminate the other and humanity destroys its adversary by making use of
young combat game savvy teenagers as strategists. In Speaker for the Dead it
becomes apparent that the war was a tragedy because it might have been averted
by communication between the species. All the universe’s sentient beings can be
divided into species with whom humans can communicate and those with
whom they cannot. It is theoretically possible to live in peace with all of the

96
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951).
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270 identity reconsidered

self.” Psychological research demonstrates that identity is another illusion. We

are, and always have been, beings with consciousness, but a consciousness that
lacks continuity beyond the illusions we impose. We are multiple, conflicting and
labile selves, if judged by our self-identifications. Our self-identifications are the
result of our affiliations and roles, and their relative importance changes in
response to social cues and life circumstances. Our autobiographies, which are
the principal source of our claims of continuity and uniqueness, are notoriously
inaccurate and frequently reworked in response to our psychological and social
needs. We possess agency, but it is constrained, and what we think of as agency
often consists of desires and behavior that has been socially induced. We have no
identity, if by that we mean some coherent inner self that is relatively consistent
over time. In the absence of such an identity, a concept that presupposes its
existence has no analytical purchase.
I offer a critique of the conventional understanding of psychological autonomy.
I agree that it is very much dependent on the development of interiority and the
reflective self, both of which are generally assumed to have emerged in the late
Middle Ages, to have become more pronounced in the Renaissance and early
modern Europe and full-blown in the nineteenth century. I contend that interior-
ity is evident in the ancient world, and those who consider it a modern develop-
ment may be confusing interest in inner life with its existence. There can be no
doubt, however, that interest in inner selves and the discourses it fostered had the
effect of publicizing and legitimating interiority, which in turn strengthened it. A
similar story can be told about reflexivity, as the two concepts are closely linked.
In this connection, I stress the importance of role proliferation as a key catalyst of
modern identity because it has greatly exacerbated tensions between reflexive and
social selves. Modern selves are accordingly the product of ideational and material
changes and their interaction. They cannot be explained in terms of either alone.
Ideas clearly came first, as growing interest in interiority and selfhood developed
well before the economic changes associated with modernity.
Modern identities respond to interiority and reflexivity in different ways. I
described four generic strategies that developed to address the tensions between
reflexive (inner) and social (outer) selves. The first two are anti-modern in the
sense that they attempt to restrain or do away with interiority and reflexivity as
far as is possible. They are nostalgic, as they look back to a world that never was.
The last two embrace interiority and reflexivity, but one gives priority to social
selves and the other to internal selves. These strategies are attractive to different
kinds of people, but their appeal can also be explained by reference to the
relative strength of state and society. The two anti-modern strategies have
proven unrealistic, although they have numerous adherents. The two modern
strategies have potential, but encounter serious obstacles.
My micro-analysis focuses on the role of agency in identity construction. My
most radical claim is that it is a dialectical process that involves drawing closer to
those from whom we differentiate ourselves. Some of my texts, and psychological
 b i b l i og r a p h y 379

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 m o de r n s e lv e s 273

public discourse. It burst upon the American scene in the 1960s through the
writings of Danish-American psychiatrist Erik Erikson. Erikson was a
Freudian, and Freud was steeped in German idealism.
Historians of political thought provide a more satisfying answer by putting
discourses about the self into historical context; they portray them as the
product of a long-term intellectual and political project to construct the auton-
omous individual.4 An early move was to transfer responsibility for enforcing
moral codes from church, state and family to individuals. Another key objective
was to give individuals more choice about their identities, rather than allowing
society to impose roles and statuses. This required shifting the basis of status
away from birth and toward merit. Autonomy is generally thought to have a
long history, with origins that might be traced back to ancient Greece, but really
only manifest in the modern era, where it was the product of religious skepti-
cism, state building and industrialization.5 The construction of the autonomous
self is undeniably a modern phenomenon, although some of its fiercest advo-
cates like Rousseau and the Romantics envisaged it as a reaction against
modernity. By the twentieth century, the autonomous self came to be regarded
by many intellectuals as a means of escaping from what Weber called the
“stahlhartes Gehäuse” (iron cage) and Foucault the “disciplinary society.”6
My reading of autonomy differs from the conventional wisdom in important
ways. As noted, I emphasize the extent to which two major identity strategies
are anti-modern in their goals as they seek to limit individual autonomy by
reducing, or doing away with, interiority and reflexivity. I challenge the sharp
distinction that is routinely made between modern and ancient selves. Greeks and
Romans are said to have derived their identities and moral compasses from the
roles they performed and to have been incapable of thinking of themselves
divorced from them and their societies.7 Modern people are said to look more
to themselves for definition, routinely described as “self-definition.” This distinc-
tion originates with the nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt.8 In
sociology, it finds an influential statement in Durkheim’s distinction between
mechanical and organic solidarity. It is based on the idea that the replacement

4
MacIntyre, After Virtue; Taylor, Sources of the Self; Yack, Fetishism of Modernities; Seigel,
Idea of the Self; Martin and Barresi, Naturalization of the Soul.
5
MacIntyre, After Virtue; Taylor, Sources of the Self; Seigel, Idea of the Self. Taylor attempts to
find some sense of self in the Greeks, most notably in Plato, but it is a very thin self. See
Blumberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age; Gilson, Études sur le rôle de la pensée médiévale dans
la formation du système cartésien; Löwith, Meaning in History; Gillespie, Theological Origins
of Modernity for arguments that Christianity contributed to the emergence of modernity.
6
Weber, Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism; Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The
Weber translation is by Talcott Parsons and has been criticized by Peter Baehr, “‘Iron Cage’
and the ‘Shell as Hard as Steel’,” who suggests that “shell hard as steel” better captures
Weber’s intentions.
7
Mauss, “Catégorie de Personne.” 8 Burckhardt, Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy.
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changing roles in practice was much more difficult. It heightened interiority

and reflexivity – and also alienation to the degree that people felt more
comfortable in their assumed roles than those they were compelled to perform
on a daily basis.
Discourses and autonomy were to a significant degree co-constitutive.
Charles Taylor rightly reminds us that the modern self is not simply the
creation of the mind. It is the product of numerous changes in religious, social,
political, economic, family and artistic practices. Some of these practices were
supportive of discourses valorizing external and internal autonomy.18 Others
were distinctly at odds with them, so we must avoid being drawn into a
narrative of linear progress. The sixteenth century, where the narrative of
modernity so often begins, witnessed little change in external autonomy as
religious and state institutions became better organized and more capable of
disciplining middle-class and aristocratic subjects alike.19 For this reason,
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artifact.” The self can only be constructed and maneuver within collectively
prescribed practices and codes. The power to shape oneself is also dependent on
tolerance or support offered by the society.20 This latter point is also made by
Natalie Zemon Davis in the context of sixteenth-century French villages. She
finds considerable evidence of a normative ideal of self-expression and
autonomy, although not nearly as pronounced as in nineteenth-century
France. She attributes this difference to the confining nature of traditional
religious obligations and patriarchal family structures. Individuality and its
expression, she insists, require the external autonomy of agents.21
Tensions between individuals seeking freedom and states attempting to
regulate the lives of their citizens intensified in the modern era. Some of the
philosophers, writers and artists who pioneered the concept of self found
themselves severely constrained by this process. In chapter 5, I argued that
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his dependence on powerful patrons. Locke imagined a world in which he
would feel at home and personally fulfilled.
Chapter 4 depicts Mozart and Da Ponte in a similar light. Given the political,
economic and social restrictions of the Austria of Maria Theresa, Joseph II and
Leopold II, Mozart and his librettists had to experience the Enlightenment
vicariously. In Salzburg, Mozart was repeatedly humiliated by his patron,
Archbishop Colloredo. In Vienna, he was treated better, but still came up
against serious creative, economic and social constraints. In their operas,
Mozart and Da Ponte created worlds in which aristocrats and kings were

18
Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 206. 19 Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 1.
20
Ibid., p. 256. 21 Davis, “Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France.”
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 m a k in g s e lv e s 279

It is important to clarify what I mean by society. In Britain, in the mid-

eighteenth century, society still referred to associations that brought like-
minded people together. It also had a contractual connotation, so had gradually
come to be used to describe a polity. In the early nineteenth century, society
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beings but also had the potential to restore their humanity. Diderot insisted
that society wears away individuality instead of fostering it. Throughout the
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compelled to bow to the conventional wisdom by distinguishing two kinds of
self, one positive, the other committed to individuality with selfishness.33 In
Germany, where society was weaker still, it was regarded with correspondingly
greater suspicion. Chapter 5 describes how German philosophers, writers and
educators denigrated commercial activities and sought to focus the ambitions
of the young on grand collective projects. Most envisaged identity construction
as a national rather than individual enterprise and the state as the appropriate
focus of individual identification and fulfillment.

30
Lynch, Economy of Character, pp. 107–51; Armstrong, How Novels Think, pp. 7, 16–18,
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31
Ibid., pp. 54–6, 79–80. 32 Jaume, L’individu effacé; Lukes, Individualism, ch. 1.
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282 identity reconsidered

confident identities are most likely in families where a sense of self develops in the
context of positive feelings toward other family members and caregivers.40
Identity formation is best understood as a dialectical process in which we
become ourselves by drawing closer to others while at the same time separating
from them. At every level of social aggregation identity formation should be
studied in the context of relationships, not as an isolated individual or group
phenomenon. Other actors provide positive and negative role models as well as
feedback about our behavior, all of which is essential to how individuals,
institutions and states shape, maintain and revise their sense of self.
The self does not form so much in opposition to the “other” as it does
in conjunction with it. In the course of such an interaction, the self is
constructed and has the potential to become stretched. This understanding
of identity receives its first theoretical treatment in Plato, for whom identity is
a reflection of a universal form. People are distinct but linked to one another
by virtue of their connection to this form. Otherness is a highly visible but
superficial feature of identity.41 On a more practical level, Plato, like
Thucydides, contends that cities – that is, political orders – depend on
affection and friendship (philia). These bonds encourage empathy that ena-
bles us to see ourselves through the eyes of others. We come to recognize that
our framing of justice – and everything else – is parochial and that our
happiness and identity depend on those of our families, friends and fellow
citizens. Plato also considers friendship important because it creates an
atmosphere of trust in which meaningful dialogue becomes possible. In his
Republic, Socrates’ positions never represent any final truth. His interlocutors
make arguments that he cannot fully refute, or chooses not to. Deeper under-
standings only arise from a holistic understanding of competing claims and
positions.42
With modernity, friendship again comes to the forefront as the foundation of
order and even of human fulfillment. Hobbes describes “fellow-feeling” and
sympathy for others as natural proclivities of human beings and relies as much
on them as a Leviathan to construct and maintain society.43 Adam Smith
attributes moral sensitivity to empathy. Our imagination allows us to place
ourselves in the positions of others and to experience their pains and pleasures,
and our desire to have them experience ours keeps us from being entirely
selfish.44 Socrates’ emphasis on dialogue has been revived in the twentieth
century, and is central to the writings of figures as diverse as Mikhail Bakhtin,

40
Mahler, On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation, pp. 8–10; Bird and
Reese, “Autobiographical Memory in Childhood”; Fivush, Bohanek and Duke,
“Integrated Self.”
41
Plato, Sophist, 254d–255e; Labbarrié, Discours de l’altérité, p. 49.
42
Plato, Gorgias and Republic; Cooper, “Socrates and Plato in Plato’s Gorgias.”
43
Hobbes, Leviathan, Book I, ch. vi, p. 126.
44
Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, Section 1, chs. 1–2, Section II, ch. 4.
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 a g e n cy 285

or society.56 He roots this capacity in his transcendental idea of freedom. It

provides “a complement of sufficiency” that is based on “absolute spontaneity
of the will.”57 Hegel comes at the problem from an altogether different per-
spective. In Phenomenology of the Spirit, he emphasizes the behavioral con-
formism imposed by the conventions of language and how this limits the
spontaneity of the self. Mead offers a third take on external constraints. For
him, social categorization and its associated attributions constitute the principal
external constraint to our freedom. They give rise to the “me” – that part of the
self that internalizes the attitudes and expectations of others. However, the “I” –
the actor’s response to others – can provide a sense of freedom and initiative “as
it is never entirely calculable or merely a response to situational demands.”58
The point here is not to catalog what different theorists say about agency, but to
stress the widely shared understanding that true agency requires something
beyond simple choice and behavior based on it.59 It must be free choice, a
choice that is anchored in one’s so-called identity or rationally constructed
agenda, not merely a response to appetite, socialization or other social pres-
sures. Logically and empirically, claims of free choice are notoriously difficult to
establish. As Durkheim, among others, observed, individuals nevertheless have
a strong illusion of agency.60
Agency drives social change of all kinds, but we know relatively little about
the various mechanisms by which this happens. In some circumstances, for
example, African Americans fighting segregation, it required conscious, and
often courageous, rejection of existing social, institutional or legal realities.
Other changes are the result of countless, small, mostly unrecorded acts.
Consider how the practice of professor has changed since the 1960s.
Publishing has replaced teaching as the most important criterion for hiring
and promotion at universities, sexual relationships with students are verboten
and the boundaries of the professorial role have been redefined. The profes-
soriate has become open to qualified Ph.Ds regardless of race, religion, gender
or sexual preference and the status of professors has declined relative to many
other professions. Some of these changes were initiated from above but most
came about through practices – inside and outside the university – and in
response to value shifts in the profession and society at large.
My texts draw our attention to role playing as an important form of
agency and one that can be a powerful catalyst for changes in identities and
their associated practices. Role playing is a form of play that invites subjunctive

56
Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 19.
57
For an elaboration, Alison, “Spontaneity and Autonomy in Kant’s Conception of the Self.”
Lewis Beck, Commentary on Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason” and “Five Concepts of
Freedom on Kant.”
58
Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, pp. 175–8.
59
Mele, “Causation, Action, and Free Will.”
60
Durkheim, Rules of Sociological Method, p. 54.
 b ib li o gr a ph y 399

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288 i d e n t i t y r ec o n s i d e r e d

nobles in search of sexual adventures donned capes and masks to mix with
lower-class women. Beaumarchais witnessed this practice in Madrid and
incorporated it into Marriage of Figaro. Mozart and Da Ponte feature this
practice not only in their opera based on the Beaumarchais play, but in Don
Giovanni, where Giovanni compels Leporello to exchange costumes with him
for purposes of seduction.
In Così fan tutti, the two male suitors adopt disguises to seduce each other’s
inamorata. Critics at the time, and many since, consider its libretto morally
corrupt and entirely unsuitable to Mozart’s genius. Così fan tutti appears
to legitimate role playing for erotic ends, and worse still, to undermine
the institution of marriage by showing the arbitrary and fickle nature of the
romantic attachments on which it was increasingly based. I argue in chapter 4
that the plot facilitates the intellectual goals of composer and librettist as it
was part of their thought experiment to probe the consequences of ancien
régime and Enlightenment identities under widely varying circumstances. It
also provides the opportunity for the more sophisticated Don Alfonso
and Despina to educate the young couples by destroying their illusions about
love. By doing so, Don Alfonso advances the case for a social order based
on equal doses of reason and cynicism. Così fan tutti is an epistolary, even
revolutionary opera.
As the reaction to Così fan tutti indicates, traditionalists focused on the
perceived immorality of role playing and did their best to limit it through
regulation of dress, theater and other amusements. Chapter 4 describes how
Spanish authorities sought to suppress role playing and social mixing. The
reforming ministers wanted to reduce crime, but also objected to the social
confusion, loss of legibility, libertinage, laziness and bad hygiene they believed
capes and hats to promote. Anti-majismo legislation aroused resistance and led
to a popular revolt in 1766, known as the esquilache riot (riot of the cape and
hat). The government suppressed the demonstrations, which in retrospect
came to be regarded as the first collective revolt against Enlightenment-inspired
reforms.70 The riot had the immediate effect of politicizing habits, which in
turn encouraged their conceptualization by journalists and writers. Majismo
became more self-conscious and culturally elaborated and a principal subject of
popular theater, literature, music and art, especially inexpensive prints.
Sumptuary laws also backfired. Louis XIV was frustrated in his attempt to
regulate clothing, as were similar efforts in seventeenth-century Italy, Spain,
England and Holland.71 Diderot observed that everyone at court tried to

70
Jovellanos, Obras escogidas; Casanova, Memoirs, vol. VI, p. 73; Herr, Eighteenth Century
Revolution in Spain, pp. 184–5; Noyes, “La Maja Vestida.”
71
Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, pp. 2–3; Sennett,
Fall of Public Man, pp. 72–147; Hunt, Governance of the Consuming Passions, pp. 29, 374–5.
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reveals an abiding optimism in the prospect of individual improvement

through social interaction.
The embrace of civil society and role playing as a vehicle for identity
construction is the quintessential expression of strategy three, the first in a
temporal sense of our two modern strategies of identity construction. Both
strategies welcome interiority and reflexivity, but regard society differently.
Boswell, Smith, Hume and Mill believed that society and individual identity
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The anti-Enlightenment and Romantic movements gave the metaphor of
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Rousseau and the Romantics developed the second modern strategy of identity
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Mozart’s operas explore these different understandings of role playing
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Their characters are not undermined but strengthened by this ruse, unintention-
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more responsibly and is emotionally reunited with his wife. The most interesting
figure is Figaro who is under deep cover as a servant; he suspects, but does

84
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294 i d e n t it y r e c on s i d e r ed

Anti-Semitism has been a long-standing European social disease, but dramat-

ically intensified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as modernity’s
opponents portrayed the Jews as its principal perpetrators and beneficiaries.
From Germany east, modernity was widely judged an alien “Western” import.
Central, Southern and Eastern Europeans accordingly displayed the same
generic responses to modernity that would later become evident in the so-
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and developed anti-modern identities; groups like the Roma and Amish still
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West, as elsewhere, responses to modernity have been diverse and fluid, as have
their implications for identity.

Identity and order

Until the Renaissance, identity and order were thought to be mutually reinforc-
ing; society conferred identities and the practices associated with them sus-
tained political, religious and social orders. This relationship became
problematic when people began to distinguish themselves from their roles.
The latter were increasingly seen as artificial constructs whose performance
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modern psychology, I argue that the tension between reflective and social selves
is often pronounced and can be considered a defining psychological feature of
the modern era. This phenomenon gave rise to four generic strategies intended
to reduce the gulf between reflective and social selves.
The first two strategies, both of which I characterize as anti-modern, emerged
in the Renaissance. They attempt to resolve internal conflict by limiting, or
doing away with, interiority and reflexivity. One seeks this end by means of a
secular utopia in which individuality will be all but expunged. The other aspires
to create a religious-based cosmic order in which there will be no tension
between individuals and their society because individuals will be devout
Christians and society will instantiate practices based on their beliefs.
Thomas More, author of the first modern utopia, pioneered strategy one.88
More was deeply troubled by the growing tension between his inner self and his
political and social roles. His Utopia aimed to overcome this alienation by
submerging individuals so deeply in their social milieu that they would lose
their interiority and reflexivity. Utopia allows no visible distinctions among
people, no independent careers, no real free time and no privacy. Such a society
was intellectually appealing to More but unrealistic, and this may be why he

88
I draw on Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning.
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Wooton, David, “Pierre Bayle, Libertine?” in M. A. Stewart, ed., Oxford Studies in the
History of Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 1997), vol. XI, pp. 197–226.
Worchel, S., “A Developmental View of the Search for Group Identity,” in
S. Worchel, J. F. Morales, D. Páez and J.-C. Deschamps, eds., Social Identity:
International Perspectives (London: Sage, 1998), pp. 53–74.
Wright, John C., The Golden Age Trilogy (New York: Tor, 1994).
 identity and order 297

characterize them as dystopias. Dystopias are more diverse than utopias in their
horrors, but some very prominent works (e.g. Zamyatin’s We, Orwell’s 1984)
achieve their most chilling effects by reducing interiority and reflexivity.
Zamyatin and Orwell follow More in their regimentation, uniformity, propa-
ganda and surveillance. In Huxley’s “soft” dystopia, carrots more or less replace
sticks, but reduce interiority and reflection just as effectively by hooking
individuals on drugs and sex. People are enticed to lull themselves into a
numbing but pleasurable form of mindlessness.
Utopias and dystopias alike deprive human beings of meaningful freedom. In
Don Giovanni, Mozart and Da Ponte explore the other side of this equation: the
consequences of near total freedom. This is, of course, an instrumental goal in
strategy four. People must free themselves of all social roles and conditioning to
discover and express their inner selves. Don Giovanni suggests that efforts to
liberate oneself in this fashion would deprive us of our humanity by reducing us
to beasts governed by raw appetites. Don Giovanni is presented as the inevitable
outcome of the Enlightenment project: a man liberated from external and
internal restraints who constitutes a danger to himself and everyone around
him.94 He is intended to rebut the idealistic expectation that human beings will
use freedom and reason to make themselves into more ethical beings, as Kant
and so many Enlightenment thinkers hoped. Mozart and Da Ponte believe that
reason is more likely to be directed outwards, with the goal of satisfying
unconstrained and therefore more urgent appetites. Untrammeled reason will
not lead to a more harmonious society, but one in which a minority effectively
assert their will and exploit everyone else. This powerful minority will not be
any happier, merely driven. Die Zauberflöte further elaborates this theme. It
suggests that political orders that pretend to be based on reason and love for
humanity are really tyrannies. From our vantage point, Sarastro’s realm, like
Schiller’s Spain in Don Carlos, is a precursor of the totalitarian regimes that
plagued the twentieth century.
Don Giovanni is more an archetype than a person and the Commendatore
takes him to the underworld, not to hell. This Greek framing is appropriate
because Giovanni behaves the way Greeks expect of someone who frees himself
of social constraints. The opera can be interpreted as an avant la lettre critique
of the fourth strategy of identity construction associated with Romanticism.
Mozart and Da Ponte suggest that the project of autonomy is as dangerous as it
is hollow. Conservatives still read Don Giovanni as a warning about individual
assertion run amok, but the opera should be understood as an equally powerful
critique of the ancien régime and more traditional approaches to identity.
Mozart and Da Ponte have no sympathy for the class-based hierarchy that
sustains itself through superstition and oppression. Commoners like Leporello,

94
Adorno and Horkeimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 90–1, make a similar argument
about the Marquis de Sade.
 NAME INDEX

Adam, 57, 221, 232, 268 Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, 115
Adams, Douglas, 246 Bacon, Francis, 3–4, 67–8, 73, 77, 307
Adorno, Theodor, 10, 320–1 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 6, 34, 282, 292
Aemilius Paulus, 98 Barjavel, René, 244, 268
Aeschylus, 168 Barna, George, 212
Alba, Duchess of (Maria del Pilar de Bartelson, Jens, 45, 317
Silva), 123 Barth, Frederick, 81
Albahari, Miri, 31 Bartlett, F. C., 27, 86
Aldis, Brian, 240 Baudelaire, Charles, 3, 14
Allenby, Edmund, 160, 191 Bauman, Zygmunt, 282
Allport, Gordon, 85 Baumann, Thomas, 136, 137
Althusser, Louis, 35 Bear, Greg, 239
Anderson, Poul, 244, 247 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron
Anderson, W. S., 102 de, 114, 124–5, 128, 288, 292
Antichrist, the 2, 35, 186, 189, 191, 192, Beethoven, Ludwig van, 112, 113, 277
217–18, 226, 295 Bellah, Robert, 13, 28
Apel, Karl-Otto, 136, 137 Bellamy, Edward, 70–1, 243, 244–5,
Aquinas, Thomas, 19 305, 307
Arachne, 232 Bem, Daryl, 149
Arendt, Hannah, 315 Benedict XVI (Joseph Aloisius
Ariosto, Ludovico, 83, 99 Ratzinger), 301
Aristophanes, 73 Benford, Gregory, 238, 259
Aristotle, 19–20, 64, 65, 83, Benhabib, Seyla, 10, 54
112, 247, 292, 299, 308, 310, Bentham, Jeremy, 131, 300
311, 314 Berenskoetter, Felix, 83
Arnim, Hans-Jürgen von, 151 Berger, Peter L., 29
Arnold, Matthew, 241 Bergson, Henri, 87
Artaxerxes, 188–9 Berkeley, George, 22
Asimov, Isaac, 236, 244, 245, 254, Berlin, Isaiah, 75, 284
259–60, 261, 263, 268, 313 Bernstein, Eduard, 221
Athena, 232 Bertati, Giovanni, 117, 120
Augustine of Hippo, 11, 19, 49, Besant, Walter, 245, 249
50, 57, 58, 268, 274, 275, 285 Bester, Alfred, 246
Augustus (Gaius Octavius), 95–6, 97, Blackstone, W. J., 187
99–101, 104, 281 Bleiker, Roland, 321
Austen, Jane, 279 Blish, James, 236, 240, 243, 246, 263

415
416 name index

Bloch, Ernst, 62 Clarke, Arthur C., 59, 232, 235, 266, 312
Boas, George, 55, 56 Clarke, Samuel, 21
Bond, James, 153, 164 Clement, Hal, 237
Bondini, Pasquale, 117 Clement of Rome, 19
Boswell, James, 13, 278, 290–1, 325, Clinton, Bill, 193, 253
326–7 Clouston, J. Storer, 259
Bova, Ben, 237 Cochran, Molly, 318
Bradbury, Ray, 243 Colley, Linda, 81
Bradley, Mary E., 243 Colloredo, Hieronymus von, 111, 112,
Brewer, Marilynn, 84, 86 114, 116, 278
Brophy, Brigid, 121, 136, 138 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 20,
Brown, Arthur, 209 289, 290
Brown, Dan, 212 Connolly, William, 81, 83
Brown-Montesano, Kristi, 136, 138 Connor, Steven, 245
Brubacker, Rogers, 16–17 Cooper, Frederick, 16–17
Budry, Algis, 236, 240 Corneille, Pierre, 13, 114
Burckhardt, Jacob, 273, 274 Couperin, François, 115
Burgess, Anthony, 73 Cowper, Richard, 236
Bush, George W., 253
Butler, John, 21 Da Ponte, Lorenzo (see also individual
Byron, George Gordon, 117 operas), 10, 40–1, 51, 110, 117–33,
148–9, 213, 276–7, 288, 290, 297–9,
Cadalso, José, 123 308, 326
Cadmus, 232 Dallmayr, Fred, 321
Calvino, Italo, 245, 308 Dante Alighieri, 97, 130
Calypso, 232 Darby, John Nelson, 186, 187
Camping, Harold, 228 Darwin, Charles, 314
Čapek, Karel, 244, 259 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 276
Captain Marvel, 164–5 De Mille, Cecil B., 204–5, 206
Card, Orson Scott, 234, 237, 239, 256–7, Deci, E. L., 11
258, 263, 266, 315, 316, 319 Defoe, Daniel, 300
Carlos III (Spain), 122 Delany, Samuel R., 237, 240
Carlson, Carole, 192–3 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 35, 77, 327
Carlyle, Thomas, 13, 240 Descartes, René, 3, 19–20, 235,
Carol, Ruth, 235 310, 311
Carver, Jeremy, 237 Deutsch, Karl W., 49, 106
Casanova, Giacomo Girolamo, 125 Devil, the, 191, 192, 217–18, 222, 304–5
Cerny, Phil, 317 Dewey, John, 33
Cervantes (Miguel de Cervantes Dick, Philip K., 260
Saavedra), 51 Dickstein, Morris, 241, 242
Chabon, Michael, 215 Diderot, Denis, 20, 279, 288
Chailley, Jacques, 135, 137 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 47
Charles I (King of England), 97 Diogenes Laertius, 318
Cherryh, C. J., 236, 238 Disch, Thomas, 241, 242
Chesterton, G. K., 252 Donne, John, 183
Chrysostom, John, 286 Donnelly, Ignatius, 69
Cicero (Marcus Tullius Cicero), 11, Du Bois, W. E. B., 15
18, 20 Durkheim, Émile, 26, 29, 87, 149, 253,
Clark, Stephen, 237 271, 273, 279, 285, 306
 n am e in d e x 417

Edwards, Derek, 26 Gasset, Ortega y, 72

Edwards, Jonathan, 186, 187 Gauguin, Paul, 56
Egan, Greg, 238, 247, 256, 263, 268 Gazzaniga, Giuseppe, 120
Eichendorff, Joseph von, 151 Geertz, Clifford, 2, 25
Eichmann, Adolf, 315 Gergen, Kenneth J., 34, 37
Elias, Norbert, 289 Gernsback, Hugo, 240
Eliot, T. S., 241 Gibson, William, 268
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 28 Giddens, Anthony, 2, 25
Endymion, 232 Giles, Peter, 64
Enett, Daniel, 33 Gillespie, Michael Allen, 11
Engels, Friedrich, 42, 71, 220–3, 225–6, Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 115, 116
296, 304, 306–7 God, 187, 216, 217–18, 228, 230, 301
Eos, 232 Godwin, Joscelyn, 136
Erasmus (Desiderius Erasmus Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 13, 49,
Roterodamus), 64–7 50, 114–15, 131–2, 289, 292
Erikson, Erik, 2, 24, 25, 273 Goffman, Erving, 149
Erskine, Toni, 318, 319 Golding, William, 73
Euripides, 18 Goldoni, Carlo, 114, 117, 120, 129
Eve, 57, 60, 221, 232, 268 Goldsmith, Oliver, 114, 289–90
Goya, Francesco, 123–4
Farmer, Philip, 240 Gozzi, Carlo, 114
Faulkner, William, 233 Graham, Billy, 222
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 278 Graves, Robert, 77
Fearn, John Russell, 236 Gray, Alexander, 77
Federn, Paul, 24 Greenblatt, Stephen, 67, 276
Festinger, Leon, 228 Gregory of Nyssa, 19
Fielding, Henry, 51, 289 Grimm, Melchior, 114
Finley, Moses, 55, 64 Grotius, Hugo, 80
Fischer, John M., 235 Guardasoni, Domenico, 117
Fish, Stanley, 58 Gunn, James, 237
Ford, Henry, 75 Gurwitsch, Aaron, 30
Ford, Jeffrey, 236 Guzzini, Stefano, 50
Foucault, Michel, 9, 34–5, 77, 81, 273, 328
Franklin, Benjamin, 13 Habermas, Jürgen, 78–88, 126, 136, 137,
Franz Ferdinand (Austria), 165 283, 318
Franz Josef II (Austria), 165 Halbwachs, Maurice 26, 87–8
Frenkel-Brunswick, Else, 224 Haldeman, Isaac M., 190–1, 221
Freud, Sigmund, 87, 273, 274, 281, 314 Haldeman, Joe, 246
Fromm, Eric, 24 Hargis, Billy James, 192
Frost, Mervyn, 318, 319 Harris, Robert, 165
Frye, Northrop, 55 Haslam, Nick, 313
Frykholm, Amy Johnson, 209, 210, 211 Haydn, Joseph, 115
Furnham, Adrian, 224 Hayes, Carleton J. H., 49
Hayles, N. Katherine, 238
Gabelein, Arno C., 188, 190, 209, 221 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1, 4,
Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 136, 137, 282 14–15, 16, 24, 40, 41, 54, 77, 78–109,
Gaita, Raymond, 313 258, 280, 285, 292, 293, 294, 310, 317,
Garrick, David, 278 322, 325
300 identity reconsidered

about religion or the social order – perhaps less than there formerly was. In the
absence of consensus, we confront acute conflicts over beliefs and practices.97
Dispensationalism nicely illustrates this problem. Like all forms of Christianity,
it claims legitimacy on the basis of its understanding of the cosmic order, but
believers find the larger society bemused by, or downright hostile to, their
eschatology. Their response – the only one possible aside from hermit-like
withdrawal – is to insist that Jesus will soon prove their truth by rapturing
the faithful. This demonstration is expected to prompt mass conversions and,
after a period of tribulation, the advent of the millennium. Dispensationalists
maintain that Jesus will impose harmony between individual identities and the
social order.
Taylor may be correct in insisting that in the absence of an accepted cosmic
order there is no firm foundation for moral choices.98 But it does not follow that
people will stop making moral choices or give up their commitment to identity.
Throughout this book I have argued that continuous and unified identities are
impossible under any circumstances and belief or disbelief in cosmic orders
does not affect this reality. Toward the end of this chapter I explore alternative
ways of thinking about self-identifications. In the paragraphs that follow I
connect ethical behavior to identity in a very different way than Taylor.
Traditional European conceptions of order relied on enforcement of moral
codes by family, church and state. During the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, there was a general assault on these authorities and their self-serving
claims that they were essential to maintain order.99 Philosophers conceived of
morality as self-governance, which in turn provided the justification for people
to assume control of their lives in a wide range of domains. It also served as a
justification for the bourgeoisie to claim a higher social position on the grounds
that internal mastery of this kind is a better claim to status than birth. Locke,
Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Reid, Bentham, Rousseau, Wolff and Kant are all
major figures in this intellectual project. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe can
be read as a demonstration of how self-governance is possible. He transforms
himself from a lone castaway to a self-governing subject. He curtails his
acquisitive impulses and learns to live with others with similar impulses.100
From Locke to Kant, many philosophers nevertheless doubted that moral codes
could effectively be enforced by reason-induced self-restraint. More and
Voltaire considered belief in a vengeful god necessary to maintaining order
because those who would commit misdeeds had to expect judgment and
punishment.101 Kant thought belief in God and a “world not now visible”

97
Swaine, Liberal Conscience, for a thoughtful discussion of this problem.
98
Rist, Real Ethics, for a more detailed defense of this position.
99
Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, p. 4; Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 83.
100
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Armstrong, How Novels Think, pp. 36–7.
101
More, Utopia; Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, p. 54.
 n a m e i n de x
Legrand, Dorothée, 31
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von, 55
Leinster, Murray, 243
Łem, Stanisɫaw, 235, 243, 245
Lenin, V. I., 72, 143, 144, 221,
251, 304
León, Ponce de, 232
Leonardo da Vinci, 12, 14
Leopold II (Austria), 111
Lessing, Gottfried Ephaim, 114, 132
Levey, Michael, 136, 137
Lewis, Wyndham, 241, 242
Liebeskind, Jakob, 134, 147
Lindsey, Hal, 192–3
Locke, John, 19–21, 24–6, 36, 131, 276,
277, 293, 299, 300
Logan, George, 63
Loughner, Jared, 316
Louis XIV, 122, 148, 288
Lovejoy, Arthur, 55, 56
Lucius Mummius, 98
Luckmann, Thomas, 29
Lukács, John, 125
Lynch, Dierdre, 14
Lynd, Helen, 24
Lyotard, Jean-François, 34–5, 325,
326–7, 328
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 13, 66, 67, 286
Machinist, Peter, 18
MacIntyre, Alasdair, 2, 25, 32, 33, 192,
272, 301, 318
Mackintosh, C. H., 189
Madame Mao (Jiang Qing), 139
Madoff, Bernard, 146
Mahler, Gustav, 129
Mandeville, John, 56, 232
Manheim, Karl, 71
Mansbridge, Jane, 86
Mao Zedong, 136, 138, 139, 206, 304
Marcus Aurelius, 246
Maria Luisa (Maria Luisa Josefina
Antonieta Vicenta), 123
Maria Theresa (Austria), 111, 147
Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain
de, 114
Marlowe, Christopher, 12
Marusek, David, 237
Marvin, Lee, 316
419
Marx, Karl, 42, 71, 77, 143, 144, 220–3,
225–8, 241, 266, 272, 293, 296, 304,
306–7, 324
Maslow, Abraham, 24, 28
Mauss, Marcel, 25
McCaffrey, Anne, 237
McCarthy, Wil, 247, 250
Mead, George Herbert, 82, 271, 285, 325
Mendelssohn, Moses, 22
Mercier, Louis Sébastien, 68
Merlin, 164
Metastasio, Pietro, 116
Michener, James, 184
Mifune, Toshiro, 316
Migazzi, Christoph Anton, 124
Mill, John Stuart, 80–1, 278, 290–1,
293, 325
Miller, Walter, 243
Miller, William, 187
Miłosz, Czesław, 37
Milton, John, 97, 99, 101
Mink, Louis, 307
Mino de Fiesole, 12
Minsky, Marvin, 237, 258
Mitchison, Naomi, 237
Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 114,
117, 121
Molina, Tirso de, 120
Molotov, Vyacheslav, 141
Montaigne, Michel de, 13
Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de
Secondat, 46, 125
Moody, Dwight L., 191
Moravec, Hans, 237
More, Thomas, 5, 56, 64–8, 72, 77, 286,
294–6, 297, 300, 306
Morgan, Richard, 236, 238, 240, 248,
255, 292
Morris, William, 69–70, 226, 306–7
Morton, John, 64
Mouffe, Chantal, 83
Mozart, Constanza, 133–4
Mozart, Leopold, 112, 116, 124
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 10,
40–1, 51, 110–50, 213, 276–7,
286, 288, 290, 291–2, 297–9,
308, 326
Mumford, Lewis, 64
Münkler, Herfried, 151, 171
302 i d e n t i t y r ec o n s i d e r e d

and same-sex marriage offer contemporary examples, just as dancing, card

playing and the education of women did in the past. Cosmic orders have lots
of wiggle room and require interpretation just as constitutions and laws do.
Conflicting interpretations are often equally justifiable within the same cosmic
order. In institutionalized versions, religious authorities attempt to adjudicate
controversies, but in the West, a declining proportion of people are willing to
accept their right to impose solutions by fiat. This social reality points to a more
general problem faced by religions or philosophical systems that root themselves
in cosmic orders. Even in situations where there is a consensus about a moral
position, it does not mean everyone will act accordingly. I have seen no empirical
evidence in support of the proposition that religious people behave more ethically
than their secular counterparts. The last century provides ample evidence of both
kinds of people committing the worst kinds of atrocities.
In practice, modern roles and affiliations are multiple and often cross-
cutting. These tensions put a premium on rules and conventions that provide
guidance in role conflicts and they are routinely offered by the religious,
economic, political and other authorities. In today’s world, these authorities
are generally independent of one another and not infrequently at loggerheads.
People in search of guidance often encounter competing sets of rules, which
only intensifies their problem of choice and commitment. When rules are
reinforcing and effective, they have the potential to become unduly constrain-
ing and make it difficult for people to act in ways they think consistent with
their personalities, needs or goals.
Civil order and psychological well-being require rules, but also frequent
exceptions to them. Orders with loose, vague or ambiguous rules are invariably
fortuitous as authorities of all kinds do their best to forestall such possibilities.
For this reason, successful orders are never the result of purposeful design. It is
all the more ironic that so many intellectuals have nevertheless aspired to
overcome alienation and injustice through the rational construction of orders.
And it is to these utopian projects that I now turn.

Utopias and progress

Golden ages trace the decline of the human race from an earlier imagined state
of near-perfection. They are deeply pessimistic and generally deployed to justify
and reconcile people to current miseries and injustices. The Christian version
combines this pessimism with optimism as it holds out the prospect of resur-
rection and life in heaven.
Utopias generally advance reformist, sometimes revolutionary, projects, and
are associated with a period of Western history in which intellectuals were
optimistic about the possibility of scientific and social progress. Utopias reverse
time’s arrow, moving golden ages into the future but also making them less
 n a m e in d e x
Sargent, John, 21
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 28, 32
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 41,
113
Schickaneder, Emanuel, 40, 110,
116–17, 133–47
Schiller, Friedrich, 13, 30, 113–15, 134,
136, 138, 277, 297
Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 113
Schmitt, Carl, 78, 81, 83, 98, 103,
106–8, 109
Schneewind, J. B., 11
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 9
Schwartz, Fred, 192
Scofield, Cyrus I., 187–8
Scott, James, 283
Semele, 232
Seneca (Lucius Annaeus Seneca), 11
Sennett, Richard, 287
Serling, Rod, 185–6
Shaftesbury, Earl of (Anthony
Ashley-Cooper), 21, 300
Shakespeare, William, 11, 12–13, 134,
136, 149, 281, 286
Shaw, Bob, 236
Shaw, George Bernard, 120, 239, 245, 252
Shea, Robert, 250, 263
Shelley, Mary, 73, 236, 240, 241, 242
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 14
Sheridan, Richard, 114
Sherif, Carolyn, 86, 106
Sherif, Muzafer, 86, 106
Shilliam, Robbie, 45, 107
Shklar, Judith, 72
Shoemaker, Sydney, 32
Singer, Irving, 121
Singer, Peter, 316, 318
Sisyphus, 235
Sitwell, Osbert, 241
Skinner, B. F., 55, 72, 77, 243, 307
Skinner, Quentin, 66
Smith, Adam, 59, 132, 282, 290–1, 293,
315, 325
Smollett, Tobias, 289
Socrates (see Plato)
Sommers, Margaret, 47
Sophocles (see Antigone, Oedipus
Tyrannus), 16, 18, 20, 263, 308, 312
Spengler, Oswald, 298
421
Spenser, Edmund, 12
Spinoza, Baruch, 196
Spinrad, Norman, 244
Stableford, Brian, 236, 251
Stalin, Josef, 136, 138, 139, 141–2,
199, 208
Stamitz, Johann. 115
Stapleton, Olaf, 264, 266
Steele, Richard, 51
Stephan, Alexander L., 211
Sterling, Bruce, 237, 251
Stewart, Lyman, 188
Strauss, Leo, 272, 298, 299, 301
Strauss, Richard, 117, 120
Strawson, Galen, 32
Subotnick, Rose, 136, 138
Sumner, William Graham, 84
Superman, 218
Suvin, Darko, 240
Swanwick, Michael, 216
Swieten, Gottfried von, 112
Swift, Jonathan, 73, 232
Szilard, Leo, 233
Taine, John, 236
Tajfel, Henri, 84
Tasso, Torquato, 19, 99
Taylor, Charles, 2, 25, 32, 33, 46, 83,
272, 276, 299–300, 301, 318
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilych, 145
Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 230
Terasson, Jean, 134, 147
Terence (Publius Terentius), 11
Thatcher, Margaret, 253
Thoreau, Henry David, 28
Thucydides, 265, 282, 313, 314
Thun, Franz Joseph, 112
Till, Nicholas, 121, 134, 136, 138
Tithonus, 232, 235
Titian (Tiziano Vecelli), 12
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 327
Tolkien, J. R. R., 217, 264, 312
Tolstoy, Leo, 319–22
Torrey, Reuben, 219
Truman, Harry S., 234
Trumbull, Charles, 160, 209
Turgenev, Ivan, 284
Tyndale, William, 47, 184, 196, 227,
295, 296
422 n a m e i n de x

Ulam, Stanislas, 257 Weinberger, Jerry, 68

Weizmann, Chaim, 203
Van Gogh, Vincent, 35 Wells, H. G. (see also individual novels),
Van Vogt, A. E., 236 73–4, 75, 77, 234, 241, 242, 244, 245,
Vance, Jack, 238, 240, 248, 250, 255, 249, 252, 303
256, 292 White, Haydn, 307
Varley, John, 237, 250, 255, 263 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 14, 134
Vasari, Giorgio, 12 Wiener, Norbert, 237, 315
Vattel, Emerich de, 37 Wilde, Oscar, 14, 46, 58
Verne, Jules, 241, 243, 245 Williams, Bernard, 235
Virgil, 39–40, 61–2, 95–106, 274, 280, 281 Wilson, Gahan, 323
Vogelen, Eric, 272 Wilson, Robert Anton, 250, 263
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 300 Wolf, Christian, 41, 300
Vonnegut, Kurt, 253 Wolin, Sheldon, 53
Vygotsky, Lev, 27, 87 Wordsworth, William, 14
Wylie, Philip, 243
Wahrman, Dror, 13–14, 290
Walpole, Horace, 97, 289–91 Yack, Bernard, 3, 11
Walzer, Michael, 318 Yeats, William Butler, 284
Warren, Rick, 162
Waugh, Evelyn, 241, 242 Zamyatin, Evgeny, 73, 75, 76, 242, 244,
Weber, Max, 58, 59, 133–47, 241, 273 253, 297, 303, 306
Weber, Timothy, 220 Zeus, 60, 232
Webster, D. M., 225 Zhemchuzina, Polina, 141–2
 SUBJECT INDEX
1984 (Orwell), 73, 76, 244, 253, 303, 306
2001 Space Odyssey, 259
Actium, battle of, 95, 99
adventure (genre), 213
Aeneid (also see Virgil), 53, 78, 95–106,
213, 216–17, 281
aesthetics, 113, 157, 158, 162–3
affiliations, 16, 38, 302
Afghanistan, invasion of, 79, 81,
82, 98
African Americans, 261, 269
Africans, 314
Age of the Pussyfoot (Pohl), 248, 251
agency (see also role playing), 7–8, 13,
37, 157, 222, 262, 269, 270, 271,
284–6, 326
Alexandria library, 152
alienation, 4, 15, 156, 296
Altered Carbon (Morgan), 236, 238, 240,
248, 251, 254–6, 262–3, 292–3, 305
Altneuland (Herzl), 305–6
Amish, 5, 294
An deux mille quatre cent quarante
(Mercier), 68
anarchism, 5, 37, 327
ancien régime, 51, 110–12, 147, 288,
292–3, 297
androids (see also gynoids), 254,
259–61, 311, 313, 314
anger, 112
Animal Farm (Orwell), 245–54
anonymity, 149
anti-Semitism, 156, 173, 191, 203,
209, 293
Antigone (see also Sophocles), 16, 20,
152, 168, 322
423
archetypes, 3, 11, 18, 51, 122, 136, 274,
275, 297, 308
aristeia (honor gained through
competitions), 103
aristocracy, 123, 129, 151, 166, 298
Armegeddon, battle of, 191
artificial intelligence, 257–8
artificial life, 257–61
Auerstädt, battle of, 168, 172
Austerlitz, battle of, 172
Australia, 262
Austria (see also individual rulers,
intellectuals and composers), 133, 146,
169–70, 172, 276–7, 289
authenticity, 15–16, 23–4, 28–9, 327
autobiography, 13, 25, 50, 270, 274, 275,
278
autonomy (see also agency, authenticity,
self-fashioning), 4, 10–16, 132, 163,
270, 273–4, 276–80, 297
Back to Methuselah (Shaw), 236
Balfour Declaration, 203, 208–10
Baptist Churches, 187, 189
Barber of Seville (see also
Beaumarchais), 125
Barna Group, 203, 211–12
Barnes and Noble, 183
Baroque style, 166
Bastien und Bastienne (see also Mozart),
116–17
Bavaria, 124
Berlin, 290
Bible (see also Old and New
Testaments), 47
Bildung (general education), 153, 277
binaries, 7, 78–109, 282, 313
 ut op i a s a n d p r o gr e ss 305

The two strategies share much in common. They seek to obliterate individualism,
one by religious, the other by secular means, and dispense, as far as possible, with
individual identities by having people define themselves with reference to a
collective and its mission.
Anti-modernism in both projects finds further expression in negative
attitudes toward role playing. The Left Behind novels portray it as a form of
deception for evil ends. There is a long tradition in Christianity of the devil
adopting disguises to better corrupt people and win their souls. In Left
Behind, the devil’s disciple, Nicolae Carpathia, pursues this strategy with
great initial success, convincing his countrymen, and then the world, that
he is a man of peace and the right choice for Secretary General of the United
Nations. He quickly persuades most countries to disarm and give him dicta-
torial powers. Much of the plot of the Left Behind series concerns Carpathia’s
use of his false persona to accumulate enormous power and the efforts of a
small group of Christians, who make no pretence about who they are, to
expose him.
Most of the science fiction texts I analyzed are anti-modern in a different
sense. They offer a more nuanced but still largely negative view of role playing.
In Altered Carbon, it is done primarily for nefarious purposes. Criminals
regularly assume sleeves that make them more powerful and enhance their
reflexes or facilitate subterfuge. They give no indication of being uncomfortable
in their new bodies. By contrast, our hero Takeshi Kovacs only assumes sleeves
in the hope of returning to his original self, and never feels comfortable in any of
these other bodies. The same is true of the woman he brings back from
electronic storage and reunites with her partner. They feel estranged until she
resumes her original form.
Beginning in the Renaissance, individuals gradually had more choices
about their lives. Role playing is central to the development and exercise of
these choices as it is a vehicle for trying out roles, and sometimes by this
means, assuming or creating new identities. Certain kinds of discourses
accelerated this process. Utopias that create visions of better worlds helped
to inspire efforts to bring them about, as did Bellamy’s Looking Backward and
Herzl’s Altneuland. Dystopias depict negative features of change and efforts to
escape them through utopian projects. By the second half of the twentieth
century, they all but displaced utopias in Western literature. Dystopia is the
dominant genre in science fiction, whose authors see little hope of escaping
the inequality, corruption and alienation of the modern era. Many see these
afflictions becoming more pronounced. In contrast to utopias in which
science often helps to build a better world, dystopias uniformly portray the
social consequences of science in a negative light. Immortality is the gold
standard of scientific breakthroughs because it has been an enduring human
dream, and one seemingly beyond the reach of science until quite recently. In
science fiction, it often develops as part of a suite of scientific, engineering and
 su b j e c t in d e x
deception, 287, 299
Deep Blue, 257
democracy, 159, 231, 253
Democratic Peace, 81, 98, 109
destiny, 164
Deutsches Nationaltheater, 134, 135
dialogue, 283, 292, 314
diaries, 274
Dictionaire de la musique (see Rousseau)
Die Entführung aus dem Serail
(Abduction from the Seraglio) (see
also Mozart), 114, 115–20
Dio (Knight), 268
Discourse on the Origin and Foundation
of Inequality Among Men (see also
Rousseau), 22
Dispensationalism (see also
premillennialism, Left Behind
novels), ix, 5, 41–2, 43, 184–5, 186,
230–1, 267, 283, 295, 304, 306, 313,
323, 328
division of labor, 4, 284, 324–8
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
(Dick), 260
“Doing Lenin” (Benford), 237, 238
Don Carlos (see also Schiller),
138, 297
Don Giovanni (see also Mozart), 10,
40–1, 110–11, 116–33, 134, 135, 148,
213, 288, 290, 291, 297
Don Juan (Molière), 117
Don Juan, 117
Don Quixote, 51, 263
drama giocoso, 129
Dune (Herbert), 230, 239, 264
dystopias, x, 6, 39, 42, 43–4, 51–4, 73–7,
138, 145, 230–1, 245, 264–5, 271, 297,
303, 305–7
Earthlight (Clarke), 242
Eastern Europe, 301
Ecclesiazusae(Aristophanes), 73
Eclogues (see also Virgil), 95
economic development (see also
Industrial Revolution), 69, 70
Edda, 151
Egypt, 137
Émile, 315
425
empathy, 256–7, 280, 282, 314–17
empiricism, British (see also
liberalism), 5
“End of Summer” (Budry), 236, 240
England, 13–14, 152, 169
Enlightenment, 40–1, 58, 59, 62,
110–50, 151–82, 277, 288, 290
ensembles, 119
entiativity, 79, 84
environment, 70
Episcopalian Church, 186
esquilache riot, 123, 288
Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (see also Locke), 19, 20
ethical cross-pressures, 323
ethical discourses, 54, 300
ethical systems, 2, 256, 300, 301–2
ethics and identity, 7, 272, 290, 299–300,
314–28
eugenics, 236
Exile’s Gate (Cherryh), 236
Eyes of Heisenberg (Herbert), 236
Fabian Society, 77
fact-value distinction, 45
Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury), 243
fantasy (genre), 213, 216–17, 234, 262–3
fascism (see also Germany, Nazi), 174
Fear No Evil (Henlein), 236
feminist ethics, 318
Foundation novels (Asimov), 236, 244,
254, 259, 263, 268
Fountain of Youth, 232, 233
France, 107, 164, 167, 168, 169, 171, 173,
179, 181, 276, 278, 322–3, 324
Franco-Prussian War, 179
Frankenstein (Shelley), 236, 240, 241,
256
Freemasonry, 111, 114, 135–6, 138, 139
Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden,
133–4
French Revolution, 3, 133, 166
French Revolutionary and Napoleonic
Wars, 80, 108, 124, 133,
151, 277
friendship, 282, 321–7
From a Changeling Star (Carver), 237,
238
426 subject index
Fundamentalism (see also pre- and
postmillennialism,
Dispensationalism), 230, 324
Furthest Shore (Le Guin), 264
Gaia hypothesis, 316
Garden of Eden (see also Adam, Eve,
Genesis and under Hebrew Bible), 184
Gay Science (see also Nietzsche), 164,
165
Geisteswissenschaft (humanities), 155
gender, 265
Genealogy of Morals, 8
Genesis, 55, 57–9, 62, 184, 230, 306,
312–13
Georgics (see also Virgil), 95
German Constitution (see also Hegel),
79
Germany (see also Bavaria, Prussia,
Revolutions of 1818, Franco-Prussian
War, Sonderweg, Bismarck and
Hitler), 41, 43, 107–8, 276, 277–8,
289, 290, 324; imperial, 172, 181–2;
Kultur, 172, 180, 278; middle classes,
153, 154, 179; Nazi, 173, 174, 176,
179–80, 208, 261, 301; Weimar, 154,
175–80
Geschichte des Agathon (Wieland), 14
Gilgamesh, 59
Giovanni Temorio (Goldoni), 117
God Emperor of Dune (Herbert), 239
golden ages, 39, 41, 42, 43, 51–4, 55–62,
145, 146, 232, 233, 271, 277, 302, 303
Goodbye Lenin, 58
Gothic (genre), 241
“Götter Griechenlands, die” (see also
Schiller), 160
Grand Secret (Barjavel), 268
gravitas (order, purpose, commitment),
102
Great Awakening, 186
Great Depression, 191
Great Instauration (see also Bacon), 68
Gulliver’s Travels (Swift) 73, 232
gynoids, 260
hallucinogens, 316
Hamlet (see also Shakespeare), 13, 28
Hanover, New Hampshire, 326
Heaven Makers (Herbert), 247
Hebrew, 190
Hebrew Bible, 50, 53, 209; Daniel, 186,
187, 188–9, 193; Ezekiel, 57, 192;
Ezra, 193; Jeremiah, 191; Genesis
(see also Garden of Eden, Adam,
Eve), 188; Nehemiah, 188;
Zephaniah, 207, 213–14
Hegel, G. W. F., 1
Hell in the Pacific, 316
hermeneutics, 43, 137
Hinduism, 233
History of Richard III (see also More), 67
history, 164–5
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
(Adams), 246
Holland, 288, 289
Hollywood, 306
Holocaust, 55, 108, 191
Holy Fire (Sterling), 237–8, 248, 251
hubris, 265
humanities, 48
Hyde Park (London), 301
I Robot (Asimov), 230, 313
identitarian thinking, 320–1
identity (see also self); ancient vs.
modern, 273–5; boundary
maintenance, 231, 258–62, 272, 310,
314–28; bodies, 235, 255; children,
281; construction of, 78–109, 231,
269–71, 276, 281–3; collaborative,
281–3; collective, 23–4; concept of,
16–17, 269; dialectical process, 7,
270–1; discourses, 2, 8, 276–80;
fragmented, 10, 321–8; genealogy,
16–24; illusions concerning 1–2, 6, 8,
10, 24–30, 38–9, 272–3, 327; multiple,
254, 255–6, 262, 270, 319–23, 326;
national, 25, 106–9; projects, 2;
reflective, 8, 299
species, ix, 42, 231, 272, 283, 299–310;
strategies of, 4–6, 37, 278–9, 291,
294–6, 304, 324–8; Western vs. non-
Western understandings, 2–3, 25
Idomeneo (see also Mozart), 115, 116
Iliad (see also Homer), 39, 50, 53, 56, 60,
78, 87–106, 207, 213–14, 263, 274–5,
280–1
 subject index
Illuminatus Trilogy (Shea and Wilson),
247, 250, 263
immortality, 231–68, 281–313;
collective minds, 239; definitition,
234; virtual, 237–8
Immortality Factor (Bova), 237, 238
Immortals (Gunn), 237, 248, 250
in- and out-groups (see also identity
construction, binaries), 84–7, 317
Industrial Revolution, 69, 73, 151, 225,
240, 241, 273
Inferno (Dante), 130, 131
information revolution, 237, 238
Inner House (Besant), 247, 249
Inquisition, 262
Intelligence Gigantic (Fearn), 236
interiority (see also identity
construction), 11–14, 227, 270,
273–6, 291, 296, 324, 326
international law, 80
international non-governmental
organizations, 80
Iraq, invasion of, 80, 81, 98
Ireland, 314
Island (Huxley), 55, 72, 77
Island of Dr. Moreau (Wells), 241
Islands in the Sun (Clarke), 242
Israel, 191
Italy, 288
Japan, 148–9, 157, 174, 180–1, 234, 261,
301
Jena, battle of, 167, 168, 169, 172
Jerusalem, 188, 191, 203, 211–12
Jews, 58, 60, 124, 131, 188–9, 191, 192,
203, 208–10, 262, 322
John Birch Society, 193
Julie, 289
King Lear (see also Shakespeare), 62
Kultur (see Germany)
La finta giardiniera (see also Mozart),
113
Labour Party (Great Britain), 77
Last and First Men (Stapledon), 264,
266
Last Judgement, 19
427
Latin America, 301
Left Behind novels, 41–2, 53, 183,
267–8, 296, 303, 304, 305; continuity,
200–3; gender, 203, 210–11; Jews,
203, 208–10; Millennium, 203–8;
plot, 193–6; readers, 203, 211–12,
230; theology, 196–9; racism,
200–1
Leipzig, battle of, 172
Leopoldstädter Theater, 134
Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism (see
also Schelling), 151
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
(see also Schiller), 3, 138, 155, 159
Leviathan (see also Hobbes), 19, 20, 51,
285–93
liberalism, 5, 37, 83
libertinage, 122–6, 131
lieto fine, 126, 130
linearity (see narratives)
locavore movement, 327
London (see also Hyde Park;
National Gallery), 278–9, 287,
319–23, 326
London School of Economics, ix, 43
longevity, 231–68
Looking Backward (Bellamy), 70–1, 243,
244, 305, 307
Lord of the Flies (Golding), 73
Low Countries, 171–3
Lulu (Liebeskind), 147
Macedonia, 81, 98, 109
Magic Flute (see Die Zauberflöte)
Maja vestida (Goya), 123
majismo, 123–4, 288
Man Without Qualities (see also Musil),
29–30, 51
Mannheim, 114, 115
Maoris, 79–80, 84, 261
Marriage of Figaro (see also
Beaumarchais), 31, 125
marriage, 64, 127, 299
Martyrdom of Man (Reade), 243
Marxism (see Engels, Marx, socialism)
masked balls (see masquerades)
masquerades, 128–9, 147, 287–90
materialism, 168–9
308 i d e n t i ty r e c on si d er e d

people think of linear narratives as “natural” forms of expression that capture

the essence of the world and ourselves. Some philosophers in the phenom-
enological tradition contend that narratives are central to our being because
they allow us to incorporate the past into the present in meaningful ways.106
Kantian-style isomorphism between our minds and the world is highly ques-
tionable, although it is deeply entrenched in Western philosophy and culture.
Efforts by novelists from James Joyce to Alain Robbe-Grillet and Italo Calvino
to break free of linear structure do not appeal to mass audiences because of the
difficult demands they make on readers accustomed to linear narratives.
There is nevertheless nothing “natural” or superior about linear structure.
Such beliefs are based on the false understanding of causation and its
representation.
Linearity is distinguished by its causal understanding of the physical and
social worlds. In such narratives, earlier events or developments are assumed to
be responsible for later ones and constitute the thread that ties stories together.
Other forms of representation are available, and some have a long history in
Western culture. Aristotle, while aware of efficient, or preceding causes, also
emphasizes telos, the ends objects and living things are intended to serve. The
purpose of the acorn is to give rise to an oak, and a story about it would work
backwards from this end to explain various stages of transformation and
growth.107 The New Testament is framed this way, as are Marxist accounts of
history; their respective oak trees are the second coming and communism.
Greek tragedy and some modern fiction employ archetypes, as Mozart and Da
Ponte do in Don Giovanni. While telos-driven stories and archetypes are often
embedded in linear plots, causation is external to them. Depending on how we
read Sophocles, Oedipus’ actions are attributable to fate or his character, either –
or both – drive the plot forward.
Modern understandings of linear causation build on the pioneering work of
David Hume. He reasoned that “X” could be considered the cause of “Y” if there
was a constant conjunction between them and “X” precedes “Y” temporally.108
This “thin” approach to causation undergirds positivism and its search for
regularities. In the course of the twentieth century, non-linear models have
become prominent in the physical and biological sciences. They assume that the
physical and biological worlds are complex, open-ended systems in which
initial conditions, accident and confluence are important. So-called variables
often interact in non-additive ways, and their effects depend on the presence or
absence of other factors. Even linear systems with known feedback loops can
quickly become non-linear and unpredictable when some of their parameters

106
Carr, Time, Narrative, and History, pp. 51–2, for a strong statement of this position.
107
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 2.2 and Physics 7.2, 8.5, 256a4–256b27.
108
Hume, Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, pp. 26–7, 41–5.
 subject index
plantation capitalism, 125
Players of Null-A (van Vogt), 236
poisēs, 159
Poland, 180
polis, 39
Pope Julius II (Raphael), 12
Porto Alegre summit, 327
positivism, see social science
post-structuralism, 47, 77, 320–1, 325
Postmillennialism, 186, 221
postmodernism (see post-structuralism)
practices (as related to identities),
46–7
Prague, 117
Pre-Raphaelites, 226
premillennialism (see also
Dispensationalism), 184, 220
Presbyterian Chruch, 187, 189
Prince (see also Machiavelli), 66, 190
procreation, 267–8
progress, 3, 271
Progressive Movement, 192, 213, 220
prophecy (see also Dispensationalism,
Left Behind novels), 183, 223
Protector (Niven), 237
Protocols of the Elders of Zion (see also
anti-Semitism), 203, 209
Prussia, 41, 154, 157, 168–9, 172, 277
Punch, 314
Pydna, battle of, 98
Québecois, 108
R.U.R. (Čapek), 244, 259
racism, 261, 313–14
Rajneeshees, 5
rapture (see also Dispensationalism,
Left Behind novels), 188, 207–8, 211,
213, 214
RaptureReady.com, 184
rational choice (see social science)
Ravage (Barjavel), 244
Reefs of Space (Pohl), 237
Reflections of a Non-Political Man
(Mann), 178
reflexity (see also identity construction),
4, 16, 227, 273–6, 277, 291, 324
reincarnation, 235
429
Renaissance (see also individual artists,
philosophers and writers), 61, 270,
271, 272, 275, 294, 305
Rendezvous with Rama (Clarke), 242
Republic (see also Plato), 59, 256
Republic of South Africa, 261
Revolutions of 1818, 168, 169, 175
Ring Cycle (Wagner), 151
Ringworld Engineer novels (Niven), 237
Ritornelli, 136
Riverworld (Farmer), 240
Robinson Crusoe, 300
Robot novels (Asimov), 259
role playing, 270, 271, 275, 285–93, 299,
305
roles, 4, 16, 38, 148, 283, 284, 294, 297,
302
Roma, 294
Roman Catholicism (see also
Christianity), 19, 47, 58, 59, 114, 123,
186, 295
Roman Empire, 80, 98, 109
Romanticism, 2, 5, 10, 15, 41, 49, 163,
273, 284, 290, 291, 297, 326–7
Rorschach Test, 54
Rosicrucianism, 139
Russia (see also Soviet Union), 50, 157,
172, 173, 180–1, 223, 226, 227
Russian Revolution, 75, 76
Salzburg (see also Mozart), 115, 124,
170
Sam’s Club, 183
Sandmann (Hoffmann), 236
Sands of Mars (Clarke), 242
Satmar, 5
Scandinavia, 171, 301
Schild’s Ladder (Egan), 237, 238, 268
science, 155, 159, 161, 174, 231
science fiction (see individual authors
and titles), 41–3, 51, 207–8, 213, 214,
230–68, 269, 272, 299, 305–6, 311,
312; as literature, 242; origins, 240–2;
objections to immortality, 234,
245–54, 312, 325; progress, 242; social
practices, 244
Scopes Trial, 189
secularism, 299, 314
310 identity reconsidered

and their activities in non-linear ways.115 In so-called postmodern culture,

unitary identities are giving way to unstable, pastiche identities.116 The recog-
nition, even quest, for such identities is reflected in dress that mixes diverse
styles that promote distinctive, but often illegible, presentations of self.
In the absence of significant pressures to rethink the nature of identity, it
seems unlikely that non-linear forms will ever challenge their linear counter-
parts. Some feminists claim that autobiographical narratives by women are less
linear than male ones, but for the foreseeable future, linear narratives will
remain dominant for both sexes, as they are essential to the affirmation of
unified and consistent selves.117
Could we think about our lives in non-linear ways within the framework of
linear narrative? This might take the form of parallel linear narratives that track
the development of multiple selves. Such narratives would not capture the
reality of social life as well as their non-linear counterparts, but they would
allow life narratives to support more complex understandings of the self.
Multiple narratives would also encourage us to think about some of the con-
nections between or among different framings and the extent to which the
dominance of any of them are partial and contingent. If so, we might also
consider other selves that might have been or might yet become. For some
people, reflection of this kind could serve as a spur to personal development and
a more humble understanding of themselves, and even of our species.

What makes us human?

Over the millennia there have been many attempts to distinguish humans from
other animals. Most markers build on our extraordinary cognitive capacity.
Ancient Greeks emphasized our ability to speak and cook food.118 Aristotle
insisted that different forms of life have different kinds of souls. Only humans
have “intellectual” souls, and with them, the ability to reason.119 Christians
followed Aristotle in associating humanity with souls, but of the immortal
Platonic kind. Descartes connected souls to cognition and argued that animals,
who lacked souls, could not think and were accordingly machine-like in their
behavior. Modern thinkers like Kant and Hegel also emphasized reflexive
capabilities. Kant proclaimed: “The fact that man can have the idea ‘I’ raises
him infinitely above all the other beings living on earth.”120

115
Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock. 116 Gergen, Saturated Self, pp. 145–7.
117
Freccero, “Autobiography and Narrative,” on gender, Lebow, “Constitutive Causality.”
118
Aristotle, Politics, 1253a9–11. Condillac and Herder would make similar arguments.
119
Aristotle, De Anima, 434a6–7, a17.
120
Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, p. 9 and Critique of Practical Reason,
5:161–2.
 s u b j e c t in de x
Troy, 153
Tübingen Stift, 158, 159–82
tyranny, 5, 72, 231, 324
United Nations, 203, 209
United States (see also Bush), 106, 152,
243, 252, 284, 301, 304, 325
utilitarianism, 55
Utopia (see also More), 65–7, 72
utopias, 6, 39, 46, 51–4, 61–2, 145, 146,
243–4, 245, 248–50, 252, 264–5, 271,
294–7, 302–3, 305, 306–7, 325
Vicenza, 152
Vienna (see also Mozart), 112–13,
115–16, 117, 123, 124, 169, 276,
277–8, 289
Vietnam, 324
Walden Two (Skinner), 55, 72, 77,
243, 307
War from the Air (Wells), 242
Waterloo, battle of, 172, 216
We (Zamyatin), 73, 75, 76, 242, 244,
253, 303, 306
Wellstone (McCarthy), 247, 248,
249, 250
Werther, 130, 131, 289
431
Wheaton College, 190
White Britain and Black Ireland
(Lebow), 313
White Plague (Herbert), 253
women, 70
Word for World is Forest (Le Guinn),
243
Works and Days (see also Hesiod), 60,
61, 95
World of Null-A (van Vogt), 236
World Out of Time (Niven), 247, 249
World Set Free (Wells), 234
World War I, 75, 108, 174, 175, 179–80,
225
World War II, 73, 77, 108, 176, 191, 328
Wyrms (Card), 237, 238
xenia (guest friendship), 89
Xenocide (Card), 230, 239, 256, 258,
266–7, 315
Yiddish, 190
Zaide (see also Mozart), 114
Zauberflöte, Die (Magic Flute) (see also
Mozart), 40–1, 53, 111, 213, 220–9,
297, 303, 304
Zionism, 208