- Odysseus after the Odyssey:

- Odysseus vs. Achilles:

Music by Michael Levy, "Composer for Lyre" — used with permission.
Spotify:

Website: https://www.ancientlyre.com

If I took away one lesson from the Odyssey, it’s you gotta choose your wife wisely. Here’s the range of outcomes:

• She starts a decade-long war which kills most of your friends (Helen)

• She cheats on you while you are fighting for your nation and murders you at your homecoming (Clytemnestra)

• She holds down the fort, raises your son, and ennobles your legacy (Penelope)

The outcome of the Greek heroes are strongly determined by the woman they chose to marry.

While Penelope clearly is the best wife, most people misunderstand what makes her so great. Why does Odysseus turn down goddesses, a princess who is much younger from a wealthier kingdom, and the very offer of immortality to go back to Penelope?

It’s not just because of her loyalty, but what Homer calls “ὁμοφροσύνη” -- like-mindedness. What makes her the ideal wife is that she matches Odysseus in his defining quality, his cunning. Odysseus on what makes a good marriage:

… Like-mindedness is a goodly gift. For nothing is greater or better than this, than man and wife dwell in a home in one mind, a great grief to their foes and a joy to their friends.

What the names “Odysseus” and “Achilles” mean is fascinating. It reveals the terrifying reality of what a Greek hero is.

• Achilles can be read as ἄχος (grief) + λαός (fighting men) = grief of the fighting men.

• We are told that Odysseus is given the name by his grandfather from ὀδύσσομαι (to hate) = Mr. Hatred.

• The non-ionic pronunciation from which we get Ulysses sounds like οὐλή (scar) which is of course the defining physical feature by which Odysseus is identified. (These are all “folk” etymologies)

The Greek hero is a man of pain and suffering. They cause enormous pain to their rivals: Achilles to Hector and Agamemnon; Odysseus to the Trojans, suitors, and cyclops. But they also cause enormous pain to their friends: Achilles to the Achaeans; Odysseus to his family and the Phaeacians. Lastly, they cause enormous pain to themselves: both lives are riddled with suffering.

While both heroes are men of pain and suffering they are also clearly different. Wily Odysseus is a different archetype than godlike Achilles. So who is the greater hero? That’s what I try to answer in this video essay filmed in Ithaca.

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Companion videos:

- Gregory Nagy on the Homeric Question:

- Odysseus after the Odyssey:

Timestamps:

00:00 0. Introduction

00:27 1. The Cyclops Scene

06:07 2. Lying as Institution

18:17 3. Hero as Man of Pain

25:54 4. Socrates as Hero

Music by Michael Levy, "Composer for Lyre" — used with permission.

Website: https://www.ancientlyre.com
Spotify:

Music by Michael Levy, “Composer for Lyre” — used with permission.

Website: https://www.ancientlyre.com
Spotify:

What happens to Odysseus after the Odyssey? Can you imagine him just settling down in Ithaca after 20 years of warring and wandering?

No notable “sequel” tells of such a happily ever after. Some say he rejects domestic life and abandons Penelope and Telemachus for more adventures. Some say he ends up marrying the Queen of Thesprotia and is mistakenly killed by his own son. Some say he sails into the Atlantic and drowns as he is about to reach Mount Purgatory.

I became fascinated with Odysseus’ ending because I too am a wanderer. I have not settled down romantically. I am a seeker when it comes to religion. I am constantly travelling. And unlike Odysseus, I don’t even have a single Ithaca to return to having grown up between worlds. By asking the question, “Will Odysseus ever settle down?” I wanted to figure out if and how I will be able to settle down.

The interesting philosophical question is this: is wandering good? And, if not, how does one stop wandering? The common advice is to quit “cold turkey,” but what if you should accelerate your way out?

For example, Odysseus had sex with two divinely beautiful goddesses for eight years before he was ready to go back to his wife. Remember that he wanted to stay longer than a year with Circe and had to be convinced by his crew. And Homer tells us that at the end of the seven-year stay with Calypso, the nymph was “no longer pleasing to him,” implying that she initially was (Homer’s Odysseus is much more lustful than Nolan’s).

What if that’s what the wanderer should do in all circumstances: indulge in hedonism until you see the limits of pleasure; make so much money that you cure yourself of avarice; become famous to rid yourself of vanity. What if you should indulge in things most people would say are completely out of bounds but still come out unscathed on the other side by tying yourself tightly to the mast?

These questions around “what ought the wanderer do?” motivated me to investigate the literary explorations of Odysseus after the Odyssey. I’ve picked four of the most canonical accounts – the Telegony, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Tennyson’s Ulysses, and Plato’s Republic. I will explain to you their fascinating plots and what they have to teach us wanderers.

Odyssey Movie Review

Nolan’s Odyssey is so close to being great. Here’s my spoiler (lite) review after just having reread Homer’s Odyssey.

First off, the good: the look and feel of the film is incredible. But the greatest accomplishment must be the pacing. Nolan managed to follow the in media res structure, include (most) of the big episodes, without any of it feeling rushed. I particularly like how he combined many scenes (e.g. Calypso, lotus eaters, and Phaeacians) into one.

If he had just avoided these three mistakes this would’ve been legendary:

1. Odysseus is Overly Moralized

2. Deception is Underutilized

3. Racially-Mixed Ithacans Breaks Immersion (it’s not just black Helen of Troy but the mixed White/Black/Indian/Chinese crew of Odysseus that subverts a key premise of the story)

Each of these contributes to a lack of mystery in the film. I elaborate on each of the points below:

 Homer didn’t write the Odyssey, he didn’t write the Iliad. In fact, there was no person ever called “Homer”.

This is not a conspiracy theory but the considered conclusion of Harvard’s Gregory Nagy after a lifetime of research. Professor Nagy is the most respected Homerist alive and his defining contribution is to uncover the 3000 year old mystery of who (or what) actually produced the epics.

This interview will examine two of Professor Nagy’s radical claims:

1. The Homeric epics were not written, carefully edited, and memorized for performance. They were created on the fly while being sung! That is to say the Greeks somehow developed a method to create amazingly intricate, 12-15 thousand line poems in the middle of a performance.

2. The Homeric Epics were not composed by an individual but cumulatively by countless poets over a millenia. There was never a person called “Homer”.

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What we cover:

00:00 0. Introduction

02:09  1. Homer Didn't Write, He Sang

35:44  2: The Process of Crystallization

1:05:49  3. The Panathenaic Festival

1:38:34  4. Is there Room for Genius?

Johnathan Bi: I’ve been reading Homer’s Odyssey here in Ithaca, where they proudly display a statue of Homer. But what if they got it wrong? What if Homer never wrote the Iliad, or the Odyssey? What if Homer never existed in the first place? This is not some wild conspiracy theory, but the considered conclusion of my guest to Harvard’s Gregory Nagy after a lifetime of research. Professor Nagy is one of the most respected Homerists alive, who’s published over a dozen books on Homer, and his defining contribution is to uncover who, or I really should say what, produced the Homeric epics. If you are at all engaged in creative work, if you’re interested in how to build creative cultures and creative countries, then this is an incredibly important conversation because the Iliad and the Odyssey are two of the most important creative acts in the Western tradition, and learning about how they are made will help you gain a fundamentally new perspective on your own work, as it ha…

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America is hostile to Christianity. Democracy slowly but surely corrupts the faith from within.

Reading Tocqueville & the Founding Fathers between the lines convinced me of this.

Look at the sorry state of Christianity at 250 compared to America’s Puritan founding. That is the result of two centuries of democratic corrosion and this weakening will only continue. What people are calling a “Christian revival” is a mere blip on this macro downward trajectory, a knee-jerk reaction to the excesses of progressivism of the last 20 years. Reading Tocqueville convinced me that America will never be truly Christian, unless it gives up being a liberal democracy (e.g. Integralism).

Look at American Christianity today, it is already more American than it is Christian:

Jesus preaches against wealth and yet I’ve rarely heard an american pastor do so. I hear the prosperity gospel quite often, but never sincere urges to poverty, asceticism, or monasticism as can be loudly heard in every Christian society prior.

Christianity teaches love and humility; the American right co-opts it for hate and superiority. The Bible prescribes universal gender norms, sexual codes, ethical standards; the American left appropriates it for the latest political fads of the day.

But the most hostile democratic force against all religions, not just Christianity, is toleration. The Bible is clear about Jesus’ singular status: “No one comes to the Father except through me.” It’s clear about the demonic or, at the very least, inferior status of the other faiths. And yet most American christians show not just tolerance but a puzzling affirmation of other religions.

Tocqueville saw the terrible cost of this toleration, in a private letter in 1831, he wrote: ”this so-called tolerance … is nothing but a huge indifference.” Christianity could flourish for a 1000 years under persecution. Christianity did flourish for a 1000 years persecuting others. But just 250 years under liberal toleration and what Christians left have already stopped caring about ultimate questions, masking their indifference under the banner of toleration. Perhaps this was the Founders’ plan all along, Jefferson writes: “the way to silence religious disputes, is to take no notice of them.”

To see how strange and corrupting American religious toleration is, one need only look at how other cultures practice toleration. Look at how the ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel treat their Christian minority: they look down upon them as fools deceived by a false Messiah. They don’t hide their contempt either: they openly mock the Christians, but they stop at organized, legal persecution. This was the original meaning of toleration. Toleration came from the Latin root tolerare which meant “to bear, to suffer, to endure.” The ultra-orthodox merely “put up with” their Christian minority.

American Christians, even (maybe especially) the hyper-religious ones, do not behave like that towards their jewish minority. If you behave like that in America, you will be called “intolerant.” Because American toleration requires not just the lack of legal discrimination but a positive affirmation of the other. This concession doesn’t seem like much (in fact, it has infinite benefits) but it completely subverts the original concept. Tolerare originally meant that the thing I’m tolerant of is bad, but I endure it for a greater good. American toleration demands you to affirm the thing you are tolerant of as good to begin with.

This is a radical subversion because tolerare preserves a precious freedom of the mind to come up with one’s own judgements: as long as you do not compel the others’ body you are free to think as you wish in your soul. American toleration does not compel the body but strikes directly at the soul: you are not allowed to discriminate in thought and must affirm the other as good. This is why you hear so often “all religions teach the same lesson” (which, it always turns out, is some mushy platitude around love). American toleration is the most radical and thorough form of intolerance and the death of serious religious thinking.

The ultra-orthodox Jews in their hostility secure the freedom that American Christians lose in their compassion.

Tocqueville came to similar conclusions, on the deadly effects of religious toleration, in that private letter from 1831. And yet, in Democracy in America he defended the separation of Church and State and advocated for the liberal order. In this lecture, I am going to attempt to reconcile this seeming contradiction. What we are going to find is terrifying: democracy unleashes not just one, but four separate forces hostile Christianity. And the separation of Church and state is to protect the Church from these forces as much as it is to preserve the state, for democracies can not function without religion. That is to say, as much as America is hostile to christianity, it needs it even more. This is the tragedy of Democracy: it endlessly attacks the very religious pillar that sustains its existence.

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Companion lectures & interviews:
- Democracy with American Characteristics | Tocqueville’s Industrial Aristocracy

- What All Great Men Want (But Won’t Admit To) | UT Philosopher Thomas Pangle:

Americans don’t take their religion seriously. They are rejecting Jesus when they choose peace over the sword. What the hell do you mean you’re going to raise your son half Jewish and half Christian? Who do you tell your son who Jesus of Nazareth is? Is he the one true God? Or is he a great deceiver? All the religions basically teach the same morality. Love and kindness. Really? Yahweh commands genocide against women and children. The Quran put polytheists to the sword. In Odinism, you have to die in combat to end up in Valhalla. The leading progressive feminists actively campaigned against the women’s right to vote. Why are so many of the great technologists homosexuals?

1. Why Democracy Is Hostile to Religion

1.1 The First Force: Toleration

It’s obvious to foreigners like myself and Tocqueville how strange American religious tolerance is and how corrosive it is to your religious life. But not to Americans. So let me tease this out with a story. So, when I just arrived in…

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Companion interviews:

- What All Great Men Want (But Won’t Admit To) | UT Philosopher Thomas Pangle:

America used to be the most equal nation in the world. There were no aristocrats who lorded themselves high above everyone else, and the social distance between classes was much smaller. When Tocqueville wrote this book, Democracy in America, in this very chateau in the 1830s, this is why people came to America. People came to America for her equality.

In 2016, I came to America for the exact opposite reason. I came for your inequality. For the dazzling heights you can achieve in America, and for the vertical distance to ascend upwards. And I am not alone. The best and the brightest no longer come to America for equality, but to achieve an unequal greatness.

Much has changed in the last 200 or so years. In fact, in the time of Tocqueville, his worry was that America was so equal that it would produce an impressive mediocrity, but that has completely changed. America is now the only Western nation hospitable to greatness, but at the great cost of not just her equality, but…

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In 1776, people immigrated to America for EQUALITY, to live without lords or kings.

In 2016, I came to America for her INEQUALITY, to learn from billionaires and intellectuals who have achieved an unequaled greatness.

America has abandoned its founding principle of equality, but that’s not a completely bad thing.

Canada, where I came from, scoffs at American inequality, but the best Canadians immigrate for it. We come here precisely for this inequality and the unbounded limits of achievement it opens up. In Canada, all humans are given more respect regardless of their achievements. Society is materially and socially more equal. But when you are given a participation trophy for just being human, there isn’t the same lust for success.

The same sentiments of equality so hospitable to the majority are suffocating for the ambitious.

Ask yourself this American: why do the best talent from stable, rich, lawful western democracies all want to come to the US? What do you have that no one else does?

• If they wanted equality they would go to Norway.

• If they loved private property, New Zealand protects it more.

• If they craved rule of law they could go to Canada.

• If they were tired of European civilization and wanted to immerse themselves in non-western cultures, they would go to Paris.

What you have that none of the other democracies do is radical inequality, and that’s why we are here. The vast chasm between the billionaire and the struggling worker, the Ivy League chair and the wandering community college adjunct, the best private healthcare in the world and no healthcare at all sets Americans into a frenzy, a frenzy that most would be happier living without. Most Americans would live better lives in Canada.

But the same fire that makes chaff smoke makes gold glow.

And a tiny minority of you are able to capture that frenzy, that lightning in a bottle, and transmute it towards great ends. That energy is what we came to America for.

America is unrecognizable from that of 250 years ago. When Tocqueville visited, just a few decades after the founding, America was so equal that one of his chief worries was that this equality would result in a complacent mediocrity that left no verticality for greatness. Today that has flipped, America is the only country in the western hemisphere hospitable to greatness, but at the terrible cost of not just equality but its very nature as a democracy. America has increasingly taken on the features of aristocracy it once stood proudly against.

But just because America betrayed, what Tocqueville considered, its founding principle, that doesn’t mean you Americans can no longer embrace it:

• Rome was first a kingdom, and there was beauty in Romulus’ founding, in Numa’s laws, in Lucretia’s suicide.

• ~250 years later, Rome became a republic, it defined itself against the Tarquins and kingship. But there was new republican beauty to be found: in Regulus’ honor, in Cicero’s oratory, in Cato’s stubbornness.

• And then Rome changed again, into an empire. It betrayed everything the republic stood for. But there was a new imperial beauty to be found: in Vergil’s lines, in the wisdom of the five good Emperors, in the conversion of Constantine.

America has no less betrayed who she was, but that does not mean there is not a new aristocratic beauty to fall in love with in your great country.

This lecture, given at the very Chateau where Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, is my love letter to this new America; to a country that has accepted me with open arms, furnished me with unlimited freedom and resources; a country in which ten years ago I came not knowing a single soul, and now call home and have formed my deepest relationships; a country in which I’ve in turn come to love, not for who she was, not for who she would like to be, but for who she has become.

And my gift to America on her 250th birthday is to help you see and delight in your new republic through my fresh foreign eyes that never saw what was and does not long for it, but only sees what is and delights in it. As Tocqueville says, “the majority … lives in perpetual adoration of itself; only foreigners or experience can make certain truths reach the ears of the Americans.”

This is America’s next chapter, a mixed democratic-aristocratic constitution or, if it’s easier to swallow, “Democracy with American Characteristics.”

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Companion interviews:

- What All Great Men Want (But Won’t Admit To) | UT Philosopher Thomas Pangle:

Johnathan Bi: One of the most radical ideas of the American founders is that greed is good.

Thomas Pangle: The pursuit of happiness. It expresses the idea that you never catch it. For the ancients, work is the curse. But in America, that became, no, the more money you have, the more successful you are.

Johnathan Bi: People think the rich man is a playboy, hedonist. Yeah. That couldn’t be further from the truth. He’s a monk. And the God which he devotes himself to is money. Jefferson and Franklin, they’re just outright heretics.

Thomas Pangle: The American founders, I think, have a pretty drastically lowered view of human nature.

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America was founded on a revolutionary idea: Greed is Good.

How highly America’s founders elevated acquisition & wealth is unprecedented in the history of ideas.

• For Plato, producers are the lowest of the tripartite division in the Republic

• The Confucian tradition ranked merchants as the lowest class

• In Hinduism, workers are the lowest caste with merchants being the second lowest.

• The Bible depicts labor on earth as a punishment for humanity’s transgressions: you will eat bread by the sweat of your brow.

The common thread within these classical traditions is the idea that work is undignified and that a life focused on wealth produces a petty soul.

What’s surprising about America’s founders then is not just how highly they elevate acquisition but why they did so. They valued the formative consequences of acquisition on the character of citizens! Their reasoning flips the classical traditions on its head: work is the most fertile soil to produce virtues necessary for scientific enterprise, familial life, and civic action.

The founders didn’t just embrace commerce. They reconceived human nature around it. They built a system where work becomes your identity, where acquisition has no natural limit. And they knew what they were giving up. The founders looked at the imagination, at religiosity, at Plato’s Eros -- the deepest longings of the human soul -- and ejected them for being too dangerous for a commercial republic.

On America’s 250th, I’ve invited the legendary UT philosopher Thomas Pangle to discuss the magnificent power and terrible cost of turning greed from vice to virtue, and whether America’s founders would be happy with those tradeoffs if they saw America today.

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What we cover:

0:00 0. Introduction

0:34 1. Commerce and the Republic

22:26 2. Human Nature and the Life of the Mind

55:27 3. Religion and the Founding

1:07:04 4. America’s Political Innovations

1:23:45 5. Has America Betrayed Its Founding Principles?

1:31:54 6. The Great Thinkers that Influenced America

After interviewing dozens of leading AI experts and reading hundreds of books, these 4 books stood out as the most important for the AI-age. If you truly understand their insights, not only will you survive this revolution, you will thrive.

1. Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic

2. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics

3. Rene Girard’s Deceit Desire and the Novel

4. Jeff Kripal’s Secret Body

People today are mostly worried about AI taking their job or the bubble bursting, but Weber’s Protestant Ethic is going to show you the problem is much greater. The right comparison isn’t the dotcom bubble or 2008. It’s Darwin which shook the faith of an entire civilization or the industrial revolution which required two world wars to sort out. That’s the scale of the AI challenge and Weber’s text helps put that in view.

The next 3 books will teach you where to spend your time now in order to thrive in this radically new world order. I’ve already made major life decisions based on their insights to AI-proof my life and career. Why should we go looking for guidance in “outdated” works of philosophy? Because we need to rethink everything from the ground up from first principles. And if you are just stuck on learning how to prompt engineer or following the latest fads on X you are underestimating the size of the earthquake that is about to hit us by magnitudes.

These are the crucial insights each of these 4 texts have to offer us in the AI age…

Read the Transcript

What We Cover:

0:00 0. Introduction

1:42 1. Weber’s Protestant Ethic

5:41 2. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics

9:48 3. Girard’s Deceit Desire and the Novel

14:25 4. Kripal’s Secret Body

Companion interviews & lectures:

He Studied Every Religion, This One Came Closest to Truth | Rice Professor Jeff Kripal

Introduction to Mimetic Theory | René Girard