Those Most Apt to Crash: A Halloween Story - Part 2

[Begin with Part 1]

            “Okay, Kara. Now, when I first heard the story, it came from those boys. They said the twin girls’ grandma died, and they wanted to talk to her. So they got their hands on a Ouija board and tried to talk to her—do you know how those work?”

            “Yes, I know what a Ouija board is. You’re not supposed to use them because you never know who you’re really talking to.”

            “Well, that’s just the problem they had. The boys said those two girls conjured a demon, and at one point it actually showed up. They were running their hands over the board, getting answers from somebody they thought was their grandma. The whole time they were getting tricked into reciting some incantation that let this hideous monster escape from wherever he came from.”

            “What’s an incantation?”

            “It’s like a prayer or a magic spell. Like if you say the wrong words, you can curse someone or call for some supernatural being to appear. And that’s what they said happened. They followed the demon’s instructions on how to release him and then he was able to come right into the basement. The girls of course were terrified and ran from it. That’s why they ran up here. That’s why this place is still standing here empty. Because apparently the girls opened some kind of portal, so demons can come and go through the basement whenever they want.”

            “Crystal, you said the story wasn’t scary!”

            “Just listen. That was the story I heard from that group of boys a couple years ago. Then just a few weeks back I talked to Mike and the other guys down the street. He said he heard the story from his older brother’s friend. And here’s the kicker, he never heard anything about a Ouija board. He said he never heard anything about the girls’ grandmother dying either.”

            “So the story’s not true at all?”

            “Oh, Mike told me a completely different story. He said one of the twin girls started acting really strange, like waking up screaming in the middle of the night and tearing her clothes off in school, crazy stuff like that. So the parents called a priest to perform an exorcism—that’s when you cast an evil spirit out of someone’s body.”

            “I know what an exorcism is.”

            “Guess where the priest took the girl for the ritual. That’s right, the basement. Things got really intense in there, and the girl’s sister heard her screaming through the door. She thought they must be hurting the girl because it sounded so bad. Like they were torturing her. So when things got quiet for a second, the girl burst in, grabbed her sister by the arm, and ran out with her. They ran all the way up here, and, well…” Crystal turns and gestures toward the window. “According to this story, the priest succeeded in casting the evil spirit out of the girl before the sister rushed in and took her away. And some people say it’s still here. Ooh-whoo-oo.” She holds up her hands, wiggling her fingers around the device she’s holding, splashing the mess of light over the floor and windows.

            Kara, frightened and frustrated, squints her eyes accusingly at her sister. “How do you know that story isn’t true? How do you know they’re not both true?”

            “Why? Are you scared of the demon—the two demons that hang out in this place?”

            “Crystal, you said the stories weren’t scary. And, no, I’m not scared. I’m just mad because the stories aren’t like what you said.”

            “Keep listening then. It gets better. About a week ago, I went to Mom and asked her what happened in this house. And the story she told me didn’t have any dead grandmothers or demons or possessed girls at all.”

            “What story did she tell you?”

            “She says this house was originally built a couple decades earlier than most people think. It’s just been renovated a few times. The story she heard growing up was about teenagers, not little girls, and one of them got pregnant. This was back when everyone freaked out anytime a girl got pregnant before she was married, and abortion was illegal. You know what an abortion is, right? That’s when you end a pregnancy, so it’s basically killing the baby. Now, some people say the baby can’t feel anything yet. But some people say it’s just murder. Anyway, it was illegal back then, but now it’s not. Back then, you had to find a doctor who would do it in secret. Basically, if you just went on and had the baby your life was ruined because no one would want to marry you. And if you put the baby up for adoption, everyone would still know you’d been pregnant, so it wouldn’t matter.”

            Kara understands, dimly. Babies need dads. If there is no dad, you can’t have a baby. But didn’t there have to be a dad for her to get pregnant? Where did that guy go? Why didn’t the girl’s parents make him marry her? Maybe he just refused.

            Crystal continues. “So the girl’s parents find a doctor who will do a secret abortion. Guess where he does it. Here’s the thing, though. The doctor didn’t even put the girl to sleep first. So when he starts, she starts screaming bloody murder. Once again, who shows up to save her? You guessed it. Her sister bursts through the door, grabs her by the arm, and runs with her up here. The doctor is trying to get the girl back downstairs so he can finish doing whatever he was doing. So it’s out the window. What Mom heard was that the girl who fell and died was the one who was pregnant, and she’s the one who’s haunting the house till this day. That’s why people kept moving in and then moving out. They all found out it was haunted. That was until about eight years ago, when people just stopped buying the place and no one has lived here since.”

            “Mom said this story is true?”

            “No, she never said it was true. She just said it’s the story she heard growing up.”

            “Do you think that story is true? Which one do you think is right? Maybe they all are?”

            “Hang on a second. You see, after asking Mom what she knew about this place, I went to Dad. He said he’d heard a ghost story about this place growing up too. The story he heard is about an evil dad who took his twin daughters into that room in the basement and did gross stuff with them he shouldn’t be doing. Sexual stuff. One day, the girls put up a fight, and they managed to get past their dad. They ran out the door and up the stairs to where we are now. Or was it that one of the girls came back to rescue the other? I can’t remember. Anyway, the dad chased them, and so when they got up here, they had to go out the window. One of them died, just like you heard, and the other escaped but walked with a cane the rest of her life. In this version too it’s the girl who died whose ghost haunts this place. But then it’s the same as in Mom’s story where a bunch of people move in and out over the years because it’s haunted.”

            “That’s a horrible story. They’re all horrible stories. I don’t understand. Did they all happen? That would make this place just plain evil. Let’s just get out of here and talk at home. Please.”

            “Don’t you see, Kara? This place isn’t evil. It’s just an abandoned house that looks creepy because it’s out here in the middle of nowhere. For some reason, it’s sat here empty a long time, and people started telling stories about it. Before long, no one could tell if the stories were supposed to be true or not.”

            “But why would they make up stories? Why would they make up stories like that?”

            “That’s what I asked Dad. You know what he said? Stories start out simple. Like maybe one of the girls really did fall, and maybe the family that lived here really did have to move out. But then everyone who tells the story changes it a little, because they want to impress people—like your friend Gloria. Everyone changes it just a little bit, so they don’t feel like they’re lying. But as the story goes from person to person, year after year, it can change into something crazy. Pretty soon, people have different versions to choose from. They may hear one of the other versions of the story, but then just forget it because it doesn’t mean much to them. But if it does mean something to them, then they’ll start believing. He said Mom is a feminist. And abortion is a big deal to feminists, so that’s the story she likes. If you’re Catholic, you like the story about the exorcised demon. Do you see how it works?”

            “But I don’t like any of the stories.”

            “That’s just it. People look at this empty house, and they fill it with what scares them. They tell the scary story that’s scariest to them. Because everyone agrees this place is scary. They just can’t agree on what’s scary about it. And the thing is, I’ve been afraid of this place since I was a little girl, before I heard any of the stories. And I don’t want to carry that fear around with me the rest of my life. Or maybe it’s like Dad said, I want to be more mature, more adult, so I need to conquer what I’m most afraid of. If I don’t, I’ll just get old and go through horrible stuff and not get anything I want in life. That’s why I had to come in here. And that’s why I’m going down to the basement now. It’s all made up anyway.”

             The sound of a car passing the end of the driveway draws both girls to the window. They see it safely off before turning back to the room, back to the dead animal swinging gently from the ceiling, back to the message, back to the emptiness where battling stories retreat in despair of ever achieving primacy. Crystal sighs, reaches over to squeeze Kara’s hand, and walks to the door. Kara takes a good long look around the room. Does she feel dread? If she does, what would that even mean? She tries to conjure an image of demons or little ghost twins. All she comes up with is a group of stupid boys trying to outdo each other by making things up. Still, when she hears Crystal’s footsteps nearing the top of the stairs, she’s halfway down the hall before deciding to take a step.

            On her way down the stairs, Crystal stops and cranes to ask, “Are you going into the basement with me?” Kara thinks she will. Then she thinks she won’t. Crystal says, “You don’t have come in. You can wait outside the door. I only want to go in long enough to get a good look at whatever’s in there. It won’t take more than a minute. Then we get our butts back to our bikes and ride home before Dad gets there.”

            They continue down the steps in silence. Kara still doesn’t know if she’ll go in with her sister. Maybe the stories aren’t true. But it’s so dark. She wishes she’d taken the time to find another flashlight for herself before leaving the garage. Does she really need to go in there? Is there anything worthwhile she could take from the room, like something she could use against Gloria? Maybe, but then Crystal will let her know. Yes, that’s the idea. She’ll wait outside until Crystal has checked it out, and then maybe she’ll go in herself.

            “You go in and check, and then I’ll come in. Okay?”

            “Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.”

            They stop on the ground floor landing to look over at the living room and the boarded entryway. Kara has an impulse to run to the door and rush home. She’s got so much to think about for one thing. Her journey seems complete in that she’s already learned enough for one night. Going any farther feels like tempting fate.

            “Okay,” Crystal says, turning the flashlight back onto the descending stairs. “Here we go.” Kara knows she’s scared but forcing herself to go down one step after the other regardless. The flashlight shines on a small exposed concrete area at the bottom of the stairs and a door a few feet beyond, a perfect space for Kara to wait while Crystal takes an initial look in the main room.

            “Nothing ever happened here,” Crystal mutters, mostly to herself. “It’s just some stairs and a basement, nothing to be afraid of.”

            When Crystal steps onto the concrete, stained dark gray by patches of moisture, she turns back to see Kara hesitating a few steps up. “Is that all the farther you want to go?”

            “No, I’ll come down.”

            Crystal turns back to the door. Kara watches her shoulders rise theatrically as she gulps down a giant breath. Then she closes her eyes tight. When she opens them, Crystal is gone. The light folds and pinches out as the door seals shut. Alone, Kara is overcome with desperation to join her sister. She inches down the remaining steps in the darkness, slides her feet across the concrete, and gropes for the doorknob. Her hand drops abruptly back to her side when she hears Crystal scream.

            Kara stands rigid, staring at the door she can barely see. A moment passes before she hears her sister shout, “Kara, don’t come in here.”

            “Why did you scream? What’s in there?”

            “Just wait please. I need a minute. It’s fine. I’m safe.”

            Kara opens her mouth to protest but halts when she hears voices from upstairs. Then she hears stomping and scraping, someone pushing through the board covering the doorway from the porch. Stupidly, she first imagines it’s their parents. Then she remembers the animal carcass dangling from the ceiling on the second floor. What kind of person does that?

            “Crystal.”

            “I said wait a second.”

            “Crystal, someone’s here. Upstairs. I can hear them.”

            Laughter infused with exaggerated defiance, maybe a touch of cruelty, cascades down the darkened staircase. A guy’s voice is saying, “…telling you we were just here and whatever you heard at school it ain’t true.” A girl responds, “I know it isn’t true, but there could be a crazy bum in here for all we know.”

            Kara recognizes the voice. She turns back toward the door as the sound of more people squeezing through the front entrance reaches her ears. She and Crystal are trapped. There’s no way to escape. These are kids she knows from school. But she senses both she and her sister are in danger. She backs up against the door and listens intently.

            The guy’s voice booms, “Alright, First-timer, you get to do the honors of going upstairs first.”

            Now, a second girl’s voice responds, “Fine, but if any of you idiots tries to scare me somehow, I’m going to kick you in the balls.”

            Kara springs away from the door. Her body, which felt soft and exposed, shifts into a forwardly inclined attitude. The voice belongs to Gloria, and Kara heard one of the guys she’s with say this is her first time here. “Gotcha,” Kara whispers.

            “Don’t worry, Gloria,” says another guy’s voice. “I won’t let them pull anything, and I’ll be right behind you.”

            Kara can identify this voice too. The doorknob twists behind her. She turns to look at whatever may be emerging from the room her sister disappeared into but sees nothing through the darkness.

            “Kara,” Crystal whispers.

            “It’s Gloria,” Kara says. “And Nick is with her, and some other guys.”

            Kara stands there in the dark wondering what her sister will do. A plan starts forming in her own mind. They can let the newcomers all go upstairs after Gloria, and then they can run up the stairs and out the front door to their bikes. But what if they don’t all go upstairs? Maybe she and her sister can rush past them anyway.

            “Don’t tell them I’m down here,” Crystal says. “I have an idea. See if you can get them all in the ground-floor living room, away from the stairs.” Kara hears the door sealing and the latch sliding into its slot with a metallic knock. Astonished, she lets her hand shoot toward where she remembers the knob resides.

            “Hey, who’s down there?” The tiny space she occupies explodes into view in the abrupt jerking beam of a flashlight. “What in the world are you doing down there?” Kara doesn’t know this voice, and all she sees up the stairs is the yellow-white burst of the light pointed at her face. “Oh crap, you didn’t go in there, did you?”

            “No,” Kara says evenly. “I’m exploring. I was about to go in when I heard you guys coming in.”

            “You came here by yourself? And you were going in that room without a flashlight?”

            Before Kara can answer, he turns back to the living room to say, “You’ll never guess whose bike that was by the tree out front.”

            The bikes. Kara’s mind travels back to when she and her sister first rode up to the house. She’d been desperate to salvage her plan after realizing Gloria could have someone else read their message. Where did Crystal leave her bike? Searching her memory, she finds nothing but blankness. But hadn’t he, whoever he is, just said they only saw one bike? Briefly, she turns her head to see if the door is still closed. What can this idea of Crystal’s be?

            “Kara? Oh my God.” It’s Gloria. “You came here by yourself? Holy crap! Nice pajamas.”

            Now the guy says, “Why don’t you come up here with us? Gloria was about to go upstairs and check out the room where those two girls jumped out the window. It’s her first time here.”

            “Shut up Larry! I’ve been here before.”

            The sides of Kara’s lips slide slowly up over her gums and back across her molars. Her hand leaps up to cover her mouth. “Hey, would you get that light out of my face?” she says, disguising the gesture. “I’ll come up there and check out the upstairs with you guys.”

            “You weren’t really going in there by yourself?” Gloria asks, though it sounds more like an accusation. Kara can hear the shame in her voice and imagines red blotches blossoming beneath the clusters of brown freckles on her dollish cheeks. “And in your pajamas no less. That’s kind of a creepy thing to do, don’t you think?”

            Plagiarizing her sister, Kara says, “I’ve been afraid of this place since I was a little girl, and I don’t want to carry that fear around with me the rest of my life. So I’m here to check this place out and prove to myself there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

            Gloria laughs. “Well, aren’t you a brave little hero?”

            “Braver than you.”

            The older kid, Larry, backs away laughing. “Ooh, she’s got you there.”

            “Shut up, Larry. She’s here because this is a creepy place and she’s a creepy little girl. She’s probably playing with herself down there.”

            “I am not!”

            Gloria has never said anything outrightly mean to her before.

            “Give her a break, Gloria,” Nick says. And there he is at the top of the stairs, his complicated eyes severe in the shadows. He reaches up and pulls at Larry’s arm to redirect the flashlight. “You really came here by yourself? That’s hardcore. Why don’t you come up here and we’ll check out the upstairs first. Then, if you two are up for it, we’ll come back down to check out the basement.”

            Kara picks up from his suggestion that they don’t want her to go through the door. There must be something inside they don’t want her to see, the same thing Crystal saw that made her scream. But what is she supposed to do? She waits long enough to make sure Crystal isn’t going to say anything, and then she starts climbing back up the stairs.

            “So,” Gloria says, “you just decided to jump on your bike and ride out here to wander around in this dark house with no flashlight?”

            “I told you, I wanted to overcome my fear. So I forced myself to come in here. And I wanted to do it in the scariest way I could think of.”

            “That takes courage,” Nick says.

            “Well, that takes something,” Gloria says. “I’m not sure courage in the right word.”

            Larry chimes in, “It’s more courage than any of us had.”

            “Yeah,” Gloria says, “I’m not convinced. What were you really doing down there?”

            “I told you!”

            “You two shut up,” Larry says. “Gloria, you want to do the honors?” He stands aside, his mouth deranged by a mocking, conspicuously half-concealed grin, as he lifts his hand palm out to usher her into the hallway at the top of the stairs.

            Kara’s lips pull back again, but this time it’s dark enough she doesn’t have to hide it. Gloria inches toward the room at the end of the hall. Kara knows what’s in store for her. The one-sidedness of the knowledge fills her with amusement and pride. But what’s all this about playing with herself? What’s she saying exactly? Kara understands just well enough to be embarrassed. How can she respond when Gloria says it again? She has an idea.

            “Hey, Gloria, what’s taking you so long?” she says. “Are you playing with yourself over there?”

            Larry convulses with laughter, startling Kara. Even Nick can’t resist some shoulder-bouncing chuckles he tries to muffle.

            Gloria whips around and glares, her eyes full of hate. “If you’re so brave, what are you doing back there with the guys protecting you?”

            Kara steps casually out from behind Larry and strides purposefully, fearlessly, down the hall, breezes past Gloria, who now looks more stricken than angry, steps into the room, and turns with her arms out to her sides, presenting herself undeterred, unharmed, triumphant. Her victory is overshadowed by her noticing that Larry and Nick are exchanging a troubled looked in the half shadow behind the flashlight.

            Gloria storms down the hall and springs into the room. She seizes up when her gaze finally reaches the dangling animal. “Oh gross! What the hell is that? Oh my God. Did you guys hang that thing up there?”

            Nick and Larry are making their way down the hall, followed by another guy and another girl. “Well, in point of fact, we didn’t hang it there,” Larry says. “But we did think you might get a kick out of finding it. Too bad creepy pajama girl here had to ruin the surprise.”

            “Creepy pajama girl!” Gloria repeats before leaning back and crowing with laughter. “That’s why you weren’t scared to come in here. You were probably in here playing with yourself before you went downstairs.”

            Kara turns toward Nick, who laughs along with the others. She closes her eyes to think hard about how to respond, but her insides are turning liquid and oozing into heavy puddles weighing down her chin, her shoulders, her belly. Her knees feel like they’re about to give out. Finally, she manages to disgorge the words, “I wasn’t playing with myself. I came up here to conquer my fear. I bet none of you are brave enough to come in here alone.”

            Larry says, “Yeah, that’s because we’re not creepy little perverts who wander around the dark in our pajamas.”

            Gloria bludgeons Kara with her guffaws, hurling them at her, trying to beat her down with them. “That’s right. And your sister is a creepy little pervert too,” she says.

            “My sister is braver and smarter and… and just better than any of you.” She’s never hated her own words so much, never felt their inadequacy with such abject shame. Gloria continues with her fake laugh, barely putting any effort into making it sound genuine.

            Nick breaks in to say, “Hey, maybe we should get out of here. It might be a better idea to just come back another night.” He lifts his eyebrows at Larry as he tilts his head toward Kara, who’s too dejected to wonder what the gesture could mean.

            Larry sighs and runs his left hand over his stubbled scalp before turning toward the wall to shout, “Shit!”, startling Kara. “You know what?” he says. “No, we’re not going to leave, but we’re going to send creepy pjs here on her way. Time to go home, creepy little girl.”

            “I’m not going home if I don’t want to,” Kara says, realizing that’s exactly what she’d most like to do. But there’s no way she’s going to let these guys find her sister downstairs and start harassing her too. “You’re just mad because you wanted to scare your girlfriend and now you can’t.”

            Larry whips around and grabs Kara by the top of her arm. “Oh, you don’t think I can be scary just because you decided to come here to play with yourself tonight?”

            Nick reaches over to clutch Larry’s other arm, saying, “Hey man, take it easy. She’s just a kid.”

            “Oh, I’m not going to hurt her. But you can be damn sure I’m about to escort her out. Now listen, Kara. We wanted to show this place to Gloria, and we were going to initiate her into our group. Nothing personal, but our initiation is secret, and you’re already disrupting it. So what we’re going to do is we’re all going to go downstairs and see that you get nice and safe to your bike.” He dons an exaggerated, ghoulish smile. “Then you can get the hell out of here and go home. I’m guessing your parents don’t know you’re out here. I bet they’d be grateful if I told them.”

            Kara’s only concern now is figuring out how to clear a path for Crystal to escape. Her intuition tells her these kids pose a real danger. They’ll be mad when they find her sister, just like they’re mad at Kara right now, only worse. And this Larry kid is a total jerk. He’s the one who seems the most determined to scare Gloria like they planned. Now that he’s already furious because she’s ruined the first phase of his plan, there’s no telling what he’ll do if Crystal ruins the next. The only way out is through the front door. Maybe there’s another door in the back, but it’s probably boarded up more securely. Kara’s failure to come up with a solution frustrates her, and her frustration eats away at her patience with Larry.

            Swinging her arm up over her head to break his grip, she says, “I bet my mom and dad wouldn’t be too grateful if I told them about you grabbing me, you jerk.” She rubs her arm, even though it doesn’t hurt. “But, fine, I’ll go home. I don’t want to know what your stupid secret club does anyway. I just think you all should check out the tree outside before you go down to the basement.”

            “Why?” Nick asks. “We already saw the tree. Is there something we didn’t see?”

            “It’s just what you should do. The girls who lived here, they ran up to this room after what happened to them in the basement. Then they jumped from these windows into the tree. So now that you’ve checked out this room, you should go look at the tree next. And then you can go downstairs.”

            “Uck,” Gloria says, flaring her arms out to her sides. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why are we listening to creepy pajama girl anyway?” She flounces out of the room. Nick shakes his head and turns to follow her. The other two kids make their way down the hall after them.

            “Well, congratulations,” Larry says to Kara. “You’ve ruined our fun for the night. But maybe we can still have a little.”

            “I wasn’t trying to ruin anything. If you guys want to scare Gloria, it makes no difference to me.” Kara says this as she steps in front of Larry to leave the room. She’s hoping to get to the ground floor before the rest of them so she can direct them all outside somehow. “But I’m telling you, check out the tree. It’s probably better than whatever’s in the basement.”

            Larry lifts his hand. He leaves his fingers unclenched and barely touches her shoulder, but his arm makes a barrier she would have to push past. “What’s out by the tree, Kara?”

            Cornered, Kara looks to the door and then back toward the windows. Maybe she could jump out, like she imagined doing earlier, and they’d chase her out of the house. But just then Gloria’s voice reverberates down the hall. “Hey, Larry, come on. We need the flashlight.”

            As frightened and desperate as Kara is, the thrill of Gloria’s own failure of courage breaks through.

            “I’m coming,” he yells, before turning back to Kara. “Let’s go pajama girl.”

            She walks to the door and turns back. Larry gestures for her to continue down the hall. He follows close behind her until they reach the stairwell, where he steps around and squeezes past the other kids to light the way down. When he reaches the landing on the ground floor, he turns around and shines the flashlight in Kara’s face. “You know what?” he says. “Let’s get her out of here. Seth, would you make sure she gets on her bike? We’re going to take Gloria down to the basement, and then we’ll see if there’s really anything out by the tree.”

            Kara tries to look past Larry to the basement, wondering if Crystal has heard. Is she really in danger? If they get mad enough, will they hurt her? Kara decides she won’t take that risk. There’s no way Crystal would let them harm her, so she can’t even give them the chance to harm Crystal. Larry shining the light in her eyes infuriates her—and gives her an idea. Before she has a chance to envision it through to the end, she’s putting her plan into action. Roughly jostling past Gloria and Nick, she springs down the stairs and snatches the flashlight out of Larry’s hand. Enraged voices fill the house as Kara bolts toward the door. Already she knows she’s made a calamitous mistake. There won’t be time to pull back the board covering the doorway. Sure enough, as she slows to reach for the edge, a body crashes against her, enormous, its powerful arms wrapping around her shoulders and chest. Larry has her.

            “Nice try you little bitch.”

            One of his hands works its way down her arm and pries the flashlight out of her hand. With one side free, she turns to see the other four kids rushing into the living room. She’s done it. But how can she let Crystal know? She lifts her right foot to stomp on the floorboards, but Larry whips her around by her other arm, sending her down on all fours.

            Nick steps forward. “You got the flashlight. Just let her go home man.”

            Kara twists to see Larry’s chest heaving. He’s gripping the flashlight in his right hand. His left is squeezed into a fist.

            “I can’t wait to get to school tomorrow,” he says with a clenched jaw, “so we can tell everyone how we found creepy pajama girl here playing with herself in the creepiest place in town.”

            Kara, convinced he’s about to kick her or jump on top of her, turns and crabwalks toward the wall. “Get away from me! Or I’ll tell everyone how you were trying to scare Gloria away so you could have your boyfriend Nick all to yourself.”

            The words come out of her mouth, but all she grasps of their meaning is that they’re insulting. Seth and the other girl explode with laughter. Larry steps toward her, raising his right hand over his head, the hand with the flashlight. Kara notices two things simultaneously: Nick pushing on Gloria’s shoulder so he can step around her to intercept Larry, and Larry halting mid-lunge, catching himself. She knows instantly that she and her sister are in no real danger—no physical danger anyway. But before she can adjust to this assurance, a full-throated shriek fills the room.

            In the half second it takes Kara to guess it’s her sister screaming, she releases a squirt of pee. She brings her knees together and scrambles to her feet, not wanting anyone to see a wet spot. Startled shouts and whimpers reach her ears, but she doesn’t see whose mouths they come from. Now come footsteps resounding angrily as they storm up the stairs from the basement. Larry manages to direct the light onto the landing just as a blood-slicked mass dashes across the framed doorway. More whimpers and screams echo through the bare room as everyone backs away from the stairwell—everyone but Kara, who steps forward. Was that Crystal? If it wasn’t, whatever it was must’ve hurt her. Hurt her bad.

            The kids all stand frozen in silence as the stomping reaches the top of the stairs and continues down the hall. Kara looks at the faces surrounding her, all the flashing eyes pointing up at the ceiling, and she thinks now is the time to hurry away and find her sister. But her feet are stuck in place.

            They hear a tinkling crunch, glass breaking. Then they hear the clacking and crackling of branches, someone leaping into the tree from the window, followed by the sickening thud of a heavy weight landing on the ground in front of the house. Kara is the first at the window, the first to see the obscene mess of a body lying a short distance from the base of the tree. Her mouth falls open to release a sound between a retch and a grunt. Bodies are churning all around her as the light jumps and swings erratically. She doesn’t look at the others. They’re speaking, shouting. She doesn’t hear the words. She hears creaking and snapping as hands grip the board covering the front entrance by the edges to work it free of the nails. Finally, she turns, desperate to get to her sister, if that is her sister, and pursues the others onto the porch. The second her foot crosses the threshold she hears the bone rattle of clattering branches high in the tree again. They all rush out to see a second blood-spattered body suspended over them. Only this one is still moving. This one, human in shape, is working its way toward the thicker branches closer to the trunk. Then it stops, turns to face the cluster of crazed kids, thrusts its head forward and catapults its banshee roar at their quivering silhouettes. Kara stands paralyzed on the porch as the bodies around her scatter and retreat across the lawn.

            The older kids are already running alongside and springing onto their bikes when the blood-drenched girl in the tree starts climbing down. Kara backs her way under the eaves, eying her own bike. She’s completely alone now to face whatever this is. But she won’t leave Crystal. She can’t. Her gaze drops from the tree to the lump on the ground. She turns and looks into the black of the gaping doorway. Should she rush downstairs first? Or go examine whatever that is that fell out of the tree? How can she with the demented ape still in the branches?

            Or is that Crystal up there? Kara steps forward again and leans down to look up from under the eaves. “Crystal?” she murmurs, too quiet to be heard. “Crystal,” she says louder, “is that you?”

            Laughter, Crystal’s laughter, rings out. Then scraping, snapping, an inrush of air through familiar teeth, a breathy grunt, all mingle in a desperate moment, forcing Kara to smash her eyelids together and hold her breath. She hears the sickening collision with the ground as two hollow beats in rapid succession—feet then upper body.

            “Crystal!” she shouts, leaping over the steps.

            A hiss, a growl, more laughter—Kara still can’t tell if she’s running toward the demon who will slash, maul, and dismember her. She runs nonetheless. And she sees it really is Crystal. And she really is covered in blood, or something that looks like blood.

            “Are you hurt?”

            “I hurt my damn foot!”

            “But you’re bleeding all over. You’re covered in blood.”

            “It’s not my blood. It’s his.” She points to the mass that fell from the tree.

            Kara turns and stares. “What is it? Oh God, it smells.”

            “It’s a goat. Those sick jerks cut it up, pulled its skin back to make it look gross and scary. They had it lying in the middle of a pentagram to make it look like someone sacrificed it to the devil.”

            “They killed a goat?”

            “Who knows if they’re the ones that killed it? But they must’ve been the ones who carved it up.” Crystal, wincing, rocks on her butt as she squeezes her foot with both hands. “I think it’s broken.”

            “Crystal,” Kara says tearing up, “you’ve got that goat’s blood all over you.”

            “I know damn it!”

            Kara backs away. How can she know this really isn’t a demon, one disguised as her sister? How can she know her sister isn’t possessed?

            “I’m sorry,” Crystal says. “This really hurts. I didn’t want to let the body and all the blood scare me. When I saw it, I screamed, and then I went and looked closer. I didn’t understand why it was there, why it was really there, until I heard those idiots talking. Then I figured it out. And I got mad. So I decided to scare the hell out of them. And I didn’t think they’d be scared of me in my pajamas. They were already teasing you about yours. I still wasn’t sure I could do it, but then I heard them getting rough with you. You know I’d never let them hurt you.”

            “They wouldn’t have hurt me, I don’t think.”

            “Tell that to him.” She points at the flayed goat.

            Kara finally goes up to her sister to help her to her feet. “Do you think you can pedal your bike?”

            “I don’t have much choice, do I?”

            Kara grabs Crystal’s wrist, ducks under her arm, and holds her up as she pogoes toward her bike.

            “My pajamas have blood on them now too. I think I might get sick.”

            “We’ll have to throw them away when we get home. Don’t worry about that now. Let’s just get out of here before they figure out what I did and come back.”

            “How do you know it was them who killed the goat and drew the devil symbol?”

            “Well, they seemed pretty damn eager to scare Gloria, don’t you think? And they were pretty damn mad at you just for being here and messing up their plan.”

            “You carried that thing all the way upstairs and threw it out the window?”

            “First, I threw it across the landing. Did you see that? It wasn’t easy. It’s heavy as hell.”

            “I can’t believe you did that.”

            As they round the corner of the porch to where Crystal leaned her bike earlier, Kara has a thought. “Hey, I think I want to go down in that basement too. I would’ve been way too scared to do what you did, but I think I need to conquer my fear, like you said. Or else I’ll get old and never get what I want and see horrible stuff along the way.”

            Crystal pulls her arm away and turns to face Kara, clasping her by the shoulders, using her for balance. “Listen to me.” They’re close enough for Kara to see the fire in her sister’s eyes. “We’re done with this place. Do you understand? I want you to promise me you’ll never come back here, alone or with anyone else.”

            Kara stares into her sister’s transformed face.

            “Promise me!”

            “Okay! I promise! But, Crystal, why can’t we come back? You said it was all made up.”

            Crystal releases her, takes two hops toward her bike, and then turns back. “Kara, I was standing there in the dark with that thing for a long time. I almost couldn’t stand it. I was shaking. I heard those boys talking, and that ditz Gloria, and I made my plan. But right after I heard the scuffle by the door above me, right before I just said to hell with it and picked the damn thing up, I heard something. I heard it clear as day.”

            “What, Crystal? What did you hear?”

            “I heard a little girl crying. And then I heard another little girl saying, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll never let him hurt you again.’”

***

More Halloween Stories

CANNONBALL: A HALLOWEEN STORY

JAX: A HALLOWEEN STORY

KEMOA: A HALLOWEEN STORY

TANGLE AND ROWDY: A HALLOWEEN STORY

Those Most Apt to Crash: A Halloween Story - Part 1

            Kara only discovers her bike is leaning after she rounds the bend and collides with a gust of cold air that easily seeps through her pajamas. The shock sends her juddering upright, her gaze lifting from the crumbling road before the lead tire into the night-blackened trees beyond. She braces against the chill before being distracted by the hulking silhouette of the house edging into view, its upstairs windows gazing back at her through a delta of inky black branches spilling skyward in thin rivulets carved into the yellow gray clouds. With her eyes involuntarily locked on their invisible cracked glass, she succumbs to a liquid slackening of her features and her limbs.

            The stories all the neighbor kids tell about this place typically end with some mysterious figure seen through these same windows, a sight to send even the bravest middle schooler scampering home. Kara sees nothing through the dark but the white wooden frames she knows from daylight visits to the end of the driveway are fading and flaking to a dull gray. She peers deeper. Rising from the seat and leaning over the handlebars, she barely notices her cold-stiffened skin bunching up around her eyes as the wind bites into her fingers. When she glimpses movement, she can’t tell if the shapes are real or something she’s imagining. Glaring with such intensity, she forgets to watch for the entrance to the driveway, until she’s moments from reaching it.

            Suddenly aware of her surroundings again, Kara feels her breath catch in her throat. Something is wrong. She pulls her eyes from the house to scan the road ahead. Crystal is coming up on the driveway, but she’s not slowing down. Kara watches as her sister stands up and makes a straining lurch to her left, forcing the pedal down with all her might before springing back to her right to start again. This graceless bobbing from side to side picks up momentum as the mottled white blur of her pajamas recedes into the gloom.

            She’s more mad than frightened. Crystal must be playing a joke on her. Still, determined as Kara is not to fall for it, she has no idea what to do. She thinks about turning into the driveway Crystal has already raced past and waiting defiantly at the end of it. Probably a better idea, though, to turn around and ride home.

            Yes, that’s what she should do.

            It’s decided.

            Kara passes the driveway, gathering speed, wondering what’s keeping her chasing after her sister. She wants to catch up to Crystal so she can ask her why she didn’t turn and ride up to the old spooky house like they planned. Because it isn’t a joke, as much as Kara wants it to be. The way Crystal lifted herself off the seat, driving one pedal down then the other, it tells Kara she saw something. Or heard something. She must have. Finally, she manages to take in enough air to shout, “Crystal, what are you doing?” The white of Crystal’s pajamas continues to fade. Kara lowers her head and drives down hard with one foot then the other.

            Far beyond the driveway that was supposed to mark their destination, they reach a slope that has them speeding up even more. Icy streaks of wetness stream across her cheeks and whimpers burble from her mouth even as she tells herself not to panic. The road is dark. It isn’t safe to be hurtling down the hill this fast. She keeps lifting and pushing with her feet as hard as she can. The only thing more distressing than the breakneck speed is the thought of watching the white blur ahead shrink to nothing. Now the tears are sailing toward her ears. Her mind roars with the thought, “You have to stop!” even as she strains to move faster, to keep her sister in view. The tension between thought and action fills her with a frenzied elation, like she’s breaking through some unacknowledged barrier into a new frontier of untrammeled chaos.

            They’re approaching the highway now. She won’t ride into traffic, Kara assures herself. She won’t try to cross. She can’t. Oh, what can she be thinking?

            Accepting she has no chance of catching up to her sister before she reaches the intersection, Kara keeps her head up and her eyes on the distant shape in the road. The wind splashes cold and loud over her wetted ears, but she knows if she stops she’ll hear the rushing traffic. Oh God, what if she wants to kill herself? What if this is how she’s doing it? Her elation reduces to panic. She pedals harder, as hard as she can. The road evens out. She’s losing speed. Crystal must be slowing down too.

            The bike jounces beneath her. Kara looks down for the pothole she’s ridden over as she desperately grips the handlebar, releasing a loud cry as she overcorrects in a vain search for her center of balance. She knows she’s about to crash. She squeezes shut her eyes. Moments later, she opens them to find herself still upright, still pursuing her sister. God, why is she doing this? Why won’t she just stop and tell me what happened? There’s the highway ahead now in full view, traffic lights and all. Kara has another terrifying thought. This is the road their dad takes on his way home from work, and he’ll have ended his shift by now. He’s going to see them both on their bikes in their pajamas when they should be home getting ready for bed.

            “Crystal!” she tries calling again.

            But where is she? Kara has been so distracted by the hole and the thought of their dad catching them she’s failed to notice the ghostly blur has vanished. “Crystal!” she cries again, putting her head down for one last burst. She thrusts her feet down against the pedals with all the strength she can muster, grunting pathetically, before looking up to see she’s coming up on the intersection. Crystal is nowhere to be seen. There are only the glinting colors of cars whooshing past, each bulldozing its own giant scoop of light over the pavement.

            She slows to a stop, her face contorting in preparation for a sob as she pants, snot blocking the flow of air into her nostrils. All she can do is stare ahead with wet, frantic eyes, as she’s too acutely bereft to resist taking in the horrific tragedy she knows she’s about to discover. The opposite side of the road is visible from where she stands on her toes with the bike between her legs. Where is it? Where did Crystal’s body fall?

            “Kara, get down here! Dad might be coming home right now.”

            She leaps away from her bike, letting it clang noisily to the asphalt. There’s her sister, crouched in the grassy trench running alongside the highway, her bike lying next to her. Kara has her arms around her sister’s neck before she hears, “Get your bike out of the road! Hurry up!” She drops her arms and springs back to her bike. Picking it up and turning back toward Crystal, she thinks of her mom’s habit of saying one of her kids “could be lying in a ditch on the side of the road for all I know.” Well, here is Crystal, not lying, but squatting in a ditch cut parallel to the highway, her darkening blond hair still pulled neatly back in a ponytail, her pajama legs tapering into the tops of her gym shoes.

            “Crystal, what are you doing? Why did you ride past the house? Dad’s going to see us here and we’re going to get in trouble.”

            “Just get down and be quiet for a second. I need to think.”

            “Think about what? I don’t understand what you’re doing. I was really scared. I thought maybe you were going to—”

            “I just needed to get away and think because I got really mad and I just… I just wanted to pedal as hard and as fast as I could. I don’t know why. That’s why I need a minute to think.”

            Kara hears her sister panting and notices her eyes are roving violently over the scene. “Okay,” she says, “but can we get away from the highway. I don’t think we should be this close and we need to get back home before Mom figures out we’re gone.”

            “I’m not stupid! I know we need to go home. Do you really want to go past that house again?”

            Kara opens her mouth but can’t think of a word to say. So Crystal really did see something when they rode past. She turns to look up and down the length of the highway. “Is there another way to get home?”

            “I don’t think so, but that’s the other reason I need to think.”

            The girls sit on their heels by their bikes, watching the cars and trucks stream past. Kara wants to ask more questions, but she knows Crystal doesn’t want to talk yet. Sometimes, Kara knows, you have to arrange your thoughts before you speak, and it’s annoying when someone keeps asking you questions before you know what to say.

            She can’t help turning now and looking at her sister from the side of her eye. Sure, thoughts get jumbled up, and it’s hard to figure out why you seem the way you do to someone else. But something else is going on with Crystal, something strange. Lately, it’s as if two Crystals were living in the same body. The first is the one Kara has always known. The other makes no sense. And old Crystal is always struggling to account for this new Crystal’s weird behavior. Kara figures it must be feelings, which are often confusing, at the bottom of this struggle. Yes, Crystal must be battling new feelings, wild ones, pushing and pulling her this way and that, as she stumbles, trips, and staggers to keep to some straightforward path ahead. Mom says it will happen to me too, Kara thinks, when I’m a teenager.

            “Okay, I’ve got it,” Crystal says. “There’s no other way back. We could go along the highway and take the next road, but we would end up going in a big circle and we wouldn’t be home for over an hour. So we have to go back along this road, back by the house. What we’ll do is cross to the opposite side of the street when we pass the driveway and go as fast as we can get these bikes to go.”

            “Crystal, did you see something when we passed before, something scary? Is that why you didn’t stop? Is that why you started pedaling faster?”

            Kara watches Crystal in the dim light cast by the headlights of a few passing cars. Her sister never bothers about her looks, so she has an unkempt, sporty appearance, with a habitual expression of mild impatience, like anyone she encounters is keeping her from some important task she would otherwise glide effortlessly toward completing. Now an edge of serious intensity tinged with bewilderment eclipses that natural ease of intention. Her eyes go blurry for a moment before she says, as if reading aloud in class, “No, I didn’t see anything. I just felt like I needed to go, to go as fast as I could.”

            “But why didn’t you stop like we planned? We were going to leave a message for Gloria, one she would never see. Remember? Because she wasn’t telling the truth about going in that house. Because she was too scared and we were going to prove it.”

            “I remember. It was my idea.”

            “Then why didn’t you stop?”

            “I just told you.”

            Crystal lifts her head to check the highway in the direction their dad will be coming from. Then she stands with a determined air and hoists her bike upright. “Come on,” she says walking at a tilt while gripping the handlebars. “We’ve had enough time to catch our breath.”

            Kara realizes she’s still breathing hard but thinks better of asking for more time. She lifts her own bike and hurries to keep up. But then, without deciding to, she stops. “Crystal!” she yells suddenly, almost angrily, surprising herself.

            Her sister stops and turns to face her. “What?”

            “I was really scared. Please don’t take off like that again. Please don’t leave me behind.”

            Crystal squints her eyes and presses her chin into her chest. She didn’t mean it. She didn’t want to leave Kara behind. Something just came over her. “Okay, Kara. You’re right. I never should’ve taken off without you. I promise I won’t do it again.”

            Kara opens her mouth to ask again why she did. Seeing Crystal turn around, swing her leg over the bike and raise herself up over the seat with the effort of thrusting herself onward, she decides she can ask again when they’re safe at home. She takes a few running paces alongside her own bike before leaping on.

            When they reach the hill, Kara is alarmed by the tiredness in her legs and the strain in her lungs. She stands to crank the post, hearing the teeth of the main gear grip the links of the chain. In her imagination, she jumbles the creak of steel against oily steel with the jagged ache on top of her thighs. Maybe muscles are like chains and gears. What makes them all go? How do they know when the right time is? Maybe one of Crystal’s chains has a jammed link that somehow made her need to go fast when she wanted to stop. Kara tries to feel herself forming the intention to drive her foot down before it starts its descending swoop. But all she’s aware of is the desire to move forward, after her sister, and the effortful churning of her legs, as if they somehow already know exactly what they must do. If there are chains inside her, she has no sense of them.

            Crystal, true to her word, maybe a little tired herself, takes to the hill at a medium pace. Through the darkness, Kara watches her head droop between her arms, bent at the elbows, as she leans forward to chug up the incline. No, Kara thinks, there can’t be chains or anything like that inside her sister. What’s going on under her skin and beneath her skull isn’t like some machine with tiny blocks and springs you could take apart to find out how it works. That’s the stuff that goes on in boys, which is why they like machines and trucks and tools. This is a different kind of mystery, more like what goes on in the woods when it’s dark and all the people are in their beds, a girlish type of mystery.

            Cranking her own way up the hill, Kara tries to keep her eyes on the trees to either side of the road. It’s a game she often plays to imagine all the hidden goings on in the forest surrounding their neighborhood, where no humans dwell. Even now, she thinks, if you look hard enough into the black spaces, you’ll be able to see strange movements, like you saw through those windows before you had to chase after Crystal. Yes, that kind of thing is probably much more like what’s going on with Crystal’s insides. Some shadowy figure is moving around, messing things up. You have to look close though. And even then you can’t be totally sure you saw it.

            Even though Crystal is pedaling at a more relaxed pace, Kara is frustrated to find she needs to work hard to keep up, especially since what she really wants is to ride up alongside her. What she definitely doesn’t want is to be this far back when they pass the house. Will Crystal slow down for her when they get close? But then they’d both have to speed up in another minute anyway. Kara’s own insides start to go shaky again as the distance to the house dwindles with each revolution of the main gear. Had Gloria, just one year older than Kara, two years younger than Crystal, really gone inside the house as she claimed? Sure, she opened her dark-lined eyes big and told everyone she’d been scared to death the whole time. But had she really gone? Or did she just want to tell everyone a story?

            Kara thinks back to that afternoon. Her sense of there being something off about Gloria’s story was too irritating. She had to speak up. “My dad says awful things happened to the girls who lived there, and there’s no point poking around that place now.” She knew she’d made a mistake as soon as the words left her mouth.

            “Oh, you should really listen to your dad, Kara. I’ve heard those stories and they’re not for small children. He’s right about the house too. There’s no reason to go anywhere near there. It’s just dirty inside, with lots of broken glass and things to trip on. It’s no place for kids.”

            “That’s not what I meant, Gloria. I could hear the stories too if I wanted. And I’m not afraid of glass or tripping.”

            “It’s okay, Kara. I only went myself because there were older kids going. I was scared the whole time. I didn’t mean you couldn’t go. I’m sure you would be fine. I’m just saying there’s no point, you know.”

            Kara pedals harder. Gloria talked to her like a baby. And she did it on purpose, in front of all their friends—well, in front of a couple of her friends. Kara wanted to say something witty, something that would make it plain to everyone what Gloria was doing, but without sounding too mean, without making them think she was mad. She remembers fantasizing about digging around for some of Gloria’s secrets. Then the next time she talked down to her, she would be ready to hit back. She might not even have to mention anything out loud, as long as Gloria knew that she knew. But when she told Crystal about what Gloria had done, her big sister came up with an even better idea.

            “That Gloria,” Crystal said as they sat on the couch that evening vacantly flipping through channels, “she gets under my skin.”

            Kara was surprised Crystal even knew who Gloria was. “Why does she get under your skin?” She couldn’t imagine her sister letting Gloria talk down to her.

            “So,” Crystal said, ignoring the question, “she was telling you and some other girls about how she went to that old house on Campbell Road. But you don’t think she actually went there?”

            “Well, I just don’t think it sounded like she did. She said stuff like, ‘It’s dirty.’ But she didn’t tell us anything interesting, you know? Maybe she did go and the place is just boring. But I don’t think she was there.”

            “You know what we could do?”

            That’s when Crystal hatched her scheme. Kara loved it. It was perfect. The only problem was when Crystal got to the driveway, instead of turning in, she kept going. She pedaled all the way to the highway as fast as she could. Now they’re topping the rise on their way back, and Kara knows they’ll be passing the house again soon. She leans forward to pedal harder, determined to catch up to Crystal before it’s time to sprint past the place again.

            She makes up the distance faster than she expected. Crystal is slowing down for her. Kara comes within ten feet of Crystal’s back tire at the same time the stand of trees hiding the house emerges from the gloom. Worried she may have used up the last of her energy, Kara stands up on the pedals, preparing for the sprint. To her astonishment, Crystal remains seated, pedaling almost idly. This is maddening. When she’s supposed to stop, she speeds up. When she’s supposed to speed up, she slows down. Kara gets closer, a vague reticence taking hold so that even though she’s desperate for answers, and even though she’s getting a little mad, she keeps her mouth shut. There’s no telling what that growing wildness inside Crystal will make her do next.

            Kara is so focused on her sister’s bizarre behavior she barely registers the approach of the driveway. When Crystal slows even more and turns onto the gravel, Kara is too dumbfounded to be scared—at first. Swerving in behind her sister, she casts a wary glance at the windows, which always seem to be glaring right back at her, before turning to Crystal and shouting in a whisper, “Did you change your mind? Are we going inside now?”

            Crystal coasts to a stop, leaning to post her right foot on the ground. Kara grips the break and softly skids to a halt beside her. “Listen Kara. I wasn’t forthcoming with you earlier.” She doesn’t whisper, but her voice is low.

            “Forthcoming? I don’t know what that means.”

            “It means there was something I wasn’t telling you.” Her shoulders rise and collapse as she releases a dramatic a sigh. “A couple days ago I saw Gloria talking to Nick.”

            Kara already understands. Crystal likes Nick. Not that she’s ever said she does. Kara can just sort of tell. She talks about him a lot, for one thing, often criticizing or complaining or making fun. Whenever she talks about him, Kara gets the sense that she’s putting too much effort into pretending to be casual. Her dismissiveness is a charade. Or not a charade but a mask. Kara only recognizes this in her sister because she herself likes a boy named Keith, but she’d be mortified if anyone knew about her crush—at least before Keith lets her know if he likes her in return. Kara feels compelled to commiserate but decides to keep silent in case Crystal is embarrassed.

            “I don’t even know what they were talking about,” Crystal says. “I just saw her put her hand on his forearm and then lean back and laugh and he seemed really happy and I hated it. I don’t know why. I don’t even like him. Well, I sort of like his eyes. They’re, like, complicated. But I never thought about going on dates with him or anything like that. It’s just—I don’t know—I thought he maybe liked me. And even though I don’t like him I liked him liking me. Does that even make sense? And Gloria is all frilly and tries to be all sexy and important. It drives me nuts.”

            Kara wants to say something reassuring, but she’s at a loss. She opens her mouth to tell Crystal Nick does like her, but then she’s not sure that’s what Crystal wants to hear. Does she want to hear that she’s pretty too, that she could maybe get more of Nick’s attention if she wore dresses and did up her hair like Gloria always does? Or would that make her mad? These new wild feelings are impossible to navigate around.

            Crystal turns to look at her. It’s easy enough for them to see each other’s outlines in the dark, but making out expressions is hard. Somehow, Crystal seems to see Kara is distressed. “It’s so stupid. I don’t even know why I’m telling you. I just want you to know I didn’t mean to scare you. I’m your big sister and it’s my job to look out for you. I shouldn’t have taken off and left you behind like that.”

            “Why did you?”

            “I got mad. When we rounded the bend, I saw the upstairs windows and I stared in as hard as I could. I thought I saw something move, like something swaying back and forth. But I kept looking and it was gone. Then I didn’t know if I’d seen anything at all. Maybe I imagined it. Maybe it was just a reflection, or something in my eye. I couldn’t see it. But then there was the driveway and I… and I…”

            “You didn’t want to turn in.”

            “I couldn’t, Kara. I was terrified.” She chokes back a sob. “And that made me so mad. It made me mad because I wanted to help you prove that Gloria was lying about going into the house. I wanted to embarrass her so Nick stops liking her. But I’m the embarrassing one. Plus, I wanted to go in because I don’t believe the stories. I think they’re stupid and made up. And there’s no point in being scared. But I couldn’t help it. It made me furious.”

            “It’s okay, Crystal. I won’t tell anyone what you just told me. I promise. What are we going to do now, though? Aren’t we going home?”

            “Even if you don’t tell anyone, I’ll still know. You’ll still know. And I can’t have you thinking your big sis is a fraidy cat. If you’re too scared to go inside, it’s okay. But I have to go. I’m going to do what we said we were going to do.”

            “Crystal, I thought I saw something too. It was just like you said. I looked hard and thought I saw it, but then I kept looking and it was gone. I don’t think it’s a good idea to go in there. Can’t we just go home?”

            “You can wait here if you need to, but I have to go.”

            “But why? I don’t want to wait out here by myself.”

            Crystal drops her head again. Then she lifts her gaze toward her sister. “Kara, I’ll ride home with you if you really want me to. I’ll have to come back though. If Dad is getting home, I’ll wait and sneak back out after he goes to bed. I’m going in that house tonight. I already decided.”

            Kara thinks she’s about to tell Crystal that she does want to be taken home first. Instead, she sits silent on her bike, listening to the breeze wend its way through the millionfold branches surrounding her and her sister. If Crystal takes her back home first, she’ll be out for at least another hour. She’ll be at much greater risk of getting caught. And she’ll be right back here, by herself.

            “What do you say? You up for an adventure?”

            Kara sits not saying anything, sinking in a vat of dread. She can’t go in that house. She can’t leave her sister here on her own. The tears well up in her eyes. A sob starts to bubble up from her throat.

            “Kara,” Crystal says, “I wouldn’t take you in there if I thought there was any real danger.”

            Kara covers her mouth with her hand until she’s able to swallow back her urge to cry. “Okay, Crystal, but if anything happens, we run back to our bikes and go home as fast as we can. I mean, if we see anything. Or hear anything. Or…”

            “Kara, it’ll be fine. I won’t let anything happen to you. Now, let’s get in there, write our message to Gloria, and get our butts back home before Mom notices we’re gone.”

            Kara closes her eyes and holds her breath for three beats before saying, “Okay, let’s go, but don’t go anywhere without me. I’m really scared.”

            They both push off with their planted foot and continue their ride up the gravel drive. Kara keeps her eyes on the space in front of her tire. A strange feeling of weightlessness and warmth, like soda left in a hot car, flows out along her arms and legs. It may be that every joint in her body is about to lock up, causing her to topple like a block of wood onto the ground. It may also be that if the situation calls for it, she’ll be able to jump ten feet in the air and remain hovering there until she needs to come back to earth.

            Kara’s pulse throbbing in her ears brings her attention to her tingling lobes and the dry hollow crunch of her tires pinching the gravel, the drawn-out owlish querying of the wind, and the creaking and clacking of the cold-hardened branches. The air is heavy, despite the cold, and smells of grass and asphalt and wet dirt. She tells herself it’s just rocks and trees and mud on a cold spring night. It doesn’t have to be scary just because it’s nighttime. You’ve got to be brave for Crystal. Whatever is going on with her, you don’t need to understand to know she needs your help right now. Plus, you’ll be able to go back to school tomorrow and tell everyone you were here, that you left a message, and that whoever wants to prove how brave she is can go see what it says.

            But what if Gloria just has some older, braver kid go in the house and read the message for her? Kara, horrified, squeezes the break and skids to a stop. The whole plan is unraveling. She looks up and sees she’s only a short distance from the giant beech tree that stands in front of the house, the one the girls tried to jump into from the windows she was looking into from the road. That’s what the stories say anyway. Crystal has already dismounted and leaned her bike against the far side of the porch. Kara is so eager to salvage their plan, she forgets to monitor her intensifying fear, almost forgets she’s afraid. “Crystal,” she shouts again in a whisper. “The plan isn’t going to work because Gloria will probably just have someone else go in the house and read the message for her.”

            Crystal, standing before the stairs leading up to the porch, leans back to look the house up and down before turning toward Kara. “How much will it matter by then?” Her voice is still low, but there’s a new facet to its tone—impatience or defiance or a seriousness that won’t be derailed by anyone’s foolishness. “Everyone will know you were here. And if she’s able to tell us what the message says, then we just ask her about the other message in the basement. If she comes back to read the message in the basement, well, she’ll just look stupid for letting you make her go back and forth.”

            After considering this strategy, Kara moves toward the porch with her sense of mission restored. Then she realizes there’s a problem. “But we can’t go in the basement. That’s where it happened. That’s where they say the horrible stuff happened to those girls.”

            “Kara, do you even know what people say happened down there?”

            A sliver of the rage she felt during her encounter with Gloria returns. “It’s not because I’m afraid,” she says, forgetting to whisper. “I just thought we weren’t supposed to talk about it. Dad said it was awful stuff and there was no reason to go poking around.”

            “Then Gloria comes along, talking all big, and you find out she not only knows the story, but she’s even been to the house. That’s why you got so mad, right?”

            Kara looks down at the hastily tied laces of her shoe. “Will you tell me?” she mutters. “But not now! Will you tell me after we’re done? When we’re back home?”

            “I talked to Dad about this place last week,” Crystal says, still facing the entrance. “Turns out, he had a lot to say. One thing he told me, which I’ll tell you now, is that as kids we all want to be the most mature. It’s like a contest. A race. There’s a whole world of adult stuff waiting for us, he said, and we look up to the kids who seem to learn about it all before the rest of us. But he said parents try to protect their kids from that same stuff they’re trying to learn about, because it’s too confusing or too scary for them. Kids need to learn how to deal with their emotions first because adult stuff makes you feel really strong ones. He said it’s nice to be kids and think the world is great and you can do anything. Once you’re old, you look around and see everyone else just gets old too, and no one gets what they want, and there’s a lot of horrible stuff that happens along the way.”

            Crystal puts her left hand on the banister and mounts the first step before craning to face Kara. “So us kids try to learn about all the adult stuff to impress our friends, but if we find out too much before we’re ready, life can start to seem worse than it really is. He said, ‘Don’t worry about the kids who are going faster. They’re the ones most apt to crash.’ But you know what I say? The slow ones are the ones most apt to get left behind. If being an adult is all about handling your feelings, then I’m going to make myself learn how to handle mine. I don’t want to just watch horrible stuff happen while I get old and never get what I want. That’s just not acceptable. That’s why I’m going inside. We’ll go upstairs first. Then I’m going in the basement. You can wait at the top of the stairs. Then when we get home I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

            “I don’t understand why you have to go in the basement.”

            “Because I’m scared!” she says stepping down and turning to face Kara full on. “I’m so scared of going down there I hate it. Look at me, I’m crying just thinking about it. But I know there’s nothing down there that can hurt me. I’m scared for no reason. So it’s a perfect opportunity to learn how to not be afraid.”

            Kara wants to object, but now she understands. Now she thinks maybe it’s a good opportunity for her too. If she goes inside and sees there’s nothing to be afraid of, she’ll have passed Gloria in that race Dad talked to Crystal about. There’s only one point in her sister’s reasoning Kara has doubts about. “How can you be sure there’s nothing down there that can hurt you?”

            “I can’t,” Crystal says, swiping at her eyes. Is she smiling? “But I’m about to find out.” She turns, climbs the stairs, steps up to the door, and twists back to say, “You coming?”

            Kara takes a fortifying breath and wills her right foot to take the first step toward the stairs. The trick she uses to overcome the fear holding her in place is to imagine Gloria’s face as she hears all about what’s really in the house, beyond the dull and obvious dust and glass and things to trip on. What’s really propelling her onto the porch and through the front door—a sheet of particle board held with loose nails to the inside of the frame, easily pushed in at the corner—is the sight of her sister entering the house in front of her. She understands now that she’ll go wherever Crystal goes. As strong as her fear is, though, the fantasy of putting Gloria in her place still proves useful.

            Ducking and slipping under the board, Kara sees the beam of Crystal’s flashlight brushing the walls, passing over peeling wallpaper with faded graffiti overwritten with fresh markings in bolder, shinier colors. None of it is legible. The vandals’ letters are too jazzy. But Crystal lets the light linger on some snatches long enough to make Kara wonder if she’s looking for some mark in particular. The air inside the house is still, even as the wind murmurs through the cracked and missing windows. Kara listens close to the ticks and creaks and scrapes of their feet on the desiccated wood floor. The only thing to really hear or see, she discovers, is the yawning emptiness of this main room. Maybe Gloria was right about there being little more than dust and glass after all. There’s not even much of a smell to the place.

            What Kara wondered about when she pushed through the doorway was whether she would immediately feel the dread all the stories refer to. That’s the word the older kids always use, dread. They say it hangs in the air, pursues you throughout the house. It’s this dread that obliterates all doubt about the stories being true. Now Kara steps closer to her sister, turning to look into the dancing oval of illumination, and if anything she feels a greater sense of calm. Having overcome her horror at the prospect of entering the house, she’s too numb or too disoriented to feel much fear. There’s nothing in here, nobody home. You can perceive it in the stillness. Kara worries now they won’t find anything she can use against Gloria.

            The other thing that’s keeping Kara calm is her sister’s air of purpose. Crystal isn’t just scanning the walls with the flashlight. She seems to be searching for something specific. “Come on,” she says, “let’s check out the upstairs.” The beam darts toward the stairway. Kara takes a half step closer to her sister, with dueling fears battling it out in her mind. There could be something up there. There could be nothing. She climbs the first few steps on her sister’s heels, noting how the completely dark room behind her suddenly seems less certain of its emptiness.

            The stairs creak as Kara figured they would. But nothing scary happens in the stairway, and nothing greets them in the hallway they step into at the top. The room where the girls supposedly jumped from the window is directly ahead of them, at the end of the hall. When they’re two thirds of the way there, Crystal stops and turns with her finger to her lips.

            “Stay right there for a second,” she whispers before moving slowly on, careful not to make a sound. With each step she seems more delicate in her movements.

            Kara assumes she’s checking the room to make sure it’s safe before she waves her in. It occurs to her now though that Crystal may have heard something she wants to investigate. Kara slowly shifts her weight to lift her foot and move it forward. She doesn’t want her sister going in that room alone. She also doesn’t want to disregard her instruction. So she walks mincingly, only making it halfway to the room by the time Crystal is stepping inside. Then she jogs two steps before her sister’s voice rings out through the empty hall.

            “Okay, don’t be scared when you come in here. There’s something gross hanging from the ceiling, but there’s no one here, nothing to be afraid of.”

            Kara freezes. Something gross? She’s already close enough to the doorway to see in the glow beyond the flashlight beam that something is indeed swinging by a string in the middle of the room. An odd moaning sound emanates from her throat instead of the question she intended to ask.

            “It’s okay, Kara. It’s just a dead animal. Someone must’ve hung it up here as a joke. Or to try to scare other kids, just like us.” Crystal continues her hasty survey of the room’s contents, which as far as Kara can see amount to little more than some scraps of paper in the corner and the long thin carcass swaying on its string. Is it a squirrel? A ferret? “I knew I saw something through the window when we were riding past,” Crystal says as she finally turns back to inspect the animal.

            Kara, arms folded over her chest, shuffles into the room. She can see enough in the indirect light to satisfy herself that it’s empty, just as Crystal assured her it was. Her eyes gravitate back to the animal, under which she sees the dark remains of puddled blood. Even though the wind freely flows in through the one glassless and the other broken window, the smell of rotting guts finds its way to her nostrils. She covers her mouth and her nose with her hand. “Why would they do this?”

            Crystal sighs. “I guess because this place is supposed to be scary. If you work up the courage to come in here, like we just did, and you don’t find anything, maybe you feel like you should leave something for the next kid who comes. You know, so they’re not as disappointed as you are. They probably didn’t even kill it themselves. I bet they got the idea when they came across this thing already dead, lying beside the driveway or something.”

            This makes so much sense to Kara the panic threatening to overtake her subsides. Gradually, something like indignation sets in instead. If Crystal’s take is correct, it means these other kids misled them, lied to them, and were gross about it. But weren’t the kids who tied this thing up trying to help in a way? Weren’t they trying to give the kids who came after them a taste of the experience they themselves were denied? And, most importantly, hadn’t they given her something to work with in her contest against Gloria?

            Kara walks to the window. The branches of the beech tree outside, ghostly pale in the dark, reach like twisted finger bones in all directions. Could she, if she was desperate, leap far enough out from the window to grasp onto one of those branches? She could reach them, sure. But hold on? No, she would end up falling just like the girls in the story. Would Gloria make it? The question forms a lens for Kara’s focus, intensifying it, so that now she’s looking for the nearest, sturdiest branch while considering the steps and swings she could take to reach the ground efficiently and safely. Maybe she could pull it off after all.

            “Looks like someone beat us to it,” Crystal says.

            Kara turns from the window. Crystal is pointing the light at a spot in the middle of the wall facing the door they both entered through. A message she has no trouble reading is scrawled in bright yellow spray paint:

To any child who reads this,

Congratulations,

by coming here, you’ve killed yourself.

Crystal drops the light a couple feet so they can read a second part:

To any child who didn’t come alone,

Your time is coming too.

Just wait.

            The girls turn in unison to look at the upturned angular shadows cast by each other’s features.

            Crystal snorts with laughter. “Wonder why your friend Gloria didn’t mention this.”

            “Did you know this was here? Did someone tell you?”

            “Mike from the end of the street told me there was a message written inside. He said he couldn’t tell me what it says. All the guys he was with took some oath to never speak of it. I think that’s kind of a tradition with this place. You can tell people there’s a message, but you’re not supposed to tell them what it says.”

            “So your idea about how to trick Gloria—you knew there was already a message here?”

            “Well, I didn’t know for sure, but we both do now, don’t we?”

            Kara considers how this may change her plan. Really, that Gloria said nothing about a message suggests she was never here. But how can this new information be used to prove to everyone else she was lying? There may be something more urgent to worry about though. “Is it supposed to be a curse?”

            “The guys dare each other to come here alone, so it’s just a way to mess with their heads. I’m not sure what the point of the second part is.”

            “Neither of us came alone.”

            “I guess we haven’t killed ourselves yet then.” She turns from rereading the message to look at her sister. Seeing her worry, she says, “Listen, Kara, don’t take this too seriously. I know the type of kids who would do stuff like this. You do too. Mike said he’s been here messing around with a group of guys on a few occasions. It could even be one of them who put this here—or someone else we know.”

            Crystal’s efforts at calming Kara only frighten her more. Her initial shock and confusion freely mingled with curiosity until she considered how the message might apply to them personally. Now she’s wondering if there isn’t some way to counteract the curse, some ritual they can perform, just in case. “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe Dad was right.” She looks from the painted letters to the window and shudders. “Maybe we should have never come here.” She’s not sure if it’s dread she feels, but the possibility alone is enough to start a self-accelerating cycle.

            Crystal exhales roughly, exasperated, before walking over and draping her arm over Kara’s shoulders. “You want to know the real story of this place? You don’t have to worry about getting too scared.”

            “How long ago did you first hear the story?”

            “The first time someone told me a story about this place, I think I was younger than you. But only by a bit. It’s not because I was more mature or anything like that. I was just hanging out with some kids who happened to be talking about it. Just like a couple weeks ago I happened to be hanging out with Mike and Stan and a few other guys when they started talking about it. They call me a Tom Boy because I’m interested in stuff like this, and in sports too. It’s weird to them I’d want to hear what they’re saying, that I’m not just interested in hanging out with other girls. They don’t know what to make of me. But after a while they just start acting normal. Boys talk about different things when girls aren’t around. And I think that’s what was going on.”

            Kara considers this. It’s true. Crystal hangs out with boys all the time. Mom says she’s more “rough-and-tumble than most girls,” beaming with pride when she says it, leaving Kara to suspect it’s a positive trait, one she lacks. So maybe Crystal did only hear the story first because boys know more about this stuff, and Kara seldom goes anywhere near the boys. All they do is fight and talk about how tough they are. Or tell fart jokes. She’s always thought they were stupid, even if she likes the look of some of the older ones.

            “So the story’s not scary?” Kara says.

            “Well, it’s hard to explain. But once you hear all of what I found out you’ll understand.”

            “Don’t we need to get out of here? We’re going to get in trouble for sure now, aren’t we?”

            “Kara, we haven’t even been in here five minutes yet. If you don’t want to know, or if you want to wait until we’re home, that’s fine.”

            “No, I do want to know,” she says, sounding much surer than she feels.

            “What do you know already?”

            “I heard there were twin girls who lived here with their parents. One night something horrible happened to the girls in the basement, so they ran as fast as they could to get away. They ran right up to this room with the windows you can see from the road. Then they tried to jump from that window right there into the tree outside. But they didn’t make it. One of them died in the fall. The other walked with a cane the rest of her life. She died anyway, though, just a few years later. Maybe she killed herself or got in a car crash or something. I’m not sure.”

            “Did you ever hear anything about what happened in the basement? Do you have any idea?”

            “I think it was supposed to be something scary, like they saw a ghost. But maybe someone just did something bad to them.”

            “Is that all you know about this place?”

            “Crystal, just tell me!”

Continue to Part 2

Ian McEwan’s "Lessons" on How to Make It in Literature as a Rich White Guy

History first turned against Ian McEwan in retaliation for his 2008 indictment of “medieval visions of the world according to which God is coming to save the faithful and to damn the others.” Defending his friend and fellow novelist Martin Amis against charges of bigotry, McEwan complained, “As soon as a writer expresses an opinion against Islamism, immediately someone on the left leaps to his feet and claims that because the majority of Muslims are dark-skinned, he who criticises it is racist.” Islamism, McEwan insisted, is easily separable from Islam, and just as easily separable from the skin-color of its most populous adherents. We can, in other words, criticize one without disparaging the other, and violent extremism—Muslim or Christian or any other variety—must be condemned. His reward for coming to his friend’s defense was, predictably, to be accused of racism himself. But he would not be deterred from speaking out.

            When McEwan ran up against modern sensibilities yet again, he was still in poor standing with many in the literary community for his earlier infractions. So imagine the furor when in 2016 he was reported to have said in a speech before the Royal Institution,

The self, like a consumer desirable, may be plucked from the shelves of a personal identity supermarket, a ready-to-wear little black number. For example, some men in full possession of a penis are now identifying as women and demanding entry to women-only colleges, and the right to change in women’s dressing rooms.

He only made matters worse when he began his response to a request for clarification during the ensuing Q&A by saying, “Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to think of people with penises as men.” He did go on to commiserate with the harrowing plight of transwomen, but the damage had been done. He came to discover he had run afoul of yet another vision of the world where only the faithful are redeemed and all others are damned.

            Six years later, a fictionalized version of this scandal appeared in the pages of McEwan’s novel Lessons, which includes alternative versions of several other events from the author’s life as well. Indeed, McEwan appears to have set out writing the story with a simple inversion: what if someone else in his life had become the successful novelist while he had instead eked out a mediocre existence as a disappointed but mostly contented man of his time? So, in the rearranged world of Lessons, it is the protagonist Roland Baines’s ex-wife, the celebrated novelist Alissa Eberhart, who falls from grace after offhand quips about transgenderism. McEwan writes,

She had made unnecessary enemies in the trans debate when she said on an American TV chat show that a surgeon might sculpt a “kind of man” out of a woman but there was never enough good stuff to carve a woman out of a man. It was said provocatively in the Dorothy Parker mode and got a quick bark of laughter from the studio audience. But these were not Parker’s times. “Kind of man” brought the usual trouble. An Ivy League university withdrew Alissa’s honorary degree and a few others cancelled her lecture engagements. More institutions followed and her speaking tour collapsed. Stonewall, also under new management, said she had encouraged violence against trans people. On the internet her remarks pursued her. A younger generation knew her to be on the wrong side of history. Rüdiger had told Roland that her American and UK sales had suffered. (411)

Rüdiger, Alissa’s German editor who goes on to become the CEO of a publishing house, is the one who relays the story to Roland because by this point in the novel the couple has been estranged for decades. When Roland is finally reunited with Alissa, she expresses her frustration with the new generation of critics. “Life is messy,” she says, “everybody makes mistakes because we’re all fucking stupid and I’ve made lots of enemies among these young Puritans for saying so. They’re as stupid as we were” (414).

            After reading passages like these, you might expect the novel would be bitterly denounced by nonfictional critics and contemptuously dismissed by real-life readers, perhaps with an eyeroll and an exasperated “Okay Boomer.” But so far Lessons is doing well both critically and commercially, coming in at number six on review aggregator Bookmark’s list of best-reviewed fiction of 2022, while garnering an average Amazon rating—based on over 3,500 reviews—of 4.3 stars. That’s not to say McEwan and his latest offering lack their share of detractors. “It’s a reminiscence,” writes Daniel Soar for the London Review of Books, “sometimes fond, sometimes self-flagellating—and, for large stretches, it’s properly, Englishly, boring.” But the most galling thing about McEwan for Soar and the other naysayers just may be that he has not only earned a substantial measure of wealth from writing fiction, but from writing literary fiction no less. What makes this doubly impressive—or infuriating, depending on your allegiances—is that the “young Puritans” Alissa refers to in the passage above are thought to make up a disproportionate share of the readership for any literary work coming off the printers over the last several years.

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For anyone viewing his career through the lens of the currently ascendant “intersectional” ideology, McEwan’s ongoing success must stand as an annoying provocation—but it is McEwan himself who poses the real problem. Intersectionalism enjoins its followers to situate authors along the intersecting continua of their racial, gender, and sexual identities to determine their relative standing as either oppressor or oppressed: whites oppress blacks, men oppress women, cis people oppress transgenders, hetero people oppress gays. Late in Lessons, Rüdiger explains to Roland why promoting Alissa’s work has gotten dicey in the current climate. “She’s our greatest novelist,” he says. “Teenage school kids are made to read her. But she’s white, hetero, old and she’s said things that alienate younger readers” (407).

McEwan, being male, has one more strike against him than his protagonist’s ex-wife. Yet it is often difficult to disentangle criticisms focused on McEwan’s identity from those directed at his literary aesthetic. As Adam Begley, a longtime and mostly sympathetic interviewer, lays out in the Atlantic,

About literature, McEwan is always ready to talk. “Novels at their best name the world,” he tells me, not for the first time. His stubborn devotion to realism is at once a strength and a weakness; it risks making him seem old-fashioned and conventional, too tidy, too slick. He names the world, but of course can’t apprehend it with unimpeachable objectivity, his worldview distorted by the usual suspects: race, gender, sexual preference, socioeconomic status. A militantly empirical, science-minded secular humanist, he’s happy to declare that materialism is “the most freeing of worldviews” and unafraid to bash religiosity: “The word spiritual,” he told me nearly 20 years ago, “I just don’t understand what people mean. I hear that word and I reach for my gun.” His realism rests on certainty tempered by an acute awareness of contingency—and by empathy, a novelist’s indispensable attribute. But can empathy wholly compensate for an ingrained point of view, a nexus of obdurate personal bias and cherished belief? Even assuming that the world he wants to name is one we all recognize, how can he be confident that language carries meaning without spillage or slippage? Readers on the lookout for confirmation of radical, existential doubt and fans of the avant-garde thrilled by the instability of language should pluck books from a different shelf.

As bewildering as this assessment must be to the uninitiated (spillage or slippage?), it highlights the challenges McEwan is forced to overcome whenever he sits down to put pen to paper.

Begley’s characterization of McEwan’s work likely makes little sense to readers unfamiliar with what those in graduate literature courses call “critical theory” (of which intersectionalism is a subcategory). Frankly, the standard litany of charges leveled against McEwan hint at underlying premises so bizarre they ought to raise questions even in the minds of the students and academics who are most well-versed in this type of scholarship. To wit, why should the impeachability of McEwan’s objectivity count against him when no writer—no human—can claim perfectly unvarnished clarity into any topic? Doesn’t the ability to share insight into the experiences of each character matter more than the perspective of the author, especially if that author brings profound empathy to bear? Anyway, who but a masochist would want confirmation for “existential doubt”? For that matter, how are atheism and a thorough discounting of spirituality supposed to sooth such doubts? And what does it matter that language, however strenuously precise, can never fully capture the multitude of meanings the people, objects, and actions it describes are drowning in? Sure, readers often have wildly varying interpretations of the same text, but if a work of fiction contains ambiguities stark enough to make the story incomprehensible or incoherent, how likely is that work to win favor with readers—unless they happen to be among those fans of the avant-garde Begley warns off from McEwan’s work?

Begley’s anosognosia regarding the alien nature of his own “ingrained point of view” is not at all exceptional among professional literary scholars. Though, as with the case of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, McEwan’s continuing success signals a disconnect between critics and the publishing industry on the one hand and the reading public on the other. According to conservative writer and political commentator Douglas Murray, such divergent responses arise because “Publishing is Now a Left-Wing Bubble.” Murray arrived at this conclusion after reading an anonymous 2021 letter in the trade magazine The Bookseller which histrionically decries the allegedly cozy relationship between publishing companies and bigoted authors. It contains lines like, “We need to step away from the paradigm that all opinions are equally valid” to underscore the need for action, because apparently “transphobia is still perfectly acceptable in the British book industry.”

Murray surmises the unnamed signatories were reacting to the company Hachette’s decision to publish The Ickabog, a children’s book by Rowling—even though the story has nothing to do with gender. Again, the main trouble with The Ickabog is its author. Rowling has publicly rejected trans activists’ claim that no meaningful difference exists between transwomen and women born as females, further arguing that those who ignore the distinction are putting biological females at risk. The triviality of this offense, along with the ongoing debate about whether it constitutes an offense at all, offers Murray a hint about who was behind the missive.  

One suspects that the authors of the letter are the sort of liberal arts graduates who dominate the publishing world, and who bring with them the intellectual clutter of their education and their class, indicated by such jargon as “paradigms”. These are not social milieus where any sort of dissenting opinion is encouraged or tolerated, let alone the sort of hardened illiberal prejudice that they imagine—or pretend to imagine—is rife.

As further evidence of the viewpoint homogeneity in publishing, Murray points to survey data available on a website that tracks political affiliation by occupation. The site reports that book publishing stands as the sole industry exclusively employing people on the left, making it, in Murray’s words, “the sort of echo chamber that even academia can only look at with envy.”

            That an outspoken conservative like Murray would voice such an opinion is no surprise. But his assessment has been echoed by a few prominent figures on the left. In an op-ed titled “There’s More than One Way to Ban a Book,” New York Times opinion columnist and former editor of the New York Times Book Review Pamela Paul suggests that while operatives on the right continue their attempts to officially ban books they deem morally and socially corrosive, activists on the left have likewise worked to “cancel” books through social media campaigns and organized protests among publishing industry workers. Paul writes,

In the face of those pressures, publishers have adopted a defensive crouch, taking pre-emptive measures to avoid controversy and criticism. Now, many books the left might object to never make it to bookshelves because a softer form of banishment happens earlier in the publishing process: scuttling a project for ideological reasons before a deal is signed, or defusing or eliminating “sensitive” material in the course of editing.

Paul’s apostacy in acknowledging these checks to free expression provoked a backlash among the faithful in the literary community. Her move to the Times opinion section, with its “expected results,” even earned her a spot on Literary Hub’s list of biggest stories of 2022. (And Paul would go on to create further controversy with a defense of J.K. Rowling.)

Paul was inspired—or provoked—to write her column on book banning by Gayle Feldman’s Publishers Weekly report on the state of free expression in the publishing world. Feldman began her investigation by soliciting the opinions of six industry leaders. Only one of these executives was willing to discuss the topic, and only on condition of anonymity. So, Feldman went on to seek input from former executives and others involved in book publishing. The report states that while campaigns by the right are wreaking plenty of havoc,

many longtime book people have said what makes the present unprecedented is a new impetus to censor—and self-censor—coming from the left. The desire to heal historical wounds and promote social justice is conflicting with the right to speak and write freely. Call it political correctness, cancel culture, wokeness—and the fear of challenging it—this is the censorship that, as the phrase goes, dare not speak its name.

Underlying these censorship campaigns, which the campaigners routinely complain do not warrant the label of censorship, is the ideological tenet that the wrong kind of writing or speech represents a grave threat to people who are already disadvantaged and oppressed. Such unintended impacts are what Begley is referring to when he writes about linguistic “spillage or slippage.” A cis male novelist, for instance, in his zeal for naming the world, might label a biological male a man, causing untold harm to the trans community—at least according to trans activists. The most reliable way to avoid these potential harms, believers argue, is to ensure that as often as possible it’s the downtrodden themselves who get to dictate the discourse. This precept comes with a troubling corollary.

While solid data on the criteria driving publishing decisions is next to impossible to come by, some prominent voices are suggesting it is not just the handling of taboo topics like race and gender that gets books nixed. Tweeting in response to Paul’s piece, none other than literary giant Joyce Carol Oates wrote,

a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good; they are just not interested. this is heartbreaking for writers who may, in fact, be brilliant, & critical of their own “privilege.”

If taken at face value, this observation means a book may be deemed problematic for its content, but it can also be torpedoed owing to the race and gender—the “positionality”—of the author. This policy follows logically from the premises of intersectionalism. If you’re a white cis hetero man, you occupy the apex of oppressordom. That means, at least within the framework of this ideology, that if you are speaking or writing, your words can only be operating to perpetuate the status quo that affords you this power—unless, as Oates suggests, you happen to be critical of your own privilege. But even if you are “self-flagellating” in this way, as Soar accuses McEwan of being, you can still be dismissed as boring, i.e., not as interesting as other writers with more impressive claims to victimhood. 

            Many in the industry claim this policy of exclusion is an open secret. The Cuban American writer Alex Perez, who graduated from the famed Iowa Writers Workshop in 2009, created yet another controversy in 2022 with comments made in an interview for Hobart Magazine. He argued,

My take is the only take and the one everyone knows to be true but only admits in private: the literary world only accepts work that aligns with the progressive/woke point of view of rich coastal liberals. This is a mindset that views “whiteness” and America as inherently problematic, if not evil, and this sensibility animates every decision made by publishers/editors/agents. White people bad. Brown people good. America bad. Men bad. White women, I think, bad…unless they don a pussy hat. 

Perez also claims that “80% of agents/editors/publishers are white women from a certain background and sensibility; these woke ladies run the industry.” And this homogeneity has a particular effect on the types of books that get published and promoted. Perez argues,

Every white girl from some liberal arts school wants the same kind of books … I’m interested in BIPOC voices and marginalized communities and white men are evil and all brown people are lovely and beautiful and America is awful and I voted for Hillary and shoved my head into a tote bag and cried cried cried when she lost…”

A handful of Hobart’s editors resigned in protest after reading the interview, and the magazine was widely criticized for publishing it. But Sharmaine Lovegrove, founder of the Hachette imprint Dialogue Books, had just a year earlier made a similar point, saying in an interview, “I think what happened was that a particular type of person, a particular type of white, middle-class woman came through publishing and sort of had enough of the old boys’ club.” Lovegrove went on to say, “It’s really disappointing to see these stats of men not coming through, not just as novelists, but through the editorial process as well.”

Whether worries of this supposed “woke” takeover of literature are overblown—or whether you happen to be among those clamoring for it to continue—white male authors are undeniably facing unprecedented headwinds. So how has Ian McEwan managed to keep publishing and selling his books? Or, as Soar phrases the question in a London Review podcast episode,

Why do we give him quite so much attention? And some of it’s a little bit embarrassing. You know these 13 pieces that have been published in the LRB. And unfortunately, I think we can accept, he’s just inescapable, and once a figure like this is discussed, you’ve either got to ignore it in order to make space for other people—and that’s probably a better way to behave—or you’ve got to kind of think about how we’ve got to this point. What goes on to get this person on the radio every morning soon after his novel comes out?

Listening to Soar’s self-negating mea culpa, you may think McEwan was guilty of some atrocity. Though Soar provides precious few details about what he dislikes in Lessons, he seems unaccountably assured that McEwan’s mediocrity is beyond dispute—his commercial success notwithstanding. Soar, an Oxford man (though not at all like Gatsby), is so unselfconscious in his elitism that he never pauses to consider readers may pick up a book for some other reason than that people like him are discussing it. But what might that reason be?

            Soar isn’t alone in proclaiming McEwan’s writing tedious, but there is a peculiar tendency among those unimpressed with his prose to mischaracterize major aspects of the stories they’re criticizing. In a notorious hatchet job for the New York Review of Books, for instance, novelist John Banville argues that McEwan’s novel Saturday is little more than an overdressed fairy tale. In keeping with this thesis, Banville complains about having to slog through a lengthy description of the protagonist’s preordained victory in a heated squash match with a work colleague. “Having thrashed his squash opponent,” Banville writes, “Perowne returns to the arts of peace.” The only problem for Banville is that McEwan in fact has his main character losing the game. After the players argue over a let, Perowne is forced to concede. “And so they played the let,” McEwan writes, “and Perowne serves the point again, and as he suspected might happen, he loses it, then he loses the next three points and before he knows it, it’s all over, he’s lost” (118). Later, when his wife asks him over the phone why he’s out of sorts, he decides against telling her about a drubbing he took during a road rage incident earlier in the day because it might worry her. Instead, he answers, “I lost at squash,” adding “I’m getting too old for this game” (151)—some fairy tale hero he is.

What must be borne in mind is that critics’ complaints often reveal far more about their own preoccupations than they do about the books under review. Soar for instance claims later in the London Review podcast episode that among the many explorations of historical events in Lessons,

an odd missing part is 9/11, which is sort of mentioned and you kind of know it’s happened, but unlike everything else, probably in the sort of present imagination (sic), it doesn’t loom quite as large. It’s sort of passed over.

Soar then suggests the elision was deliberate, as McEwan wanted to avoid reminding readers of his earlier position on the Iraq war. But here’s how 9/11 is “sort of mentioned” in Lessons, as McEwan describes how Roland

did not trust the Tube. Only a miniscule faction, credulous and cruel, believed that the New York hijackers reclined in paradise and should be followed. But here, in a population of 60 million, there must be some. Chosen from among the bearers of “Rushdie Must Die” placards or the burners of his novel, or from among the younger brothers, sons and daughters. That was chapter one, thirteen years ago. Chapter two, the Twin Towers. The next chapter was likely to be a story of punitive revenge, of military invasion, not of Saudi Arabia where the hijackers came from, but its murderous neighbor to the north. Two-thirds of the American public were persuaded that Saddam was responsible for the New York slaughter. The prime minister was inflamed by traditional loyalty to the US and successful interventions in Sierra Leone and Kosovo. The country was preparing for war. (307)

Roland next recalls London being shut down for rehearsals of an emergency response to a terrorist bomb. “He thought about it often, too often.” His response was to “Never take the Underground again,” and he was sure “The buses too could not be trusted.” That’s why in this scene he is traveling on foot. While Soar is right that the passage takes up little space in the book, he might have noticed that Roland’s destination lends some added significance to the topic of his ruminations.

One of two major incidents that set the plot of Lessons into motion in its earliest chapters is fourteen-year-old Roland’s becoming enmeshed in a sexually abusive relationship with his piano teacher. The passage about 9/11 comes when a fifty-something-year-old Roland is going to confront that teacher for the first time in nearly forty years—not exactly where an author would tuck a topic he was embarrassed to broach. Later, as Roland walks away from the encounter, he picks up the thread again. Contemplating his former involvement with politics and why New Labor has fallen out of fashion, he thinks, “Iraq, the deaths, careless American decisions, sectarian slaughter had caused some of the best local people to return their party cards” (324).

What we have then is not an evasion on McEwan’s part so much as prejudice and suspiciously poor recall on Soar’s. Had he not decided to dislike McEwan’s work because he disagrees with his politics, Soar might have realized the simpler explanation for the brevity is that McEwan already wrote about 9/11 at length in his novel Saturday. Likewise, though Soar devotes most of his print review of Lessons to the question of why McEwan incorporates violent encounters, dramatic accidents, and other lurid events into his stories, he is so consumed with contempt for both the author and his readers that he never bothers to consider the obvious answer. Violence is compelling. Intrigue is engaging. Suspense propels us onward to the next page. An eventful plot makes reading more pleasurable.

            In keeping with H.L. Mencken’s definition of puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” critics like Banville and Soar cannot abide protagonists taking pleasure in their life circumstances, failing to be brought to their knees by the tragic state of the world, or behaving in any way heroic. And they cannot abide books that bring enjoyment to readers. “Page-turning excitement has long been a suspect virtue in a literary novel,” writes Daniel Zalewski in The New Yorker, “and some critics have disparaged McEwan as a hack with elegant prose.” For today’s critical theorists, stories are supposed to serve as tools for galvanizing collective efforts at political reform, and no one will be motivated to overturn the status quo by characters given to singing its praises or luxuriating in its blessings. The prescribed conversion is meant to begin in penance: privileged readers must be made to feel guilty so they will be more apt to divest themselves of their privilege for the sake of equity. As Perez suggests in his Hobart interview, the ideal stories for these critics feature hyperarticulate victims completely at the mercy of the societal forces that define them. Traditional plots, contented characters, anything redolent of gratitude or celebration on the part of the allegedly privileged—not only do these sins bring the taint of kitsch, but they also subvert the cause.

McEwan’s conception of what a story is and what a story does is different: less propagandistic, more aesthetic, more capacious, more human—and far more likely to conduce to true transformation, beginning as it does with transcendence. McEwan has written of “fiction’s generous knack of annotating the microscopic lattice-work of consciousness, the small print of subjectivity.” Recounting how a couple of choice sentences from the greats once restored his “faith” in the literary endeavor, he explains, “Appreciating the lines, you are not only at one with the writer, but with everyone who likes them too. In the act of recognition, the tight boundaries of selfhood give way a little.” He could be paraphrasing Tolstoy’s famous line about how “A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist.” It’s through this communion and renewal that most of us experience the exquisite pleasure of reading literature.

No clear line separates commercial from literary fiction, but one way to think of the distinction is that the commercial variety features extraordinary characters and events—dragons, wizards, epic battles—rendered in ordinary prose, while literary fiction features ordinary characters and events rendered in extraordinary prose. McEwan offers us something of a hybrid, in that his novels are eventful and brimming with suspense, even as they weave into their plots meditations on life’s finer mysteries, all the while observing the minutia of daily life with deadly poetic precision.

McEwan may have been grandfathered into the publishing world; his breakout works hit the shelves in the decades before smart phones and social media allowed radical postmodern progressivism to spread from humanities departments into the wider public consciousness. But there must still be plenty of readers who find value in his works, or they wouldn’t continue to be published to the fanfare Banville and Soar find so embarrassing. Publishers wouldn’t bother if the books didn’t sell. As novelist Charles Finch writes of McEwan in his 2014 review of The Children Act for The Chicago Tribune,

The first thing to do about Ian McEwan is stipulate his mastery. Anything we want a novelist to do, he can do, has done. His books are fantastically pleasurable. Their plots click forward, the characters lifted into real being by his gliding, edgeless, observant, devastating prose—his faultless prose. (That’s not a random word of praise. It doesn’t contain faults.) Every novelistic mode is at his command, from the dark fabulism of “The Child in Time” to the vibrant sweep of “Atonement” to the modest but beautiful realism of his more recent work, “On Chesil Beach,” “Saturday,” “Solar.”

Finch represents another common variety of McEwan criticism, one that treats political concerns as merely one dimension among many, leaving room for an appreciation of the author’s uncommon gifts. These critics, as ambivalent as they are—or pretend to be—are the ones who put Lessons on the list of best-reviewed books of 2022.

Since he begins his review insisting on “The first thing to do,” however, we know Finch believes something more must be done. “So then,” he writes, “The next, more rarefied level: To what end is he employing these perfections? What does he care about? What is he trying to tell us about ourselves?” Finch too, despite his willingness to acknowledge McEwan’s virtuosity, fails to realize his own ideological approach to reading may not be widely shared. Maybe McEwan is not trying to tell us anything. Maybe he is just trying to create great works of literature, shared aesthetic experiences that transform our consciousness by letting elements of others’ consciousness seep in through the magic of language—to no end other than the sharing and the self-transcendence.

While Finch’s review reveals he is also steeped in critical theory, his preferred subcategory is Marxist, not intersectional. Once again, though, the main criticism leveled against McEwan’s work focuses on McEwan himself rather than on any element that may be called aesthetic or literary. In this case it’s his wealth that must be gestured toward as a problem, not his whiteness or his sexuality. Here is how Finch takes on the question that stymies Soar about why McEwan’s novels include so many scenes of menace:

I think the essence of McEwan’s work lies in this anxiety. He takes a certain class of people—his people, for though every life is blemished by private sorrow, he must know how blessed he seems from the outside, a rich, brilliant, successful Londoner—and puts them at tension with their own tranquil lives. Often he has done that by examining stark moments of trauma or error, like the false charge of rape in “Atonement” or the balloon accident in “Enduring Love.”

Or maybe McEwan writes about “his people” simply because they are the ones he knows best. They may also be the ones he thinks he has the best chance of connecting to with his writing, liberal types with sufficient education to know they have it good and conscientious enough to be uncomfortable about it. And maybe the trauma and error come in simply because something has to happen in a story for it to be a story.

Finch ends his review by granting McEwan the status of genius, but “Does this dissolve the criticism most frequently leveled at McEwan in recent years,” Finch asks rhetorically, “that his novels treat the problems of a caste without many problems?” Here we come to the problem Finch struggles to reconcile with his appreciation of the book’s literary quality. Suggesting that McEwan condescends to his less well-to-do characters—by making them too intelligent—Finch explains,

It’s the kind of thing that bothers people, because in a way, every novel is already an act of class warfare in the wrong direction. It’s the art of the bourgeois order. What’s fascinating about McEwan is how he at once extends that conventionality and atones for it.

This is cleverly phrased cant. McEwan does in fact frequently explore the theme of an accidental fate that situates some in society’s more comfortable echelons while leaving others much worse off—an insight he should be credited for all the more considering he was not born to money. But when critics say things like “every novel is already an act of class warfare in the wrong direction” (Dickens, Steinbeck, Morrison?), all they’re really telling us is that they are not as interested in discussing literature as they are in proselytizing on behalf of their favored political ideology.

            So even the critics willing to grant that McEwan’s success may have something to do with his ability to write good novels have a hard time not turning the focus onto McEwan himself. This brings us back to the question of how he manages to keep selling novels and winning critical accolades—though from markedly conflicted reviewers—when his identity has nothing to recommend it. How has his writing career survived his multiple blasphemies against the prevailing academic creed? So far, we have identified two important factors. First, his renown had already begun to grow before the current checks on free expression were established. Second, he happens to write excellent novels, stories people want to read despite the denunciations of papery and patronizing scholars. But there’s something else he does to evade the censors, something ingenious.

            The scene in Lessons about Alissa’s troubles with the “new Puritans” wasn’t the first time McEwan commented on academic anti-liberalism and leftist identitarianism in his work. In his 2016 novel Nutshell, he writes that

A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in a new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options—neutrois, two spirit, bigender… (144).

At first, the unnamed protagonist’s feelings about this “mood” are hard to discern. He even seems excited by the prospect of broadened horizons. But later in the scene, it becomes clear he’s having some fun at the expense of those “almost-educated young.”

I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing in my face, my brain, like unwholesome dogs. (145)

This sendup heightens the mystery of how McEwan’s career has withstood the inevitable backlash. But it also provides a clue to his strategy.

            If the dominant ideology declares the identity of the speaker supersedes the substance of what is spoken, we must ask who it is making these problematic statements in McEwan’s stories. It so happens that Nutshell is a retelling of Hamlet, and the narrator occupies the role of the eponymous lead character. The brilliantly peculiar twist is that he narrates the entire story while still inside his murderous mother’s womb (casting still more doubt on the acuity of those critics who complain of McEwan’s bland conventionality). What accounts for the satirical lines about coddled college students in this bizarre context? The narrator continues,

I know. Sarcasm ill suits the unborn. And why digress? Because my mother is in step with new times. She may not know it, but she marches with a movement. Her status as a murderer is a fact, an item in the world outside herself. But that’s old thinking. She affirms, she identifies as innocent. (146)

Readers can sympathize with the narrator’s real grievance and may even grasp the underlying absurdity of taking desires and feelings for facts. “Lies will be her truth,” the narrator laments. Such a point is much easier to take from a babe in the womb than from a bespectacled rich white dude.   

            What McEwan understands is that fiction is the only realm where we enjoy the freedom to exchange our real identities for any of our choosing. A man may write from the perspective of a woman, as McEwan did in Atonement and The Children Act. An adult can write from the perspective of a child, as he also did in the first part of Atonement. He even took on the identity of a fetus in Nutshell. (Though, interestingly, he has yet to attempt taking the perspective of a racial minority.) At the point in Lessons when Alissa’s editor is telling Roland about her run-ins with social justice activists, readers have recently learned about the amputation of her foot. When she tells Roland in person about her frustrations with the “young Puritans,” she does it from a wheelchair, and later in the scene she reveals she’s been diagnosed with lung cancer, the result of her lifetime of smoking. Harsh truths are easier to take from moribund, wheelchair-bound old feminists than from comfortable old white men married to reason and realism.

            One of McEwan’s motives when he sat down to write Lessons was to pay homage to Nabokov, as the perverse relationship between piano teacher and pupil attests, along with references to Alissa’s Nabokovian prose in fictional reviews of her novels. So McEwan was faced with the challenge of writing about his own past, knowing no one wants to read about the experiences of overeducated white guys anymore, while incorporating thematic echoes of a famous author who would never make it past the censors today. His solution was to switch around the roles, the identities, so it was a young male student seduced by the older teacher, and an abandoned father witnessing his absconding wife’s spectacular literary success. By stepping into the character of Roland Baines, McEwan transformed himself from oppressor to victim, albeit one prevented from complaining by his awareness of being privileged in other ways. And he does all this while maintaining his authority over all the memories he most wanted to explore. This maneuver, in less skillful hands, could have easily come across as a cheap dodge. But McEwan’s musician and poet manqué is remarkably relatable, remarkably real, despite the artifice.

            Is McEwan at all concerned about spillage or slippage? Indeed, the theme of stories’ impact on our minds recurs often in his work. The dangers he worries about, however, are far removed from those of the clone legions of today’s scholar-activists. McEwan believes the world exists beyond our fears and hopes and desires—he is no linguistic determinist—so he devotes little effort to describing or defining utopia into existence. And he would be loath to yoke his prose to any block of empirically dubious assumptions about how the wrong term written or uttered by the wrong person will redound to the continuing abjection of this or that identity group. That’s not to say he fails to appreciate the real dangers of the wrong types of stories. When asked by an interviewer in 2002 why he put a child at the center of his novel Atonement, his most widely acclaimed work to date, McEwan explained,

During the 90s I’d been very aware of the moral hysteria that swept through the United States—and then Britain—about child abuse and the recovered memory movement. I was struck reading about cases of perfectly innocent men and women who had been sent to jail for unbelievable sentences on the evidence of a child manipulated by social workers, judges, police and parents in a collusion of panic. For a long time I’d been considering a plot in which an innocent person is condemned by a child. The heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is a girl completely obsessed by the Gothic novels she’s been reading. She sees the world in their terms and makes a whole set of rather amusing, ludicrous and shaming assumptions that turn out to be baseless. I wanted to elaborate on that and look at storytelling in relation to the imagination and to fiction.

Adding the two elements together, McEwan tells the story of how Briony Tallis, a thirteen-year-old aspiring playwright who experiences life as so many melodramas pitting heroes against villains, misperceives a series of mysterious events, and concludes that an innocent man is guilty of raping her cousin.

            The recovered memory movement had mostly run its course by the time Atonement was published in 2001, but McEwan must have been concerned when he set out writing that he would face fallout from advocates claiming he was siding with abusers. The most obvious perspective from which to tell a story about the circumstances surrounding a mistaken accusation would be that of the falsely accused. But embodying that perspective would make it much easier for critics to fault the author for taking the side of perpetrators by casting doubt on the testimony of victims. So, McEwan instead has us witness the suspicion taking hold and gathering strength in the mind of the accuser.

The confusion initially arises as Briony secretly observes a sequence of encounters which are inscrutable to her but that readers recognize as an awkwardly budding romance. After spying on one especially strange interaction, Briony has a profound revelation about a new style of story she could tell. She realizes she could give up on plays to instead write the story of what she had just witnessed

from three points of view; her excitement was in the prospect of freedom, of being delivered from the cumbrous struggle between good and bad, heroes and villains. None of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good. She need not judge. There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn’t only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show how they had an equal value. That was the only moral a story need have. (38)

Here we have another way of conceptualizing the distinction between commercial and literary fiction. In literature, we need not judge because there are no good guys and bad guys. There are only human beings struggling with being human. And thus, there is no need for a moral. If Briony is right about this, it would suggest all those activist critics on the lookout for problematic messages in literary works are tilting at windmills.

Unfortunately, Briony’s new conception of story is not allowed enough time to root itself in her mind before it gets stress-tested by a horrible crime. After unsealing and sneaking a peek at a letter the housekeeper’s son Robbie asked her to deliver to her sister Cecilia, Briony is disturbed by an obscenity contained therein. These are the same two characters she saw behaving so strangely earlier in the day, and she doesn’t know, as readers do, that Robbie has given her a version of the letter he meant to throw away, while the version he meant to deliver remains an arm’s-length from his typewriter. Suddenly, Briony’s doubts about the division between heroes and villains are forced to contend with her heroic certainty trying to reassert itself.

Surely it was not too childish to say there had to be a story; and this was the story of a man whom everybody liked, but about whom the heroine always had her doubts, and finally she was able to reveal that he was the incarnation of evil. But wasn’t she—that was, Briony the writer—supposed to be so worldly now as to be above such nursery tale ideas as good and evil? There must be some lofty, god-like place from which all people could be judged alike, not pitted against each other, as in some lifelong hockey match, but seen noisily jostling together in all their glorious imperfection. If such a place existed, she was not worthy of it. She could never forgive Robbie his disgusting mind. (108)

So when she witnesses her fifteen-year-old cousin Lola being sexually assaulted later that night, even though it’s too dark to identify the assailant, she knows it must be Robbie. And her testimony is enough to secure his conviction.

            Atonement then is, among many other things, a retelling of Don Quixote. If you were determined to read a message into the novel, it would have to be that our zeal for identifying evil must be tempered by greater efforts at empathy, a conviction to weigh the motives and circumstances of those we suspect, and a commitment to investigate and rein in our own biases. Had the first chapters of the novel been told from Robbie’s perspective, Briony would be easy to cast as the villain. Instead, McEwan brings her so vividly to life, makes us experience with such immediacy her struggle to understand and name her world, that she stands as a heroine of sorts, battling not some great evil, but her own ignorance and confusion, her own innate impulse to parse humanity according to the logic of us versus them. Only when we make it to later chapters narrated from Robbie’s perspective are we brought face-to-face with the full force of Briony’s mistake. But now we experience it as tragedy instead of injustice because we sympathize with Briony as well. We later learn that the whole story has been written by an elderly Briony as an act of atonement, consummating her efforts at obliterating the tribal funneling of humanity into the categories of heroes and villains, dispelling once and for all the notion that stories serve as mere vehicles for some moral.

            McEwan returns to these themes in the final pages of Lessons. The scene has an elderly Roland sitting in a rocking chair as his granddaughter Stefanie, who has just begun to read on her own, stands beside him. “That afternoon she had read Tomi Ungerer’s Flix,” McEwan writes, “about a dog born to parents who are cats. Roland, without her knowing, had read it too. A moral tale, but funny and clever.” Stefanie tells him about the dog’s adventures and his journey of discovery.

But it can be tough, torn between two cultures. Eventually he becomes a politician and campaigns for mutual respect, equal rights and an end to cat-dog segregation.

When she had finished her account, he said, “Do you think the story is trying to tell us something about people?”

She looked at him blankly. “Don’t be silly, Opa. It’s about cats and dogs.”

He saw her point. A shame to ruin a good tale by turning it into a lesson. That could be for later. (430)

He next tells her of a book he has been imagining, encompassing all the events of the twenty-first century, which he of course knows he won’t be around long enough to finish. But then he worries he may have made a mistake in explaining it to her. “It was not a children’s book,” he thinks. “Yes, a mistake to mention such a book when he was passing on to her a damaged world” (431). It’s a moving scene, one almost impossible to imagine being written by Cormac McCarthy or J.M. Coetzee or Martin Amis, other great writers who happen to be white men. How could McEwan’s race or gender possibly account for it? How could any aspect of his identity oblige us to look away?

            Notably, it’s not just stories that exploit our tribal instinct to view society as a conflict between good guys and bad guys, radicals and reactionaries, oppressors and victims, the bigoted and the woke. Plenty of professor types claim to have discovered, by looking through the lens of this or that critical theory, “the story of a man whom everybody liked, but about whom the heroine always had her doubts, and finally she was able to reveal that he was the incarnation of evil.” It’s an alluring narrative. Who wouldn’t want to be recognized as such a hero or heroine? Unfortunately, the academics and activists most in need of a lesson on how such simplistic schemas inevitably lead us astray—lead us toward true evil—are also the least likely to pick up books like McEwan’s. Or if they do read them, they simply can’t help pretending to be that hero themselves, working from the assumption that the author, being what he is, must be that evil incarnate, disguising himself in a way only they can see through.

            Of course, Briony’s lesson in storytelling and tribalism need not have been formulated in the mind of a white man. In fact, there was once a prominent black writer and orator who made a similar point, referring specifically to the struggle for racial equality. Addressing the thirty-fourth annual convention of the National Bar Association, he argued that

Our aim must not be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding. In an effort to achieve freedom in America, we must not try to leap from a position of disadvantage to one of advantage, thus subverting justice. We must seek democracy and not the substitution of one tyranny for another. Black supremacy is as bad as white supremacy. God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown and yellow men, God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race.

Sadly for McEwan, and more so for all the young aspiring novelists who happen to be white men, Dr. King’s approach to combatting bigotry has gone out of fashion. Let’s hope that doesn’t stop them. Let’s hope too that more scholars, critics, and activists realize that the most effective way to foster diversity in literature is to attract more people from a wider range of demographics, not to exclude those in the majority. The likelihood that acknowledging a work by a white male author is worth reading will turn readers from other identity groups away from writing is miniscule. Proclaiming that literature is a tool of white male oppression, on the other hand, all but guarantees diminished readership for every group. The last thing anyone needs these days is another reason not to read.

*****

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"The Dawn of Everything" and the Demarcation between Science and Propaganda

The Dawn of Everything and the Demarcation between Science and Propaganda

[A sleeker and much shorter version of this article was published in Quillette under the title “The Dawn of Everything” and the Politics of Human Prehistory. This version retains some of my wordier stylistic flourishes, more of my personal take, and longer discussions about Heard’s thesis and the connection between societal scale and political concentration.]

In 1885, Thomas Henry Huxley delivered a speech in which he famously declared that science “commits suicide the moment it adopts a creed.” The occasion was the completion of a statue of Charles Darwin for the British Museum, yet the man known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” felt obliged to emphasize that the monument should in no way be taken as an official sanction of Darwin’s ideas, because “science does not recognize such sanctions.” In science, the status of any idea is contingent upon the strength of the evidence supporting it and must therefore be treated as provisional as data accumulates and our understanding deepens. Huxley intended his aphorism as a reminder that no belief, whether personal, political, religious, or even scientific, should be immune to questioning and revision.

            While many scientists continue to uphold the strict separation between scientific research and political advocacy, a growing number now argue that the convention of barring creeds from science is quaint—even reactionary. This trend is especially pronounced in the social sciences. As Allison Mickel and Kyle Olson write in a 2021 op-ed for Sapiens titled “Archaeologists Should Be Activists Too,” 

There are still some who argue that scientists maintain their authority only when they remain objective, separate from current political concerns. Many academics have decried this view for decades, demonstrating that fully objective science has always been more of a myth than a reality. Science has always been shaped by the contemporary concerns of the time and place in which research occurs.

The suggestion here is that since researchers can never thoroughly eliminate politics from their work, they may as well ensure they are incorporating the correct politics into their foundational assumptions. We might call this the argument from inevitability. The “correct” politics are taken by most activists to consist of whatever is most beneficial to marginalized peoples—which usually means uncritically accepting their own views or, if those views are inaccessible, choosing whatever narrative paints them in the most favorable light. Let’s call this the default to the presumed victim’s truth.

            While this reasoning strikes many as both convincing and morally commendable, its flaws are easy to detect. For instance, the inevitability of political concerns coloring our research offers no justification for abandoning efforts at reducing their impact. Pathogenic microbes will inevitably survive any effort at sanitizing an operating theater. That hardly means surgeons should perform procedures in gas station bathrooms. Those whose goal is to arrive at the clearest and most comprehensive understanding of reality must strive to minimize the influence of prejudices arising from nonscientific beliefs and agendas as much as humanly possible—even if eradicating them completely is beyond anyone’s capability. And, while it may seem admirable, even heroic, to err on the side of protecting those who may not be able to protect themselves, defaulting to the presumed victim’s truth comes with two obvious drawbacks. First, over time the defaulters’ credibility will suffer, as they have clearly chosen a side. And second, the presumed victim’s truth may simply not be true at all, or it may overshadow elements of the truth that could lead to a deeper, more thorough understanding. (A third and less obvious drawback is that privileging the victim’s perspective has the side-effect of pitting groups with competing claims of victimhood against each other for the status of truer, or bigger, victim.)

            The late anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber presents a case study in what happens when you allow creeds and political interests to creep into your attempts at reasoning scientifically. For decades, Graeber participated in leftist and radical movements, and he was one of the original planners—an “anti-leader”—for the Occupy Wall Street protest. In January of 2017, he tweeted a question: “does anyone know any handy rebuttals to the neoliberal/conservative numbers on social progress over the last 30 years?” In the thread that followed, Graeber elaborated:

again & again i see these guys trundling out #s that absolute poverty, illiteracy, child malnutrition, child labor, have sharply declined...that life expectancy & education levels have gone way up, worldwide, thus showing the age of structural adjustment etc was a good thing. It strikes me as highly unlikely these numbers are right … It’s clear this is all put together by right-wing think tanks. Yet where’s the other sides numbers? I’ve found no clear rebuttals.

Graeber responded to charges of motivated reasoning in the comments by insisting he was merely demonstrating a scientist’s proper skepticism by looking for counterevidence. What he failed to understand was that it wasn’t the question itself that revealed his bias. It was that he characterized the data he was inquiring into as “neoliberal/conservative,” assuming without evidence they were “put together by right-wing think tanks.” Rather than treating the data as a possible window onto the nature of our civilization, he saw the numbers as points on a scoreboard for the opposing team, which he assumed could only have been counted because of partisan refereeing.

            Graeber died in 2020, but he continues his challenge to the narrative of social progress in his posthumously published book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, which he cowrote with the archeologist David Wengrow. Their main thesis is that it is long past time to scrap the traditional story of how human societies evolve from egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers to larger, more sedentary tribes to more hierarchical chiefdoms to highly stratified states governed by authoritarian rulers. This narrative, they argue, can be traced back to either Jean-Jacques Rousseau (if you believe that hunter-gatherers were peaceful and freedom-loving) or to Thomas Hobbes (if you believe they were miserable and warlike).

“Our objections can be classified into three broad categories,” they write in the first chapter, but only one of these objections is scientific: “these two alternatives,” the authors claim, “simply aren’t true.” The next two bullets complain that the conventional stories “have dire political implications,” and “make the past needlessly dull” (3). Graeber and Wengrow are troubled that ascendent social evolutionary theories treat hunter-gatherers as either savages or “innocent children of nature” (441), instead of crediting them with formulating lofty ideas about freedom and recognizing their ability to experiment with various social arrangements.

Unfortunately, the supposedly conventional thinking Graeber and Wengrow outline at the beginning of each of their book’s sections usually comes with few if any citations, and when they do reference their colleagues’ work, they frequently misrepresent it. Over time, as they glibly generalize about the state of scholarship in their fields, only to turn around and poke holes in their semi-fictional accounts, you start to feel like you’ve been buttonholed by an old man at a bar as he tells a series of tendentious stories about how he bested impossibly dense adversaries in battles of wit. Indeed, the overarching problem with The Dawn of Everything is that it consists primarily of a long rant against the straw man of lockstep societal progression through rigid stages—even though it becomes clear Graeber and Wengrow’s true beef is with scholars who argue that large societies require some form of government domination, an issue suspiciously close to the heart of any good anarchist.

Graeber and Wengrow paint a picture of the study of human prehistory as dominated by researchers who take it as a matter of faith that societies everywhere will inevitably progress through identical stages, driven by the same key technological developments, to arrive at one form or another of a modern state, which is characterized by heavy-handed, top-down control of the masses by the wealthy and powerful few. Late in the book, they admit that “almost nobody today subscribes to this framework in its entirety,” and go on to suggest the real problem is that

if our fields have moved on, they have done so, it seems, without putting an alternative vision in place, the result being that almost anyone who is not an archaeologist or anthropologist tends to fall back on the older scheme when they set out to think or write about world history on a large canvas. (447)

But to create the illusion that they are taking on the prevailing view, which they insist is disproportionately influenced by non-specialists, Graeber and Wengrow are forced to conflate modern scholarship with ideas from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. This is because modern scholars—both in and out of the field of anthropology—know better than to posit hard-and-fast rules about human behavior and society. Instead, they look for trends and correlations, as in the observation that hunter-gatherers tend to live in small-scale societies that tend to be egalitarian.

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm, for instance, has penned some of the most widely cited books on hunter-gatherer egalitarianism. In the introduction to his book Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, he writes, “I make the major assumption that humans were egalitarian for thousands of generations before hierarchical societies began to appear.” Graeber and Wengrow fault him for claiming “we were strictly ‘egalitarian for thousands of generations’,” though Boehm never used the word “strictly,” and it becomes clear his theory allows for exceptions. Graeber and Wengrow go on, “So, according to Boehm, for about 200,000 years political animals all chose to live the same way.” They complain of his, “odd insistence that for many tens of thousands of years, nothing happened” (87). But Boehm insists on nothing of the sort. He writes,

When upstarts try to make inroads against an egalitarian social order, they will be quickly recognized and, in many cases, quickly curbed on a preemptive basis. One reason for this sensitivity is that the oral tradition of a band (which included knowledge from adjacent bands) will preserve stories about serious domination episodes. (87)

If there were “domination episodes,” then something happened. If that isn’t clear enough, Boehm later writes that “a hunting and gathering way of life in itself does not guarantee a decisively egalitarian political orientation” (89).

Does Boehm really claim humans in the Pleistocene all lived the same way? In fact, he explicitly argues the opposite: “We must keep in mind that in Paleolithic times the planet’s best environments were available to foragers whose social and adaptive patterns varied across a very wide spectrum” (211). Graeber and Wengrow’s misrepresentation is especially frustrating because the implications of recent discoveries of hunter-gatherer earthworks and monumental building for theories like Boehm’s are important, but the authors apparently can’t help flattening his ideas and robbing them of nuance. Their goal appears to be nothing other than to bolster the impression that anyone whose perspective diverges from theirs must suffer from a stunted imagination. “Blinded by the ‘just so’ story of how human societies evolved,” they write of their colleagues, “they can’t even see half of what’s now before their eyes” (442).

The two scholars whose work—and reputations—suffer the most scathing attacks in The Dawn of Everything, Jared Diamond and Steven Pinker, also rely on the traditional sequence of cultural evolutionism in their works, but they both use Elman Service’s terms “band,” “tribe,” “chiefdom,” and “state” as descriptive categories, not as an explanatory theory of clockwork progression. Graeber and Wengrow nonetheless claim Diamond’s theory is that what spelled doom for hunter-gatherer egalitarianism was farming. “For Diamond,” they write,

as for Rousseau some centuries earlier, what put an end to that equality—everywhere and forever—was the invention of agriculture, and the higher population levels it sustained. Agriculture brought about a transition from “bands” to “tribes.” Accumulation of food surplus fed population growth, leading some “tribes” to develop into ranked societies known as “chiefdoms.” (10)

Did Diamond really argue that agriculture causes a series of transitions to more complex societies “everywhere and forever”? In the section of his book The World until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? Graeber and Wengrow cite, Diamond writes,

The higher populations of tribes than of bands require more food to support more people in a small area, and so tribes usually are farmers or herders or both, but a few are hunter-gatherers living in especially productive environments (such as Japan’s Ainu people and North America’s Pacific Northwest Indians). (15)

So, rather than asserting that agriculture sets off an inevitable march toward despotism, Diamond writes of trends and correlations, leaving unanswered the question of which direction the causal arrow points. He makes this focus on trends explicit very near some of the text that Graeber and Wengrow quote.

            While every human society is unique, there are also cross-cultural patterns that permit some generalizations. In particular, there are correlated trends in at least four aspects of societies: population size, subsistence, political centralization, and social stratification. (12-3)

Diamond’s emphasis on correlations, and on the importance of keeping exceptions in mind, is part of a page-and-a-half discussion of the advantages and drawbacks of using the traditional classification scheme.

Of course, disproving a categorical statement is far easier than refuting an argument about relative frequencies, so it’s easy to understand the temptation. All Graeber and Wengrow need to torch their straw man version of Diamond’s ideas is to provide a counterexample or two, and that is precisely what they attempt to do in the following chapters. To get the real story of what factors contribute to the increasing scale and complexity of a society, you would need to go beyond searching for examples or counterexamples for a given narrative. You would have to do some math and statistics. (It so happens researchers have conducted just this type of statistical analysis into the factors driving increasing scale and complexity, though the findings were published after The Dawn of Everything. The results show that agriculture is indeed one of the two most important factors—the other being warfare.)

            The “dire political implications” of believing agriculture leads to complexity and domination have a clear impact on the conclusions reached by Graeber and Wengrow, and the line separating their science from their politics only gets blurrier from here. Summarizing their case that the old evolutionary theories “simply aren’t true,” they write,

To give just a sense of how different the emerging picture is: it is clear now that human societies before the advent of farming were not confined to small, egalitarian bands. On the contrary, the world of hunter-gatherers as it existed before the coming of agriculture was one of bold social experiments, resembling a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. Agriculture, in turn, did not mean the inception of private property, nor did it mark an irreversible step towards inequality. In fact, many of the first farming communities were relatively free of ranks and hierarchies. And far from setting class differences in stone, a surprising number of the world’s earliest cities were organized on robustly egalitarian lines, with no need for authoritarian rulers, ambitious warrior-politicians, or even bossy administrators. (4)

Before looking into the political motivations behind these assertions, we should first ask if anyone actually takes the position that agriculture and private property mark “an irreversible step toward inequality.” Diamond certainly doesn’t: “Remember again: the developments from bands to states were neither ubiquitous, nor irreversible, nor linear,” he writes early in The World until Yesterday (18). Diamond even uses some of the same language as Graeber and Wengrow, writing, “Traditional societies in effect represent thousands of natural experiments in how to construct a human society” (9). But what is it about the transition from egalitarian bands to larger ranked societies that Graeber and Wengrow find so objectionable? After all, the first complex societies must have emerged from simpler ones, however wide the range of local factors may have been.

            The story of agriculture leading to beliefs about private property leading to inequality harks back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to whom the notion of the virtuous “noble savage” is popularly attributed (though this is an oversimplification of his views). The narrative that is routinely pitted against Rousseau’s is commonly attributed to Thomas Hobbes, who characterized life in a state of nature as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” As poor of a fit as he turns out to be upon close inspection, Diamond serves as a latter-day mouthpiece for Rousseau throughout The Dawn of Everything. Meanwhile, “We can take Pinker as our quintessential modern Hobbesian,” Graeber and Wengrow write (13). For them, though, the two sides of the debate about primordial societies are far less different than most scholars assume. Whether it is the advent of agriculture knocking over the first domino that ultimately ensures domination of the many by the few, or the surly temperament and straitened circumstances of the average hunter-gatherer necessitating the intervention of a government Leviathan to prevent melees, the outcome is the same. Hierarchy is rendered both necessary and inevitable. And that, it turns out, is the worst of the “dire political implications” of the traditional evolutionary sequence.

            For Graeber and Wengrow, accepting the traditional formulation that larger scale tends to coincide with more concentrated power means “the best we can hope for is to adjust the size of the boot that will forever be stomping on our faces” (8). This profound antipathy toward inequality and concentrated political power gels nicely with the strong anti-Western bias prevalent across academia, which is especially pronounced in the humanities and the social sciences. Steven Pinker fell afoul of this bias in 2011when he published The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, which presents copious evidence suggesting that we Westerners are living in an era of unprecedented peace. Following the trendline back into prehistory, Pinker reports startling findings about how common it was to die a violent death, not just before the Enlightenment, but even more so before the rise of the state.

Graeber and Wengrow begin their criticism by pointing out that Pinker overlays his theories about declining violence on the outdated understanding of societal evolution they are working to supplant. Then they get personal:

Since, like Hobbes, Pinker is concerned with the origins of the state, his key point of transition is not the rise of farming but the emergence of cities. “Archeologists,” he writes, “tell us that humans lived in a state of anarchy until the emergence of civilization some five thousand years ago, when sedentary farmers first coalesced into cities and states and developed the first governments.” What follows is, to put it bluntly, a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along. You might hope that a passionate advocate of science would approach the topic scientifically, through a broad appraisal of the evidence—but this is precisely the approach to human prehistory that Pinker seems to find uninteresting. Instead he relies on anecdotes, images and individual sensational discoveries, like the headline-making find, in 1991, of “Ötzi the Tyrolean Iceman.” (13-4)

Turn to the referenced pages in Better Angels, though, and you see it is Graeber and Wengrow who are making things up. The book is chock-full of statistics from scientific sources. Facing one of the two pages that mention Ötzi, which you can find by simply following the index, is a bar graph based on multiple scientific references comparing estimated rates of violence across different types of society. Reading the text, you discover Pinker is not “concerned with the origins of the state” at all; he is interested in those differing rates of violent death between states and other forms of society.

            Tellingly, Graeber and Wengrow give the clearest expression of their contempt for Pinker in an endnote to a line criticizing his endorsement of Hobbes’ theories about the causes of violence. Is Pinker’s verdict on Hobbes’ ideas true? “As we’ll see,” Graeber and Wengrow write, “it’s not even close” (13). Here, they direct us to the following note:

If a trace of impatience can be detected in our presentation, the reason is this: so many contemporary authors seem to enjoy imagining themselves as modern-day counterparts to the great social philosophers of the Enlightenment, men like Hobbes and Rousseau, playing out the same grand dialogue but with a more accurate cast of characters. That dialogue in turn is drawn from the empirical findings of social scientists, including archaeologists and anthropologists like ourselves. Yet in fact the quality of their empirical generalizations is hardly better; in some ways it’s probably worse. At some point, you have to take the toys back from the children. (529)

In other words, they are outraged Pinker, a psychologist specializing in language and cognition, had the audacity to even discuss prehistoric societies and their implications for the modern world. But, though they promise a decisive debunking to come—“As we’ll see”—what follows has little if any bearing on Pinker’s thesis.

Now, it is not for me to speculate on the psychological profile of scholars who come down this hard on a colleague when the most effective criticisms they can marshal occupy the hinterlands of legitimate scholarship, somewhere amid the realms of sloppiness, unscrupulousness, and simple dishonesty. But it is noteworthy that Better Angels (odd title for a Hobbesian book) is not even about societal evolution per se, but, as the subtitle relays, the decline in violence over the course of human history. Likewise, Diamond’s The World until Yesterday, again as the subtitle implies, is about what we can learn from traditional societies, not about how such societies scale up. Meanwhile, it is Graeber and Wengrow who are writing a grand revisionist narrative of human prehistory, one called The Dawn of Everything no less.

            Before considering which of Hobbes’ ideas Pinker called down the thunder by endorsing, we should note that it is not Pinker who attempts to don Hobbes’ mantle. It is Graeber and Wengrow who try to smother him with it, just as they do Diamond by lumping him together with Rousseau. They insist that if we did a reappraisal of Pinker’s argument, minus the cherry-picking, “we would have to reach the exact opposite conclusion to Hobbes (and Pinker),” by which they mean, “our species is a nurturing and care-giving species, and there was simply no need for life to be nasty, brutish or short” (14). While it is true Pinker credits Hobbes’ insights about the causes of violence, he also goes on to write,

But from his armchair in 17th-century England, Hobbes could not help but get a lot of it wrong. People in nonstate societies cooperate extensively with their kin and allies, so life for them is far from “solitary,” and only intermittently is it nasty and brutish. Even if they are drawn into raids and battles every few years, that leaves a lot of time for foraging, feasting, singing, storytelling, childrearing, tending to the sick, and other necessities and pleasures of life. (56)

Oddly, Graeber and Wengrow cite evidence of early peoples caring for the sick and injured as a counter to Pinker’s findings about prehistoric violence. In other words, they aggressively prosecute Pinker for crimes anyone with ten minutes and access to the source material can see he never committed.

            Things only get worse when Graeber and Wengrow discuss Pinker’s use of the Yąnomamö of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil to illustrate a scenario called the “Hobbesian trap,” or more technically as the “security dilemma.” Imagine a homeowner with a gun encountering a burglar in his house who is also visibly packing. Even though the homeowner may not want to kill anyone over what may be an act of desperation, there is no guarantee the burglar won’t shoot first. Likewise, the burglar may not be apt to kill people who are simply defending their homes, but there is no guarantee the homeowner won’t shoot first. Shooting first becomes the most rational option for both. As Pinker explains,

People in nonstate societies also invade for safety. The security dilemma or Hobbesian trap is very much on their minds, and they may form an alliance with nearby villages if they fear they are too small, or launch a preemptive strike if they fear an enemy alliance is getting too big. One Yąnomamö man in Amazonia told an anthropologist, “We are tired of fighting. We don’t want to kill anymore. But the others are treacherous and cannot be trusted.” (46)

It should be noted here that this is the only mention of the Hobbesian trap in relation to the Yąnomamö in the whole of Better Angels; Graeber and Wengrow, however, insist Pinker cherry-picks this society to support his wider application of a Hobbesian framework.

            Graeber and Wengrow go on to botch both their definition of the security dilemma and the explanations of Yąnomamö violence offered by Pinker and Napoleon Chagnon, the anthropologist whose writings inform his theory. Graeber and Wengrow write that

the Yanomami are supposed to exemplify what Pinker calls the “Hobbesian trap,” whereby individuals in tribal societies find themselves caught in repetitive cycles of raiding and warfare, living fraught and precarious lives, always just a few steps away from violent death on the tip of a sharp weapon or at the end of a vengeful club. (16)

Pinker in fact treats revenge as a separate cause of violence, though he does describe cycles of raids and counterraids as the common outcome. Graeber and Wengrow apply the term Hobbesian trap as a catch-all description of a violent society to reinforce their characterization of Pinker as a carrier of Hobbes’ torch. Though, as we’ve already seen, Pinker specifically writes that nonstate peoples were not always “a few steps away from a violent death.”

            The closest Graeber and Wengrow get to addressing the statistics underlying Pinker’s argument is to point out that “compared to other Amerindian groups, Yanomami homicide rates turn out average-to-low” (15). This is an odd point, since Graeber and Wengrow earlier in the section claim Pinker cherry-picked the Yąnomamö because they are particularly violent. And both Pinker and Chagnon themselves point to the relatively higher rates of violence among other groups to counter such charges of cherry-picking and exaggeration from other critics. Graeber and Wengrow go on to claim that

Chagnon’s central argument was that adult Yanomami men achieve both cultural and reproductive advantages by killing other adult men, and that this feedback between violence and biological fitness—if generally representative of the early human condition—may have had evolutionary consequences for our species as a whole. (16)

This is in fact what Chagnon’s critics view as the main takeaway of his work. What he was really contending in the article Graeber and Wengrow cite was not that the Yąnomamö show us how humans may have evolved to be violent, but that Yąnomamö violence was motivated by individual and family interests—what biologists call “inclusive fitness”—and not by a desire for some other village’s valuable resources. In other words, ironically, Chagnon was challenging some of the same notions about the role of farming and private property that Graeber and Wengrow take Diamond and Pinker to task for accepting, even though those two really don’t endorse these notions either.

            The publication of Better Angels made Pinker persona non grata among many social scientists and leftist commentators because it reintroduces the idea of progress in Western history. Specifically, Pinker attributes the most dramatic dips in the trendlines representing violence to some of the ideas and values that came to prominence during the Enlightenment. Unfazed by the backlash to Better Angels, Pinker doubled down in 2018 by publishing Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, which shows numerous other trendlines all suggestive of people living longer, safer, healthier, even happier lives than their ancestors—all contrary to the dismal view of life in modern states put forth by Graeber and Wengrow.

Pinker ascribes these improvements to the implementation of ideas that took hold and blossomed in 17th and 18thcentury Europe. Graeber and Wengrow respond by pointing to Pinker’s presumed politics (because, remember, their impact on his reasoning is inevitable), asking, if Pinker wants to portray himself as a rational centrist,

why then insist that all significant forms of human progress before the twentieth century can be attributed only to that one group of humans who used to refer to themselves as “the white race” (and now, generally, call themselves by its more accepted synonym, “Western Civilization”)? (17)

The shift from Pinker’s real argument to Graeber and Wengrow’s straw man entails turning the focus from the ideas of the Enlightenment to the race of the people who first embraced them as a larger cultural package. But Pinker does not attribute the progress he reports to Western civilization as a whole—which would make no sense given its long history—but to a single current that began to run through it at a certain point in that history. 

Graeber and Wengrow’s not-so-subtle accusation of racism is a predictable instantiation of the activists’ imperative to default to the presumed victims’ perspective—which likely also motivated them to make the case that the Enlightenment was largely indigenous peoples’ idea. It is this same imperative which infuses with venom the taboo against suggesting that anything coming from the West might somehow be better than what is on offer in non-Western societies or that anything coming from non-Western societies might somehow be worse. Graeber and Wengrow explain the problem thus:

Insisting, to the contrary, that all good things come only from Europe ensures one’s work can be read as a retroactive apology for genocide, since (apparently, for Pinker) the enslavement, rape, mass murder and destruction of whole civilizations—visited on the rest of the world by the European powers—is just another example of humans comporting themselves as they always have; it was in no sense unusual. What was really significant, so this argument goes, is that it made possible the dissemination of what he takes to be “purely” European notions of freedom, equality before the law, and human rights to the survivors. (17-8)

Not only is Pinker a racist by their lights; he is also an apologist for genocide, slavery, rape, and mass slaughter. This would be outrageous if true, but as we’ll see, it’s not even close.

            The sleight of hand here is again to conflate Pinker’s celebration of the specific Enlightenment values he lists in his subtitle with the whole of Western civilization. It would be difficult for anyone embracing the ideals of reason, science, and humanism to justify something so abhorrent as the transatlantic slave trade—which is not to say no one ever tried. To say that some people, who happened to live in Europe, took up a certain set of ideas, which would eventually lead to improved lives for those carrying on their tradition, does nothing to excuse the atrocities committed by other people, who also happened to be living in Europe at the time. “For one thing,” Pinker writes in Enlightenment Now,

all ideas have to come from somewhere, and their birthplace has no bearing on their merit. Though many Enlightenment ideas were articulated in their clearest and most influential form in 18th-century Europe and America, they are rooted in reason and human nature, so any reasoning human can engage with them. That’s why Enlightenment ideals have been articulated in non-Western civilizations at many times in history. (29)

Recall Graeber and Wengrow claim Pinker’s argument is that “‘purely’ European notions” are responsible for making the world a better place, when in fact Pinker explicitly argues the opposite. (Are those supposed to be scare quotes surrounding the word “purely”?) And Pinker is under no illusion that every European embraced the Enlightenment with equal fervor. He writes,

But my main reaction to the claim that the Enlightenment is the guiding ideal of the West is: If only! The Enlightenment was swiftly followed by a counter-Enlightenment, and the West has been divided ever since. (29)

In Better Angels, Pinker does consider the possibility that recent biological evolution played a role in declining violence among Europeans, but he dismisses the theory as both implausible and unnecessary. No matter, Graeber and Wengrow need to make the issue about race so they can comfortably dismiss Pinker as a racist, so that’s what they claim—the actual substance of Pinker’s arguments be damned.

Graeber and Wengrow continue their criticism of Pinker’s thesis by asserting that the only way to compare two societies is to give people a chance to experience both and then let them choose which one they would prefer to live in. They go on to assure readers that “empirical data is available here, and it suggests something is very wrong with Pinker’s conclusions.” Here’s what they mean:

The colonial history of North and South America is full of accounts of settlers, captured or adopted by indigenous societies, being given the choice of where they wished to stay and almost invariably choosing to stay with the latter. This even applied to children. Confronted again with their biological parents, most would run back to their adoptive kin for protection. By contrast, Amerindians incorporated into European society by adoption or marriage, including those who… enjoyed considerable wealth and schooling, almost invariably did just the opposite: either escaping at the earliest opportunity or—having tried their best to adjust, and ultimately failed—returning to indigenous society to live out their last days. (19)

Empirical evidence that European settlers and indigenous people alike “almost invariably” prefer to live in indigenous societies—that would be some data set. Of course, people may choose to live in a society with a shorter life-expectancy and other drawbacks for a host of reasons that bear little relation to the general quality of life. For instance, they may have fallen in love. Or they may be wanted for a crime back home. Still, the finding would be suggestive. We have to wonder who collected and analyzed the original sources and what criteria they used to score the cases. How did they ensure the sample was representative of the total population of captives and former captives? How large is this sample? And by “almost invariably,” do they mean north of 90%, or some even higher percentage?

            To get just a portion of the statistics on pre-state violence Graeber and Wengrow pretend he never bothered to investigate, Pinker relied on a paper published in the journal Science. That means it was rigorously peer-reviewed, its methods scrutinized, its math checked and doublechecked. What prestigious journal was Graeber and Wengrow’s source published in? It turns out the source they cite was never published in a journal at all; it was rather a doctoral thesis submitted in 1977 by a PhD candidate named Joseph Norman Heard—which isn’t to disparage it. The thesis, titled “The Assimilation of Captives on the American Frontier in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” makes for fascinating reading. The first thing you notice is that it is a qualitative, not quantitative analysis, which already casts doubt on Graeber and Wengrow’s account. The second thing you notice is that, at least in the abstract, Heard reports nothing like what Graeber and Wengrow claim. Heard summarizes a section examining the factors that go into determining whether a captive became assimilated thus,

It was concluded that the original cultural milieu of the captive was of no importance as a determinant. Persons of all races and cultural backgrounds reacted to captivity in much the same way. The cultural characteristics of the captors, also, had little influence on assimilation. (vi)

We are still in the introductory material for the paper, and already we see the author’s own conclusion is that whatever is going on in these cases, it is not what Graeber and Wengrow suggest. Assimilation is not about people sampling two cultures and voting with their feet. So what was going on? According to Heard, “It was concluded that the most important factor in determining assimilation was age at the time of captivity.” Heard reports that children captured before puberty almost always became assimilated—recall Graeber and Wengrow’s line, “This even applies to children”—while those captured after puberty usually wanted to return to their society of origin. This was the case for settler and indigenous children alike.

            In other words, Graeber and Wengrow’s approach to refuting Pinker’s case for progress is first to severely distort his actual position to support their charge of racism, and second to grossly misrepresent a doctoral thesis from over forty years ago so that it appears to undermine a claim of general superiority Pinker never made. Time to take the toys back from the children indeed. The one part of Heard’s paper that cites actual numbers reports that of one sample of 750 captured settlers, 92 were killed, and 60 became completely assimilated. Taking 658 as the number who had the opportunity to choose, we’re left with a mere 9% who remained with their captors. For Graeber and Wengrow, nine out of a hundred equates to “almost invariably.” Even if you add every last one of the 1500 missing captives in the report with no further record to the list of the assimilated—a move there is no justification for—you are still left with 28% who were not fully assimilated.

When historian Daniel Immerwahr pointed out in a review for The Nation that the characterization of Heard’s findings in The Dawn of Everything is “ballistically false,” Wengrow took to twitter to try to salvage the point by highlighting individual lines and suggesting that Heard considered too small of sample—apparently forgetting this was the source he and his coauthor chose to cite. For good measure, he intimates that Immerwahr got tripped up because he only read the abstract. Nowhere in the thread, however, aside from a block quote from Benjamin Franklin, does he point to any part of Heard’s paper that could in any way be construed as justification for his and Graeber’s claim that captives “almost invariably” became completely assimilated. Wengrow concludes his thread by reminding his followers what’s at stake: “for context, our point here was to refute Pinker’s suggestion that any sensible person would prefer Western civ to life in (what he calls) ‘tribal’ societies.” No citation is provided to point readers to where Pinker makes this suggestion.

            The expression straw man refers to the underhanded rhetorical tactic of challenging an argument the person being challenged never made. One of the most common examples involves treating claims about statistical trends as if they were about ironclad laws. To strawman Diamond and Boehm’s point that mobile hunters and gathers tend to be egalitarian, Graeber and Wengrow insist their position is that all hunters and gathers must be egalitarian. Then they point to exceptions and pretend they have refuted the point. Usually, straw men bear at least some resemblance to the actual argument—enough to create an illusion of fairness and accuracy. So, does the term still apply when one scholar claims another argues a point diametrically opposed to the point that was actually made? Or do we need a stronger term? What do we call it when scholars creatively misinterpret a source so it appears to undermine another scholar’s thesis when in fact it does no such thing? Archeologist Michael E. Smith calls Graeber and Wengrow out for their use of “empty citations,” an expression for when “works are cited merely to lend an aura of support for an argument, when in fact they contain no empirical support.” Historian David Bell meanwhile worries that their discussion of the indigenous influence on Enlightenment thinking “comes perilously close to scholarly malpractice.” When scientists fabricate results from their experiments, we call it fraud. Is that too harsh a verdict in this case?

            In light of Graeber and Wengrow’s stated political concerns, I think the best term for what they’ve done with The Dawn of Everything is propaganda. While it is true that every scholar who writes a book has political concerns—including Diamond and Pinker—the important question is whether those concerns take precedence over truth-seeking. If your priority is finding and sharing the truth, then you will report evidence that runs counter to your preferred political narrative honestly and accurately. If pushing that narrative is your priority, on the other hand, then you will be apt to neglect or distort any source that challenges it. When the goal is to influence people to adopt moral or political positions, what does it matter if your case is based on straw men or ad hominem attacks? Thus, it is not that Graeber and Wengrow come out and state that at least one of their issues is political that calls for applying the label—though that is a red flag. It is rather the conjunction of the stated political concern with the execrable, single-note scholarship on display throughout The Dawn of Everything that earns it the descriptor.

            What were Graeber and Wengrow hoping to achieve with their propaganda? First, having observed that works like The World until Yesterday and Enlightenment Now have captured the public imagination like few books on such weighty topics ever do, they wanted to recapture the audience for those books for assimilation into their own society of archeologists and anthropologists—the ones with the correct politics and priorities. They open their book with a quote from Carl Jung about living in the right time for a “metamorphosis of the gods.” The study of human prehistory is indeed going through some upheaval in response to many of the dramatic discoveries Graeber and Wengrow describe in The Dawn of Everything, and it seems they saw this as an opportunity to firmly establish their own paradigm before the rival one takes hold anew.

To understand why they might have been motived to do this, suffice to say the fields of anthropology and archeology are divided into rival camps, one that prioritizes science and truth-seeking in the tradition of Thomas Huxley, and another that prioritizes political reform—or at least carries on assured that truth-seeking is always perfectly compatible with a reform agenda. Scholars in this latter camp tend to believe the status quo in the West is as oppressive and unjust today as at any point in its history, and far more so than most other societies around the world. Graeber and Wengrow write,

If something did go terribly wrong in human history—and given the current state of the world, it’s hard to deny something did—then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence. (502)

That is why they bristle at Pinker’s observations about progress, and why they treat field workers like Chagnon who report on indigenous violence as suspect. That is why Graeber was so incredulous of those “neoliberal/conservative” numbers he tweeted about. What this means is that Graeber and Wengrow are effectively sending the message: Don’t listen to these guys who stole our toys, listen to us, or at least listen to people who think like us, the ones who know the West is evil and our only hope lies in dismantling its institutions.

Second, as they clearly state, Graeber and Wengrow want to persuade readers that concentrated political power is neither necessary nor inevitable for modern states—a lesson we would naturally learn from indigenous peoples of the past if we could only stop viewing them as “cardboard stereotypes” (21) in the tradition of Rousseau and Hobbes. “What is the purpose of all this new knowledge,” they ask in the conclusion, “if not to reshape our conceptions of who we are and what we might yet become?” (525). Political reform is so important to them that they list “the freedom to shift back and forth between social structures” (133) or “the freedom to create or transform social relationships” as one of three “primordial freedoms” (426). The crux of their argument for the possibility of a less politically unequal large-scale society is that such societies existed in prehistory, or at least it looks like they may have. If the people living in these societies could manage it, maybe, why can’t we?

The main unexamined assumption at the heart of The Dawn of Everything is that hierarchy and concentrated political power can only ever exist to the detriment of the people. Pinker, for instance, advocates pacificism and liberal democracy, not heavy-handed authoritarian rule. But that’s not radical enough for Graeber and Wengrow. Insofar as Western history moves in a particular direction, they can see no alternative to it being from freedom to domination, which is ironic considering their complaints about the traditions of Rousseau and Hobbes. In addition to the freedom to experiment with social arrangements, they list the freedom to move to another location and the freedom to disobey orders among the primordial liberties we in the West have lost. By the freedom to relocate, they mean that indigenous peoples could count on a friendly welcome when they arrived at a new place, though the only evidence for this is artifacts in one place originating in another and the existence of the same clan names across wide swaths of the continents. Graeber and Wengrow spend little time weighing the possibility that some travelers met with different fates than others, and they make no effort to quantify how many people exercised this freedom in prehistory versus in today’s modern societies. As for the third freedom, while they suggest we in the West have been trained in obedience, even in modern Western societies, you find a great deal of ambivalence toward authority figures, for reasons Boehm eloquently explains. Witness our fraught relationship with police.

Maybe the difference Graeber and Wengrow mean to highlight is that modern Westerners must obey certain authority figures in certain contexts, whereas in prehistory people were free to disobey anyone at any time. But was that really ever the case? Conspicuously absent from their list of primordial freedoms are the freedom to choose an occupation and the freedom to choose a spouse. And never mind the opportunities that would simply never be on offer, like choosing a major at a university or choosing to go on sabbatical to write a doorstop lamenting lost freedoms. Diamond and Pinker write in terms of tradeoffs when moving from one type of society to another. “Traditional societies may not only suggest to us some better living practices,” Diamond writes in The World until Yesterday, “but may also help us appreciate some advantages of our own society that we take for granted” (9). But for Graeber and Wengrow, the modern West is bad because of domination and oppression, while the world beyond its influence—which is mostly in prehistory—may have some unsavory elements, but as a whole was just better. If you have any doubts, they might direct you to Heard’s 1977 thesis, though they wouldn’t want you to read it too closely.

A lot of us share Graeber and Wengrow’s desire for a more widely and diversely distributed governing apparatus, but merely describing the ability to create an entirely new social arrangement as a freedom presents us with a problem: who exactly enjoys this freedom? And who grants it to them? The simplest example they give of creating a social arrangement is the promise, and indeed any individual can make a commitment to another individual. But what about the other person in this arrangement? Is this person not free to discount the promise? If the promise entails some sort of reciprocal gesture or behavior, no one is free to make the other person play along. Additionally, what form does the promise take? Do you invoke a deity? A monarch? These are all matters determined by the cultural context, and no lone individual is free to change the culture on his or her own.

Graeber and Wengrow repeatedly insist scale has no necessary implications for decision-making structures, but is it not logically the case that the larger the society the less influence any individual can have, because that individual would have to persuade however many more people to adopt any new convention? The authors are clearly irritated by Diamond’s argument that increasing scale must be correlated with concentrated decision-making, and by Pinker’s suggestion that disinterested third-party institutions are necessary to curb cycles of violence, but they never effectively engage with the basic logic. Instead, they again and again point to this or that archeological site, insisting the absence of palaces and the similarity of the dwellings means people there were equal and had no kingly rulers. Or they point to this or that indigenous American confederacy we only know about through patchy records or folk histories. (As an interesting counterexample to Graeber and Wengrow’s complaints about Westerners not being able to imagine indigenous peoples coming up with any good ideas for social arrangements, the Iroquois “Great League of Peace” is generally acknowledged as an inspiration for the US Constitution.) But, while for them the most important fact is that these more enlightened governing institutions existed, for the rest of us the big question is how exactly they functioned. How are we to follow their examples, after all, if we have no idea how they solved problems of communication and coordination? What happened when a significant bloc of people opposed an otherwise collective decision? How did they address factionalism and polarization? (You get the sense from reading The Dawn of Everything that the authors have never in their lives had a conversation with a MAGA republican—or for that matter a conservative of any stripe.)

Graeber and Wengrow take a step toward acknowledging these difficulties in their discussion of traditional Basque settlements, which are some of the few egalitarian communities in the modern world. Houses in these settlements are arranged in circular patterns, and each household has a set of obligations to the houses on both sides, with the effect that “no one is first, and no one is last” (295). But, as Graeber and Wengrow point out,

such “simple” economies are rarely all that simple. They often involve logistical challenges of striking complexity, resolved on a basis of intricate systems of mutual aid, all without any need of centralized control or administration. (297)

In the next paragraph, though, they write, “There is no reason to assume that such a system would only work on a small scale.” Of course, such a system could possibly work on a larger scale—say with tens of thousands of households—but, despite their proclamation to the contrary, there is good reason to believe such a complex system would be unlikely to arise and persist. It’s the same reason complex lifeforms are unlikely to burst into existence in the absence of slightly simpler precedents. Anyway, is a complex set of obligations to surrounding neighbors any less of a curb to freedom than a set of laws devised by a bureaucratic government?

            The archeologist Michael E. Smith, whose work on Teotihuacan Graeber and Wengrow cite in their book, characterizes their arguments about scale and urban institutions as “a serious example of ignoring prior relevant research.” Again and again throughout The Dawn of Everything, the authors attempt to dismiss theories about increasing stratification and concentrated power by tracing them back to outdated—often colonialist—theories from bygone eras. But as Smith explains,

Graeber and Wengrow want to establish that the decentralized decision-making and social freedoms common in small groups and small-scale societies can also work at an urban scale…The idea that population size and density have strong effects on urban society and organization is not just an assumption or ideological belief, as Graeber and Wengrow suggest. It is, rather, one of the most strongly supported empirical findings of urban research. (4)

Smith cites sources from a range of fields to support this assertion, but his most compelling example comes from an annual event that the organizers originally planned based on anarchistic principles.

Aerial view of Burning Man Festival

The Burning Man Festival began as 35 people on a beach in California in 1986. By 2019, attendance had grown to 80,000. Sometime in the late 90s, the organizers started to see problems arising. As festival planner Rod Garrett explains,

We got to a point where I saw people becoming irrationally angry with each other and with the city. It occurred to me that this might be an effect of overpopulation, and that we’d hit some tipping point where people were no longer comfortable.

This is a gathering of people as likeminded, at least with regard to their aversion to arbitrary constraints on their radical self-expression, as you’re likely to encounter in such large numbers. And even among this group of avowed idealists, a threshold of population density was eventually reached that necessitated the imposition of rules and greater efforts at organization. Could these new rules have been arrived at collectively? Not without first coming up with a way to gather 80,000 opinions and a method for transforming them into actionable plans. What the organizers did instead was to create the rules themselves—the few dictating to the masses.

            Intriguingly, Graeber himself seems to have experienced the difficulties on the other side of this dynamic firsthand. We have already seen how difficult it can be to maintain harmonious societies at largescale, but the other challenge for egalitarian decision-making is that you have to find a way to prevent ambitious individuals from accumulating power. In a footnote to a discussion of their three proposed forms of power—control of violence, control of information, and personal charisma—the authors reveal that at least one of them (probably Graeber) has witnessed groups struggling to keep their members from acquiring one or another of them. They write, 

This again is easy to observe in activist groups, or any group self-consciously trying to maintain equality between members. In the absence of formal powers, informal cliques that gain disproportionate power almost invariably do so through privileged access to one or another form of information. If self-conscious efforts are made to pre-empt this, and make sure everyone has equal access to important information, then all that’s left is individual charisma. (587)

This footnote comes dangerously close to an admission of how difficult egalitarianism is to establish and preserve—“almost invariably”—since putting checks on individual authority in one form leaves open opportunities of gaining other forms of influence.

            As replete as The Dawn of Everything is with ax-grinding and unscholarly shenanigans, as out of date as the supposedly conventional thinking it seeks to topple turns out to be, and as quixotic as the reform agenda the authors hope to galvanize probably is, we must still ask if there might be a scientific baby at risk of being thrown out with the propagandistic bathwater. Unsurprisingly, the parts of the book I personally enjoyed most tended to be the least polemical. I found the discussion of “culture areas” and “schismogenesis”—whereby one society consciously defines itself and its values in opposition to another neighboring society—both riveting and largely plausible. “One problem with evolutionism,” Graeber and Wengrow write, “is that it takes ways of life that developed in symbiotic relation with each other and reorganizes them into separate stages of human history” (446). That is a remarkable—and potentially fruitful—insight. And it is true that, while scholars like Boehm leave more room for exceptions to the egalitarian model of nomadic hunter-gatherers than Graeber and Wengrow let on, the range of variation is revealing itself to be far greater than previously imagined (but probably still not as great as Graeber and Wengrow suggest).

            Indeed, if a trace of impatience can be detected in my presentation, the reason is this: the question of how archeological sites like Göbekli Tepe and Poverty Point, with their massive scale, large earthen mounds, and monumental stonework, all built by hunter-gatherers, should rewrite our understanding of human social evolution is both fascinating and hugely consequential. That is why it was so disappointing to open The Dawn of Everything and find the authors riding their hobbyhorses and airing their petty grievances instead of genuinely engaging with the relevant research. Rather than offering readers their expert take on the science behind these mesmerizing discoveries, Graeber and Wengrow saw fit to exploit the intrinsic wonder to gin up support for their unscientific agendas. Though it just may have something to do with my own political concerns, I personally can’t wait until Jared Diamond, or someone writing in his tradition, takes up the topic anew.

            As for the political agenda in The Dawn of Everything, I may be less radical than Graeber and Wengrow, as I share Pinker’s conviction that while we should continue working to ensure marginalized peoples enjoy the same opportunities and protections as the most privileged among us, we also have a responsibility to both honor and safeguard the progress all the activists of past generations worked so hard to secure by exercising their own primordial right to experiment with new social arrangements. Who are we to sneer at their successes and narcissistically toss aside the fruits of their efforts? The most important starting point for any reform initiative is a clear-eyed understanding of the current reality, one that people outside the movement can be confident is based on our best methods for getting at the truth. That’s why it’s so important to keep science as separate from activism as humanly possible. Whether we are talking about anthropologists, climate scientists, or infectious disease specialists, we simply cannot afford for the view of scientists as mere members of this or that special interest group to gain any more traction than it already has. Science may have resisted committing suicide to date, but every time the public discovers an agenda driving research on important issues, its trust suffers one more potentially fatal blow.

***

Also read:

Just Another Piece of Sleaze: The Real Lesson of Robert Borofsky's "Fierce Controversy"

“The World until Yesterday” and the Great Anthropology Divide: Wade Davis’s and James C. Scott’s Bizarre and Dishonest Reviews of Jared Diamond’s Work

Violence in Human Evolution and Postmodernism’s Capture of Anthropology

Tangle and Rowdy: A Halloween Story

[This is the 4th in a series of Halloween stories. Follow the link to start with the first.]

Early fall sunshine with a fleeting chill fading before the afternoon. Unseasonably hot until the last two days. Only the vaguest hints here and there of a few leaves with a change of color on their mind. It was four weeks ago when I sat down to comb through people’s stories in my email, looking for candidates to attend our yearly gathering to celebrate all things mysterious and frightening. I came to the task reluctantly, wondering how we’d gone from charming stories told among friends to wild tales of truly terrifying tragedy. I came to the task weighed down by an unaccustomed despair.

            But miraculously I found a story I liked. Now, it’s time to share. At the same time, I’m looking back, wondering what was wrong with me. Wondering too why Steve’s story affected me when so many others, some more spectacularly macabre, fell flat.

            The beating heart of good ghost stories is a search through the dark. You know the type of scene I’m referring to. The protagonist wakes to a strange sound. Or comes home to find the door open. Or enters a spooky house as a show of courage or to find a lost sister. The shadows move in a way they shouldn’t. You hear noises impossible to identify. Edging in and out of our peripheral vision, something horrific. The mysterious lurker in the dark. These are the scenes that make us hesitate to leave our beds in the wee hours to go wee. But here’s the problem: after hearing dozens, maybe hundreds of these stories, the search-through-the-dark scenes had begun losing their ominousness. I can’t even watch a scary movie around Halloween anymore without sighing and rolling my eyes at all the hackneyed devices for making a walk through a poorly lit house scary.

            When I’m in an analytical mood, I wonder whether the purpose of these narratives isn’t to add some new dimension to the mundane, as Steve suggested in the midst of telling us this year’s featured installment. For kids, I get the sense that the appeal comes from the intensity of the emotions they evoke. If you manage to master feelings of terror induced by an experience you can end by closing the book, turning off the TV, or tuning out your friend, then you’re one step closer to being able to master yourself when the horrors are tougher to evade. In a sense, you’re one step closer to adulthood. Not that kids think all this exactly. They must just have the intuition that the stories they obsess over provide lessons worth learning—or rather training in preparation for what’s in store for them, what most of us for whom adulthood is already an inescapable reality are all too familiar with. That’s why it doesn’t matter that the premises are far-fetched. The point isn’t acquiring some new conceptual understanding of life or the world. The point is to develop the capacity for equanimity in the face of life’s inscrutable and uncontrollable reversals and transformations. The fact that it’s monsters after you and not some chaos engulfing your whole life makes the powerful emotions less confusing to grapple with. It’s not randomness and entropy. It’s a fight, hopefully one you can win.

            For us grownups, it’s more subtle. What difference does it make after all whether you die an excruciating death at the hands of some otherworldly beast with glowing transparent flesh or from some nauseatingly soul-withering combination of cancer and chemotherapy? Are ghosts more frightening than car crashes? Is it worse to have a demon possess you than to have your identity unravel from dementia? But if we can get a little bump of adrenaline from something that’s not even real, if something interrupts the unrelenting grinding down of our day-by-day existence into so many slick and polished ruts, we feel nothing but gratitude—even though most of us never bother to partake after a certain age. Defamiliarization is what literary critics call it: turning everyday experiences we barely take any note of anymore into something new and mysterious. In this case, you’re turning a walk through your house into a terrifying adventure, because the novelty is worth the terror, up to a point. Storytellers are careful to reveal their ghosts and creepy creatures gradually. The mystery is the powerful element, not the monstrosity.

            I think that’s why one part of ghost stories I still enjoy is the initial effort at setting a scene and establishing a tone. I love to read about old, eerily gnarled trees remembered from childhood. Or dilapidated abandoned houses kids once dared each other to break into. Or backcountry roads in the middle of nowhere with bizarre flashing lights. Or musty old basements. Or attics. I love the sense that something happened in this place, something consequential, a harbinger of even more consequential happenings to come. Each one of these scenes represents an exquisite promise. The problem is I can no longer help suspecting these promises will invariably be broken.

Whether you’re a believer or not, when you hear as many ghost stories as I do, you can’t help finding most of the details painfully tedious. After spending a couple months every year collecting tales of the unexplained for almost a decade, I’ve slid back from the edge and sunk deep into the back cushion of my seat. Now, I begin wondering at the midpoint of each new story how I would direct the scenes myself if I were authoring it, how I would make it optimally surprising, maximally horrifying, the most profoundly indelible. Beyond the upcoming turning point, I look ahead to the finale, and on to the big picture of the plot. How would I shape this material? Should the entire premise be scuttled?

When I first started trying to anticipate upcoming developments, my guesses were terrible, and the actual stories usually turned out better. But over time, I started becoming disappointed near the one-third point of most, because my own twists were better integrated thematically, more impactful. Eventually, the stories just started generally falling short of what I thought they could have been. The odd thing about all this was that the stories I was hearing, the ones I was considering writing up and sharing with my not huge but not completely insignificant following, well, they were all supposed to be true. I began to wonder if ghost stories are like a drug. You need more concentrated doses over time to get the same effect.

            Last year’s contribution introduced a new element. It wasn’t really a story so much as a cry for help. Ken, our storyteller, came to find out what our group would make of his daughter’s dealings with her imaginary friends. He knew from previous years’ stories, which I’d written up and posted on my blog, that we were a mix of skeptics and believers. He was particularly interested in what my mom would have to say, since of all the storytellers we’ve hosted over the years she seemed to have the most wisdom, at least according to my own biased accounting. The story and the ensuing interventions, led by my mom, entailed such a farrago of fiction and true facts, of a child’s fancies and an adult’s realized fears, that I’m still trying to force the details into some viable formulation. But that will have to wait until another time.

            This year, our Halloween gathering featured a story by a man I’m calling Steve. He too seemed to want something from our group besides a sympathetic hearing. For some reason, I’ve started taking that as a sign of authenticity, this reluctance to speak, this mild embarrassment, the impression that the teller is suffering under a heavy burden. Is it also a sign of truth? That’s an entirely different question, one I’m realizing more every year it’s impossible to answer. Steve’s story opened with a creepy warehouse loft, one that reminded him of a spooky attic in his grandparents’ house. That caught my attention. I couldn’t help steeling myself for the ensuing disappointment.

            Here’s the story as Steve told it:

            “That loft looking out over the Sentech warehouse always gave me the creeps. I think it was because for some odd reason it reminded me of my grandparents’ attic. Until I was ten, they lived in this house they’d bought right before my dad was born. Apparently, it had quite a history, but I wouldn’t find that out until much later. Back then, all I knew was someone in the family who lived there before had hanged himself in the attic. I knew this because my younger cousin Shelby told me, claiming she’d heard it straight from our grandma’s lips. I only bring this up because that attic was the eeriest place I’d ever been. You could put floodlights in every corner up there and somehow it would still be dark. What was up there? Scraped, splintery gray wood floors. Exposed beams and joists, appropriately covered in dust and cobwebs. Light beaming through the lone window as if through glue. Lots of boxes. And naturally some furniture covered in fraying sheets. I can’t picture it in my mind without conjuring the smell, a combination of musty old clothes and something sharp, cedary, almost chemical. Old cigar smoke maybe. There were tons of knickknacks scattered about, but I never got far in my sifting explorations because I was only ever up there on a dare, and I couldn’t resist bolting down the stairs for more than a minute or two at a time.

“Once, when two of my older cousins, Mike and Derek, slammed and bolted the door behind me before, for all I knew, taking off—I later found out they were listening outside the door the whole time—I managed to look around long enough to see that I could have gotten to the roof through the window, if only I could get it to open. As much as I strained and grunted though, the damn thing wouldn’t budge. When I turned back toward the center of the attic again and saw it from this new vantage within the dormer, I was simultaneously struck with two conflicting impressions: first, that this place looked completely normal, that it was just a bunch of junk in an old house, and second, that something was very wrong with this scene, like it had somehow been contaminated. I knew if I stayed up there, I would be totally safe. But I also knew if I didn’t get out of there soon, I might never be the same.

“I know, it’s silly kid stuff. Any one of us could go into that same attic now as adults—though I’m pretty sure they tore the house down—and we wouldn’t think anything of it. As a kid, though, your memory isn’t so cluttered with the detritus of years, so your perceptions are slower to sink in and more impactful once they do. Experiences you have when you’re young are higher resolution. Untrained in what to look at, your vision has much more scope. Plus, you have yet to discover that most of the stories you hear aren’t true, that they tend to be comprised of plagiarized elements of old fictions rearranged to varying degrees, so hearing about things like people killing themselves in a particular place really adds dimension to what you see.”

Steve’s seemingly jaded speculations about why the old attic stayed with him into adulthood struck a chord with me. Outwardly, his appearance was amazingly average: late 30s, slightly overweight, jeans, a hoodie, a beard that looked to be less about style than minimal effort, and an overall unassuming aspect. When he spoke, though, you almost couldn’t help leaning in to listen close. His conspicuous lack of interest in getting or maintaining anyone’s attention made it seem like he had some sort of secret wisdom. He wore glasses with nondescript frames and thick lenses that magnified his otherwise minute expressions. His nonchalance promised profundity. His speech, though rambling at times, often flirted with the literary.

He went on:

“Aside from a few nightmares after getting locked in there by my cousins, nothing happened in that attic—that I’m aware of anyway. I mention it here because there was such a distinct feeling associated with it. You all must have places like that you remember, haunted places from childhood that remain haunted in your mind no matter how cynical and disenchanted you become in later years. I had glimmerings of that feeling whenever I stepped onto the loft overlooking the warehouse at the Sentech office.

“Let me explain the layout of the building. It was offices in front and a big warehouse in the back. The office ceilings were low, so there was a lot of space on top of them where the loft extended. If you were up there and stood at the railing, you’d see the large overhead door where the trucks would back up to drop off or pick up our products. Around the walls of the warehouse, large racks held pallets of shrink-wrapped boxes high up, and lower down were rows of boxes the guys back there would take products from as they prepared shipments to our customers. It was a huge open space with a few workstations. When you came in the back door or through the overhead, you could see the wooden stairs leading up to the loft along the back wall, close to the door to the front of the building. From down on the warehouse floor, the area up there was usually completely dark.

“I was the last to leave the building most evenings, so I’d walk through the warehouse, which afterhours was itself only lit by a few safety lights, and over my shoulder was this entirely black space looming. Then there were the sounds. Sitting in my office, I could hear pretty much whatever was going on in the loft above my head. I seldom paid any attention. But I remember more than once being relatively sure I was alone in the building when I heard pounding or shuffling. A couple times I even wandered out to the bottom of the stairs out in the warehouse to investigate. Neither time did I end up climbing those stairs.

“When I first started working at Sentech, they told me there was an older guy who used to manage the warehouse, picking, boxing, and stacking all the products to ship out and unpacking and sorting all the incoming inventory. The company was just a four-man operation when it began, and Glen was the one in charge of keeping product moving in and out. Ten years on, there were enough guys back there helping for him to retire without feeling like he was leaving anyone in the lurch.

            “The company sells these infrared and sonar sensors that manufacturers put on cars and trucks. They hired me to work on the website and do some basic marketing for them, which meant I spent most of my time in an office. I only met Glen once, when he stopped in one day while I was working. Nadine, the woman who did a lot of the order processing, introduced us. That’s when I found out Glen had stored a bunch of his old belongings in the loft. He looked to be in his sixties or seventies, with thin whisps of white hair over what must have at one time been a square-jawed, hard-featured visage. He made irreverent jokes, first about how it was too bad they’d had to hire another dude who looked like everybody else in the building, and then about the decline in the quality of music sounding over the workstation speakers. But he seemed kind and had a gentle, almost peaceful way about him. He struck me as a pretty typical country grandfather type—maybe nicer and more at ease in company than most of that sort. Wittier.

“Glen had stopped in that day to pick up a snowblower from his little area upstairs, so I went up to help him get it down the stairs. I hadn’t been in the loft more than once or twice helping one of the other guys move stuff around. It was creepy. I don’t want to exaggerate. It wasn’t like some old, haunted house by any stretch. It was just a big space with particle board floors and the usual girders holding up the high roof. It took the lights up there a few minutes to warm up, and when they were burning full steam, they cast this sepia light over the sundry boxes and parts and materials. Mixed in with the typical warehouse stuff, though, were children’s toys and old lawnmowers and snowblowers. Apparently, Glen had a side hustle where he bought old equipment, refurbished it, and sold it for profit. But he had personal stuff up there too. I wasn’t ever told not to touch it, but there was a general attitude of avoidance when it came to that space. Plus, like I said, I barely ever went up there. We got the snowblower to Glen’s truck, said our goodbyes and nice-to-meet-yous, and that would be the last I ever saw him.

“Then some weeks later I get a call late in the afternoon. I don’t know a delicate way to say it, but the guy on the other end of the line had a—ahem—thick rural accent, if you catch my drift. He told me his name was Tim and that he was Glen’s grandson. Glen had just died in the hospital from a stroke, and now Tim was trying to locate a book his grandpa may have stored with his belongings upstairs. He seemed impatient when I offered my condolences, because he was so eager to locate the book.

“‘What does this book look like?’ I finally asked.

“‘You’ll know it when you see it,’ was his response.

“My first thought was to send Sam, our new warehouse guy, up there to look for it. But Sam wouldn’t be in again until the next morning and Tim was pressuring me for an answer. Finally, I told him I’d go up there and look, though I might need some more information. Glen had quite a bit of stuff up there.

“‘Well, I bet it’ll be someplace safe,’ was all he said.

“So I jogged out to the warehouse and back to the circuit breaker by the overhead to flip on the lights. They were just starting to produce their low yellow glow as I reached the top of the stairs. Everything had that sepia hue and was contoured by darkest shadow. Glen’s stuff was in the corner straight back from the stairs, and when I saw how much of it there was back there in the slowly intensifying light, I said aloud, ‘Well, are you going to stay late trying to find this damn book?’ Just as I said it, the phone started ringing again. I grumbled and headed downstairs to grab the handheld at the shipping station.

“It was Tim again. ‘Hey, do you mind if I run over there and help you look—or I could just look for it myself. I know you must be busy.’

“‘Listen, I’m just finishing up here for the day,’ I told him. ‘I’ll need to be on my way home in about ten minutes. Why don’t you call tomorrow when Nadine will be able to help you out?’

“‘No, no, not Nadine,’ he blurted. ‘Come on, man. This is something I have to do quick. I can’t explain, but… how about I pay you a hundred dollars to stick around and help me find the book?’

“‘A hundred dollars? Listen, I’m not even sure I should be letting you take anything from here. I only met Glen once. I’ve only been working here a few weeks. I’m going to need to talk to someone before I let some guy I’ve never met rifle through Glen’s stuff. And I definitely can’t let you just wander off with anything. It sounds to me like this book is valuable. So how do I know it’s not meant to go to some other family member?’

“‘It’s not. It’s for me. I swear. And I need it tonight. I need it as soon as possible. How’s this? I’ll give you two hundred dollars. I’m on my way now.’

“I started to shout at him not to come but the line went dead. I was irritated as hell because I wanted to go back to my office, sign out, and drive home. The only problem was my finances weren’t in a state that would allow me to turn down two hundred dollars for twenty minute’s work. The smart thing to do would have been to go back to my office get my stuff, lock the doors, and be on my way. But that’s not what I did.”

Here I lost focus on Steve’s voice and got wrapped up in a thought: this is another trope common to ghost stories—the good person making a bad choice. To win your sympathy, protagonists must have some virtue, some quality that makes you want to see only good things happen to them. But there has to be a fork in the road where the character takes a wrong turn. They make a deal that brings on a curse. The rest of the story details the playing out of that curse, including its ultimate resolution. Recognizing the common device and anticipating the upcoming search through the dark, I relaxed back in my chair, resigning myself to the budding disappointment.

“Instead,” Steve spoke over my thoughts, “I went back upstairs and searched with some urgency, hoping to find the book before Tim got there, just to have a better sense of what I was dealing with. The lawnmowers and snowblowers created a barrier separating the main part of the loft from where Glen’s boxes were stacked. Two tall shelves with more boxes in a variety of sizes stood in the corner. These seemed promising, so I shuffled and hopped my way back there. Later, I would attribute the sound I heard to all the stuff I’d pushed and moved around. It was a series of clicks. At least, that’s what it sounded like at first. They came at a slow pace that didn’t correspond to any movement on my part. After a few moments of doubt, I froze. Then I whipped around to scan the rest of the loft. By now, the lights were at about half power, bright enough for me to see I was alone up there, unless someone was going out of their way to hide.

“All at once, the dilemma Tim had presented me with was no longer taking up enough space in my mind to crowd out my typical reaction to the loft. What the hell was I doing up there anyway? I should just get my stuff from my office and leave, making extra sure to lock the door and set the alarm on my way out. But I had begun my search, and now I wanted to have a look at this book. Tim had said I’d know it when I saw it. Did it have a gilded cover? Was the artwork horrific? Was the damn thing bound in human flesh? Once I had the book in hand, I would be in a better position to decide on a course of action. That’s what I told myself anyway. It could have been that I just wanted to find the book and hand it over for the two hundred bucks before my better sense kicked in.

“The moment I turned back toward the shelf I’d been searching I heard the slow series of clicks again. More curious than startled this time, I pricked my ears to see if I could tell what direction it was coming from. The clicking came in intervals of a few seconds. It didn’t sound mechanical, and it came too slow to be from something tipping or falling. I walked all around Glen’s section of the loft looking for the source, but the sound ceased almost as soon as I stepped away from the shelf. When I returned to resume my search for the book, though, it started again. And it was more recognizable. Once again, I was frightened, petrified. The sound wasn’t clicking. It was growling, almost like a deep muffled groan. Unmistakably angry. No sooner had I identified the sound—though I’d later question myself—than I heard a pounding at the back door. Under other circumstances, I may have been reluctant to open the door. At that moment, though, I was glad to have a reason to rush down the stairs.

“‘Hi, I just talked to you on the phone,’ the man said as I pushed open the door. I said my name as I offered my hand. He took it enthusiastically. He was on the short side and skinny, wearing clothes that were way too big for him. Baggy jeans and a hooded jacket his slouching shoulders formed into a pouch for his pocketed hands. His hair was cropped close to his scalp, and his skin looked papery. He darted a glance at my face before looking up toward the loft, his eyes almost twitching with eagerness. Giving my hand a quick squeeze, he said, ‘Hey, I hope I didn’t give you the wrong impression—I’m not up to anything underhanded, you know. It’s just that I have to leave for a few days, and I’d really like to have this book so I can use it to write a eulogy. My cousin says the funeral will be right around the time I get back into town.’

“It occurred to me this sounded like a story you’d cook up on the drive here if you wanted to keep someone like me from asking too many questions. ‘In that case, you really don’t need to pay me anything to take it. But I really do have to call Nadine or whoever else I can reach before I can just hand it over.’ Tim looked stricken. ‘Why don’t you run up there and look for the book while I make the call? It’s right up these stairs and back on the right. You’ll see the lawnmowers and snowblowers.’

“Without a word, Tim rushed up the stairs. I opened my mouth to say something about the sound I’d been hearing but wound up turning to head back to my office without saying a word. What would I have said anyway? Now that the two hundred dollars was off the table, I shifted my efforts back to getting home as quickly as I could. I wanted to get my dogs out to the park in our neighborhood before my wife got off work. I’m always trying to squeeze in a bit more time with them, but I obviously want to be around for my wife too. Looking back now, it’s clear I shouldn’t have left Tim alone up there without getting more information. I didn’t even know if he was really Glen’s grandson.”

Chris, seeing Steve’s expression brighten, chimed in for the first time, saying, “What kind of dogs do you have?”

Steve reached for his pocket to pull out his phone. “Here, I’ll show them to you,” he said, brimming with pride, overcome by a surge of joy incongruous with his usual demeanor, a sunbeam poking through a storm cloud. “This is Rowdy—he’s the kid brother. He just turned three. And this is Tangle. He’s the wise old man. He’s 8. Rowdy is an Australian shepherd. Tangle is a border collie.”

“They look like trouble,” Cindy said through a fawning smile.

“They’re my boys. But, yeah, they’re a pain in the ass most days too, especially when they don’t get enough play time.”

“I see why you were so eager to get home,” I said, momentarily disarmed.

“Exactly. Anyway, I returned to my office and sat down at my desk to call Nadine. She’d left to pick up her daughters from school just a couple of hours earlier, but her phone rang through to voicemail. I left her a message and began to steel myself to deliver the bad news to Tim: even if you find the book up there, I’m not going to be able to let you take it until I talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. I figured I could persuade him to leave it here with me until tomorrow at least. Before I went back to the warehouse, though, I logged out of my computer and gathered up my stuff to go home. Not two steps from my desk, I heard the office phone ring. I rushed to grab it.

“‘Nadine?’ I said.

“‘What? I’m sorry, no, this is Sarah. Is this Sentech?’

“‘Yes, it is. I’m sorry, I was expecting a call from someone else. What can I help you with Sarah?’

“‘Well, I think my cousin might try to reach you. You see, he’s after a book he should know isn’t his. I don’t even know if it’s there, but if it is, it should be up with my grandfather’s stuff on that second floor you have. Did you work with Glen?’

“‘I started after he left, I’m afraid, but I did meet him once. And I should tell you, there’s a guy here now who’s up there looking for the book. What’s your cousin’s name?’

“‘His name is Tim, and if he’s there you shouldn’t let him out of your sight.’

“Just as she said this, I heard a commotion overhead, like a shelf being knocked over and its contents spreading across the floor. I froze for two beats to listen. But Tim’s scream startled me. I was already in the hall when I heard his feet stomping down the stairs. I picked up my own pace, hoping to head him off if he was running toward the door, but then another sound stopped me in my tracks. Something else was moving from Glen’s corner of the loft to the top of the stairs. At least, that’s what I thought it sounded like. And I could have sworn I could hear claws clicking against the wood flooring with each step. I reasoned that Tim must’ve brought a dog in with him to help him search—but that would mean he came down the stairs, went out to his truck, and then came back in without me hearing any of that, without me hearing the dog at all before Tim decided to rush down the stairs.

“When I finally managed to force myself to open the door to the warehouse, it was just in time to see Tim stepping through the door into the sunlight. By the time I reached the backdoor of the warehouse myself, all I could do was watch him drive away in his rickety old Ford pickup. Remembering the woman on the phone, I hurried back to the office and picked it up again.

“‘He’s gone. Something crashed upstairs and—and…’

“‘Did he have the book?’

“‘I didn’t get that good of a look at him. He may have. I’m sorry, I need to go upstairs and see if he broke anything.’

“‘What did you hear?’

“‘There was a loud crash followed by what must’ve been stuff sliding across the floor. Then it sounded like something was chasing him.’ I’d blurted it out before I could think better of it. The other end of the line remained silent for what seemed like a long time. Finally, I said, ‘Sarah, I’m going to run upstairs to see what happened. Then I’m going to go home. Please stop by sometime tomorrow and we’ll see if we can’t find that book.’

“‘I hate to ask,’ she replied, ‘but could you call me back and tell me what you find?’

“I was annoyed by the request, but in the circumstances, it seemed perfectly reasonable, so I agreed. I hung up the phone and went back to the warehouse. By now, the lights in the loft were on full blast, and when I reached the top of the stairs, I was surprised to see that both the large shelves remained upright. What had I heard crashing down and spilling its contents? Or had I completely misconstrued the sound? I approached Glen’s corner, and the mystery only deepened. There didn’t seem to be anything on the floor that wasn’t there before. In fact, after a quick scan of the corner and then the loft as a whole, I couldn’t detect any sign that Tim had been up there at all. So what had all that noise been?

“Rather than calling Sarah back from my office, I typed the number into my personal phone so I could talk to her on my way home. From work to home is a twenty-minute drive for me. Even with the phone to my ear, I managed to catch a glimpse of something on the floor. It was a tiny piece of metal in the shape of a bone with a loop at the top. Being a dog owner myself, I knew what it was right away—a tag for a collar. It had some flecks of red on it still, but it was so dinged up I couldn’t find any legible words on it. I stood there squinting for lettering for a few seconds before it hit me: the tag must have fallen out of the book. It must have been tucked in the pages like a bookmark. Where else would it have come from?

“And that meant Tim had indeed fled with the book in hand.

“I returned to my office to grab my things, came back out to the warehouse to switch off the lights and activate the alarm, and then went out and got in my car. I waited till I was on the highway before calling Sarah back. I told her I was pretty sure Tim had the book and that a dog’s tag had fallen out of it. ‘What’s the name on the tag?’ she demanded, cutting me off mid-sentence. I told her it had worn off. All I knew was that at some point the tag had been red. Sarah wanted to come to the warehouse and confirm that the book wasn’t there, but when I told her I’d already left she agreed to come the next morning.

“‘What’s this about?’ I asked before letting her hang up. ‘What is it about this book that makes it so special?’ After a long silence, I raised my voice to say, ‘Are you still there?’

“‘I’m still here,’ she said. ‘I just don’t know where to begin.’

“She told me Glen had brought the book home from his travels after he finished his tour in Vietnam. He’d really gotten around apparently, finding menial jobs in several countries, not feeling enough like himself to return to his old life. He’d bought the book as a gift for the love of his life back home, the woman he’d go on to marry. Unfortunately, she was diagnosed with leukemia two years after the wedding, and she was dead a few years after that. Glen remarried quickly, but almost as quickly got divorced. Tim, it turned out, was the son of one of his ex-wife’s daughters, so sort of a step-grandson. A few years after the divorce, Glen got remarried, to the woman who would become Sarah’s grandmother. Decades after that, when Sarah was just a little girl, Tim, already in his twenties, somehow found out about the book. He did some digging and discovered it was worth a lot of money. When he brought this information to his grandpa, suggesting they sell it, Glen dismissed the idea out of hand. Tim got mad and was later caught trying to steal the book. That was when Glen moved it out of his house. Sarah hadn’t been sure the book was in the Sentech loft until I told her about the tag. But she assured me Nadine would corroborate much of the story I’d just heard—which I realized was why Tim reacted so strongly when I said I needed to talk to her before letting him leave with any of Glen’s belongings.

“‘But what is this book?’ I asked just as I was pulling into my driveway. ‘What’s so special about it?’

“After another pause, Sarah said, ‘What’s special about it is that my grandfather gave it to his first love, his first wife, a woman he cherished right up until the time he stood by watching her lowered into the ground. It was a sort of scrapbook, but not that exactly. What makes it valuable is that it’s a few hundred years old and contains sections from some ancient mystics, but the format also encourages you to make your own contributions, if that makes any sense.’

“‘It doesn’t really,’ I said. ‘I can’t say I’ve ever heard of anything like that. It seems once someone started writing in it, the value would depreciate.’

“‘Oh, you don’t write in it,’ she said. ‘That’s not the kind of contribution it invites.’

“With that, I thought I understood: the book must lay out rituals or prayers or incantations. It didn’t encourage contributions so much as participation. But I figured it was pointless to keep trying to pull any more information out of her. ‘And the tag I found?’

“‘Baltus,’ she said, almost whispering.

“Now I was parked in the garage. I knew my own dogs would be going nuts inside. ‘Your grandfather’s dog?’ I asked.

“‘Well, yeah, originally, but reportedly he came to be quite devoted to Vivian—Grandpa’s first wife. Grandpa used to say he was afraid if he ever raised his voice to his wife, his own dog might maul him. I guess he was a big rottweiler, intimidating in appearance but gentle and sweet—most of the time. After Vivian died, Baltus was soon to follow. Losing them both in such a short span nearly ruined my grandfather. But he only started talking about them both when I was in my late teens.’

“Impatient to get in the house to let my dogs out, I realized there was something I needed to say before hanging up. ‘Listen, Sarah, I’m sorry I let Tim run off with that book. It was stupid of me. I was in a hurry to get home, so I just didn’t want to deal with it. It was irresponsible. But I’ll help you look for it tomorrow—even though I’m pretty sure he got away with it. I’ll do whatever I can to help you find it.’ I didn’t mention the two hundred bucks Tim had offered me.

“She assured me she understood and that it wasn’t my fault before signing off. Between the car and the door from the garage into the kitchen, I had a thought that induced a shudder. The sounds I heard above me when I was in my office. The clicking noise while I searched the two shelves—the growl. The crashing and shuffling and sliding as Tim fled. The nails on the floorboards. And that damn tag falling out of an ancient book of spells. But ten seconds later I was inside the door being smothered inside a Tangle and Rowdy tornado.”

Cindy chimed in here to ask, “Did you ever get confirmation from this Sarah woman that it really was a book of spells? Did you ever see it?” Our demure and giggling Cindy—she looked worried as she spoke, making me realize my fellow group members were less lacking in enthusiasm for our old Halloween storytelling ritual than I’d grown. Of course, they weren’t the ones responsible for sifting through dozens of stories sent in by email every year in search of someone who may make a worthy contribution to our ever-growing collection.

Steve replied, “I never spoke to Sarah again after that, and I never saw the book. I talked to Nadine about all of it, and Sarah was right about her corroborating what she told me about Glen. But Nadine didn’t know anything about the book.”

“Wait, so Sarah never showed up the next day to look for the book?”

“Nope, she never did. But I found out from two police detectives that the book was found with Tim.” Steve paused as we all looked back at him with stunned expressions. “I’ll get to that part,” he said. “Let me put this all in chronological order.”

“So what happened after you got home?” Mike asked.

“Well, first, as is my normal routine, I leashed up the dogs and got them over to the park in the middle of our neighborhood so we could play for about half an hour before heading back home to greet my wife. When we got there, the weather was beautiful, and throwing the ball around for them both, I finally stopped thinking about Tim and feeling guilty for letting him in to steal his grandfather’s book—his step-grandfather’s book. It was difficult for me to wrap my head around how enticed I’d been by the promise of money. That’s not me; at least I didn’t want to think it was. At the time, though, I was more strapped than usual. But that’s another story. Anyway, we had our fun at the park. By the time we were heading home, there were rain clouds rolling in. We jogged home.

“By seven o’clock, as I was sitting down to dinner with my wife, the rain was pounding against the windows and the sides of the house. Crashes of thunder had the lights in our dining room flickering, and we got up from the table long enough to get out some candles and find a couple flashlights to keep close at hand. The most intense part of the storm only lasted about half an hour, but the dogs were stuck inside, which meant they were both play fighting in the kitchen and living room most of the night.

“Now, I know you said you’d alter any identifying details before you publish this story, and I’d prefer not to reveal anything too personal. But I have to add some backstory for what happened next to make sense. You see, my wife and I had been trying to have a baby for a couple years. When all this happened with Glen’s grandson and his book, we’d already been to see a doctor on a few occasions. Meanwhile, at thirty-seven, after years of freelancing as an online marketer, and now with my second full-time gig, I was looking down the barrel of an established career—one I hadn’t chosen for myself but instead fell into as I tried to make ends meet. This despite my long-held ambition to be a serious journalist and all-around writer: poetry, novels, travelogues. I still have boxes filled with notebooks bursting at the seams in my attic. Ha, another haunted attic. There are other aspects to what was going on I could mention here, but that should suffice.

“While I was running the dogs up and down the stairs with their tennis balls to wear them out, and then while I was sitting on the couch watching TV with my wife, I kept having these horrible thoughts. I brooded over the two hundred dollars and how it had led me to make such a stupid decision. That line of inquiry led me straight to a bone-deep sense of self-loathing. I was a failure. I had nothing to contribute to the world. I was a burden, the weight tied around my wife’s neck, dragging her down, ensuring her unhappiness. The idea was a poison coursing through my intestines, casting a pall over everything I saw, felt, or thought. I couldn’t even fulfill the one function that accounted for my biological existence. The world would be a much better place without me in it.

“My self-hatred radiated from my guts to contaminate every cell in my body, transforming each into a tiny black hole gulping down all the surrounding light. My wife noticed me sinking into myself on the couch and asked what was wrong. I lied and said I had heartburn and was a little worn out from not having slept well the night before. So when the power went out again—even though the thunder had eased to a series of intermittent drawn-out rumbles—and didn’t come back on, she said, ‘Why don’t we just go to bed?’ It was only about a half hour before our usual time, so I figured it was a good idea. I was hoping to feel better the next morning.”

This inward shift to Steve’s story had me sitting up and listening more intently. I knew a second search-through-the-dark scene was next, but the route through Steve’s own doubts and disappointments struck me as not just revealing with regard to his own story, but as providing a larger insight into the hidden workings of these narratives in general. As a kid, you read Poe’s overheated stories about beauty and lost love as if they were a play on abstractions, their power deriving from the staggering vastness contained within the symbols. When you grow up and read stories about hauntings and possessions, though, you respond as you would to real individuals who’ve experienced real losses, because you have experienced similar ones yourself. So much heartbreak in even the most blessed lives—how can you not be haunted by it? Isn’t the instant of starkest, most all-consuming terror preferable to facing the reality of the inevitable demise of everyone you love as you struggle through your own drawn-out decline? All of this is to say I found it easy to relate to Steve’s inner turmoil.

“My wife went upstairs cupping a candle flame, the dogs close behind. I meanwhile set to my ritual of flipping off the light switches, turning down the heat, and checking to see if all the doors were locked. But after walking out into the garage to check the back door at the far corner, I got stuck. I felt so bad I could barely move. I found myself scanning the length of a beam along the ceiling, looking for a place I could fasten a rope. Then my gaze gravitated toward my car. My key fob was still in my pocket. I could start the engine and wait. With the noise from the rain, my wife probably wouldn’t hear. I had taken two slow steps toward the driver’s-side door when I heard scratching at the locked door I’d just checked.

“I was relatively certain both dogs had gone upstairs with my wife, but what else would be scratching to get in? I was in no state for caution or fear. So I walked over, unlocked the door, and turned the knob. Just then a gust of wind hit like a freight train, pushing open the door and knocking me back against the hood of my car. I rushed back to force the door closed, but then I remembered the scratch. So I put my hand against the door frame and thrust my head out into the lashing rain to see which of the dogs had managed to get trapped in the storm. Not seeing anything, I turned back to look for a coat or something to drape over myself. I ended up grabbing an old gray tarp, wrapping it over my shoulders, and running out into our backyard.

“The rain had intensified again, and the wind was batting me around with powerful gusts. The motion sensor by our door from the garage kicked on as I stepped past—meaning the power must be back on—but I could still barely see anything. Making a circuit of the yard along the fence, I saw that neither of our dogs was outside. I was in the back corner, farthest from the gate and the door to the garage, when I thought I caught a glimpse of something moving by a stand of trees about fifty yards outside our fence. Straining my eyes, I could just make out the outline. It was black. An animal. Maybe a dog. If it had come from somewhere around our house, its trajectory would take it right to the highway running alongside our neighborhood. So I ran to the gate and then to the stand of trees, clasping the corners of the tarp to my chest.

“I made it all the way to the sidewalk beside the highway, a few hundred feet from the neighborhood entrance. Out of breath, I stood staring through the curtain of rain, turning from side to side to see if I could spot the dog in the streetlights. But there was nothing. With nothing left to do but get back to the house and out of the rain, I found myself stuck in place again, thinking I’d failed at yet another task. It took me right back to the loathsome mental place I’d been before leaving the garage. When a semi’s headlights appeared on the distant highway, two menacing yellow eyes burning through the wet gloom, I thought, you can step right out in front of it. Gloria will wonder what you were doing out here, what you might have been looking for or chasing, but she probably won’t suspect you killed yourself. So this is it. Just wait for the right moment and step out into the road. It’ll be over before you know it.

“I have to say here I’d been down for a while, as I explained. But aside from some overdramatic episodes in my early dating life, I’ve never been the type to even think about suicide. I’ve always considered myself a writer, so all experience is good, you know. When things are bad, I try to focus on how I can turn what I’m going through into something poetic or literary, something to sharpen my perspective, make my engagement with life in all its facets more profound. More beautiful. But when I tried this thought on as I stood waiting for the perfect time to step in front of that truck, it led me straight to the fact that I was old enough now to know I’d never really be a writer, not one who got paid anyway. Meanwhile, my life insurance would pay my wife a lot more than two hundred bucks. I felt so horrible I couldn’t see beyond any of this. My mind had squeezed tight like a fist,” he held his up to demonstrate, “crushing this one idea in its palm. I had stopped breathing.

“Now, here was the truck approaching at last. My lungs finally loosened enough for me to draw in a sharp breath and hold it. The only way I can describe the feeling is that my despair and my pain were so intense, the prospect of oblivion promised bliss. I was desperate to be squashed, blotted out of existence. The lights whooshed closer. Five more seconds. Three. I lifted my foot and felt it moving forward. I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to the abyss.

“The next thing I knew, I was stumbling backward. There was a flash of white. And a sound like a roar. I watched the truck hiss and splash along the road in front of me as I sat with my butt in the soaking grass and fallen leaves. My missed opportunity. Maybe there’d be another soon. But the sound I’d heard wasn’t from the truck, I was sure. It sounded like an animal. It sounded like a larger and angrier version of what I’d heard up on that loft earlier in the day. At last, I started to come back to myself. And I was scared. I looked around frantically and saw Tangle, drenched, facing away from me, toward something I couldn’t see behind a wall running along the sidewalk. Tangle, ha, my bestest buddy. He’d poked in his nose and run right between my legs as I was stepping into the road. Only a border collie would think to do that. He knocked me backward. He fucking saved my life. Then Rowdy was there too, turning one circle around me as I sat in the grass beside the sidewalk, then another. I got to my feet and saw him bolting back toward our house.

“I must’ve left the door from the house to the garage open—or they found a way to open it. The door from the garage to the backyard, the gate, I was sure I’d pulled them both closed behind me. But Rowdy and Tangle had found a way. Maybe they’d just come to investigate when they heard the door open. Maybe they knew something was wrong.”

Here Maddy interrupted to echo in a mutter: “They know.”

Steve went on: “And now Tangle still looked like he was facing off against something obscured by the rain and shadow. I stepped forward to see what had his hackles up, staring deeply, but then drew back when I heard that fucking growl again. It set Tangle to barking wildly.

“I was still in an odd state, which must be why I was eager to see what was there. I’d left the flashlight in the kitchen, but the street was lit well enough. There was only so much darkness behind the wall to hide in. But I couldn’t see anything. Tangle finally stopped barking and turned to look back at me. As he did, my mind cleared even more. Suddenly, I couldn’t figure out what the hell I was doing out here. Trying to save a dog I wasn’t even sure I saw?

“I bounded past Tangle to have a look behind the wall. When it was clear there was nothing to be seen, I turned back, pulled the tarp tight over my shoulders, and called for Tangle to follow me back to the house. I ran, feeling the squish of the wet grass, my thoughts weighing heavy, my whole body feeling—I don’t know—shaky. Buzzing. And this is where things got scary. I was maybe a third of the way from the sidewalk to my yard, running along the back of my neighbor’s fence, with Tangle well ahead of me. That’s when the tarp caught on something. My feet tried to whip out in front of me as I twisted my body, but I managed to stay upright. I still had the edge of the tarp gripped in my hand and I turned to see what it had gotten snagged on. That’s when it was violently jerked out of my hand. Here I question my own memory. Or maybe it was some trick of the darkness and the driving rain. I thought I saw the opposite edge of the tarp dart back and forth, as if in the jaws of a huge dog shaking it side to side. But there was no dog. There was nothing to be seen at all.

“Tangle ran up and stopped by my side, his hackles up again, and we both stood dumbstruck as the tarp was pulled back toward the road, by the wind obviously, because what else could it have been? The rain picked up, breaking the spell, and I ran back toward the gate with Tangle. We were just behind our own fence when I heard Gloria calling me from the back door. I shouted back telling her I was there and heading for the door to the garage. Rowdy, still soaking wet, had alerted her that something was wrong, and she’d come to look for me.

“Inside, I explained to Gloria I thought I’d seen a dog heading for the road and gone to save it. I didn’t tell her the rest. The lights kept flickering as we were toweling off the dogs. I no longer felt any desperate urge to bring my existence to a halt. I was confused. Stupefied even. And I didn’t get much sleep that night. But that horrible feeling was gone, and I’m happy to report it’s never come back. Not really.

“The next morning before work I went out to look for the tarp. I found a few pieces scattered behind the line of yards and out into the highway. There were only a few strips, but I imagined the whole tarp being shredded. I never found any more of it.

“Naturally, I was anxious to see Sarah the next day at work. I wanted to ask her for some more details about that damn book her cousin had stolen. Would I have told her what happened to me the night before? As embarrassing as it might have been, I think I would have, if only because I remember being worried it might happen again. Unfortunately, she never showed up. She never called. I went home feeling apprehensive. But it was a peaceful night. I left work early so I could spend some extra time with the dogs.

“The day after that I got a call asking if I would be willing to answer some questions posed by a couple of detectives. I suspected it had something to do with the stolen book, but obviously thought it was odd that detectives would bother with such a thing. I agreed to talk to them at work and show them around the warehouse. When they got there, I was surprised how normal they seemed. Just two guys asking simple questions and writing notes, no good cop-bad cop games or anything. It was from them I found out Tim had been found hanged to death in his neighbor’s barn. I told them everything that had happened, minus the strange events of the night before last. Before they left, they asked me if I had a dog. I told them about Tangle and Rowdy. They wrote something down in their notebooks, thanked me, and left through the back door.

“The question about my dogs made me wonder. I got online and looked for any accounts of the death in the news. Sure enough, there was a short piece on the website of our hometown’s lone newspaper. The death was clearly a suicide, but the police were investigating some odd details. In particular, it appeared as though the man, before climbing up and slipping his head through the noose, had been attacked by some kind of animal. He had bite marks on his left ankle and thigh. And his jeans had been ripped at the cuffs.”

Steve looked down, seemingly dazed. We all waited, but he didn’t seem as though he had any more to say.

“Did you get anymore answers?” Tom asked. Tom’s own story for the group had been cast into doubt two years earlier when my dad informed him the ghosts he thought he heard out in the woods belonged to living women. “Did anything else happen after that?”  

“Let me tell you,” Steve said, “I had some sleepless nights for a while. And for about a week I made sure to keep Tangle and Rowdy close by wherever I went. But that was the last of it.”

“How long ago was all this?” Mike asked.

“Year before last.”

“I’d say you’re in the clear.”

“Here’s hoping,” Steve said, chuckling.

Chris, standing up from the couch, said, “Now we’re all wondering what you personally make of everything that happened to you.” He went over to the kitchen island where the snacks were arranged, ladled himself another cup of spiked punch, and turned back toward Steve. “And what did your wife think of it all?”

“I never told my wife any of it. She believes in all that crap, and I didn’t want to scare her. That’s why it’s been so nice to talk to you all about it. As for what I personally think happened, that’s not so easy to answer. My general attitude toward supernatural stuff is that it’s bullshit. But I admit I’m as susceptible to getting freaked out as anyone. The sounds are really the only thing I can’t explain, the animal sounds, the growling and later the roaring. Still, I was standing by a road, in a storm, when I heard the roar. The noises up on the loft—it wasn’t like there was no one else there who could’ve made those sounds somehow. The tarp could have been caught up in the wind and torn when cars ran over it. And it’s not that big of a mystery why I had a sudden attack of self-loathing. I’d just let a stranger come into work and steal something because I was tempted by the prospect of earning a couple hundred bucks doing essentially nothing.”

“So you don’t believe any unseen forces were at play?” Maddy said. “You have it all down to natural explanations?”

“I wish I could say that. But I’m not so sure. For all I know, I had some kind of”—he twirled his hand in the air as he searched for the word—“psychological episode. Maybe I was poisoned and hallucinating. Maybe it really was just a bunch of unlikely and weird events happening in sequence. But damn—it didn’t seem like any of that. At the time, it felt like something truly strange, something truly inexplicable was happening. So let’s just say I wasn’t a believer before all this happened, and I’m not really one now—but I’m far more open to the idea than I was.”

“And now for the really important question,” Cindy said. “How are Rowdy and Tangle doing today?”

Steve laughed, and his big cheesy grin remained even after his mirth faded. “They’re doing great. Though I can’t believe Tangle is ten now. That’s a little hard to accept, because I know—well, five or so years doesn’t seem as long a span of time as it used to. And I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you if it weren’t for him. It wasn’t just the maneuver to knock me back away from the road, you know. It was like he gave me his vote to continue living, at a time when I felt like nobody would care if I died. Even if he and Rowdy hadn’t been as deft in their intervention as they were, their determination to save me was enough to make me see through the shadows in my head.”

I felt my eyes welling, so I turned away. You may be thinking I chose Steve’s story this year because it included dogs, like the other stories I’ve chosen over the years. Maybe I did. But there were at least three features of the tale that appealed to me, aside from Tangle and Rowdy. It began with a recollection of a haunted attic remembered from childhood. The search-through-the-dark scene came with a twist, an inward shift that made it truly affecting. And, finally, it ended on a note that reminded me of my mom’s contribution to our Halloween storytelling event a few years ago. What ultimately makes these stories worth telling and hearing, she’d opined, is not that they point to meanings and beings beyond our mundane existence; it’s that they show our willingness to face off against the most extraordinary and monstrous of perils to protect the ones we love; it’s that we’re willing to follow the most unbelievable and inscrutable of prompts if they point to a possible avenue for us to save the ones we hold dear from danger. For whatever reason, Steve had a deadly bout of suicidality. You could say Tangle saved him by poking his snout behind his knee to prevent him from stepping in front of a truck. But that dog saved him just as much by being there to show he wasn’t going to let his master, his friend, die without a fight.

When you’re young with the boundless expanse of your undetermined future yet to live out and your fate perfectly mysterious, it’s so easy to feel like you’re the author of your own story. You hold the pen. You create the next turning point in your own character development. You’re responsible for the overall structure of the plot. You decide how it ends. The older you get, though, the more you realize that the most significant parts of the story will be authored by characters and developments that are not only beyond your control but, moment by moment, tend to operate outside of your awareness. Being happy or fulfilled isn’t about exerting the awesome cosmic force of your own willpower to wrangle the best possible story for yourself into existence; it’s about taking all the elements that get thrown in while you’re barely paying attention and arranging them into a story you can live with. The most blessed of us all are the ones lucky enough to have a character or two show up at some point who just desperately want to see us get to a happy ending without going through too much awfulness along the way. And it hardly matters what species those characters are.

            “Now that I think about it,” Steve said, “I can’t really say nothing else has happened—I’ve been hearing those damn shuffling noises above my head after everyone leaves the warehouse almost every day.”

            Yes, I thought, and our whole lives are a search through the dark.

***

CANNONBALL: A HALLOWEEN STORY

JAX: A HALLOWEEN STORY  

KEMOA: A HALLOWEEN STORY

THE TREE CLIMBER: A STORY INSPIRED BY W.S. MERWIN

Why Timothy Snyder Lied about Jonathan Gottschall and Steven Pinker in The New York Times

            My first thought after reading Timothy Snyder’s review of Jonathan Gottschall’s The Story Paradox in The New York Times was, “Jeez, did Gottschall sleep with this guy’s wife or something?” Snyder’s own most popular book, On Tyranny, is written as a series of lessons and includes chapters titled, “Remember Professional Ethics” and “Believe in Truth.” Yet something in The Story Paradox bothered him so much he jettisoned his own professional ethics by distorting—and flat-out lying about—its contents, and he did it in perhaps the most prestigious newspaper in the English-speaking world. The most likely explanation for the review’s copious errors is that Snyder never actually read the book; he instead flipped through it looking for points he could arrange into a narrative of his own about the evil Gottschall and his ridiculous ideas about the dangers of story. But why would a professor of history at Yale, one who’s garnered a modicum of fame over the past few years through his appearances on multiple news outlets, one whose book has been on the bestseller lists for the past five years—why would this guy suddenly forget all his own warnings about the dangers of propaganda so he could go on to create some of his own? 

            With his review, Snyder creates a fictional version of Gottschall and his book that bear a striking non-resemblance to their real-life counterparts. The version of The Story Paradox you’ll discover if you actually read the book has Gottschall acknowledging the much-touted benefits of becoming immersed in a good story, including a boost in empathy, particularly for the types of people represented by the protagonist. He goes on to point out, however, that the flipside is also true: stories often inspire suspicion, fear, and hatred as well. The haunting example he cites in the introduction is the Tree of Life killer, who believed an ancient story about evil Jews trying to take over the country, believed it so sincerely that he went to a synagogue with a gun and murdered 11 people, wounding several others. As effectively as storytellers seduce us into partisanship on behalf of their protagonists, along with real-life people embroiled in similar struggles, they also tempt us into indulging our darkest impulses when dealing with antagonists, which in fiction means cheering on the heroes as they mete out brutal justice, and in reality can mean cheering on violence against people thought to be in the same camp as those antagonists—or even actively participating in such violence. 

            Snyder’s made-up version of the book, on the other hand, has Gottschall fumbling through a bunch of books before concluding “that no one has ever undertaken his subject, the ‘science’ of how stories work.” Gottschall’s actual gripe in the relevant section near the end of the book (190) was that story science is absent from psychology textbooks; he writes in the introduction, “Today a broad consortium of researchers, including psychologists, communications specialists, neuroscientists, and literary ‘quants,’ are using the scientific method to study the ‘brain on story’” (13). No matter—Snyder goes on to whip up a tale of a quixotic scholar, ironically trapped in his own self-stroking story even as he warns of the dangers of becoming trapped in your own stories, ignorant or disdainful of every past scholar’s contribution, obsessed with statistics and algorithms to the point where he doesn’t even bother to read the great works of literature he’s subjecting to his brand of cold-blooded analysis, all so he can arrogantly declare he’s discovered insights that have been perfectly obvious to every real scholar of literature for decades. Oh, and his efforts somehow pander to the powerful while exacerbating economic inequality—or at least failing to offer keys for how to fix it. Gottschall himself satirized Snyder’s review in a postmortem for Quillette, writing, 

my reviewer began by dispensing with effete norms against ad hominem argument to spin a tale of a cartoon heel named Jonathan Gottschall—a fool who sees himself as an intellectual colossus. Gottschall also has an unfortunate mental condition that causes him to shout mad, dangerous things. All history is useless, Gottschall shouts, before going on to hypocritically cite a bunch of history books. Down with the humanities, Gottschall cries, and down with humans too! Up with Zuckerberg! Up with big data and the robot overlords! Down with the wretched of the earth! Up with the big evils of unrestrained capitalism and “power”!

What stands out about Snyder’s fictional characterizations when placed alongside the relevant passages in the book is that there’s almost no chance he arrived at his defamatory view of Gottschall through any good faith effort at understanding his positions. The review is a deliberate smear.

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Whose perspective?

            Snyder’s take on the subject matter of The Story Paradox is just as absurdly off-base. At one point, he suggests that Gottschall writes “creepily” about a young girl in a fictional snippet he composed himself, adding that “The story will be different when not narrated from a place of complacent omnipotence, for example if it is told from the perspective of the woman.” This is precisely the type of innuendo—see, Gottschall is a creepy misogynist—journalism students are taught to avoid (or used to be anyway). There’s also the small problem that Gottschall in fact did write the vignette from the girl’s perspective. This mistake is hardly the exception. The review’s central points are, to a one, based on bonkers misconstruals. Snyder somehow even managed to miss the book’s central thesis; he complains that Gottschall “promises a paradox in his title, but none is forthcoming.” I could quote the passage in the introduction where Gottschall describes the paradox in detail, but you don’t need to read beyond the subtitle to get the idea: How Our Love of Stories Builds Societies and Tears Them Down. 

Based on the number of errors and the quality of the prose, it looks as though Snyder devoted no more than a few hours to scanning the book and scribbling his takedown. Along with the myriad mischaracterizations, his review is filled with choppy non sequiturs and odd solecisms, like when he claims, “Little is original in his analysis. His notion that stories tell us arose out of the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 1950s.” His notion that stories tell us what? And how can Snyder know if Gottschall’s analysis is original if he can’t accurately state what that analysis entails? Even if we ignore the poor grammar, Snyder’s point is just silly. He’s referring to Lévi-Strauss’s theory of a universal language of myth, which the anthropologist posited operates on a dynamic juxtaposition of binary opposites. Though Gottschall does describe a “universal story grammar,” at no point in The Story Paradox does he put forth the idea that opposing binaries lie at the heart of effective stories, unless you count good guys versus bad guys, which wasn’t at all what Lévi-Strauss had in mind. The only similarity is that both Lévi-Strauss and Gottschall are interested in universals. (Also recall that this charge of unoriginality is coming from a guy who achieved notoriety among the politically left-leaning for comparing the opposition leader to Hitler.) 

Here’s Snyder’s take on the theory put forth in The Story Paradox: “The universal story hard-wired into our brains is, says Gottschall, one in which everything gets worse until it gets better.” Apparently, Snyder thinks that was Lévi-Strauss’s theory as well. He goes on to recite a list of stories that don’t have happy endings, supposedly exposing the absurdity of Gottschall’s argument. Now, Gottschall does at one point cite a research finding that stories which get worse and worse until a happy resolution occurs at the end are far more popular than those with other plot structures. But he never claims that structure is universal (102). What he says about the universal structure of stories is this: 

The universal grammar of storytelling has, I propose, at least two major components. First, everywhere in the world stories are about characters trying to resolve predicaments. Stories are about trouble. Stories are rarely about people having good days. Even comedies, though they often end happily, are usually about people gutting through bad days—often the very worst days of their whole lives. Second, as corny as it may at first sound, stories tend to have a deep moral dimension. Although sophisticated novelists, historians, or filmmakers may deny that they’d ever sink to expressing anything like a “moral of the story,” they’ve never stopped moralizing for a moment. “The poets,” says Nietzsche, “were always the valets of some morality.”

Stipulated: If you ransack your brain, you’ll be able to name exceptions. But they will be exceptions that prove the rule—statistical outliers dominated by experimental works like Finnegan’s Wake. On the other hand, maybe it seems obvious to you that stories are this way. But academic literary theorists would mostly deny it. And, if you think about it, it’s not a bit obvious that stories should be this way. Many of us might expect to find storytelling traditions where stories mostly function as escape pods into hedonistic paradises where pleasure is infinite and moral trespass in unknown.

We never do. (100)

It would be bad enough if Snyder had merely relied on the cheap strawman tactic of turning Gottschall’s qualified point about a statistical trend into an absolutist claim that can be refuted with reference to a few exceptions, but Snyder doesn’t even refer to the right section of the book in his effort to convince us of the weakness of Gottschall’s theory. (That, Professor Snyder, is what happens when you skim instead of reading.)

Okay, so what’s going on here? Why would a public intellectual of Snyder’s stature accept the commission to review a book he couldn’t bring himself to read, only to go on to write a review that’s so caustic, contemptuous, careless, and dishonest that anyone who does get around to picking up Gottschall’s book will see at a glance that the reviewer is sanctimonious, superior, mean-spirited, and completely full of shit? Something interesting must be happening behind the scenes to make Snyder so reckless with his reputation for honest scholarship, something urgent enough to overshadow any concern for his integrity. 

What might that something be? 

Gottschall sees a clue in Snyder’s outsized objection to his endorsement of the work of Steven Pinker. The section in The Story Paradox where Gottschall refers to Pinker is only a few paragraphs long, but Snyder devotes almost as much space in his short hit piece in the Times to a seemingly damning critique of Pinker’s findings. This prompts Gottschall to posit,

At the bottom of the reviewer’s contempt is an allergy to two traits Pinker and I share. We both seek to bring a scientific mindset to traditional humanities questions, and we both feel obliged to question the ideological excesses not only of the right wing, but also of the intellectual left.

I think Gottschall is correct on both points, but if Snyder simply despised these men’s positions on a few hot-button issues, he could have addressed them honestly. Instead, he does two things legitimate scholars aren’t supposed to do: he makes his criticisms personal, and he bases those criticisms on a deliberate and gross misreading of the work under review. 

            So, what made Snyder think Gottschall and his book must be so bad they didn’t deserve a fair hearing? Let’s look at both factors Gottschall identifies, beginning with ideological excesses, and see if they adequately account for what Snyder wrote in his hatchet job.   

Leftist Ideology at Elite Universities

In an ideal world, we could take book reviews at face value. Scholars would assess each other’s ideas and writing, then relay to the rest of us their expert take on what a book covers, what informs its perspective, and how successfully the author achieves her goals. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world. Instead, with ideological positions taken in advance, reviewers all too often take it as their mission to campaign for or against the author of the book under consideration. And the rhetoric they use in the service of these campaigns has far more in common with what you hear on cable news than in any reason-based scholarly debate. 

The sad reality is that we live in an age when large swaths of academia have come under the sway of a political ideology which holds that ideas must be weighed, not by their truth value, but by their imagined consequences. What an author intends to convey to readers, in other words, is far less important than the impact these academics insist the work will have on the wider society. Surveys designed to explore the distinction between liberals and leftists find that the latter tend to define themselves in terms of their anti-capitalism and their radical antipathy toward the current societal order, with all its supposedly oppressive systems and structures. Liberals on the other hand are far more likely to define themselves according to their advocacy of choice and their embrace of science. Leftists understand liberals endorse many of the same progressive social reforms they do, but they fault liberals for wanting incremental, as opposed to radical change, often, the leftists insinuate, because the current order affords liberals some form of privilege they want to safeguard. Another way of looking at this is that while liberals want to tweak the system to move us ever closer to a world where everyone enjoys the same freedoms and opportunities, leftists see the system as inherently oppressive, so they want to tear it down and establish an altogether new one. 

Here’s how that precept plays out in academic disputes. The core assumption of the leftist ideology is that, whether we know it or not, whether we’re willing to acknowledge it or not, we are all engaged in a struggle either to maintain the political and social status quo or to dismantle it. As linguist John McWhorter describes this foundational tenet:

Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized.

The work of any author, leftists would have us believe, must therefore be understood in the context of this struggle to tear down the institutions and structures that empower some at the expense of others—whether that author has any desire to comment on that struggle or not. That’s why you get this bizarre passage in Snyder’s review of The Story Paradox: 

Part of Gottschall’s tale of himself is that his views will offend the powerful. Yet his own account of the world does nothing to challenge the status quo. He treats political conflict only as culture war, a view that is more than comfortable for those in power. His most feared enemy, he says, are left-wing colleagues; he portrays their thinking as entirely about culture. One would think, reading him, that left and right had nothing to do with economic equality and inequality, a subject Gottschall ignores.

Though he claims to have read “2,400 years of scholarship on Plato’s ‘Republic,’” Gottschall misses the famous point in Book IV about the city of the rich and the city of the poor. In a country where a few dozen families own as much wealth as half the population, the opportunities for storytelling are unevenly distributed. Gottschall has nothing to say about this. He believes that we live in a “representative democracy” in which the stories told by the powerful simply reflect our own stories. No need, then, to think about the Electoral College, campaign finance, gerrymandering, or the suppression and subversion of votes. Gottschall offers not a challenge to the powerful, but a pat on the back.

Recall that Gottschall’s book is about the effects of storytelling, not economics. Essentially, Snyder is criticizing The Story Paradox for what it’s not about. Nowhere in the book does Gottschall come down in favor of the political left or the right, as the book is not directly concerned with politics. He does express concern over the lack of viewpoint diversity in journalism and academia, as nearly everyone working in these fields is politically left of center, but that comes right after a long section about the dangerous, if entertaining, absurdity of “the Big Blare,” his epithet for Trump, who he won’t even name. Nowhere in the book does he express the view that “the stories told by the powerful simply reflect our own stories,” but he does discuss how the left has adopted “a history from the point of view of the enchained, the plundered, and all the restless ghosts of the murdered” (136). 

What’s going on here is that Snyder, not having read the book, is treating it as little more than a Rorschach, giving us a window onto his own menagerie of ideological bugbears. Is Gottschall concerned with inequality, campaign finance, and voter suppression? To leftists, it doesn’t matter if he is or not; what matters is whether his book deals with them explicitly enough—regardless of whether that’s what the book is about. 

There’s another point raised by this passage I only feel justified in adding because Snyder himself gets so personal. Gottschall is a research fellow at Washington and Jefferson College, while Snyder is a full professor at Yale. Snyder is probably also making quite a bit of money from his bestselling book On Tyranny, along with all his media appearances. So what we have here is a very rich and somewhat famous scholar at an elite institution using his privileged access to the pages of the paper of record to take to task a much less well-off researcher with no status to speak of, for not expressing adequate opposition to economic inequality. Makes you wonder how sincere Snyder’s calls for reforming the system really are; he certainly looks comfortable enjoying the benefits of that system himself. Your complaints about the evils of hierarchies ring a bit hollow when you’re shouting them down from your perch atop of one. (Such a resoundingly negative review in the Times almost certainly cost Gottschall considerable book sales as well.) Snyder can ridicule Gottschall for fearing that his “views will offend the powerful,” but Snyder himself is one of those powerful people. And there’s no mistaking how offended he was. 

            It’s an amusing irony that Snyder, without any supporting quotes, accuses Gottschall of portraying himself as “a heroic scholar whose original insight challenges our preconceptions, leading a charge against an enemy tribe of terrifying left-wing academics,” when Snyder himself told an interviewer for The Yale Daily News: “The bad news is that our republic is in a lot of trouble. The good news is that On Tyranny is a practical guide for how to defend a republic, how to defend individual freedoms, so if a lot of people are reading it, that’s good news.” Snyder’s renown as a popular historian has grown immensely over the past few years, as he’s been a go-to source for explaining how Trump poses the same kind of threat to American democracy as guys like Hitler and Stalin posed to their people. Writing for City Journal, journalist Lee Seigel charges that “Snyder has become a one-man industry of panic, a prophet whose profitability depends on his prophecies never coming true.” Seigel then argues that Snyder “could flourish only in a country so far removed from ‘totalitarianism’—a word he freely applies to America—as to seem historically blessed with eternal freedom.”

            I’m not sure what Gottschall’s politics look like, but the only “terrifying left-wing academics” he mentions in The Story Paradox are the ones who might come after him for “saying anything even mildly heretical regarding the Left’s sacred narratives” (176)—a line that doesn’t appear until the penultimate chapter in the book (and, given Snyder’s review, seems strikingly prescient). Gottschall in fact only brought up how he “managed to tread on powerful toes” (175) to emphasize how strange it is that he can criticize the Catholic Church, tech oligarchs, and Trump supporters without concern, but he nonetheless has to worry about what leftist academics like Snyder will do. 

Snyder tips his hand with this odd mischaracterization, in case we had any doubt regarding his own membership in that “enemy tribe” he hallucinates Gottschall charging against. In addition to all his dire warnings about Trump ushering in a new age of still greater authoritarianism in America (which, I admit, I don’t find all that implausible), Snyder has also recently compared Republican efforts to ban the teaching of The 1619 Project in public schools to Putin’s efforts to memory-hole elements of Russian history like the Great Famine—despite the fact that several of Snyder’s fellow historians have stated unequivocally that many of the central claims in The 1619 Project, in particular the notion that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery, are completely wrong. As Seigel points out, “it is hardly undemocratic for two competing versions of history to clash, especially when it comes to what should be taught to young children.” 

The key point here is that Snyder isn’t using history to show us the dangers of tyranny; he’s using an insanely overstrained historical analogy to cudgel his partisan rivals. Perhaps uncoincidentally, Gottschall warns of historical narratives being put to just this sort of divisive use. 

Biophobia and Leftist Anti-Science

What Snyder probably knew before reading—i.e., scanning—The Story Paradox, was that Gottschall is part of a group of literary scholars who apply theories from psychology, in particular evolutionary psychology, to their research on narrative. Among leftist academics, evolutionary psychology is thought to be a thinly veiled effort at justifying the political status quo, helping to sustain all the wicked hierarchies and hegemonies baked into our civilization. Evolved traits and behaviors, these leftists believe, are not amenable to reform; if it’s in our genes, in other words, it can’t be changed. Since one of the central tenets of the Foucauldian ideology that holds sway among these academics is that ideas must be assessed according to their political implications and their imagined consequences—as opposed to being evaluated in terms of accuracy or truth—the idea that any behavior or social dynamic has a biological dimension is treated as anathema. 

            This isn’t the place to detail all that leftists get wrong about evolutionary psychology, which is pretty much everything. Suffice to say surveys show that adaptationist psychologists vote for liberal candidates at the same rate as any other psychologists, and while I’ve been reading books about evolutionary psychology for decades, I don’t know of a single one that argues against political reform by claiming that human nature is completely fixed or “hard-wired,” the term leftists insist applies. Think about it, these researchers are fascinated with hunter-gatherers because they live closer to the way humans have lived for most of their time on earth. One of the most fascinating through-lines in The Story Paradox connects research among the Agta hunter-gatherers of the Philippines to surveys of Western readers’ attitudes about characters in Victorian novels. How could anyone compare a hunter-gatherer society with a modern civilization and conclude that social dynamics can never change? (And hunter-gatherer societies are quite diverse in their own right.) 

            But Snyder’s prejudice against Gottschall probably goes deeper than his aversion to any single field in the behavioral sciences. Snyder complains that The Story Paradox is a “bonfire of the humanities.” Even though Gottschall only cites psychologist Steven Pinker as part of a three-paragraph-long aside about how material conditions are improving for most people in most parts of the world—despite the bad news from journalists and historians—Snyder felt obliged to comment on the reference: 

Gottschall’s view about our nonfictional world is that “almost everything is getting better and few things are getting worse.” It is hard to see how he can judge the past against the present, given his dismissal of both history and journalism. He relies upon Steven Pinker’s “data” on the issue of violence, though there is no such thing. Pinker cited others; his peculiar choices are usefully examined in “The Darker Angels of Our Nature.” In the fields I know something about, Pinker cherry-picked with red-fingered fervor; his best numbers on modern death tolls come from a source so obviously ideological that I was ashamed to cite it in high school debate. Like Gottschall, Pinker is a friend of contradiction. He supported his story of progress in part by pointing to rising I.Q.s at a time when I.Q.s were in fact in decline. He began his book by noting that the modern welfare states are the most peaceful polities in history, and concluded it by embracing a libertarianism that would lead to their dissolution. Pinker was telling us a story; it is a story Gottschall likes, and thus it is ennobled as “data.”

Of course, Snyder’s take on history is just as much a story as Pinker’s. The problem is the two stories have diametrically opposed plot trajectories. If there’s any data supporting Pinker’s version, it’s only natural Snyder would seek any justification on offer for dismissing them. I mean, the thought that a psycholinguist from Harvard, one who traffics in evolutionary psychology no less, managed to discover something astonishing and consequential about history, something which actual historians like Snyder never noticed or even bothered to look at—that must be infuriating.

At the risk of being indelicate, the entirety of Snyder’s passage about Pinker—and I mean every word aside from the quote—is bullshit. Gottschall criticizes both history and journalism for their negativity bias and for hewing to us-versus-them storytelling that adds vitriol and outright hatred to contests between identity groups. (Now, why might Snyder take that personally?) He at no point goes in for wholesale dismissal of these fields. “Of course, not all histories give us such sharp and rousing grammar,” Gottschall writes. “These tend to be academic accounts that lay out all the clutter of historical facts, while resisting the urge to neatly weave the true facts into merely truthy tales” (132). “Journalism performs an absolutely essential, and frequently heroic, social function as a de facto fourth estate,” he also writes. “But like every other sort of storytelling, journalism has great capacity to do harm as well as good” (107). 

It’s hard to know which of Pinker’s sources Snyder is so cravenly alluding to without any actual citation, because he relies on so many, and Pinker is far from alone in coming to the conclusions he does based on these sources. I have no illusions about being able to settle the controversy about whether violence has declined through history in this small space, but I can say it’s clear from the earliest pages of the introduction that the authors of the book Darker Angels (a play on the title of Pinker’s book on declining violence Better Angels) are reporting from inside the same ideological bubble as Snyder. On both sides of the ongoing debate, you have competing claims of cherry-picking and ideological bias, but I’ve yet to see an analysis that would call into question the general and quite dramatic downward trends Pinker writes about. 

On the topic of contradictions: how could Pinker have “cherry-picked” his data about violence through history when “there is no such thing” as data? And if there’s no such thing as data, how does Snyder know Pinker is wrong? Further, if there’s no such thing as data, how can disputes like this ever be resolved? IQs, meanwhile, rose an average of three points per decade through most of the 20th Century as part of a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect, which has reversed slightly in a few Western European countries where the increases had been going on the longest, a minor, localized reversal that has scant impact on the larger trajectory. So, this is Snyder showing us what real cherry-picking looks like.

As for Pinker’s embrace of libertarianism, well, it’s entirely fictional. He endorses social spending and market regulation. He even donated substantially to Obama’s 2012 campaign.  Here’s the operative quote from his book Enlightenment Now: “The facts of human progress strike me as having been as unkind to right-wing libertarianism as to right-wing conservatism and left-wing Marxism” (365). 

            Why this sloppy and mendacious attack on Pinker when his work plays such a small role in The Story Paradox? Early in his review, Snyder has Gottschall claiming that “no one has ever undertaken his subject, the ‘science’ of how stories work.” This is yet another lie, as Gottschall discusses and references the work of multiple other researchers and literary scholars. (The references section runs to 30 pages.) What Snyder is likely implying here is that Gottschall is neglecting the work of literary theorists who weren’t scientists (which is also untrue); the scare quotes are meant to call into question the distinction between what modern research psychologists do and what the people literary theorists enjoy citing, guys like Freud or Jung or Lacan, were doing, in the same way he calls into question Pinker’s work: “it is a story Gottschall likes, and thus it is ennobled as ‘data.’” The designation “science,” like the honorary term “data,” we’re to believe, serves merely to elevate some ideas over others based on arbitrary preferences—or worse, as part of an effort to secure the designator’s privileged status in society. (I feel I have to point out that if people on the left make these arguments, we can’t pretend to be outraged when those on the right throw them back at us—as they do when discussing evolution, climate change, or various pandemic interventions.)

             It occurred to me while reading Snyder’s pseudo-review that the recent emergence of radical leftist beliefs in arenas outside of academia can be thought of as the revenge of the humanities scholars. Both Pinker and Gottschall lament the total routing of the humanities by the sciences, as funding for the latter dwarfs that of the prior. But what gets lost in discussions about funding is the fact that many of the odd tropes and strictures of the left originated in humanities departments, including the prioritization of “lived-experience” over scientific evidence, the dismissal of scientific rigor in favor of Manichean ideologies, the emphasis on implicit forms of bigotry, and the obsession with power and its distorting, self-perpetuating influence on every aspect of culture. 

            Whatever bridge scholars like Gottschall and Pinker hope to build between science and the humanities, their counterparts on the other side are waiting to knock it down, hoping all the while that those waiting to cross with their olive branches wind up buried in the rubble. The alliance these pro-science, “third culture” advocates hope to form is seen by humanities scholars as a poorly disguised invasion. Just as Snyder sneers at Pinker’s “data,” he sees Gottschall’s commitment to psychology and science more generally as little more than the trappings of his membership in a rival tribe. He writes,

Gottschall chooses quantity over quality, tabulating surveys about novels rather than reading them himself. He cannot quite see that what the internet creates is an endless psychological experiment and not a story. By allowing the tools of big data and psychology to guide him, Gottschall blinds himself to this essential point about our contemporary reading experience. He is not wrong that social media algorithms draw us into unreflective narcissism. What he misses is that it is precisely psychology and big data, his own allies, that supply the digital commercial and political weapons that trap us in stories where we are always on the good side. Gottschall warns us of such stories and rightly so. But in his analysis of their multiplication and intensification he has confused the villain with the hero. In conflating human storytelling with automated manipulation, he has gone over to the side of the machines, without realizing that he has done so.

Gottschall didn’t just tabulate surveys about novels; he helped create the survey questions, which would be pretty difficult for someone who hadn’t read them. By now, you won’t find it at all surprising that Gottschall never claims the internet is a story and that he has no trouble seeing it as an experiment. “Social media,” he writes, “is a powerful if inadvertent experiment into what sort of narratives actually win out in story wars as measured by quantifiable views, likes, and shares” (85). And he at no point conflates human storytelling with automated manipulation; he instead warns that the manipulators are using the same tools as human storytellers: 

The cold scientific vocabulary of surveillance capitalism seems far away from the warm old craft of tale-telling. But these “behavior modification empires,” as the computer scientist Jaron Lanier calls them, collect this data largely toward the goal of targeting us with narratives that are more engaging, more emotionally arousing, and ultimately more persuasive. In the end, it’s about getting us to buy whatever’s on sale—from a harmless new widget to a socially toxic virus of thought. (66)

Has Gottschall really “gone over to the side of the machines”? Here Snyder is relying on the alchemy of ambiguity to convey a conclusion he reached through what Pinker calls “voodoo resemblance.” The psychology Gottschall relies on uses experiments and statistics; the behavior modification empires also use experiments and statistics; therefore, Gottschall is on the same side as the imperials. It must have never occurred to Snyder that the two may be using similar tools for completely different ends. After all, why would Gottschall warn us about what his supposed allies were doing if he wanted their manipulations to succeed? 

What the passage reveals more than anything is Snyder’s inability to escape from the tribalism at the heart of his belief system, which is itself based on a story of evil capitalists and their machines facing off against heroic academics who know the value of all things truly human. Even when he agrees with what Gottschall has written, he still strains to find fault with it. In the closing paragraphs of his review, Snyder, not realizing his points are becoming increasingly incoherent, attempts a grand finale of ad hominem dismissal. 

Gottschall confesses that he was “confused about this book,” and it is not hard to see why. If everything is story, then all we have is our own; and our own story makes us feel good, until the moment comes when it doesn’t. Gottschall visibly suffers in these pages as psychology becomes his personal tar pit. In the end, he flails in the direction of “facts” and “science,” terms he has already reduced to cliché by confusing them with common-sense nostrums. Even had he told us what he meant by “facts” and “science,” he gives no clue as to how our brains would escape their supposed hard-wiring for story and think in such terms.

In his last gasp, Gottschall invokes the Enlightenment. One of its mottoes was “dare to know.” Kant, who used that phrase, knew that the liberation from others’ stories begins with liberation from one’s own. Gottschall does the opposite: Drowning in his own story, he grabs us by the ankles. Voltaire’s Candide was miles ahead of Gottschall: Understanding stories means knowing when to laugh at them. This book is just sad.

Here Snyder, desperate for some secure footing to deliver his coup de grace, simply flipped back to the first page, where in the second sentence of the book, Gottschall explains what he was doing at a bar, at a point when he was trying to come up with a title and an organizing theme. He wasn’t claiming to be confused about how to help readers escape their own and other people’s stories. But how beautiful the irony, how poetic the justice, if the guy presenting himself as a hero sounding the alarm about the dangers of getting caught in stories could be shown to be trapped in his own. Silly Gottschall didn’t realize though that he’d happened upon a problem he lacked the cleverness to solve. His only recourse is to point to the same science and Enlightenment that have brought us to our current, terrible condition—the data showing that it’s not so terrible notwithstanding. 

            Sad indeed—but Snyder is lying here too. Gottschall couldn’t be trying to present himself as a genius hero if he opens his book talking about how confused he was in the late stages of writing it. Most importantly, Gottschall never claims our love of story is “hard-wired” in the sense that we can’t possibly escape it. Anytime we read a scientific journal article or sit through a PowerPoint presentation, we’re forgoing the joys of storytelling. And Gottschall does explain how science helps us to escape:

The strength of science resides not in individual geniuses like Newton or Darwin but in an ingenious collective process, which—with its demands for mathematical rigor, peer review, and replication—guards against predictable human failings from outright lying to unconscious prejudice. Though the scientific method is a prophylactic against bias, it’s not a perfect one. Academic scientists, too, lean strongly to the left, and we must assume this shapes the questions they ask and the interpretations they favor. (177)

How do you keep from drowning in your own story? Surround yourself with a bunch of people who have a bunch of stories of their own and have them check your work. 

This gets us to another of Gottschall’s ideas for a solution—viewpoint diversity in academia and journalism. Many of the points that set Snyder off come from the same section in The Story Paradox, where Gottschall discusses the political homogeneity of our scholars and reporters. One of the numbers he cites comes from a survey of history departments, where for every conservative you’ll find 33.5 liberals (these surveys don’t distinguish between liberals and leftists). This imbalance not only prevents the error correction that comes from pitting differing views against each other; it also leads to greater extremism. Gottschall explains,

When homogeneous groups are insulated from skepticism and counterarguing, they stampede toward the most extreme position in the room. When you have a room full of partisans, the question asked is seldom “Are we going too far?” It’s usually “Are we going far enough?” This tendency is so strong and predictable that [Cass] Sustein calls it “the law of group polarization.” (174)

When you factor in the negative characterizations of people holding rival views that are all too frequently embedded in ideologies, it’s easy to understand Gottschall’s concerns. Yet he finds that whenever he brings this issue up to his colleagues, they respond with a shrug. This is part of why the public outside of academia is often so skeptical of information emerging from campuses. In most academic departments, the left-right skew is between 8 and 13 to one. In the country as a whole, about 25% of people identify as liberal and 37% conservative. 

            It must have been this section of the book that gave Snyder the impression that Gottschall’s “most feared enemy” is the tribe of his “left-wing colleagues.” Recall that Snyder went so far as to characterize The Story Paradox as Gottschall’s story of himself “leading a charge against an enemy tribe of terrifying left-wing academics.” While it’s true Gottschall expresses his fears about left-wing cancel culture, his general point isn’t that the left is necessarily wrong about its beliefs. Indeed, he writes in this section that he’s focusing “on the failings of my own tribe, the academics” (174). So why does Snyder claim that Gottschall is charging against an enemy tribe? More importantly, why doesn’t Snyder say anything about Gottschall’s actual point? For Gottschall, the dangers of ideological homogeneity and the phenomenon of cancel culture are two sides of the same coin. He writes,

To proceed as though intolerance, intimidation, groupthink, and homogeneity of ideology would not lead to timid party-line scholarship (a sort of miniature version of Soviet Lysenkoism) would be to yield to the epistemological equivalent of flat earthism. It would be to cluelessly insist that the facts academics have ourselves uncovered about the deep biases of human cognition and ideology don’t apply to us. (176)

Yet this is precisely how Snyder proceeds. When confronted with a challenge to his ideology, he fabricates a series of lies about the nature of the challenge and attacks the heretic’s reputation, all the while certain of his own righteousness. 

            Gottschall’s true goal with The Story Paradox, however, wasn’t to call out viewpoint imbalances or push back against cancel culture. He hopes rather to spur others into action to explore all the remaining mysteries of storytelling and its effects on our thoughts and behavior. He writes in the conclusion,

If we hope to address civilization’s largest problems, we need a much better sense for the sneaky ways that stories work on our minds and our societies. This means encouraging scholars across the humanities and human sciences to embark on a massively interdisciplinary effort in the new field of narrative psychology, combining the thick, granular knowledge of the humanities with the special tools of the sciences. (191)

In the minds of humanities scholars like Snyder, however, such an interdisciplinary alliance would amount to a surrender in a much larger, much more consequential conflict. 

An Ideological License to Lie 

            Gottschall offers readers still other ways to ward off the potential harms of story. For one, while the universal story grammar puts trouble and conflict at the heart of nearly every narrative, that conflict needn’t be between individual humans or groups. Consider movies like Babel and Castaway. It’s conceivable we could arrange history into narratives with plenty of engaging conflict that nonetheless resist the temptation to cast entire groups as evildoers. We can even do this in our own personal lives. “For example,” Gottschall writes,

when I sense myself getting worked up into a fit of moralistic outrage—when I catch myself dehumanizing a person by turning them into a villain—I take a deep breath and try to imagine the story differently. In this way, I exert some sort of executive control over the automatic process of my brain. If I can’t or won’t do this, I’m not the master of the stories in my head, I’m just their slave, and I’m all the more degraded because I can’t even sense the chains that hold me. (192)

Astoundingly, Gottschall even resists casting Snyder as a villain. He writes in his Quillette article about the review and its fallout, “To be clear, I don’t think the reviewer told lies. If he meant to deceive readers he would have done so with a lot more care, without putting his own reputation for accuracy and trustworthy judgement at risk.” What’s happening, Gottschall goes on to theorize, is that Snyder has a story playing out in his head in which guys like Gottschall and Pinker are agents for the enemy, trying to sneak their way into the home camp, so they can lay waste to all he holds dear. “That someone as smart as the reviewer can read a book bristling with warnings about the pitfalls of narrative psychology,” Gottschall writes, “and still blunder into the biggest traps, leaves me feeling pessimistic indeed.”

            I’m afraid Gottschall is flattering himself if he believes Snyder actually read more than one or two of the warnings in his book. And it doesn’t make sense to say that Snyder didn’t lie but rather succumbed to story. The simple fact is that Snyder lied because he succumbed to story. I too was shocked that Snyder would make so many false claims in his review, claims whose falsity could be so easily detected. But if Snyder arrived at all those errors due to some confusion or misunderstanding, that would betray a level of incompetence almost as damaging to his reputation as dishonesty. There’s no denying Snyder made claims in his review that he could have easily seen were misrepresentations had he simply gone back to check the pages he was referring to. The man is a professional scholar. What Gottschall’s laudable, even heroic, efforts at graciousness are keeping him from either seeing or admitting is that Snyder obviously views him as so far beneath contempt that he doesn’t care whether he gets caught lying about his book.  

            Snyder despises Pinker and Gottschall both, and I doubt he’s ever really read either of their work. All he needed to know before smearing them in his review was that they belong to a particularly detestable tribe, one whose members are united in their mission to infiltrate the sacred bastions of Snyder’s own tribe, so they can continue to prop up the wealthy elites, those parasites who for generations have gotten fat on the suffering of the people whose stories go unheard. And Snyder isn’t the least bit worried that someone like me will expose his lies. He won’t read this post. He doesn’t have to worry about his fellow tribespeople reading it either, any more than he has to worry about them reading The Story Paradox.

            Even as I write this, I admit it’s still difficult for me to wrap my mind around how intellectuals can convince themselves it’s okay to lie. Whenever I encounter one of these dishonest reviews, my brain can’t resist imposing a truth-seeking frame on the reviewers’ moral and political campaigning. Isn’t it necessary, or at least optimal, to fully understand a problem before crafting a solution? If we discover our understanding is wrong or incomplete, then isn’t there an opportunity for a better solution? Aren’t solutions based on a faulty understanding of the issue bound to fail, almost certainly in a way that causes still more problems? And if we lack recourse to systematically collected evidence, i.e. data, then what are we left with aside from competing ideologies and stories with contradictory morals?

            Reading The Story Paradox played a big role in helping me see what was really going on. (Scott Alexander’s essay Conflict versus Mistake also helped a lot.) Throughout the book, Gottschall compares being trapped in a story to LARPing, or Live-Action Role-Playing. The only difference is LARPERs know the stories in which they’re casting themselves as protagonists are fiction; guys like the Tree of Life killer truly believe they’re saving the world. 

            The realization I came to was that, for many reporters and academics on the far left, our globalized civilization is a vast conspiracy of the ultrawealthy to steal from and otherwise exploit everyone else—which is strange in light of how many of these opinion-makers are themselves wealthy. These elite scholar-cum-activists believe us plebians are all living in a real-life version of The Matrix, just with billionaires playing the part of the machines. So, when someone like Pinker comes along and argues that capitalism is, on balance, better than any of the alternatives we’ve tried so far, they respond, not as though he’d made a claim that was verifiable or falsifiable, but as if he’d engineered a subroutine to the program that makes it harder to convince the clueless masses they need to wake up to the real world. That Pinker’s book was endorsed by Bill Gates didn’t exactly help. What those of us still trapped in this matrix see as texts making straightforward arguments, the academics who’ve woken from it see as cascading lines of green code spelling out the contours of our nightmarish alternate reality. Until the entire system is blown to smithereens, none of us is free, and some of us will continue to suffer far more than others. 

            For academics like Snyder, this real-life matrix really does share a lot in common with a machine. It runs on numbers and systems and its inhabitants are taught to worship charts and statistics. Those who’ve woken from it believe that what the world needs is more human interaction and more knowledge derived not from systems and data, but the poetic sharing of “lived experiences.” Recall Snyder’s line about how Gottschall “has crossed over to the side of the machines.” Sure, science is okay in its place, as long it’s guided by members of the woke elect. But any attempt at applying it beyond the bounds of its traditional remit, say, in fields like history or literature, must be resisted at all costs, resisted as strenuously as any invasion, lest the billionaires and their machines gain a foothold in the last redoubt of our humanity, sealing its doom. 

What it’s taken me a long time to appreciate is that leftists believe in their matrix not as a metaphor but as the true reality. They’re not LARPing, in other words; they’re acting out fantasies they believe are as real as the sun in the sky. That’s why it’s so easy for them to treat Pinker and Gottschall as beneath contempt; these defenders of the old oppressive order are not even human, not in any sense that matters. The great struggle of our time is not about figuring out whose ideas are right and whose are wrong so we can choose the best solutions to our society’s problems. That time has long since passed. What good is evidence or data anyway when it comes from the same matrix we’re on a mission to destroy? The great struggle now is about identifying the enemies to reform, the friends of the machines, and making sure everyone knows how bottomlessly evil they are. 

            Snyder tries to convince readers of his review that it’s Gottschall who’s trapped in a story, thinking he’s the hero. But it’s Snyder who has access to a ready supply of certainty about who deserves to be treated with fairness and dignity and who doesn’t. It’s Snyder who’s so sure of his own beliefs and so sure of his own assessments of others’ moral character that he has no compunction about publishing grotesque falsehoods if it keeps their evil from spreading. And he’s not alone. In campuses and newsrooms all over the country and beyond, academics and journalists are crusading to erode the boundaries between scholarship and activism, the personal and the political, what’s fair and what’s politically expedient, what counts as honest reporting and what’s deemed necessary to say by their fellow academics, all because they’re suffering aggressively from the same collective delusion. 

            Am I turning Snyder into a villain? I appreciate Gottschall’s point that Snyder has fallen victim to his tribe’s story, and that creating propaganda against Pinker and The Story Paradox may have seemed like a rational, even heroic course given his beliefs. Visiting Snyder’s website, I even see he’s helping to raise funds for humanitarian aid to Ukraine. So, no, I don’t have any interest in convincing anyone that Snyder is a bad person. That’s not to say I have a very high opinion of the man. The last thing this world needs is another demagogue, ideologue, or true believer of any stripe. One thing that’s clear is that as much as Snyder hates right-wing propaganda, after his review of The Story Paradox in the Times, he can no longer claim he’s doing anything qualitatively different with his own writing and commentary than guys like Mark Levin or Glenn Beck, his fancy Yale professorship notwithstanding. These guys are all playing the same damn game, just on different teams. But whereas sport often brings out the best in competitors, the game of left versus right brings out the very worst in citizens. 

That Snyder couldn’t see Gottschall’s wonderful, fascinating, and disturbing book as anything other than the latest move in that dreadfully stupid game is truly sad.

***

Also read:

THE STORYTELLING ANIMAL: A LIGHT READ WITH WEIGHTY IMPLICATIONS

TED MCCORMICK ON STEVEN PINKER AND THE POLITICS OF RATIONALITY

THE FAKE NEWS CAMPAIGN AGAINST STEVEN PINKER AND ENLIGHTENMENT NOW

THE SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS INSTINCT: STEVEN PINKER ON THE BETTER ANGELS OF MODERNITY AND THE EVILS OF MORALITY

Is "The Mirror and the Light" as Good as "Wolf Hall" and "Bring up the Bodies"?

Wolf Hall is a sheer wonder of a work of fiction, with all the thrilling terror of a shuttle bursting through the clouds clear through to where the heavens cap the sky. Riding the same momentum, Bring up the Bodies hurtles the protagonist—and us along with him—toward some nameless rock in the void, where he’s bound to crash and, should he survive, be forced to contend with hostile inhabitants. Bring up the Bodies carries on the richly textured prose and psychologically probing narration that mesmerized readers of Wolf Hall, but now in the service of a more tightly focused and propulsive plot, making it simultaneously a fit successor and a startlingly fresh sequel. The questions hanging over both novels are how high will Thomas Cromwell soar and how will he wend his way safely through the myriad dangers menacing his ascent. Somewhere along the way, though, we also find ourselves wondering, what will Cromwell be forced to do to protect himself and those in his charge; just how far will he have to go to satisfy his king, when dissatisfaction spells death? And how will Cromwell live with what he’s had little choice but to do? 

The Mirror and the Light, the third and final installment of Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy, has elements of both its predecessors, along with a few we haven’t yet seen. It lacks something of the thrilling sense of discovery and adventure on offer in Wolf Hall—that initial launch into the heavens—and only at a few points does it induce the exquisite dread and desperate push to arrive at a resolution that make Bring up the Bodies so engrossing. But there’s more than enough wonder and heartbreaking magnificence on offer to even the balance. If the earlier two novels encompass Cromwell’s rise and his transit through the uncharted and deadly expanse, the third serves as a record of his sojourn on the alien world, every page subtly eloquent of his realization that he’ll never make it home again. The question hovering over every scene this time around: which of his enemies’ multifarious plots will be the one to finally ensnare him, the one that fixes him in place while the nobles he’s so often confounded in the past rush to drive in their spears? 

The most authoritatively scathing of the critical responses to this final book of the trilogy was Daniel Mendelsohn’s in The New Yorker. The Mirror and the Light, Mendelsohn points out, begins in 1536, just after the execution of Anne Boleyn, a sentence which Cromwell himself contrived in order to free his king for yet another marriage, and ends with Cromwell’s own death in 1540. The novel “does cover those years,” Mendelsohn notes,

but the tightly symmetrical trajectories that organized the first two volumes and generated their morals and meanings have gone. This book has to embrace a concatenation of major events, any one of which could be the matter of an entire novel. We get the popular uprising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace; the brief queenship of Jane Seymour, the birth of her son, the future Edward VI, and her death soon afterward; the selection of the German princess Anne of Cleves as Henry’s fourth wife, a match that was urged by Cromwell in part because of his desire to move England closer to the Protestant German states—and whose failure was to doom Cromwell himself. (Some things even he couldn’t manipulate: the King found Anne physically distasteful, and the marriage was annulled.) Henry’s unhappiness with the whole affair was a turning point in his relations with his chief minister, whose fall from power occupies the final section of the novel.

No surprise, then, that the new book—seven hundred and fifty-four pages long, complete with a seven-page list of the dramatis personae—is Mantel’s longest yet. Unfortunately, it’s beyond even her skill to hold these disparate happenings together, and the result is a bloated and only occasionally captivating work.

While Mendelsohn leaves unanswered the question of what role “morals and meanings” play in his response to a novel, he does relate which trajectories in the earlier novels he’s referring to: “The two books have the same basic plot: Cromwell’s ascent to ever-greater positions of power is contrasted with the downward trajectory of a queen against whom he connives.” This is true enough of Bring up the Bodies, but the character in Wolf Hall whose downfall is the most salient is Cromwell’s mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, not the queen Katherine. And the difference in the amount of space given to the two plots is such that any reader of that first novel would marvel at Mendelsohn’s mischaracterization. How could anyone overlook the far more important Wolsey plot, which sent Cromwell on a subtly concealed and prolonged quest for vengeance? 

There are a few other odd things about Mendelsohn’s review. For one, three quarters of the piece is about Mantel’s earlier works, which he discusses with a blend of warm praise and fussy condescension. This is common enough practice for some longer reviews, but here the extra content seems to serve no other purpose than to lend Mendelsohn himself more authority—as if he’s straining to show us just how deeply familiar he is with Mantel’s writing. When he finally gets around to discussing her latest offering, he gives the sense that he’s somehow personally offended by what he takes as its outright failure, writing,

By the time you get to Cromwell’s execution—a brilliantly imagined moment, and perhaps the best single scene here—the incidents and details, all no doubt with some basis in history, have overwhelmed any discernible pattern. I found my attention wandering more than once as I made my way through an elaborate description of a court entertainment, a subplot involving an anonymous gift to Cromwell of a leopard, and a visit to baby Elizabeth, who’s cranky because she’s teething; and even started to wonder—a thought unimaginable during my reading of the first two books—whether this particular historical figure really merits nearly two thousand pages of fiction.

Mendelsohn is at pains to emphasize just how much of a disappointment The Mirror and the Light is in light of Mantel’s earlier work. It’s a fair enough point to make, if that was his honest response, but he takes it suspiciously far, concluding his review by writing, 

I suspect that Mantel had already said everything she had to say about Thomas Cromwell in the first two books, but felt compelled—by her evident love for the character; perhaps, too, by the appetite of her audience for more—to doggedly follow the historical trail to its conclusion.

But, for all the additional events it relates, nothing in “The Mirror and the Light” is really new—or, I should say, really “novel.” The great quantity of matter here will no doubt satisfy fans of both the Tudors and Mantel; but since when was that the point? If an author has told a tale well, given it a firm shape and delineated its themes, brought its hero sufficiently to life to leave an indelible impression, she’s done her job. Everything else is just words, words, words.

Reading these passages, I couldn’t help but chuckle at how unselfconsciously Mendelsohn lives down to the caricature of the New Yorker crowd as a bunch of prissy snobs. (Full disclosure: I’m a recovering subscriber.) This passage also serves as a helpful summary of what Mendelsohn believes makes for a successful novel: a “firm shape” with “delineated” themes and a convincing protagonist who leaves an impression—though those first two ingredients are rather vague. 

Mendelsohn may be bitter about the novel not paying dividends for all the effort it demands. You don’t get the sense, however, that he’s pressed for time, what with all the research he did into Mantel’s pre-Cromwell oeuvre. And, his wildly off-the-mark take on the opposing trajectories in Wolf Hall notwithstanding, he has plenty of admiration for the earlier books in the series. So, we have to ask, is The Mirror and the Light really so terrible when compared to Mantel’s other Cromwell books? Is it all just a mess of historical scenes adding up to nothing in particular? Let’s just say not everyone had the same response Mendelsohn did. Here’s how author and critic Stephanie Merritt puts it in the Guardian: 

One reviewer complained of Wolf Hall that it had no plot, which strikes me as a wilfully obtuse failure of reading. These books are precision-engineered, and none more so than The Mirror and the Light. It may be less obviously dramatically focused than Bring Up the Bodies, which spanned less than a year and concentrated almost exclusively on events leading up to Anne’s death, but the plot here is shaped as meticulously as any thriller. Chekhov’s gun is there on every page: words spoken carelessly or in jest are later repeated in a court of law, their meaning twisted; gifts given in innocence are produced with new motives ascribed. The technical skill required to marshall the events of these four years between 1536 and 1540 – which include the dissolution of the monasteries, the northern uprising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace, and the political manoeuvring that resulted in Henry’s short-lived fourth marriage to Anna of Cleves – while rendering those events comprehensible and dramatic to contemporary readers, is breathtaking.

Is the novel a “great quantity of matter” only Mantel’s most blinkered fans can appreciate or a “precision-engineered” work “shaped as meticulously as any thriller”? (Mendelsohn’s review appeared a week and a day after Merritt’s—making me wonder if he deliberately inverted her evaluation.) Is Mendelsohn succumbing to his envy of a more successful author, directing his contempt at the popular audiences who’ve yet to take any notice whatever of his own work? Or is Merritt, a Brit like Mantel, indulging in a bit of nationalistic favoritism? 

            Our default response probably ought to be to ascribe these diametrically opposed opinions to differing tastes, but in this case I’m going to argue that Mendelsohn’s take is simply wrong. I base this conclusion on several points he makes in his essay—almost all the points he tries to make—that suggest he failed to grasp what most readers probably found patently obvious. To wit, he fails to find the “discernable pattern” around which the various historical details cohere because he’s looking in the wrong place. And he arrives at this rather embarrassing failure through a misapplication of his own idiosyncratic approach to criticism. 

The main principle implicit in all of Mendelsohn’s reviews, including in the lines already quoted above, is that a work of fiction should be held together by a central theme. He also seems to believe all the best themes originally found their expression in the works of the ancient Greeks and Romans. As fellow critic Jackson Arn explains, “Mendelsohn sees books and films, fundamentally, as vessels in which Greco-Roman archetypes are sealed forever; to analyze them is to peel away everything unique or particular until the archetypes lie naked for all to see.” Here’s how Arn goes on to describe Mendelsohn’s approach to criticism: “Pick a popular subject. Link it to the ancients. From time to time, spice things up by dissing those pesky youths who are ruining everything by reviewing books on Amazon.” 

            Mendelsohn’s elitism notwithstanding, I’ve read and enjoyed several of his reviews over the years, though I nearly always disagree with his conclusions. I thoroughly enjoyed the movie Troy for instance, despite its undeniable hokeyness, but found his withering review gratifyingly erudite—and just interesting. He’s probably on to something with his theory that central organizing themes play a critical role in our appreciation of stories and that most of the best themes have a long history, but I’d add he’s a bit vague on the distinction between themes and plots. Regardless, in treating time-tested themes or plots as archetypes, he’s buying in to Carl Jung’s theory that stories derive their power from an ability to project back into the mind some of its own inborn dynamics. The more likely explanation for the tendency of some themes to recur in story after story across cultures and through the ages is that these are the ones that outcompeted other themes in other stories in their struggle to grab our attention, evoke our emotions, and haunt our thoughts. Some stories simply work better than others, and these are the ones most likely to inspire new generations of storytellers. It’s a sort of natural selection playing out in the environment of our minds, themselves hybrid constructions of both biological and cultural evolution.

            The difference between these two theories is subtle, but their application leads to wildly divergent takes on any given work. Mendelsohn’s view is conservative in that every new work points back to earlier works, adjusting them for modern sensibilities. The evolutionary view is more open-ended, allowing for—even predicting—more and greater innovation when it comes to the storyteller’s toolkit. This is because there’s no guarantee the stories which caught on in the past will continue to resonate in the future, as minds are altered more and more through cultural change. There’s also no reason to assume that simply because a story outcompeted most of the others at a given time, in a given cultural context, that still better stories couldn’t have been crafted, ones that would have even more successfully commandeered people’s imaginations, but that simply went undiscovered. 

            Mantel’s chief innovation with her Cromwell trilogy lies in the style of narration she uses both to reveal her protagonist’s character and to tell his story. The technical term for her use of narrative perspective is free indirect discourse, and you can find examples of its use at least as far back as Austen and Flaubert. But Mantel stands much closer to her protagonist than these earlier practitioners. So closely melded are her own authorial messages to her character’s thoughts and perceptions that the narration seamlessly shifts between first and third person to meet the needs of each scene. Mantel’s “he” is fluidly and poetically interwoven with Cromwell’s “I”, with the effect that reading the works in the trilogy feels like more an act of communion than of voyeurism. The joy of experiencing these novels comes far more from sharing mental space with Cromwell than from any exploration of the thematic material, as rich as that material is. 

            Characteristically, Mendelsohn remains perfectly oblivious to any element of the novels that can’t be traced back to the ancients. He doesn’t even mention Mantel’s approach to perspective, even though for most readers the merging of narration with characterization is what’s most remarkable about these works. What’s most remarkable about Mendelsohn’s failure to see what so many of us love about Mantel’s writing, though, isn’t that his critical approach has no vocabulary to describe her greatest achievements; it’s that he flubs even the part that most interests him. Here’s how he supports his claim that The Mirror and the Light contains too much historical material with no discernable pattern.  

A structure implicit in the history of Cromwell’s final years is one that literature has loved to exploit, and Mantel tries hard to make it work. If, in the first two books, the protagonist’s trajectory was an upward one, the arc in the third is the old Greek one that goes from hubris to nemesis.

Note that Mendelsohn refers to the Icarus theme as implicit, failing to credit Mantel for working it out deliberately. That’s in fact the problem he has with the novel. He goes on, 

The hubris theme is too intermittent, too submerged beneath the exhausting accumulation of events and details, to make things cohere. Other tactics fall short, too. As the book reaches its climax, there is a feverish increase of flashbacks to Cromwell’s childhood—many of which, such as recollections of his father’s vicious beatings, repeat incidents familiar from the previous installments, presumably in order to create echoes and parallels that will give some kind of shape to this mass. (There are even ghosts: Thomas More hovers, as does a talkative Wolsey. The past is never past.) But the gesture fails, and the repetitions feel merely repetitive.

Ah, but what if Mantel pushed the hubris theme to the background on purpose? What if Mendelsohn has simply missed the actual theme tying together all these supposedly disparate historical details? In that case, it wasn’t Mantel who failed Cromwell. It was Mendelsohn who failed Mantel—along with his own readers. 

            Before I go on to show that this is exactly what happened, let me make some concessions to Mendelsohn. First, whereas the first two novels in the series were from start to finish exhilarating to read, The Mirror and the Light is heavier, more dragged down by the protagonist’s past than propelled by the promise of his future. One of the chief pleasures of reading scenes in the earlier novels comes from knowing Cromwell almost always has an ace up his sleeve when dealing with the nobles who despise his presumption at even being in their presence. In this latest installment, though, opportunities to take delight in Cromwell’s deft maneuvering are fewer and farther between. “A realm’s chief councillor should have a grand plan,” Cromwell muses at one point. “But now he’s pushing through, hour to hour, not raising his head from his business” (652). For me personally, and I imagine for many other readers, this makes the novel more serious and difficult—not in the sense of forcing us to slog through less engaging scenes, but in the way it’s more exciting to see a legendary fighter in his prime than in the twilight of his career, even though the later victories are in many ways more impressive (think Ali beating Foreman). 

            What I have to point out here, though, is that Cromwell’s seeming decline isn’t owing to his hubris, and it certainly isn’t owing to any failure or oversight on Mantel’s part. Rather, his lapses come from an odd complacency, one bordering on resignation, which is a symptom of something quite separate from hauteur or senescence. Aside from being the first bit of “novelty” Mendelsohn should have noticed in his reading, this symptom also provides a clue to the novel’s true central theme. 

            But first, a second concession: Mantel is writing from Cromwell’s perspective, and Cromwell does his best to avoid noticing or thinking about what’s really motivating him. The following passage from The Mirror and the Light reveals both the novel’s central theme and the protagonist’s attitude toward dwelling on it. 

When Cromwell assures Henry that Jane will not fail to give him a son, he responds: 

“That’s easy to say, but the other one made promises she could not keep. Our marriage is clean, she said: God will reward you. But last night in a dream—” 

            Ah, he thinks, you see her too: Anna Bolena with her collar of blood. 

            Henry says: “Did I do right?”

Right? The magnitude of the question checks him, like a hand on his arm. Was I just? No. Was I prudent? No. Did I do the best thing for my country? Yes.

            “It’s done,” he says.

“But how can you say, ‘It’s done’? As if there were no sin? As if there were no repentance?”

“Go forward, sir. It’s the one direction God permits. The queen will give you a son. Your treasury is filling. Your laws are observed. All Europe sees and admires the stand you have taken against the pretended authority of Rome.” (33-4)

Cromwell, like the king, is haunted by the dead queen whose execution he conspired to bring about, along with those of five courtiers he convinced the king were both cuckolding him and devising his overthrow. 

The king turned a blind eye to Cromwell’s machinations because he wanted to be free to marry Jane Seymour; the other men were collateral damage. The faux investigation, the multiple interrogations, and the farcical—but deadly serious—trials that resulted in all these executions take up the bulk of the action in Bring up the Bodies. But they follow a pattern we first see in Wolf Hall, as Cromwell connives to bring about the conviction and execution of Thomas More, a man he simultaneously despises and admires, for the crime of not acknowledging the king’s supremacy over the pope. Some of the most beautiful scenes in Wolf Hall have Cromwell, often in the midst of a conversation with More, struggling with what he must do. We as readers look on wondering how he’ll be able to live with the burden of guilt—only to pick up the next novel and find that he’s going to have to do much worse. Before ever cracking the cover of The Mirror and the Light, we knew it wouldn’t be a story of hubris and nemesis; it’s a story about sin and redemption. 

            I’ll make one final concession to Mendelsohn: the hubris theme really is there to be found in The Mirror and the Light. The obvious point Mendelsohn misses, though, is that this is the story Cromwell’s enemies, particularly the nobles who hate to see anyone lowborn rising so high, want to foist on him. “There is a proverb,” the Countess Margaret Pole says to him, “the truth of which is hallowed by time. ‘He who climbs higher than he should, falls lower than he would.’” Cromwell will have none of it: “A feeble saying, and feebly expressed. It leans on the same conceit, the wheel. What I say is, these are new times. New engines drive them” (204). Of course, Pole is vindicated in the end (if only after her own fall from grace). But even as he awaits his own execution in the Tower, Cromwell reframes the traditional tale: 

He lays the book aside and turns the pages of his engravings. He sees Icarus, his wings melting, plummeting into the waves. It was Daedalus who invented the wings and made the first flight, he more circumspect than his son: scraping above the labyrinth, bobbing over the walls, skimming the ocean so low his feet were wet. But then as he rose on the breeze, peasants gaped upwards, supposing they were seeing gods or giant moths: and as he gained height there must have been an instant when the artificer knew, in his pulse and his bones, This is going to work. And that instant was worth the rest of his life. (742)

These lines allude to an earlier instance of Cromwell’s musing, this one following a warning from another noble. 

He thinks of the wings he wears; or so he boasted to Francis Bryan. When the wings of Icarus melted, he fell soundless through the air and into the water; he went in with a whisper, and feathers floated on the surface, on the flat and oily sea. Why do we blame Daedalus for the fall, and only remember his failures? He invented the saw, the hatchet and the plumbline. He built the Cretan labyrinth. (133) 

Lines like these are what Mendelsohn is referring to when he complains that the hubris theme is “too intermittent.” This is supposedly how “Mantel tries hard to make it work.” Since each of these passages has Cromwell himself rejecting the myth’s application, and since the novel is centered on Cromwell’s perspective, Mendelsohn might have inferred that Mantel only touches the theme—inevitable, to some degree, given Cromwell’s “trajectory”—so that her protagonist can let us know the story’s true “morals and meanings” are to be found elsewhere. What we discover in these passages is that Cromwell sees himself not as an aspirant to higher authority but as an inventor, engineering machines to drive a new world, and, in point of fact, he was. 

What would that new world look like? In other words, what higher vision could possibly justify Cromwell’s horrific transgressions, at least in his own mind? In a scene that has him debating theology—works versus election—with a prior named Barnes he met while serving Cardinal Wolsey, he gives an impassioned description of what he’s up to. 

“Works follow from election,” Barnes says. “They do not precede it. It is simple enough. The man who is saved will show it, by his Christian life.” 

“Do you think I am saved?” he says. “I am covered in lamp black and my hands smell of coin, and when I see myself in a glass I see grime—I suppose that is the beginning of wisdom? About my fallen state, I have no choice but agree. I must meddle with matters that corrupt—it is my office. In the golden age the earth yielded all we required, but now we must dig for it, quarry it, blast it, we must drive the world, we must gear and grind it, roll and hammer and pulp it. There must be dinners cooked, Rob. There must be slates chalked, and ink set to page, and money made and bargains struck, and we must give the poor the means to work and eat. I bear in mind that there are cities abroad where the magistrates have done much good, with setting up hospitals, relieving the indigent, helping young tradesmen with loans to get a wife and a workshop. I know Luther turns his face from what ameliorates our sad condition. But citizens do not miss monks and their charity, if the city looks after them. And I believe, I do believe, that a man who serves the commonweal and does his duty gets a blessing for it, and I do not believe—” 

He breaks off, before the magnitude of what he does not believe. “I sin,” he says, “I repent, I lapse, I sin again, I repent and I look to Christ to perfect my imperfection. I cling to faith but I will not give up works. My master Wolsey taught me, try everything. Discard no possibility. Keep all channels open.” (223-4)

What we see in this passage is that what Mendelsohn treats as mere background historical happenstance is for Cromwell the key to his salvation. Later, he reflects on the durability of the changes he’s helped to bring about:

So even after Henry dies, he thinks, our work is safe. After a generation, the name of Pope itself will be blotted out of memory, and no one will ever believe we bowed to stocks of wood and prayed to plaster. The English will see God in daylight, not hidden in a cloud of incense; they will hear his word from a minister who faces them, instead of turning his back and muttering in a foreign tongue. We will have good-living clergy, who counsel the ignorant and help the unfortunate, instead of a scum of half-literate monks squatting in the dust with their cassocks hauled up, playing knucklebones for farthings and trying to see up women’s skirts. We will have an end to images, the simpering saints with their greensick faces, and Christ with the wound in his side gaping like a whore’s gash. The faithful will cherish their Saviour in their inner heart, instead of gawping at him painted above their heads, like a swinging inn sign. We will break the shrines, Hugh Latimer says, and found schools. Turn out the monks and buy horn books, alphabet books for little hands. We will draw out the living God from his false depictions. God is not his gown, he is not his coat, he is not shreds of flesh or nails or thorns. He is not trapped in a jewelled monstrance or in a window’s glass. But dwells in the human heart. Even in the Duke of Norfolk’s. (231-2)

The meeting with Barnes takes place in secret, and throughout all three novels we see that Cromwell’s advocacy for Protestantism extends far beyond what he can safely reveal to the king. This is in part the impetus behind many of the sentiments that seem to intimate his hubris. Even Mendelsohn caught on that “it’s highly unlikely that Cromwell ever intended to depose Henry,” but readers know the councillor’s and the king’s goals are less than perfectly aligned. 

            Now we can see the central thread that ties together so many historical episodes. The uprising in the north known as the Pilgrimage of Grace was in response to Cromwell’s efforts to shut down monasteries and rob the people of their saints and feast days. The death of Jane Seymour threatened to make Henry question the righteousness of his turning away from Rome. The failure of Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves meant that he might marry someone less eager to embrace Protestantism—a point that Mendelsohn appreciates but fails to grasp the significance of because he betrays no understanding of what such an embrace means to Cromwell. At one point, Cromwell refers to his efforts to get the Bible translated into English for his countrymen as his “life’s work” (545). Before Cromwell’s execution, it was already widely suspected that Henry would go on to marry Katherine Howard, the Duke of Norfolk’s niece. Norfolk was not enthused about the religious reform taking place in England. 

            Oddly, Mendelsohn does pick up on part of this dynamic—at least in the earlier books. He writes about how Mantel presents Cromwell as “an increasingly haunted man who finds it ever more difficult to extricate himself from the moral implications of his sophisticated political maneuvering.” But he explains it away as if it were merely the author’s attempt to make her protagonist more sympathetic before going back to his search for a Greco-Roman theme to serve as the key to unlock the whole novel. He goes on to suggest the title refers to Cromwell’s mistaking himself for the light, when in fact he could only be the mirror to Henry. But that would assume that Mantel wished for her readers to accept the king’s authority as truly natural and God-given, when in reality one of the main sources of dramatic tension in all three novels is that everyone, Cromwell first and foremost, must pretend Henry is something other than a cruel, short-tempered, and mercurial narcissist, as apt to run the country into the ground in service of his own vanity as to bring about any new and more just world. (Mendelsohn tacitly endorsing the elitism of the nobility is an amusing irony.) It’s not hubris that keeps poking up in Cromwell’s speech and behavior; it’s honesty. And his increasing inability or unwillingness to dissemble what he knows is part of the same complacency and resignation that throughout the novel should have pointed Mendelsohn back to Cromwell’s conscience getting the better of him. 

            Mendelsohn also might have noticed, as Merritt does, that Mantel sneaks an allusion to a mirror into the opening scene of the novel, as Cromwell accepts the sword from Anne’s executioner to examine it. On it, he finds etched a crown of thorns and an inscription. Only we don’t find out what the inscription says until later in the novel. Cromwell recalls it even as he’s kneeling for his own execution on the second to the last page. 

After Anne’s swift end he had spoken with the headsman; he read the words engraved on the blade. Speculum justitiae, ora pro nobis. They don’t write words on the head of an axe. (753)

The Latin phrase translates, “Mirror of justice, pray for us.” In a sense, then, the entire story is bookended with references to the sword used to kill Anne Boleyn. It serves as a kind of repeated slap to Cromwell’s face, since, as we know, the sword was in nowise used to mete out justice. When one of the leaders of the northern rebellion comes to negotiate with Henry, the theme is reprised. Henry says that Robert Aske “will see that I am a monarch both generous and just,” prompting Cromwell to think: 

The only danger—and we cannot get around it—is that Aske will also see that Henry is not the puissant warrior of ten years ago, and he will carry word back to Yorkshire. The king wishes to be known as Henry, Mirror of Justice. But perhaps he will be known as Henry the Bad Leg. (332)

Cromwell himself doesn’t ever address Henry with this phrase. You could even say he comes up with the phrase that makes up the title so he doesn’t have to recognize him as an arbiter of truth or morality. When it comes time to flatter Henry, he says, “What should I want with the Emperor, were he the emperor of the entire world? Your Majesty is the only prince. The mirror and the light of other kings.” (467)

            With the theme of sin and redemption in mind, the scenes that Mendelsohn complains failed to hold his attention likewise take on new “morals and meanings”. The elaborate court entertainment he cites is deliberately rendered by Mantel as a failure. The drama is meant to impress the new queen Anna, and it has ancient Britons repelling a Roman army. It’s also meant to get both Henry and Anna in the mood for making a new prince. But the queen “looks bewildered” (639), one of the jesters offends both Henry and Cromwell and has to be chased away, and the conversation turns to Cromwell’s son’s skepticism about the glories of the past kings of Albion. After “The queen stands up, at some invisible signal or perhaps some inner prompting” to walk away from the show, Cromwell sees that “Henry’s face shows nothing, except traces of fatigue” (642). For most readers, this is probably a shocking instance of Cromwell’s maneuvers ending in failure. And Cromwell knows it. But Mendelsohn, not appreciating that this spells doom not just for Cromwell himself, but for his mission to reform Christianity, a mission which has already cost him his soul, finds the entire three-page scene tedious and overdone. 

            What’s with that leopard near the end of the novel though? The metaphorical uses of cats in these novels could supply a graduate student material for multiple theses. Early in The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell’s people have to capture an escaped cat from Syria. Cromwell imagines himself as the Damascene Cat, looking down at his pursuers, smugly certain of his own ability to evade them. This is a clear reprisal of the hubris theme, but Mendelsohn makes no mention of it. With the leopard, though, Mantel is up to something else entirely. Again, Cromwell deliberately avoids dwelling on his sins. But Mantel reveals the impact they have on him in myriad ways—some less than subtle. Anytime Cromwell is going to bed or dreaming or feverish, or even just alone in a house, he encounters those ghosts Mendelsohn is so perplexed by. At the close of Part One, for instance, Cromwell wanders around one of his empty houses, musing,

Don’t look back, he had told the king: yet he too is guilty of retrospection as the light fades, in that hour in winter or summer before they bring in the candles, when earth and sky melt, when the fluttering heart of the bird on the bough calms and slows, and the night-walking animals stir and stretch and rouse, and the eyes of cats shine in the dark, when colour bleeds from sleeve and gown into the darkening air; when the page grows dim and letter forms elide and slop into other conformations, so that as the page is turned the old story slides from sight and a strange and slippery confluence of ink begins to flow. You look back into your past and say is this story mine; this land? Is that flitting figure mine, that shape easing itself through alleys, evader of the curfew, fugitive from the day? Is this my life, or my neighbour’s conflated with mine, or a life I have dreamed and prayed for; is this my essence, twisting into a taper’s flame, or have I slipped the limits of myself—slipped into eternity, like honey from a spoon? Have I dreamt myself, undone myself, have I forgotten too well; must I apply to Bishop Stephen, who will tell me how transgression follows me, assures me that my sins seek me out; even as I slide into sleep, my past pads after me, paws on the flagstones, pit-pat: water in a basin of alabaster, cool in the heat of the Florentine afternoon. (212)

With this passage, Mantel is pointing us back to the metaphorical conceit in Bring up the Bodies that Cromwell was rewriting Anne’s life, transforming her from what she really was into what he needed her to be, a cheating wife with murderous intentions. Later in The Mirror and the Light, Cromwell suffers the same fate at someone else’s hands: “Dorothea has rewritten his story” (247). Dorothea is Wosley’s daughter, and in this scene she’s just turned Cromwell’s failure to save his beloved cardinal into a deliberate betrayal. And there’s no convincing her she’s been misled. 

            But it’s those last lines of the passage that provide us with a clue as to what Mantel is doing with the leopard, the ones about how transgression follows him. Here’s how the scene when the leopard is delivered comes to an end. 

Until now the beast was torpid. Now it stands up, and in the cramped fetid space it stretches itself. It takes a pace forward, and that pace brings it to the limits of its freedom, and it stares at him, at him; its eyes are sunk deeply into its folds of fur, so you cannot see its expression, whether awe, or fear, or rage.

There is quiet. Dick says uneasily, “It knows its master.”

            As an arrow its target. He feels pierced by its scrutiny: thin as it is, a walking pelt. (607). 

This scene takes place near the end of the novel, when Cromwell will soon be made to answer for crimes he never committed, as he discovers again, “They are rewriting my life” (717). A character being made to suffer the same fate he’s made others suffer is a staple of redemption stories. 

            As for the visit to baby Elizabeth that Mendelsohn found so pointless, we need only point out that this is Anne Boleyn’s daughter, the same Anne Boleyn Cromwell had executed for having multiple affairs, and it’s not just in her crankiness that the child resembles a character we’re acquainted with. Mary Shelton, Anne’s cousin and the child’s nursemaid, comes right out and says, “I think she’s Henry’s. You should hear her bawl. Had any of Anne’s gentlemen red hair?” It should also be noted that Cromwell isn’t just there to visit Elizabeth; his main purpose is to meet with another of Henry’s daughters, Mary. Later we’ll find out that Cromwell promised Mary’s mother, Queen Katherine, that he would take care of her. The whole first part of The Mirror and the Light centers on Cromwell’s efforts to persuade Mary to accept that her parents were never truly married and that her father, not the pope, is the true head of the church in England. If he fails, she too could be executed. 

            Now, why would Cromwell want to help the daughter of a queen whose reign he was so instrumental in bringing to an end? And why doesn’t Mendelsohn see that there’s more to Cromwell than hubris and Machiavellian self-interest? 

            What about all those flashbacks and repetitive repetitions Mendelsohn groans about? By now, I don’t think there’s any need to go into much detail here. So let me point to some clues to the scenes’ significance. One of the scenes has him recalling a time when his dad recruited him to take part in some crime. “Father, do you not know right from wrong?” he says. 

Walter’s face grew dark. But he said in a tone mild in the circumstances, “Listen, son, this is what I know: right is what you can get away with, and wrong is what they whip you for. As I’m sure life will instruct you, by and by, if your father’s precept and example can’t get it through your skull.” (298)

Later in the novel, as Cromwell faces his own death, Kingston, the constable of the Tower, asks him if he would like a priest for confession. Cromwell responds,

“It is not long since I confessed, and I have had scant opportunity of sin since I came here.” 

“That is not it.” Kingston is disconcerted. “You are meant to pass your whole life in review, and discover new sins each time.”

“I know that,” he says. “I know how to do it. I live here with Thomas More.” (743)

Okay, one of the main themes of the novel is sin and redemption, but I’ve acknowledged that hubris is also present throughout the story. And, as Mendelsohn stresses, it’s a long book. Maybe he and I are simply quoting selectively to paint our opposing pictures. But this just isn’t the case. The stretches of the novel where you don’t come across some clue to Cromwell’s tortured soul over more than a few pages are rare. Meanwhile, there are only a handful of instances where hubris comes up—as Mendelsohn himself admits. One last block quote should adequately illustrate the point, as you only have to turn a couple pages from the front cover to find it. It’s the scene that takes place just after Anne’s execution, and Cromwell is criticizing Kingston for not having a casket ready for her body. The duke Charles Brandon can’t resist piping up.

“I’d have put her on a dunghill,” Brandon says. “And the brother underneath her. And I’d have made their father witness it. I don’t know what you are about, Cromwell. Why did you leave him alive to work mischief?”

He turns on him, angry: often, anger is what he fakes. “My lord Suffolk, you have often offended the king yourself, and begged his pardon on your knees. And being what you are, I have no doubt you will offend again. What then? Do you want a king to whom the notion of mercy is foreign? If you love the king, and you say you do, pay some heed to his soul. One day he will stand before God and answer for every subject. If I say Thomas Boleyn is no danger to the realm, he is no danger. If I say he will live quiet, that is what he will do.”

The courtiers tramping across the green eye them: Suffolk with his big beard, his flashing eye, his big chest, and Master Secretary subfusc, low-slung, square. Warily, they separate and flow around the quarrel, reuniting in chattering parties at the other side.

“By God,” Brandon says. “You read me a lesson? I? A peer of the realm? And you, from the place where you come from?”

“I stand just where the king has put me. I will read you any lesson you should learn.” 

He thinks, Cromwell, what are you doing? Usually, he is the soul of courtesy. But if you cannot speak truth at a beheading, when can you speak it? 

He glances sideways at his son. We are three years older, less a month, than at Anne’s coronation. Some of us are wiser; some of us are taller. Gregory had said he cannot do it, when told he should witness her death: “I cannot. A woman. I cannot.” But his boy has kept his face arranged and his tongue governed. Each time you are in public, he has told Gregory, know that people are observing you, to see if you are fit to follow me in the king’s service. (5-6)

Mantel juxtaposes Gregory’s behavior with Cromwell’s to demonstrate that the father is breaking his own rules. This is that complacency that rears up in him throughout the novel. Mendelsohn reads this scene as evidence of hubris—just as Brandon does. But you don’t have to read too closely to see that Cromwell was already on edge, that he couldn’t take any more aspersions being cast on the poor woman whose life was just cut short, thanks to his own machinations. 

            I’m going hard after Mendelsohn here because he went so hard after Mantel and her fans (including this one)—based on a ridiculous misreading of her work. But his embrace of an arcane theory that all but guarantees precisely this kind of misreading is unfortunately not the least bit out of the ordinary. You could say there’s a massive epistemic crisis in the field of literary theory and criticism. What’s most disheartening about this situation, though, is that this crisis has been baked into the practice for decades. Critics don’t want any system of accountability. They want their work to be more art than science. This is why they eschew empirical approaches and opt instead for bizarre philosophies like psychoanalysis and deconstructionism—or lately activist ideologies like intersectionalism. Part of this is an understandable fear of reductionism, though that threat is wildly exaggerated. But another part of it is that without anything resembling an objective account of what fiction is and how it operates, critics get to say whatever they want. Mendelsohn’s enviable mastery of the English language’s highest register, along with his staff position with the august New Yorker, means that he can say some outrageously stupid shit without taking a hit to his reputation. But his status should not distract anyone from the fact that, when it comes to modern fiction, especially novels like The Mirror and the Light, the guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. (Still, I should say I can’t help liking the dude; his book An Odyssey is on my reading list.) 

            Is The Mirror and the Light as good as Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies? Both of those first two books grabbed me and thrust me into Cromwell’s world, forcing me to wrestle with the dilemmas he faces. The third book didn’t take hold of me in the same way; its invitation is much more subtle. In many ways, The Mirror and the Light is more demanding than the other two books. But unlike Mendelsohn, I felt my own efforts were handsomely repaid. The Cromwell of the earlier novels is a bracing inspiration. The Cromwell of The Mirror and the Light is more recognizable, more relatable. Now we see Cromwell not as a marvel but as a mere mortal. Hubris or no, all of us are heading for a fall. The story of the elder Cromwell is closer to reality. It’s sadder, more tragic than exhilarating. It has to be. And yet it comes with a message of hope. If we’re all heading for a fall regardless, why not reach for the heavens. Cromwell, awaiting his execution, stands in awe of what he’s managed to accomplish: “This is going to work.” And it did work, even if Cromwell was no longer around to see it.

            Does Mantel’s protagonist achieve the redemption he seeks throughout the novel? I won’t venture an answer, but I will say if you keep that question in mind as you read the book from beginning to end, you’ll come away with a much richer understanding of the work, and you’ll get much more pleasure from it, than the great Daniel Mendelsohn did.  

Also read:

WHAT MAKES "WOLF HALL" SO GREAT?

NOTIONAL BODIES, ANGELS' WINGS, AND POET'S TRUTHS: THE EXQUISITE DISCOMFORT OF "BRING UP THE BODIES" BY HILARY MANTEL

PUTTING DOWN THE PEN: HOW SCHOOL TEACHES US THE WORST POSSIBLE WAY TO READ LITERATURE

HOW VIOLENT FICTION WORKS: ROHAN WILSON’S “THE ROVING PARTY” AND JAMES WOOD’S SANGUINARY SUBLIME FROM CONRAD TO MCCARTHY

Why Sam Harris Snaps His Fingers while Telling You to Look for the Looker

Image by Canva’s Magic Media

            Sam Harris has revealed that users of his Waking Up meditation app struggle with the instruction to “look for what’s looking” more than any other. The confusion arises partly from the figurative use of the word look. You’re not literally looking with your eyes, obviously. You’re instead looking in the sense of searching. But that only raises more questions. How exactly do you conduct this search? And what does Sam mean by “the looker,” i.e., what the hell are you supposed to be searching for? 

            Some time ago, I arrived at an insight that got me most of the way toward answering these questions. In meditation, you’re shifting from your usual mindset of living thought-to-thought. That is, you’re ceasing to experience consciousness through concepts—words, abstractions, narratives—and instead engaging with the world through sensations. “The looker,” which Harris often refers to as “the seat of attention” or “the center of consciousness,” is that sense we all have that we’re directing our attention toward one thing and not another. It’s the sense that we’re here, pulling the strings of our mental dynamics, while whatever we’re attending to is over there—even if over there is no farther away than our own nostrils. We have that sense, but are we really sensing it? 

            What my new grasp of the distinction between the thinking and feeling modes helped me understand is that the way to look for the looker is to scan your body, particularly your head, for a sensation associated with being in control of your attention. Ask yourself what it feels like to be here and directing your attention over there? Where exactly do you experience that feeling? In what part of your body? If you’re like me, you’ll first realize that it really does feel like you’re aiming a spotlight at the world from some place behind your eyes, but when you turn that spotlight around there’s nothing for it to illuminate. In other words, you search for the sensation of being in control of your attention and you realize your head is empty of any such sensation. You look where you think you’ll find this center and instead discover nothing there. 

            This amounts to a discovery in its own right. The feeling of there being a center of consciousness—a self—arises not from any bodily sensation, but from our habitual application of concepts to every aspect of our experience. The sense of self, in other words, is a thought, not an experience. It’s in this sense that meditators say the self is an illusion. Once you disrupt this illusion, there’s just a flow of perceptions arising and falling away. Some we direct our attention to, but the decision to do so is as mysterious to us, as inaccessible to consciousness, as the source of any particular thought that pops into our minds. 

            Okay, so what? Why is this insight into the centerlessness of consciousness so important? If you’ve ever managed to reach this stage, no matter how briefly, even if only peripherally, then you know there’s a mental state that comes in the wake of looking and failing to find the looker. Breaking the spell changes the nature of experience. For me, it was nothing vivid enough to take much notice of at first, just a minor break in my usual chain of concept linked to concept. It felt like being momentarily dazed, without the anxiety that attends moments of disorientation. The more I practice, though, the more prolonged this mental state becomes, and the more profound the feeling becomes.

            I had already been experiencing this state for intervals of ten or fifteen seconds when I first heard Harris suggest that his app users look for the looker in the space of a finger snap. Confused, I wondered if I’d been doing the whole thing wrong all this time. Then I recalled that the first several times I’d reached the empty, dazed state after looking for the looker, the shift had occurred in the space of a few seconds. The longer I practiced, though, the more gradual the transition seemed (and the longer it lasted). So I reasoned that maybe the finger snap technique is to help people at an earlier stage of their practice. But I still didn’t get how it was supposed to work. 

            Then I considered the finger snap in light of my insight into the distinction between experiencing consciousness conceptually and experiencing it sensuously. Each of these modes of experiencing the world has its own inertia. Concepts breed concepts ad infinitum. That’s how we get lost in thought. A big part of the game in meditation is to disrupt this momentum—to derail the train of thought, as it were, so we can get into the mode of feeling the world instead of thinking about it. Therein lies the difficulty of following the instruction to look for the looker. As soon as you hear it, you can’t help trying to parse it conceptually. You start to think. Thought follows thought until you’re giving up in frustration. Next, you’re writing an email to Sam Harris asking what the hell this look-for-the-looker nonsense is supposed to mean. 

            The finger snap is probably in part an acknowledgment that the first few times you pull off the technique, the effect is going to last only a few seconds, wearing off so fast you’ll be left wondering if it even really happened. You’ll wonder, was that it? It doesn’t seem earthshattering. It’s not even pleasant—though it’s not unpleasant either. But that initial inkling is just the first step. The main thing the finger snap is designed to do, though, is prevent you from thinking—because there’s not much thinking you can do in the amount of time it takes for Harris to make the sound. 

            The focus of Vipassana meditation is attending to the breath. Most of us spend most of our waking hours in thinking mode, so to derail our trains of thought we focus on something that’s both physical and timebound. This gets us out of thinking mode and into feeling mode, out of the realm of concepts and into the realm of sensations. The idea is that with enough practice, you’ll be in feeling mode most of the time, so when you have a thought, you’ll key into what it feels like to think instead of pursuing the thought as it ramifies. Harris has talked about how he struggled with this transition when he was using Vipassana techniques alone. His breakthrough came when he took up Dzogchen practices, including the pointing out instruction—the cue to look for the looker. That’s why this instruction is emphasized so much in his app. 

            While the pointing out instruction helped Harris, though, he knows it comes with a risk. Even as beginning meditators are working to build momentum with the feeling mode, you’re giving them a prompt which is almost guaranteed to get them thinking. Notice that Harris seldom instructs us to look for the looker without first having us focus on the breath or in some other way helping us get into feeling mode. What he’s hoping is that since we’re already in feeling mode, his instruction to look for the looker might not get wrapped up in thought the way it normally would. But just in case, he encourages us to do it quickly, in the span of a snapping sound, again because he wants you to experience the shift, not think about it. 

            Unfortunately, it seems these techniques aren’t sufficient to get many of the app users over the hump. So, I figured a little more conceptual understanding might be helpful. Just remember, though, no amount of thinking will get you to the mind state you’re after. Again, the experience comes from being in feeling mode—even though it leads to a third state that transcends both thinking and feeling. It’s cultivation of this third state that’s the goal of continuing meditation practice, insofar as you can say there’s a goal to a practice that entails disconnecting from thoughts of the future. Buddhists call it non-dual awareness, anatta, or selflessness. I experience it for fifteen or twenty seconds at a time, maybe twice a week now. As I get more skillful at getting into this state, and better able to maintain it, I’ll report back on my experiences. 

Also read:

SAM HARRIS’S “POINTING OUT” INSTRUCTION: WHAT IT MEANS TO LOOK FOR THE LOOKER

THE IDIOCY OF OUTRAGE: SAM HARRIS'S RUN-INS WITH BEN AFFLECK AND NOAM CHOMSKY

THE SOUL OF THE SKEPTIC: WHAT PRECISELY IS SAM HARRIS WAKING UP FROM?

Glossary of Yąnomamö Terms

I put together a list of terms and definitions while writing my novel about an anthropologist studying the Yąnomamö. Good for students or researchers, or anyone else looking to learn some basic terms of the language. These definitions are mostly my own paraphrasing of Napoleon Chagnon’s.

...tari                         

suffix signaling the name of a collection of villages, like Shamatari

…-teri                        

suffix signaling the name of a village, like Bisaasi-teri

a brahawä shoawä      

expression that means "It's still a long way off." 

abawä                          

older brother

aîwä                             

also older brother

amoamo                      

a ritual to ensure success in the hunt, dances performed by women and girls while the men seek game

awei                             

yes

babracot                      

platform made of sticks 3 feet over a campfire for cooking/smoking meat

bädao                          

without cause, as in "killing without cause." 

bareto                          

biting gnats

barröwo                      

to lead the way on a trail

basho                           

spider monkey 

beshi                            

to be horny (something seldom admitted openly)

bisaasi                         

palm leaf

bore                             

malevolent wandering spirit with glowing eyes

boshe                           

small white-lipped peccary

browähäwä                 

politically important man

buhii                            

spirit or soul--particularly the will

date (dah-tay)              

sweet, boiled plantain soup

dehiaö                         

to eat a bite of meat, then a bite of vegetables, and chew them together

duku kä misi                

uppermost of four layers to the cosmos

ebene                           

hallucinogenic green powder shot through a tube into shaman's nostrils

habe                            

father

habo                            

come over here

he borara                    

term used to describe a village (shabono) that has fissioned into two, with the newer one staying close by for protection from enemy raiders

hedu kä misi                

the sky layer, the underside of which we see when we look up, on top of which the dead and no badabö live        

hei kä misi                   

the earth layer in the Yąnomamö cosmos

hei tä bebi                   

lowermost layer of the cosmos, the one beneath the earth we occupy

hekamaya                    

son-in-law or nephew (sister's son)

hekura                         

spirits who travel down hammock strings from the sky layer to commune with shamans (tiny light beings seen after taking ebene)

heniyomou                  

hunting trip

himo                            

shorter, but deadlier club with sharpened edges, used when nabrushi fight has escalated

hisiomö                       

seeds used to make ebene

hori                             

poor; literally, to be without tobacco

horeö                           

to crawl or creep, as when learning to walk

howashi                       

capuchin monkey

hushuwo                      

sad and volatile; emotional state common at reahu (funeral)

huya                            

young bachelor looking for adventure (and often looking for trouble)

ihiru (formal ihirubö)  

infant or either sex

iro                                

howler monkey

iwä                              

caiman

kawa amou                 

shouted, often poetic monologue given by a man at night after most villagers are settled in their hammocks

ma                               

no

madohe                       

manufactured goods like machetes, axes, fishhooks and line, etc. brought in for trade

mashi                          

blood relations (as opposed to shori, in-laws), reckoned through patrilineal descent

middi                           

darkness

mohode                       

caught unawares 

moko dude                  

a recently post-pubescent female who has never had a child

moyawe                       

alert, suspicious, wary

nabä                            

foreigner; non-Yąnomamö

nabrushi                      

long clubs used for duels

nara                             

red paint applied to the body

no badabö                   

"those who are now dead"; "the original humans"; mythical precursors to Yąnomamö, some of whom travel from the hedu layer to earth as hekura

no mraiha                   

the giving of a gift with the expectation that it will be reciprocated at some later date instead of on the spot

no owa                        

effigy representing a man from enemy village, used as a dummy for practice raids

nomohori                    

"dirty trick"; a deception, often an invitation to a feast, that can result in an ambush and several members of the visiting village killed

noreshi                         

animal alter ego

obo                              

armadillo

ohodemu                     

work

oka                              

harmful magic from a particular plant that is blown toward the enemy; suspicions of the use of this magic are the cause of many killings

öra                               

jaguar

oshe                             

a young child of either sex

owa                             

little brother

pajui                            

wild turkey

pata                             

"big one"; headman

patayoma                    

an old woman

rahaka                         

lanceolate arrow tip used for killing humans, often dipped in curare poison

rahara                         

river serpents; dragons

rasha                           

palm fruit

riyahäwä                     

beautiful

rohode                         

an old man; old person

shabono                      

the circular or ovular structure formed by joined yahis into a large communal dwelling with an open courtyard

shabori                        

shaman; man who communes with the hekura

shaki or shakiwä          

pesky bee; name given to Shackely 

shama                          

tapir

shoabe                         

father-in-law or mother's brother

shori (formal shoriwä) 

brother-in-law; term used to address strangers; in-laws as opposed to patrilineal relatives (mashi)

shuwahi                       

woman who flees her village in search of a husband who will treat her better

sina                              

adjective used to describe a man who's a poor marksman with his bow and arrows

sioha                            

a man from another village doing bride service for his wife's family

siohamou                    

bride service--period of work done for in-laws' family as part of a marriage exchange

suaböya                       

mother's brother's daughter; cross-cousin; or wife (same term)

suhebä ukaö                

a girl whose nipples are beginning to get hard

suwa härö                   

a female who is about the age of puberty; also, the magical charms such a female may use

suwa pata                    

a mature woman

tora                             

baboo quiver tied to hunters back

unokai                         

man who has killed another man (or several)

unokaimou                  

ritural cleansing and quarantining undertaken by a man after killing another man

urihi                            

jungle; nature

urihi ä rimö                 

having to do with beasts and animal things as opposed to humans and human things (yahi tä rimö)

Wa bei kä he shami    

"Your forehead is filthy," one of the worst insults

wabu                           

fruit from which originated women in Yąnomamö myth

waiteri                         

fierce; aggressive in defending one's honor; also noun, a man who's waiteri

waiyamou                   

marathon competitive chanting

waiyumö                     

long camping trip that can last days or weeks

wara                            

large-collared peccary

waro pata                    

a mature man

wayu huu                    

raid

wayu itou                    

ritual lineup of warriors in preparation for a raid, usually performed during reahu mortuary ceremony

wayu käbä                   

raider

weshi                           

to have lots of pubic hair (a turn-on for men)

yai                               

"true"

yahediba                     

electric eels

yahi                             

portion of a shabono for individual nuclear families; house

yahi tä rimö                

having to do with humans and human things as opposed to beasts and animal things (urihi ä rimö)

yano                            

small hunting tent

yaöya                           

mother's sister's daughter; parallel cousin; or sister (same term)

yawaremou                 

incest

yawäwä                       

a young boy who has started tying his penis to his waist string

yaya                             

mother-in-law

yiwä                             

an adolescent male whose muscles are getting hard

Also read: NAPOLEON CHAGNON'S CRUCIBLE AND THE ONGOING EPIDEMIC OF MORALIZING HYSTERIA IN ACADEMIA

And: JUST ANOTHER PIECE OF SLEAZE: THE REAL LESSON OF ROBERT BOROFSKY'S "FIERCE CONTROVERSY"

Kemoa: a Halloween Story

[This is the 3rd in a series of Halloween stories. Follow the link to start with the first.]

“When she started telling me stories about little creatures with bizarre names, I figured she’d gotten it all from a book or a TV show. By now I’ve googled every permutation of the names I can think of. They’re not from any show I can find. She doesn’t read like she used to before Janelle passed away. So where was she getting it all? Maybe I’m too indulgent with her. It’s not like I haven’t considered that. Dads are supposed to dole out the tough love, right? But how am I supposed to be tough when…. Excuse me. Let’s just say I often find myself at a loss. What can I do but spoil the hell out of my daughter?

“I know your next thought too. Mind you, I openly admit I’m as susceptible to fantasies of my daughter’s creative genius as the next parent. At first, I encouraged her in what I thought were flights of imagination. Two things changed my attitude over time. First, the stories were just so elaborate. Leena is only eleven, and I figured keeping so much stuff like that straight in her mind would take more concentration than a girl of that age tends to be able to muster. Second—and this is what sent me in search of help—some of the characters started getting scary. But I’m getting ahead of myself.”

Ken, our featured guest at this year’s Halloween gathering, is a trim, youthful-looking man in his late thirties or early forties. Aside from his eyes’ red rims and the heavy dark crescents beneath them, he looks like a guy who takes care of himself. He’s in decent shape, well-groomed, and was neatly but by no means ornately dressed. At just under six foot, he carries himself like a white collar professional, courteous, thoughtful, but with an undercurrent of seriousness, even urgency, like he’s only ever being polite long enough to get back to work without causing offense. He seemed almost embarrassed to be addressing our group, but mostly he seemed mutedly desperate. He really needed help. 

“Here, let me give you an idea what I’m talking about,” he said. “I recorded this on my phone. I’m not a hundred percent sure I should be recording my daughter without her knowing and then playing it back for a room full of strangers. But I’m running out of ideas. I’ll just ask that if you talk to anyone about this or write up the story, you change the names and any identifying details. Please just be discreet.”

Ken held up his phone and did some swiping with his finger until the tiny voice had everyone leaning forward. Ken helpfully increased the volume.

“They’re like fish,” the little girl’s voice said when the playback started afresh, “but they don’t swim in the ocean. They swim through the clouds. On some bright days, if you look really close, you can see them. But only because they dart around so much when the sun is shining. They don’t look much like fish either—though the way they look changes depending on what they see going on in the world. When I see them, they usually look like tiny people, but their skin or scales or whatever are all different colors—green, blue, purple, black, yellow, any color you can think of. The same one will be a different color from one day to the next. I suppose it’s like us with our clothes; every day we wake up and decide what we want to wear. They just choose the color they want to be instead.

            “They all have little fans on the outsides of their legs and arms. That’s how they swim around in the clouds. It’s also how they glide down to the ground where we live, but only when the air is just right. Sometimes, if they really need to tell us something, they’ll swoop down even if the air isn’t right, but it’s dangerous, so they only risk it when what they need to tell us is urgent. 

            “The thing you have to remember is that they don’t fly. They can only swim when they’re in the clouds. So, when they come down here to talk, they have to catch a ride back up to the clouds from birds or hawks or something. That’s not usually a problem because they all have friends who are birds or hawks who are happy to help. That’s because they do such a good job stirring up the clouds and moving them to where the sky most needs them. See, that’s what they do, move the clouds and change them so the sun shines clear to where the trees and flowers need them, so the ground has shade and fields don’t dry up and crops can grow big and strong.”

            “Do they have a name?” Ken’s voice asks.

            “Of course! They all have names.”

            “No, I mean, what do you call them in general?”

            “Piltok says they’re called eckyura.”

             “Piltok?”

            “Yeah, Dad, you know about Piltok. I told you about him.”

            “The guy you talk to by the creek? The one who lives underground?”

            “He lives in the tunnels connecting all the lakes and ponds. He tells a joke I don’t really get, but maybe you will. He says he looks like what you’d get if you bred a boulder with a tree and then raised it in a family of moles. He laughs whenever he says that. Even though he looks a bit scary, I like his voice. He sounds strong and wise.”

            “And how does he know about the—what did you say they were called? The eckyura?”

            “He talks to them all the time, silly. He especially makes a point of checking in with them when it storms.” 

            “Let me guess, they make it storm when they’re angry?”

“No, goofy! It storms because the eckyura are fighting the adabo. The adabo live on the eckyura’s blood—only it’s not blood like ours. It’s light like air. The adabo bite into the eckyura’s chests and breathe in the blood mist, which glows blue in the dark.” 

            “That’s horrible. Does it kill them?”

            “Usually, the adabo only get a little before each eckyura’s friends manage to rescue him. But sometimes they do die, and it’s really sad. But the thing is, the eckyura only live three or four days anyway.”

            “What? That’s it?”

            “Piltok says he knew one that was five days old, but he’s never known one older than that. Here’s the other thing you need to know: when the adabo breath in the eckyura’s blood, their minds are connected. That’s how the eckyura find out what’s going on where the adabo are from. That’s where they get information they need to share with us sometimes. That’s also why Piltok always goes to talk to them after a storm.” 

            “How often do you talk to Piltok?”

            The ensuing pause lasts long enough to make us all wonder if the playback has stopped. Finally, Leena’s voice returns: “Dad, can I go outside? I don’t feel like talking anymore.” 

            “Okay, but before you go, answer my question please.” 

            “What question?” 

            “How often do you talk to Piltok?”

            “Um…”

            “You’re not in trouble. I’m just wondering.” 

            “I talk to him every time I go outside. Well, not every time. Sometimes, he doesn’t come around, or he doesn’t want to talk. I don’t know what he’s doing, but he just doesn’t answer, you know. Can I go outside now?”

            “Okay, honey. Just stay close enough for me to see you.” 

            Ken reached for the device as the clip ended. “Okay,” he said, “that gives you some sense of how she speaks about all these characters. She never hesitates with a response like she would if she had to make up an answer on the spot. Whenever I press, she’s ready with more details. And she’s—what’s the word? She’s cagey, like she understands all this business is bizarre but can’t quite put her finger on what might be wrong about it. But this next clip is the part that first got me worried.”

            He held up his phone again.

“Leena,” his voice sounded from the device, “you started talking about the grentroleems. You said they’re two-foot-tall black and gray monsters who hide out near children’s beds.”

“That’s right,” Leena said. “They use their power of weaving nightmares and making fears worse in the wee hours so they can frighten their victims to death. Piltok told me what the grentroleems are and how to deal with them. He said if I ever get too scared and can’t handle them, I can call him and he’ll come stomp them to death.

“But anyone can do the tricks that make them go away—I mean most of the time. What you do is take deep breaths and remind yourself that nothing is as bad as it seems when you’re lying awake at night. You see,” the voice continued, with a gravity out of place in an eleven-year-old, “the thing with fear is that it feeds on itself, until you start mixing the bad feelings from the fear with the bad things you’re afraid will happen and that makes everything seem just horrible, which just adds more fear to your mind, which makes things seem more horrible. To stop it, you remind yourself that you’ve gone through bad things before, and a lot of times—most times—they didn’t end up being as bad as you thought they would. As bad as they were anyway you got through them. And all the worry and fear you put into working yourself up and not falling asleep didn’t end up helping at all.”

            After a pause, the voice begins again. “That’s really hard though when what I’m worried about is people dying.”

“Are you afraid of people dying?” Ken asked.

“Well, Dad, everyone is going to die eventually, right?” 

“Do the grentroleems make you afraid any particular person might die?”

“Sometimes.”

Ken pauses the clip to tell us how her expression hardened as she turned away. She didn’t want to talk about it. More than that, it pained her to talk about it.

He hit play again so we could hear him changing tacks: “Your friend Piltok comes and kills the grentroleems? And then you feel better?  But you said Piltok is a salobog, and salobogs only live a few months. How long have you known Piltok? Hasn’t it been a few months since you started talking to him?”

“Now you’re being a grentroleem, Dad.”

“I’m sorry dear. I’m just wondering who will come help you when Piltok is dead.”

“Piltok is my friend. I don’t like to think about him dying. But he has talked to me about it. He says if the grentroleems, or anyone else, are really getting to me and he’s not around, I can call Kemoa. She’s a six-foot-tall shaggy beast with black and white fur and glowing blue eyes. Kemoa loves children and babies. She can shoot invisible fireballs—well, invisible to us—that turn the grentroleems into statues of ash.” 

Ken stopped the recording again to say, “This part was really interesting to me because it was the first time I thought I knew where she was getting her ideas. You see, I read your story Cannonball to Leena—eliding a few of the adult parts. She loved it. I think I read it to her three times, and each time she made me repeat the part at the end where your mom tells you how dogs like your old husky scare ghosts and goblins away so children can sleep soundly.” 

He pokes at his phone again.

“How long does this Kemoa live?”

“Piltok never said. From the stories he tells me she’s been around like a hundred years. So she’ll always be around for me. The problem is, there’s only one Kemoa, and she has kids all over the world to look out for. Sometimes I get scared that when I call her, she’ll be busy saving someone else.” 

Ken let the recording continue playing through a heavy pause. I looked up to see an expression of intensity, and perhaps regret, darken his features. Then his voice emitted again from the phone, almost a whisper. “Honey, you know the grentroleems are just make-believe, right? I really love that you have such a wonderful imagination, and someday I hope you write down all these awesome stories. But some of these guys seem like they’re upsetting you, and I don’t want you to be frightened. I don’t want you to worry about people dying.” 

Silence.

“Honey, you know it’s all make-believe, right?” Ken pleaded.

“Yes, Daddy, of course,” she said abruptly, and then didn’t say another word. 

***

Ken had reached out to me after discovering the writeups I did for some of our group’s earlier stories. Cannonball was my mom’s story about how our old dog Kea had saved her—sort of—from a guy who got rough with her after she changed her mind about bringing him home. Our group of friends has been getting together every Halloween for nine years now to share our ghost stories as part of our very own holiday tradition. Two years ago, Mom told this story that shocked me at first and then moved me for weeks afterward, until I felt I just had to write it down. Apparently, it’s moved some others as well. Since I posted it to my blog, the number of views keeps going up. The next year, I posted a story my dad told at our gathering, and the same thing happened, though to a lesser extent. It was this online footprint that led Ken to our stories, and then to me personally. 

He said he got online to search for information about when imaginary friendships constitute a warning of some underlying problem. “I want my daughter to have a rich fantasy world. Her mother and I always encouraged that. I probably wouldn’t have worried so much if it weren’t for all these creatures’ ridiculously short lifespans. And then there were the ones who wanted to scare her, even hurt her. I mean, I’ve never heard of kids coming up with scenarios that dark. I thought imaginary friends were basically a step beyond having pretend conversations with yourself, you know? We all do that on occasion.” 

After coming up dry with several searches, he typed in something about kids and scary stories, and that’s how he found my blog. When I got the first email from him, I responded that neither I nor anyone else in the group is a psychologist—though Mike has a degree in psychology. Ken assured me Leena had already seen a therapist, which led to some interventions that, at least for the time being, only made things worse. He said he wasn’t so much expecting a solution to his problem as he was simply looking for a nonjudgmental audience he could trust to tell him if he was being crazy, an audience that wouldn’t necessarily assume as much from the outset. He wanted a sounding board. He particularly wanted my mom to be there, which is of course perfectly understandable to me. 

Unfortunately, Mom couldn’t make it to our Halloween party this year, for reasons I won’t go into here. Ken was nevertheless happy to share his story with the rest of us.

***

“It’s not so insane to think a kid might try to work through her grief over her mother’s death through her fantasies. I figured that’s why so many of her creatures were so strikingly short-lived. And, like I said, I was proud of her creativity. There was even some wisdom in what she said about how the grentroleems try to work you up into an anxious frenzy in the wee hours, and how you can ward off their attempts. Still, she didn’t seem to be interacting with any actual friends, not at school, not around the neighborhood. I was afraid I might lose her to her fantasy world for good. So I started taking her to a therapist every week.

“It was Dr. Thurman who first suggested some of the intricacies I was so blown away by in the stories may have come from Janelle, before she died. It’s entirely possible, she pointed out, that the two of them had a story world they visited together but kept from me, if for no other reason than that stories told in secret are more fun. Dr. Thurman’s main message to me, though, was that I needn’t worry so much about the imaginary menagerie, but I should make a point of getting her around other kids so she could strike up some real friendships. And that’s exactly what I did.

“Leena unfortunately fought me on this tooth and nail. She wanted to come home after school and go to the woods to see Piltok. That’s where she wanted to be on the weekends too. She didn’t want to go to any park or hang out with any of the neighbors I knew who had kids. But I kept at it. Then one night, I woke up to her screaming what sounded like, ‘Get away from her!’ over and over again. I bolted to her bedroom, expecting to find her in bed in the middle of a nightmare, but she wasn’t even in her room. She was wide awake, standing at the top of the stairway. ‘Honey, what’s the matter? Who are you screaming at?’ 

“‘It’s nothing Daddy. I was just having a bad dream.’

“‘Then what are you doing out here?’

“‘I was scared and I thought I heard something, so I came out here to look. But it must’ve just been part of the dream.’

“She was lying to me. I knew it to a certainty. But Dr. Thurman had advised against pressing for information about Leena’s fantasy world when she seemed reluctant to offer any. So I took her downstairs for a snack of granola and milk and then put her back to bed. 

“The next time she woke up screaming was only a few nights later. This time, she was screaming, ‘Get away from me,’ and ‘Don’t touch me.’ I found her at the bottom of the stairs this time, in the foyer. She started violently when she heard me coming down the stairs, whipping her head around to see who it was. But it was the same as before. She had no answers to give. Only there was something different this time. She had three scrapes on her left forearm, deep enough to draw blood. They formed parallel lines, like someone had scratched her. When I asked if she’d done that to herself, she pressed her lips tight together. I demanded to know how she’d gotten those scratches. She burst into tears. 

“You guys are all parents. You understand. I know Dr. Thurman didn’t say to stop her from talking to her friends. When she said it’s important that Leena have some real-life friends though, I took it to mean the imaginary ones were better left behind. Now, she’d woken up screaming on two separate occasions, so it wasn’t a stretch to conclude something was seriously wrong. What would you have done? 

“I’ll tell you what I did. I gave her a silver cross that Janelle had given me to wear around my neck. I told her—did my best to impress upon her—that it would keep anything that wanted to harm her away. I told her it would also keep away everything else of the sort that I couldn’t see or talk to but she could. I told her the visits to the woods had to stop. And I signed her up for a creative writing club after school—so she wouldn’t have a chance to go have one of her chats with Piltok or whoever. I forbade her from talking to her invisible friends. I offered her the cross partly as a consolation. Believe me, it was hard for me to part with. But mostly I figured I needed a charm or a talisman to psych her out, to give her a reason to think her imaginary friends wouldn’t be showing up anymore.”

“What did the therapist say when you told her you’d taken that step?” Chris asked.

“Dr. Thurman was… Well, she’s professional enough not to dress me down for going against her recommendation, but I could tell she thought it was a bad idea. ‘Foreclosing on this fantasy world of hers could be dangerous,’ she said, pointing out that it was likely some kind of coping mechanism. ‘But I’m not sure the damage can be reversed by you giving her your blessing to return to it again. I would wager she knows now that you think her visits to her friends are cause for concern.’ Her upshot was that we would have to see what Leena would do next. Maybe with all the new people and the new club activities, she’d move back toward the real world again.”

Ken cast his eyes downward as he drew in a rough breath before saying, “That’s not what happened.” 

***

Ken lifted his phone again, scrolled down a few swipes, and then started another clip.

“Honey, you were telling me about a new character you’ve been talking to. Didn’t I tell you I didn’t want you talking to anyone I can’t see or talk to myself?”

“Yes, but I didn’t go to the woods to talk to her. She came here.” 

“You mean she came in the house?”

“She comes to my room at night, almost every night. I think she’s there even when I’m not awake.”

“Do you know what she wants?”

“She says I’m in danger and she’s come to protect me.” 

“Protect you from what?”

“She says she has to protect me from Piltok and Airdol and Skirm and Leetoria—all the friends you told me not to talk to anymore. She says there’s no such thing as a salobog or an eckyura or an adabo or any of the others. She says the grentroleems are the only ones who are real, but they’re not really trying to scare me. They’re the ones trying to help me.”

“What did you say this woman’s name is?”

“Belcane. Her name is Belcane. Piltok told me about her before I ever saw her. I don’t know who to believe anymore.” 

“What does Belcane look like sweety?” 

“I only ever see her outline, you know, her silhouette. She’s short. Her arms are really long though, and her fingers are twice as long as they should be. Her voice is creaky, but sweet. She sounds like somebody’s grandma. I never see her eyes, but I can somehow feel them, like she’s looking at me really hard, trying to see something that’s not easy to see. And she always wears a coat or a cape or something, with these weird points that stand up on her shoulders.”

“Honey, if Piltok and the others aren’t real, why would Belcane have to protect you from them? Does she say they want to hurt you?” 

“She doesn’t say they’re not real. She says they’re not what they say they are. She says all the stories about eckyura flying through the clouds and salobogs living in tunnels between lakes is a trick. She says Piltok is a demon, sent by the devil to lure me away from the house, away from everyone who would protect me, so he can keep me from signing my name in her friend’s book.” 

“Leena, I need you to tell me something honestly. No stories. No fantasies. No make-believe. Where did you hear about demons and the devil and signing your name in a book? Did someone tell you about all that in school?” 

“It’s not make-believe, Dad! Belcane told me all of it. But before I ever saw her, Piltok told me about her, and he said she’d try telling me lies to get me to only listen to her. He told me about the book and said I should never sign my name. Daddy, I don’t know which one of them is telling the truth.”

“I don’t know either, sugar plum. I think maybe the best thing to do is to stop talking to either of them for a while, until we can get it all sorted out. And obviously don’t sign anything.”

“But Dad, you already won’t let me go talk to Piltok. And Belcane comes to my room every night. She talks to me whether I answer back or not.”

“Yes, we’re definitely going to need to talk to Dr. Thurman about what to do with this Belcane character. In the meantime, here’s what I want you to do. If you wake up and she’s in your room, I want you to reach under your nightgown and pull out Mommy’s cross. I want you to hold it up between you and her and say, ‘You have to go away now, and God won’t let you stay.’ Can you do that for me?”

“Yeah, I can do that. But Dad, what if she’s telling the truth? What if she really is protecting me?” 

“Do you think she is? I don’t see any reason her friend would want your name in his book. Do you think Piltok or any of the others would hurt you?” 

We all listened rapt as Leena considered her answer.

“Never,” she said at last. 

“Has Piltok ever come to the house?”

“No, but I see the eckyura here all the time. And the grentroleems, they’re here most nights too.”

“You said the eckyura wouldn’t hurt you either. And Belcane doesn’t protect you from the grentroleems. You know how to do that yourself, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do. Thanks to Piltok.” 

“Okay, so for now, I want you to tell this Belcane to keep away from you. We see Dr. Thurman again in two days. We’ll ask her what she thinks and then maybe we can have Belcane back. And honey, if you would just spend some time with some real flesh-and-blood kids, like the ones from your writing group, I may even let you go back to the woods to talk to Piltok again.” 

“It won’t matter,” she said glumly. “I doubt Piltok will be alive for more than a couple weeks.”  

***

Halloween fell on a Sunday this year. We had our party, the one where Ken told us all his story with the help of his recordings, on Saturday the weekend before. As I see the numbers of views on this site grow every day, I’m becoming more heedful of the details I share. Plenty of people who know my mom, for instance, have read her story, and I’m not sure she’d have wanted to share it so indiscriminately. I’m applying the rule here that I’ll only share details that are crucial to a clear storyline, and even if they are I’ll leave them out or change them if they could be tied to any individual. 

We each took our turn to tell our old stories as per tradition, and we even got to hear some new ones. But Ken’s took centerstage, provoking intense discussion. One theme that took hold was that it was too tragic that Leena might not get to talk to Piltok before he died. Still, Ken couldn’t be convinced to let her go talk to him again, not until he could be reasonably sure it was safe. By the time everyone was getting ready to leave, I had the impression he was happy with how his visit turned out. Mike invited Ken to bring Leena over to meet his own daughter. He also said it was okay if Ken wanted to call him in the middle of the night should Leena wake up with another of her screaming fits. Chris said if Mike didn’t answer to call him next. None of our group members had any answers or solutions, but I think Ken just wanted some support. His daughter wasn’t the only one in need of some new friends. 

The introduction of Belcane to Leena’s lineup of invisible interlocuters upped the ante for Ken. He said he’s considered himself Christian his whole life, but he’s never been especially devout. Having gone to Catholic school as a kid, he was plenty familiar with stories about demons and the devil trying to get people to sign his book. Unless one of her classmates told her about that stuff, though, he couldn’t think of how she may have learned about it herself. Worse, he had an inkling that Belcane showing up was a direct result of his aggressive response to Leena’s night terrors. That’s how her original and charming stories were suddenly hijacked by more traditional, far darker themes and characters. He felt guilty. More than that, though, he was scared for his daughter. 

I only hoped, watching him sidle into his car and back out of the driveway after the party, that he’d been reassured that he had people who believed and supported him, people who’d come to his aid if more trouble ensued. None of us thought we’d heard the end of the story that night. But I was thoroughly unprepared for the next call I got from Ken, which culminated in a plan for another gathering, this one the night before Halloween. And this time, my mom was able to attend. I took quite a bit of time filling her in on the details she’d missed. She said she’d be glad to come to the gathering and hear Ken’s story, but she probably wouldn’t be of any more help than any of my friends or the girl’s own therapist.

I smiled before hanging up the phone, thinking, yeah, I’m not so sure about that.

***

“It wasn’t Leena’s screams that woke me up this time. It was a commotion outside my own window. Mind you, both our bedrooms are on the second floor of the house, so I’m not at all used to being woken up by anything thumping on the casement. I started from a dead sleep and turned to see the blankness beyond the glass. For a long time, I was too startled to move. The last thing I wanted to do was get out of bed and walk toward the sound I thought I’d heard. By the time I finally put my feet on the floor and started creeping up to the window though, I’d already resolved to go down the hall and check on Leena. First, I needed to see what was outside.

“With my face against the glass, I looked out and then down at the ground beside the house. There was nothing out of the ordinary, but it was too dark to see much of anything. Then, just as I was turning away to walk toward the door, I caught a glimpse of something darting past the window. In the second and a half my eyes managed to light on it, I saw it was a bird. Just a bird. I’m no expert on species. I imagine it was a finch or something. What I did see for sure was that it flew away from the house along a vertical course up into the sky. I stood there struck dumb for a couple seconds. Then I hurried out to the hall and toward Leena’s bedroom. 

“That’s when I heard the scream. Only it wasn’t Leena, I knew right away. I sprinted to the door and burst in just in time to see a shadow streaking across the floor, up the wall, and along the ceiling. Bewildered, I reflexively looked over at the plug-in night light next to the closet. That’s when I realized Leena’s bed was empty. I scanned the room frantically, ran to the closet to see if she was in there, dropped down to look under the bed. Then I bolted from the room, horrified that she may have sleepwalked to the stairs. Just as I was imagining her little body as a crumpled pile at the foot of the stairs, I heard the front door open. I shouted for her to stop. But before I made it to the stairs, I heard a crunch from her bedroom. The sound stopped me in my tracks. Was she still in her room? If she wasn’t, who was? Who had just opened the front door? 

“A crunch?” Mike said.

“Yes, that’s what it was. I was even sure I knew what had made the noise. The window was cracked, by something pushing against it from inside Leena’s room. I hesitated just long enough to review my search of the room in my mind. Leena wasn’t in there. As much as I wanted to investigate the sound, I had to make sure she was alright first. So I threw myself down the stairs and rushed out the front door, trying to look every direction at once. With the yard lit by the porch lamp, she wasn’t hard to find. I caught sight of her running toward the woods. I called out to her. She heard me but she didn’t stop. When I called out again, she turned back and said, ‘Dad, I have to see Piltok—I have to!’ And then she turned back toward the woods and kept going. I ran after her.

“She was by the creek when I caught up to her, an old spot I’d shown her years ago. She was sobbing. ‘I did what you said,’ she managed to say. ‘I held up Mom’s cross and I told Belcane she had to leave.’ I asked her if Belcane had said anything. ‘She told me Piltok is dead, that I’ll never get to talk to him again.’ So, that was why she’d run out of the house. Next, I asked her what happened after she told Belcane to leave. ‘She screamed and started making a commotion.’ 

“‘Honey,’ I said, ‘the window in your room is cracked.’ I waited. She didn’t say anything. ‘Do you know what happened to the window?’ She sniffled. Then she started sobbing again.”

This was when my mom first spoke. “I’m guessing she was plenty mad at you for forbidding her from speaking to Piltok in his final days.”

“She was indeed—she still is. As we were walking back to the house, she pulled away, shouting, ‘You made me stay away! You’re the reason I couldn’t talk to him! I had so much to tell him. I had so much to ask him.’ She tried to run back into the woods, but I caught up to her and picked her up. She wailed the whole time I carried her to the house.”

“And the window really was cracked?” Mike asked. 

“The window was cracked. Leena must’ve done it somehow. She must’ve. Maybe she threw something at it or hit it. Maybe it caused a smaller crack at first, but then the wind picked up. I don’t know. It’s not like it was windy that night. Maybe pulling open the front door… I don’t know.”

“But the voice,” Chris objected. “You said you heard a scream, that you knew it wasn’t Leena. And wasn’t Leena already on her way downstairs?” 

“Listen,” Ken said, exasperated. “I don’t know what you want me to say. That I have proof some ghost or demon was in my house, saying God knows what to my daughter? I came here to talk to all of you because I thought you could be reasonable but wouldn’t dismiss me out of hand as crazy. But all of this is crazy. I don’t believe in demons or grentroleems or salobogs or any of it. Jesus, it sounds asinine just saying those names out loud.”

“Mr. Baldwin,” Mom said, “how did your wife die?”

“What? She had cancer.”

“Did she have it for a long time before she died?” 

“Yes, she had it when Leena was just old enough to remember. Then the treatment started working and it went into remission. Then, after a few years, it came back.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Two years ago. Why?”

“And how much have you talked to Leena about your wife’s passing?”

“I talked to her… Of course, we talked. I’m sorry Mrs. Caldwell, but what are you getting at?” 

Mike, Chris, and Cindy were all staring at Mom now in disbelief. I suppose I felt the same way they did. Was she really going to psychologize this whole thing? How could the hidden mental mechanics of grief possibly account for invisible screamers and self-cracking windows? 

Mom said, “Leena started developing her friendships in the woods about two years ago too, if I’m guessing right. I’d also wager that was the last time you personally visited the spot by the creek you said you originally showed her.” 

“It wasn’t exactly at the same time,” Ken said, “but not long after, yeah.” 

“Don’t you see why the creatures have short lifespans then? Leena’s mom was most likely given a series of updates to her prognosis. She had a year. Then she had six months. Then the cancer went into remission and she was saved. Then she had six months again.”

“Mrs. Caldwell,” Chris broke in to say, “you don’t really think this is all just coming from some emotional disturbance from Leena’s mom dying, do you? I mean, seriously. Emotional disturbances don’t crack windows.”

“Oh, by the time you reach my age, you’ll understand that you’re under no obligation to form hard and fast opinions about things before learning all you care to about them—and you’re almost always far better off if you don’t. To me, it sounds an awful lot like Mr. Baldwin here has a demon in his house, one who’s taken a liking to his daughter. On the other hand, it also sounds like Mr. Baldwin wasn’t quite sure where Leena was when he heard the window splitting. It’s also interesting to me that this Belcane character first arrived on the scene after Mr. Baldwin introduced a traditional religious element to the story—the silver cross his wife had given him. As you said yourself,” she said turning back to Ken, “up till then it had been all original, and if I may, all rather pagan-seeming characters.”

Ken looked down, shaking his head. He was smiling but I saw a tear drop from his eye. “I’ve been beating myself up over that. I knew I shouldn’t have told her to stop talking to them, if for no other reason than that she was so invested in that world. It was so important to her. Hell, she created the whole thing. And I took it from her. Whatever her conversations with Piltok were, they were important to her. And I took the last of them away from her.” 

“Don’t feel bad about it, Mr. Baldwin. Your daughter is trying to encourage your engagement. Her story realm isn’t as sealed off from the rest of the world as you imagine. It’s like a dance. She coaxes you into making a move, and then she responds.”

“But Leena’s not like that. She’s not manipulative. She’s not… histrionic. She’d never pretend to some affliction to get attention.”

“Oh, in her mind, I’m sure the crises are very real—just as they are in yours. I’m not saying either of you is leading this dance deliberately. From each of your personal perspectives, you’re both responding to quite literal realities. Your daughter is receiving all kinds of messages from her new friends, and she doesn’t know how to respond or what to believe about them. Meanwhile, she’s worried that each of them is days—or minutes—away from dying. Then there’s you, Mr. Baldwin. You’re terrified your daughter may be losing her mind, and you’re worried she may hurt herself in the process. Now, with all the special effects, you’re doubting your own sanity, if you’re not wondering if maybe there really is an old witch talking to your daughter.”

            “Special effects?” Chris said aghast. “You can’t really be saying Ken would mistake his own daughter’s scream for someone else’s, Mrs. Caldwell. And he heard the front door open before he heard the crunch of the window cracking. Did she open the door, run back up the stairs, sneak past her dad, break the window, and then run back downstairs, again without him seeing her?”

“Heavens no,” Mom said. “I’m as impressed with these phenomena as you are, Chris. If it’s as Mr. Baldwin says, then it sounds to me like something extraordinary really is happening in his house. You even forgot about the shadow he saw bounding about his daughter’s room when he first came in.” 

Ken finally looked up now. “You’re right, Mrs. Caldwell. I mean, about Leena and me. The fact is, we hardly ever talk anymore. With Janelle’s sickness, things got so intense. I didn’t know how much more my heart could take. So I withdrew.”

“Here you are now, though, unburdening yourself among new friends. Tell me something, Mr. Baldwin. Those nights Leena woke up screaming or had scratches on her arm—did you stay with her the rest of those nights or did you both go back to your separate rooms?” 

“Oh, I stayed with her for a while, but then we both eventually went back to sleep in our own beds. She’s eleven.” 

“I see. Yes, eleven is old enough to sleep alone, barring extenuating eventualities. I imagine you’re not one for staying with someone you’re worried about through the night, because you’ve already done that so many times, and all that ended… not so well.” 

“Yes,” he said with a brittle voice, “not well at all.” 

“Tell me about the spot by the creek.”

“That’s where Leena goes to talk to the Piltok character. That’s where she goes and comes back talking about all these fantastical creatures. That’s where I should have let her keep going while I looked for other solutions to her night terrors.”

“You said you were the one who first showed the spot to Leena. What did it mean to you?”

“To me? I suppose it was just a pretty spot by our house. I did go there sometimes to sort of catch my breath, you know, when Janelle was… going through what she went through. Leena once asked me where I’d been, and I told her I’d needed a minute to gather my thoughts. She pointed out I tended to go to the same place whenever I did that. So I took her there.”

“How often did you go there together after that?”

“Not often. Maybe half a dozen times. We had a couple of really tough, but really good conversations there. Ha, you know, I’m pretty sure that’s where we were when I told her her mom’s cancer had come back, and that it was more aggressive than before.” He lifted his hand to cover his eyes.

“That poor child. Is it any wonder she kept going back there? For answers. For peace. For some kind of connection. Is it any wonder that when you stopped going there yourself, she found another way to get all of those things?” 

Amazed, I looked around the room. Chris sat on the edge of the couch, his eyes focused on the floor in front of him, as if he were puzzling out some mystery etched in the carpet fibers. Mike had one leg propped on the armrest, and he was staring at Mom with his mouth agape. Cindy swiped a tear from her cheek before looking back at me and shaking her head in wonder. Ken, meanwhile, had a choked expression, as if trying to decide whether to erupt or collapse. 

It was Chris who broke the silence. “What do you think Ken should do, Mrs. Caldwell?” Now Ken’s mouth fell open as if he were about to say something but then thought better of it. Everyone in the room turned back toward Mom, who visibly shrank back into her chair. 

“I’m no expert on these things,” she said with poise at odds with her posture. “And I certainly wouldn’t presume to tell you what’s best for your family, Mr. Baldwin. If I were in your predicament, though, I have to say there are a few courses that seem commonsensical to me. The first is that, if you’re concerned about your daughter’s safety, whether the danger is posed by this Belcane woman or by Leena herself, you should stay with her. Bring a cot into her bedroom if you have to. Or maybe there’s a couch one of you can sleep on. That way you can be better assured she’s safe.”

Chris leaned over and whispered something to Mike. I imagine he said something like, “Why the hell wouldn’t you keep your child in the room with you with all that’s going on?” I recalled Mom’s suggestion about why Ken might be reluctant to stay with Leena through the night, though, and I concluded she was right not to think ill of him for it. But both Chris and Mike were probably adjusting to the change in focus from a thrilling exploration of supernatural occurrences to an intervention of sorts.

Ken swallowed hard before saying, “I guess that’s not so unreasonable.” He cleared his throat. “And you probably think I need to talk to Leena more as well, which is also something I probably should have thought of myself.” 

“Yeah, it sounds to me like you tried to get her talking to everyone except you. I know it won’t just be hard for Leena to talk to you now, especially about the things she most needs to talk to you about. It’s going to be just as hard for you. That’s not something you should beat yourself up over. But you also can’t count on the idea occurring to you spontaneously in any given moment. And you’re going to have to overcome some natural reluctance.” 

            “I suppose you understand all this so well because you’ve lost someone close to you as well.”

“Oh, that was such a long time ago. Another life. Sure, I’ve lost not just one by this point. But I do remember back to when Jim died and all I wanted to do was push away the people I most needed to be close to. I don’t know how well I understand what you’re going through. It’s genuinely frightening. I’m just pointing out some things that jump out to me.”

“Maybe I’ll go with her tomorrow to look for Piltok by the creek,” Ken said. He couldn’t make it to the last word of the sentence before breaking down in tears, briefly. With some effort, he righted himself. Mom had nailed it: there really was some emotional block preventing him from going there. 

I turned back to her in still more disbelief. I wanted to express my awe at her insight—we’d all been talking to Ken longer than her but were too distracted by the details of the story. Instead, I heard myself saying, “You said a few courses, Mom. Was there something else you wanted to suggest?”

Mom smiled knowingly. “I may be biased, but my favorite part of Leena’s story is the six-foot shaggy beast that saves children from nightmares. What did you say her name was?”

“It was Kemoa,” Chris said before Ken could answer. 

“Ah, yes. Kemoa. I think maybe you and Leena can go looking for Piltok in the woods together, and if for some reason he doesn’t turn up, the two of you can call on Kemoa. Oh, and Mr. Baldwin, whatever happens, sometime soon I would go to the shelter and get your daughter a dog, preferably one with black and white fur and blue eyes.” 

***

“Well, Chris and Mike were a little upset you turned their scary story forum into a ‘psychotherapy session,’ as Mike called it. But mostly we’re all just amazed at how you saw through to the crux of the whole thing.”

It was Halloween night and I’d called my mom to tell her I’d heard from Ken, who was already feeling much better. He’d even moved an old couch into Leena’s room so he could stay the night with her until they could figure out what to do about Belcane. “Tell your mom I somehow knew from the story you wrote she’d be able to help me,” he said in a tone markedly different from the one he’d spoken to us in before. “I was not disappointed. Tell her I can’t thank her enough. I’m even wondering if I should invite her to go to the shelter with us to pick out a dog.” 

“I don’t have much confidence I saw to the crux of anything,” Mom said now. “Though if I made either of them feel better for a bit, that’s good enough for me. I’m guessing that means Piltok was a no-show. We’ll all just have to hope Leena hasn’t seen the last of him; she did say he doesn’t always come. We don’t have to assume the worst. They may still need his help if Belcane keeps getting more violent.”

“Oh, come on, Mom. I bet you were right and there was something off about Ken’s perception of the timing between when the door opened and when he heard the window cracking. He’d just woken up and was walking around the house in the dark. I know he said the scream he heard wasn’t his daughter, but it’s not like he’s ever heard Leena’s impression of a scary old woman shrieking in fear or rage or whatever. The shadow could have been anything. It could have been nothing. The real issue here was that Leena’s connection to her father was lost right when she most needed it. You saw that right away.”

“I did see that right away, but I’m not sure about the rest of it. Mr. Baldwin doesn’t seem like the fanciful type. As desperate as he probably is himself to make some new connections, he looked genuinely pained—embarrassed—when he was relaying those details. He thinks he’s losing his mind. He may be.”

“Wait. You don’t think there really is something supernatural going on in Ken’s house, do you?” 

“No, you’re probably right. Probably. But I’ll say one thing, thinking about that old creature looming over that little girl sends a shiver down my spine. And even when I was telling him he should sleep in his daughter’s room, I was thinking you’d have a hard time getting me to sleep in there. Yeah, I generally don’t buy these stories you and your friends are so thrilled about, and if I had to bet I’d say it’s all explainable without recourse to the otherworldly. But I’d also bet we haven’t heard the end of Leena’s story. We haven’t heard the last of Belcane.”

The line went silent. I couldn’t think of a way to respond. As I was opening my mouth to ask what she thought we should do, Mom added, “And I keep finding myself staring at clouds in the sky, thinking I really can almost see little dots darting around in them.”

***

Kemoa is the third in a series of Halloween stories. You can follow the links below to the first two.

CANNONBALL: A HALLOWEEN STORY

JAX: A HALLOWEEN STORY  

THE TREE CLIMBER: A STORY INSPIRED BY W.S. MERWIN

Ted McCormick on Steven Pinker and the Politics of Rationality

Concordia University historian Ted McCormick has serious reservations about Steven Pinker’s new book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems So Scarce, Why It Matters. His short review in Slate provides of long list of reasons why Pinker’s project was doomed from the outset. But the one issue that really seems to bother McCormick is that “instead of confronting his targets head on, the middle chapters engage in a kind of indirect culture warfare, dragging foes in as apparently incidental examples of irrationality or motivated reasoning.” You see, by McCormick’s lights, Rationality isn’t about rationality at all, but about scoring points against ideological rivals. 

            Throughout his review, McCormick is at pains to ward off the impression that he’s tilting at windmills. He admits “the bulk of the book is less an open culture war campaign than a May Day of rationality’s arsenal,” and he even goes so far as to call it “entertaining,” noting that if you skip the bad parts, “you can find an informative and briskly written book about types of reasoning and their applications.” In other words, the bulk of the book is entertaining and does exactly what Pinker says he wanted it to do. Still, McCormick makes it clear he isn’t giving Rationality his endorsement. “The trouble,” he writes, “begins when you read all the words,” by which he means read between the lines. Doing so, he seems convinced, will reveal that all this stuff about the methods of reasoning is little more than a smoke screen hiding Pinker’s real points, which are political. 

            This can be seen, McCormick insists, when you look at the examples of irrationality Pinker uses: “as the examples pile up, one wonders what is being defended.” McCormick is fine with all the examples of right wing or religious irrationality. “Where the shoe fits,” he writes, “fair enough.” But the small handful of examples from the left side of the political divide are another matter. Here’s an emblematic passage from the review: 

Pinker lets his own solidarities and enmities shape his concern for facts and argumentation. This results in large, unsupported claims, as when a Politico op-ed he co-wrote in defence of Bret Stephens is his sole footnoted source for the claim that logical fallacies are “coin of the realm” across academia and journalism. It also produces some mystifying assertions, such as that the 2020 murder of George Floyd led to “the sudden adoption of a radical academic doctrine, Critical Race Theory”—and that both CRT and Black Lives Matter are driven by an exaggerated sense of Black people’s statistical risk of being killed by police. While Pinker soon walks back what he suggests may be a “psychologically obtuse” account of BLM’s origins, the chronological nonsense of the claim and the characterization of CRT as a “doctrine” stand without evidence or argument. After all, he might say, they’re just examples.

Unsupported claims and nonsense sound pretty bad. But, given all the examples McCormick fails to look up the citations for and doesn’t fault as insufficiently supported, examples in the realms of climate change, creationism, anti-vaxxism, Q-Anon and the like, you could be forgiven for wondering if he’s just mad Pinker is poking at some of his own pet causes. 

            Did Pinker really claim that fallacies are the coin of the realm “across academia and journalism” with reference to a single citation? You can find the passage on pages 92 and 93 of the hardback edition:

The ad hominem, genetic, and affective fallacies used to be treated as forehead-slapping blunders or dirty rotten tricks. Critical-thinking teachers and high school debate coaches would teach their students how to spot and refute them. Yet in one of the ironies of modern intellectual life, they are becoming the coin of the realm. In large swaths of academia and journalism the fallacies are applied with gusto, with ideas attacked or suppressed because their proponents, sometimes from centuries past, bear unpleasant odors and stains. [Here’s where the footnote appears referring to the article on Bret Stephens; it begins “For discussion of one example…”] It reflects a shift in one’s conception of the nature of beliefs: from ideas that may be true or false to expressions of a person’s moral and cultural identity. It also bespeaks a change in how scholars and critics conceive of their mission: from seeking knowledge to advancing social justice and other moral and political causes. 

Pedantic of me to point out, I know, but McCormick’s “across academia and journalism” is a misrepresentation of Pinker’s phrase, “In large swaths of academia and journalism,” one that serves to increase the scope of a claim McCormick faults for being large and insufficiently supported. Still, the claim does require support, and it’s true that the footnote lists a single example. 

            The next question is what does the case of Bret Stephens reveal, if anything, about academia and journalism? The first point that jumps out is that the controversy surrounding Stephens involves The New York Times, the biggest name in journalism, and it began when critics faulted an article by Stephens for abhorrent arguments allegedly contained within it. The result was that the Times deleted large parts of the article. Since the Times is the source of record, you might assume the criticisms held some merit. Not so. The authors of the Politico article write,

the column incited a furious and ad hominem response. Detractors discovered that one of the authors of the paper Stephens had cited went on to express racist views, and falsely claimed that Stephens himself had advanced ideas that were “genetic” (he did not), “racist” (he made no remarks about any race) and “eugenicist” (alluding to the discredited political movement to improve the human species by selective breeding, which was not remotely related to anything Stephens wrote).

Those hyperlinks in the passage are to false charges leveled in the pages of The Guardian and Mother Jones, both newspapers with rather large circulations if my sources are correct. 

            So Pinker’s citation isn’t completely useless, but maybe it leaves something to be desired. It’s still just one case, and it doesn’t mention anything about academia. There is, however, another footnote at the end of the same paragraph. This one refers to a post by Jonathan Haidt arguing that universities must decide whether their main mission is to seek truth or to pursue social justice. Haidt writes,

As a social psychologist who studies morality, I have watched these two teloses come into conflict increasingly often during my 30 years in the academy. The conflicts seemed manageable in the 1990s. But the intensity of conflict has grown since then, at the same time as the political diversity of the professoriate was plummeting, and at the same time as American cross-partisan hostility was rising. I believe the conflict reached its boiling point in the fall of 2015 when student protesters at 80 universities demanded that their universities make much greater and more explicit commitments to social justice, often including mandatory courses and training for everyone in social justice perspectives and content.

Is 80 a significantly large number of universities to justify the phrase “large swaths”? Does demanding greater focus on social justice amount to succumbing to fallacies? Haidt’s position is in fact that campus activism is often motivated by faulty reasoning. The second part of the post Pinker cites lists some of these errors, including the conflation of correlation with causation. Haidt writes,

All social scientists know that correlation does not imply causation. But what if there is a correlation between a demographic category (e.g., race or gender) and a real world outcome (e.g., employment in tech companies, or on the faculty of STEM departments)? At SJU, they teach you to infer causality: systemic racism or sexism. I show an example in which this teaching leads to demonstrably erroneous conclusions [there’s an embedded video]. At Truth U, in contrast, they teach you that “disparate outcomes do not imply disparate treatment.” (Disparate outcomes are an invitation to look closely for disparate treatment, which is sometimes the cause of the disparity, sometimes not).

Of course, while these citations offer some support for Pinker’s claim, we can be sure McCormick isn’t convinced. 

            What about Pinker’s claims regarding Critical Race Theory and Black Lives Matter? First, the statistical matter: are CRT and BLM motivated by an overreaction to police shootings? McCormick doesn’t mention the numbers cited in the section he quotes: “A total of 65 unarmed Americans of all races are killed by the police in an average year,” Pinker writes on page 123, after making the claim McCormick objects to, “of which 23 are African American, which is around three tenths of one percent of the 7,500 African American homicide victims.” He cites the data on police shootings tracked by the Washington Post.* Pinker could have also cited a report by the Skeptics Research Center that shows Americans wildly overestimate the number of African Americans killed by police: “over half (53.5%) of those reporting ‘very liberal’ political views estimated that 1,000 or more unarmed Black men were killed, a likely error of at least an order of magnitude.” But his book isn’t about police shootings. 

Next, can the claim that the murder of George Floyd led to widespread adoption of CRT be supported? A 2020 article in the BBC by Anthony Zurcher called Critical Race Theory: The Concept Dividing America includes this passage, 

The term itself first began to gain prominence in the 1990s and early 2000s, as more scholars wrote and researched on the topic. Although the field of study traditionally has been the domain of graduate and legal study, it has served recently as a framework for academics trying to find ways of addressing racial inequities through the education system - particularly in light of last summer's Black Lives Matter protests. “The George Floyd murder caused this whole nation to take a look at race and racism, and I think there was a broad recognition that something was amiss,” says Marvin Lynn, a critical race theory scholar and professor of education at Portland State University.

What is it about Pinker’s chronology that strikes McCormick as nonsensical? He must understand that most people outside of academia only learned about CRT recently, and it’s been in the context of the newly heated discussion of racism instigated by Floyd’s killing. I suspect his issue is semantic—is it really CRT that’s being taught in schools? 

            The other semantic point here is whether Pinker should support his use of the term doctrine as applied to CRT; again, he goes so far as to call it a “radical academic doctrine.” I’m just going to refer to Richard Delgado’s definition from his 2012 textbook on the subject. 

The critical race theory (CRT) movement is a collection of activists and scholars interested in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power. The movement considers many of the same issues that conventional civil rights and ethnic studies discourses take up, but places them in a broader perspective that includes economics, history, context, group- and self-interest, and even feelings and the unconscious. Unlike traditional civil rights, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.

Well, that sounds pretty radical to me. But does it amount to a doctrine? As far as I understand it, all CRT follows from the tenet that society is comprised of two groups, the oppressors and the oppressed, and the efforts of the oppressors to maintain their hegemony infect every institution imaginable, from universities, to courts, to scientific research programs. That’s why CRT “questions the very foundations of the liberal order.” That central division wasn’t discovered through any empirical methods; rather, it’s asserted as an axiom—or a doctrine. I have no doubt McCormick would call my take simplistic and naïve, but I’d counter that he’s using obfuscation to avoid legitimate criticism.

            Let’s briefly consider another point McCormick takes issue with. This one includes the serious allegation that Pinker has misrepresented an activist’s writing. 

Pinker treats Mariame Kaba’s 2020 New York Times op-ed in favor of police abolition as an example of confusing “less-than-perfect causation” with “no causation,” because it is based on the fact that, under the current system, few rapists are prosecuted. “The editorialist did not consider,” he writes, that fewer still might be prosecuted without the police. In fact, Kaba’s argument is not primarily based on rape at all; she begins by talking about how much time police spend on traffic violations and noise complaints, and proceeds through a century-plus history of failed attempts at police “reform” (the point of her piece). What good does such misrepresentation serve?

Pinker’s comments on the matter take up a whole three sentences on page 260, coming right after the example of people pointing to nonagenarian smokers as a refutation of the link between cigarettes and cancer. The idea is that people point to rare exceptions in their efforts to cast doubt on wider trends, and he does indeed suggest Kaba’s reason for wanting the police abolished is because “the current approach hasn’t ended” rape. But the quotation is accurate, and the failure of policing to end rape is part of her argument. 

Is it really a misrepresentation to cite one part of her argument without mentioning the others? Possibly, but if so McCormick himself has a lot to answer for. What good does the alleged misrepresentation do? Well, it provides an illustrative example of people thinking an intervention that’s not a hundred percent effective can’t be effective at all—precisely the purpose Pinker wanted it to serve. What McCormick failed to notice is that Kaba makes the same error throughout her argument. She writes, for instance,

Minneapolis had instituted many of these “best practices” but failed to remove Derek Chauvin from the force despite 17 misconduct complaints over nearly two decades, culminating in the entire world watching as he knelt on George Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes.

So, the reforms didn’t save George Floyd, but did they save anyone else? Kaba doesn’t think to ask. We should also ask if Kaba really believes police tactics haven’t improved at all since 1894, the date of her first example of a failed reform. Pinker, in the same footnote he uses to cite Kaba’s article, refers to a quantitative analysis of how policing affects crime that avoids the all-or-nothing fallacy he’s discussing in this section of his book. It paints a more optimistic, though by no means Panglossian, picture. 

            BLM, CRT, fallacies running rampant in journalism and higher education, police abolitionism—are you noticing a pattern? The only thing missing is cancel culture. By now, you won’t be surprised to find out McCormick faults Pinker for mentioning that topic as well (though not by name): 

Blaming universities’ “suffocating leftwing monoculture” for popular mistrust of expertise, Pinker mentions two examples in the text: University of Southern California professor Greg Patton’s removal from a course after using the Chinese ne ga, which can sound like the N-word, and testimony from unnamed personal “correspondents.” (In a footnote, he invites readers to look to Heterodox Academy, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and Quillette—all of it—for further examples.) The very next paragraph warns of “illusions instilled by sensationalist anecdote chasing.” Doctor, heal thyself!

If you’re following along, the offending section is on pages 313 and 314. What Pinker wrote is that “confidence in universities is sinking” and “A major reason for the mistrust is the universities’ suffocating left-wing monoculture.” It’s a fine point, to be sure, but explaining mistrust of “expertise” is different from explaining mistrust of “universities.” A few high-profile cases of stifled speech at universities may just be enough to account for public mistrust, though you’d need further evidence to support the same point about expertise in general. 

That’s a minor misrepresentation, it’s true, but McCormick also fails to mention that the same footnote referring readers to Heterodox Academy, FIRE, and Quillette includes the line, “For other examples, see…” before citing: The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on College Campuses by Kors and Silvergate, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate by Lukianoff, and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting up a Generation for Failure by the same Lukianoff and Johnathan Haidt. Who can forget the Evergreen Incident, where Bret Weinstein was threatened by a group of student protesters in the middle of one of his classes? It was all over the news. It’s covered in detail in Lukianoff and Haidt’s book, along with the case of Nicholas Christakis at Yale, who was confronted by students protesting his racism—because he and his wife Erika argued that students were capable of choosing Halloween costumes themselves without being told how not to offend each other. 

Maybe McCormick has a point, though, that fears about cancel culture are overblown because of “sensationalist anecdote chasing” by right-wing news outlets. How is this different from African Americans fearing for their lives after seeing YouTube videos of police shootings, when the numbers show they’re much more likely to be killed by someone who’s not a cop? For one thing, the numbers on police killings, though difficult to acquire and analyze*, are relatively simple compared to any effort at quantifying the risks posed by Twitter mobs or campus protesters. How many cases amounts to cause for valid concern? Another difference is that cancel culture operates on the logic of terror: activists publicly take down offenders in order to send a message to anyone else who may consider giving voice to a forbidden idea. They also send the message to other activists on how to deal with figures who don’t toe the line. I could be wrong, but I don’t think most cops are eager to have their fatal interactions with African Americans made more public.**

It should be noted too that organizations like Heterodox Academy and FIRE take it as their mission to promote diversity of opinion and protect free speech on campuses. Johnathan Haidt, one of Heterodox Academy’s founders, writes, “Nowadays there are no conservatives or libertarians in most academic departments in the humanities and social sciences.” In case you want some other sources he adds in a parenthetical “See Langbert, Quain, & Klein, 2016 for more recent findings on research universities; and see Langbert 2018 for similar findings in liberal arts colleges.” Sounds a bit monoculture-y to me. Signing on to Quillette, I had to search all of about two minutes for the tag “Free Speech,” which quickly helped me find an article about a composer who was mobbed and lost his job for criticizing arsonists at BLM protests. A continued search brought up several more cases. (I’ve actually witnessed a couple Facebook and Twitter debates firsthand that culminated in references to workplaces and threats to contact employers.)

I grant that Pinker could easily have been more precise with his citations; for instance, he could have cited FIRE’s report on the largest survey ever conducted on campus free expression, which found that “Fully 60% of students reported feeling that they could not express an opinion because of how students, a professor, or their administration would respond. This number is highest among ‘strong Republicans’ (73%) and lowest among ‘strong Democrats’ (52%).” FAIR also reports on the worrying trend of scholars being targeted and sanctioned for what was once protected speech:

Over the past five and a half years, a total of 426 targeting incidents have occurred. Almost three-quarters of them (314 out of 426; 74%) have resulted in some form of sanction.

The number of targeting incidents has risen dramatically, from 24 in 2015 to 113 in 2020. As of mid-2021, 61 targeting incidents have already occurred.

Still, Pinker’s book isn’t about free expression in schools or newsrooms. Remember McCormick elsewhere takes Pinker to task for not properly citing evidence to justify his use of a single term (doctrine). How long and in-depth does a citation need to be for a sidebar discussion in a book on a different topic?  

It’s by now a standard retort among leftists that cancel culture is a myth promulgated by outlets like Fox News. That’s why McCormick only has to nod at Pinker’s example to signal to his readers what the book is really about. The Ad Fontes Media site, which assesses outlets for their bias and reliability, puts Slate, where McCormick published his review, in the hinterlands between “Skews Left” and “Hyper-Partisan Left.” (Quillette is incidentally closer to the center on the chart.) It’s not at all hard to imagine that McCormick would think fears of cancellation are overblown, since in this single article he’s shown himself willing and eager to defend any of the left’s central orthodoxies, regardless of the cost to his intellectual integrity. As a liberal historian, he’s far less likely to run afoul of campus speech codes than, say, a behavioral geneticist or evolutionary psychologist—to name two fields Pinker often reports on. (Pinker is no conservative though; he donated to Obama’s last campaign and released an embarrassing video of himself dancing in celebration of Trump’s 2020 defeat at the polls.) 

From a Twitter discussion (commenter is not McCormick)

Why am I searching through footnote references about BLM and cancel culture in response to a review of a book about rationality? In earlier times, McCormick’s review would rightly be denounced as a politically motivated hatchet job. The thing is, though, I don’t think McCormick or many of his readers would be bothered much by this verdict. Largely as a consequence of intellectuals’ move from truth-seeking to social justice activism, the very one that Pinker and Haidt lament, it’s become far more acceptable to attack one’s fellow intellectuals on political grounds, regardless of the nominal topic of discussion. Many believe that you’re either helping to dismantle the hegemony or you’re helping to keep it in place. Pinker is allegedly doing the latter. He’s an old-fashioned modernist in a newfangled postmodern world.

So, McCormick quibbles with Pinker’s citations and I quibble with McCormick’s quibbles. What’s the point? For me, it’s the sad state of book reviewing, where McCormick can write an entire review calling Pinker out for insufficiently supporting his claims about hot-button political issues when the book he’s supposed to be reviewing is about something else entirely.*** Sure, McCormick offers up some arguments in addition to his political issues. Everyone claims to be rational, he insists, so what good can encouraging people to use reason possibly do? Everyone? Recall critical race theorist Richard Delgado’s challenge to “Enlightenment rationalism” for one prominent counterexample. Pinker answers the question himself, pointing out that many people think rationality is “overrated” because “logical personalities are joyless and repressed, analytical thinking must be subordinated to social justice, and a good heart and reliable gut are surer routes to well-being than tough-minded logic and argument” (xvi). I guess McCormick has never encountered anyone saying things like that. 

McCormick’s strongest point is that, as Pinker admits, rationality must be in the service of some preestablished goal. What Pinker points to as an example of irrationality then might simply be an instance of competing goals. Let’s take Richard Delgado as an example. He says rationality is problematic because it might get in the way of racial justice. I imagine Pinker would respond, how do you know? (See page 42 of Rationality.) Why would you assume subordinating reason to social justice will lead to better outcomes? Even if it did, how would you know the approach worked? You’d have to use the tools of reason to find out and to convince others (unless you were prepared to use coercion). Tellingly, though, in this case, Pinker and Delgado actually share the same goal; they’re simply disagreeing about the best way to pursue it. 

McCormick’s supposedly damning point about goals can really only apply to a subset of disagreements anyway. True, some people may have the goal of reinstating Trump as the president, while others have the goal of keeping him as far away from the oval office as possible. Encouraging both sides to be more rational will do nothing to settle the conflict. But isn’t getting one president elected over another a sub-goal, with the larger goal being to ensure the well-being of our nation’s children in the future. This goal too will be hampered by competing values in many areas, but it allows for at least some overlap of visions. Unless McCormick is suggesting that every instance of irrationality really reduces to differing goals, then the criticism can only apply to some disagreements and not others. The ones it doesn’t apply to can rightly be called irrelevant to Pinker’s discussion. 

One of the things about McCormick’s review that will most frustrate anyone who’s actually read Rationality is that, contra McCormick’s central thesis, Pinker spends a lot of time describing how an idea that’s irrational from one point of view turns out to be rational from another. This includes BLM: “The goal of the narrative is not accuracy but solidarity,” he writes, explaining that “a public outrage can mobilize overdue action against a long-simmering trouble, as is happening in the grappling with systemic racism in response to the Floyd killing” (124-5).

It’s also not always the case that people are aware of which of their own goals are driving them. Recall Pinker’s line, quoted above, about “a shift in one’s conception of the nature of beliefs: from ideas that may be true or false to expressions of a person’s moral and cultural identity.” I’m sure if we ask McCormick if he was being rational when writing his review, he’d say yes. But I suspect his efforts were in large part motivated by his desire to signal his leftist bona fides to the other members of his tribe. (I’m probably doing the same thing right now, just for a different tribe.) If he has these two competing goals, might he be pursuing one rationally and the other irrationally? 

Here’s the larger point: regardless of whether I can convince McCormick that his review is irrational, anyone reading the exchange can get the takeaway message that to be rational, one must try to avoid the trap of letting our desire to belong and elevate our status distort our view of the matter in question. How might you do that? Well, seeking out friendships with people holding different views could help. Engaging in honest, open debates with people with competing perspectives wouldn’t hurt. It may even be a good idea to simply ask yourself, “Is this something I believe because I’ve really looked into it? Or is it just what the people around me think I should believe? Am I trying to impress everyone by taking down some figure they dislike?” The outcome of the debate about whether McCormick’s review is rational is irrelevant as long as the goal is to help people understand the principle and apply it to their own reasoning. 

Of course, if it really were the case that Pinker’s book bursts at the seams with dubious examples of the irrationality of one political group, that would amount to a good reason to believe he had ulterior motives. But we’re talking about a few passages and a handful of lines in a 340-page book. I’ve already quoted nearly all of them in this post. And he spends just as much time focusing on the reasoning behind showing up at a pizzeria with an assault rifle or storming the Capitol. The real reason McCormick likes the point about rationality serving goals, I suspect, is that it allows him to argue (mistakenly) that determining what’s rational “means choosing some values and imposing some goals.” 

That’s what McCormick wants us to believe Pinker is really up to in the pages of Rationality, imposing his values and goals, anointing himself arbiter of all things rational, and pointing readers to his own weird and dystopian vision of the world. McCormick writes,

This paradox of defining reason as a universal means while invoking it as a specific norm, which is what Pinker specializes in, has wider political implications now, much as it did in the Enlightenment. Remember the San hunters? It was one thing to appreciate their fine calculations when the point to be made was the universality of reason as a human tool. But by the time the theme of reality vs. mythology returns, late in the book, rationality has new heroes: the people Pinker identifies as W.E.I.R.D. (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) “children of Enlightenment.” Unlike the San—indeed, unlike everyone else—these champions not only possess the tools of rationality but “embrace the radical creed of universal realism”. To them belongs an “imperial mandate … to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins,” so that a “technocratic state” can act on their rational beliefs. Welcome to Steven Pinker’s Kingdom of Ends.

Ah, the axe McCormick has come to grind is very large and very blunt indeed. Having argued that Pinker is using his discussion of rationality as a Trojan Horse to promote his goals and values, he paints a final picture of a world ruled by a bunch of the Enlightenment champion’s clones. 

If you’ll forgive me one last lengthy block quote, you can see McCormick’s distortions in action. First, it’s in a chapter titled, “What’s Wrong with People?” in which Pinker attempts to explain why it seems like people are so bad at reasoning. In one section of the chapter, he posits “Two Kinds of Belief: Reality and Mythology”, pointing out that throughout most of our run here on Earth, we humans have let the two realms peacefully coexist in our minds. This was partly because we lacked tools like telescopes and computers and sophisticated statistical methods. But part of it is simply that we lacked a commitment to applying reason to certain questions. The passage begins quoting Bertrand Russel: “It is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatsoever for supposing it is true.” Pinker writes, 

Russell’s maxim is the luxury of a technologically advanced society with science, history, journalism, and their infrastructure of truth-seeking, including archival records, digital datasets, high-tech instruments, and communities of editing, fact-checking, and peer review. We children of the Enlightenment embrace the radical creed of universal realism: we hold that all our beliefs should fall within the reality mindset. We care about whether our creation story, our founding legends, our theories of invisible nutrients and germs and forces, our conceptions of the powerful, our suspicions about our enemies, are true or false. That’s because we have the tools to get answers to these questions, or at least to assign them warranted degrees of credence. And we have a technocratic state that should, in theory, put these beliefs into practice.

But as desirable as that creed is, it is not the natural human way of believing. In granting an imperialistic mandate to the reality mindset to conquer the universe of belief and push mythology to the margins, we are the weird ones—or, as evolutionary social scientists like to say, the WEIRD ones: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. At least, the highly educated among us are, in our best moments. The human mind is adapted to understanding remote spheres of existence through a mythology mindset. It’s not because we descended from Pleistocene hunter-gatherers specifically, but because we descended from people who could not or did not sign on to the Enlightenment ideal of universal realism. Submitting all of one’s beliefs to the trials of reason and evidence is an unnatural skill, like literacy and numeracy, and must be instilled and cultivated.

Suddenly, the paradox McCormick trips over seems a lot less problematic; applying reason in some contexts is natural but applying it in all contexts is not. And what McCormick holds up as a prescriptive vision for the world turns out to be a descriptive—even somewhat humble—answer to the question of why people find rationality so difficult. 

Most importantly, McCormick dishonestly claims Pinker assigns an “imperialistic mandate” to the WEIRD—a group McCormick doesn’t seem to realize he belongs to as well—when he in fact writes that the WEIRD grant this mandate “to the reality mindset.” Pinker’s “Kingdom of Ends”—a reference to Kant’s idea that society should treat every individual not as a means but as an end unto themselves—now looks quite a bit more open-ended and far less autocratic. Is it going too far to suggest McCormick, in seeking out diverse tidbits to connect into a pattern revealing a dangerous hidden plot, must be relying on the same kind of conspiracy theory mindset that’s killing the vaccine hesitant and driving armies of Trump supporters to agitate for his reinstatement after a rigged election? 

            The reason people like Pinker and me are worried about activism invading intellectual spheres is that it undermines the trust the public once rationally placed in truth-seeking institutions. As long as universities, the editorial boards of scientific journals, and the staffs of journalistic websites openly proclaim their commitment to pursuing political agendas—no matter how well-intentioned—the public has good reason to doubt their commitment to truth and just as good reason to treat them each as just another special interest group. McCormick hasn’t written a review of Rationality so much as he’s participated in a campaign against Pinker, who many feel must be denounced because he doesn’t hold all the proper political opinions. (McCormick continues this campaign on Twitter if you’re interested.) A book reviewer should strive to represent the author’s work honestly and fairly, offering readers an accurate sense of what it’s about, how successfully the author is in meeting his goals, and what it’s like to read. McCormick’s review fails on all these counts, as you can see in comparing the passages above. Perhaps, he simply had other goals. 

*****

* Data from a recently published analysis shows that police killings have been underreported by a factor of 55.5% over recent decades. This changes the math on relative risks, but since the numbers are still so small, the outcome isn’t markedly different.

** Since I’ve already had someone complain about my “take” on BLM and police shootings, and because I fear [rationally?] being mobbed myself, let me stress here that I’m in no way giving my own personal take on these subjects here—and I don’t believe Pinker is giving his in Rationality either. The point here is to evaluate the underlying logic of some of the ideas and popular reasoning associated with the subjects. Later in the essay, you’ll find an example of how Pinker’s reasoning about BLM is more nuanced than his pointing to any single error in reasoning might suggest.

*** McCormick gave some brief, rather snarky, responses to this essay on Twitter. Most of his points were against straw men (in my opinion), but he did correctly call attention to this one line that was misleading. I complained of McCormick “bashing Pinker’s politics” throughout his review; he doesn’t. I’ve revised the line to be more precise and correct the error.

Also read:
THE FAKE NEWS CAMPAIGN AGAINST STEVEN PINKER AND ENLIGHTENMENT NOW

And:

THE SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS INSTINCT: STEVEN PINKER ON THE BETTER ANGELS OF MODERNITY AND THE EVILS OF MORALITY

And:

NAPOLEON CHAGNON'S CRUCIBLE AND THE ONGOING EPIDEMIC OF MORALIZING HYSTERIA IN ACADEMIA

Violence in Human Evolution and Postmodernism's Capture of Anthropology

Anytime a researcher publishes a finding that suggests violence may have been widespread over the course of human evolutionary history, you can count on a critical response from one of just a few anthropologists. No matter who the original researcher is or what methodological and statistical approach are applied, one of these critics will invariably insist the methods were flawed and the analysis fails to support the claim. To be fair, these critics do have a theoretical basis for their challenges. By their lights, violence, especially organized, coalitional violence, emerged in complex societies as the result of differential access to prized resources. Hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists tend to roam widely, so they don’t accumulate much by way of property over their lifespans, which means there’s nothing much for them to fight over—at least according to the theory.

But these anthropologists also openly admit to a political agenda driving their engagement in the controversy. The idea that violence was rampant over the course of human evolution could imply that humans evolved to be violent—that violence is in our genes. And, if the view that humans are innately and hence irredeemably violent is allowed to take hold, war hawks can more credibly brush aside talk of peace as naively utopian. As Brian Ferguson, the single most cited advocate of the view that our hunter-gatherer past was markedly more peaceful than our civilized present, says in a documentary about the history of controversial research among the Yąnomamö of Brazil and Venezuela, “If we’re going to work against war, we need to work against the idea that war is human nature” (36:26). In other words, these scholars see a direct line connecting the science of human violence and the politics of war. If you want peace, according to this line of thinking, you must not let the contention that violence was widespread throughout human evolution go unchallenged. 

Of course, admitting to an agenda like this opens you to accusations of ideological bias. Are scholars like Ferguson insisting the evidence of violence in the Pleistocene is weak because they genuinely believe it is? Or is it because they believe they can prevent wars by convincing enough people it is? If some new evidence clearly demonstrated their view to be in error, would they admit this publicly? Or would they continue singing the same tune about our notionally peaceful past while casting aspersions on whoever reported the new evidence? The inescapability of questions like these are what makes it so odd that anyone would admit to a political agenda in a scientific context. So how do they justify it? 

Image by Canva’s Magic Media

Anthropology is an odd discipline. The political homogeneity of people in the field has made it particularly vulnerable to the encroachment of a certain set of ideas from nonscientific disciplines. Postmodernism is rife in the field, and one of the central tenets of postmodernism is that there are more or less covert political motivations driving every intellectual or artistic endeavor. From this perspective, all the scholars proclaiming their ambition to promote peace are doing differently from their seemingly apolitical colleagues is explicitly owning up to their political agenda. 

(Many scholars, no matter how well the label fits, chafe at being called postmodernist, complaining that the term is too vague or that it’s too broad to be meaningfully applied to them. I suspect this is mostly an effort at muddying the waters, but here I’ll simply define postmodernism as a philosophy that focuses on the role of power relations—oppressors versus the oppressed—in knowledge formation and which thus encourages a high degree of skepticism toward scientific claims, especially those that can be viewed as in any way negatively portraying or impacting some marginalized or disempowered group.)

This is where the situation gets scary, because the flipside to postmodernists’ presupposition of political motives is that any researcher who reports evidence of pre-state conflict or any theorist who emphasizes the role of violence in human evolution must likewise have an agenda—to promote war. This must be true even if the anthropologist in question explicitly denies any such agenda. Here’s Douglas Fry in an interview with Oxford University Press:

When the beliefs of a culture hold that humans are naturally warlike, people socialized in such settings tend to accept such views without much question. Cultural traditions influence the thinking and perceptions of scientists and scholars as well. I suspect that one reason that retelling this erroneous finding is so common is that it supposedly provides “scientific confirmation” of the warlike human nature view.

The specific “erroneous finding” Fry refers to is that Yąnomamö men who kill in battle father more children than those who never kill anyone. It was published by Napoleon Chagnon in Science, and Ferguson promptly responded with his criticisms, which Fry insists completely undermine Chagnon’s analysis. Whether the finding has truly been overturned is contested to this day, but Fry’s interview demonstrates a common pattern: Yes, of course, the evidence proves the findings about violence wrong, the postmodern anthropologist will claim, but just for good measure let’s also indict the anthropologist who reported them for his complicity in perpetuating a culture of war. They never seem to realize that the second part of this formula undermines the credibility of the claim made in the first. 

Chagnon’s Findings on Unokai (Killers)

Whether you accept the proposition that politics percolates beneath the surface of all forms of intellectual discourse, you can see how the postmodern activist stance provides a recipe for overly politicized debates, where instead of arguing on the merits of competing views, scholars are enjoined to imagine they’re engaged in righteous combat against their morally compromised colleagues. If you’re more of a traditional scientist, meanwhile—i.e., if you don’t take postmodernism seriously—then the sanctimonious tone taken by your detractors will strike you as evidence of an ideological commitment to sweeping inconvenient evidence under the rug.  

If you’ve ever debated someone who insists on arguing against your presumed ideological agenda while completely ignoring major parts of the case you’re actually making, you know how maddening and futile such exchanges can be. Indeed, many of the rules of scientific discourse—rules postmodernists believe only serve to allow justifications for oppression to fly in under the radar—exist to help intellectual rivals avoid the deadlock of competitive mind-reading and the attribution of sinister motives. Nonetheless, many scholars today take it for granted that science not only can coexist with postmodernism but that science needs postmodernism to prevent the reemergence of evils like eugenics, scientific racism, or colonialist exploitation. What they don’t understand is that you can’t take in the Trojan horse of an idea like ulterior agendas without opening the gates to the entire army of postmodern tenets. Once you let morality or politics or ideology into the debate, then that debate is no longer scientific; there’s no having it both ways. 

Ah, but the postmodernist critic will object that it’s impossible not to let politics and ideology into any debate. Pure objectivity is a fantasy. So, if hidden agendas and biases are going to continue operating despite our best efforts, we may as well call them out. And, having exposed them to the light of day, we may as well admit that our disagreement is as much political as it is scientific. As Allison Mickel and Kyle Olson write in a 2021 op-ed for Sapiens titled “Archaeologists Should Be Activists Too,” 

There are still some who argue that scientists maintain their authority only when they remain objective, separate from current political concerns. Many academics have decried this view for decades, demonstrating that fully objective science has always been more of a myth than a reality. Science has always been shaped by the contemporary concerns of the time and place in which research occurs.

This brings us back to the permissibility, even the moral necessity, of infusing our science with postmodernism. 

But this point rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science. The point was never to thoroughly eradicate bias or to deny that individual perspectives are always shaped by forces beyond the individual’s awareness. The point is that by taking measures to reduce bias we can engage in more fruitful discussions that are more likely to lead to real insights and discoveries. True, bias can never be fully eliminated. Nor can pathogens ever be thoroughly annihilated from an operating theater. That doesn’t mean anyone should undergo surgery in a gas station bathroom. Seeing countless scientific debates degrade into petty moralizing and name-calling free-for-alls between tribalized groups of intellectuals for the past decade on social media ought to have convinced us all that at least trying to stick to the facts while avoiding ad hominem attacks has a lot to recommend it. 

The public trusts science—insofar as this is still true—precisely because scientists make a point of examining evidence as objectively as humanly possible while doing whatever they can to minimize bias. But, once scientists start proclaiming their activist agendas, they forfeit that trust, giving the public no reason to see scientists and scientific institutions as any different from all the other special interest groups vying for attention and resources. Indeed, this loss of trust is already well underway, as the Covid-19 pandemic made abundantly clear.

There are at least two other major problems with the melding of postmodernism onto science. The first is that, while it may be true that we all operate on unconscious beliefs and agendas, there currently exists no method that’s even remotely reliable for determining what those beliefs and agendas are. If you accuse some anthropologist of reporting on the violence she observed among the people she’s studying merely because she favors military expansionist policies, you can expect her to reply that, no, she’s simply telling everyone what she witnessed. How, without resorting to spectral evidence, would you then go about establishing that she in fact doesn’t know her own true motivation? How can others check the work you put into uncovering this hidden agenda? The awkward reality is that postmodern anthropologists routinely insist that their rivals have some reactionary agenda even when those rivals are on record supporting progressive causes. 

To see how catastrophically the attribution of unconscious motives can go awry, take a look at some of the earliest theories about the inner workings of the mind from the turn of the last century. Freud can be credited with the revelation that much of what goes on in our minds is outside of our awareness. But nearly every theory he put forth based on that revelation turned out to be wrong—and in the most grotesque ways. As the theory of the Oedipus Complex, which posits that infant boys want to kill their fathers and marry their mothers, ought to make clear, without sound methods for examining the contents of our unconscious minds, all this speculation about hidden biases and motivations all too easily morphs into fodder for the formation of cultic beliefs. 

The postmodernist anthropologists counter this point by insisting they’re not interested in the contents of individual minds. Rather, they’re interested in the impact those individuals’ actions and statements have on society. Whether, say, Napoleon Chagnon really intended to bolster the rationale for sending troops to Southeast Asia is beside the point. His case for widespread violence in human evolutionary history had that effect regardless of his intentions.

But did it really?

Leaving aside the question of whether someone should be held morally accountable for outcomes he didn’t intend, we still must ask how the postmodernists know what the impact of an idea will be—or has been. How do they know Chagnon’s work had the effect they claim it had? Is there any evidence that Kennedy or Johnson or any of the top generals were even aware of Chagnon’s work among the Yąnomamö? (His infamous paper on Yąnomamö warriors having more children wasn’t published until 1988.) Are there any survey data tying beliefs about pre-state warfare to voting behavior? As is the case with their efforts at revealing an individual’s unconscious motives, the absence of any viable methods for examining the societal impact of ideas essentially gives postmodern critics a blank check to assert whatever’s on offer from their darkest imaginings.  

This leads into the next flaw in the campaign to blend postmodernism with science. The connection between beliefs about human nature and the political or moral convictions one holds is hardly straightforward. Personally, I’ve gone back and forth on the issue of how violent our Pleistocene ancestors were, but I have never, and would never vote for any politician campaigning on the glories of conquest. Likewise, I believe there are consequential differences between male and female psychology, but I have never, and would never vote for a candidate who insists women should be banned from certain professions because of these differences. Indeed, I hold many views that are more compatible with the conception of human nature that gets ascribed to those with conservative politics, but I’ve never voted for a Republican in my life. In this supposed contradiction, I’m far from alone. 

Survey data show that adaptationist psychologists, whose stance allegedly serves to perpetuate the political status quo, are no more likely to vote conservative than any other psychologists, all of whom tend to be left-leaning. This however isn’t to say political leanings have no connection to the beliefs of anthropologists. One large, in-depth survey showed that while people in the field are almost invariably on the left, some are much farther to the left than others. And those who identify as Radical, as opposed to Liberal or Moderate, are more likely to agree with the statement, “Foraging societies in prehistory were more peaceful.” They’re also more likely to disagree with the statement, “Advocacy and fieldwork should be kept as separate as possible to help protect the objectivity of the research.” Not surprisingly, Radicals are also more likely to agree that “Postmodern ideas have made an important contribution to anthropology.” 

One of the most recent flareups over the role of violence in human evolution was fomented by Steven Pinker’s book The Better Angels of Our Nature, which argues that the story of civilization is one of progress toward greater peace. If Western societies are becoming less violent over time, then they must have been more violent in the past. To demonstrate this, Pinker includes a graph showing what percentage of various populations likely died at the hands of other people. (Like clockwork, Brian Ferguson went on record insisting the numbers for pre-state societies are exaggerated.) Many anthropologists and native rights activists believe the publication of these figures is unconscionable. But the interesting point here is that Pinker cannot be using his evidence of pre-state violence as a justification for war, because the whole point of his book is to examine the causes of the documented decline in violence. Let me emphasize this point: Pinker argues both that violence was rampant in our evolutionary past and that we as a species are entirely capable of transcending that past. Indeed, we’re not only capable of reducing violence; we’ve been doing it for centuries. Better Angels thoroughly obliterates the notion that believing violence played a significant role in human evolution makes one a de facto advocate for war in the present. 

There are plenty of other instances of this disconnect. Anthropologist Agustin Fuentes recently raised a kerfuffle by writing an op-ed for Science about all the racism and misogyny on display in Darwin’s Descent of Man. Fuentes contends it’s important to see that even someone as brilliant and insightful as Darwin was still a slave to the prejudices of his day, which ought to make us all consider how big of a role prejudice may be playing in our own thinking. To make this point, Fuentes explains how Darwin got so much about race right: he knew no clear line separates one race from another and that no feature is found in any one race that’s absent in all the others. Most importantly, as an outspoken abolitionist, he knew that slavery is evil. Fuentes can’t hide his frustration with Darwin for getting so close without quite reaching the modern understanding of race as a social construct. What Fuentes is missing is that Darwin demonstrates that it’s not necessary to believe all races or all individuals are completely equal in every regard for one to insist that all races and all individuals should be treated as equally human. The scientific belief in group differences, or gender differences, or individual differences, contra the postmodernists, can live peacefully alongside a commitment to equal and universal human rights.

Politics can never be completely decoupled from science. Beliefs about human nature can’t be completely disentangled from moral reasoning. But the lines connecting theory to policy, or paradigm to advocacy, are seldom as straight as postmodernists would have us believe. The notion that you can improve the circumstances of indigenous peoples, or reduce racism, or make way for military drawdowns simply by criticizing intellectuals you disagree with and making accusations against them you can’t prove strikes me as childish and absurd. That’s because my own deepest intuition is that to solve a problem it’s best to first try to reach as thorough an understanding of that problem as possible. Any insistence that activism supersede science is based on the pretense of already having the very answer you’re supposedly seeking. What if humans really are naturally violent in some circumstances? Isn’t it better to honestly investigate what those circumstances are than to zealously promote a fantasy of violence being some civilization-induced aberration from our history of angelic communalism?

            For many people, the addition of a second reason to reject an idea probably makes the criticism that much more plausible. Not only is the evidence not a hundred percent airtight, but if people believe this idea there’ll be hell to pay. But scientists ought to recognize the fallacy of an argument from adverse consequences when they see it. Plenty of anthropologists catch on to this trick when it’s played by creationists: If people believe they descended from apes, they’ll start to behave as if they had. The second part may seem plausible, but it still requires evidence to establish. More importantly, the first part may be true even if the second is. Scientists trained to recognize such flaws in human reasoning ought to know focusing on the reasons you want a claim to be true does nothing but detract from your credibility. 

            If your priority when engaging in science is to seek the truth, that will be reflected in your readiness to change your mind when new evidence emerges. If on the other hand your main concern is managing what ideas make their way into the prevailing culture, then you have no right to call yourself a scientist. What you’re trying to be is some sort of preacher, but what you’re probably engaging in more than anything else is censorship. Scientists are supposed to be truth-seekers first and foremost, not social engineers. Activism is well and good, but if you mix it with science, you degrade the integrity of both. Yes, neither you nor anyone else will escape bias and cultural programming, but that should make postmodernists just as intellectually and morally humble as they demand scientists be. The best way to rein in your bias after all is to engage regularly in discourse with people who hold different views and beliefs. Given postmodernism’s woeful effect on intellectual discourse of any sort, it seems a catalyst for more, not less bias, and more, not less tribalism. 

Also read:

Just Another Piece of Sleaze: The Real Lesson of Robert Borofsky's "Fierce Controversy"

The Self-Righteousness Instinct: Steven Pinker on the Better Angels of Modernity and the Evils of Morality

“The World until Yesterday” and the Great Anthropology Divide: Wade Davis’s and James C. Scott’s Bizarre and Dishonest Reviews of Jared Diamond’s Work

Napoleon Chagnon's Crucible and the Ongoing Epidemic of Moralizing Hysteria in Academia

From Darwin to Dr. Seuss: Doubling Down on the Dumbest Approach to Combatting Racism

If you believe our society is deeply racist, how do you go about changing it? You may start by trying to change your country’s laws, but what happens if the injustice persists after racism has been officially outlawed? Further, what happens when you realize large swaths of the population fail to see racism as a serious problem? 

This challenge lies at the heart of many bizarre trends today among not just activists but academics, journalists, and even businesspeople. Why, for instance, are we suddenly so concerned with whether historical figures lived up our modern moral standards? What can we hope to achieve by pointing out all the areas in which they fell short? 

This trend is partly the natural outcome of a misdiagnosis. Racism is embedded in our culture, it is argued, so we need to change our culture to eradicate racism. That begins with a reevaluation of the characters we hold up as heroes. Dr. Seuss, for instance, is read by millions of kids. Well, it so happens that Dr. Seuss early in his career created some racist propaganda. But does anyone outside of graduate school ever see these WWII-era cartoons? Who knows? Either way, it warrants a deeper look at the books so many of us do read, because the bringing to light of this man’s subtle racism, the thinking goes, will likely raise our collective understanding of how racism works and how we can recognize it. So, let’s write some academic papers examining the racism implicit in, say, The Cat in the Hat. Even better, let’s cease publication of some of Dr. Seuss’s more dubious early works like And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street. 

One problem here is that it’s unlikely in the extreme that any nonracist person ever read a Dr. Seuss book or saw a Dr. Seuss cartoon and was transformed into a racist for having done so. It’s only slightly less unlikely that anyone was ever nudged into being even slightly more racist for having read these works. Starting a conversation about Dr. Seuss’s alleged racism, at least as part of an effort at combatting racism in general, is predictably and resoundingly futile. But there’s an even bigger problem the activist academics fail to appreciate. We love our heroes. People love Dr. Seuss. So, if you campaign to stop some of his books from being published, or if you simply argue publicly that he was a racist, not only are you going to fail to reduce racism by even the most negligible margin, you’re also going to provoke a backlash that could easily hamstring less ill-conceived efforts in the future. 

The response to Dr. Seuss’s estate ceasing to publish some of his books—and countless high-profile liberals defending the move as something other than another instance of “cancel culture”—was that these books jumped to the top of the bestseller lists. Along the way, many centrist liberals (like me) and nearly all conservatives became less receptive to any messages about alleged racism. You can imagine someone saying something like, “You say this guy’s a racist, huh? You idiots think Dr. Seuss was a racist.” And there’s no doubt the political party least likely to push for reforms that may lead to better conditions for minorities is the very one that’s going to be campaigning on the idiocy of the folks who think “canceling” Dr. Seuss was a stellar idea. 

The mistaken assumption leading to debacles like this is that prejudice and racial animosity are entirely cultural. The reality is that all over the world people tend to be suspicious of others who are different from them. And it only takes a few bad experiences to push this suspicion into full-blown hatred. This isn’t just a white people problem. It’s a human problem. Further, the answer to why some groups within a larger society don’t do as well as others isn’t always to be found in the attitudes and beliefs of the groups that are doing better. Inequality, including racial inequality, arises from a multitude of factors. I have little doubt one of the factors behind racial inequality in America today is our racist history. But I don’t think tearing down a statue of Robert E. Lee—or anyone else for that matter—is going to help at all. The issue is simply too complicated to be addressed by calling a bunch of people racists and striking their names from history. 

Okay, so the Dr. Seuss episode was silly. But what about historical figures who made explicit claims and arguments that can be used to justify racial oppression? The anthropologist Agustin Fuentes recently published an editorial in the journal Science to mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin. What did Fuentes see fit to say about the great man of science and his still controversial but undoubtedly brilliant work? Well, it turns out some parts of the book are less than charitable to people who aren’t of European descent. Some of the things Darwin wrote about women are pretty awful too. To be fair, Fuentes acknowledges that Darwin was a “trailblazer.” In a later podcast episode with science writer Robert Wright, he goes so far as to say that Darwin is one of his heroes. All the more reason, he explains, to challenge the “problematic” ideas he put forth in his magisterial work on human evolution. 

Fuentes doesn’t want people to stop reading Darwin. In fact, he insists what he wants is for us to read more Darwin, so we can appreciate the genius in all his complexity, which means acknowledging he wasn’t as great as he could have been. The crucial lesson Fuentes gleans from Darwin’s failure to see through to our modern understanding of race—when he took so many tantalizing steps in that direction—is that as much of a genius as he was, even he couldn’t see past the prejudices of his day. It’s enough to make you wonder, what makes Fuentes so confident he can see past the prejudices of his own day? 

It’s a safe bet that the publication of Fuentes’ editorial will make not a single soul a scintilla less racist, though I’m certainly open to evidence to the contrary. Nor will Fuentes’ writing do anything to improve the material well-being of minorities in this country or any other. I would also have predicted, had I known about the article in advance, that it would provoke a heated backlash. As it happened, I watched that backlash play out on Twitter. (I even participated in it.) The people who read editorials in Science, mirabile dictu, love Darwin. And many of them were less than pleased to see his name dragged through the mud in the nation’s most prestigious scientific journal. 

Was Darwin really racist? Fuentes, with his considerable geeky charisma, is the type of pedant who would ask you six other questions before answering that one, just to key you in on how complex of an issue we’re dealing with. What do we even mean, for instance, by the term racist as applied to someone in the Victorian Age, an era that had neither our modern understanding of racism nor our modern scientific understanding of population genetics? Both our morals and our science have evolved. And, unlike biological evolution through natural selection, the evolution of our mores and theoretical frameworks represents clear progress. 

Fuentes credits Darwin for pointing out that races can be difficult to categorize because each race grades into the others with no bright line demarcating one from the next. Darwin also realized that there were no single traits or features found solely among the members of one race that could be used to distinguish them from members of another group. He even argued against the hypothesis that racial differences arose due to natural selection (an idea that could be taken to imply one race was somehow better adapted to its environment, i.e., superior). In addition, Darwin was personally aghast at the cruelty of slavery, which was why he supported abolition. (He was in fact highly sensitive to suffering in all its forms, whether in animals or humans—of any race.) 

So, he was sophisticated enough, morally and scientifically, to understand these truths, but he nonetheless failed to arrive at the understanding of race Fuentes advocates, that it’s a biologically incoherent concept. Worse, he accepted the hierarchical ranking of the races that was prevalent in his time, with Africans, Native Americans, and Australian aborigines at the bottom and Caucasians at the top. Meanwhile, at multiple points in his writing he refers to the lesser cognitive capacity of women. 

The impression we get of Darwin then is that he was intensely empathetic, had great prescience and insight, but that he also harbored some loathsome beliefs. Those observations alone would have made for an outrageously banal editorial. I think “Well, duh” would be the proper response. He was writing after all in the years just after slavery was abolished in the US. As historian of science Robert J. Richards writes in an essay defending Darwin from charges of racism leveled by creationists, “When incautious scholars or blinkered fundamentalists accuse Darwin or Haeckel of racism, they simply reveal to an astonished world that these thinkers lived in the nineteenth century.” Who are any of us to fault someone for not arriving at conclusions we had the benefit of being taught directly? But Fuentes raises the stakes at a couple points in his essay. For instance, he claims that Darwin 

went beyond simple racial rankings, offering justification of empire and colonialism, and genocide, through “survival of the fittest.” This too is confounding given Darwin’s robust stance against slavery.

That first line is the one Robert Wright took issue with, beginning the exchange that culminated in the two conversing on Wright’s podcast. 

Did Darwin really offer justification for evils like colonialism and genocide? Wright points out the phrase “survival of the fittest” wasn’t coined by Darwin, and he let it be known he wasn’t too keen on its use. But is there anything in Descent that would imply Darwin thought genocide was a good idea? Fuentes points to sections where he describes the process of one race supplanting and exterminating another through conquest. Wright then poses the appropriate follow-up: isn’t there a difference between explaining and justifying? Fuentes doesn’t have a good response to this question. He merely says that by “justification” he means “the right and reasonable explanation for what’s happening in the world” before going on to agree with Wright that he’s relying on the naturalistic fallacy—taking what’s natural for what’s moral—that Darwin himself challenged. 

Fuentes’ mealy-mouthed response to Wright’s valid criticism could be ascribed to simple dishonesty, or if we’re charitable we could ascribe it to sloppiness. The word “justification” has the connotations it does. But I think he was simply bowing to the conventions of the genre he’s writing in, with its cliched expressions like “problematize” and its inbuilt insistence that whatever mistakes Darwin made were “harmful.” This type of criticism is required to include references to the purported harm or injury caused by the “problematic” statements under scrutiny, thus providing justification for the project of reevaluation. The part of Fuentes’ essay that most bothered me personally, though, is where he extends this point about the harm of letting Darwin’s ideas go unchallenged.

Today, students are taught Darwin as the “father of evolutionary theory,” a genius scientist. They should also be taught Darwin as an English man with injurious and unfounded prejudices that warped his view of data and experience. Racists, sexists, and white supremacists, some of them academics, use concepts and statements “validated” by their presence in “Descent” as support for erroneous beliefs, and the public accepts much of it uncritically.

Fuentes could set me straight on this with some quotes from the white supremacist academics he refers to, along with some survey data showing that the public accepts their statements uncritically. But my sense is that he included these lines not because he’s familiar with any such evidence but because he needs them to convince readers that his highlighting of Darwin’s mistakes is morally important, even imperative. 

            Fuentes may be right that there are people today who appeal to Darwin’s authority to support their racist arguments. But if there are, I doubt there are many. Darwin’s is the last name you’d expect to hear in any encounter with a white supremacist. In my experience, you’re much more likely to get Bible references. On the other hand, it’s far too easy for me to imagine a naively self-righteous college kid saying something along the lines of, “Darwin, seriously? You know that guy was racist as hell, don’t you?” 

            Historically, it’s undoubtedly true that the theory of natural selection has been held up as a justification for atrocities. But, again, such justifications relied on the naturalistic fallacy Darwin himself avoided. And it’s probably the case that those atrocities would have been committed even if natural selection had never been propounded. Racial hierarchies trace back to the medieval Great Chain of Being. Darwin wasn’t around to provide justification for the transatlantic slave trade (which he abhorred). As they once did with religion, modern people now often use science the way the proverbial drunk uses a light post: for support, not illumination. (Curious that the far left has found common cause with the creationist right in their mission to tar Darwin as complicit in modern evils.) This gets at the central point of confusion I see tripping up scholar/activists like Fuentes. 

            In looking for the roots of racism, too many academics flatter themselves by looking to the history of ideas and scholarship, as though every evil attitude and belief can be traced back to some scientist or philosopher just like them, only less moral. If that were the case, it would make sense to go back to those originators in an effort to root out the evil. But what if racism doesn’t merely seep into our minds from our cultural milieu? Indeed, research with infants suggests the first stirrings of racial bias are evident as early as six months. This bias may be solely attributable to a preference for what’s familiar. It may be attributable to inborn favoritism toward those similar to us. But, at 6 months, it’s certainly not attributable to reading books like The Descent of Man—or for that matter, I Saw It on Mulberry Street. 

Likewise, if you were a world traveler in times of yore, you didn’t need some aristocratic naturalist to tell you that the natives you were encountering weren’t as intellectually sophisticated as the people back home. You could see it with your own eyes (or at least that’s how it would have seemed). Fuentes may imagine that were he himself in one of those situations of first contact he would think something like, “These hunter-gatherers are obviously exactly the same as us Europeans but for the higher melanin content of their skin, their different culture, and the level of their technological advancement,” but he’d be forgetting the deep cultural influences he himself has been subject to. The more obvious conclusion anyone would draw is that the natives simply aren’t as intelligent as civilized people. 

That conclusion is wrong of course. We know from works like Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel that there are sufficient geographical and historical reasons for the varying levels of technological advancement achieved by peoples in different regions of the world to make the intelligence hypothesis unnecessary. But that book wasn’t written until 1997. For Fuentes, however, the right answer is so clear, he can’t help being frustrated at Darwin for not arriving at it. Why is Fuentes so blind to all the reasons people might draw racist conclusions that have nothing to do with books or the dominant culture? 

One commenter took Fuentes to task for falling prey to a strange reverse of the curse of knowledge. This is the curse that makes experts so lousy at explaining anything in their field of expertise because we humans all struggle to take the perspective of people who don’t know the things that we know. Fuentes makes the opposite mistake, believing no one knows about Darwin’s racist and sexist statements, when almost everyone who bothers reading his books almost certainly understands that his beliefs reflect the attitudes of his time. It’s an important point. And this thoroughgoing lack of perspective regarding their audience is what leaves so many activist academics open to the charge that they’re not as interested in changing minds as in signaling their superior virtue. Still, when it comes to Darwin himself, Fuentes is cursed in just the way we’d expect.  

Fuentes and others engaged in similar projects don’t seem to grasp that racism wasn’t invented by scholars and scientists. Racism is the norm in cultures the world over. We have every reason to believe it crops up in most societies all on its own, based on people’s natural perceptions and the most intuitive understandings of group differences. Far from something that needs to be taught, it’s something we need to be taught to transcend. Many critics faulted another scientist, Steven Pinker, for not considering the history of racist colonialism in his case for recommitting to Enlightenment values, and indeed you can easily find quotes from the era’s philosophes that make us cringe today. But insisting that any program begun by racists will forever bear the stain of racism is like saying no species is truly terrestrial because all land-based life had its beginnings in the sea. 

Isn’t it better to think of figures like Darwin and Dr. Seuss as akin to transitional species—like Tiktaalik—emerging from a morally less evolved era but containing within them the seeds of a more enlightened, more just society? Doesn’t that framework help to ease the frustration of people like Fuentes who see in Darwin’s writings a mosaic of promising lines of thought alongside the standard prejudices of his time? You could even go so far as to say that Darwin, despite never escaping a racist mindset himself, invented some of the cognitive tools that later generations used to overcome their own racial prejudices. 

A glance at a historical timeline shows that while colonialism and slavery persisted for centuries under Christianity as the ascendent authority, when racism went scientific its days became numbered. That’s because the remedy for bad science is better science, and we’ve been getting more and more of that since before Galileo was placed on house arrest for challenging the church. 

I don’t think for a second that I’m morally or intellectually superior to Fuentes; it’s entirely possible that two years from now I’ll have been persuaded he was right. The sanctimony and triteness suffusing his editorial notwithstanding, he comes across as likeable and genuinely fascinated with Darwin and the history of science. He’s also been admirably responsive to his critics on Twitter and elsewhere, a practice that sets him apart from many who argue in his vein. His expertise is impressive enough that I’d tune in to hear him discuss evolutionary psychology with Robert Wright anytime. But I think the curse of knowledge that leaves Fuentes so mystified about Darwin’s thinking about race extends to the very people he’d most like to convince today. The one advantage I have over Fuentes—I surmise—is that I have much more experience working and talking with people outside of academia, people who work with their hands and never went to college. 

If you tell these people that race is a “social construct,” they’re going to think you’re being both contemptuous and dishonest—either that, or you’ve been indoctrinated to the point of delusion. You can see race with your own eyes, after all. And, sure, some cases are harder to classify, but the existence of El Caminos doesn’t invalidate the concepts of cars and trucks. Likewise, if you start going on about how racist Darwin was, or how Dr. Seuss’s drawings echo tropes from the days of Jim Crow, well, good luck keeping anyone’s attention. You have no chance, at any rate, of changing attitudes about race. What you’ll almost certainly accomplish though is a further widening of the already catastrophic cultural divide between the rural non-college-educated populations of our country and the urban elites who can’t help condescending to them. 

I was going to end this essay with a quote from Darwin about the horrors of slavery, but then I came across something more interesting. Early in his career, the great orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass railed against the U.S. Constitution for “supporting and perpetuating this monstrous system of injustice and blood,” by which he of course meant slavery. Indeed, with such provisions as the Three-Fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause, there was a good case to be made for the Constitution being an inherently racist blueprint. But what Douglass later realized was that those loathsome provisions notwithstanding, our founding document held the key to bringing about a more just society, a better America. In other words, the Constitution had within it the seeds of its own reform. Douglass writes,

I became convinced that … to abstain from voting, was to refuse to exercise a legitimate and powerful means for abolishing slavery; and that the constitution of the United States not only contained no guarantees in favor of slavery, but, on the contrary, it is, in its letter and spirit, an anti-slavery instrument… Here was a radical change in my opinion. 

I hope more of us come to our own change of opinion and start to look at Darwin and evolutionary science and Dr. Seuss, not as irredeemable because of their past mistakes and failures, but as instruments for arriving at a better understanding of the world and how best to live with the rest of its inhabitants. 

Also read

THEY COMES A DAY: CELEBRATING COOPERATION IN A GATHERING OF OLD MEN AND HORTON HEARS A WHO! PART 1

THE FAKE NEWS CAMPAIGN AGAINST STEVEN PINKER AND ENLIGHTENMENT NOW

Putting Down the Pen: How School Teaches Us the Worst Possible Way to Read Literature

Science’s Difference Problem: Nicholas Wade’s Troublesome Inheritance and the Missing Moral Framework for Discussing the Biology of Behavior

Sam Harris’s “Pointing Out” Instruction: What It Means to Look for the Looker

Image by Canva’s Magic Media

You’re in the middle of your daily meditation, focusing your attention on your breathing as precisely as you can. Now your guide breaks in to ask, “Does it feel like you’re paying attention from somewhere?” All the sudden, you’re no longer attending to your breath; you’re trying to parse the meaning of the question. Fortunately, your guide is ready with an attempt at clarification. “Does it seem as though you’re directing your attention from some location, perhaps behind your eyes, toward your breathing?” 

This is the setup to the “Pointing Out” instruction that Sam Harris reveals in today’s “Featured Content” on his meditation app Waking Up, “Looking for What’s Looking,” is the one users tend to find the most difficult. For Harris himself, this exercise, which forms the core of Dzogchen practice, was what finally helped him break through his increasingly futile efforts to achieve selflessness through Vipassana alone. But for many users of his app, it seems, the instruction only brings about a state of confusion. 

How the hell do you look for what’s looking? Your eyes, after all, are pointed forward, not backward. How are you supposed to look into your own brain? 

Harris has provided clarification for this instruction, along with a few variations designed to come at it from a different angle, in several of his lessons and meditations. But, if you’re still having trouble breaking through the confusion, I’ve lighted on a way of conceptualizing it that helps me a great deal (though I still have a lot of practice to do to gain any proficiency). I pieced this understanding together two years after going through Waking Up’s introductory series of meditations, and after going almost a year without doing any significant practice. This is to say I had plenty of difficulty with the instruction myself and only came to understand it after much effort and perspective-taking. 

The main insight I had is that meditation is at least as much about mindset as it is about concentration. At first, I thought the purpose of all that focusing on the breath was to train yourself to direct your attention at will as opposed to letting it get carried away with the plethora of distracting thoughts. Indeed, this ability to focus your attention minutely and for longer and longer periods of time is central to more advanced practices. But focusing on the breath does something else as well. 

Attending to your breath requires that you focus on bodily sensations as opposed to abstract concepts and narratives. The post you’re reading now is all abstract concepts, so comprehending it demands you be in a mindset to experience time conceptually. One of the goals of meditating is to get you into a mindset to experience time sensuously. If you’ve been practicing for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed that focusing on your breath for a few minutes transforms the experience of having a thought. Harris is always encouraging us to reflect on this transformation, encouraging us to notice that “There’s only consciousness and its contents.” 

So what does it feel like to have a thought? To answer that question, you have to separate yourself from the thought itself—i.e., no longer identify with it. With the thought emerging from the space carved out by your physical sensations, you can observe it as something apart from that space. This is important because in most of our waking life, whatever we’re thinking takes up the full space of our consciousness. Getting into a sensuous mindset puts the thought in the context of our bodily sensations. The thought itself may not change, but now we’re aware of the space in which the thought occurs. That space is consciousness. 

Some of the mental health benefits of mindfulness derive from this contextualization of thought. If a thought or a narrative is causing you anxiety, for instance, you can meditate and see that what’s bothering you is indeed just a thought. That thought might be wrong. It may simply not be the best thought for capturing and responding to the stressful situation. It may even be arising merely as another actuation of a bad habit. At any rate, you aren’t being shot at (probably), you aren’t dying this moment (probably), so whatever you’re afraid of can most likely be dealt with in some way other than getting anxious. This insight is nearly impossible to arrive at when the anxiety-inducing thought is taking up all the available space in your mind. 

Once I figured out this was what I was doing—or what was happening—while I was meditating, I gained a new understanding of the pointing-out instruction. How do you look for the looker? Well, you don’t “look” in a literal sense. You don’t use your eyes. Instead, you’re trying to find the sensation in your body that’s associated with the center from which you’re directing your attention. Rather than “looking,” try to sense where your attention is coming from. Is it really behind your eyes? Well, can you feel anything back there? It turns out you can’t. (At least, I can’t.) 

What this boils down to is that any center or location for your consciousness is in fact conceptual. There’s no real sensory element to it. Try to feel or sense it, and you come up dry. It seems like you’re experiencing this centeredness all the time, though, because you’re so accustomed to thinking it’s in the place where you experience it. But that’s an illusion. There is no center. There’s only consciousness and its contents. And nowhere among those contents is a sensation of a “seat of attention” or the “you that is looking.” 

So when Sam tells you to look for the looker, try scanning your body, primarily your head, for any sensation that would help you locate the source of your attention. The point is that you won’t find any. To the extent that you think you know where it is—it’s only because that’s where you’re accustomed to think of it as being. 

Hope this helps. 

Jax: A Halloween Story

[This story is a sequel to Cannonball.]

“I turned off the headlights when I was a few hundred feet from the parking lot because there was a sign saying the park closes at dusk. The area around Bicentennial Woods is thickly wooded as well, but there are some houses along that road. One sits right beside the parking lot. I’m sure the people who live there can see any cars that pull in at night. Hell, if they were listening, they could’ve probably heard my tires rolling over the gravel in the parking lot. But I needed those damn keys or I wouldn’t be able to get into the office the next day. And I’d just gotten that job after a stretch of unemployment that had gone on a bit too long, so I didn’t really feel like trying to explain to my boss that I lost my keys already because I was a dumbass and tripped over a root while doing a trail run.”

            We all remembered Tom’s stint of unemployment, so we understood his motives in going back for the keys. Still, hearing him describe the situation for the third time in as many years, I wondered how much of his willingness to go back for them had to do with simple curiosity. That’s the nature of these stories about haunted places. If we play it safe, if we never travel to scary locations, then there will be no stories to tell.

“Once I’d parked and cut the engine, I opened the door and just waited for a few minutes. I wanted to see if anyone would drive past, if they’d raise some objection to me being there. There were no lights on at the house nearby, at least not that I could see. And there wasn’t a sound aside from the crickets and the breeze passing through the leaves. The silence was both a comfort and a cause for concern, you know, because right then I realized I was completely alone, and I was about to go trudging through the forest at night.”

Tom’s eyes went vacant, as though he couldn’t help reliving the experience. I played with the idea that he cut something of an Ichabod Crane figure, gangling and loose-limbed. But really he’s too solid for that. With his serious bespectacled eyes, a beard that practically grows before your eyes, and a forehead that protrudes almost aggressively from under a receding hairline, he looks like a cross between an Olympic diver and a civil rights attorney, at once strong and assured but also guilelessly expressive. 

“The first thing I discovered was that, after my eyes adjusted a bit, I could see my way around. I mean, not well, since there were plenty of little turns and cresting roots and whatnot that I didn’t see until they already had me stumbling around, but it wasn’t pitch black. If you went slow and paid attention, you could make your way alright. Of course, the spot where I tripped was all the way at the back of the nature preserve, so I’d have to cross the bridge and climb the stairs. But I thought, if I can see halfway decent here, why would it be any different farther into the woods, especially if my eyes keep adjusting?” 

“Dude, you never heard the stories about those woods?” Chris said, as if they were discussing the incident for the first time.

“I only heard those stories after I started telling people what happened that night. I honestly don’t know if it would’ve made a difference. What was I going to do, just leave my keys in there?” 

“I would have.” 

“Maybe I should have. Maybe if I’d just left and come back the next day, I’d still have my old favorite running trail. As it happened, though, I kept going. I figured I could be in and out in twenty-five minutes, and none the worse for wear. And here’s the thing, it was beautiful. I’m not kidding you. It was one of those surprisingly profound experiences you remember throughout your life—and I was thinking that even before what happened later. You could see stars overhead whenever the canopy of branches and leaves opened up. The air was cool and it was like—I don’t know—like something primal took over. When I got to the bridge over the creek, I stood there for what must’ve been a few minutes staring at the moon’s rippling reflection on the water, like a thousand tiny silver sparks winking in and out of existence. Seriously, I was already planning a return visit some night when I didn’t have to work so early the next day.

  “It was when I was going up the stairs on the other side of the creek that I started getting—not freaked out exactly, but apprehensive. That staircase isn’t all there, so even in broad daylight it takes some effort to climb without stepping into one of the gaps where the planks have broken. Even with the flashlight on my phone, I found myself probing with my toe every time I took a step up, and all that concentration on the space directly in front of me left me wondering what was going on everywhere else around me. Maybe it was just the distance from the parking lot. Maybe my imagination had simply had enough time to start working on the dark spaces around me. Whatever the reason, the tone of my little adventure changed as I neared the top of the rise. 

“The spot where I’d tripped was still some ways off. I had to go along the edge of the hill and then circle down to the other side to where the trail runs alongside a marsh. It was close to where the trail curves toward the other side of the rise, after I’d turned my phone off to save the little remaining battery, that I first heard the whispering. Though by the time my brain got around to figuring out that’s what it was, I think I’d already heard it three or four times. The first time I caught it distinctly, I turned around and said, ‘What’s that? Who’s there?’ I said it in a loud whisper of my own. Then I immediately regretted opening my mouth.”

“What were the whispers saying?” Maddy asked.

“At that point, I couldn’t have told you. But I heard it three more times before I’d had enough and got my ass out of there. And each time it came from a different direction, so I was sure whoever was doing the whispering, they had me surrounded.”

“So what did they say?”

“‘Be quiet. He’s coming.’ That’s what I heard. And though it came from different directions, I was sure it was the same voice each time.”

We all fell silent. Tom had recounted this story at our Halloween parties in the past, so I knew how it ended. After last year’s party, though, I couldn’t help feeling like all these stories we’d been sharing over the years were pointing to something consequential, something more than a source of rejuvenating thrills.

“Did you hear those words distinctly?” Maddy asked. “I mean, before you knew the story?”

“I heard the story from a guy after I told him what I heard. Yes, those were the exact words I heard.”

My dad entered the room from the kitchen, where he must’ve been listening while preparing his drink. “What’s this story you keep referring to?” Since he’s my dad, his presence has always loomed large for me, but my impression is that he has a way of stopping people in their tracks when he enters a room even if they’ve never met him before. How do you describe your own father in light of how the signature blend of authority and kindness you see in him is likely derived from your being his daughter? My dad is self-effacing but assertive, goofy at times but ever on the ready to take charge whenever chaos rears. He can go too far in his teasing and playful argumentation, but just watch how fast he backs off once he senses he’s hurt someone’s feelings. Physically, he seems tall despite being no taller than your average man. His hair is still impressively thick and dark despite its turn to silver. His expression is usually wry, like he’s got an inside joke with himself for every situation. But you can see the whole gamut of emotions in his face, if you know how to look for them. 

He scanned the faces arranged about the room in the ensuing silent hesitation. I’d encouraged him to attend this year’s gathering because he kept asking what my mom had told all of us last year that had created such a stir. Every year, our group gets together around Halloween to share our stories about encounters with the spooky and mysterious. Last year, this had led to a good-humored debate about the meaning of these stories, driven mainly by Mom. After telling us one of the most impressive stories to date, she went on to claim she didn’t believe there had been any hidden agency involved in what had happened to her. Now, awakened to the prospect of learning about aspects of my parents’ lives I’d never known before, I wondered what Dad would make of all this. Had he even heard Mom’s story about our old husky-malamute Kea? 

“You haven’t heard the story about the Stevenson girls Mr. Caldwell?” It was Chris who spoke up at last. Of course it was Chris. Hyperanimated, fastidiously groomed, attention-hungry, fun-loving, only sometimes annoying Chris. 

Dad flashed one of his grins that only spreads over the left side of his face. For an old guy, he’s still got a look of hardness that makes it impossible not to cede him the floor, kindly though his expression tends to be. “Oh, if you mean the incident when those two girls went missing, I actually followed the story in the news pretty closely back then. I would have thought that was before your time.”  

“On the contrary,” Chris said, “we grew up hearing about how Bicentennial Woods is haunted, and we’ve all made pilgrimages to those woods to see for ourselves. Oddly enough, though, Tom is the only one of us who’s ever experienced anything strange out there.” 

“Probably because I’m the only one who’s been out there at night.” 

“I’m curious,” Dad said. “What’s the story you all heard growing up?” 

Chris took it upon himself to fill Dad in. “The twin girls lived with their mom in one of those houses you drive past to get to the nature preserve—we never knew which one precisely. When they were just toddlers, their dad was killed, in a car accident I think, and their mom remarried a few years later. Well, the girls had been just old enough to remember their dad, so they never really liked the new guy. They made several attempts at running away, but each time they were found in the woods around the nature preserve, having set up tents and made little caches for food. One day, the stepdad happened on the girls in the garage as they were packing up for another expedition into the woods, and he grabbed one of them by the wrist, which the other one didn’t like at all. She grabbed at whatever was nearest to hand, which turned out to be a shovel, and hit him over the head with it. Seeing him crumble to his knees, they panicked and bolted into the woods.

“Now, that’s the official story. They ran off into the woods and were never seen again. Supposedly, they kept running until they managed to get beyond reach of the searchers. Some people said they ended up in foster homes somewhere. But most people believe something else happened entirely. See, there were rumors that the stepdad was abusive. Given these rumors, the story about the girls getting caught making ready to run away again struck everyone as suspicious. What most believed was that the girls had finally had enough and threatened to tell their mom what was going on. Then the stepdad in turn threatened something else. 

“As kids, you used to always hear the part about how the girls were hiding together in the woods, in an arbor that happens to have been right where Tom was when he lost his keys, and trying to keep quiet because their stepdad was right on their heels. They heard him approaching but then he must’ve stopped moving because they couldn’t hear anything anymore. So, they waited. It was then that one of the girls started crying.”

“Ah,” Dad said. “So, that’s where the whispering comes in. ‘Be quiet. He’s coming.’ Ha ha. Spooky.” 

“That’s right,” Chris said. “According to this version of the story, the stepdad found the girls, murdered them, and buried their bodies in those woods. So, if you get stuck out on the trail after the sun goes down, you can still hear the girl whispering to her sister.” 

Dad laughed heartily. “Wonderful. Wonderful story.” 

“So, Mr. Caldwell, are you a skeptic like your wife?”

“Oh no, not me. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure most of these stories you hear are highly embellished, and if you could go back and see what really happened, it wouldn’t seem even half as inexplicable. But I’m also convinced there’s something going on in the universe that most people aren’t aware of, the types of things religions try to get at—even though, in my opinion, they all fail miserably.”

“Then why do you laugh at the story of the Stevenson girls?”

“Because those girls were found with their dad—their biological dad, who wasn’t dead—about four years after they went missing, alive and well as far as I recall. Like I said, I followed the story in the news—” 

“—Wait! What? Are you serious?”

“I’m looking it up right now,” Chris said. “What year would that have been?”

“I was probably in my mid-30s,” Dad said, “so that would mean they were found thirty years ago, after going missing thirty-four years ago.” 

“Missing Girls Discovered with Father after Being Presumed Dead for Four Years,” Chris read aloud from his phone. “I’ll be damned. He’s right.”

All our attention wandered back to Tom. His eyes darted around sheepishly, as if he’d been caught in a fabrication. “Well, what the hell? Why didn’t anyone tell me that part of the story?”

“Don’t feel too bad,” Dad said. “I suppose it’s a bit like those crazy scientific findings that all the news sources pick up. ‘Gene for musical genius discovered,’ or whatever. Then, when the finding fails to replicate, or when other researchers find flaws in the methods, no one bothers to report on it. I remember when those girls went missing, it was all anyone around here could talk about. And you heard all kinds of weird stories—including the one you heard—all within a couple years. Then they find the girls out in New Mexico or wherever, but by then minds were made up and people had stopped paying any attention. The stories had already taken on a life of their own.”  

“But I really heard those whispers. I heard someone say, ‘Be quiet. He’s coming.’”

“Maybe you weren’t alone out there. Maybe they were talking about you. Think about it, you weren’t supposed to be out there, and neither was anyone else. I imagine you would have hidden yourself had someone approached. So would anyone else who was out there.” 

“Well, that’s kind of creepy too,” Cindy said, laughing her demure little laugh. “You have to wonder who would’ve been out there with you?” 

“It could have been kids smoking weed.”

“He would’ve smelled it.”

“Mushrooms then.” 

“Or meth! Does meth have a smell?” Mike said.

            “Oh, don’t pretend you don’t know.”

            We all laughed, except Tom who looked equal parts perplexed and aggrieved. As if trying to save him from further embarrassment or give him time to figure out what to say, Chris jumped in to say, “So Mr. Caldwell, you said you believe in the supernatural. Was it an experience you had that made you a believer? Mrs. Caldwell told us quite a story last year, but she insists these occurrences don’t really prove anything.” 

            “What was the story she told you?”

            Feeling a strange sense of ownership, I beat Chris to a response. “It was the one about how Kea saved her from some guy who got scary after she brought him home and changed her mind about having him there.” I spoke haltingly, reading my dad’s response, trying to see if he knew which story I meant. 

I was getting ready to call Mom in from the kitchen when Dad, after a thoughtful pause, nodded and said, “Well, that isn’t even the best story about those damn dogs—not that she knows anything about what happened with Jax.” 

I felt my mouth fall open. “Jax?”

Dad went quiet, his eyes focusing on nothing. “Jax was only around for a couple years. He died just after you were born.” 

Chris, Cindy, Mike, Maddy, and Tom were all at my house for this year’s Halloween party. Through most of our twenties, we’d done costume parties, but now that some of us were settling down and starting families, we found ourselves more interested in sharing stories. Last year had been a real doozy. Mom, who was attending for the first time, had revealed she’d had a boyfriend who’d died a year and a half before she started dating the guy who would be my dad—the guy I’d pressed to attend the party this year. Some months after her boyfriend had died, she succumbed to a fit of recklessness and brought a guy home from a bar. When the guy started getting pushy, and then started trying to force himself on her, Kea showed up in the bedroom upstairs, even though she’d been trained not to go upstairs. When Mom used the dog’s appearance as a pretext to try to escape down the hallway, the guy ran up behind her and tackled her at the top of the stairs, wrapped a cord around her neck, and may have killed her. Just when she was about to pass out in her desperate effort to roll out from under the guy, Kea bolted past, knocking the guy off balance just enough to allow Mom to roll on her side, reach back, and push the guy down the stairs. The strange thing was that Kea didn’t attack the guy; she just ran past him, in a way suggesting she was responding to a cue from Mom’s boyfriend, the guy who’d died months before, the one who’d trained Kea the first three years of her life. 

“So, you do know the story about how Kea saved Mom, though?” 

“Oh, believe me, I heard plenty about Jim and his special bond with Kea soon after you girls were born. I heard all about her little cannonball trick and how she knocked that degenerate scumbag over so your mom could push him down the stairs. Let’s just say your mom is a wonderful lady, and it didn’t take me long to fall in love with her. But there were times when I was close to calling it quits over her never-ending obsession with her ex—her deceased ex.”

“So you got another dog? How come I don’t remember it?”

“Well, we were planning on having a baby, so we thought we should get Kea a friend to keep her company when we couldn’t pay her the attention she needed. But, yeah, it was my idea, and I have to admit it did probably have a little something to do with how annoyed I was with Jim’s ghost and how it was kept alive by our precious Kea. Anyway, you don’t remember Jax because we only had him two years before he died. We think he was at least ten when we got him.” 

“Why did you get such an old dog?”

“We were probably lied to about his age. He was a rescue. We wanted a dog that would have energy like Kea’s, but who wouldn’t demand a bunch of time and training. So, we got an older dog.” 

“Well, Mr. Caldwell,” Chris broke in, “are you going to tell us this story about Jax that’s supposedly better than Mrs. Caldwell’s story?” 

Dad leaned back into the couch and looked up at the ceiling. Folding his arms, he donned a pensive expression. “You know, I’ve never told that story before. I mean, I had a couple friends who knew most of it. But I don’t know quite where to start.”

“Before you tell us—I’m curious—what do you think about your wife’s story?” 

“Today, I can honestly say I love that story. When I first met your mom, she wouldn’t talk about Jim—not a word. So, I didn’t hear the story about Kea until around the time she first got pregnant. I remember I kept trying to assure her it was okay to talk about him, but she simply wouldn’t do it. Then, when she finally ended the silence, well, let’s just say it wasn’t long before I regretted encouraging her. I think Jim was overly attached to that dog. You know how some people get a little weird about their animals, like they don’t understand they’re not humans. Your mom was actually frustrated with him over it, but, after he died, she took it over for him, if you know what I mean. So even though I hadn’t even heard any of the stories yet, I would get annoyed myself at how much we had to go out of our way to make sure the damn dog was happy and well provided for.

“I love dogs, don’t get me wrong. But by then we had kids, and things were hard enough, you know. So, when I first heard what Kea had done to that guy, I dismissed it. I thought, so the dog snuck upstairs and got riled up when she saw two people wrestling, and she made a dash from the bedroom doorway to the loft. And that makes her some kind of savior? It just seemed like an excuse to keep spoiling the dog—and to keep talking about Saint Jim.”

Chris broke in, “You didn’t think the part about the dream, how she dreamt Jim was talking to the dog, meant anything? Your wife assured us nothing supernatural happened, but the whole cannonball husky thing was… interesting, don’t you think?”

“I can’t pretend to know. I heard the story years after it happened, and I have a hard time believing almost any old story maps onto actual events as they really occurred. Some details had to have changed. But I’m perfectly willing to accept something supernatural may have been at play.”  

“How much have you and Mom talked about that whole thing?”

“We talked about it a few times, but that was a long time ago. Like I said, after some time, I started to like the story. What she told me was that, even though she knew it didn’t prove anything, it made her happy to think about it because it meant Jim was still alive in her memory, and in the dog’s mind too—even if it didn’t mean he was still around in the world outside, you know.”

            “But you think he may have still been around in the external world too?”

            “I can’t rule it out. And I don’t know for sure if your mom is completely convinced one way or the other. She just knows the odds favor a mundane explanation as opposed to a supernatural one. They always do. The way I see it, though, just because something is more likely doesn’t always mean it’s also true.”

            “So, what happened with your dog Jax? Was that what convinced you there might be something to the supernatural?” 

            “At that point, I didn’t need all that much convincing, but I’d never had anything like that happen to me. So, if I had needed convincing, that would have done it. It started before we even brought Jax home. Like I said, we were looking for an older dog that wouldn’t need much training, a dog who could keep Kea occupied while we were dealing with a pregnancy and a baby. When we heard there was an older husky at the shelter, we were there the next day to meet him.

            “Now, at the shelter they told us Jax was aged between 6 and 8. Later, I’d start thinking he was probably closer to 10. I guess shelters do that with older dogs sometimes. They said he was old enough to be calm most of the time, but still young enough to play, which was exactly what we wanted. I have to say, though, I had my doubts about him. He just had a way of looking at people that made me think he was leery for some reason. But your mom made the final decision.”

            “Kea made the final decision,” Mom said as she stepped into the room from the kitchen. “Kea put her ears down when she met him, like she does when she greets people. There were only a couple of other dogs I remember her greeting like that. Then the way she crept around him—I took it for intense interest. Later, I came to think it was concern for poor Jax, like she knew something was wrong.”

            “You know, I never told you most of this,” Dad said to Mom as she lowered herself onto the couch beside him, “but if you remember, the weird stuff started even before we brought Jax home.”

            “That’s right, we almost didn’t end up getting him at all because Kea started having problems.” 

            “What, like health problems?” I asked. 

            “We didn’t know,” Mom said. “She started barking and whining in the middle of the night—and that was strange for her. She was usually so good about sleeping straight through till morning. But something really had her spooked.”

            Dad picked up the thread. “When I went downstairs to check on her that first night—this was before we just started bringing her upstairs with us—she looked, I don’t know, panicked. I let her outside and she freaked out and ran around from one end of the yard to the other and back a few times. When she came back in, she was panting but still hyper, still anxious. And, though she normally slept in the alcove between the front door and the closet, now she wouldn’t go near that spot. The front door was part glass, so I wondered if she’d seen something outside, which you can bet freaked me out too. But I went out and checked and there was nothing. I went back to bed after a while, but I couldn’t sleep. Finally, I went back downstairs to check on her—” 

            “—You try to act like such a hard ass,” Mom cut him off to say, “but you loved that dog as much as anyone.”

            “As much as you did? I doubt that. But I admit she won me over eventually. Anyway, when I went back down, she was sleeping all the way back in the kitchen, hiding between the fridge and the island. And she’d puked in three big piles spread over the tile. I was afraid she’d been poisoned. I slept downstairs on the couch for the rest of the night. She paced around a long time, but finally went back to sleep. 

            “In the morning, she was still agitated but seemed mostly alright. She ate and did fine on her walk. Then she came home and took a nap, which I would have liked to do myself since I was up most of the night.”

            “Mmm-hmm,” Mom said, shaking her head with a half-hidden grin. 

            “I called the vet the next day even though she seemed to be doing alright. We got an appointment, but it was two days away. And Kea called me downstairs again both those nights. The one place she felt safe was in my car. I actually slept out in the garage in my front seat for a couple hours one of those nights. The horrible part was we just couldn’t figure out what was spooking her. We thought maybe there was a mouse somewhere in the walls, so we put out a bunch of traps. Six months later, though, I picked them up—all empty. Our next thought was maybe the air coming out of the vent had been pushing up the edge of the rug, making it move around and scaring her. But she wasn’t a skittish dog, and that didn’t seem like it would be enough to scare her that bad.”

            “What did the vet say?”

            “Ha ha. She said, ‘Well, that would freak me out. It’s like someone’s outside your house.’ I thought, thanks a lot. I’m trying not to think about that. She ended up prescribing Kea an antinausea, which put her to sleep for a day and a half. After that, she started sleeping through the night again, but it was months before she went back to her spot behind the door.”

            “And you never figured out what had her so scared?” 

            “To this day, I still don’t know.” Dad put his hand on Mom’s knee, as he is wont to do, and she put hers on top of his. He looked at her and smiled. “So, do you want to hear the rest of the story?”

            “Well, I think I know some of it already, but I’d love to hear the rest. I’m wondering, though, why you didn’t tell me when it was going on.”

            “When it all started, I wanted to get to the bottom of it before I told you—because to be honest I thought I was going crazy. After that, I didn’t say anything because you were pregnant. Then, after that, I went back to worrying I might be crazy.” 

            “Oh, honey, we all know you’re out of your gourd. It doesn’t mean we don’t love you.”

            Dad smiled another of his playfully magnanimous smiles. “You better reserve judgement until you hear the story. So, Kea seems okay after her big mystery fright, and now I’m back to trying to get another dog for her to play with. Jax was still at the shelter, though we were assured there were other people interested in him. We brought Kea to meet him again, and they seemed to get along, though they didn’t do much playing there in the shelter. We talked it over and decided to bring him home.

            “Nothing crazy happened right away. Jax wasn’t comfortable in his new home, but that was understandable. The only problem as far as I was concerned then was that he stood around staring off into space all the time—not playing with his new sister. She would sniff around him, nudge him with her nose, and then wander off to harass me when he didn’t respond.”

            “Kea harassed you because you always responded to her.”

            “Be that as it may, you remember us talking about how we had two dogs to entertain now instead of one, so we were afraid our little plan had backfired. Gradually, though, Jax started to relax, and after a while they would play a bit. Not enough to keep me from having to walk them all the damn time, but we felt better leaving Kea at home for longer now that she had some company.”

            “I don’t get it,” Cindy said. “You said Kea annoyed you, but it sounds like you were ridiculously attentive to her needs.”

            Mom laughed. “It’s only recently that he’s started admitting how much he loved that dog. He used to go on and on about what a huge pain in the ass she was. But he took such good care of her—he gave even Jim a run. See, some people love dogs. I love dogs. But some people can hear dogs, if that makes sense. I don’t mean they’re like the guy in that horrible ‘dog whisperer’ show who’s always spouting nonsense about how you need to be the alpha. These people can’t communicate with dogs like that guy supposedly could. They just have a better intuitive sense of what they need. Doug can hear dogs, better than I can anyway. I loved Kea like crazy. Honestly, though, she was far more attentive to me and my needs than I was to her and hers. Somehow, she knew Doug would take the time to figure out what she needed, because when he paid attention, he was capable of puzzling it out. I even remember Jim talking to Kea a few times, saying he knew he’d trained her to look at him and watch for cues, but the way she stared at him and tracked his movements all the time freaked him out sometimes. When I saw her following Doug with her eyes just like that, I knew. Actually, I think I can truthfully say that was one of the reasons I fell in love with him. He complained all the time because she always came to him, but he almost always responded so you can’t blame her.” 

            “Great! So, the damn dog chose me too. Oh, she was a great dog. I have no problem admitting that I loved her too. At the time, though, it was a bit overwhelming. And she wasn’t my dog, you know. I was truly annoyed, but yeah, I guess I rewarded her for annoying me. What was I going to do, ignore her? Back then, I may have thought that was the thing to do, but now I’m glad I didn’t.” 

            “So, you get Jax home and weird stuff starts happening?” 

            “The first thing we both noticed was that at night he’d go to the corner of the yard and just sit there staring at the fence. Or that’s what we thought he was staring at anyway. You know how when you’re training a dog, you try to get him to come to you, sit in front of you, and wait for your next command? That’s what it looked like. It was actually you who pointed that out,” he said turning to Mom. “You said it looked like he was sitting there listening for the next command from someone—but obviously there was no one there in the corner of the yard where he was facing.” 

            “Oh, that used to creep me out something awful when Jax did that.” 

            “That’s why I didn’t tell you about all the other things that happened.” 

            “Do I even want to know?”

            “Let’s just say it got creepier. One night, I went out back and Jax was sitting staring in the corner again. I called him in, but he didn’t come. Typical husky, right? But when I went to get him, he had blood all over his mouth. My first thought was that he attacked Kea, but she’d come in the house a minute earlier when I first called them both in and she looked fine. So, I started looking all over the yard for whatever Jax had killed. Sure enough, there was a dead raccoon lying halfway between where Jax was sitting and the corner. When I saw it, the tingles crawled all up my back. I got a flashlight from the garage and went searching all around the house and outside the fence. We had four trees, none of them very big, in our backyard. There was a pond behind our house, but the area around our house was mostly other yards and houses. We kept our garbage bins in the garage. I’d never seen a raccoon anywhere near our house.”

            “Well, that’s not so strange, is it?”

            “No, it was like the thing with Kea getting scared of her sleeping spot all the sudden, strange but not so inexplicable that we were ready to call a priest or anything. By now, though, Susan was asking what I was doing, so I had to hurry up and get Jax in the garage to clean all the blood from his maw.”  

            “What did you do with the raccoon?” 

            “I had to get rid of it fast so Susan wouldn’t find out, so I tossed it in the pond.”

            “You did not. What the hell is wrong with you?”

            “I was taking care of it so you wouldn’t have to is all.” 

            “So, what else happened that you didn’t tell me about?”

            “Well, the raccoon was only the first of three critters Jax sacrificed to the corner of the fence. Now, why the hell would a dog keep killing animals and dropping them in the same spot in the yard, a spot close to where he sits staring at nothing? I actually called Gary, our trainer, and he said he’d never heard of anything like it.”

            “What kind of animal were they?”

            “That’s the other weird thing. One was a gopher, a big one. The other I think was an otter. Now, gophers and otters live around here, but you don’t see them very often. And I’d never seen any of either anywhere near our yard. The pond behind our yard was nowhere near big enough for an otter to live in it.” 

            “It almost sounds like someone was trapping them and throwing them in the yard for Jax to hunt down,” Chris offered. “After he killed them, he brought them back to the spot where whoever it was tossed them over the fence.”

            “Yeah, the same person who scared Kea through the glass of the front door,” Tom said, finally breaking his daze.

            “You guys, stop,” Mom said, lifting her hand to her face.

            “Okay, so what happened next?”

            “I got a call from someone at the shelter saying Jax’s owner had just been released from prison.” Dad paused to enjoy the effect.

            “Wait—does that mean the guy may have actually been coming to your yard and giving Jax critters to chase?” 

            “I had that thought at the time, but all three of the incidents when I found a dead animal happened before he got out.” 

            “Are you being serious?” Cindy asked. “Please tell me you’re not having us on.”

            Before Dad could respond, Chris asked, “Why did the guy at the shelter call you? Did he think there was some way this guy could find you?” 

            Dad took a slow breath and turned toward Mom. “I never told you a lot of this before, because I knew it would scare the hell out of you. This guy—Craig Avery was his name—he was arrested after the police were called to his house for a noise complaint. He kept playing music with bass drops that neighbors could hear for miles around. When the police got there though, they found dozens of animals in cages, and he got arrested because he was violating a bunch of ordinances. His house wasn’t out in the country; it was right on Illinois Road, like three quarters of a mile from I-69. So, his ritzy neighbors were understandably not too happy. Now, I got all this information from an old friend who was cop. But what I found out from the guy at the shelter…” 

            Dad trailed off, his eyes lost to a daze, as though he were weighing whether to go on. “Here’s something I’ve learned in my long sojourn here on Earth,” he said at last. “There are three types of crazy person you need to watch out for. I’m sure there are other types, but these are the ones that get scary. The first is the type who’s unstable. One minute they seem fine and nice and normal. The next they’re blowing their lids. This type is dangerous because you never know what’s going to set them off, and once they’ve snapped, they don’t care who you are. They’ll lash out at you as soon as anyone else.

            “The second is the type whose ego is as volatile as a powder keg. Whether they’re narcissistic or psychopathic or whatever, they need you to recognize how important and how great they are. And if that recognition isn’t forthcoming, they can’t make it to DEFCON 1 fast enough. The scary thing is that blowing up everything and everyone around them is for them a matter of principle. And no matter what you’re prepared to do to fend them off, they’re always willing to go one step—hell, ten steps farther. Like they just have nothing to lose.

            “But it’s the third type that’s scariest to me personally. These are the people who are driven by some set of beliefs. They can be conspiracy theorists, cult members, radical ideologues, religious fundamentalists, or anything else that makes them paranoid and self-righteous and superior. Like they think they have the secret no one else has. For these guys, abusing other humans—or animals—is not only justified, but sometimes required. Hurting others supposedly serves their god, or helps to bring about some utopia, or both. Their crazy beliefs dictate that they be terrible to some other group of people.  

            “I say all this because the guy at the shelter told me Jax’s previous owner was a member of some strange cult, and he’d come to the shelter insisting that he needed to find Jax. The dog, so this guy Avery said, played a critical role in his rituals. Of course, the guy told Avery that Jax had already found a new home, and he couldn’t legally give him any information about who adopted him. Avery responded with a bunch of threats. So, the guy at the shelter called to warn me. He said something like, ‘He won’t get anything from us here, but I don’t know if there’s some other way he might be able to track you down.’ Naturally, that freaked me out, so I called my cop buddy to see what else I could learn.” 

            “Your friend couldn’t pay this Avery guy a visit and let him know he was being kept an eye on?” 

            “He may have, but I was told Avery violated his parole and failed to check in. At any rate, he left the residence he was supposed to be staying at, and the police didn’t know where he was. That means if he turned up anywhere, he’d be arrested. Apparently, though, his crimes hadn’t been serious enough to warrant a manhunt.” 

            “Okay, that would scare the hell out me. Did you consider taking Jax back to the shelter?” 

            “Huh? … You know, I never did. But that does kind of seem like a logical response.”

            “Not for you,” Mom said smiling. 

            “I did get one good piece of information from John, my cop friend. I found out where the guy lived before he got arrested. Like I said, it wasn’t anywhere off the beaten path. It was actually only a few miles from where we were living then. The place was scheduled to go up for auction because Avery had defaulted on the mortgage. Understandable considering he was in prison for a while. It was right next to a big construction site where they were building a new subdivision. 

            “I put both dogs in the car one Saturday and went to check it out. It was just a big white house, set back into the woods. From the front, all you saw was the graying façade. As we drove around the gravel circle drive, though, I noticed some sheds in the back, which were barely visible through the trees.”

            “Please tell me when you went it was broad daylight.”

            “Oh, yeah. I wanted to look around, so going at night wouldn’t have made much sense. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to find—I was just curious. If I hadn’t brought Jax, I wouldn’t have found anything but an old house and a couple of sheds out back. I peeked through the windows and saw the place had been pretty thoroughly stripped. The sheds had some wood piles and big stacks of old newspapers, but nothing out of the ordinary. The whole time I was looking around Jax kept stopping and staring at me. Kea was being Kea, just sniffing around and being excited to explore a new place. But Jax was acting weird. Every time he stopped, I just pulled him along. Then, as I was finishing up my survey of the property, I started paying him more attention. And it was as clear as if he’d opened his mouth and spoken it to me in plain English: he was pleading with me. He wanted me to do something.”

            “Oh my God. Did he want you to take him in the house?”

            “Well, I didn’t know at first. So, before going back to the car, I just stopped for a second and watched him. I said, ‘What’s up buddy?’ and waited to see what he’d do. Sure enough, he turned and started walking toward the far corner of the yard. I gave him enough slack in the leash to lead me and Kea wherever it was he wanted to go.”

“Oh no, what did you find?”

            “Nothing at first. In fact, after we walked through the underbrush for a while, I was about to stop Jax and go back to the car. That’s when I saw that we’d made it to a trail that had been grown over. It led farther back into the woods. The thing was, though, those woods weren’t that deep. I knew if we kept going, we’d eventually end up in somebody’s yard. But every time I hesitated, Jax would turn back with those pleading eyes. So on we went.

            “Finally, he stopped and started sniffing in a spot that at first glance couldn’t have been more nondescript. My curiosity was piqued, but I was also getting impatient. My best guess was that he was following a path he’d been taken along for his walks back when he’d lived there. So I wasn’t really expecting to find anything all that interesting. This was just Jax going down memory lane.”

            “But you did find something?”

            Dad turned to look at Mom beside him on the couch before turning back to the rest of us. “Oh yeah, we definitely found something.”

            “Not a dead body. Please tell us it wasn’t a dead kid or something.”

            “Well, in point of fact, it was a dead body, but not a human.”

            A shiver spread from my spine across my shoulders and over my scalp as I imagined what the inhuman thing could have been that my dad and his dog discovered all those years ago in the woods. I turned to see every last pair of eyes in the house fixed on him, every mouth agape. 

            “Jax went from sniffing to pawing to digging through the leaves and the surface dirt. When I saw what was unmistakably a bone sticking up through the side of the hole he was digging, I let out a sound before I could stop myself by clapping a hand over my mouth. Suddenly, I was in a panic, afraid I’d be seen and caught by someone out here. By who, I couldn’t say. I was just terrified someone was out there and now that I’d shouted, they knew exactly where I was. It didn’t make much sense. But I was turning to look in every direction, my eyes roving around frantically. 

            “Time was at a standstill, so I couldn’t tell you how long it took me to notice it. The trees nearby were all tiny, with thin trunks barely as tall as me. There was undergrowth all around, but all the bigger trees were some distance away. It hit me that I was standing in what, some years ago, had been a clearing. Coming back to my senses a bit, I rushed over to Jax and squatted down to help him uncover the bones. I figured if it did turn out to be a human, the next step would be to call the police. It didn’t take me long though to figure out it wasn’t a human. It was a dog. And it would have been about the same size as Jax.”

            “Ooooh, so Jax was a ghost dog.”

            A tidal wave of tension-releasing laughter crashed over the room.

            “Believe it or not, that possibility never occurred to me. I’m pretty sure the bones had belonged to Jax’s friend, possibly a sibling. The next question that sprang to my mind then was what the hell had this crazy fuck Avery done to this poor dog. With some help from Jax, we excavated the rest of the skeleton. It wasn’t even buried really. There was just a light covering of dirt and leaves. By now, Kea was excited to help too, but Jax let it be known her help wasn’t welcome. She wandered off and sniffed around elsewhere as we completed the task. That’s when I made another discovery. Sifting through the leaves, I kept finding stones and beads and other sundry objects that didn’t look like they belonged there. It took me some time, but I eventually saw the stones were arranged in lines radiating out from the spot where we found the skeleton. I felt sick. I tried to tell myself that Avery may have simply performed some funeral rites after this dog died from cancer or something. But I’m reasonably certain the fucker killed Jax’s friend as part of some perverse ritual.”

            Dad went quiet, dropping his gaze to the floor. He seemed to have fallen into a trance, but no one wanted to speak up to encourage him to continue. Finally, I said, “Dad, what did you do with the bones?”

            “I gathered them up in the flannel shirt I was wearing over my t-shirt and brought them back to the car. But before we left, I went back to the big sigil—or whatever the hell it was—Avery had arranged over the ground and scattered the pieces as far and wide as I could. I got myself worked up into a fury as I did it. I even had the thought that I wouldn’t mind all that much if Avery managed to find out where Jax ended up, because then I could have a word with him.”

            “And did he ever find you guys?”

            “I never saw him. But I have a feeling he and Jax were reunited briefly.” 

            Mom had been looking disturbed. Now she said, “Doug, what are you talking about?”

            “This is the main part of the story I didn’t want to tell you about. You were pregnant at the time—and I just didn’t know what the hell to say about any of it.”

            “Just tell me what happened.” 

            “You probably remember the night. You were a couple months pregnant. There was a big storm.”

            “I remember you said Jax got out. You both came in drenched. And you worked late that night, didn’t you? I was already in bed by the time you came upstairs.”

            “I didn’t work late. I was actually at John’s house. That’s my cop buddy,” Dad turned to tell the rest of us. “We were talking about what I might do about Avery being out of jail and his whereabouts unknown. I was racing the storm on my way home when I got a call. I remember I forgot I’d added the number for the animal shelter into my contacts list, but it appeared on my phone. It was a good thing too because otherwise I wouldn’t have picked up. I still almost ignored it. I thought it was probably about a fundraiser or something. But when I picked up, it was the kid who’d warned me about Avery, and he was frantic. The first thing he said was, ‘You need to understand he threatened me.’ I didn’t say anything. It took me a couple seconds to register what it meant. He’d told Avery where I lived. Avery was on his way to get Jax—on his way to my house, where my pregnant wife was—to get a dog there was no way in hell I was going to let him take.”

            “Did you really not know any of this happened, Mrs. Caldwell?” 

            “I never told her,” Dad said before she could answer. “But I’ll get to that. Anyway, I’m flooring it now to get home. The kid at the shelter said Avery had only left a minute ago and that all he’d told him was my name. That meant I might have a little time. As soon as I hung up, I called John and told him what was happening and then I just concentrated on getting home as soon as I could. 

            “The kid said Avery was threatening him, but he didn’t say anything about a weapon of any sort. Still, I would have expected to be more scared than I was racing home. What I felt instead was pure rage. From what I could tell, this guy had already killed one dog, and now he wanted Jax for something. Well, that wasn’t going happen. He wasn’t going to get anywhere near that dog. And, if he came close to my wife, there’d be no saving him. I was gripping the steering wheel and clenching my teeth, planning to get home first and be ready for him when he showed up.”

            “Why didn’t you call me?”

            “I did. I called and asked what you were doing? You said you were tired and that you were going to go to bed a little early. I asked if you were upstairs and you said yes. Then I asked where the dogs were. You said Kea was with you and Jax was outside, but you were about to go bring him in. I told you to wait, not to worry about the storm because I was almost there, that I’d get him inside before it hit.”

            “Hmm… I almost remember that. I guess you didn’t want to worry me if you didn’t have to and that’s why you didn’t tell me some criminal was on his way to our house.”

            “I definitely made some decisions that night I would later question. The most likely scenario, as I guessed it, was that we’d never hear from the guy. Or he’d show up and I’d send him away, with John’s help if need be. If he pressed matters, I was fully prepared to fight the guy. I figured I could hurt him bad enough for him to get the message. What I didn’t plan on was getting home and finding the backyard empty.”

            “What? I remember both you and Jax coming inside soaking wet that night—if I’m thinking of the night you’re talking about.”

            “That was the night.”

“You got sick. You stayed home from work for a week after that.”

            “I stayed home. But I wasn’t sick.”

            “I see. Just tell me the guy wasn’t at our house.” 

            “When I got there, nobody was there except you and Kea. Not even Jax. After looking in the backyard, I came in the house to ask if you’d brought him in. Instead, I met Kea standing at the top of the stairs, baring her teeth and growling at me. She growled at me sometimes when Susan and I were arguing, but never like this. She stopped me in my tracks. That’s when I knew for sure something was wrong. Jax would have come to see who was there if he’d been in the house. So I bolted back outside. I checked the backyard again, but he wasn’t out there. I ran to the gate and saw that it was still latched. I was running around outside the fence when the rain started. By now, I was less worried about waking you up, so I started calling for Jax, knowing his recall sucked and he probably wouldn’t come anyway.”

            “But you said you had him until he died, so you must’ve found him.”

            “I caught sight of him in a flash of lightning. He was sitting, facing the opposite direction, on the hill that separated our yard from the pond. The thunder drowned out the sound of my voice when I called him, but I was already sprinting to where he was. He didn’t budge the whole time I was running up to him, shouting his name. There was just enough light from the surrounding houses for me to see the blood.”

            “Was it his?”

            “I didn’t know for a few very long moments. I was like, ‘Jax buddy, are you alright?,’ patting him all over, looking for a wound. Then another flash of lightning showed me that he was sitting in a huge pool of gore, one that trailed off down the hill.”

            “Trailed off?”

            “As in there was what I thought was a big circle of it where Jax was sitting, and about a two-foot wide trail of it leading down the other side of the hill. And Jax’s maw and chest were warm and sticky with it.”

            “You never saw Avery?”

            “I looked in all directions as best I could, but no, I didn’t see anyone. So, my first task was to get Jax out of the storm. I was running up to the garage when I saw John’s car parking in the street. He must’ve known something was up, because he jumped out in the downpour and ran up to me. I told him Jax must’ve bit someone, mauled him really, because there was blood all over the hill behind the house. He ran back there with his flashlight to search. I put Jax in the garage and then went back out to help him look.”

            “I never even knew John was there that night.” 

            “He slept in his car out front the whole night, and a few nights after that.”

            “You never found Avery? Did you call the police?”  

            “We never saw or heard from Avery again. As far as I know, no one else did either. John told me he either died from blood loss, which is likely given how much blood was on the hill, or he crawled away, got medical attention, and then changed his identity to avoid cops looking to serve a warrant. He told me it wouldn’t make much difference if I called the police. They would send someone to sit out front that night, but that would be about it. Since John offered to stay anyway, and since I didn’t want to stress you out if it could be helped, I figured it wasn’t necessary to give a statement. The other thing I was worried about was what might happen to Jax.”

            “Do you think he killed Avery?”

            “Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what happened. I have a hard time seeing how any other scenario would have played out.”

            “And after all these years you’re just telling me now.”

            “Like I said, I took a week off work, saying I had the flu. That meant I had to stay away from you too—since you were pregnant and all—which meant I could stay downstairs in case anything happened. The police were already looking for Avery, and John stayed out front a few more nights after the first one. Really, though, the main reason I didn’t get the police involved officially was that I was almost certain Avery was already dead.”

            “Oh my god. He crawled into that pond and died, didn’t he?”

            Dad didn’t respond. 

            “Wouldn’t you have smelled the corpse decomposing or something?”

            “This was in the fall. The storm was blowing hard, and it was pouring most of the night. By morning, there was no blood, no trace of any sort. There was frost on the ground almost every morning by that point. But, yeah, I have to say, I was worried for a good long while about his damn bloated corpse poking out of the cattails. We got through the winter, though, and nothing. I mean, it wasn’t like that pond smelled like lavender all the time anyway. There were times the next spring and summer when I was out mowing or playing with the dogs when I thought I caught a whiff. But that was all it ever was.”

            I got the sense from looking at Mom that Dad was in for some rough treatment when they left the party. I could understand his reasoning though. “But Dad, why didn’t you tell Mom later, like after Christa was born?”

            Dad threw back his head and laughed. “Pure cowardice. I figured she’d be real good and pissed I hadn’t told her before. Even now, I’m getting the sense she’s not too happy about how I handled things.”

            “You left a dead body in the pond behind our house. We’re lucky our kids never found it. Hell, you’re lucky you didn’t end up in prison.”

            “John assured me that wouldn’t happen. No one could even prove Jax ever had blood on him. I spent an hour that night scrubbing out his fur. I never even saw Avery, so how could I be liable for his death in any way?”

            “You should have told me—we’ll talk about it later.”

            “Yeah, tell your pregnant wife that her dog just killed the cult member who sacrificed its friend to some damn tree god or whatever the hell it is those nutjobs worship. At first, it seemed perfectly reasonable not to tell you. Later, I started having doubts about my decision, but I couldn’t see any benefit to telling you by then.”

            “You said Kea growled at you inside the house. Do you think she saw Avery? How did she know something was going on?”

            “That’s only one of several weird aspects to the story I can’t explain. Why was Jax just sitting there on the hill after his former owner dragged himself bleeding down the hill? How had Jax known where his friend was buried behind that abandoned house? What had Kea spooked those nights before we brought Jax home? Those damn dogs seemed to know all kinds of things they shouldn’t have.”

            The room went quiet again as everyone processed what they’d heard. I felt intensely worried, as I had after hearing Mom’s story, even though everyone who had been in danger was safe in the room with me—or safe in the ground. I considered my dad’s story from start to finish. The question that came to mind wasn’t about any of the particulars, though; it was whether Dad’s story really was better than the one Mom told last year. 

            Cindy might’ve been thinking along the same lines, because she was the first to break the silence, saying to Dad, “So you do believe Mrs. Caldwell’s story—I mean the part about how Kea was responding to someone who wasn’t there when she bolted down the hall and knocked the guy attacking her off balance?” 

            Dad looked at her and said, “Let’s just say, it’s not hard to imagine either of those particular dogs picking up on something like that. Not hard at all.”

            I said, “But Mom says she doesn’t believe anything supernatural happened.”

            Dad’s brow furrowed as he sat thinking. Finally, he said, “There’s a quote from Einstein that helped me understand your Mom’s position on these things. It’s not something I necessarily agree with, but he said basically, ‘There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is.’ You see, Susan has a mind that’s more efficient than mine. She’ll do some math in her head to tell you the probability of this or that rare occurrence. With some effort, I can follow her calculations, but afterward I’ve got nothing left. She can figure out that something is quite possibly a coincidence instead of a miracle and still have enough mental energy left to be curious about the implications. She sees science as magic enough. But it costs me so much energy to follow her reasoning that when I get to the point of realizing no miracle took place, I’m too exhausted to be fascinated. All I am is disappointed. Honestly, I have to say she’s probably right about there being no benevolent force operating beneath the surface of nature, no miracles, but I can’t say for sure one way or the other, and since there’s some uncertainty, I take that to mean I have a choice in what I believe, a choice in how I live. And I kind of just prefer to live in a world where there’s some magic.”

            “It’s all magic dear. And I think it’s doubtful Einstein ever said that.”

            “Like I said, for you the plain reality is magic enough.”

            “That’s because there’s nothing plain about reality.” 

            “Yeah, like I said. I’m just saying I don’t have the mental capacity to fully appreciate the intricacies of that reality. That’s why you’re the most magical thing in my life.” 

            “That’s very sweet dear. We’re still going to have a talk later about you keeping what Jax did from me all these years.”

            “One question I have,” Tom said, “is what did you do with those bones, the ones Jax found at Avery’s old house?” 

            “This is where things get really interesting. I buried them in the same place I would eventually bury Jax himself. It was one his favorite places in the world—Kea’s too.”

            “On the hill by the pond in your backyard?”

            “Ha ha. Nope, it’s a little place called Bicentennial Woods. You see, there’s a storied arbor on the far side of the ridge overlooking the creek. Rumor has it, that place is very haunted. It’s always struck me as a beautiful place to visit. I still go back once in a while to reflect and reminisce about our time with Jax in our lives.”

            Dad went silent again, his eyes losing focus. Then he turned to Mom and said, “Don’t worry honey, I know Bicentennial coming up twice tonight is only a coincidence. Still, what an interesting one.

            “Now I have a question for you Tom. Did you ever find your damn keys?” 

Also read:

Cannonball

The Fire Hoarder

Encounters, Inc.

The Smoking Buddha

Bedtime Ghost Story for Adults

Politics, Ideologies, and Epistemologies

I was trying to explain to my girlfriend the difference between postmodern liberals and classical liberals like me. She’s right-leaning, but not at all onboard with some far-right ideas about, say, homosexuality. So, I broke it down according to guiding philosophies and attitudes toward America. I later realized it would be a good illustration of how someone could be liberal and agree there’s a need for reform without going in for ideas about, say, the importance of identifying white privilege or insisting human sex is a spectrum.

Cannonball: a Halloween Story

            “I’m sure I would’ve dismissed it as nothing but a weird dream. I opened my eyes, and I saw a figure standing past the foot of my bed, as if he’d just walked into the room from the hallway. All I could see was an outline, but for some reason I got the sense it was somebody I knew. That’s why I didn’t feel scared, not at first. It was only after I stared for a long time that I started to get freaked out, because whoever it was just stood there, like he was staring right back at me, only I couldn’t see his eyes. I couldn’t see any of his other facial features either. Finally, I was awake enough to say, ‘What’s up?’ –I know, stupid right? But I opened my mouth, and that’s what came out.”

            Nearly all of us had heard Chris’s story before. For six years now, our group of friends has been taking turns hosting these Halloween parties, and each year we gather around a fire—indoors this year—to share our experiences of the eerily unexplained. What made this year’s party different for me was that it was the first time my mom attended. I wondered what she, a grandmother, would make of all these twenty-somethings indulging in such frivolity. I couldn’t resist stealing glances at her as I listened to each of the stories, even though she remained perfectly silent as we each stood next to Cindy’s fireplace in turn, holding forth on our life’s most mysterious moments. 

            “Now, here’s the freaky part,” Chris went on in his typical supercharged fashion, his hands ablur. “The guy didn’t turn and walk out of the room. No, he backed through the door into the hallway. And there was no bouncing or swaying to indicate he was taking steps. It was like he was on wheels or something. I kept blinking, trying to clear my eyes. Then he passed through the door and was outside the room, out of sight. By now, I was more awake and was like, ‘Hey!’ as I climbed out of bed and rushed out to the hallway. Well, you probably already guessed. I looked all over the house—nothing. There wasn’t a soul there but me.”

            “There wasn’t a body there but yours anyway,” Cindy said, daintily lifting her hand to cover her mouth between bouncing shoulders. 

            “It was disturbing as hell, mostly because I’ve never had any dreams at all like that, before or since. I probably still would’ve forgotten the whole thing after a few years if it hadn’t been for the phone call I got—literally the second after I gave up searching the house and sat down on the couch. It was my sister Jen. Some dude had started freaking out after a Tinder date and wouldn’t let her out of his car. I found out later she’d gotten in just to talk to the guy, but then he started the engine and began driving toward his house. As soon as I hit the button to answer the call, I hear her screaming, ‘Stop the car! Stop the car! I want out right now. Stop the car!’ Next, I hear the dude demanding to know who she called. ‘It’s my brother,’ she says. ‘He’s on his way right now.’ That was a lie of course, since I had no clue where she was yet. ‘Chris, if the line goes dead, call the police right away and tell them where I am.’ 

            “The dude apparently fell for it, or else he realized my sister was going to be too much trouble. For whatever reason, he stopped the car. By the time she was stepping out onto the side of the road, I was already pulling out of my driveway.”

            Chris paused, puffing out his chest. A good-looking, fastidiously groomed, dark-bearded man with a slight build, he evinced, beneath his habitual smart-ass attitude, an undercurrent of earnestness that made his story all too believable. 

            “Okay, so you’ve all got it down to coincidence, right?” he said. “I had a weird dream, and then my sister calls because she needs picked up after a date gone awry. Here’s the kicker: no sooner had I pulled back into my lane after stopping to pick her up than we see this asshole barreling down the road, heading right for us. I jerked the wheel to the right and swerved over onto the shoulder, but he still almost hit us. I mean, I was pissed. Jen had to talk me out of turning around and going after the guy. She ended up calling the police after all and telling them what happened. I expected them to come out to the house and interview us or something, but they didn’t do a damn thing. It was kind of an unsettling education in how useless the police are to women frightened of creepy assholes.”

            “And what woman isn’t?” Cindy chimed in again.  

            “Now, here’s the thing. If I hadn’t been awake to get that call from her, I might’ve been another four or five minutes getting to where she was. She would’ve still been walking on the side of the road when that psycho came back. Because of whatever the hell that was that walked—or floated—into my room earlier that night, I was there just in time to save her.”

            Everyone in the room fell silent. I was left pondering how each year’s sharing of stories, which is meant to be fun, almost invariably turns solemn. I glanced at my mom again. She’d been listening intently. Now, she was looking down at nothing. I realized, with a modicum of stupefaction, I didn’t know much of anything about her beliefs when it came to the supernatural. She’s been a Christian her whole life, as far as I know, but even in that realm I could only describe her views generically. You always take your parents’ lives and beliefs for granted, I guess, gathering bits and pieces as the years go by, seldom considering how incomplete your grasp of their stories probably is.  

Finally, Chris added a postscript. “Now, I’m not saying it was an angel or a ghost or anything. But I know one thing: it wasn’t a coincidence.” 

            I looked around at everyone’s faces, amazed by the amount of time passing without anyone making a joke. When I looked back at Mom, though, I saw the faintest suggestion of amusement. Was she quietly laughing at us for taking Chris’s melodrama so seriously? 

            “Okay,” Mike, who’d been sitting quietly nursing his whiskey sour through most of the storytelling, said at last. “Can anyone top that one?” 

            We all knew each other’s stories from the years prior. Still, it was fun to get together and rehearse them as part of our group’s holiday ritual. I’m sure we would’ve all gladly listened as Maddy told us her story about the guy with glowing eyes she once saw crouching beside a country road—as if he were eating something he’d just killed—or as Tom recounted the incident when he was surrounded by whispering shadows while on a darkened forest trail, looking for his lost keys by the light of his smart phone. Chris, however, must’ve seen the same smirk on my mom’s face as I did. 

            “What about you Mrs. Caldwell?” he asked. “Have you ever had any encounters with the unexplained?” 

            “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she said with perfect equipoise. “If you go deep enough, you can say pretty much everything is unexplained.” 

            “So, you’re not a believer?” Cindy asked. “I don’t go in for any of the usual UFO or haunted house nonsense, either, but I have experienced some things that made me wonder. Haven’t you ever had something happen to you that made you think, even for a second—I don’t know—like some unseen force was involved?” 

            I slid into my old habit of looking at my mom as an older, wiser version of myself, despite all my adolescent and early adult thrashings to free myself from her influence. Maybe it was the confusion that comes from a couple failed relationships and the onrushing peril of my thirties, but of late I’d been wanting to hear more of what my mom had to say about things practical and transcendent alike. She scrunched her eyes, her cheeks etched by decades of ready smiles into a mask of hard-won wisdom—or something. Pushing her still-slim body back into the couch, she gathered her thoughts. We really do look alike, I thought, though I’m not sure I’d want my life to in any way recapitulate hers. But should that be the measure of what a woman has to say? 

            “I know that as us ladies get older, we’re supposed to get more attuned to that sort of thing: burning sage to cleanse your house of evil spirits, seances, spirituality—all that spooky stuff that everyone finds so thrilling. That story you told—your name is Chris?—it did remind me of something that happened years and years ago. More than anything else, though, I feel the need to tell you, that ‘unseen force’ you’re talking about, it’s not what you think it is.” 

            “So you actually know what it is? Like—you’ve seen it or heard it?”

            “Oh, yes. So have you. It’s not anything from beyond the grave or anything hiding beneath the fabric of nature. It’s something in your mind that insists on fitting the chaos of life into a pattern—or, more specifically, a story.”

            “Ah, so you’re an unbeliever. Do you think stories like the one Chris just told are random coincidences that we make too much of? Because Chris seems pretty convinced it was something else entirely.”

            “More than convinced. You’d have a very hard time convincing me it was a chance occurrence.” 

            “I’ve had quite a few dreams at this point in my life. Some of them, most of them, have been pretty forgettable. A few of them I remember years later. You said you’ve never had a dream like the one you described before or after the night your sister got into trouble. But, before that, you said you probably would’ve forgotten the dream had it not been for what happened afterward. My question is, how many similar dreams did you in fact forget, simply because nothing happened later to bookmark them as significant?”

            Chris squinted, either thinking hard or exaggeratingly conveying his disbelief.  

            Mom went on, “Memory is a tricky thing, you see, because what you remember is always tied up with what you find meaningful. So, when you examine your life looking for turning points and revelations, it’s easy to pull details from their context. It’s easy to fudge them—or even invent them.”

            “Are you saying I made up that my dream saved my sister’s life?” Chris asked, more amused than insulted. 

            “It sounds like the scene on the road would be difficult to hallucinate. But how close was the guy to hitting you two really? You were angry, you were frightened, and it was the middle of the night. Is it so hard to believe you could’ve remembered it—or even experienced it in the moment—as more dangerous than it actually was? For that matter, is it impossible that, knowing the significance of what happened later, you started to recall the details of your dream differently? I mean, I don’t know about you, but my dreams are pretty murky, pretty open to interpretation. They’re less like movies and more like Rorschach inkblot tests. Then there’s the timing.”

            While Chris had been telling his story, I remembered thinking I’d never heard the detail about how close in time his arrival on the scene to save his sister was to when the guy came back and forced them off the road. As my mom questioned how sure he could be about the precise sequence of incidents that occurred so long ago, I looked to see his expression go rigid, as though he were effortfully concealing his embarrassment. Maybe he really had simply added this part to make the story more compelling, not even realizing he was doing it. 

            Knowing Chris would be eager to defend his account, I jumped in to redirect the conversation. “Mom, you said Chris’s story reminded you of something that happened. Did you have a prophetic dream? If you did, how can you say it’s all about misremembering and fudging details?” 

            “‘A prophetic dream’? Well, I would’ve never called it anything so grandiose.”

            “But you had a dream that tipped you off to something that was going to happen in your waking life?”

            “Not exactly. I had a weird dream that ended up seeming significant.” 

            “What was it?”

            “Do you remember our dog Kea? You were only about six when she died.”

            Kea was a husky-malamute mix, and one of the sweetest dogs I’ve ever known. Some of my earliest memories are of her chasing me around our backyard. In those memories, she was enormous, all soft black and white fur, with ghostly light blue eyes. She had these tendrils of white sprouting down from the otherwise black fur around her ears, and they had tiny striations, as though someone had crimped them. Like all huskies, she was independent—stubborn—but all my mom ever had to do was whisper and that dog would obey. Though “obey” isn’t the right word; it was like they had a rapport. Twenty-three years on, I can still see the heartbreak in my mom’s eyes as she watched Kea get frail with age. My mom loved that dog. She disappeared for a few days when Kea died. Even at six and seven years old, I recognized how devastated she was. It was over a year before she stopped tearing up whenever she talked about her, and she couldn’t seem to help talking about her. 

            “How could I forget Kea? I thought us kids were going to end up in an orphanage after she died. You were so depressed. We loved her too. I couldn’t stand the thought of her lying in the ground—I remember wanting to dig her up. To this day, I think about her from time to time. She was such a huge presence in my childhood.”

            “I don’t know if I ever told you this, but Kea wasn’t really my dog originally. Well, she was, but I bought her for my boyfriend at the time, a man I lived with for four years, a man I loved and thought I was going to marry.”

            “You never told me any of this! That means you broke up with this guy just a year or two before you started dating Dad.”

            “I’ll get to that.”

            “Hold the phone. Who was this guy?”

            “He was Kea’s dad,” Mom said laughing coyly. “The way he used to look at that dog—it drove me crazy for a long time. Eventually, I came to realize that’s just how he was. He formed these insanely strong bonds, not with everybody obviously, but with the people he got close with—and the animals he got close with too.”

            “You lived with him for four years? What happened? Is he still around?”

            “No, he died a year and five months before I started dating your dad, although I’d known your dad for a long time already by then.”

            “You were in love with a man who died right before you got together with Dad—and you never told us about him? How did he die?”

            “Some kids were trying to save their dog after it fell through the ice on a lake he walked Kea around all the time. One of them ended up falling through the ice himself. Jim got both the dog and the kid out—apparently with some help from Kea—but he got severe frostbite, and then he got a really bad infection. The doctors kept saying he would be fine, but the antibiotics just wouldn’t work. Then he got pneumonia. They think that’s what killed him.” 

            “Mom, how come you never told us about this guy before?”

            “Do a lot of mothers tell their daughters about their dating histories?”

            “Oh, come on, Mom. This was right before you started dating Dad—and you didn’t just break up with him. The guy died.” 

            “Well, maybe it was just something I felt I needed to move on from, not resurrect through retelling, you know? Haven’t you ever gone through something like that, something you need to recover from but never really felt comfortable talking about?” 

            This was when Chris butted in. “It sounds like you two have a lot to talk about, but I’m curious about the dream you were about to tell us about.” 

            “Oh yeah, that.” 

            “Yeah, come on, Mrs. Caldwell. Tell us about the dream.”

            “I had the dream about eight months after Jim died. After the funeral, Kea went to live with my mom and dad. She was home with me that particular night, though, because they were on this big road trip Dad had been planning for years. It was Kea’s first time back in a long time, but she went right to her old spot by the front door. She seemed a little sad from the moment my parents dropped her off, and, really, I just wasn’t paying all that much attention to her. At one point, I was sitting on the couch, doing some work, when Kea started whimpering in her sleep, as if she were having a nightmare, and then she jolted awake. I called over to her, ‘What’s wrong girl? Did you have a bad dream?’ She looked at me, got up, and started walking around the front hallway, as if she were looking for something. ‘It’s okay Kea,’ I said, ‘I miss him too.’”

            “So the dream you’re talking about—it was the dog’s dream?”

            “Not exactly. I only thought about Kea waking up and searching around later. It’s like I was saying, what happened next made my memory of the dog’s behavior seem more significant. Otherwise, I probably would’ve never remembered it at all.”

            “What happened next?”

            “That’s where my dream comes in. It was late at night or early in the morning. I’d been asleep for a long time. The image of Kea appears in my mind; only, it’s not really an image. I’m partially looking down at Kea as she sleeps in her spot by the door, partially inside Kea’s own mind. I don’t know if any of you ever have dreams like that. I’ve had some others, but it’s usually another person’s perspective I step into. I can’t remember it ever being a dog’s.”

            “Ha! So you and the dog shared a dream?”

            “Well, yeah, I guess. I mean, I don’t know if my dream was anything like what Kea had been dreaming, but in my own dream I was sharing the dream with her.” 

            “Okay,” Chris said, “your dream is definitely much weirder than mine.” 

            “What did you and the dog dream then?” I asked. 

            “It wasn’t anything earthshattering. It was just Jim’s voice saying, ‘That’s a good girl, Kea.’ It was in a whisper, like he used when he was saying goodnight to her.” Here, Mom went quiet, staring down at her feet. “He had this way of saying it, like he was talking to a baby. Not sing-songy, but ever so gentle. Sometimes, he’d leave off the t-h-a, so it sounded more like, ‘Suh good girl, Kea.’” 

            She paused again for two deep breaths.  

            “I should probably explain that for the first two years or so after we got Kea, I couldn’t stand her. Jim became obsessed with her the moment we brought her home, and he spent so much time playing with her, training her, walking her—it drove me crazy. For one thing, she was my second husky, and the first I’d trained using a prong collar. I’d learned that the first thing you have to do to get a dog to behave is let them know you’re in charge, that you’re the alpha. And my other husky was a great dog, so I knew those methods worked. 

            “Jim assured me all that ‘dominance training stuff’ was nonsense. He thought it was immoral to deliberately inflict pain on a conscious being in an effort to change its behavior. By his lights, you don’t have to establish dominance to get a dog to listen to you and behave. You just have to have a mutual understanding based on trust and wanting the best for each other. I’d let him go on and on, and just think to myself, ‘I’ll watch you figure it out for yourself when your methods go completely wrong.’ The infuriating part of it was they didn’t go wrong—at least not in any obvious way. His methods just took so much time. It was like he adopted a special-needs kid. I’d want to go out for an evening or take a trip somewhere, and it was always, ‘We can’t leave Kea for that long.’ So we’d stay in. For a while, I really felt like that damn dog was ruining my life.

            “At night, when she finally stopped following him around and harassing him, she’d lay down behind the front door of our old house, and before he went upstairs he’d say goodnight to her like I described. It always annoyed me because he treated her like his baby. ‘Daddy loves you, you’re such a good girl, I’m so proud of you,’ and on and on. I just wanted to shout, ‘It’s a damn dog you idiot!’ And, if I’m being honest now, I think that was a big part of why when we moved into that house, I insisted he train her to recognize the upstairs as off-limits, which he did, grudgingly. 

            “Anyway, in the dream, I was half looking down at Kea as she lay there, half in her head as she dreamt hearing Jim’s whisper. The weird part was I had this dream the same night I’d seen her jolt awake—it was like the dream was showing me what had startled her, why she’d gotten up and looked around so frantically. Now I was jolting awake from my own dream, breaking into sobs, and rushing down the stairs to check on Kea. She licked the tears off my face and lay her head in my lap as I cried.” 

             “My God, it sounds like a really rough time for both of you.” 

            “You have no idea. I guess I should fill in the rest of the context for you. After Jim died, not surprisingly, Kea started having some pretty serious behavior issues. It started with my grandpa’s couch getting chewed all to hell. That alone was enough for me to want to rehome her. Then she started digging like crazy in the backyard. At one point, she even managed to dig under the fence. Lucky for her, the neighbors she ran to had seen Jim walking her a billion times, so they knew right where she lived. I was actually disappointed when they showed up at the door. That’s when I got online and started looking for a new ‘forever home’ for her. But my parents told me to wait and see how I felt after a few months. My compromise idea was for them to take her for a few months, and then I’d decide whether I wanted her back. 

            “Meanwhile, you could say I was having some behavior issues of my own. I don’t need to go into it, I’m sure. Suffice to say, no matter what I did, all I could think about was never seeing Jim again. For months, I was subject to waves of intense emotional pain. I kept obsessing over all the ways I’d been a terrible girlfriend to him, and I’d never be able to tell him I was sorry. That’s a big part of why I gave Kea to my parents instead of just getting rid of her. He loved that fucking dog so much, there was no way. 

            “After about seven months, though, the intense pain gave way, mostly, to numbness, a bone-deep numbness that was close enough to death I wondered every day what the point was of waking up in the morning. On occasion, the feeling would come back, but what was the point to all that suffering if the best I could get back to was this zombie-like state of near oblivion? You’re old enough to understand what can happen to you as a woman when you’re in a state like that. After sleepwalking through life for day upon day, week upon week, month upon month, I started getting desperate to shock myself out of it. 

            “That’s how I ended up at a bar downtown—which one doesn’t matter—hanging on a guy, whose name doesn’t matter. He was the most attractive, charismatic guy on the premises, funny as all get-out, and he was just all-around fun. Was he a good person? I didn’t care in the least.”

            “You went home with him?” I said, unable to conceal my horror. 

            “No, I took him home with me. Now, I’m not judging anyone, but I think you know I was never the type to go in for one-night stands. This was only the second I’d ever had—and the first was the beginning of my relationship with Jim, so I don’t even think that meets the definition.”

            “Wait! You slept with this Jim guy on the first date?” 

            “Oh yeah. I wish you could’ve met him. He was the type who could put you at ease even if your clothes were on fire.” 

            “It sounds like your clothes were on fire,” Cindy said giggling some more—until I turned my gaze on her, silencing her in an instant. 

            “When you two are done, I’d like to hear what this all has to do with your mom’s dream about the dog.” 

            “Well, as you can imagine, I had no idea what I was doing or what I even wanted to happen. When we got to the house, I offered him a drink, but he was impatient to get to the next stage—if you know what I mean. I kept pushing him back and stepping away, trying to stall, realizing now that it was too late that I wanted nothing to do with what I’d led him to expect. In the bar, he’d been so smooth, such a talker, you know. Now, he was, shall we say, straight to the point.”

            “Let me guess,” Chris interjected. “This is when the dog shows up to scare Squidward away.” 

            “Kea scare a guy away?” Mom said. “If you’d ever met her, you’d see how funny that notion is. Oh, I suppose I have seen her get her hackles up on a few occasions, and Jim told me about a couple others. Most likely, her intervening would take the form of pinches with her incisors—husky pinches, we used to call them—or a good goosing in the behind. She just wasn’t an aggressive dog.” 

            “Mom, Kea used to growl and flash her teeth whenever Dad raised his voice at you.”

            “That was much later, dear.”

            I held back telling her about the time Kea inserted herself between me and some older kids who were heckling and intimidating me, even as I marveled at how vivid the memory was. Mom was mostly right about her not being aggressive, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t protective. What I was really interested in just then, though, was whether my mother ended up going through with her second one-night stand. 

            She began again, “No, as far as I knew, Kea was asleep behind the door already. It was late after all, and though she usually greeted me whenever I got home, she seemingly felt no obligation to do so every time. So what did I do? Mostly, I just wanted to stall, so the brilliant idea that sprang to mind was to say we should go upstairs. He fancied that idea, so up we went. 

            “Once we were on my bed, he shifted gears and slowed down again, which was exactly what I’d hoped he would do, though I still dreaded what would come next, what I already regretted setting in motion. At the same time, I felt too guilty for leading him on to call a halt to the proceedings. I think all us girls have been in this particular pickle at one time or another.”

            “You didn’t go through with it, did you?” I couldn’t help blurting out. 

            “Honestly, I may have. I was drunk. I was heartbroken—although that word doesn’t even begin to capture it. Then in walks Kea. You have to understand how strange this was. Not since before the house was finished had she ever been upstairs. Now here she was, five years later, just waltzing in as if it was her nightly custom. I took the opportunity to put the smooching on pause, saying, ‘Kea, what are you doing up here?’ I started to sit up but was roughly pushed back down. And that’s when things got scary.”

            “Mom?”

            “Oh, don’t worry about me, hun. This was all so long ago. Let’s just say the most flashy, bold, and charismatic guys don’t always turn out to be the best human beings. It was a mistake I wouldn’t have made at any other juncture in my life. But that night I made it.”

            “He forced himself on you?” Chris asked, his earnest, heroic self stepping in to relieve the ornery, smart-ass version.

            “He pushed me back down and began unbuttoning my jeans. It took me a few moments longer than it should have to find the air and initiative I needed to tell him to stop, and then to demand that he stop. No matter how loud I got, though, he didn’t seem to mind. His only response was to put his hand over my mouth. What did bother him, though, was that Kea was just sitting there beside the bed, staring at him. 

            “‘What’s with your fucking dog?’ he said, all nonchalant, as if he hadn’t noticed at all how scared I was. I turned my own head to look as he sat up, saying, ‘Shoo!’ I thought the brief halt to the proceedings was a good opportunity and told him I’d take her outside. But he just said, ‘Fuck that,’ and started screaming at her to get out. Finally, he started climbing off the bed, bringing his arm up like he was going to swat her, and that sent her scrambling into the corner on the other side of the room. I figured this was my chance, that if I made it downstairs I could find some way to dissuade him from pushing matters any further. So I jumped out of bed and dashed through the doorway into the hall. 

            “It’s hard to describe what I was feeling then. I’d just made this colossal blunder, you know. It didn’t seem like I should be in any real danger, and I kept thinking at any moment the guy would bust up laughing. I think running down the hall I must’ve had a grin on my face, like it was all so ridiculous. But then I felt his body collide against mine from behind. He hit me so hard it knocked the wind out of me, and I fell hard on my knees. He rode me to the ground—I think I was even laughing at that point, though not for very long. 

            “After a moment, when I realized it wasn’t a joke, I found myself pinned face-down on the carpet. The panic finally kicked in. I tried to scream, but I didn’t have any air in my lungs. The whole time I kept thinking he was about to let me up and start laughing like it was just a big prank. Then I felt his hand snaking its way around my waist to start trying to undo my jeans again. I kept trying to lift myself up, but he would shove my face into the carpet every time I managed to lift my head. I actually had rug burns on my face later.” 

            “Good lord!” Chris exploded. “Please tell me the dog eventually came to save you.”

            “Oh yes, she did. But not the way you’d think. First, I started trying to call her. I couldn’t put much volume into it, but I did my best. When I heard her tags clinking together, the guy did too, and he turned to look at her. The asshole laughed, saying, ‘What’s that dog going to do?’ I could just see her out of the corner of my eye, and sure enough she was just sitting there, her tongue lolling out like she was excited about something, but with what looked like a smile on her face. She definitely wasn’t angry, definitely not trying to intimidate. 

            “Desperate now, I gathered all my strength to try and roll the guy off my back. I almost pulled it off, but then he picked up a lamp we’d knocked over, wrapped the cord around my neck, and told me to shut up and hold still. Somehow, I’d managed to drag us both close to the top of the stairs. I kept thinking my only chance now would be for both of us to tumble down the stairs together. Maybe then he’d get hurt while I avoided injury, you know. Or we’d both get hurt and I could avoid something else, if you know what I mean. Unfortunately, he had the cord tight enough around my neck that the more I struggled the darker it started going around the edges of my vision. Sure I was about to pass out, I put everything I had into one last buck to send us rolling over the edge of the top stair. 

            “It didn’t work out anything like that. I did upset his balance for just an instant, but I couldn’t quite topple him over. As I twisted my body with the last of my strength, I felt his weight beginning to shift back to center. I coughed and whimpered, certain all was lost. But then I hear the tags clinking again. And here came Kea running from the bedroom doorway at full speed. The guy either didn’t hear it or was too busy trying to pin me back down, because when she ran past him, nudging him sideways—just the direction I needed him to move—he was caught completely unawares. I gave another push with my leg and my arm, and he started to lean farther and farther, until I was finally out from under him, rolling over, and pushing him with both hands down the stairs. 

            “I didn’t see much of his fall, but I heard him thudding down and landing at the bottom of the stairs. It was a sound that told me pretty unequivocally I wouldn’t have to do any more fighting with him. Still dizzy myself, I slowly got to my feet and looked down the stairs to see him writhing and bleeding all over the tile. Before going down the stairs to get my phone, I turned to see if Kea was alright. She was standing on the loft, staring into the corner. ‘Kea, what’s wrong girl?’ I said, whispering for some reason. She turned to flash those blue eyes at me for a second but then went back to staring into the corner. 

            “My first call was to your uncle, who lived just three minutes away. My next call was to your grandma.”

            “Why didn’t you call the police?” 

            “Let’s just say in our family we already knew the police weren’t of much use in situations like this. So we took care of it on our own.”

            “What the hell did you do?”

            “A woman has her secrets. The important thing is that I never had any trouble from the asshole again—and I seriously doubt any other woman did either.” 

            “Wait, so the dog just ran past the guy you were wrestling with on the ground? Why didn’t she attack him?”

            “Well, I can think of two possible answers. The most likely one is that she thought we were playing, so she did sort of a flyby. Like I said, she’d been acting weird for a long time—she wasn’t even supposed to be upstairs. She may have just been confused.”

            “What’s the second possible answer?”

            Mom cast her eyes downward, smiling. “Cannonball husky,” she said looking back up, her eyes welling. 

            “Cannonball husky?” I said, verging on tears myself, though I hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about.

            “The first time we brought Kea home, it was New Year’s Eve. That’s when she met your grandma, who we always said was her grandma too. When Jim and I came back from the party we went to, your grandparents came back to see the new dog. Kea was so excited Jim had to hold her back, but when he let go she went flying at Grandma—an eight-week old bundle of fluff. Grandma squatted down to catch her, but Kea knocked her back into the cupboard beneath the sink in our kitchen. We all howled with laughter. That was the beginning of the game she would play where she ran full-force at someone—almost always Jim—and tried to knock him down. 

            “Jim said when she was about eight months old, he tried to take her for a run in the woods he loved. She was all over the place though, pulling ahead, stopping to sniff, wanting to go everywhere but forward on the trail. At one point, she pulled him off balance and he tripped over a tree root, losing his grip on the leash as he fell. He said he sat up, surrounded by brush, and Kea was nowhere to be seen. ‘She could have disappeared without any effort if she’d wanted to,’ he said. Instead, after a few tense moments, here she comes crashing through the leaves like a cannonball. He laughed and laughed as she rolled around in the dirt with him. That’s when he started calling her cannonball husky. 

            “I personally only saw it once more, when she got loose at your grandparents’ house on Thanksgiving, which would have been when she was just over a year old. Your uncle unchained her to wipe off her paws before letting her in the house—because he had a lab and didn’t understand huskies don’t come when called—and she was off. Jim came out as I leashed my other husky to try to find her and lure her back. We step outside the back door and here she comes running full speed between the houses and down by the pond. I took my dog down to get her while Jim circled around some other houses in case she turned back. 

            “God, Kea’s face. She was having so much fun. I didn’t think she’d ever stop running, and I was afraid it was only a matter of time before she found her way out to the road. Sure enough, when I got down by the pond, she took off back toward all the houses, right toward where Jim was coming to head her off. Now, she could have easily just run past him, but instead she stopped when she saw him. I was coming up behind her with my dog now, and I saw her kind of hesitate so she could lock eyes with Jim. Then she just bolted right toward him. He got this half grin on his face and squatted down. I was so sure she was going to veer off and run past him and he was going to have to dive after her. But she bowled right into him. It looked like she about knocked him over. When I got there, he was laughing and laughing—and then he whispered something in her ear. Trudging up to them, I was relieved and irritated both at once, because I knew your grandpa would pitch a fit when we brought the dog back with muddy paws. 

            “I ended up snapping at Jim about how idiotic it was that he insisted on bringing that damn dog everywhere we went. Of course she would get out, what with all those people coming and going. It was just dumb luck she hadn’t run straight for a road and gotten killed. Jim took it in silence, as he often did, either trying to ignore me or working out the implications of my anger—I never knew which.”

            She went silent herself now, remembering. 

            After a moment, Chris asked, “You think Kea was doing the cannonball husky thing when she knocked that asshole off of you?” 

            “It’s hard to say all this time later. At the time, though, I was pretty convinced. You have to keep in mind I wasn’t exactly in a good position to see what she was doing. All I know for sure is that she came running right for the guy, and if she hadn’t… Well, we found out later the guy had hit his head in an accident a few months earlier; today, they’d probably call it a traumatic brain injury. He was on a bunch of medication. And he also told us he’d snorted a bunch of cocaine that night.”

            “You didn’t call the police?” 

            “Oh, we took care of it, believe me. You have to understand how horrible the official legal process can be for a woman in cases like this.”

            “But, Mom, that son of a bitch needed to go to prison.” 

            “Well, instead, he got a second severe blow to the head. What he really needed was to be in a hospital—or an institution. At any rate, getting the law involved isn’t the only option to take care of situations like these. But, like I said, an old woman is allowed some secrets.” 

            I felt like pressing her, but before I could say anything else, Chris was asking, “When exactly was this attempted assault—I mean, in relation to the weird dream you and Kea shared?”

            “It was the next night.” 

            “Wait, you have this dream, and then the dog mysteriously shows up upstairs for the first time, and then she ends up saving you from some dude who’s jacked up on who-knows-what—and you still don’t believe there could be otherworldly beings watching out for you?” 

            “‘Could be’ is a different question. Of course, there could be. The real question is how likely is it? You’re focusing on these one-off incidents in our lives. You went to save your sister because you had a dream. Think about, though, how many examples of things like that do you know of? If you live 70 years, how many nights is that for you to dream? Over twenty-five thousand, right? Now, if only one incident occurred every day in your life, that would be the same number. In reality, probably two or three things happen to you every day. What would really be implausible is each of us living a few decades and never experiencing coincidences that strike us as bizarre, or architected, or whatever.”

            “Wow. That’s so… mechanistic.” 

            “Aren’t you trying to be mechanistic when you reason that unlikely coincidences imply ‘otherworldly beings’? The world really does operate on mechanistic principles. That’s what makes it possible for humans to invent machines that fly and medicines that cure diseases. I think what really bothers most people isn’t that explanations need to be mechanistic to be valid. No, what really bothers them is that mechanistic answers fail to offer up any answers to the question of meaning. The significance of your experience with being visited in a dream and saving your sister is that you were meant to be there for her. And that would mean that some invisible person or cosmic force is watching over you and your sister—because you both have meaning. You both have some value to the universe. Of course, we all have a powerful desire to believe that about ourselves, and that desire makes us read significance into the paltriest of evidence, like these prophetic dreams and such.”

            “Let’s say you’re right. Don’t you have that same longing for meaning and significance?”

            “Oh yes, I absolutely do. That’s why I’ve enjoyed sharing my story about Kea with you all so much. And I suppose it would be wonderfully reassuring to believe some angels in the sky watch over and guide me because they think I’m great or because they know of some plan for how I’m going to make the world a better place. When you think about it, though, isn’t all that just a big distraction?”

            “How could that be a distraction? A distraction from what?”  

“Aren’t the living, breathing, flesh-and-blood people in your life more important than any beings slipping between dimensions? You believe this figure in your dream tipped you off about your sister needing help. Maybe he did. Maybe he was a part of your own psyche that simply figured out something was wrong before the rest of you did. Maybe it was merely a coincidence—you roll the dice enough times you’re bound to get snake eyes eventually. To me, none of that is as interesting as the fact that you were ready to jump out of bed in the middle of the night to go help your sister, or that you were so glad to be able to save her that you’re still telling the story to this day.”

“You told us your story too. What’s the interesting part of that, if not the possibility that it meant someone was watching out for you?”

“Someone was watching out for me, just like Chris was watching out for his sister. It’s us. We take care of each other. And that’s what’s so beautiful about us humans.”

“And dogs too.” 

“Yeah, and dogs too.” She turned to look at me now. “During what turned out to be our last argument over Kea before all the trouble with his infection, Jim had said to me, ‘Yeah, I spend way too much time trying to make the dog happy. I’ve put my heart and soul into raising her, and no investment pays bigger dividends than putting your heart and soul into someone you love.’ Skeptical, I was like, ‘Yeah, and what dividends are you getting from her now?’ He said, ‘Oh, you’ll get them too—when you have kids.’ 

“I didn’t think much of it. He was just being cheesy. Maybe I didn’t like that he said, ‘when you have kids,’ not when we have them. Really, it was only much later when I thought about it at all. Kea gave us some headaches after your oldest sister was born, because for a while there was no way we could give her the attention she was used to. It wasn’t long, though, before she became the most devoted babysitter you all ever had.”

“I remember whenever we had nightmares or got scared at night, you would bring in the dog to sleep in our room. You used to tell us that evil spirits hated dogs, so as long as Kea was around they’d stay away. I really believed you for the longest time.”

“Ha ha. After a year or two, she would go to bed every night with you girls first, wait until you were asleep, and then come back to my room and lay in her spot by my bed. She knew when you all would wake up every morning too, and so she’d leave my room and go back to yours. I don’t think any of you ever realized she hadn’t been in there all night. I told you dogs like her keep evil spirits away because it’s true—in the only sense that really matters.” 

[Continue to the sequel: Jax.]

Also read:

The Fire Hoarder

Encounters, Inc.

The Smoking Buddha

Bedtime Ghost Story for Adults

What Is a Story? And What Are You Supposed to Do with One?

            This is one of those questions to which, even though you’ve never given it much thought, you’re reasonably sure you know the answer. So let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way. A story is an imagining or a recounting of an event or series of events which can be conveyed through spoken words, written words, or images. This thing happened, which led to this next thing happening, and so on. 

            There’s more to it of course. I could describe my walk from the kitchen to my office as a series of events, but that wouldn’t constitute a story. The next ingredient most of us think of as essential is conflict. My walk to the office isn’t a story unless I have an encounter along the way that impedes my progress and forces me to rethink my route. Even then, though, if we do indeed have a story, it isn’t a very good one. But let’s start by saying you need, at the very least, a character encountering an obstacle in pursuance of some goal.  

            I would also argue the obstacle must somehow present the character with a dilemma. Indeed, such dilemmas are what make stories emotionally compelling, as opposed to something resembling a mere list of instructions or a technical description of an incident. In other words, it’s not a story unless it features some choice forced on the character, with both options arousing strong emotions. 

            To go back to the basic formula then: character plus goal plus obstacle plus dilemma equals a story. Nothing revolutionary here, I know. But my purpose in posing the question is to set up another one. 

            Why is this most basic of questions seldom brought up in literature courses? 

What to Do with Fiction

            Every day in this country kids and young adults are sitting down to read literature, which means they’re having to figure out where they stand in relation to what’s going on in the pages before their eyes. Instead of helping students orient themselves to the story, though, teachers instruct them to approach the text as a coded message to be deciphered—implicitly suggesting that’s what a story is and that’s how it should be dealt with. 

            The simplest way stories could be interpreted as messages is to focus on the decision arrived at by the character and the consequences that ensue. If the decision results in the character achieving the goal, the decision must have been a good one, and the message would be that readers should choose a similar course when faced with a similar dilemma. This brand of messaging appeals to advertisers: when faced with a choice between our product and the competitor’s, choose ours. 

            But, once you open the door to symbolism, allegory, and social constructivism, there’s no end to the possible interpretations. A character may be standing in for a belief system. A plot twist may recall some historical event. Every encounter between characters may be an effort at perpetuating a balance of power between the group each represents. Unfortunately, this all-too-common type of code-breaking method reduces the art of narrative to algebra, robbing it of its emotional resonance.  

            By the time kids are old enough to read more serious literature, they’re so accustomed to the decoding approach that they almost never get around to asking whether stories are really best treated as conveyances of secret messages. This is strange in light of how much fiction most of us consume that we never bother trying to decipher. 

            Postmodernists may lucubrate at length on the hidden hegemonies promulgated through superhero movies, but most of us just watch them, hoping to be enveloped and held in suspense. So it is with Netflix series and horror movies. Tellingly, such entertainments are thought worthy of scholarly attention only when the purported hidden messages undermine the values and beliefs shared by the academics who like to sift them out. If an academic uses a summer blockbuster as course material, you can rest assured mere immersion and enjoyment won’t be on the list of acceptable treatments. 

            This probably isn’t much to the detriment of TV shows and movies as art forms. But when this type of analysis is held as the only legitimate treatment of literary fiction, the idea of reading for any direct connection with the characters inevitably suffers. What was intended as a series of emotionally fraught encounters with characters as their fates unfold in something like real time gets twisted into an exercise in confirmation bias (of the least fair and most sanctimonious sort imaginable in the case of postmodernism).

            Let’s take an example many of us were assigned when we were still in grade school. What is Lord of the Flies? You remember the story, the one about the boys marooned on a tropical island who try to set up a society of sorts but end up breaking into rival factions and trying to kill each other. It’s easy to read the book as an argument about the nature of man absent the strictures and enforcement mechanisms of civilization. And there are plenty of characters and objects that can be seen as symbols for abstract ideas or principles. Simon, the first boy to die, could be a stand-in for Jesus. The severed pig’s head affixed atop a stick sharpened on both ends—the boys’ offering to what they suppose is a monster—could be seen as representing our capacity for evil. 

            Then there are all the postmodern readings, which would examine the ideas about maleness conveyed by the story, the way the book bolsters our belief in boys’ propensity toward violence and attempted domination. The phrase “toxic masculinity” will inevitably be uttered. It may even be suggested that the novel is somehow meant to excuse male dominance of women, since boys will after all be boys, and why should they stop at lording their flies over each other? 

            But is that really the message innocent readers take away?

Reading Stories the Natural Way

            What’s the essence of a story? A character pursues a goal and faces a choice. 

            The character Lord of the Flies centers on most closely is Ralph. Indeed, he pursues a goal—getting off the island, or in lieu of that, figuring out a way to survive and thrive on it. In the course of pursing that goal, he’s met with an obstacle in the form of Jack and his followers’ increasing dissatisfaction with his pacific governance. This presents him with a dilemma; he can appease Jack and follow his lead, or he can stick to his guns and continue standing up for what he believes is right, which includes protecting a weaker boy named Piggy.

            If Ralph is the character readers most identify with, the one whose unfolding fate holds us in suspense until the last page of the novel, then how can it be said that the message of the book is one of violence? If you were like me when you read the story, you were scared for Ralph, but not for Jack. You hoped Ralph would be the one to prevail against all odds. Yet Ralph is the character representing—if we’re obligated to reduce him to an abstract principle—peace and self-sacrifice, not force and dominion. 

            If a dynamic of sympathy similar to this one operates in most other novels, we may have another criterion for our definition of story. Perhaps, stories must have a character whose behavior somehow induces us to root for him. What types of behavior make us favor one character over another? In the case of Lord of the Flies, it’s behavior that’s altruistic. Ralph tries to do what’s best for all the other boys on the island, including the weakest among them. Jack meanwhile seeks to establish a hierarchy with himself in the highest position of authority. 

            Recent theorizing about how storytelling became universal across human cultures focuses on the need for members of a group to be on the lookout for individuals who would subvert cooperative norms. Babies too young to talk or even walk show preferences for puppets they witness behaving helpfully or cooperatively with other puppets (in shows that just meet our minimal requirements for categorization as stories). 

           Stories featuring moral dilemmas are also prominent in hunter-gatherer cultures. Anthropologist Daniel Smith and his colleagues recently reported that 80% of the stories shared by the Agta, a group of traditional hunters and foragers in the Philippines, focused on a character who had to choose between a deed that benefited him or herself at the expense of the group and a deed that benefited the group at some expense to the character. The groups with the most in-depth knowledge of the stories performed the best on tests of cooperation. And individuals who told the best stories were disproportionately chosen as partners for cooperative endeavors, including procreation. This suggests a selection mechanism that may have driven the evolution of storytelling.

            What about literary stories? Researchers have surveyed readers of 200 novels ranging from those of Jane Austen to those of E.M. Forster and analyzed their responses. Unsurprisingly, readers tended to have positive emotions toward protagonists and negative ones toward antagonists. But it was the commonality among the antagonists that proved most revealing. Summing up their findings, the researchers write:

Antagonists virtually person­ify Social Dominance—the self-interested pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. In these novels, those ambitions are sharply segregated from proso­cial and culturally acquisitive dispositions. Antagonists are not only selfish and unfriendly but also undisciplined, emotionally unstable, and intellectu­ally dull. Protagonists, in contrast, display motive dispositions and person­ality traits that exemplify strong personal development and healthy social adjustment. They are agreeable, conscientious, emotionally stable, and open to experience. 

It would seem stories are an exercise in programming altruism and an ethic of egalitarian cooperation into the minds of listeners and readers. 

            Could storytelling have evolved because it increased our ancestors’ odds of surviving and reproducing by helping them to establish more cohesive social bonds? Not in any simple way of course, but the theory goes a long way toward explaining why stories are found in every human society and why infants too young to understand language can nevertheless appreciate basic plot dynamics. 

             Other researchers have shown that reading fiction actives parts of the brain associated with social, as opposed to abstract, cognition. You have to wonder if this holds true in academic settings where theoretical approaches to reading and analyzing texts are de rigueur. And, if readers are being prevented from engaging their social cognition, wouldn’t that make it less likely they’ll have the attendant improvements to their ability to empathize? 

            Have we robbed literature of its power by trying to reduce it to algebra? 

How to Teach Kids (and Adults) to Read Literature

            First, we must rid ourselves of the silly notion that literature somehow encourages prejudice. This idea never added up in the first place. If it were true, then the most literate societies, and the most literate sections within a given society, would be the most prejudiced. We can be reasonably sure the opposite is true, and given the research on the effects of reading, we have a good idea why that’s the case.

            Next, we must recognize that immersion in stories comes naturally to us humans. There’s no trick to it beyond assigning stories the kids (or the grownups) will be able to comprehend and to some degree identify with. If the writing is too sophisticated or the topic too mature, no amount of highlighting, summarizing, or notetaking is going to engage the students’ emotions, meaning the story will be lost on them in the only ways that matter. 

            Another thing to keep in mind is that anything that makes the story more vivid and more meaningful will increase students’ interest, and hence their attention. Taking the time to parse sections of the book in class is a good way to nudge the kids toward closer reading, as is reading parts of it to the class aloud as they read it on a screen or a board. Likewise, reading with the foreknowledge that you’ll be discussing the story with the rest of the class fosters more intense focus. 

            Sadly, two things are working against an emphasis on natural reading: The first is the ridiculous pressure on teachers to get their students to pass tests, which represents a constant push to force material on kids they’re not ready for. The second is the prevalence of postmodern ideologies in academic departments. The good news is that alternatives to postmodernism, like those emerging out of evolutionary psychology, are helping scholars point a spotlight on its myriad weaknesses and absurdities. The bad news is we’re dealing with an entrenched ideology, and literary scholars have a long history of being wary of science. The other bad news is that the pressure on teachers to make kids work harder—whether or not working harder is more conducive to learning—shows no sign of abating. 

            There is a longstanding trend countervailing these forces however. Kids tend to find books they like no matter what adults try to push on them. And, if you have a real aesthetic experience with literature as a child or young adult, you stand a better chance of seeing through your lit teachers’ bullshit—a better chance of indulging your love of narrative art no matter what message the squares insist you read into the story. 

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            Also read: 
Putting down the Pen: How School Teaches Us the Worst Possible Way to Read Literature

HOW TO GET KIDS TO READ LITERATURE WITHOUT MAKING THEM HATE IT

How to Get Kids to Read Literature without Making Them Hate It

           “It makes a lot more sense now why it’s called The Great Gatsby.”

            I overheard a teenage boy saying this as I was leaving the theater after watching Baz Luhrmann’s imagining of the story. In the film’s final scene, Nick Carraway, played by Toby McGuire, scribbles the words “The Great” over the original title, which was simply “Gatsby.” Earlier in the movie, Gatsby himself, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, had told Nick he was only thirty-two years old and could still be a great man someday. The idea is that Nick is conferring with his title the posthumous greatness on his friend that an unjust world denied him in life. It’s sort of touching.

            Fitzgerald gave Gatsby no such line of course, no such explanation of his book’s title. But does the pair of scenes capture something of the novel’s essence? Was the kid correct in the interpretation that was helped along by Luhrmann’s liberties? My own sense is that Nick’s attitude toward Gatsby is more negative in the novel—though in both renditions his feelings are complicated. After saying that he was repulsed by the people he’d met in Long Island, for instance, he reveals, “Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.” The first two words of the title thus strike me as more searingly ironic than sentimental.

            But should we hold this discrepancy against the movie-makers? Or, a more interesting question, is a teenage boy really ready to appreciate searing irony? This line of thinking led me to wonder how likely it was that a teenage boy could be ready for Gatsby at all.

            I was in my early twenties when I first read The Great Gatsby, and I still remember the scene that resonated most with me then. After Daisy’s infamous line about hoping her newborn daughter is a “beautiful little fool,” Nick says,

I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributary emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.

Cynical yes—but I knew what he meant. I knew people like that. Still, I admit much of the rest of the novel eluded me then; I recall enjoying it on some level, but much of the nuance I would discover in readings at later ages was lost on me.

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            What do kids in high school make of all that sarcasm layered over and tangled up with awe and disgust and admiration and jaded disillusionment? My guess is that very few of them grasp any of it on any level. They’ve never been to parties with self-important socialites and sycophantic social climbers, at least not in anything but their nascent guises. They’ve never witnessed an encounter between old-money types and the newly rich. Nick writes of Gatsby’s party guests guessing at his corruption while standing oblivious of his incorruptible dream. High school kids, I imagine, know next to nothing about the type of corruption, let alone the type of dream, Fitzgerald is referencing.

            Yet kids are assigned this book in schools all over the country, and if it’s not Gatsby it’s something just as difficult, presuming just as much worldliness. For many of us, it’s not hard to recall what it’s like having a teacher assign a book that offers little meaning we possess the wherewithal to grasp; after a while, you stop even trying to make sense of the words your eyes are slipping over. And, if you’ve ever taught an English class, you’ve probably been confronted with students who insist they read the assignment, even though they can’t recall a single detail. That’s understandable considering the language and the thematic material are completely beyond them.

            Therein lie the seeds of a lifelong apathy—if not an outright antipathy—toward reading. The student’s reasoning goes something like this: All my teachers keep saying there’s so much great stuff in these books, but every time I try to read one I get nothing. So either my teachers are full of it, or I just don’t have a head for this reading business. Reading comes to be thought of as work, and unrewarding work at that. What you’ll tend to hear them say aloud is, “Reading is boring.” By the time the kids are out of school, books are things you pick up only when you have to—when there’s not a movie to watch instead.

            We can bemoan their laziness or lack of curiosity, or we can acknowledge that we’ve set them up for failure. Attitudes toward reading develop as a result of past encounters with the printed page. If your experiences with books are characterized mainly by frustration, bewilderment, and drudgery, the chances of you being positively disposed toward the endeavor aren’t good. The cognitive psychologist and education expert Daniel T. Willingham, in his book The Reading Mind: a Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads, describes an interplay of attitude, motivation, and self-concept in determining how much an individual reads—and consequently how proficient that individual becomes at reading:

            If you’re a good reader, you’re more likely to enjoy a story because reading it doesn’t seem like work. That enjoyment means that you have a better attitude toward reading; that is, you believe that reading is a pleasurable, valuable thing to do. A better attitude means you read more often, and more reading makes you even better at reading—your decoding gets still more fluent, lexical representations become richer, and your background knowledge increases. We would also predict the inverse to be true: if reading is difficult you won’t enjoy it, you’ll have a negative attitude toward the activity, and you’ll avoid it whenever possible, meaning that you’ll fall still further behind your peers. This cycle has been called “The Matthew Effect” from the biblical verse “For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance; but whoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath” (Matthew 25:29). Or more briefly, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. (139)

The formula is: enjoy reading, read more, get better at reading, start to think of yourself as someone who reads, enjoy reading, read more, ad infinitum.

            Following this recipe, it seems the goal of English teachers should be to match reading materials to students’ current aptitude and preferences. (Another commonly overlooked key is focusing on reading materials that reference topics the students already have some familiarity with.) If you want your students to be able to eventually appreciate Gatsby in all its richness, in other words, you should probably back way up and start with Harry Potter. This isn’t a flippant point: contemporary books with more social currency will be more rewarding because students can discuss them more widely; books with themes about the social pressures of school will be far more likely to resonate. Comprehension and enjoyment will be maximized—and so will the likelihood of each student picking up another book for enjoyment.

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            Comprehension and enjoyment—or rather immersion—suggest themselves as the highest priorities for any curriculum meant to cultivate better reading. Unfortunately, English teachers the country over seem to be suffering from the delusion that as long as they’re supplying their students with the proper tools and training them to employ the most advanced techniques, it doesn’t matter whether reading offers any pleasure. “Education’s goal to have people develop opinions about what they’re reading instead of just having a good time, as they would watching a movie, is not something to generally disparage,” a high school teacher recently commented in response to some criticisms I leveled against the current trend educators are calling “active reading”.

            Writing opens a portal onto a world, whether that world be the one we all inhabit, the one as represented in a character’s mind, or one that’s entirely fictional. Teachers’ role should be to help their students step through that portal, so they can have genuine encounters with the characters, get a sense of the settings, follow the ideas, and work through the dilemmas conjured up by the author’s words. But many of the practices kids are taught have them fixating on the portal’s architecture as opposed to what it opens onto at the other side. The rationale for this fixation, according to my teacher friend, is that many of his students simply can’t make it through the passage on their own.

What if students struggle with comprehension, let alone analysis? They need tools and strategies. You’re throwing all of those out and saying “just immerse yourself.” They can’t. They do not understand the text. They have no point of reference to immerse themselves. You are vastly overestimating a student’s ability to read by assuming the solution to their reading deficiencies is to just read it. You can’t immerse in what you don’t understand.

To which I say, tools and strategies are well and good—if they work. But why not instead assign texts the students can understand, works they do have a point of reference to help them immerse themselves in?

            Active reading is the new catch-all term for the set of behaviors students engage in to try to make difficult texts more accessible, including practices like underlining, annotating in the margins, and summarizing. The idea is that if teachers can get their students to work harder, they’ll be able to comprehend more complex writing. This approach has two main drawbacks: first, experiments have demonstrated many of the techniques that go into active reading are only moderately effective—if not completely counterproductive. (Willingham cites research showing comprehension has much more to do with background knowledge of the topic being written about than the amount of effort put into decoding the text.) But the even bigger problem with pushing students to work harder at deciphering difficult texts is that it trains students to see reading as, well, work.

            We shouldn’t rush to judgment. Teachers try to get their students reading hard books in response to pressure from parents and administrators to help them achieve higher test scores, read at grade-appropriate “levels”—whatever that means—and prepare them for what they’ll face in college or in the business world. It’s a huge responsibility. But teachers also want to challenge their students to do serious intellectual work. As my friend argued,

It’s a laudable goal to have a public consuming media (even books) and do something besides enjoying it. I’m not going to have them read Hunger Games and “have a good time” in a classroom setting. We can have a good time with Canterbury Tales, enjoy the hell out of it, and have some intellectual goals along the way.

The reality is that the books in the Hunger Games trilogy offer plenty of opportunities for rigorous intellectual discourse (the story is actually quite harrowing), but those opportunities are being overlooked because what’s most important to those in the education system is the perception of seriousness. If kids are assigned Hunger Games or Harry Potter, can you really even call it homework?

            I read Gatsby in my early twenties right after I slogged through James Joyce’s Ulysses, cover to cover. This was because I was going down the list of the one hundred best novels in the English language as voted on by select members of the Modern Library. Gatsby is tough reading, but Ulysses is truly a book only academics can love—or for that matter even comprehend. Joyce didn't write it to be enjoyed so much as studied. I don’t just mean it’s complex; you literally can’t make any sense of it unless you have a large store of historical, linguistic, literary, and mythological knowledge to apply to deciphering the allusions. It’s more a grand literary puzzle—or a punishingly lengthy series of puzzles—than a work of literature. But at least Joyce’s puzzles have solutions. The Modern Library’s list mostly predates the rise of postmodernism, represented by purportedly brilliant works like Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest. Books like these also read like puzzles, only with no solutions. The idea is that they represent tricks readers willingly let the authors play on them. Somewhere in that awkward dance is supposedly something quite profound, by some accounts even genius. (If you want more details on my take, check out my essay: What’s the Point of Difficult Reading?)

            Personally, though, I like stories. I like novels that bring me face to face with characters and vicariously expose me to their thoughts and experiences. I like to step through the portal instead of just standing there staring stupefied at the walls. It’s in these genuine encounters that we experience the beauty of literature—those scenes where we ache with sympathy or uncomfortably withhold judgment, the turning points when we’re desperate to see our favored character persevere and prevail. And isn’t it this beauty that compels us to read these stories in the first place, impelling us to continue reading regardless of how complicated the plot and the language become?

            Though I’d find it shocking, I’m prepared to allow for the possibility that some people find Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow narratively immersive and even beautiful—their authors clearly intended for them to be so at least on some level. I became immersed in Saul Bellow’s Herzog after all, even though it’s chock-full of high-brow allusions and the main character is an über-nerd. All literature balances somewhere on a continuum between purely aesthetic experience and grueling intellectual exercise. If a novel hits all the pleasure centers in a student’s brain, though, far too many teachers will be apt to dismiss that book as shlock. It’s commercial fiction, they’d complain, not literature—something you read outside of class, just for fun.

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            I arrived at the Modern Library’s list of great novels along a journey that began with Doctor Seuss and E.B. White, meandered into territory inhabited by the likes of Batman and the X-Men, overnighted in Jurassic Park (four times) before being swept up in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, and only then, in my junior year of high school, got knocked on my butt by 1984. In the middle of that first leg of my literary trek, I fell in love with Edgar Allan Poe—a love that was grossly incompatible with the lessons my seventh-grade lit teacher subjected us to as part of her misguided efforts to help us appreciate the stories. Ever since, my reading has taken two separate tracks, one personal and the other academic. Even when I’ve discovered books I loved in school, I felt I needed to experience them separately, in my own way—because the teachers just didn’t get it. They were obsessed with turning art into algebra.

            Just as I have to admit the possibility that some readers derive great pleasure from the postmoderns’ execrably extravagant prose, with their tedious profusion of pointlessly cul-de-sacing plots—though I suspect, if I’m not speaking to a masochist, any claim along these lines is a pretense—I also have to acknowledge that, like my teacher friend, some students “enjoy the hell” out of all the apparatus and rigmarole of underlining, notetaking, marginalia scribbling, and classroom discussions, which always veer ever farther from the reality behind the text into the realm of highest, most bloodless abstraction. Still, it seems to me that in all these strange rituals the book itself becomes all but moot. I would wager it’s the same kids who develop this kind of fetish for marking up books who grow up to boast of how fascinating they find Infinite Jest.

            Whether it’s a pretense or a genuine feeling, I won’t begrudge them their fascination. I simply have to point out there’s an entirely different set of readers out there who love the books themselves, who experience them and find them beautiful and engrossing as real encounters and not as mere empty gestures. And if we want more kids to read—more kids to enjoy reading—we would need to see more readers from this set teaching, more of them assigning books based on what their students are ready for, not what would look serious or impressive to parents and administrators, more of them encouraging their charges to put down their pens and look at the worlds created by the authors as real, if only for a brief time, places where they can meet people like they’ve never met before, worlds where they can have experiences like none other on offer in their lives, settings almost magically conducive to personal transformation and self-transcendence.  

            There’s real beauty in these otherworldly sojourns. Let’s forget whatever it is we’ve been trying to prove and start helping kids approach that beauty.

***

Still want more? Check out:

Putting down the Pen: How School Teaches Us the Worst Possible Way to Read Literature

Or:

The Rowling Effect: The Uses and Abuses of Storytelling in Literary Fiction

The Fake News Campaign against Steven Pinker and Enlightenment Now

            Steven Pinker has already been proven right on at least one of the points he raises in Enlightenment Now: “Intellectuals hate progress,” he writes in a chapter titled “Progressophobia.” “Intellectuals who call themselves ‘progressive’,” he goes on, “really hate progress.” The many acerbic responses to his book in the pages of high-brow magazines have borne this out in spades.  

            From The New Stateman and The Nation, to The New York Times, The Evening Standard, ABC Religion and Ethics, and The American Spectator, major publications are rushing to give the disgruntled intelligentsia a platform to gripe about Pinker’s woefully misguided—or loathsomely inconvenient—arguments and views. (Though, to be fair, The New York Times has also published positive reviews.) But it’s not just progressives; conservatives like Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan have also rejected Pinker’s paean to human progress.

            What is it precisely these intellectuals hate so much? “It’s the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class,” Pinker opines, “the Enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the human condition” (39). On the one hand, it’s shocking anyone would bother making The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, as the book is subtitled. On the other, “nothing demonstrates the case for Pinker’s book, the non-obviousness of his thesis,” the computer scientist Scott Aaronson posits, “more clearly than the vitriolic reviews the book has been getting in literary venues.”

“Nothing demonstrates the case for Pinker’s book, the non-obviousness of his thesis, more clearly than the vitriolic reviews the book has been getting in literary venues.”

— Scott Aaronson

            Indeed, you get the impression early in the book that Pinker must’ve known how uncool the values and principles he’s celebrating have become, which is precisely why he felt so compelled to write it. “I’ve noticed that everything Pinker writes bears the scars of the hostile mistranslation tactic,” Aaronson writes, in one of the alarmingly few honest and thoughtful reviews I’ve come across. “Scarcely does he say anything before he turns around and says, ‘and here’s what I’m not saying’—and then proceeds to ward off five different misreadings so wild they wouldn’t have occurred to me, but then if you read Leon Wieseltier or John Gray or his other critics, there the misreadings are, trotted out triumphantly; it doesn’t even matter how much time Pinker spent trying to prevent them.”

            Reading Enlightenment Now is both an exhilarating and a curious experience. Somehow, the many measures of improvement to the human condition seem simultaneously banal—of course, medicine has made us healthier—and beyond belief. How, for instance, can we be living longer lives with all the unnecessary medical treatments our perversely incentivized healthcare providers subject us to? What about all the mystery chemicals we absorb into our bodies through polluted air and water, or through industrially farmed produce?

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            Yet live longer on average we do—much longer. That alone is incontrovertible proof of progress, for what meaningful improvement can there be if no one survives long enough to enjoy it? And Pinker is just getting started. Still, as Saloni Dattani writes in a revealing essay comparing Pinker’s critics to counter-Enlightenment figures through the ages, “As the bearer of these glad tidings, Pinker has received no thanks from his opponents. On the contrary, they appear to resent being asked to acknowledge this news.”

An Aversion to Reason

            While the general notion that life is improving for ever greater numbers of people is counterintuitive in this age of terrorism, summary executions by police of unarmed minorities, civil war in Syria, partisan rancor hamstringing pragmatic policy, populist demagoguery, and mass shootings in schools, the numbers Pinker reports are as stark as President Trump’s incompetence. So you’d expect the intellectuals who are so rankled by the idea of progress to aim their rebuttals at Pinker’s statistics, or the methods used to arrive at them.

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            But that’s not the type of criticism these writers are equipped to level. Indeed, it’s difficult to find a single point in a single one of these reviews that engages in good faith with Pinker’s arguments as he presents them in the book. This isn’t hyperbole, nor is it a matter of different shades of meaning; the discrepancies between Pinker’s arguments and the straw men his critics so superciliously disembowel are unmistakable to anyone who reads the reviews with the book close at hand. (For reviews that are only mildly unfair but nonetheless legitimate, you can go to Nature or The Atlantic. The aggregate valance of the reviews, as calculated by Literary Hub, has been positive.)

            You might say the mark of a comprehensively researched and presciently argued book is that critics desperate to find fault, any fault, with it are forced to pretend that the author never wrote certain of the passages and chapters contained within its pages, or that he wrote them in some way other than the way he did. Conversely, it’s the mark of a sloppy—or dishonest—critical review that all the main points can be fatally refuted via reference to relevant passages from the book in question.

            In the spirit of this principle, the editors of the publications referenced above owe their readers an apology for their reviewers’ many blind spots, inaccuracies, and mischaracterizations. Even more, the authors of these pseudo-reviews ought to be held to account for their wantonly unscholarly antics. As Aaronson notes, these reviews can’t even be classified as serious scholarship. We’re left wondering why on earth an intellectual would be so eager to forfeit his or her status as an honest and careful reader of books they’re so publicly discussing, especially since the inaccuracies and mischaracterizations are egregious enough to be perfectly plain to anyone who gets around to doing any cross-referencing.

            But when you take into account that these reviewers are attempting to undermine Pinker’s case for reason and science, it’s no wonder they’re so comfortable heaping their scorn on straw men. The debate, in their eyes, isn’t about discovering any truth, as only the most naïve understanding of scholarly pursuits might lead us to presume. The point is rather to persuade as many readers as possible to accept the ideas the reviewer already knows to be true. As Dattani points out:

            It is worth noticing that Pinker’s most trenchant critics are eager to flaunt their aversion to the very values Pinker sets out to defend – reason, science, humanism, and progress – and that their critiques display the traits and tics of exactly the kind of counter-Enlightenment thinking he attacks. These counter-Enlightenment trends include Catholic, Romantic, and Postmodern modes of thought which stand – and have always stood – in opposition to the values that Pinker’s book credits with the vast advances humankind has made since the 18th Century.

            But none of these critics defends or even avows any of the modes of thought they’re de facto espousing. The self-appointed champions of an alternative to Enlightenment values never bother offering, well, any alternative to reason or science, much less to humanism and progress.

            The irony is that Pinker’s most hostile reviewers bitchily bemoan our nation’s base consumerism, its misinformed politics, and its history of violence, even as they’re plying rhetorical tactics straight from the domains of marketing and campaign PR (the modern euphemism for propaganda) in an effort to silence an intellectual rival making a case for a dissenting view—or at the very least to ensure as few people as possible believe that view is worth hearing out.

            Reading reviews like John Gray’s, you can’t help experiencing a visceral discomfort at the injustice of the myriad distortions. Aaronson, catching Gray out in one particularly glaring misrepresentation, vividly captures the feeling: “You see, when Pinker says he supports Enlightenment norms of reason and humanism, he really means to say that he supports unbridled capitalism and possibly even eugenics. As I read this sort of critique, the hair stands on my neck, because the basic technique of hostile mistranslation is so familiar to me. It’s the technique that once took a comment in which I pled for shy nerdy males and feminist women to try to understand each other’s suffering, as both navigate a mating market unlike anything in previous human experience—and somehow managed to come away with the take-home message, ‘so this entitled techbro wants to return to a past when society would just grant him a female sex slave.’”

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            This “hostile mistranslation” provides a good illustration of why reason and humanism tend to go hand-in-hand. Without recourse to reliable methods for assessing the truth or falsity of an accusation, we’d all be vulnerable to whatever verdict is shouted from the highest platform through the biggest loudspeaker. It is this very failure to insist on the primacy of reason and science that has paved the way for fossil fuel companies to convince nearly half of Americans that the damage their products wreak on the climate is entirely fictional, a political weapon wielded by the big-government left. It’s this same failure that paved the way for the election of a conman to the highest office in the land.

Demagoguery to Fight Demagoguery

            The most seemingly substantive criticism the critics level against Pinker isn’t that he gets the numbers wrong—though they each have their pet causes they fault him for giving short shrift—but rather that he gets the Enlightenment wrong. Gray penned one of the earliest reviews, and his successors latched on to it as a useful template—or, more accurately, a good list of talking points for their campaign message. Gray writes:

you don’t need to bother about what the Enlightenment was actually like. By any standards, David Hume was one of the greatest Enlightenment thinkers. It was the sceptical Scottish philosopher who stirred Immanuel Kant – whose well-known essay on Enlightenment Pinker quotes reverently at the start of the book – from what Kant described as his “dogmatic slumber”. Pinker barely mentions Hume, and the omission is not accidental. He tell us that the Enlightenment is defined by a “non-negotiable” commitment to reason. [sic]

            Yet in A Treatise of Human Nature (1738), Hume wrote: “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Hume believed being reasonable meant accepting the limits of reason, and so too, in quite different ways, did later Enlightenment rationalists such as Keynes and Freud. Pinker’s Enlightenment has little in common with the much more interesting intellectual movement that historically existed.

            First, some context: David Hume is famous for his argument that you can’t derive moral values from knowledge, no matter how thoroughgoing, of the facts of the world. You can’t get ought from is. In the line Gray and so many of his fellow propagandists quote, Hume is in no way suggesting that reason isn’t worth its salt; he’s merely saying that it should be applied in service of values we already hold. Not only is he not denying the power or importance of reason; he’s implying the existence of values and passions that arise from our shared nature as humans. There’s no missing Pinker’s allusion to Hume when he explains, “It is humanism that identifies what we should try to achieve with our knowledge. It provides the ought that supplements the is” (410).

“Save 300 million people from smallpox, and you can expect in return a lecture about your naïve and arrogant scientistic reductionism.”

— Scott Aaronson

            The larger point is that even if Gray had found a lone philosophe who wrote something counter to what Pinker points to as the main takeaways of the Enlightenment, it still wouldn’t undermine the case he makes in his book. “The era was a cornucopia of ideas,” Pinker avers, “some of them contradictory, but four themes tie them together: reason, science, humanism, and progress” (8). Prior to the Enlightenment, people sought the truth in holy texts, and they adopted the policies enforced through political and religious authority of the sort critics like Gray aspire to harness for themselves. To effectively counter the notion that the Enlightenment was characterized by the elevation of reason above revealed truth and political authority, you’d need more than a quote or two. Hume, after all, wasn’t pronouncing on the proper relationship between reason and the passions based on his analysis of Bible verses. He was expressing a position he arrived at through the application of reason. Cherry-picking philosophers or citing quotes out of context is simply encouraging readers to concentrate on the trees so they miss the forest.

            To find the passage that best evidences Gray’s simple dishonesty, though, you need look no further than Pinker’s chapter titled “Reason,” in which he writes:

            By now many people have become aware of the research in cognitive psychology on human irrationality, explained in bestsellers like Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational. I’ve alluded to these cognitive infirmities in earlier chapters: the way we estimate probability from available anecdotes, project stereotypes onto individuals, seek confirming and ignore disconfirming evidence, dread harms and losses, and reason from teleology and voodoo resemblance rather than mechanical cause and effect. But as important as these discoveries are, it’s a mistake to see them as refuting some Enlightenment tenet that humans are rational actors, or as licensing the fatalistic conclusion that we might as well give up on reasoned persuasion and fight demagoguery with demagoguery.

            To begin with, no Enlightenment thinker ever claimed that humans were consistently rational. Certainly not the über-rational Kant, who wrote that “from the crooked timber of humanity no truly straight thing can be made,” nor Spinoza, Hume, Smith, or the Encyclopédistes, who were cognitive and social psychologists ahead of their time. What they argued was that we ought to be rational, by learning to repress the fallacies and dogmas that so readily seduce us, and that we can be rational, collectively if not individually, by implementing institutions and adhering to norms that constrain our faculties, including free speech, logical analysis, and empirical testing. (353)

Projecting Stereotypes

            Interestingly, heartbreakingly, Pinker’s list of cognitive traps in this passage can serve as a helpful map of the tactics implemented by the anti-Enlightenment campaigners. The instances of violence they cite as supposedly undermining the general trend of pacification is an example of extrapolating from anecdotes, as is the lone quote from Hume about the proper role of reason.

            The stereotyping comes in the form of lumping Pinker in with other historical figures who’ve had superficially similar ideas. Suggesting that Pinker is making essentially the same arguments as Herbert Spencer, the father of Social Darwinism, Gray writes,

Pinker is an ardent enthusiast for free-market capitalism, which he believes produced most of the advance in living standards over the past few centuries. Unlike Spencer, he seems ready to accept that some provision should be made for those who have been left behind. Why he makes this concession is unclear. Nothing is said about human kindness, or fairness, in his formula. Indeed, the logic of his dictum points the other way.

Pinker’s position is far more nuanced than Gray is making out here, and the comparison between Pinker’s advocacy for free markets and Spencer’s ideas about evolution is just silly. But Gray not only compares them; he conflates them so he can apply the well-earned ire toward Spencer that’s been building up over the past century and a half to this new bête noire.

            Any stereotype stretched to contain both Spencer and Pinker will inevitably be forced into the realm of loftiest, vaguest abstraction, as in the observation that everyone fitting the category believes in both evolution and progress. How many others would answer to this description? Would Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton? But where does Pinker really come down on the topic of economics? Is he an apologist for the one percent? “The facts of human progress strike me as having been as unkind to right-wing libertarianism as to right-wing conservatism and left-wing Marxism,” he writes. The passage that follows this line illustrates the futility of trying to fit Pinker into any ideological stereotype:

            The totalitarian governments of the 20th Century did not emerge from democratic welfare states sliding down a slippery slope, but were imposed by fanatical ideologues and gangs of thugs. And countries that combine free markets with more taxation, social spending, and regulation than the United States (such as Canada, New Zealand, and Western Europe) turn out to be not grim dystopias but rather pleasant places to live, and they trounce the United States in every measure of human flourishing, including crime, life expectancy, infant mortality, education, and happiness. As we saw, no developed country runs on right-wing libertarian principles, nor has any realistic vision of such a country ever been laid out.

            It should not be surprising that the facts of human progress confound the major -isms. The ideologies are more than two centuries old and are based on mile-high visions such as whether humans are tragically flawed or infinitely malleable, and whether society is an organic whole or a collection of individuals. A real society comprises hundreds of millions of social beings, each with a trillion-synapse brain, who pursue their well-being while affecting the well-being of others in complex networks with massive positive and negative externalities, many of them historically unprecedented. It is bound to defy any simple narrative of what will happen under a given set of rules. A more rational approach to politics is to treat societies as ongoing experiments and open-mindedly learn the best practices, whichever part of the spectrum they come from. The empirical picture at present suggests that people flourish most in liberal democracies with a mixture of civic norms, guaranteed rights, market freedom, social spending, and judicious regulation. As Pat Paulsen noted, “If either the right wing or the left wing gained control of the country, it would fly around in circles.” (365)

Confirmation Bias

            Falling prey to the human weakness for “seeking confirming and ignoring disconfirming evidence” for cherished beliefs, the anti-Pinker propagandists go in for the simple tactic of disparaging the very idea of keeping score. Gray for instance writes,

To think of the book as any kind of scholarly exercise is a category mistake. Much of its more than 500 pages consists of figures aiming to show the progress that has been made under the aegis of Enlightenment ideals. Of course, these figures settle nothing. Like Pinker’s celebrated assertion that the world is becoming ever more peaceful – the statistical basis of which has been demolished by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – everything depends on what is included in them and how they are interpreted.

Are the millions incarcerated in the vast American prison system and the millions more who live under parole included in the calculus that says human freedom is increasing? If we are to congratulate ourselves on being less cruel to animals, how much weight should be given to the uncounted numbers that suffer in factory farming and hideous medical experiments – neither of which were practised on any comparable scale in the past?

Sure, people are living longer, but a lot of them are incarcerated or on parole. Sure, we’re being kinder to some animals some of the time, but there’s factory farming and animal testing to consider.

            Gray doesn’t bother citing figures, because to him figures are meaningless, like the size of a crowd at a presidential inauguration. They can all be waved aside in the same manner that Taleb “demolished” the statistical underpinnings of any belief in declining violence—except Taleb’s actual argument wasn’t focused on the decline in violence per se but rather on the likelihood that another major war would break out (meaning he too mischaracterized Pinker’s position). It should be noted as well that while Taleb has won notoriety, along with some ridicule, for his alternative statistical methods, he is by no means recognized by anyone as an expert in warfare, mathematical or otherwise. The people who study these things for a living aren’t convinced he’s demolished anything.

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            But even if we grant Gray’s points against progress as valid—though they obviously require far more analysis—would they tip the balance in favor of a gloomier outlook for modernity? Here are the areas where Pinker presents well-documented and widely accepted evidence of improvement: lifespan, health, sustenance, wealth, inequality, the environment, peace, safety, terrorism, democracy, equal rights, knowledge, quality of life, and happiness. Inequality, the environment, and happiness are more complicated cases. But eradicating diseases like polio and small pox, while finding ways to save billions of people in underdeveloped nations from starving, is nothing to sneeze at—or sneer at. If sizeable portions of the population are imprisoned, they must be doing reasonably well for themselves behind bars. Once again, Aaronson has the best rebuttal to such glib dismissals of progress when he writes about the “colossal incomprehension and ingratitude” shown by the Enlightenment’s scholarly beneficiaries: “Save 300 million people from smallpox, and you can expect in return a lecture about your naïve and arrogant scientistic reductionism.”

Loss Aversion and Zero-Sum Games

            This charge of scientism, echoed by nearly all the critics, brings us to the cognitive trap of dreading harms and losses more than prizing benefits and gains. By scientism, the critics mean the belief that science is the only way to address any question of import. Indeed, Pinker does advocate for more quantification and hypothesis-testing in the humanities and other domains of academia. Humanities scholar Peter Harrison doesn’t like this idea one bit. In a review for ABC Religion and Ethics, he writes,

            As an aside, my own prediction is that future historians, if they haven’t all been replaced by cognitive psychologists, will regard misplaced faith in data, metrics and statistical analysis as the curse of the twenty-first century. Consider, for a start, the “replicability crisis” sweeping the social and medical sciences. And for those in academe, think also of the incessant and increasing demand that we measure and metricize every aspect of intellectual life. It is one of the saving graces of the humanities that it hasn’t fallen for this line, notwithstanding the undoubted insights yielded by some aspects of the digital humanities.

In the final line of his review, Harrison snarls that “if Enlightenment Now is a model of what Pinker’s advice to humanities scholars looks like when put into practice, I’m happy to keep ignoring it.”

            Dattani notes a strong similarity between modern charges of scientism and earlier arguments against C.P. Snow’s idea of a “Third Culture” brought by the likes of literary scholars like F.R. Leavis. The first culture, as Snow conceived of it, was the domain of the sciences, while the second was that of the humanities. Snow wanted there to be a place where the two cultures could meet to form a third. But Leavis and the other members of the second culture weren’t having it. Dattani observes that

Snow’s critics, like those who fret about scientism today, were unable or unwilling to think in anything other than zero-sum terms. Snow, on the other hand, recommended a positive-sum synthesis of science and the humanities that would be mutually enriching.

This zero-sum reasoning discounts what science may have to offer because it’s too wrapped up in what the humanities may have to lose. Once again, though, the important point here is that Harrison and Gray, along with nearly all the other propagandists railing against Pinker, are misrepresenting the position laid out in Enlightenment Now. Pinker himself sees the relationship between science and the humanities in purely positive-sum terms.

Snow, of course, never held the lunatic position that power should be transferred to the culture of scientists. On the contrary, he called for a Third Culture, which would combine ideas from science, culture, and history and apply them to enhancing human welfare across the globe. The term was revived in 1991 by the author and literary agent John Brockman, and it is related to the biologist E. O. Wilson’s concept of consilience, the unity of knowledge, which Wilson in turn attributed to (who else?) the thinkers of the Enlightenment. The first step in understanding the promise of science in human affairs is to escape the bunker mentality of the Second Culture, captured, for example, in the tag line of a 2013 article by literary lion Leon Wieselitier: “Now science wants to invade the liberal arts. Don’t let it happen.” (390)

But is Pinker just paying lip service to a mutually beneficial partnership? His disgust at certain strains of humanities scholarship is hard to miss. But those happen to be the strains most dismissive or antagonistic toward science. His thoughts about the Second Culture in general are more reverential. “No thinking person,” he writes, “should be indifferent to our society’s disinvestment in the humanities.” He goes on,

            A society without historical scholarship is like a person without memory: deluded, confused, easily exploited. Philosophy grows out of the recognition that clarity and logic don’t come easily to us and that we’re better off when our thinking is refined and deepened. The arts are one of the things that make life worth living, enriching human experience with beauty and insight. Criticism is itself an art that multiplies the appreciation and enjoyment of great works. Knowledge in these domains is hard won, and needs constant enriching and updating as the times change. (406)

Teleology and Voodoo Resemblance

            Harrison writes that “A final remarkable feature of Pinker’s vision is his teleological view of history - the idea that historical events are destined to unfold inexorably in a single direction.” He doesn’t have the definition of teleology quite right here, but the bigger problem is that Pinker explicitly disavows this idea early in his book:

            The Enlightenment belief in progress should not be confused with the 19th-century Romantic belief in mystical forces, laws, dialectics, struggles, unfoldings, destinies, ages of man, and evolutionary forces that propel mankind ever upward toward utopia. As Kant’s remark about “increasing knowledge and purging errors” indicates, it was more prosaic, a combination of reason and humanism. If we keep track of how our laws and manners are doing, think up ways to improve them, try them out, and keep the ones that make people better off, we can gradually make the world a better place. Science itself creeps forward through this cycle of theory and experiment, and its ceaseless headway, superimposed on local setbacks and reversals, show how progress is possible. (11)

            So the critics asininely accuse Pinker of teleological thinking, but do they engage in it themselves? Teleology, in its strictest sense, means the explanation for how something came to exist lies in the function it currently serves. It can also mean that something is developing toward some predetermined end, the idea Harrison wrongly attributes to Pinker’s understanding of history.

“Snow’s critics, like those who fret about scientism today, were unable or unwilling to think in anything other than zero-sum terms. ”

— Saloni Dattani

            I have to credit the propagandists with mostly avoiding this pitfall. Certain postmodern scholars do tend to intimate, or argue outright, that the evil ends to which science has historically been put are somehow inherent to the program itself, suggesting that science is fundamentally racist, colonialist, sexist, ableist, etc. But you don’t see this level of radicalism in most of the reviews of Enlightenment Now. David Bell, for instance, after playing Gray’s game of hiding the Enlightenment in the forest of diverse philosophical statements by individual Enlightenment figures, writes,

            Pinker’s problems with history are compounded even further as he tries to defend the Enlightenment against the many scholarly critics who have pointed, over the centuries, to some of its possible baleful consequences. Did Enlightenment forms of reasoning and scientific inquiry lie behind modern biological racism and eugenics? Behind the insistence that women do not have the mental capacity for full citizenship? Not at all, Pinker assures us. That was just a matter of bad science.

            Indeed, it was. But Pinker largely fails to deal with the inconvenient fact that, at the time, it was not so obviously bad science. The defenders of these repellent theories, used to justify manifold forms of oppression, were published in scientific journals and appealed to the same standards of reason and utility upheld by Pinker. “Science” did not by itself inevitably beget these theories, but it did provide a new language and new forms of reasoning to justify inequality and oppression and new ways of thinking about and categorizing natural phenomena that suggested to many an immutable hierarchy of human races, the sexes, and the able and disabled. The later disproving of these theories did not just come about because better science prevailed over worse science. It came about as well because of the moral and political activism that forced scientists to question data and conclusions they had largely taken for granted. Again, progress did not just occur because the ideals of the Enlightenment mysteriously percolated out through society.

Note that Bell here acknowledges that science didn’t bring about the various forms of oppression but merely provided a new language for justifying them. As Pinker pointed out in Better Angels, “Though the United States and other Western nations are often accused of being misogynistic patriarchies, the rest of the world is immensely worse” (413). These injustices are probably as old as humanity, so it’s no wonder it’s taken our species centuries to outgrow them, even when we should know better. Bell also tacitly credits “better” science with having at least some role in disproving oppressive theories when he insists their demise needed help from political activists.

            The last line of this passage from Bell is, however, a non sequitur. His main problem with Pinker is that he doesn’t give sufficient credit for societal progress to political thinkers and activists. “Almost entirely absent from the 576 pages of Enlightenment Now ,” he writes, “are the social movements that for centuries fought for equal rights, an end to slavery, improved working conditions, a minimum wage, the right to organize, basic social protections, a cleaner environment, and a host of other progressive causes.” And Bell takes Pinker’s admonition against politicizing debates as another dig at activism. Pinker does write far more about activist movements in his previous book, Better Angels. But Enlightenment Now is about the ideas driving the activism, not the activists themselves. Still, Pinker does discuss the movements Bell claims he’s neglected. In a section defending humanism from critics who claim it’s too similar to utilitarianism, he writes that

this approach to ethics has an impressive track record of improving human welfare. The classical utilitarians—Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill—laid out arguments against slavery, sadistic punishment, cruelty to animals, the criminalization of homosexuality, and the subordination of women which carried the day. Even abstract rights like freedom of speech and religion were largely defended in terms of benefits and harms, as when Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” Universal education, workers’ rights, and environmental protection also were advanced on utilitarian grounds. (417)

Is Bell so sure that “progress did not just occur because the ideals of the Enlightenment mysteriously percolated out through society”? At any rate, that was never Pinker’s argument. What Bell really means is that science alone can’t explain these instances of moral progress. Of course, Pinker never claimed that it could: “Science,” he states explicitly, “is not enough to bring about progress” (410). That’s why he includes humanism on his roster of enlightened values.

            So the propagandists aren’t quite guilty of teleology, but what about voodoo resemblance? An uncannily large number of the propagandists couldn’t resist comparing Enlightenment Now to a TED Talk, the implication being that the book is aimed at the cheap seats—despite its daunting length. Never mind that Nobel laureates like Daniel Kahneman have given TED Talks, along with scientists like Jennifer Doudna, a coinventor of the CRISPR Cas9 gene-editing technique. These lectures are not to be taken seriously because they’re directed at a popular audience. Bell even takes this tactic a step further by comparing Pinker to the novelist Dan Brown. You don’t get any more low-brow than that! What’s the basis of this comparison? Bell writes,

            Enlightenment Now is not a book that deserves a wide readership, but much like Dan Brown’s new novel, Origin, piles of it loom wherever books are sold. Oddly, Enlightenment Now has several points in common with Origin. They both, for instance, have long, windy passages musing about the relationship of the second law of thermodynamics to the meaning of life. Brown, riffing on the work of Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Jeremy England, proposes that life is “the inevitable result of entropy. Life is not the point of the universe. Life is simply what the universe creates and reproduces in order to dissipate energy.” Pinker, alternately, believes that the “ultimate purpose of life” is “to deploy energy and knowledge to fight back the tide of entropy.” The principal male characters in Origin are a wise Harvard professor and a farseeing tech mogul, and the climax is a TED Talk–like lecture in which the mogul reveals the destiny of the human race. But while Origin does little more than provide transient entertainment, Enlightenment Now may well have real influence.

I haven’t read Brown’s novel, but the lines Bell quotes suggest his character’s ideas run perfectly counter to those of Pinker’s. The similarity doesn’t extend beyond the fact that both books feature discussions of entropy, a concept Bell betrays no understanding of. Fittingly, Pinker quotes C.P. Snow taking literary scholars to task for their ignorance of science as evidenced by none other than their obliviousness of the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the one about entropy):

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you ever read a work of Shakespeare? (17)

            Reading Bell’s harebrained argument about Dan Brown, I stopped to wonder why he would go to the trouble of making such a case, which can only diminish his stature as an honest scholar. I mean, he must know his case from voodoo resemblance isn’t valid, and yet in his desperation he stoops to using it anyway. (And this post you're currently reading is by no means an exhaustive inventory of the distortions and lies.) Then it occurred to me again that Bell and the other writers of the pseudo-reviews I was reading don’t accept the case for reason and science. To them, persuasion is persuasion, no matter how it’s accomplished. The only thing that’s important is that readers are persuaded in the right direction—toward the ideas and beliefs the reviewers already know to be true and morally correct.

“No thinking person should be indifferent to our society’s disinvestment in the humanities.”

— Steven Pinker

            So another point Pinker has proven right on is that “Intellectual culture should strive to counteract our cognitive biases, but all too often it reinforces them” (48). But why is this? Unfortunately, most scholars working today subscribe to one degree or another to the tenets of postmodernism, the conviction that reality is so difficult to understand, while human motives to distort that understanding are so overwhelming, that anything masquerading as a statement of fact is really nothing but an argument for the perpetuation of the status quo. Most of these implicit arguments, the postmodernists believe, are shot through with racist, sexist, ableist, cis-gendered messages.

            While any serious scholar must acknowledge there’s a kernel of truth, variable in size, to these suspicions, the proper response is hardly to abjure any effort at objectivity, much less to insist that anyone who disagrees with your own ideas must be harboring some yen for the existing hegemonies and hierarchies. The proper response is to identify the sources of bias and strive to correct for them.

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            Yet what most scholars who profess a cynical stance toward science do is simply elevate unscientific rhetoric to the level of unassailable moral truth, a move which allows them to carry on their debates, not as any fair weighing of evidence and counterapplication of reason, but rather as something more akin to political discourse, relying on the argumentation style of electoral campaigns or PR initiatives. Scientists meanwhile rightfully recognize many rhetorical tools in the ideologue’s repertoire as logical fallacies, such as the argument from adverse consequences, and the suggestion of guilt by association, both of which are favorite tactics among postmodern scholars. Naturally enough, many readers are taken in. 

             What the cynics are doing then is little more than giving themselves a blank check to invade the minds of readers, viewers, and students with any type of argument they like, validity be damned, and the more directed at emotions and intuitions the better. It’s difficult to see this trend as anything other than backsliding to the bad old days of appealing to authority and relying on the inerrant sanctity of divine revelation.

            However much academics may lament the fake news phenomenon, the ascendance of alternative facts, and the ushering in of the post-truth era, any honest accounting would leave them no choice but to admit they played a part in laying the intellectual foundation for all three. In granting themselves license to ascribe evil motives to anyone standing across an ideological divide, they were simultaneously arming their rivals with all the same invalid rhetorical weapons they were using themselves. Now people with truly loathsome messages can hide in the fun-house hall of mirrors that is our current political environment.

            Rather than smearing and demonizing Pinker, the academic propagandists should have taken Enlightenment Now as an opportunity to reflect on what scholarship is, what it could be, what it has to offer humanity, and how it can best be conducted. Alas, many of them are too entrenched in their ideologies, too loyal to their own tribes, too concentrated on guarding the borders of their own tiny sandboxes. Let’s just hope the generation of intellectuals that succeed them will be more open-minded, more enlightened. And there is cause for optimism: Enlightenment Now, despite the fake news campaign against it, has been on the best-seller lists for a couple months now.     

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The Self-Righteousness Instinct: Steven Pinker on the Better Angels of Modernity and the Evils of Morality