9-11: Waves of Anger, Fear Circulated over the Earth

By Robin Bates | Published: September 10, 2026

Friday – 25th Anniversary of 9-11

I’m currently in Iowa for a funeral so, to commemorate 9-11, I’m reposting a two-year-old essay on W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939. It was written while Joe Biden was still president but seems even more relevant now, especially the lines

The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Two years ago I optimistically talked of turning the page on Trumpism. In more ways than I ever imagined, the “unmentionable odor of death” continues to offend our September nights.

Reposted from September 11, 2024, slightly revised

I recently came across an article that references W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” which reminded me that many people turned to it 23 years ago on this day. Auden was writing about something even more momentous, the day that Hitler set off World War II with his invasion of Poland. We see the poet floundering as he grasps for hope, just as we were floundering in 2001.

First, however, let me explain the recent reference. Tufts history professor David Ekbladh uses Auden’s phrase “low dishonest decade” to make the point that our situation in 2024 may be closer to Auden’s than we think. Just as authoritarianism was on the rise in the 1930s, so we today are also seeing assaults on democratic rule. “To a critical eye,” Edbladh writes, “the world [today] looks less like the structured competition of that Cold War and more like the grinding collapse of world order that took place during the 1930s.” He fears that we too may be heading towards liberal democracy’s demise.

On this happy note, I turn to what people experienced on that September day 25 years ago. To capture his own feelings, Scott Simon of National Public Radio read for his audience the following excerpts from Auden’s poem:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odor of death
Offends the September night.
…

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
…

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Poet Eric McHenry, writing about the poem nine days later in Slate, noted that poetry is meant for occasions like this. When we get “nothing but cant from public figures and TV personalities,” he wrote, “people crave language that’s as precise as their pain.”

Simon leaves out some of Auden’s historical passages. One of them alludes to the Greek historian who recorded the catastrophic rise of those demagogues that brought an end to Athens’ democratic experiment:

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Having just finished watching Trump debating Kamala Harris, I have to say that “elderly rubbish” sounds about right for dictators (or at least this wannabe dictator). “Habit-forming pain,” meanwhile, is another way of capturing how we’ve managed to normalize him, the way that abused women normalize her husband’s violence.

McHenry also notes Auden’s reference to “blind skyscrapers” that “use their full height to proclaim/ The strength of Collective Man.” To the hijackers, the Twin Towers seemed to signal America flexing its muscles before the world, which is one reason why they chose them. In bringing them down, they undermined Americans’ easy self-confidence—just as, in recent years, Trump has undermined our easy confidence in democracy’s guardrails:

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream.
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

In the face of Hitler’s invasion, Auden resolves to “show an affirming flame.” Following 9-11, America too came together (although, granted, not with positive results as George W. Bush used our euphoria over new-found unity to steer us into an insane and unjust war). Today, we can once again refuse to surrender to “negation and despair.” Looking back over last night’s presidential debate, with Harris on the offense and Trump in a defensive crouch, there’s hope that (to use one of her expressions) we might finally be turning the page on Trumpism.

Further thought: Auden later disavowed the poem and refused for the longest time to allow anthologies to include it. For instance, in retrospect he thought the line “We must love one another or die”–which he coined when he was desperately looking for solace–was hopelessly naive. After all, we are going to die anyway. But to defend the poem against the poet, there are different ways of dying, one of which is forgetting that love is always an option. McHenry makes the good point that Auden was frustrated that language, even the language of poetry, couldn’t do justice to the moment.

The frustration is common amongst great poets. As Shakespeare has Theseus say in Midsummer Night’s Dream (he’s being generous about the wretched play the wedding party is watching), even “the best of this kind are but shadows.” And if Shakespeare, who did in fact write “the best of this kind,” is dissatisfied, what help for the rest of us? His point, however, is that no artistic creation can live up to vision a poet has in his or her mind. What’s important is that Auden’s poem brought deep comfort to us at a time when we needed deep comfort. At that moment, his dissatisfaction with his creation was irrelevant.

Or as Theseus notes in a follow-up observation, “And the worst are no worse if imagination mend them.”

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Caste in India and the U.S.

By Robin Bates | Published: September 9, 2026

Thursday

Of the non-fiction books that have impacted me the most over the past ten years—there haven’t been many since I normally stick to novels—Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents leads the list. For the first time in my life I understood why racism persists in America, despite Martin Luther King, Barack Obama, and the many, many African Americans one sees in sports, entertainment, and public life.

Wilkerson contends America has an unacknowledged caste system, which she compares to India’s treatment of the untouchables or Dalits and the Nazis’ systematic discrimination against the Jews. With this in mind, I have found myself particularly attuned to mentions of caste in the Indian novels I have been reading. These include A Fine Balance, by Indian Canadian author Rohinton Mistry, and Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things.

Mistry’s account of the Dalits dramatizes for me what we are seeing in this country. I’ll share passages in a moment but first some words on how America’s caste system works. 

Every immigrant group, upon entering America, is tacitly invited to see themselves as superior to African Americans, and not a few accept the invitation. Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish Became White is one study of the process, but certain Eastern Europeans, Asians (South, East, and Southeast), Mexicans, Central and South Americans, West Indians (most notably Cubans but not only Cubans), and even Africans have also attempted to buy in.

A former Ethiopian student who lived with us recently told me a revealing story. When he was working in the campus coffee shop, he had both white and Black friends amongst the staff. At one point, however, an otherwise kindly white worker informed him that one of his Black friends was an “n-word.” In other words, seeing that he was missing a distinction that helped define who she was, she set out to instruct him. Fond of him, she thought she was doing him a favor by inviting him to join the in-group. 

In the same conversation—we were dining with him and his wife in Washington, D.C.—we learned about a Trump supporter in the Ethiopian community who had become impossible to talk to. Among other things, this woman characterized longtime African Americans (i.e., the descendants of slaves) as shiftless and lazy. She was sure that Trump would distinguish her from these others because she saw herself as a hard worker.

MAGA, of course, has its own opinions on the subject. Certain high-profile influencers have gone after J.D. Vance’s Hindu wife, and on Elon Musk’s X there is currently debate about whether Jews can be considered white. While Musk himself says that Jews “look extremely European in every way” to him, he adds that DNA testing is needed to know for sure. 

Our caste system is 300+ years old so I can only imagine how entrenched it is in a country like India. In Mistry’s novel we get a glimpse into how Dalits were taught their place in a small village in the early part of the 20th century:

For walking on the upper-caste side of the street, Sita was stoned, though not to death–the stones had ceased at first blood. Gambhir was less fortunate; he had molten lead poured into his ears because he ventured within hearing range of the temple while prayers were in progress. Dayaram, reneging on an agreement to plough a landlord’s field, had been forced to eat the landlord’s excrement in the village square. Dhiraj tried to negotiate in advance with Pandit Ghanshyam the wages for chopping wood, instead of settling for the few sticks he could expect at the end of the day. The Pandit got upset, accused Dhiraj of poisoning his cows, and had him hanged.

We also learn how the class distinctions are passed on to the next generation:

Thus Dukhi listened every evening to his father relate the unembellished facts about events in the village. During his childhood years, he mastered a full catalogue of the real and imaginary crimes a low-caste person could commit, and the corresponding punishments were engraved upon his memory. By the time he entered his teens, he had acquired all the knowledge he would need to perceive that invisible line of caste he could never cross, to survive in the village like his ancestors, with humiliation and forbearance as his constant companions.

At one point, when Gandhi is campaigning for freedom from British rule, Dukhi hears members of the Indian National Congress speaking out against the caste system. “How can we even start to be strong,” says one, “when there is a disease in our midst? First we must be rid of this disease that plagues the body of our motherland.” He continues,

What is this disease? you may ask. This disease, brothers and sisters, is the notion of untouchability, ravaging us for centuries, denying dignity to our fellow human beings. This disease must be purged from our society, from our hearts, and from our minds. No one is untouchable, for we are all children of the same God. Remember what Gandhiji says, that untouchability poisons Hinduism as a drop of arsenic poisons milk.

Speaking to a Muslim friend, Dukhi says, “I wonder if the zamindars in our villages would ever clap for a speech about getting rid of the caste system,” to which his friend replies, “They would clap and go on in the same old way. The devil has stolen their sense of justice, nah—they cannot see or feel.

His friend wants Dukhi to send his two sons to him to apprentice as tailors, which would be a radical departure. Dukhi resists until his young sons are punished for entering a school. He has their thrashing explained to him:

Your children entered the classroom. They polluted the place. They touched instruments of learning. They defiled slates and chalks, which upper-caste children would touch. You are lucky there wasn’t a holy book like the Bhagavad Gita in their cupboard, no sacred texts. Or the punishment would have been more final.

The punishment prompts Dukhi to take up his friend’s offer, even though he loses his own livelihood in this departure from custom. His sons do in fact become tailors, entering the world to become part of the book’s subsequent plot.

I know that the fortunes of the Dalits have changed significantly since that time. Yet, as in America, despite legal protections discrimination still continues.

To switch novels, I think of the way that police treat a Dalit character (Velutha) in The God of Small Things. When a Christian Syrian woman has a relationship with Velutha (the action is set in 1969), the police track him down and beat him to death. They appear driven, not by individual will, but by thousand-year-old “love laws” that dictate “who should be loved, and how. And how much.” Roy tells us that the book’s twins, who have befriended Velutha and who witness his murder,

were too young to know that [the police] were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilizations fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of the powerlessness.

Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.

Men’s needs.

Describing the killing of Velutha as “history in live performance,” Roy says that the police “were exorcising fear”:

Unlike the custom of rampaging religious mobs or conquering armies running riot,…the posse of Touchable Policemen acted with economy, not frenzy. Efficiency, not anarchy. Responsibility, not hysteria. They didn’t tear out his hair or burn him alive. They didn’t hack off his genitals and stuff them in his mouth. They didn’t rape him. Or behead him.

After all they were not battling an epidemic. They were merely inoculating a community against an outbreak.

If one realizes that America’s own caste system goes this deep, it explains a lot about our politics. So what if Democratic policies benefit workers and farmers while GOP tax cuts benefit only the wealthy. MAGA Republicans are deeply grateful to Trump for his birther lie about Obama and his assault on Diversity, Inclusion and Equity. They love that he hates the people they want to feel superior to.

It helps explain why his poll numbers aren’t even lower.

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Steinem, Rich, Atwood, and Men in “Walls of Iron”

By Robin Bates | Published: September 8, 2026
Gloria Steinem

Wednesday

Yesterday, using poems by Adrienne Rich, I discussed how Gloria Steinem helped free women from myths that entrapped them in confining identities. Today, turning again to Rich and also to Margaret Atwood, I show how Steinem did the same for men like myself.

For a vivid exemplar of a man trapped in a corrosive male myth, one need only look at our Secretary of Defense (or “Secretary of War,” as Pete Hegseth likes to call himself). By performing the caricature of the manly man, Hegseth hides his insecurities. Real men don’t abuse women, blow up fishing boats and Iranian weddings, fire generals who disagree with them, and do push-ups on national media. The amount of energy expended on reassuring oneself takes a mental toll.

I’ve written several posts on this anxiety, which often shows up in comedy. Fear of being labeled a cuckold, of being a man who can’t satisfy or control his wife, is a running joke in Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Cavalier poets, and Restoration comedy. As Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu pointed out in the 18th century, a woman needed only to hint that she was unfaithful for a man to fall apart: the husband might appear to have the power but it didn’t take much to shatter it. (See my post on her “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge to Her Husband.”)

In “The Knight,” written in 1951, Rich shows the inner toll that maintaining a manly façade exacts. As I noted in a previous post on the poem, Rich shows the inner misery of men who are obsessed with maintaining the image of themselves as heroic knights. The first stanza captures how they want to be seen, the second shows how they feel inside, and the third wonders what it will take to free them of the metal/mental trap in which they have caged themselves:

The Knight

A knight rides into the noon,
and his helmet points to the sun,
and a thousand splintered suns
are the gaiety of his mail.
The soles of his feet glitter
and his palms flash in reply,
and under his crackling banner
he rides like a ship in sail.
 
A knight rides into the noon,
and his only eye is living,
a lump of bitter jelly
set in a metal mask,
betraying rags and tatters
that cling to the flesh beneath
and wear his nerves to ribbons
under the radiant casque.
 
Who will unhorse this rider
and free him from between
the walls of iron, the emblems
crushing his chest with their weight?
Will they defeat him gently,
or leave him hurled on the green,
his rags and wounds still hidden
under the great breastplate?

Wearing “nerves to ribbons” is probably a reference to military ribbons, worn to signal prowess. (Donld Trump once confessed, “I’ve always wanted to get the Purple Heart.”). These are the emblems “crushing his chest with their weight.” When Hegseth’s cosplay comes to an end as he is hurled to the ground (as he will be), will he still seek to hide his rags and his wounds? Will he still try to maintain his metal mask? 

As a sensitive boy who grew up not playing football in football mad Tennessee (I was born in 1951), I recognize the pressure. I even had my sixth-grade teacher call me “a sissy.” Fortunately, I was supported by my bookish, birdwatching father, who had successfully resisted similar pressures when he was growing up. Nevertheless, one could not be a boy during the 1950s without being aware of the expectations. 

Therefore, this Margaret Atwood poem meant a lot to me when I encountered it in the early 1980s. It’s the first of the poet’s “Circe/Mud” poems, in which the Homeric island goddess critiques the macho ethic that drives Odysseus:

Men with the heads of eagles
no longer interest me
or pig-men, or those who can fly
with the aid of wax and feathers

or those who take off their clothes
to reveal other clothes
or those with skins of blue leather

or those golden and flat as a coat of arms
or those with claws, the stuffed ones
with glass eyes; or those
hierarchic as greaves and steam-engines.

All these I could create, manufacture,
or find easily: they swoop and thunder
around this island, common as flies,
sparks flashing, bumping into each other,

on hot days you can watch them
as they melt, come apart,
fall into the ocean
like sick gulls, dethronements, plane crashes..

I search instead for the others,
the ones left over,
the ones who have escaped from these
mythologies with barely their lives;
they have real faces and hands, they think
of themselves as
wrong somehow, they would rather be trees.

I’ll let you decide which of the macho postures can be best applied to Hegseth and Trump. Many of them the president is explicitly using on his AI-generated Truth Social posts these days, which often feature eagles and the president as either George Washington, General Patton, or a superhero with supernatural powers (Green Lantern, for instance). Rather than setting the two men apart, their he-man act just makes them as common as flies as they “swoop and thunder/ around this island…sparks flashing, bumping into each other.” Atwood is familiar with Rich’s “Knight,” and her men disintegrate in similarly spectacular ways (“melt, come apart,/ fall into the ocean/  like sick gulls”). The reference is to Icarus, who thought he could soar as high as the sun, only to find out otherwise. 

How might Circe create or manufacture such creatures? Perhaps by fluttering her eyelashes and feigning helplessness? Atwood criticizes women who are complicit in the charade. “You can have this water,/ this flesh, I abdicate,” she writes in another of the Circe poems, before concluding,

I watch you, you claim
without noticing it,
you know how to take.

I wouldn’t say that I escaped the male mythology with barely my life. As I say, having a father who honored my bookish sensitivity helped. Nevertheless, I sometimes did feel a little wrong. And yes, I love the image of a strongly rooted, life-affirming tree.

So thank you, Gloria Steinem, for understanding how female liberation leads to male liberation.

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Feminism’s Deep Dive into the Female Psyche

By Robin Bates | Published: September 7, 2026

Tuesday

Today I honor Gloria Steinem with two Adrienne Rich poems that get at her contributions to American women. Tomorrow I’ll returning to Rich, along with Margaret Atwood, on what Steinem meant to American men like myself.

Building on the work of Betty Friedan, Steinem understood women’s anger at their status as second class citizens. One sees this hidden anger in Rich’s poem “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” written in 1951:

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer’s fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

Jennifer may appear to be fluttering and weak, weighed down by her patriarchal marriage. In her imagination, however, she is a prancing tiger. Art reveals sides of ourselves that we dare not acknowledge even to ourselves.

Steinem’s goal was to release the tiger. “I am woman, hear me roar,” as the Helen Reddy song put it.

To release it, however, significant inner exploration was required. Women had to identify the myths that mastered them. “Diving into the Wreck,” perhaps Rich’s signature poem, shows a woman doing just that.

The poet imagines divers exploring the wreck that is our subconscious. The myths defining women go back thousands of years and are reinforced daily by everything from social expectations to cultural tropes to media images. Having done her homework, which perhaps includes reading Steinem, Rich is ready to do a deep dive into herself. It’s a dive that she will be doing alone, and it will be awkward because she’s not accustomed to such self-examination:

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

The ladder, the first step to self-exploration, has always been there waiting. She just hasn’t thought to use it before now. Descending it feels alien, as though she’s a crippled insect. She’s not even sure where myth ends and reality begins:

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

Once the exploration begins in earnest, she experiences intense anxiety (“I am blacking out”) but also inner strength (the mask “pumps my blood with power”). Her true inner self has things to teach her if she works with it rather than fighting against it:

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

So enthralled is she by what she sees—perhaps she is learning of other women who have preceded her—that she momentarily forgets why she is there. The goal is for she herself to live her life differently.  To do that, she must figure out both “the damage that was done” and the treasures—the inner resources—that “prevail”:

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

There are many stories—many myths—that have led this woman to become a “drowned face always staring toward the sun.” The sun is male patriarchy while the wreck is Aunt Jennifer, “worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty”:

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

In this exploration, Rich steps beyond rigid gender demarcation, acknowledging that she has both a female and a male side. And despite damage to the inner compass that is supposed to guide us towards psychic health, we still “find our way back to this scene.”

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

It doesn’t matter whether cowardice or courage has sent women into this self-exploration. Their challenge is to rewrite the book of myths, creating new stories in which their names will appear. 

Gloria Steinem played a major role in women discovering the silver, copper, and vermeil cargo hidden within.

Further thought: I particularly like what Margaret Atwood had to say about the poem in a 1973 New York Times book review. Tomorrow I will share at Atwood poem in which she conducts her own attack on male myths:

The wreck she is diving into . . . is the wreck of obsolete myths, particularly myths about men and women. She is journeying to something that is already in the past, in order to discover for herself the reality behind the myth, “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.” What she finds is part treasure and part corpse, and she also finds that she herself is part of it, a “half-destroyed instrument.” As explorer she is detached; she carries a knife to cut her way in, cut structures apart; a camera to record; and the book of myths itself, a book which has hitherto had no place for explorers like herself.

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For Labor Day, a Labor Strike Novel

By Robin Bates | Published: September 6, 2026

Monday – Labor Day

For Labor Day I share a passage from Rachel Kranz’s Leaps of Faith, one of the best labor novels I know. (Full disclosure: I’m not entirely objective as Rachel was my best friend before she succumbed in her early sixties to ovarian cancer.) The novel’s title reflects Rachel’s approach to life, which was to have faith in the struggle for—well, for whatever one puts one’s mind to. 

Leaps of Faith has several planes of action, all of which present significant challenges: a working-class actor trying to make a living in New York; his boyfriend suddenly discovering he must become a father to his 11-year-old niece; a director striving to run a small experimental theater company (as Rachel did); and a union organizer attempting to organize a strike against a city university.

Rachel put her faith in a better future to the test when she left her job as a reporter at Minnesota Public Radio and became an administrative assistant at Columbia University so that she could assist with efforts to form a union.  While no one gave those efforts any chance given Columbia’s stiff resistance, the workers in fact prevailed by means of a very risky strike. As one of union members working with the clerical workers later recalled:

The strike, a culmination of five years of organizing, and its settlement were a clear victory for the 1,100-person, 80% female, 50% minority unit. It also demonstrated that women can be organized, Blacks and whites can work together not only for material gain but also to combat racism, and that strikes, led by the workers themselves, are still an effective weapon -even in the hands of service employees.

Throughout the process, Rachel worked tirelessly and never gave up hope, even when many around her did.

The novel provides a fictionalized account of those now-unionized employees eight years later. Once again they are considering a strike, this time to get a better contract. Union representative Rosie must walk a fine line between those who are fiery but unrealistic and those who are overly cautious. In a meeting early in the novel, we see the challenges she faces when she faces the workers:

“What I’m trying to say is that I don’t have any illusions about what we’re up against. They’re a monster, OK, they’re a giant. They’re the third largest landlord in the city of New York. Their budget is in the millions. Their trustees run the city. We all know that, but OK, we can remind ourselves once in a while.” I laugh, and a couple of people laugh with me, the way that some women do, just to stay in sympathy. “I remember,” I say, “writing those facts over and over and over again, one newsletter after another, when we were still trying to get the union Because in those days, if you don’t mind my saying so, it seemed really hopeless—only about three other private universities were even organized, and who were we to think we could organize this—leviathan? This behemoth?” OK, that was a bit much.

I lean forward on the podium, focus again on their faces. “The point being,” I say, “that we won. The point being, they only look unbeatable. The point being, we beat them. For the past eight years, every single contract we’ve gotten has been better than the one before. Every single contract, we’ve won something that they didn’t want us to have. Every single contract has made our lives better—OK, not as much as we’d like, not as much as we deserve—but better, definitely better. Am I right?” A few nods. Some people muttering to neighbors, which I welcome, actually. Let them disagree. If they wake up, they can think about what I’m saying, and then they will agree. Or at least we’ll be talking on different terrain.

When Rosie gives a realistic assessment of their present situation, it’s Rachel recalling her own experience:

“Now we’re at a very difficult point in the process,” I say. “Those of you who have been through it before know what I mean. There’s always this point, this space of time, when winning just looks impossible. When it looks like they’re so big and we’re so small.”

Rosie knows it’s important to acknowledge how hard the service staff have been working:

I fix my gaze on Tony, sitting in the front row. Patrice, next to him. Elena, next to her. “Look at you!” I say suddenly. “I have to say it, people, you are amazing! You’re working eight hours a day, sometimes ten, night shifts, weekends—and month after month after month, you’ve kept this going. You go to negotiations at night, and meet with your buildings on your lunch hour, and make phone calls to get people out for rallies, and answer all those questions everyone’s always asking, right? ‘Why isn’t the union doing anything?’ “Why is it taking so long?’ ‘Why don’t we have a contract yet?’ Am I right?” This does get a laugh, because yes, this is exactly what they’ve been going through, and they didn’t think we knew.

“And you’re starting to wonder yourselves, why it’s taking so long, and why we’re not making more progress. And you look at their negotiators, who are paid full-time to be at these meetings, who get to go home and sleep late the day after an all-night session, when you have to be back at your desks at 9 a.m. sharp; you look at their negotiators, who have MBAs and law degrees and really expensive suits…”

Then she provides the morale boost:

The point being, people, that if we let them psych us out, we’re going to act from a position of weakness. And I want us to come from strength. I want us to look around this room and see the incredible strength we represent, the way we’re all here together, all different types of jobs, all different races and backgrounds, male and female, gay and straight—when do people ever come together like this? This is what freaks them out. This is what blows their minds, because they can’t believe that here we all are, tougher, on our own time, these stupid little secretaries and file clerks and xerox operators, from their point of view, because—until we don’t show up Monday morning—they have no idea of the work we do, am I right?” This gets nods, agreement. “And they can’t understand how we can be holding out so long, how we don’t just cave.”

To be sure, this is only the first step in a long and very complicated process, during which mistakes are made. Rachel does a deep dive into union politics—which is not always pretty—and to the different personalities of the university work force. In the end, however, the workers get most of what they ask for:

[I]t’s a great offer. Not perfect, but better than I’d ever have expected. And the irony, of course, is that every single thing we did to get it was pretty much by mistake. We went on strike against the recommendation of the union; we rejected Olympia’s most divisive proposal by only one fucking vote; and then we had a resounding unanimous vote to continue the strike, which is probably what did convince Olympia to back down—but that only happened because I made probably the worst mistake of my organizing career, taking the proposal to the members like that. So was I wrong to trust the members? You tell me. 

The last we see of the workforce, they are standing together and singing “Solidarity Forever.” 

Rachel’s favorite writer was Bertolt Brecht, and at the beginning of the union section she includes his poem “The Learner” to capture the uncertainty of the change process:

Those to whom I had entrusted the letter
Threw it away. But those I paid no attention to
Brought it back to me.
Thereby I learned.

What I ordered was not carried out.
When I arrived I saw
It was wrong. The right thing 
Had been done.
From that I learned.

The change process is messy, whether it involves getting a new union contract or building a coalition to win elections. Often what is required is a leap of faith.

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Theories of Aslan’s Crucifixion

By Robin Bates | Published: September 5, 2026
Pauline Baynes, the Pieta in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Sunday

My church reading group has devoted five sessions to John Gatta’s Green Worlds of C. S. Lewis: The Ecology of Aslan’s Realm. This is giving me an excuse to revisit the Narnia books.

John and I both ascribe to an idea propounded by Rob MacSwain, editor of The Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis and faculty member at Sewanee’s School of Theology, that Anglicans/Episcopalians practice theology by means of literature rather than analytic logic. Our theologians, one might say, are not St. Thomas Aquinas and Anselm but John Donne, George Herbert, William Blake, Wendell Berry, Mary Oliver, and Lewis. 

A theological issue that came up in last week’s discussion is whether Aslan’s giving up his life for Edward in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is atonement through penal substitution or through moral influence.

I’m no theologian and so don’t understand all the ins and out of the issue, but here’s how I understand the two interpretations of the crucifixion. In the penal theory, Christ died on the cross in order to cleanse humans of their sins. It’s as though humankind deserved punishment but Jesus took the punishment on himself to spare us, functioning as a kind of scapegoat or sacrificial lamb. This view of the crucifixion is powerfully articulated by Milton’s God in Paradise Lost, who is telling the angels around him what Adam and Eve will deserve once they eat the apple:

But to destruction sacred and devote,
[Man] with his whole posterity must die,
Die he or Justice must; unless for him
Some other able, and as willing, pay
The rigid satisfaction, death for death.

No one among the angels steps forth—”all the Heav’nly Quoir stood mute”—and humankind’s fate hangs in the balance:

                               [O]n man’s behalf
Patron or intercessor none appeared,
Much less that durst upon his own head draw
The deadly forfeiture, and ransom set.
And now without redemption all mankind
Must have been lost, adjudged to Death and Hell
By doom severe…

Fortunately, Jesus is there to save the day and volunteers for the mission.

I turn to Theopedia to sum up the moral influence theory:

This theory denies that Christ died to satisfy any principle of divine justice but teaches instead that His death was designed to greatly impress mankind with a sense of God’s love, resulting in softening their hearts and leading them to repentance. Thus, the Atonement is not directed towards God with the purpose of maintaining His justice, but towards man with the purpose of persuading him to right action.

Generally speaking, conservative fundamentalists lean towards the penal substitution theory whereas liberal Christians like myself prefer the moral influence theory.

So which vision seems to be guiding Lewis in his depiction of Aslan? At first glance, penal substitution appears to be at work. Although Edward is saved before the White Witch can cut his throat, she nevertheless claims that, as one who was prepared to betray his siblings, he belongs to her. In her conversation with Aslan she points out her rights:

“Have you forgotten the Deep Magic?” asked the Witch.

“Let us say I have forgotten it,” answered Aslan gravely. “Tell us of this Deep Magic.”

“Tell you?” said the Witch, her voice growing suddenly shriller. “Tell you what is written on that very Table of Stone which stands beside us? Tell you what is written in letters deep as a spear is long on the trunk of the World Ash Tree? Tell you what is engraved on the scepter of the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea? You at least know the magic which the Emperor put into Narnia at the very beginning. You know that every traitor belongs to me as my lawful prey and that for every treachery I have a right to a kill.”

Unless she has blood, the Witch proclaims, “the Law says all Narnia will be overturned and perish in fire and water.” Or as Milton’s God puts it, “Die he or Justice must.”

The story unfolds very much along the lines of the crucifixion as described in the Gospels, complete with Susan and Lucy functioning as Mary Magdalene outside the tomb. After his resurrection, Aslan explains what has happened:

“Oh, you’re real, you’re real! Oh, Aslan!” cried Lucy and both girls flung themselves upon him and covered him with kisses.

“But what does it all mean?” asked Susan when they were somewhat calmer.

“It means,” said Aslan, “that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.

This still sounds points toward penal substitution, as does a discussion that Lucy and Susan have following the battle:

“Does [Edmund] know,” whispered Lucy to Susan, “what Aslan did for him? Does he know what the arrangement with the Witch really was?”
“Hush! No. Of course not,” said Susan.
“Oughtn’t he to be told?” said Lucy.
“Oh, surely not,” said Susan. “It would be too awful for him. Think how you’d feel if you were he.”
“All the same I think he ought to know,” said Lucy. But at that moment they were interrupted.

In Susan’s eyes, Edmund would feel intolerably guilty if he knew that someone else had given up his life for him. And it’s worth noting that sin plays a key role in many of Lewis’s novels, including Digory striking the bell in Magician’s Nephew; Susan not believing Lucy in Prince Caspian; Aravis not caring that her serving maid is whipped in The Horse and His Boy (Aslan makes her pay by clawing her back); Jill forgetting the signs in The Silver Chair; and Tirian and Jewel killing two Calormenes in Last Battle. Oh, and Susan forfeits her place in Narnia heaven by becoming more interested in cosmetics.

Lucy, on the other hand, leans more toward a moral influence interpretation of Aslan’s sacrifice, which shifts the focus from guilt to love. Of course Edmund should be told because he would see in action Jesus’s declaration, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

Perhaps Edmund has already intuited this. In the battle against the Witch’s forces, he puts his own life on the line for the forces of good. It’s as though, by ritually enacting the greater love, he has changed Edward’s heart and mind. When Lucy sees her brother—this after she has cured his substantial wounds—he is

looking better than she had seen him look—oh, for ages; in fact ever since his first term at that horrid school which was where he had begun to go wrong. He had become his real old self again and could look you in the face.

After he is crowned along with his siblings, we learn that he will become known as King Edmund the Just, “a graver and quieter man than Peter, and great in council and judgement.” In Prince Caspian, furthermore, he will again prove pivotal, persuading the others to follow Lucy when she sees Aslan, even though he and the others can’t. 

I think the book goes beyond Edmund’s sin and the discussion of deep magic, emphasizing far more a vision of love. Jesus may tell Mary Magdalene, “Noli me tangere,” but in Lewis’s version of the resurrection, Aslan wants to be touched. He is in love with life and humanity in all their physicality, which results in the most exuberant passage in the Narnia Chronicles:

“Oh, children,” said the Lion, “I feel my strength coming back to me. Oh, children, catch me if you can!” He stood for a second, his eyes very bright, his limbs quivering, lashing himself with his tail. Then he made a leap high over their heads and landed on the other side of the Table. Laughing, though she didn’t know why, Lucy scrambled over it to reach him. Aslan leaped again. A mad chase began. Round and round the hill-top he led them, now hopelessly out of their reach, now letting them almost catch his tail, now diving between them, now tossing them in the air with his huge and beautifully velveted paws and catching them again, and now stopping unexpectedly so that all three of them rolled over together in a happy laughing heap of fur and arms and legs. It was such a romp as no one has ever had except in Narnia; and whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten Lucy could never make up her mind. And the funny thing was that when all three finally lay together panting in the sun the girls no longer felt in the least tired or hungry or thirsty.

Aren’t we seeing heaven on earth in this moment?

Where Lewis’s Narnia books go beyond conventional theology is in their embrace of nature and God’s creation generally. This is the major point of John Gatta’s book, and one sees it in Lewis’s generous inclusion of figures from other cultures, myths, and religions (including Islam). It’s as though Christian symbolism alone, powerful though it may be, is not enough to express all that Lewis feels and sees. Through fantasy he could expand the playing field, although he unnerved Tolkien in the process. Santa Claus in Narnia?!

It’s not unlike what we see in the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Christian Camelot is all very well, but if you don’t include the Green Man in your vision of the world (and carved into the pillars of your local church), something crucial is missing.

It’s worth noting that George MacDonald, Lewis’s great mentor, also broke from a narrow Calvinism. Indeed, his Congregationalist church cut his salary when he started preaching about God’s universal love and insisting that everyone is capable of redemption. About MacDonald Lewis at one point wrote,

I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself. Hence his Christ-like union of tenderness and severity. Nowhere else outside the New Testament have I found terror and comfort so intertwined.

One sees this union in Aslan, who can be severe upon occasion but who is always tender. I think of the scene in The Magician’s Nephew when Digory tells the lion about his sick mother:

“But please, please—won’t you—can’t you give me something that will cure Mother?” Up till then he had been looking at the Lion’s great front feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion’s eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory’s own that for a moment he felt as if the Lion must really be sorrier about his Mother than he was himself.

“There is no place where earth’s sorrows are more felt than up in heaven,” goes one of my favorite Victorian hymns.

I conclude with an interchange—this when the White Witch is negotiating with Aslan—between her and Mr. Beaver. When she is insisting that, according to the Deep Magic installed by Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea, Edmund is her lawful prey, Mr. Beaver says,

“So that’s how you came to imagine yourself a Queen—because you were the Emperor’s hangman. I see.

Not a few Christians set themselves up as God’s hangmen, relishing the thought of passing judgment on sinners. Aslan, however, is never about punishment. His love for his creation is always paramount.

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Jane Eyre Opened Me Up to Feminism

By Robin Bates | Published: September 4, 2026

Friday Memories of Books that Shook My World

While I will be devoting a special post next week to the late Gloria Steinem, I examine today a work that helped open me up to feminism’s message. I can remember exactly where I was when I first sat down to read Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

The year was 1965 and I was a first-year cadet at the Sewanee Military Academy. The school library had the 1943 edition of Bronte’s novel, featuring the haunting woodcuts of Fritz Eichenberg, and my attention was captured by the cover illustration. Featuring tormented orphans walking two by two (as in Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline, which I loved as a child), it spoke instantly to something deep inside me, prompting me to pull the book off the shelf. 

Although it was a hot September afternoon—no air conditioning—I lost myself in the sad story of orphaned Jane, who is first bullied by her cousin John and then punished for rebelling against him and his mother. Things go from bad to worse as she is imprisoned in a room, has a fainting fit, is cross-examined by the tyrannical hypocrite Rev. Brocklehurst, and is shipped off to Lowood school. There she is first publicly humiliated but then comforted by headmistress Miss Temple and befriended by the saintly Helen Burns. Eventually she becomes a teacher herself and then a governess in a haunted house. 

I don’t know how much of this I read on that first day, but it was enough to hook me. Realizing that my mother had a copy of the same edition (which is now in my possession), I continued reading it at home. I remember hoping that Jane would marry Rochester (despite the bigamy), fearing that she would marry St. John, and savoring the “Reader, I married him” ending.

Looking back, I think I was drawn to the cover illustration because I didn’t want to be in a military school, even though it offered the best high school education in the area. (It was associated with the University of the South.) First-year cadets were constantly being hazed so that one had to ask permission to enter the common area; refer to older students as “sir”; undergo constant uniform inspections; and drill several times a week. I once was thrown up against a locker for saying something wrong. No wonder I identified with Jane.

Not that identifying with girl protagonists was new for me. In fact, I preferred Mary in The Secret Garden to Tom Sawyer, Alice to Penrod and Mowgli, Wendy to Peter. Jane, however, hit with particular force.

One reason was her special energy: she stands up for herself even though everything is stacked against her. Wanting nothing more than to retreat into a book that she is reading, she is dragged out and assaulted by her male cousin. I cheered as she fought back: 

“Wicked and cruel boy!” I said. “You are like a murderer—you are like a slave-driver—you are like the Roman emperors!”

I had read Goldsmith’s History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of Nero, Caligula, &c. Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I never thought thus to have declared aloud.

“What! what!” he cried. “Did she say that to me? Did you hear her, Eliza and Georgiana? Won’t I tell mama? but first—”

He ran headlong at me: I felt him grasp my hair and my shoulder: he had closed with a desperate thing. I really saw in him a tyrant, a murderer. I felt a drop or two of blood from my head trickle down my neck, and was sensible of somewhat pungent suffering: these sensations for the time predominated over fear, and I received him in frantic sort. I don’t very well know what I did with my hands, but he called me “Rat! Rat!” and bellowed out aloud.

When Jane goes into full rebellion, I was there for it:

I resisted all the way: a new thing for me, and a circumstance which greatly strengthened the bad opinion Bessie and Miss Abbot were disposed to entertain of me. The fact is, I was a trifle beside myself; or rather out of myself, as the French would say: I was conscious that a moment’s mutiny had already rendered me liable to strange penalties, and, like any other rebel slave, I felt resolved, in my desperation, to go all lengths.  

I myself didn’t rebel against military life—not, at least, until my senior year, when I published an underground newspaper—but Jane acted out my fantasy.

I now know how shocking Jane’s rebellion was to certain 19th century readers. As I note in my book, reviewer Elizabeth Rigby called the book unchristian, unladylike, and communist. She even came to the defense of Jane’s aunt and Rev. Brocklehurst, saying of young Jane, “It pleased God to make her an orphan, friendless, and penniless—yet she thanks nobody and least of all Him.” Other reviewers agreed the book was unladylike, with the Christian Remembrancer (April 1848) castigating the book for its “masculine hardness, coarseness, and freedom of expression.”

Jane Eyre was published at a time—1847—when revolution was in the air, which is one reason why it elicited such strong reactions. (The following year revolutions would break out all over Europe and Marx and Engels would pen The Communist Manifesto.) It was within this context that readers read such a passage as the following:

It is in vain to say human beings ought to be satisfied with tranquility: they must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts, as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

It wasn’t only Jane’s longing for freedom that unsettled Victorian readers. Lucasta Miller, in her book The Bronte Myth, points out that by foregrounding a woman’s individual psyche—“unheard of in the novel at the time”—Jane Eyre was revolutionary:

Charlotte had found a way of relocating the Romantic individualism that had shaped her literary ambitions in the outcast figure of the small, plain, shabby-genteel governess, the social persona into which she herself had often felt boxed. Instead of trying to emulate male writers in her quest for literary identity, she had found a path of her own, distinct from the exhibitionism of a Byron. Disbarred by her gender from the public posturing of the man of genius, she instead poured her egoism into a new and specifically female form of self-expression. In Jane, she let out the pent-up emotions of a woman who feels the world against her, and in doing so she indicted the society that had told her to suppress her passions and ambitions in the interests of womanly duty.

Little wonder that when I encountered the feminist movement at Carleton College, I would instantly sympathize. I still had a lot to learn—being male came with many privileges, which I didn’t discard all at once—but a novel I read in high school had set me on the right path.

Memories of Books That Shook My World
Lord of the Rings: Trudging up Mount Doom with Frodo (Aug. 28, 2026)
The Silver Chair and a Childhood Love (Aug. 21, 2026)
My Childhood Encounter with Wind in the Willows April 14, 2026)

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Berry Comes into the Peace of Wild Things

By Robin Bates | Published: September 2, 2026
Wendell Berry, August 5, 1934 – August 31, 2026

Thursday

I’m sure I am just one of thousands of Wendell Berry fans whose minds automatically went to “Testament” upon hearing of his death. I also imagine the poem will be read at his funeral since he tells us how we are to respond. Attuned as he was to nature and nature’s rhythms, he expands our ideas of what is possible. 

“Don’t call it death,” he writes. Instead, “say that my flesh/ Has a perfect compliance with the grass/ Truer than any it could have striven for.”

By merging with the earth, he goes on to explain, he is on his way to his roots (in all senses of the word). That earth, after all, 

has been my care and faithful charge from birth,
And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,
And all my hopes.

The earth, he later tells us, has freedom and changeability so it’s okay to be one with it.

Testament
By Wendell Berry

And now to the Abyss I pass
Of that Unfathomable Grass… 

1.
Dear relatives and friends, when my last breath
Grows large and free in air, don’t call it death —
A word to enrich the undertaker and inspire
His surly art of imitating life; conspire
Against him. Say that my body cannot now
Be improved upon; it has no fault to show
To the sly cosmetician. Say that my flesh
Has a perfect compliance with the grass
Truer than any it could have striven for.
You will recognize the earth in me, as before
I wished to know it in myself: my earth
That has been my care and faithful charge from birth,
And toward which all my sorrows were surely bound,
And all my hopes. Say that I have found
A good solution, and am on my way
To the roots. And say I have left my native clay
At last, to be a traveler; that too will be so.
Traveler to where? Say you don’t know.

He addresses where his spirit will travel in part 2, asking us not to predict “anything too final.” After all, “whatever is unsure is possible, and life is bigger than flesh.” Therefore, we are to let our imaginations reach beyond thought and figure our hope. “Why settle/ For some know-it-all’s despair,” he cautions, “When the dead may dance to the fiddle.” 

2.
But do not let your ignorance
Of my spirit’s whereabouts dismay
You, or overwhelm your thoughts.
Be careful not to say
Anything too final. Whatever
Is unsure is possible, and life is bigger
Than flesh. Beyond reach of thought
Let imagination figure

Your hope. That will be generous
To me and to yourselves. Why settle
For some know-it-all’s despair
When the dead may dance to the fiddle

Hereafter, for all anybody knows?
And remember that the Heavenly soil
Need not be too rich to please
One who was happy in Port Royal.

I may be already heading back,
A new and better man, toward
That town. The thought’s unreasonable,
But so is life, thank the Lord! 

I note in passing that, after my own son died, I imagined him dancing joyously (as was his wont) in some ethereal space. Berry would point out that I was generous to myself in so doing.

I’d be very surprised, given poem’s third section, if those in charge of his funeral will muck up his face “with wax and powder and rouge.” Nor, I suspect, will they do anything other than bury him in his work clothes and lay him out in a plain wooden box:

3.
So treat me, even dead,
As a man who has a place
To go, and something to do.
Don’t muck up my face
With wax and powder and rouge
As one would prettify
An unalterable fact
To give bitterness the lie.

Admit the native earth
My body is and will be,
Admit its freedom and
Its changeability.

Dress me in the clothes
I wore in the day’s round.
Lay me in a wooden box.
Put the box in the ground.

In the final section, the poet situates himself in his family lineage. He is off to join that “gathering of his kin,” the latest Berry to be planted in his home land. All of his forebears did “that they had to do,” he informs us before returning to the ease of the Port Royal graveyard.

4.
Beneath this stone a Berry is planted
In his home land, as he wanted.
He has come to the gathering of his kin,
Among whom some were worthy men,

Farmers mostly, who lived by hand,
But one was a cobbler from Ireland,

Another played the eternal fool
By riding on a circus mule

To be remembered in grateful laughter
Longer than the rest. After

Doing that they had to do
They are at ease here. Let all of you

Who yet for pain find force and voice
Look on their peace, and rejoice.

Or as he puts it in another poem, he has “come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” He can now truly say, “I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

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Tech Bros Stuck in Sci-Fi Childhood

By Robin Bates | Published: September 1, 2026

Wednesday

Although I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, I was never a fan of “the golden age of science fiction.” It was far too male and technocratic for me, unlike the 1970s science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, Samuel Delaney, Marge Piercy, and Douglas Adams and the 1980s science fiction of Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler.  (Wrinkle in Time, written in 1962, was a notable exception.) Nevertheless, I read with interest a recent Atlantic article on how Silicon Valley’s tech bros immersed themselves in the works of Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke.

They also misread them.

Gal Beckerman’s article builds on an idea in Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State. Lepore writes that, for tech bros like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and Jeff Bezos, science fiction is  

neither a slight nor an incidental entertainment. Nor is it read as a literary text or a set of cautionary tales; instead it’s taken as a form of technical writing, a set of assembly instructions.

Lepore asks how these men came to regard Earth “as a burden to be sloughed off.” Why do they embrace technology “that might just lead to our elimination”? Altman, for instance, imagines much of our planet’s surface being covered in data centers, and Thiel and Musk fantasize living away from Earth, whether in underwater cities (Thiel) or on Mars (Musk).

Beckerman blames their childhood sci-fi and fantasizes time traveling back and confiscating it. What they failed to understand, she writes, 

was that these were cautionary tales, stories that projected deep societal worries into space or onto a future many millennia away. These boys just thought the killer robots sounded cool. They grew up to become ruthless entrepreneurs, but their surface enchantment stayed with them. It helped shape their desires. In 2009, Thiel, by then a man in early middle age, directed his venture-capital fund to focus on “science-fiction-type investing. So it’s basically: space, robots, AI.” The world we now live in was made from this misreading. We are all trapped under the covers with those 13-year-old boys.

Or as Lepore puts it, these dark fantasies reveal “the power and stubborn persistence of the adolescent mind.” 

Le Guin once observed that, in science fiction, the future is a metaphor for the present, and sci-fi authors from the 25 years following World War II can be seen as grappling with such contemporary worries as Stalinism (1984), McCarthyism (Fahrenheit 451), nuclear holocaust (Canticle for Leibowitz), rapid social change (Stranger in a Strange Land), dehumanization (2001), and social breakup (Foundation). The popular series Star Trek, meanwhile, used futuristic space travel to explore a wide range of current social and ethical issues, including civil rights, sexism, racism, nationalism, cross-cultural encounters, and global war. 

The tech bros, however, saw something else:

–From Asimov’s Foundation, about a man seeking to preserve human knowledge in the face of an upcoming Dark Age predicted to last 30,000 years, Musk “has pulled out the simplest, most self-glorifying story, about individual genius and foresight.” If anything, his DOGE dismantling of USAID, which has resulted in tens of thousands of African deaths, seems designed to return us to the Dark Ages.

–From the 1955 story “Franchise,” where Asimov imagines a future in which a computer ends democracy by electing the U.S. president, Altman draws the lesson than an AI president “makes a lot of sense.” As he told podcaster Joe Rogan, AI “can go around and talk to every person on Earth, understand their exact preferences at a very deep level, and optimize for the collective preferences of humanity or of citizens of the U.S.—that’s awesome.”

–Peter Thiel, enamored with all futuristic tech—perhaps he’s responding also to the cartoon series The Jetsons and the Tom Swift, Jr. series (e.g., Tom Swift and His Diving Seacopter)–laments society not taking seriously its visionary scientists. “We’d have colonies on the moon, you’d have robots, you’d have flying cars, you’d have cities in the ocean, under the ocean,” he rhapsodized.

–Musk has named his AI program Grok, taken from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, although I can’t imagine someone less able to understand the concept than the man who declared, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” To grok is to connect with someone at the deepest level. One wonders if Musk misses the irony and actually thinks that an AI program can know and appreciate us more than any human.

–From Star Trek, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has “picked up on the show’s love of the extraterrestrial but ignored its morals.” Beckerman writes,

“He wants to build space hotels, amusement parks, yachts and colonies for two or three million people orbiting the earth,” a local newspaper reported. “‘The whole idea is to preserve the earth,’ he said. “His final objective is to get all people off the earth and see it turned into a huge national park.” 

“Where the billions of us who don’t fit on the yachts are supposed to go, I’m not sure,” Beckerman sardonically observes before adding, “And I’m also not sure Captain Kirk [played by William Shatner] would approve.”

Beckerman links to a Vanity Fair article about Shatner’s excursion (at the age of 90) aboard Bezos’s Blue Origin shuttle. Shatner returned from space with a vision diametrically opposite that of the tech bros:

I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound. It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna… things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.

Beckerman blames arrested development, not golden age sci-fi, for the tech bros’ warped perspective. That being said, however, Le Guin was concerned enough about sci-fi’s technological focus to take the genre in a more human-centered direction, especially in her gender-bending novel The Left Hand of Darkness. Even in The Dispossessed, which involves space travel as an anarchist collective settles on a moon to escape capitalist society, she exposes the flaw of thinking that you can escape from yourself.

For it is this fantasy that Lepore and Beckerman find most nefarious about the tech bros. Beckerman quotes political philosopher Hannah Arendt on the 1960s space race–“Nobody in the history of mankind has ever conceived of the earth as a prison for men’s bodies”—yet this is how Musk et. al. regard our earthly existence. “What stayed with the Silicon Valley magnates,” Beckerman writes, “was the idea of abandoning our bodies and the messiness of other people, leaving behind our finitude for an infinity of stars and self-coding machines.” 

As a result, they are attempting (Lepore this time) to turn “a science-fiction dystopia into a fully functioning infrastructure.”

The Atlantic article ends on a positive note as Beckerman examines a tech bro who has seen the light. Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who loved sci-fi as a child, now describes himself as “an innovation lover” who “is scared and says we’re not ready and we’re crossing thresholds.” Maybe significantly, the work he mentions is Stranger in a Strange Land, in which a human raised by Martians returns to earth and starts a universal religion. In other words, Heinlein doesn’t describe fancy gadgets but rather explores different ways of being.

His 1961 novel anticipated the intense exploring that would characterize the late 1960s and early 1970s, which is why it became one of the novels that helped define the period. Gates says that Heinlein’s warning about belief in technology’s inevitability is a “grown-up” lesson.

Of course, this warning dates back to the novel that kicked off the genre, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus. And yet we continue to steal fire from the gods, consequences be damned.

Further thought: Arendt’s contention about no one previously regarding Earth as a prison isn’t altogether correct since this has been a longtime belief amongst a certain kind of Christian. It’s why some fundamentalists don’t care about trashing the planet. Their dreams of escape, similar to those of the tech bros, absolve them of the hard work of saving the planet.

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