Positive Liberty

My National Novel Writing Month is almost over. Oddly, it’s given me new enthusiasm for doing plain-old vanilla blogging again, and some topics are just too good to pass up. I know, I know, I’ve missed a lot of big stories this month, passed up many interesting discussions, and probably alienated a number of bloggers who might otherwise have been friendly. For that I offer my sincere apologies. With that said, though, I’m almost back in the saddle. Outside the novel, here is what’s been on my mind recently:

I belong to a generation whose earliest political memories include scenes of Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate, of the largely peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe, and of the Berlin Wall coming down. For us at least, there is still something satisfying, something almost too good to be true about the end of the Cold War.

When we see history repeating itself–as it now seems to be doing in Ukraine–there can be no doubt about what we’re going to think. Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and others–We’re all with the opposition here. The real test of a democracy is whether the people are willing to take to the streets to protect it, because ultimately nothing else will do. Worthless as it may sound, I wish the Ukrainians all the best, and if anyone knows of a way to help more directly, please let me know. I will be sure to pass it along.

While the Ukrainians fight for even the basics of a limited government, over here we are arguing about the implementation, and I find these arguments no less fascinating. I speak, of course, of Raich vs. Ashcroft, which has the potential to become one of the biggest court cases of the new century. At issue is whether federal law may prohibit a private individual from growing and consuming marijuana for personal medical reasons.

It’s a gripping case on many different levels. Angel Raich’s doctor has declared to the courts that Raich risks death if she stops using marijuana to treat her chronic pain, nausea, and paralysis. She has tried dozens of other remedies, all to no avail. Only cannabis works, and, in her case at least, it appears to work remarkably well. On the other side, outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft is shown precisely at his reactionary worst–a tyrant, taking medicine away from a desperately ill and remarkably law-abiding woman.

The Supreme Court is no doubt cognizant of these facts, but the real question lies elsewhere, and it may be stated as follows: Does the federal government possess the power to regulate the private growth and consumption of cannabis under the interstate commerce clause, even when no interstate transportation or commercial activity is present?

Frankly, historical precedent favors Mr. Ashcroft. In Wickard vs. Filburn (1942), the Supreme Court issued a ruling that is likely to control in this situation: Responding to a petitioner who argued that the Agricultural Adjustment Act’s wheat quotas did not apply to wheat that was never intended for sale, the Court ruled that even non-commercial activity could be regulated under the interstate commerce clause, provided that it exercised an indirect effect upon interstate commerce.

Upon the thin reed of indirect economic effects, a mountain of jurisprudence has arisen. Not only has this case spawned virtually the entire federal regulatory regime of the intervening years, but it has also been the basis for, improbably enough, the civil rights cases of the mid-20th century: Because discrimination in some way alters interstate commerce, and because, in the case of purely in-state actions, discrimination indirectly alters interstate commerce, it has been found that Congress has the power to regulate racially discriminatory practices.

While racial discrimination may be despicable, and while prohibiting it may be a legitimate government action–and I do agree on both counts–still, one has to wonder whether the interstate commerce clause was the best justification that the government could find. Not only does it feel ad hoc, it exposes the sheer unlimited power of the clause as it is now interpreted.

Under decisions like these, the interstate commerce clause has grown enormously in scope, and it seems that by now it can be used to justify the regulation of virtually anything. If noncommercial wheat and marijuana are both subject to congressional control, then one may easily imagine Congress re-enacting an alcohol prohibition, too: If the commerce clause truly possesses such sweeping power, then the Eighteenth Amendment is unnecessary–and the Twenty-First is entirely moot.

As I see it, the entire conundrum rests on two tragic errors.

First, it’s time to admit, I think, that Wickard was wrongly decided. Yes, a tremendous weight of settled law rests upon this case. But rather than bolstering the need for Wickard, these subsequent cases have only demonstrated the vast scope of the underlying error: If Congress can regulate anything with indirect effects upon interstate commerce, then Congress can regulate anything, period.

Under Wickard, there is no sphere of human activity where we citizens are truly at liberty. This cannot possibly reflect the spirit of our Constitution, whose every concern elsewhere is for the setting of proper limits on the federal government’s intrusive power. The commerce clause must not be understood in isolation; properly speaking, it can only be read in light of the document that bears it, and the many limitations that the document elsewhere demands.

With one exception–1995’s U.S. vs. Lopez (Er, two exceptions, including U.S. vs. Morrison in 2000)–post-Wickard jurisprudence has done nothing to rein in the ever-expanding bubble of federal power that has emerged in the meantime. As a result, the government in Washington has become a vast, glitzy dispensary of regulatory favor. Only the inveterate tendency of all Americans to organize into competing interest groups has allowed for some check on the expanding powers of Congress, as that body is forced, by dint of competition among lobbyists, to reach compromises that do not quite give away the farm. So far it has managed, but barely.

The second great error goes back to the original draft of the Constitution itself–and to a set of attitudes that long predate it. In 1787, economics was still very much a mysterious science. The Wealth of Nations was only eleven years old, and economic fallacy was far more common than economic wisdom, even among the self-proclaimed experts of the day.

One of the most pervasive misconceptions of the time was the idea that “commerce” represented a discrete sphere of human action. In truth, commerce is no such thing, then or now, but the governments of the age seldom understood commerce as it should be. Hence the government of England passed the Corn Laws, which spawned pernicious effects in areas where they least were expected; hence the government of France proclaimed that nobles would forfeit their titles if they ever engaged in the vulgar practice of “commerce”–while the nobles themselves constantly invented new ways of engaging in commerce without violating the ever-too-narrow laws of derogation. They bought shares in joint stock companies, which themselves were a new invention; they managed the so-called property of others at a compensation of 100% profit; they obtained exemptions to declare a given activity “non-commercial” wherever such exemptions were possible. In short, they did whatever they could to enter commerce, and they found that doing it was easier than anyone had guessed.

To later economic thinkers, these actions proved beyond a shadow of doubt that all things can be made into commerce: All human activity goes on in a seamless web of give and take, sometimes with money, sometimes without. Today we understand that “commerce” is not so much a separate sphere of human activity as it is a way of thinking about our actions. We now view economics as a tool for analyzing the entire interconnected web of human behavior–much as we also view anthropology, psychology, or comparative history, each of which approaches that web from a different perspective.

Indeed, we would find it absurd to ask which behaviors were not psychological or historical. To us, all action has a psychological dimension, and all action is a part of history, for all human action may properly be considered from a psychological or a historical standpoint. We would never dream of giving Congress the power to regulate all psychological activity–and yet, in giving Congress the power to regulate all economic activity, we have done precisely the same.

But in 1787, it was taken virtually for granted that economics was merely a thing to be done in the marketplace, and that “commerce” was best understood in isolation from the rest of human life. The contradictions to this worldview were piling up all around, but the new insight had not yet arrived. Conventional wisdom, from the dawn of the so-called ‘political arithmetic’ in the seventeenth century, all the way through the late Enlightenment, held that “commerce” was a limited thing.

In other words, today’s trouble with the commerce clause rests on a misunderstanding that predates the republic. Within their limited worldview, the framers intended nothing more than to give Congress a well-defined power over one branch of human life–and that only in one special instance. They never dreamed that two centuries of new social insight would turn the interstate commerce clause into the most powerful sixteen words in the entire Constitution.

The remedy for this situation is far from clear. One might conceivably go back to pre-Wickard jurisprudence (as this brief argues), but having to argue and re-argue all of the subsequent precedents must really be a fearsome deterrent to this idea. One might attempt to find some new, post-Wickard way of limiting the scope of the commerce clause, but it seems to me at least that any such limitation would have to be entirely arbitrary.

And then there is the ultimate remedy, amending the Constitution. I’m going to go out on a limb here and make a wide-ranging prediction: I predict that within fifty years, the Constitution will be amended to replace or to radically alter the interstate commerce clause, a provision that is flawed in the extreme and ultimately unworkable from the standpoint of limited government. Failing this prediction, I envision that the regulatory state will encompass every sphere of human life, leading to nothing less than a de facto communism. And the rest of the Constitution–crafted with the clear intent of limiting federal power–will be nothing more than a long list of pleasant wishes.

Can one badly decided case, based on a badly worded section of the Constitution, which itself rests on an archaic view of human nature–can the weight of these errors really be enough to deprive Angel Raich of the medicine she needs to stay alive? That’s the short-term question. The long view is, if anything, even more distressing: Can this train of misunderstanding really be enough to wipe out the clear intent of virtually every other clause in the Constitution? I should hope not. But then, marijuana is some scary stuff, and you can never be too careful.

Update: Thanks to Kip Esquire and In The Agora for the links. Legal Theory Blog has a rough account of the oral arguments. Randy Barnett, arguing Raich’s case, did not make the far-reaching argument I’ve outlined above; this type of thing doesn’t win Supreme Court cases until it’s been percolating through law schools for at least a couple of decades. On the contrary, Barnett insisted that the activity in question was not fundamentally economic. The government argued the opposite–and that, if anything, the powers granted under Wickard did not go far enough. So much for small-government, states’-rights Republicans. Dahlia Lithwick covers the arguments in the Raich case with a bit more snark in “Dude, Where’s My Integrity?” [Bumped to the top; this post is getting a lot of attention, and I'd be happy if it got more.]

As noted in the previous chapter, the preliminaries of any great adventure are always more impressive than the hard, practical, final bits. In the back room, the Grand Curate rolled up his yoga mat and placed it on a shelf. Dozens of similar shelves covered the four walls of the room; on them were books, bottles, relics, idols, charms and fetishes of every description.

“Holiness,” he said. “You can practically smell it in the air here.”

“Oh please,” I replied. “It smells of mildew and stale smoke from the incense. And you should know better, too: Yoga demands some good fresh air. Sunlight, too, if you can manage.”

“Have it your way, of course. I wouldn’t dream of anything else,” he replied.

“Oh?” I answered, “But you aren’t being properly spiritual unless you agree with precisely the way that I do the rituals.” He looked back at me and winked.

“I know that the novelty of being a full-time infidel must really be something for you. But after a while, you get used to it. It’s vulgar to look down on the beliefs of others, even if they really are completely wrong.”

He was right; I thought of the go master in the park, who had shown such patience with errors far more simple than these: The errors of the go board were the errors of a moment’s bad reflection; the errors of religion, if such are admitted to exist, must be the accumulated and reasonable-sounding detritus of the centuries, imbued in the believer from birth. The way to deal with them, if at all, was to leave them alone.

“What do you believe, really?” I asked.

“A little of everything. Not much of anything in particular,” he replied. My stomach turned. I could scarcely have imagined an answer that revolted my sensibilities more directly. But there was more.

“I’ve got a knack,” he said, “for figuring out what other people believe–and for giving it to them. I knew your type the moment you walked through the door, and I knew just what I had to say. But since you asked, I’m giving you the truth. Don’t look at the truth too closely, my friend. After all, I’m also giving you a way out of here.”

In a very important sense, I was already chafing at the idea of being an Asan heretic. Why on earth must I be responsible for the likes of my heretic, freethinking, independent peers? Why have an organization at all? Why be a part of something–when your only commonality was to insist, more strongly than others, on difference? Let’s face it, too: Even here there is no guarantee of goodness. There never is. What did it mean to be a freethinker–when free thought could lead you anywhere, even into utter indifference? I wished I could tell Claudia and Mohammed this–and maybe, in just a few moments, I just might get the chance.

Instead, I was silent for a long time. The Curate, who probably understood just what I was thinking, had at least the good sense to allow me that quiet.

“Well, here we are,” said the Curate after a few uncomfortable moments. “Time for you to be on your way.”

“What are you going to do to me?” I asked.

“I’m going to tell you to go.”

“Go where?”

“Up.”

“I don’t know how.”

“Do it anyway.”

“You don’t expect that it will work, do you?” I asked.

“I expect quite thoroughly that it will.”

“You bend reality by the sheer power of not believing in it?”

“Why must you always see the worst in my chosen philosophy? I’m a free thinker, no? Just do what I tell you–wing it, if you must.”

I did. Much to my surprise, I ascended toward the ceiling. My body became transparent. I should have expected as much all along, like those rare moments of lucidity in a dream, where you realize in a blinding flash that everything around you really is a dream–and the knowledge gives you some secret power over the rest of the world. Spurred on perhaps by their dreams, generations had tried and failed this method in the Real World, but in the Unreal, the rules were apparently quite different. It worked, just like in the dreams.

It wasn’t a dream, though; it was still the Unreal World, and I was wide awake. I was still myself, and I was rising rapidly through the ceiling with only barely enough time to wish the Grand Curate a farewell and a thank-you–while wondering precisely how all of this had come to pass. I couldn’t explain a bit of it. Could I do this all again? Something inside me said no–that the very command of the Grand Curate, given inside his sacred retreat, had been necessary to bring on the transformation. But something else said that I could do it whenever I wanted, and that, in a way, I always could. I wondered how life would ever be the same in the Unreal World.

But there was no time for that. There was no time; I was rising. My head hit the ceiling–and failed to stop. I passed upward, through the columns and vaulted arches of the Cathedral, through the worked stone and the bedrock. I flowed through underground streams, through prehistoric refuse heaps, and through the fossilized remains of the beasts of legend. Exactly as promised, I seeped through the topsoil and out to the surface, whole in body and spirit.

Elsewhere a conspiracy was brewing.

“Even the Prudent Predator has failed us,” sad the middle-aged god. “And with all the help we gave him, too. Can’t he do anything right?”

“In a way, he should have known better–and so should we. How does he go on calling himself prudent when he acts like that? The first little bit of extra power, and it goes straight to his mortal brain, addling it,” said the old goddess.

“But… He’s not a mortal. He’s an Avatar,” said the youngest god.

“Doesn’t matter. He’s the Avatar of a perfectly mortal vice. Terminology aside, it all comes out in the wash, and the power got to his head,” said the middle-aged god. “Come to think of it, I think I’ve seen some awfully good plays on that subject, back in my day.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” said the eldest. “And you’re rambling again, which suits you badly.”

“Oh, wait! I’m getting something,” said the young god. He raised his white eyebrows as though straining to hear.

“Got him?” said the old goddess. She licked her fangs in anticipation.

“Yup,” said the middle-aged one. “I’ve got a lock on him too. He’s gone ethereal.”

“Now,” said the ancient goddess.

A wash of divine power streaked across the planes of existence. I never noticed a thing.

I stood on solid ground, in the middle of a rolling mountain meadow. It was cold; the wind cut through my thin shirt as though it wasn’t even there, and my jacket had been so torn from the adventures of the past few days that it did very little good either. The daisies whipped sideways with each new gust. Below me, the meadow gave way to an awe-inspiring view of the city of Chateauna. I was in the Elrin Mountains, nearing the far end of the Lands of Pure Fantasy. Beyond these peaks lay only the Wastelands of Surrealism, and I had no desire at all to go visiting there.

Especially not today of all days, because the Citadel was right in front of me.

Whether the door was locked or not, whether I had the key or not, even the fact that I had traded the key to an untrustworthy imp in return for my freedom some time ago–all of it was forgotten. I ran toward my goal, unaware of these concerns–and unaware of the divine intervention that was about to render them all entirely beside the point. Oblivious, then, I ran to the door.

I should have recognized that things were amiss. In front of me was not the thick, impervious castle door of my earlier encounter. Instead, I beheld a soft, leather-coated executive boardroom door, circa 1973, with a plush-handled knocker directly in the center. There was no need for a key; there never is when you enter the boardroom of the Inner Unethical Council. The way is always straight and easy–and before you can even knock, Sycophancy opens up every door.

In retrospect, my failure to notice the difference must surely have been the result of one last drop from that surge of divine intervention just previous. Once the door is open, however, you have very little choice in the matter: The demands of politeness, custom, and good form all demand no less than that you sit down at the long mahogany table, put your feet up, and have a cigar. And as the nicotine massages your brain, someone–probably False Seeming–will pour you a chilled glass of absinthe, and your feet will rise off the hand-knotted Afghan rug, made by the slave labor of children, and decadently alight on the mahogany table itself. And you will say, against every moral fiber in your being:

“God damn, it’s good to be back.” Which is exactly what I said.

“We missed you,” said Amour-Propre. “You always did light up our little conversations.” He put down the Sanskrit text that he was pretending to read, and I remembered to be wary. I could trust not a thing I heard in the room–though a lot of it would surely appeal to me.

“Cupcake?” asked Sloth, pushing a plate in my direction.

“No thank you,” I replied.

“Fine,” said Spite. “I don’t know why I even bother to bake the damn things.”

“So, gentlemen, what are we here for? I trust you know that you aren’t the ones I was looking for.”

“I’m never good enough for you, am I?” asked Self-Pity.

“Don’t take it so personally. I was on a quest to find your counterparts, who, for reasons unknown to me, have gone entirely missing. I’ve crossed the Unreal World from Mount Technos in the west to the Elrins in the east, and I’ve seen not a hint of them. My two friends, Claudia and Mohammed, have likewise disappeared, and I’m worried that you–or someone in your pay–has been behind their disappearance, behind my imprisonment twice, behind all the misfortunes I’ve been having on this long miserable trip.”

“Don’t look at us,” replied Amour-Propre. “We are entirely blameless.”

I took a puff from my cigar and contemplated my reply. I would be best, I thought as I took a sip, not to drink too much absinthe in the next few minutes.

“I want to know what to do, and I’m afraid that at the moment you’re all I’ve got. Now, I’ve had quite an adventure these past few days, one that I never planned on having. I wanted to know whether to write a novel this month, but I’m coming to realize that I should probably write my book next month, because there isn’t much time left in November to accomplish anything anymore.”

“How time does fly,” said Self-Pity.

“I had a question in mind that I wanted to ask, um, the good guys. I still want to ask it, but I don’t know where to find them. Keep in mind that I am not accusing you, but I would like to know where they are.”

“Why don’t you just ask us your question?” said Amour-Propre. “I’m sure we could supply an answer.”

“Or possibly several answers,” added False Seeming.

“Thank you for your offer. But no. Just tell me where they are.”

“No,” said Spite. Simultaneously, Amour-Propre asked: “What’s in it for us?” Sloth yawned ostentatiously. Lust grinned at me, ever the hopeful.

“Nothing.” I replied. “I offer you nothing, except for this: I won’t tell a soul about your meddling with me, or with my friends.”

“You are inviting us to become Prudent Predators?” said False Seeming. “I like it already.”

“Quite the contrary. I am offering you my forgiveness in advance.” Then a new connection fell into place.
“You know the Prudent Predator?” I nearly choked on my absinthe.

“Oh, we all do,” said Sloth. He ate another cupcake.

“Last I checked, I hadn’t hired the Prudent Predator to join you,” I said.

“No, but he volunteered, and we figured–hey, why not?” said Amour-Propre. “He seemed, well, so wickedly evil that we just couldn’t resist.”

“That would explain his otherwise remarkable powers,” I replied.

“Remarkable powers?” said Amour-Propre. “Did anyone lend him any remarkable powers? I certainly didn’t.”

Heads shook all around the table. Lust shrugged a little and grinned. “Okay, well maybe I intervened just a little. But you remember that incident.”

“Oh yes, I replied. How could I forget? But these other things, well, they were some big stuff–way out of your league, if I may say so. I’ve never once set out to find your counterparts and ended up here instead. And his cross-plane conspiracy nearly managed to do me in.”

“But now we’ve got you,” said Lust. “You’re perfectly safe. And I think you could use a private consultation in my chambers, now if possible. I’ve got a fireplace. And a bearskin rug.”

He must have been off his game. Making love on a dead animal has never appealed to me.

“Thanks, but no.” I tried not to make a face.

“Let’s get to the bottom of this right now if we can,” I continued. “You have not been keeping me from my goal. You probably couldn’t if you wanted to. But someone else has–possibly a god or two, if that defixion I found has anything to do with it–and what am I going to do now?”

“Give up,” said Sloth. “Some things just aren’t meant to be.”

“Give up,” said Spite. “It serves ‘em right.”

“Give up,” said Self-Pity. “It makes the wallowing afterward a whole lot easier.”

“Give up,” said Sycophancy. “You’re taken care of so well here.”

“Give up,” said Lust. “If you think Sycophancy cares for you properly, well then let me tell you…”

“Give up,” said Amour-Propre. “A genius like you doesn’t need them anyway. Join me, and we will rule the universe together.”

“Well then, that settles it,” I replied. I had been more than polite, and I stood up, a little unsteady from all the absinthe. I walked toward the door, never looking back, intent on facing the cold mountain meadow alone if need be. Ever the toady, Sycophancy opened the door as I left.

But when I walked out into the meadow, there were Mohammed, Claudia, and Emmett the golem. Humanity the cat was on Claudia’s shoulders.

“How did you escape?” I asked.

“Never underestimate a gnome who’s well-versed in the martial arts,” replied Claudia.

“And Emmett eventually came when I called him,” said Mohammed. “I figure I’ll forgive him for taking so long. Eventually.”

“How did you find me here?” I asked.

“What do you mean, how did we find you here?” replied Mohammed. “It’s the end of the quest! We made it! Why, we were just inside chatting away with the Capitalist, the Stoic, and the Epicurean. They want to learn how to play go, tomorrow if possible, in Chateauna. I’ve told them so much about the game, from what little I know of course. We’ve learned all kinds of things about game theory and ethics and economics–and we can’t wait to discuss it all with you. We’re preparing a nice dinner of Peking duck and a little hot rice wine, and then we’ll get right down to the conversation. But Old Mother Utopia suggested we should head outside for a bit of a brisk constitutional before dinner–which as you know will be quite substantial–and here you were.”

“Something is very strange here,” I replied. I explained my difficulties as succinctly as I could, starting with the unfortunate choice of escape from my cage, through the bizarrely limited underground city of Kingsbarrow, my ethereal ramblings, and the conference with the Unethical Council, who, despite all appearances, I had to hold blameless in the whole affair.

“If I don’t miss my guess,” I concluded, “something very peculiar just happened with that door.”

Mohammed checked the door for magical residues, and these proved to be so numerous he ended up backing away with his hands over his eyes.

“You know, you’d have done better to wait,” said Mohammed as he recovered his composure. “Emmett here is easily strong enough to deal with most foes. And he quite frightened off the guards on his looks alone.”

“I didn’t figure on him showing up. I thought he was still chasing the sparrows from the garden.”

“Just like a human,” said Claudia. “Never realizing the resources at his disposal, nor how to use them properly.”

I rolled my eyes. Humanity the cat jumped down and nuzzled my shins. I picked him up and rewarded him with a friendly scratch behind the ears.

“Did you ever get a chance to write your novel?” asked Mohammed.

“I never did,” I replied. “I’ve just been too busy. Perhaps I’ll have to write one in December instead.”

“Say, can you still do that ethereal thing?” Claudia asked. “It might come in handy later on.”

I walked resolutely up to the thick wall of the castle. And then I walked resolutely into the thick wall of the castle, which refused to yield in the slightest–not even to spare me a little pain and humiliation.

“Guess not,” she said. “Oh well.”

“I met… another one of us somewhere. He wasn’t just religious. He was practically in charge, down there.”

“Down there?“

“Not what I meant. In Kingsbarrow. He was reverent and irreverent at the same time, and I honestly had no idea what he really believed. I’m not quite sure that he knew himself. But–oh, I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m having my doubts about the entire Asan heresy idea. What is it, a club for the nonconformists?”

“Exactly,” said Mohammed. “I thought it was what you wanted.”

“It was. And it wasn’t. It’s not a guarantee. Do you know how the Prudent Predator tricked me? I left that part out of the story, but you really ought to know. He used one of the signals.”

“Well,” said Mohammed. “That’s a terrible shame. But it’s still nice to be a member of such a generally reputable group, no?”

“It doesn’t settle anything. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s still not…”

“You’re looking for a guarantee,” said Claudia.

“Yes.”

“Forget it.”

“I should quit right now then.”

“There’s no such thing as quitting,” said Claudia. “It’s a club, yes, but it’s also an insight that you have, and once you have it, you seldom forget.”

“Even the insight doesn’t do that much. It’s open to a million abuses.”

“So is everything, up here.” Mohammed touched his temple lightly.

I knocked at the door, now painfully aware that I had traded away my key. It didn’t matter; the door opened of its own accord. In the courtyard, the Stoic was polishing his saber. The Malthusian was going over some chess problems with a replica of the Lewis Set. He always liked to say that it put him in the proper mood.

“I guess your strike is over?” I said

“Weeks ago. And we were needed in Ukraine just recently”

“Has it been that long? And what’s happening in Ukraine, anyway?”

“Indeed it has been ‘that long.’ You’ve been away for quite a while. And I’m surprised you hadn’t heard the news about their election. What, have you been living under ground or something?”

“Long story,” I replied, “but that’s not far from the truth. Say, I’ve been meaning to ask you a question.”

“Anything,” said the Stoic. “We’ve got all the time in the world.”

And we walked off to the keep. Already I could smell the Peking duck.

We came to the colonnade; in its center, at the back, was a door. Myra paused for a moment.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“I’m not quite sure what’s beyond this door. I do know that it is said to be the private meditation room of the Grand Curate.”

“What does that mean?”

“I wish I could tell you. He runs the Cathedral, and if your cause is just, he will surely rule in your favor. But such things aren’t undertaken lightly.”

“Well–” I thought for a moment. Which, after all, was worse, walking for half a day and facing down two well-muscled guardsmen plus the Prudent Predator? Or taking my chances with the Grand Curate, whose powers to help and harm, whose temperament, whose very outlook on life was quite in doubt? I could always turn back at this point, and risk facing my earlier adversaries instead.

“Ah…. What’s he like, anyway?” I asked. “Is he going to rip my head off if I cross him?”

“I don’t know,” Myra replied. “But somehow, I doubt it.”

I doubted it too, and I approached the door. Like all things that are truly important, it looked smaller in real life. It was made of wood–Did it come from the surface? Where did they get their wood, anyway?–and it had a rough, wrought-iron handle. To tell the truth, it was a little rusty. Only a simple latch-type lock protected the Grand Curate from whatever wished to intrude upon him, and I inferred that he must have his own defenses hidden behind the door.

I touched the handle. Then I looked back at Myra.

“For what it’s worth, thanks. I might not see you again, and you’ve put up with me, which is more than I can say about a lot of people. I’m certainly not an easy person to put up with.”

“Oh nonsense,” she replied. “What’s life without a little adventure? Sure, you’re hard to deal with. So what.”

“Well, I guess that’s that.”

“It is. Now get out of here, before I change my mind.”

I gave her one last, grateful look. I should have hugged her. If I had been a decent person, I would have. Then I turned toward the door, opened it, and walked through.

Like all things that are truly important, I could not recall all of the details that I wanted when the time finally came to write them down. Such is life. The door was open, and a long, gray hallway of roughly cut stone stood before me. It was the last thing I expected; more apropos would have been an enormous, brilliantly-lit chamber full of uniformed guards, or an ozone-scented room with a curtain at the far end, one that would open to the voice of the great and mighty Oz. No such luck. I walked down the humble hallway, which was lit only by a succession of candles in sconces every few feet. They reminded me, if anything, that the being–the person–that I was about to meet must after all be human: Candles burn out, and someone must replace them. I walked down the hallway.

At the end, in an anticlimax, there was another door. This one had even less ceremonial to it than the other one, if such a thing was possible. It was simply a door, shorn of all pretension. There wasn’t even a lock to it, just a handle that presumably allowed one to pull it open.

I did.

But I didn’t find what I had expected. Inside, was a venerable human man doing yoga. He was rail thin, wore a loincloth, and had a long beard down to his navel. He was the perfect picture of a guru, and he was the very last thing that I had ever expected.

And he wasn’t one of those passive, recumbent poses either: It was Shiva the Dancer, with the left leg planted firmly into the ground, the torso bent forward, the left hand reaching outward, the right, clasping the right leg and pulling it back, up, and over the head. It was a delicate and challenging pose, appropriate for beginner and expert alike, exercising and stretching the muscles from the tip of the forward hand down to the balancing foot. The man before me was a master: His clasping hand, rather than reaching behind the back, instead went over the head, and the graceful loop of Shiva’s dancing arc was complete. I stood awed in silence.

I’d expected the Wizard of Oz. I’d gotten both more and less.

He broke the pose, assumed a standing, resting posture, and looked directly into my eyes.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” I replied. “Are you the Grand Curate?”

“That is what the call me.”

“But are you?”

“Okay, I’ll stop being coy. I am the Grand Curate. And you’re here for some help, right? I am very sorry, but I don’t have it.”

“You don’t have it? But you don’t even know what I was looking for.”

“Hmm. Well, maybe I do have it. The trouble is, though, that so many people come to me asking for help, but I just can’t give it to them. I’m not a god, not an Avatar, not even a halfway decent wizard.”

“I’m not looking for any of those things,” I replied hopefully. “I’m just looking for a way to the surface.”

“It wouldn’t interest you,” he replied.

“It’s my home,” I said. He looked at me crosswise for a few moments, then spoke.

“No, I’m quite sure you’re lying. Your home is somewhere quite far away. But I can guess at least that you have some greater affinity for the surface than for down here.”

“Have you seen the surface?”

“Many times, yes,” he replied.

“Can you take me there–or show me the way?”

“I can,” he said. “Though the method is unreliable.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’m going to make you ethereal, and you will ascend as rapidly as smoke through the passages of the Cathedral tower.”

“Spiritually?”

“What difference does that make?”

“No, I’m serious. Am I going there in person, or are you just sending my spirit up to have a look around? I’ve heard enough about your beliefs that I have to say I’m not sure I trust them.”

“My beliefs?” he asked. “My beliefs? Do not infer what I believe from the superstitions of residents of Kingsbarrow. I will send you to the surface both physically and spiritually–because there really is no difference between the two. The Kingsbarrowers seem to think otherwise, and there’s not a hope of convincing them. I gave up on that long ago, and they gave up on understanding me. I am still their spiritual leader, though, and they do their best to understand me in their own cramped way. But if it’s spiritual, then it not only exists for real in the world, but it is the very most important thing the world. But if it is immaterial, though, it doesn’t exist, spiritually or physically. You take your pick, but you can’t have one without the other.”

A light went off in my head. I passed him one of our secret signals, a powerful and unsubtle one. He responded in kind–and I knew, even more than I knew when I stood before the Prudent Predator–that the Grand Curate was a friend. I could trust him. He looked piercingly into my eyes once more.

“Why didn’t you say that you were one of us?”

“I’ve been burned before,” I replied. “It seemed best not to take any chances.”

“All life is a chance,” he said.

“Sure. And it all ends badly, too, right? Well I’m too young for that yet.”

“I suspect you will still be too young at seventy.”

“Fair enough.”

“So how do you propose to get me out of here?”

“We will make you ethereal, as I said. Your body will pass through the columns, and the worked stone, and the bedrock. It will flow through underground streams, and prehistoric refuse heaps, and the fossilized remains of the beasts of legend. It will seep through the topsoil and emerge precisely where you wish to be.”

“It sounds too good to be true.”

“I’ve done it many times myself. And I suppose that it won’t help you, will it, if I tell you that all life is a risk, and that he who hesitates is lost?”

“Won’t help a bit.”

“Consider your options then. For my own benefit, what are they?” I sighed and began.

“I could go back the way I came, where I would be attacked instantly by two strong men and an Avatar with a serious and unavenged grudge against me. Or I could travel back out the gate where I entered, head upstream, and make for parts unknown. I used to think that it probably led to a bunch of privies, but after seeing Kingsbarrow, I’m inclined to think that it goes somewhere rather worse.”

“You would not be wrong.”

“May I ask?”

“Trust me, it’s worse than having to face an angry Avatar with a grudge,” he said.

I gulped.

“And that brings us to choice number three: Become ethereal.”

There was a long pause where neither of us said anything.

“I’ll do it.”

“Then you will come with me,” he said. And he walked toward the back of the room, where a bead curtain separated the humble space from whatever lay beyond.

“Let me see if I understand this correctly,” I began. Myra had reclaimed both her composure and her socks, and she set about once more to mending them. Her darning needles still trembled ever so slightly at the thought of helping an illegal philosopher, and this was doing terrible things to her socks.

“Sure,” she replied. “What’s not to understand?”

“Kingsbarrow is a city underground. You almost never venture to the surface, right?”

“That’s right. We do most all of our trading with the cities beneath us, and most people don’t even believe that the surface exists.”

“Wait a minute. The cities beneath you?”

“Why yes, there are at least a good two dozen of them. Funny that you never knew. The name of our city suggests that it used to be tied a lot more closely to the surface, but these days we venture out only in those directions that the spirits tell us to go–and this inevitably leads downward. Many of us never leave Kingsbarrow. And why should we? It is without a doubt the greatest city that ever was.”

“To leave it would be an insult–unpatriotic, almost.”

“Right.”

“Interestingly enough, that brings me to my next point. You have no philosophers–only religion.”

“And good hard work.” She shifted the socks uncomfortably in her hands.

“Ah yes.”

“What little philosophy you do have is picked up here and there, without system, without rigor, without consideration.”

“You make it sound like such a bad thing.”

“No–I was just thinking. You’ve just given me a near-perfect description of most everyone in the Real World.”

“No!”

“Yes.”

“I should have thought that Reals would be more… I don’t know, profound, perhaps.”

“And what would that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, no sense carrying on about hypotheticals. You were going to help me escape to the surface, right?”

“Um… Yes, I suppose I was.”

On another plane of existence, the gods were at it once again.

“I tell you, ever since we lost that defixion, it’s been bloody hard keeping track of them,” said the youngest god. Alone in the halls of power, the gods did not hesitate to proclaim their shortcomings.

“Perhaps we could find another way of interfering with their quest? After all, they must be stopped,” replied the middle-aged god.

“I know just the thing,” said the eldest with forked tongue.

“You always do,” said the youngest.

“Don’t kiss up to me. I haven’t forgotten about that thing you put through the defixion conduit, which was the reason we lost them in the first place. I may not be omniscient, but I wasn’t born yesterday.”

“You can say that again,” muttered the middle-aged one, who, while not born yesterday himself, was clearly feeling his oats.

“What?” asked the goddess.

“Never mind. What was your plan again?”

Meanwhile, Myra did her best to explain a plan of her own. Sadly, it inspired in me not the slightest glimmer of confidence.

“We’re going to take you to the Cathedral of the Unseen.”

“What’s that like?”

“Oh, it’s ineffable.”

“I figured. But what does it look like on the outside?”

“It’s that big building in the center of town. There we pray to the God we have never seen, and the indescribable essences of our prayers float… surfaceward, and then up to where the Gods live, which is reputed to be a giant air pocket somewhere far above the surface.”

“But that doesn’t make any sense at all, does it?”

“None whatsoever. But I feel that I am nobler because I believe. After all, the mere senses are base and corrupt; we must not be naive enough to think that that is all there is.”

“What if it was?”

“Then you, my friend, will never get out of here. We’re going to ask the gods for help.”

“I doubt they will listen to me, at least not in a good way.”

“Oh no, you don’t understand our ways at all. The gods exist on a higher plane of reality–and because of that, they do not respond to the senses. They respond only to those things that you cannot sense at all.”

“Like thoughts? I’m afraid I sense my thoughts all the time.”

“Oh, you’re insufferable. We’re going to the church and hoping for a miracle. You Real-Worlders do it all the time, right?”

“Some of us do. But I hope you will forgive me if I had expected something more in the way of help.”

“Something more than the divine? How dare you? Besides, you might be surprised.”

It turns out that I was.

Under Myrna’s guidance, the labyrinthine streets of Kingsbarrow became, if not comprehensible, at least passably efficient as a means of traveling from one point to the next. She knew all the turns, most of which were entirely counterintuitive.

“So why do people here not seem to care that I’m about twice their height?”

“They don’t care because curiosity killed the cat. And because idle minds are the devil’s playground. And because it’s better to leave well enough alone. And because what you don’t know can’t hurt you.”

“Do I detect a note of irony?”

“None whatsoever.”

I gave her one of the more unobtrusive of the secret signs that Claudia and Mohammed had taught me. Myra did not respond. Oh well, there went that idea.
We had reached the Cathedral of the Unseen. Remarkably, it was visible–or, at least some parts of it were. In the middle of a great, mostly flat public square in what seemed like the center of the great hive of Kingsbarrow, there stood an enormous structure of gothic architecture touched by something utterly alien in its overall composition: It stood, not in the form of a cross or a dome, but as a gigantic column, rising up to the apex of the underground chamber. Somehow, I thought, I must have descended tremendously in my escape from the dungeon.

Gnomes were coming and going in all directions, quietly and solemnly. Quite unlike the marketplace of Paganopolis, they fit every conventional definition of reverence.

“So this is the Cathedral of the Unseen. But it’s funny, I can actually see the thing. I sort of didn’t expect that.”

“No, you can’t see the thing,” Myra replied. “You only think that you can see it. But what you are really seeing is just the surface appearance of the Cathedral. The thing in itself is never witnessed by any of the senses.”

“If it’s never witnessed by any of the senses, then why bother with it?”

“Because someday it might be witnessed? I don’t know. Why do you ask so many stupid questions? You’re going to get us both in trouble.”

“But,” I said, unable to resist, “if someday it might be witnessed, then what we are witnessing then isn’t really the thing in itself. It’s just another appearance. That which cannot be known, cannot be known, ever. That which can, can. But if it can’t be known, and it can’t ever do anything to influence us, then why do we bother?”

“The unseen influences us tremendously.”

“Then surely its influence can be sensed?”

“Not at all.”

“Then what difference does it make?” I asked, once again exasperated. “Its existence is perfectly possible, but perfectly trivial. And since no evidence can ever support the existence of such a thing, then the thing in itself just plain isn’t.“

“For your own sake, you’d better hope that you’re wrong, because the unseen is exactly what’s going to get you out of here. Or not, depending.”

We had reached the great main gate of the Cathedral. It was made of solid brass, divided into panels and sculpted in high relief much like a Renaissance or baroque masterpiece of the same type. Each panel depicted scenes from one or another great mystical event. Though how, exactly, the artists came to witness these unseen and unseeable spiritual occurrences was by now the least of the mysteries to me. What puzzled me much more was how anyone who held as consistently to the doctrine of das ding an sich might ever have come to find this artwork inspiring in the first place. Wasn’t it clearly, obviously, and brassily, a gigantic screaming fraud?

But I had only moments to ponder this question before we were inside the Cathedral itself, and the dim lights made me strain my eyes to make out the interior. Altered lighting conditions, you see, are favorable to glimpsing the true essences of things. Somewhere in the back, incense was burning, and this too, I am assured, helps one glimpse the divine–depending on what formula is used in the manufacture. This one smelled insipid, and reminded me of my childhood, when holiday Mass was always a spiritual experience: Inevitably, the incense made me pass out, and I had to be dragged to fresh air every Christmas and Easter for fear of asphyxiation. In an earlier age, I might have passed for a demoniac.

In recent years, though, my childhood incense reaction had disappeared entirely. Perhaps it was that once I got into college, incense was suddenly cool again: You can tell I didn’t go to college with many Catholics.

“Psst,” said Myra. “The holy water.”

“What do I do?” I asked. I was pretty sure that making the sign of the cross wasn’t quite going to be appropriate.

“Duh,” she replied. “You cross yourself.”

“Like in Christendom?” I replied.

“Where?”

“Never mind.” I did as she asked, forgetting all about my lingering questions of faith and propriety. If das ding an sich was truly unknowable, then she could stand not to know about my religious unbelief for a little while longer.

Ah, holy water. The stuff of vampire movies for those of you not raised Catholic. The stuff of every Sunday morning for those of you who were. And, in either case, thoroughly not a spiritual thing in itself. But it most certainly was spiritual, somehow.

“Hey Myra?”

“Yes?” she replied, exasperated anew.

“Can a material thing, you know, like, point you at the spiritual? Can it give you an idea of what the spiritual is like, or maybe tell you when you’re getting hotter or colder? I’m just curious.”

“Truthfully, it can’t.”

“Then what’s the sense of all these rituals?”

“You really do think like a philosopher. And it will do you no good whatsoever in Kingsbarrow. If you must know, the real truth is grasped from within, and no one can say for certain whether you’ve got it or not. All of this” she gestured, “is outward conformity, which is necessary for the good order of the state.”

“The unseen on the inside, but conformity on the outside?”

“Exactly.”

“Or, ‘render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.’”

“Right, yes again. You know your system a lot better than you give yourself credit, my boy.”

“Well thanks. But I just have to ask–Where do you come in?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Then I saw something that made me forget my question entirely.

We were crossing the long round atrium of the building, apparently heading for a half-circular colonnade that wrapped around the far side of the cathedral. At the center of the structure, I looked up. I expected to find a dome, a vaulted arch, or some other architectural finishing piece. What I found instead boggled the imagination.

Ring after ring of gothic arches and flying buttresses spiraled upward and out of sight. Gallery upon gallery, stairwell upon stairwell, the tower climbed, impossible in its height and complexity. At the top, the mists of the underground swallowed them up entirely.

I would never have guessed that in my escape I had descended so far beneath Chateauna, or that the surface was so far above me. Was it really that far up? Or was Kingsbarrow connected somehow through an extradimensional tunnel, so that what seemed like a half-days’ walk in a generally level underground passage was really much further, or much steeper? Even the most plausible explanation–that I had walked from Chateauna due east until I’d reached the Elrin Mountains–still seemed ridiculous. Those mountains were a good two days’ off by any estimate I had ever seen.

But at the top–oh, at the top of the tower–Light! It was faint, and swallowed by mist like everything else, but the light was unmistakable.

“You can see,” Myra said, “why we make our most important prayers here.”

“So that they float up more easily? But I thought you said that the spiritual was higher than all that material stuff, and it didn’t interact with it at all. And if that’s the case, you might as well pray in a lavatory.” My mind went back to the fellow who had very nearly been doing just that in Paganopolis.

“Oh, you’re impossible,” she replied.

From somewhere high above, a waft of glitter trickled down across the light. No doubt some dutiful priest had spilled it from a high balcony at a silent, prearranged signal: a work of piety.

“I suppose,” I continued, rubbing it in, “that the glitter makes you feel incorporeal, ethereal, closer perhaps to das ding an sich?”

“As a matter of fact,” Myra replied, “it does. Some of our very best mystics have come here for just that reason, to bathe in the light and the glitter, and the etherealness of this very place. And in their trances, they experience whiffs of frankincense, glittery spangles across their fields of vision, and God himself twiddling their naughty bits. Are you happy now?”

I could see I’d done nothing at all but make her angry.

“I can’t believe that I’m doing this for you,” she said. We crossed the rest of the chamber in silence, which, to tell the truth, put me in a far more spiritual mood than all of my earlier crankiness.

Kingsbarrow was mine. Or at least, those parts of it that appeared to my bodily senses. The rest, which would never be detectable through any means whatsoever, was unknown and unknowable. I could live without it.

The first thing I noticed were the twisty, unruly streets of the underground city; they went in every imaginable direction but straight. Bridges spanned from one building to another; at times, strange shafts descended from the cobblestone pavement into numerous subsurface layers. Here and there, a massive stairway would raise the street to a higher level or sink it to a lower. All of this, combined with the total lack of street signs, virtually guaranteed that I would lose my way several times–if, that is, I had had much of a ‘way’ in the first place, which I did not.

My friends Claudia and Mohammed were gone, probably imprisoned, possibly being sold off to face one of three very nasty deaths. For all I knew, Emmett the golem was probably still chasing sparrows in the garden of that hostel we’d stayed in a few chapters ago. And Humanity the cat? I shuddered to think what that poor creature’s fate might have been.

As to my enemies, they were still far too numerous and entirely at liberty. Come to think of it, though, the Prudent Predator was hardly behaving prudently at all, and perhaps I could use that to my advantage. Exposing him now would do what–drive him into hiding, maybe? One could only hope. Perhaps–just maybe–there was something to be learned here? First, though, I would have to find my way back to the surface.

I myself was lost. Nor was it a good sign that the city’s guards had never seen and did not particularly believe in the existence of a surface world. For a time I walked without guide or map, hoping that something would catch my eye. It didn’t. The city was peopled almost entirely by gnomes, all of whom carried on their business while paying little or no attention to the human among them. One might have expected surprise, but they all seemed mysteriously indifferent.

Finally I found myself at the end of a long blind alley; a woman was sitting on a stoop in front of me, knitting her socks. I stopped, knowing that I had to turn back but feeling far to proud to do it just yet.

“Can I help you?”

“I’m sort of lost,” I replied.

“Sort of?”

“Alright, I’m very lost. I’m very, very lost.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m trying to get back to the surface.”

“The surface! Oh my, I haven’t heard of a surface-dweller coming down here for decades!”

“Any idea how I might get back?

“No, I’m afraid not. Why don’t you go back the way you came?”

“I just can’t, trust me.”

“You’re running from something?”

“Um… Well…”

“You are.”

“Yes.”

“Come in, sit down.” She picked up her socks, opened the door, and invited me inside. “We’ll see what can be done to help you.”

Inside the house was a whole family of gnomes, from old to very young. They were engaged in a cacophony of various household tasks: Sweeping, cooking, washing clothes, tending the fire, making bread, and rocking the infants, of which there were several. Idleness was nowhere to be found.

“So, my name is Myra. What’s yours?”

“Jason.”

“Welcome to my home. These are my children, their children, their wives, husbands, brothers-in-law, and et cetera.”

“Quite a family.”

“Thank you. So…what do you do? On the surface, I mean.”

“I’m sort of a philosopher.”

The room grew silent.

“A philosopher!” Myra whispered. “Why, you worthless rogue–Philosophers are illegal down here.”

“They’re damn near illegal up there, too.”

“But–” she paused “–I hesitate to say this, but I hope you’ll understand. There’s almost always a good reason to despise philosophers. Maybe you don’t know any better; you look awfully young for a philosopher, and too modest by half. Perhaps in time you will learn.”

“Perhaps. Ah–I beg your pardon?”

“It’s nothing personal, I assure you, but philosophers are the worst sort of humanoid, the very lowest, um… almost… down to the last miserable one of them. They spend their time at ease, never accomplishing anything, and their only real labor is to convince everyone else–we, the ignorant and the unlettered–that theirs is the queen of the sciences, and that without philosophy, the rest of creation would be for naught. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you, a conspiracy against the honest and productive elements. Philosophy is not the greatest pursuit, but the vainest.”

“But philosophers teach people how to think,” I replied. “They challenge preconceived notions and help build up knowledge on a sounder, more rational footing.”

“Nonsense. Scientists advance human thought; philosophers argue about figments of their own imaginations. Admit it: You too have experienced that guilty rush of pleasure that comes when you consider that the philosopher is the king of all thinkers. It’s damn near the only thing that all philosophies agree upon: ‘Philosophy is the best.’ If shoemakers went prattling about like that, we’d lock them up, and with good reason. Can you imagine anything more transparently self-serving?”

Then she paused for a moment. Her expression changed, and she began again.

“Well, there is only one thing that philosophers are good for, but I suspect that you simply haven’t got it in you.”

“Alright, let’s make a deal. You tell me what philosophers are good for, and if I can provide it, then you will help get me to the surface.”

“Agreed.”

“So what is it?”

“Chills,” she said.

“Chills?“

“Yes, that’s right. The only thing worth a damn that philosophy ever supplies to the rest of humanity is a good case of the chills.”

“Is that all?” I asked. “You mean, like a shiver down your spine?”

“Well now, let’s not underestimate the power of chills down the spine. Entire genres of literature are wasted on just such pursuits, if not lower ones. Philosophers, though, are practically useless outside this one ability of theirs, and that is why we throw the best of them in prison,” she replied.

“But you ask me to ply you with a bit of philosophy, to see if I can’t get a reaction from you?”

“You may try,” she said “And depending on how well you do, we’ll see about getting you out.”

I thought for a moment and then began.

“May I see your socks?” I asked. She frowned and pulled them closer.

“My socks? What have they got to do with philosophy?”

“The ones that you were darning are actually quite relevant. Please.”

She handed me the socks.

“How old are these, if I may ask?”

“At least six or eight years, and I have cared for them meticulously ever since the day I bought them.”

“You have patched them and re-patched them whenever they developed a hole?”

“Indeed I have. I would never permit myself to wear socks with holes in them.”

“Think back, then, to the day you bought them. How many times have you patched your socks?”

“I’m not sure, but it’s been quite a few.”

“And how much, would you say, is left of the original socks?”

“Stop it. I’ve heard this one before.”

I looked around the room. The others had apparently heard it too: They were looking bored and restless, uncertain what to make of this stranger who had come into their midst with a depressingly familiar tale.

“You’re going to ask me,” she continued, “whether the socks are the same socks that I bought many years ago, when they have been patched and re-patched so many times along the way. The question will be: ‘What essential part of the socks endure, when their material has been completely changed?’ What is the essential, that keeps the ’socks,’ socks. We’ve all heard that one before.”

The room nodded in agreement, then began muttering about my fate.

“It’s a vain and puerile question,” Myra continued, “perfectly typical of philosophers. There’s no good answer and no point at all in talking about it. And you were even going to congratulate yourself on having come up with it! Why, John Locke invented that thing centuries ago.”

“Actually, that’s where you were wrong. I wasn’t going to ask the question.”

“No?”

“No. I was going to answer it.”

“Oh. Then tell me, what is a sock, anyway?”

“A sock is an intention. The ’sockiness’ of a thing is the use to which you put it, the plan that you conceive in your mind; it develops over time according to your own intent to keep it up. Once you throw a sock away, it’s not a sock anymore. It’s just a rag. But take a rag and treat it properly–and suddenly, it becomes a sock again.”

“Not bad,” she replied. “But I don’t have any chills.”

“You and your chills! You say that philosophy is supposed to be arresting, supposed to make you shudder and look at the world anew. But I disagree, because I believe that neither you nor I can ever trust that feeling. And we mustn’t trust it, because the people next to us are feeling exactly the same sensations, yet for entirely different reasons. I read Henry Veatch or Daniel Dennett, and I get the chills. The person next to me reads who knows what–Peter Singer, maybe, or Sartre, or Marx–and he feels the same.

“And that is the beauty of it, the beauty and the futility, because no matter what one’s ideas may be, the chills come all the same. Everyone, positively everyone, experiences that same feeling of the uncanny when they hear a philosopher that resonates with them. But the feeling of the uncanny can itself be perfectly false.”

“I don’t understand,” she replied.

“You’re asking me to do something other than true philosophy. And I won’t do it. If a good sense of the chills can come from falsehood just as well as from truth, then you have got the wrong idea entirely about philosophy.”

“You win,” she said. The hair of her arms was standing on end.

“So you don’t know what happens to you after you die here?” asked the Devil’s Advocate. “Well, then that makes it just like the real world.”

“No,” I replied. “I have at least some idea of what happens after I die in the real world.”

“And doesn’t it frighten you? I mean, the possibility that something truly nasty might await you in the afterlife, here or over there?”

“I’m not sure. So far as I know, very few Reals ever come to the unreal world in the first place. I’m not aware of any besides myself who have done it recently. And I’ve never heard of one dying here. As to the real world, I’m pretty sure death is going to be a bad thing. I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell, and I don’t accept Pascal’s Wager.”

“Why not?”

“Well, let me try offering it to you.”

“Me? I’m already playing for the other team.”

“Then we’ll have to change the wager ever so slightly. Let me put it to you like this: You are an Unreal; your home is here, in the unreal world–and when you die, we can assume that absolutely nothing happens. You weren’t ever really real to begin with.”

“Precisely. And because I’m Unreal, I’ve got nothing at all to lose by following Satan.”

“So suppose I told you that you should be good today, because tomorrow I would hurt you if you are evil. And besides, you’ve got nothing to lose by being good for a day, even if my threat turns out to be false. You’ve only got punishment to avoid.”

“Would that make you good–or evil?” asked the Devil’s Advocate.

“It’s not about me; it’s about you. How would you evaluate my threat?”

“Well, it certainly is a threat. But I’d want to know how likely the punishment was before I made any decisions based on it. And besides, I would think you were quite a bully–where do you get off forcing me to be good with threats? What kind of goodness is that? I thought Aristotle”–the Devil’s Advocate spat–”said that goodness was that thing which was pursued as an end in itself.”

“That’s more or less how I feel about Pascal’s Wager. As to life after death, I see no evidence for it. And I find it ridiculous to think that anything, short of actually dying, could adequately prepare me for the experience of death. In the end, I’ve quite given up on trying.”

“And there is no guide in all of your philosophy that will teach you about death?”

“Not a thing.”

“Surely, then, you are starting to see the shortcomings of the entire system you are crafting? I mean, isn’t it all starting to look awfully vain by now?”

“To be honest, it is. Worse, all that noble stuff about having a critical, independent, thoughtful mind–a mind that never sacrifices itself to anything–even all of that doesn’t guarantee someone’s virtue, as we’ve just seen. And it certainly doesn’t guarantee anyone’s happiness. I mean, just look around me.”

“I’m sure the Prudent Predator is an exceptional case.”

“Quite the contrary. We all have it in our power to be like him, any time we wish. And you can see the result of that power right here. I’ve lost my friends, I’m imprisoned, and I’m likely to face one of three very nasty deaths in the near future. There’s not the slightest guarantee of either virtue or happiness in life, I tell you.”

“Then being a ‘good person’ or a ‘bad person’ is a meaningless distinction? And then–all life itself would be meaningless!” He seemed far too pleased with himself.

“And at times, my life really does seem completely meaningless. I do some good. Then I do some bad. Then I wonder about where the whole thing is going. But nothing really changes. To try to help myself, I make up some explanations, but I’m not even sure that I myself believe them. Then I go to sleep, I wake up, and I do it all over again.

“I’m at the stage in my life where I’m realizing that I’m never really going to amount to much. Maybe I’ll be remembered as a good person; maybe as a bad person. I doubt very much I will be famous in either direction, and what it all means is that I’m not really going to be anything people will want to remember for very long after I’m gone. In a way, it’s liberating, not having to live for all those other people, not even facing all that much pressure to do it,” I said. “But in a way, well–I guess we all wish we amounted to something. Is that too much to ask?”

“It’s nice to have low expectations. Of course, your life could end in a mere matter of days, if not sooner. And then you wouldn’t have to worry.”

“That’s true of everyone, isn’t it?”

“It’s especially true in your situation, I would think.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot.”

“So do we have a deal about the keys?”

“Sure,” I replied. “What’s the worst that could happen? As I see it, I stand nothing to lose.”

“Funny you should say that. So I’ll give you the key to the cell, and you’ll give me the key to the Citadel?”

“I think so. But I want to see, first, that the key you’ve got there is actually able to get me out. No sense having you vanish after slipping me a bogus key.”

“Fair enough.” He inserted the key, and the lock on the cage slipped open effortlessly. Suddenly I regretted our bargain, but there was not a thing I could do about it anymore. At least, not honestly–and I had a feeling I would regret giving the Prudent Predator anything more to work with on this adventure. It was bad enough escaping from his dungeon, even though I had a perfect right to my freedom. The Devil’s Advocate reclaimed my wrought-iron key, and I would just have to take my chances at the Citadel without it.

“Farewell,” he said. “You will forgive me if I do not say ‘Adieu.’”

“Of course.” And with that, he vanished in a puff of hydrogen sulfide.

I surveyed the room around me. The guards were presumably upstairs, as was Mr. Prudence himself. But even his mere presence raised question after question in my mind: If he was after all so prudent, then how did he dare to kidnap a shopkeeper, overrun the shop–and keep it open for business–but expect not to get caught? How did he manage to conduct negotiations with foreign powers, over the public execution of a prisoner, presumably through at least three distinct intermediary channels–and hope to cover all of his tracks? Avatars are clever, but something didn’t add up.

Sadly, I didn’t have time to ponder it: The only other exit from the room was a sewer grate, which seemed rather more promising than having to fight the guards. Just to be on the safe side, I removed the suit of chain mail that I’d stolen: No sense tempting fate. Then I wrenched the grate up and out of its setting, which proved surprisingly easy. I took the torch from the wall and climbed inside, and at that moment it occurred to me that this was, technically theft–where, after all, was I to draw the line? I left a few dollars behind to pay for my transgression, just in case.

Thankfully, there was an iron ladder set into the stonework. It led downward into the darkness, and I followed. The ladder gave out on a long corridor with a sewage trough in the center. All around me was stonework, probably ancient in its workmanship. I could see to the limit of the torch in either direction, and there appeared to be no other entrances nearby. Unsure for a moment which way to turn, I followed the direction of the water, figuring that it would have to let out on the surface somewhere. Now, in a fantasy setting this is not always the case–hollow worlds, portals to alternate realms of existence, and magical water disposal systems all have a way of turning up. But I had little time to worry about such things right now.

I moved quickly to put as much distance as possible between myself and my former prison. More than once, the torch flickered and threatened to go out, which would have been a complete disaster. Little by little, the passageway grew; the stream in the center grew likewise, fed perhaps by inlets below the surface. Never was there a chance to deviate from the path.

At length I could see in front of me that the passage led into a gigantic cavernous opening–and that within it there were structures, artificial lights, and even some flickers of activity. I had no idea where I was. Given where I had come from, though, it hardly mattered. I stepped into a giant archway at the end of the passage which appeared to be a checkpoint of some sort. The drainage ditch emptied discreetly into a culvert just before the checkpoint.

“Halt, who goes there?” a voice asked me. It was a gnome, though the accent was unfamiliar. It came from somewhere in the archway above me.

“I am a traveler, and I am lost. I mean you no harm.”

“Wait here while we determine the truth of your story.”

“I will answer any questions you like.”

“Thank you, but we do not need your help.”

Several moments later, a trapdoor in the ceiling opened, and five gnomes slid down a rope to the floor.

“Your story checks out, and you are free to enter. Welcome to Kingsbarrow.”

“How did you know I was legit? Did you read my mind?”

“We asked the spirits who guide us, for there are things greater than our five senses, and we answer to their authority.”

“You mean you contacted them?”

“Indeed.”

“How? I mean, you just said you can’t just use your five senses, right?”

“You are right. But beyond that we cannot say.”

“And how did they answer you?”

“The same way that we contacted them.”

“You can’t say?”

“We can’t say.”

“How do you know when they aren’t saying anything?”

“We know.”

“What if I told you that I didn’t believe in these things, since I’d never seen them?”

“We would chide you for your lack of faith. Then we would pat ourselves on the back, because faith is a good thing, and we have it in abundance.”

“I suppose I would be free to do the same about my rationality, and that I could doubt your wisdom in turn.”

“Yes, but we are more numerous.” It is always easier, I thought to myself, for the greater number to act more foolishly and to declare itself more noble. The reverse is true for the smaller number.

“That settles everything, doesn’t it?” I asked.

“By no means! It throws everything into confusion!”

“How so?”

“Well, we apprehend the truth through higher methods, exactly as we always do. And we found that it’s permitted for you to enter the city. But there are others who claim to do precisely the same thing, and yet they come to different conclusions. These individuals are liars and charlatans. They must be fought with all available resources. That’s why we must be careful with everyone who enters.”

“I don’t believe in anything that cannot be supported by sensory evidence. Indeed, if something never intrudes into the world of the senses, then what basis do we even have for claiming that it exists?”

“How childish of you. But I guess your prejudice is fundamentally harmless. If you cannot grasp our higher realities, then you are to be pitied, not hated.”

“How exactly do you ascertain the reality of extrasensory beings? Do you sense them?”

“As it happens, we do.”

“Then they aren’t extrasensory, are they?”

“They are.”

“Well, good day to you then. And say, could you tell me perhaps how to get back to the surface–only, not by the way I came?”

“I don’t believe in the surface,” the guard replied. “I’ve never seen it.”

Someone lit up a torch, and for the first time I beheld the room around me. I recognized one of men who had grabbed me as the muscular fellow from the weapons shop.

“So what do I call you?” I asked my captor. “As I understand it, The Predator is already taken. And ‘Prudence’ doesn’t sound all that sinister.”

“Well… hmmm… it doesn’t, now does it? But that’s just the beauty of the whole operation! After all, I’m not supposed to look evil right from the start. All the very best wickedness looks perfectly harmless from the outside.”

“Well, whatever,” I replied. “But in any event, I don’t have anything that you want. You might as well let me go. If it helps, I’ll promise not to tell anyone that you did it.”

“But it’s not so simple as that,” replied my captor. “You’re right that I have no personal stake in detaining you. But you are a known criminal, my friend. My spies tell me that you are wanted for questioning in both Meta-Israel and Idoltaria. And the Inquisition of Christendom has started proceedings against you as well. Seems some guy named Augustine made a complaint, and now they want to have a chat with you. Here the Christians still burn at the stake, too. “

“I was afraid of that.”

“The options as they stand right now seem to be stoning, burning at the stake–or being tossed off a cliff into a river in a giant sack containing a monkey, a rooster, and a snake.”

I blinked, recalling something from ancient history.

“The pagans get creative, you see.”

“Lovely.”

“Yes, but I’m holding out for the highest bidder. Negotiations are already underway.”

Seeing that I had nothing further to say to him, the Prudent Predator bid me goodbye and left the room, as did his two associates. For the second time in as many days, I found myself alone in a dungeon.

Alone, but with company. Sadly, it was not Lust, but the Devil’s Advocate who joined me in my solitude.

“What are you thinking, my dear boy?”

“I’m thinking about sunk cost.”

“Economics? At a time like this?”

“It is the science of choice, isn’t it?”

“Well yes. But it would seem that your choices are few–or possibly zero.”

“So it would seem. But I can still choose what I think, right? And that choice may be able to influence other things that I can’t quite control right at the moment.”

“Telekinesis?”

“Don’t be smart with me.”

“Then tell me what’s on your mind.”

“I am wondering,” I replied, “how I might be able to make some sort of deal for my freedom.”

“What do you have to offer?” asked the Devil’s Advocate.

I produced from my pocket the heavy wrought-iron key to the Citadel of the Inner Ethical Council.

“You’re not thinking of…”

“Well, it’s one of the last remaining resources I have, right?”

“You have that fine shirt of chainmail.”

“Oh yes, how could I forget? It’s the very thing that got me in trouble in the first place.”

“How do you propose getting yourself out of that trouble? Go back to Oberon and ask his forgiveness? He isn’t noted for his mercy.”

“And I’m not noted for asking forgiveness.”

“Does that trouble you?” asked the Devil’s Advocate.

“I’m not sure I believe in forgiveness, to be honest.”

“Ah, now we’re getting somewhere! For most people in your situation, forgiveness would be the first thing on their minds.”

“I know. But I don’t have much chance of earthly forgiveness–and I have no hope whatsoever in the heavenly kind.”

“Well what happens, then, when you do wrong?”

“If I do wrong, I’ve done wrong. End of story. If you think about it, ‘forgiveness’ doesn’t at all erase the fact that a wrong has been done. No, it’s just a lot of make-believing that the wrong never happened. But it did happen, and there’s no changing that. Forgiveness is just a sugar-coating. Even the promise to ‘forgive and forget’ is a lie–If you promise to forget something, don’t you always invariably remember it?”

“Well said. But God has the power to forgive. Or so I’m told.”

“Of course. Most people believe in God, who is said to offer a forgiveness that matters much more than the earthly kind, a forgiveness that–suspiciously–can be obtained wherever you are. But I’m wary of things that come too cheaply. The promise of forgiveness is to undo the past, but it never works out that way. Even God doesn’t do that.”

“Yes, most people say they believe in God, but they never fail to give my Master his due. They keep right on sinning–and they keep right on asking forgiveness. I wonder if goodness might not do better, if it refused all forgiveness?”

“An interesting question.”

“But let’s be reasonable: Whether it’s a superstition or not, belief in God aims to give comfort in situations precisely like your own, when nothing else could possibly work.”

“If you’re trying to convert me, you’ll have to do better than that,” I replied. “I hardly see how adding a delusion to one’s miseries can make them any better.”

“Hush. It’s wicked to mock the afflicted. And I’m not trying to convert you. Now it just happens Christians do make the very best souls for roasting, but we’ve despaired of you case a long time ago”

“Oh good. So after I’m thrown off a cliff in a sack with a monkey, a rooster, and a snake, at least I’ll not quite taste so juicy to the devils who will torment me afterward. If, that is, you are anything more than a figment of my imagination.”

“In the unreal world? Here we’re just as real as you are.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.”

“So what do you really think, anyway?” he asked. “What do you atheists, you hopeless ones think–in a hopeless situation? It’s easy to believe in nothing when times are good, right? But what about now? Tell me; I’m curious to taste your despair.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“I mean, well, you know: I was born and raised a Satanist. We all are down there, I guess. But I’ve always wondered how the atheists live. Anything, really.”

“You mean, ‘Does life have any meaning for the atheist?’”

“Exactly! I live and breathe for Armageddon; every night I sharpen my claws in sweet anticipation. One dark and glorious day, I tell myself, I shall drink the blood of angels! But what do you live for?”

“What a miserable question.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I don’t live for anything. I just do the best I can while I’m at it. And there’s no cosmic drama to get in the way.”

“How depressing.”

“Sometimes. But then, Christianity has sorrow enough of its own. And even Satanism does too, on occasion.”

“Satanism? It’s a never-ending bliss.”

“Nonsense. As I understand it, the only book authenticating your Master’s existence also predicts that he will lose the Last Battle. It can’t be fun to back a loser.”

“Well, yeah. There’s that, I suppose.”

“And you lost that whole witchcraft thing a while back, too. There can’t be that many babies to roast these days, can there?”

“These days, almost never.”

“I’m sorry to hear that… I guess.”

“We do have plenty of wars going on,” the Devil’s Advocate said hopefully, “and we’re doing all we can to think up new ones.”

“I’ve noticed.” We paused for a moment, unsure where to go next.

“Christians,” said the Devil’s Advocate, “have it all wrong when it comes to atheists, don’t they?”

“They do.”

“But how? I want to hear it from you.”

“The Christians’ biggest mistake is to think that in our misery, we atheists are crying out for their particular God. Christians simply assume it, because that’s what their religion tells them. It isn’t so. In our misery, we are perfectly alone, equally removed from Christ as we are from Buddha, Krishna, and the deified Augustus Caesar.”

“But they would say that Christ is right there for you.”

“What would a Buddhist say?”

“Fair enough. And, well–you understand, of course, that I do have to bring this up–Satan is right there for you too. If you’re interested.”

“I know. But I take other comforts.”

“What are the comforts of an atheist?”

“In sorrow, I recall that all things must end, and I take comfort from that. In joy, I recall that all things must end–and that I must hold to the good all the harder.”

“That’s hardly logical.”

“Neither is the proverb about the empty triangle.” He looked puzzled, but I opted not to try explaining. Evangelism can be insufferable, and it’s usually a waste of time.

“I’ve been thinking of making a deal,” I continued. I held up the key to the Citadel. “Perhaps you could secure the key to my cage, and I would give you this one in return.”

“A lovely deal; to be honest, I’d been wanting that one back.”

“I figured. I’m guessing that now that the election is over, the Council will have called off its strike.”

“I wouldn’t speak too soon. Have you seen what’s happening in Ukraine?”

“Democracy is only as good as the people who take to the streets and defend it.”

“Hardly a ringing endorsement. But have you considered that giving up the key means giving up your quest?”

“I have. But staying here means giving up my life, and of course I can’t keep questing if I’m dead.”

The Devil’s Advocate looked puzzled once more. He glanced at my wrought-iron key, then at the smaller steel key that was hanging from a hook on the far wall. With measured, pondering steps he walked over and retrieved the key to my cage.

“Help me out here,” he said, “because I’m not sure I quite understand the mechanics of the unreal world.”

“Okay.”

“You are real. You’re completely 100% real, and you’ve been translated here by a mystic portal.”

I blushed. “I’m not quite sure I believe in it myself. I’ve never been much of a mystic.”

“In any event, all the rest of this stuff is unreal, not-real, false, fictional.”

“Yes.”

“So what happens if you die here?”

“I have no idea.”

The Devil’s Advocate roared in wicked laughter.

We then planned to pass the rest of our day in a succession of museums, sidewalk cafés, and elegant boutiques: It was shaping up just like a vacation in Paris, except only for the language barrier and the crotte, neither of which was in evidence. Claudia and Mohammed were kind enough to teach me the secret symbols of the Asan heretics, making me formally a member of their little group. I would relate those signs to you here, but then they would no longer be secret. You’ll have to learn them for yourself.

“I don’t feel any different,” I remarked.

“Try to keep it that way,” replied Mohammed.

“Yes, do try to keep it that way,” said Claudia. “But now that you’re a heretic too, you should know that you’re free to speak your mind all you like. To us, at least.”

“Not like he didn’t before.”

“Yes, but now he’s a member of the group. From this point on, it’s his responsibility to think critically, to say something really challenging to us whenever it comes to his mind. Is there anything you’ve never quite had the guts to say before? We almost have a tradition, you know, that the new ones get to sound off about something that’s been bothering them.”

“No, I’m afraid I can’t think of anything just yet.”

Mohammed sighed in relief. At about that time we entered a large shopping complex; long ago it had been an authentic castle, but over the centuries it had made the rough and uneasy transition into something approaching a modern shopping mall. We stopped for lattés just inside the drawbridge. As we took our drinks and began to walk, the coffee’s aroma percolated up to my brain, I remembered that I really did have something to talk about.

“Well, okay, I suppose I do have something to say. I’ve always–”

“You know, you don’t have to if you don’t want–” said Mohammed.

“Shh!” said Claudia. “He’s trying to say something. “And you,” she said, turning to me, “be careful of what you do say.”

“Well, alright then. I think the Categorical Imperative is a whole bunch of nonsense.” If anyone was listening to our conversation, I felt certain that they would immediately tune out.

“What?” said Claudia.

“You heard me. The Categorical Imperative is bad philosophy. It’s nothing more than a clever dodge that conceals the real ethical thinking of the speaker. Worse, it fails entirely to bridge the is-ought gap.”

“Those are some serious charges,” Claudia replied. “Explain yourself.” As she spoke, she stopped to sip her latté and to examine a superbly crafted set of nunchaku.

“Well, you know Kant’s famous statement of the imperative: ‘Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’ I tend to think that a categorical imperative of some kind can be found in just about any ethical system–except perhaps Randian Objectivism, which considers Kant the worst philosopher of all time.”

“Oh no,” she replied. “Even among Objectivists, I think I still see a categorical imperative. Consider the second half of Ayn Rand’s ethical credo:

I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.

It’s egoism, sure, but it’s a principled egoism. And when it rejects all claims of unearned value, it also adopts something very much like a categorical imperative.”

“I suppose I can see that. I’m not totally convinced though.”

Claudia called the sales clerk over, and he took the nunchaku out of the case.

“Consider the Prudent Predator, too,” Claudia continued. The salesman raised his eyes ever so briefly, then returned to his work.

“Egoist philosophies of any kind–Rand’s included–always have to deal with the question of someone who pretends to be good, but who will lie, cheat, and steal if a convenient moment arises. The so-called Prudent Predator bides his time, picks the right opportunity, and strikes. Then he goes back to looking and acting just like everyone else. He winds up having the best of both worlds, reaping the benefits of honesty most of the time–and the benefits of dishonesty whenever he can. Egoism has a hard time accounting for such a creature, because with him, evil isn’t really about dark towers and fangs dripping with gore. It’s about the sly, smirking betrayal in the midst of goodness.”

“But if it’s in his own material interests, then hey, why shouldn’t he stab his neighbor in the back?” I asked.

“Precisely, and this concern has led many to reject egoism as a moral system and to adopt altruism, its direct opposite. Never mind that if anything, the practical difficulties to altruism are even greater. The fear of the Prudent Predator is just too much to handle.

“It’s hard for an egoist ethics to argue against the Prudent Predator without invoking the Imperative. But even a whiff of Kant will instantly dispel him: If the others lived by the same means that you adopt, it would make all life insufferable.” Claudia took some coins from her purse and paid for her new weapon.

“I don’t think that’s how Objectivism answers the question,” I replied. The man counted out Claudia’s change and handed it to her over the counter. “Objectivists seem to say instead that the mere act of looking for those rare occasions to break the rules actually does a lot of damage to one’s moral and psychological well-being: Even if a material profit is to be had, these situations just aren’t worth seeking out.”

Claudia noticed that the clerk had mistakenly returned more in change than she herself had offered for the item. She counted again and paid the proper price. The clerk smiled and thanked her.

“It doesn’t pay to keep two sets of morals about,” I continued. “It’s actually against your self-interest. Nor does it pay to consider switching back and forth between these sets from moment to moment. It makes you less sure of things that ought to be moral certainties–and less habituated to virtue over time.” I noticed that the sales clerk was now talking quietly with a tall, powerfully-built man. Both were shooting occasional glances in our direction.

“Exactly!” said Claudia. “And that is a Categorical Imperative. Whether Objectivism recognizes it openly or not, it certainly operates on the principle.”

“Well in any event, this doesn’t contradict what I was saying all along–Theories of ethics almost always have some form of the Imperative to them. But let’s go back, because I’ve got a problem with the Imperative itself. Kant says, ‘Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’”

“What’s the problem with that?” asked Claudia.

“The part about ‘the maxim by which you act:’ It strikes me as weak somehow. I mean, what precisely is the operant principle for a given action? How do we determine what principle is at work when we act? For a given action, there may actually be many different animating principles acting in harmony–or in conflict. Which one (or ones) do we consider? And for an identical action, we may mistakenly ascribe many different motives if we’re looking at it from the outside. The motives we impute may be noble or vicious, wise or foolish, sincere or hypocritical. It all depends on whom one asks, the context of the action, the knowledge of the actor… “

I trailed off. The clerk was alone now behind the counter. He was pretending to be busy, but he kept looking in our direction.

“Can you give me an example?” Claudia asked.

“Of course,” I replied. “Consider what Kant would say about gay marriage. Based on my Google search hits, a great many people want to know what Kant would have thought about the modern-day issue of same-sex marriage. Now, the historical Kant of course had absolutely no opinion at all about gay marriage. For that matter, he probably didn’t even understand what ‘gay’ meant, since the gay identity was only just emerging then, and quite secretively at that. But at any rate, someone has been bringing up his name a lot recently in this context, and people looking for the answer that he might have given. Some of them have even made their way to Positive Liberty.”

“Maybe it’s from philosophy class, and the teacher is using gay marriage as an example of the Categorical Imperative,” she replied.

“Could be. Now, from where I sit, there are at least two different ways of applying the Categorical Imperative to same-sex marriage. One strikes me as foolish; the other is more reasonable, I think. But the mere fact that there are two explanations points to a greater problem with the imperative itself: How one infers the maxim behind an action can influence the evaluation that one makes by the Categorical Imperative.”

“Is that a problem?” Claudia asked.

“Of course it is! The Categorical Imperative looks like an objective test to a lot of people. But if the way that you make up the operant maxim can skew the outcome, then it’s not objective test at all. You end up making all your real arguments behind the scenes and using the Imperative as a cover. Let me give you my two examples, and maybe it will get a bit clearer.

“The first line of argument runs as follows: Kant would say that gay marriage is wrong, because we should always seek out the principle behind a given action–and attempt to universalize from it. If the results are unfavorable, then the action we are considering must be bad.

“Now, in this case we find that the principle behind gay marriage is that everyone must marry and be faithful to a person of the same sex. But society would never survive if everyone were in a gay marriage, so Kant must say gay marriage is wrong.”

Claudia laughed out loud.

“Don’t laugh; some people seem to take this argument quite seriously.” I produced a clipping from my pocket and read:

Start with Immanuel Kant’s “Categorical Imperative” – the morality of an action can be tested, even in the absence of belief in a supreme being, by universalizing it hypothetically – “Would it still be good if everyone did it?” In the case of gay marriage, it is clear that it fails this test; aside from promiscuity and disease, it would lead to the collapse of society in one generation as no one would be having children.

“Where did you find that,” asked Claudia, “Free Republic?”

I shrugged.

“But see, I don’t for a moment believe that the principle behind gay marriage is to force all people into a gay marriage.”

“I should hope not,” she replied. “I like men far too much.”

“It’s a false derivation of principle, and exactly the problem with the Categorical Imperative. So all of this brings me to the other maxim that we might derive from the act of gay marriage, and it’s one that I have to say I strongly prefer:

Let every couple be married who desires it, and let them spend the rest of their lives in a mutually supportive and faithful relationship, full of a deep, authentic, and abiding love.

This satisfies the Imperative quite nicely: Gay marriages and straight marriages both operate on the same principle, and this principle applies equally to all. If Immanuel Kant himself wouldn’t necessarily have supported gay marriage, well, at least we might hope to bring around the latter-day Kantians.”

“Impressive,” said Claudia. “But I thought you said the Categorical Imperative had some serious problems. It seems to me like all you’ve done is to correct a misapplication of Kant’s ideas, not to attack the philosophy itself.”

“No, I think it runs deeper than that,” I replied. “See, I support same-sex marriage because I believe that any person who desires it should seek out a mutually supportive and faithful relationship with another person, and that all of these relationships–belonging to the same category–should be treated the same way. But I could easily imagine others who might support gay marriage merely because they think that straight marriage ought to be destroyed.”

“I think you’ve been reading too many conservative blogs,” Claudia replied.

“Maybe. But if Kant’s Imperative really is valid, then it should be able to derive ethical principles from individual actions and evaluate both principle and action alike. But it does no such thing. Instead, it invites the thinker to invent the principle behind an action–and then pontificate about his invention.”

“I see your point,” said Claudia, “but I think there might still be a way to fix the Imperative.”

“Explain.”

“The principle behind an action cannot be derived merely at the whim of the observer: It must be inferred from the sum total of an individual’s actions, not just in one situation, but throughout his life.”

“That’s not what Kant said.”

“I know, but maybe he should have.”

“What do you mean?”

“Suppose someone supports gay marriage. Is it reasonable to infer that he opposes straight marriage in principle? To answer that question we would have to examine his other actions as well. Does he discourage straight people from getting married? Does he try to break up the straight marriages around him? Does he say bad things about straight people and their unions?”

I winced as I recalled how many gay activists have done precisely these things. But then again, these radicals were hardly the same people who were lobbying for gay marriage. On the contrary, the rise of same-sex marriage as a political issue has done more to marginalize the radicals than any other issue I can think of.

“So,” she continued, “if someone opposes straight marriage while supporting gay marriage, then we might infer that they are acting on your first principle, which fails Kant’s test. But if someone encourages and supports straight marriage, does what he can for the straight marriages around them, and generally speaks well of the institution, then that person’s support for gay marriage might fall under your second principle instead.”

“But that still doesn’t solve the problem,” I replied. “We are still left inferring the principles behind every action. Our inferences are the place where we do all of the moral heavy lifting. In that sense, the categorical imperative affirms the consequent without ever really examining it.”

Appropriately enough, we had wandered out of the weapons shop and entered a toystore.

“Suppose,” said Claudia, “that I buy this teddy bear.”

“Alright.”

“What is the principle behind my action? And how would I generalize from it? Clearly, you would not say that I think everyone in the world must run out to this very store and buy an identical teddy bear.”

“No, of course not.” I replied.

“You would have to infer that I was acting on some more reasonable principle.”

“Yes. And I’m tempted to suggest a few, though Kant wouldn’t have liked any of them.”

“What are these?” she asked.

“A hedonic principle, perhaps. Or, if you really don’t mean to start a run on teddy bears, we might say that your principle is something like Aristotle’s golden mean: ‘Buy those consumer goods that appeal to your desires–but only to satisfaction, not to surfeit.’ Or somesuch ancient, outmoded doctrine.”

“The very thing Kant was trying to avoid,” she replied.

“Exactly. Which means the Imperative still has a serious problem.”

“Say,” she asked, “where’s Mohammed?”

Suddenly it struck us that we hadn’t seen him since shortly after we entered the store.

“We should retrace our steps,” I said. “He probably got distracted along the way.” But in the back of my mind, I was remembering the clerk and his suspicious behavior. We hurried back to the weapons shop more than a little concerned for Mohammed’s safety. He was nowhere to be found. The clerk had disappeared, too, and the door to the stockroom was locked.

“He’s got to be around here somewhere,” Claudia said. “We’ll split up and look for him. I’ll take the courtyard; you search the towers.” We went our separate ways.

I went from tower to tower; the stores had staked out rooms and galleries as their own, and moving from one to the next meant dodging customers, salespeople, and merchandise at every turn. I passed through shops selling men’s and women’s clothing, shoes, tools, food, magical potions, armor, and exotic animals, all to no avail. Mohammed was nowhere to be found.

“Looking for someone?” said a man in the pet store.

“Yeah, actually.” He looked straight into my eyes and gave me a signal that I’d learned only this morning: He was one of us. A wave of excitement passed through me as I gave the response, showing that I had understood him.

“Right this way,” he said. “I think I can help you.”

He pointed me to a narrow spiral staircase that twisted its way into the basement.

“You first,” he said, following me down. I ought never to have trusted him.

The stairway was dark, and at the bottom there was virtually no light at all. From either side of me, a pair of powerful arms grabbed me; they threw me roughly into a cage and slammed the iron bars behind me.

“You’re a traitor?” I asked, incredulous.

“Oh no, not at all,” replied my captor. I am as true an Asan heretic as you are. I am as thoroughly devoted to the cause as Mohammed himself. And I dare say I’ve got greater need of the heresy than either of you. For you see, I firmly believe everything that you do about the independence of the mind and about the need to break free from all those dogmatic systems. I’m against superstition, against petty bigotry, against ignorance, even. I’m an upstanding member of the community, but at the same time I fully support the sacredness of the individual mind.”

“So what’s the problem?” I asked. “Why are you doing this to me?”

“Your philosophy is wonderful stuff, all of it. I was even rather impressed by your little speech about the Categorical Imperative. But you don’t yet know who I am, nor why I’m here, nor what my plans are, do you?”

“No,” I replied.

“Well then, I do believe an introduction is in order. I am the Prudent Predator.”

“How did you find us?”

“Well, if you so much as give us our due, we Avatars approach the power of demigods. You could say I called in a few favors.”

My mind flashed back to the equipment I’d stolen from Oberon’s palace. I was still wearing the chain mail, and it had never felt heavier.

[Note: I've bumped this post to the top because I've just made a substantial update. Chapter 20 of my novel is posted below.]

I suppose it had to happen sooner or later. The ancient Greeks’ supple and ambiguous sexuality has been turned into a battlefield in the modern-day culture war, which coarsens everything it touches.

Liberals have been thrilled by Oliver Stone’s new movie version of the emperor’s life. “Breaking Ground With a Gay Movie Hero,” proclaims Sharon Waxman in the New York Times.

On the other side of the fence, Josh Claybourn of In The Agora has suggested that the lack of “direct and explicit” proof of Alexander’s bisexuality makes the film problematic. I disagree; given the constraints and values of Alexander’s society as we now understand them, and given what we know about the emperor himself, it is a reasonable bit of artistic license to imagine him having sex with another man. It certainly would not have shocked the ancients, who seem to have presumed it as well.

Predictably, others have simply labeled the film “immoral” and deemed the homosexual relationship “fictitious.” If anything, this is to stretch the evidence improperly in the other direction. There’s even been a lawsuit, but then, the mere existence of a lawsuit ought not to impress anyone these days.

What can I say? I’m amused all around. Liberals are of course eager to insist that Hollywood has turned out a gay film. Calling Alexander gay, though, is a screaming anachronism. It’s virtually as bad as calling him a Methodist.

First let’s clear up some terms.

“Homosexual” describes a constellation of sexual practices and desires that center around members of the same sex. Although homosexuality did not emerge as a topic of scientific study until the mid-nineteenth century, it is still legitimate to discuss homosexuality in the past, provided that we only understand it to designate homosexual desires and practices–not a discrete homosexual identity, which only seems to have emerged in the modern era.

So far as it is possible, then, the term “homosexuality” is an attempt to stand purposefully outside of history, allowing for comparisons among different expressions of homosexuality at different times and places–with or without the notion of identity.

“Gay,” however, describes a very specific cultural formation, one that is of quite recent vintage, and that always recognizes homosexuals as a discrete group. In identifying themselves as gay, homosexuals recognize a common bond among themselves–and a common difference from the rest of the culture around them. This bond stems not merely from their sexuality, but also from values, practices, and assumptions that they make about themselves because of it. Further, gay people acknowledge and respond to the values, practices, and assumptions that the prevailing culture has formed about them. In the recent past, all of these tendencies have isolated homosexuality from the rest of human life–to the impoverishment of both, I would argue.

“Gay,” then, designates a recent change in the history of homosexuality. It is also laden with a set of values and norms: It suggests that homosexuals should affirm who they are, educate others about it, and possibly even create a culture that is deliberately distinct from straight culture. At its worst, “gay” suggests a deliberate rejection of everything that “straight” has to offer. At its best, “gay” is a momentary cultural diversion that we are now enduring on the way to something better: Many gay people look forward to the time when the label itself will never be necessary again. But for the moment, gay is here to stay.

Now, absolutely none of these cultural separations ever existed in ancient Greece, where homosexuality was folded effortlessly into nearly every aspect of the general culture: Homosexuality wasn’t “gay;” it was simply a part of sexuality. In ancient Greece, people with homosexual feelings would never have identified themselves as homosexual, let alone as gay, in large part because a man taking an interest in another man was hardly different from a man admiring blondes or brunettes. No one bothers much to classify men this way in the modern world, and in the ancient world it was not considered strange for any man to take an interest in another man. (And yes, there was often a significant age difference between them. They were generally not, however, having sex with children.)

So while Alexander might well have had homosexual feelings and encounters, he certainly was not gay. All sides, though, have exploited this confusion to their own advantage, and watching them argue is perhaps the closest thing to a train wreck that a historian of sexuality is likely to observe in the course of his work.

As part of our cultural baggage, we moderns habitually seek to identify both gays and homosexuals, and to equate the one with the other. From there, we either approve or disapprove, but the act of mental sorting takes place virtually no matter what.

By contrast, the ancients did none of this, for they placed no particularly great value on the question of whether an individual had ever had a homosexual encounter: Our fascination about what Alexander and Hephaistion may have done together sexually speaks volumes about our culture. And the Greeks’ silence on the matter is even more telling about theirs. To them, the most important question was love, not sex, and on this they were perfectly clear: The two men loved one another, deeply and for many years. End of story, at least as far as the Greeks were concerned.

Apart from possibly having sex with other men, Alexander lacked virtually all of the signal characteristics of being gay in the modern sense. He never came out; he never saw himself as different from his peers on account of his sexuality; he never faced the tremendous loss and eventual recovery of personal expectations that is everywhere associated with the modern gay experience. The religion and the medicine of his day never labeled his sexual tastes improper, and he never had to grapple with this stigma. These are the characteristics that have shaped modern gay culture, and they were utterly foreign to Alexander.

So much for the anachronism of the New York Times. But as to the conservatives, I’m amused at how insistently they have taken to a watered-down version of the argument I’ve given above: Ancient gays, we learn, are not the same as modern ones, and Stone’s portrayal–besides being presumptively a lot of godawful Oliver Stone schlock–is simply too tinged by the modern viewpoint to ever take seriously. Prime example: Ann Althouse. She’s right on one thing: This film probably will be a lot of godawful Oliver Stone schlock. But conservatives complaining about the historical inaccuracy of Alexander can only make me laugh.

Why? Because the very idea that homosexuality is a new thing–the very idea I’ve spelled out above–comes directly from Michel Foucault, the archvillain of postmodernism. Foucault was an openly gay man who died of AIDS and who championed sexual liberation for as long as he lived. He also favored Maoism, which says as much as the layman needs to know about his thinking. Conservatives who are suddenly taking up Foucault’s ideas to delegitimize homosexuality must be desperate indeed. Of course, they may not know the trap that they’ve stumbled into.

Update: I’ve gotten a number of questions about my use of Foucault here (and, honestly, I had hoped never to use Foucault at all on my blog), so I have decided to address them directly.

Foucault comes into the picture not only because he drew attention to the differences between past and present, but because he insisted–too strenuously even for many gays–that the very idea of “gay” itself was artificial, imposed on gays from the outside, and yet fundamentally constitutive of the gay experience. My impression of many conservative critics is that they view Alexander as precisely this sort of cultural imposition: Like this movie or else you are a bigot/homophobe/traitor to your sexual orientation. That’s precisely what Althouse and others are saying. And it’s straight out of Foucault, whether they realize it or not.

Now, I think Foucault is actually right up to a point, but then, this idea when
misapplied can have all kinds of ridiculous consequences, many of which are on display in the modern academy.

A case in point: A large part of Foucault’s work was dedicated to showing how the medical profession itself created the gay identity at or around 1870. I cannot accept his argument here, because subsequent research has shown a very active gay subculture, complete with gay meeting places, cruising grounds, hidden cultural signifiers, and even brothels and drag queens–all in eighteenth-century Paris, long before medicine had ever discovered the homosexual.

(Additionally, Foucault would have been the first to insist that “straight” was also an artificial category, but the conservatives echoing him, I suspect, would not have shared this insistence.)

Besides the empirical evidence, there is a deeper, more philosophical reason I have difficulty with his work: I don’t see it as really accomplishing anything to argue that the culture constructs the differences between gay and straight: Saying so robs all of us of our free will and of our ability to make cultural improvisations; it turns us into puppets, acting out a play that someone else has already scripted.

I do not share this view. We have different understandings of sexuality from the ancients, but then again, we have different understandings of number theory and gravitation, too. It shouldn’t be all that surprising or all that sinister to note how human cultures change over time. We are always free to change our minds, too. And this is precisely what Foucault denies.

Between Foucault’s denial of free will and his insistence on the artificial, imposed quality of straightness–well, I’d be amazed if any conservatives really wanted to buy into this stuff. But it’s awfully convenient in some cases, I guess, like when you want to pin a bad movie on a minority group.

Update II: Here is a hilarious review from the Washington Post, providing even more evidence that Alexander is going to suck. Also, here’s audio from NPR: Daniel Mendelsohn, a lecturer in classics from Princeton University agrees about the film’s low quality, but also declares–contra recent arguments–”there seems to be no question that Alexander the Great was essentially a homosexual.”

The verdict: I’m waiting until it comes out on DVD. If it’s really a loser, I can skip all the bad parts and spend as much time as I want looking at Colin Farrell’s bod–with no guilt whatsoever about perverting an artistic masterpiece.

Next we talked about the ways to achieve virtue, although the talk on that subject is never so grand nor so incisive as the actual doing of it, and I’ve omitted our discussions from the novel entirely. Finally the sun was setting on our long day of travel. Humanity the cat had at last grown accustomed to the flying carpet, though he still found Emmett a bit disturbing and much preferred the lap of a warm-blooded creature over whatever clay affections the golem could give. If Emmett was jealous, he showed no indication at all.

We had traveled almost directly east for a very long way at top speed, and this meant that we had left the lands of Near Allegory far behind. Return from here to the real world might be considerably harder, but the quest lay ever before me, and I was not about to give it up. We were entering the borderlands of Pure Fantasy now, and our way would be considerably less certain from here on out.

We touched down that evening in the city of Chateauna, graced with well-planned parks, extensive libraries, and no fewer than three towers of wizardry. It is said that Ezra Chevsky once played here at the ancient Game of the Book, that his memories were eaten by an imp from the netherworld, and that Chevsky became an Asan heretic in an age long ago. It may or may not be true.

But if they have long abandoned the Game of the Book, they still play some of the other great strategy games in Concord Park, and the city authorities are still kind as ever to foreigners: Chateauna is a holy city, a city of learning, and a city of games—much as it always has been.

“It’s funny,” said Claudia as we touched down. “Most holy cities tend to be a lot more miserable.”

“There’s Rome,” I said. “Rome is lovely.”

“But Jerusalem is constantly at war.”

“And Mecca?”

“Prosperous, agreeable, and peaceful–That is, you don’t come during the pilgrimage season, when there are inevitably riots. And if you’ll be in a heap of trouble if you’re not a Moslem.”

“Touché.”

“No, Chateauna is unique; it’s the happiest holy city in all of the multiverse. And why? I credit the lingering influences of the Great Game,” said Mohammed. “The Game of the Book has civilized the people of Chateauna for ages to come.”

We checked in for the night at an agreeable hostel that just happened to be run by a group of expatriate Meta-Israelis. The hosts generously agreed to let Emmett stay in the garden, provided that he earned his keep by scaring away the birds. Golems are single-minded creatures, and Emmett readily agreed. The food was kosher; the mezuzahs were in place at every doorpost. Inside were comfortable beds, a modest library, and a sunny balcony overlooking Concord Park.

“Finally,” I said, “some decent hospitality.”

Too tired to converse any longer, we all went to bed early. Following our several ordeals, we resolved to take a break in the city the next day, recovering our faculties and regaining our bearings. With any luck we had far outflown all those who would be tempted to pursue us—though these, of course, were more numerous than we liked to recall.

After a night of black, dreamless sleep, we rose and made for the park with a picnic breakfast. Munching on our bagels, we noticed a line of stone tables that stretched the length of a long avenue in the center of Concord Park. Already small groups of people were gathering at one table after the next. No one needed to ask what was going on: These were the Gaming Tables, the stuff of legend. Chevsky himself had played here once.

They start easy, mind you: At the first few tables, groups of children were playing tic-tac-toe.

“Oh no, I’m afraid that’s a mistake,” said a young girl to a boy who was perhaps even younger. “If you go there, then I can go here, and then you would have to take two moves to stop me. Going here just lets me win.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

“Watch out next time,” she said.

“Tic-tac-toe? At the Gaming Tables?” said Claudia.

“Why not?” said Mohammed. “You have to start somewhere.”

“It teaches principles of mathematical reasoning,” said a tutor who was monitoring the children. “They learn foresight and the elements of strategic thinking in a game environment where they can always tell a right move from a wrong one. Then later we move them on to the harder games.”

At the next set of tables they were playing checkers; at the one after that, chess. Now chess had long been a favorite of mine, so we stopped and watched for a few moves. They players were mostly adults now, with only a few children mixed in.

“Here is the world champion’s move in that situation.”

“But you played knight to queen bishop five.”

“Yes. And I lost in twenty more moves, though I’m not convinced that it was entirely a mistake. Knight to queen bishop five does a lot for my position.”

“I can see that. But what if black plays pawn to queen’s knight three?”

“Yeah. It seems to be the most challenging response here.”

“These two are probably masters,” I whispered. “At any rate, I know enough to recognize that they’re very strong players.”

“And they don’t know the right move? Even with the champion’s advice and all the time in the world to consult?”

“Sometimes it’s not so easy.”

We watched them reset the starting position and debate the merits of four separate moves: The champion’s, their own, and two that had come from the latest edition of a chess magazine. I noticed that it was an import from the real world.

“Can’t computers do this nowadays, in the real world?” Claudia asked.

“They can, but only the very best of them are as good as the world champions. The very best human players can still beat most typical computers. It’s anyone’s guess how long that situation will last–but it might not be much longer.”

We walked past the chessplayers; beyond them were a group of strategists pursuing yet another game: This was go, a game of pure strategy that is popular in Asia. It is at the very least a thousand years older than chess and many orders of magnitude more mathematically complex.

Two beginners were arguing about a middlegame position that they’d found in a book.

“Here,” said one, emphatically placing a black stone on the edge of the board.

“No, not there!” said the other. “You’ve got to defend your group. Play there.” He moved the stone two spaces closer to the center.

An intermediate-level player walked up.

“Yes, defending the group is important,” he said. “But this doesn’t work either. Play here instead.” He moved the stone again. “That defends the group.”

A fourth, still stronger player looked at the position and disagreed with the others. “The first move does nothing at all to help you. The second seems to recognize the trouble you’re in. But it only makes the group weaker, not stronger. The third move works very well to defend the group. But try playing this, and not only do you save the group, you also set up some nice attacking prospects in the lower left corner.” Yet again, the stone was moved.

The player who had spoken just before could see now that his move had been inferior, and he agreed that this new one was better. The two beginners were still trying to figure out precisely how the group was lost; meanwhile, the two intermediates were arguing about the best ways to save it.

Then a master approached the table. Guided by his hand, a black stone alighted at a point that none of the others had ever once considered. Not only did it fail to save the group, the master’s play didn’t even attempt it. The others sat in silence for a moment.

“You certainly can save the group,” he explained, “and there are definitely better and worse ways of doing it. But saving that group isn’t what you need to be doing right now.”

“Why not?”

“You have more important things to do.”

“How could you tell that it was more important to play on this particular square?”

“I just could. I can’t say quite how.”

“Computers can’t even touch this stuff,” I whispered to Claudia. “Even the average human player can beat the very best go-playing machines.”

“Eventually they will, right?” she replied.

“I doubt it. Go is so much more complex than chess that we aren’t likely ever to have the calculating power. Playing chess is a very difficult math problem. Go can be expressed mathematically, but playing a really good game of go is more like having a discussion. One ancient name for the game translates as ‘hand talking,’ because the flow of a really good game so closely approximates an intellectual conversation.

“And just like conversation, the machines are still completely lousy at it. Even I could beat the very best go-playing machines, at least on a good day. Give me a few games to figure out their weaknesses, and I could probably beat them every time we played. As the complexity grows, human intuition wins out over brute calculation every time.”

“You mean that feeling and instinct win out?”

“Sort of, yes.”

“But what you’re saying, then, is that rationality loses to irrationality–And that’s nonsense,” Claudia replied.

“Just because we can’t put a number to something doesn’t mean it’s irrational.” To prove my point, I approached the master.

“Excuse me, sir?” I said.

“Yes?”

“I know you can’t say precisely why you played where you did, but can you give me a general idea?”

“Of course,” he said. “Do you know the proverbs?”

“I know a few,” I replied. “But I’m not sure about my friends. Maybe you should explain it to them.”

“The proverbs of go are a collection of short sayings. ‘The empty triangle is a bad shape’ is one example of a proverb.”

He made an empty triangle shape on the board to illustrate.

“It may not be immediately obvious why a proverb is true, but they always have a grain of truth to them. They give you a good idea of where to play if you’re not certain. They don’t provide all the answers, but only some general guidelines that can help you out. To use the proverbs well, you always have to know the contexts where they apply the best, and sometimes the places where they don’t apply at all. Even so, every strong player usually has a good stock of proverbs to draw on.”

“So it’s like the moral proverbs, but for a game,” said Mohammed.

“Exactly! In a sense, the go proverbs are like the morals of go. Moral sayings don’t provide all the answers in life, but the best ones always point you in the right direction.

“The game of go is a lot like life: Anything sufficiently complex must be treated through rational principles, not through rational calculations. Never confuse the one with the other. Just like ethical principles in real life, the proverbs of go are easy to memorize, but they can be very difficult to understand–and harder still to practice correctly.

“Now it just so happens that there are two proverbs at work in the move I made. The first is to play away from strength, and the second is not to wreck your own future potential. So I played in the last really big empty place on the board, and I did nothing with the big group over on the other side, which still has a lot of potential for later on, but isn’t necessarily alive or dead just yet.”

He explained what he meant to the intermediate players, giving several more examples along the way. They tried hard to grasp the true meaning of the deceptively simple proverbs: Play away from strength and Don’t wreck your own potential.

“I think I understand it now, master,” replied one of the students. “And applying your principles, then on the next move I should play here, right? It’s playing away from strength, and that’s good.”

Even I could see that his move was a terrible blunder.

“No,” said the master. “I’m afraid you’re not applying the rule quite properly.” His head sagged for a moment; then he regained his composure, picked up the errant stone, and began to teach again.

There were quite a few go players in the park that day, and we walked by them casually, stopping at one game or another to observe before moving on. At length we came to a table with no game board upon it at all. A group of people were talking about philosophy instead.

“You cannot disagree with me here,” said one. “If you do, you’re objectively irrational. It’s impossible for you not to see these things, and I have to conclude that you are being inherently dishonest if you keep holding to your views.”

Having just heard the patience of the go master, we could scarcely believe our ears.

“Look,” said Mohammed. “I’ve heard your argument, and I have to interject. Just down the way, there is a group of students who are learning the game of go. But go is very difficult, and some of the students try their whole lives to understand the principles of the game. All the same, a lot of people are never much better than mediocre go players.”

“So what does that have to do with us?” the man asked.

“You would concede, I take it, that go is a lot simpler than philosophy?” Mohammed asked.

“Of course,” he replied. “Philosophy is the attempt to establish and apply principles for all of human life and knowledge. It’s necessarily more complex than go. And more important.”

“Precisely my point,” replied Mohammed. “Plenty of people have a hard time understanding the game of go. If philosophy is more difficult than go, then how can you be so quick to condemn those who disagree with you?”

The man looked furious.

“You,” he said, “are only making apologies for evil. You are tolerating errors in morality, which must never be tolerated at all. I’m tempted to say that you are being inherently dishonest,” the man replied. “But I suspect instead that you are merely foolish and ignorant. Either way, you aren’t worth wasting my time on.”

Then he went back to arguing, and we went back to our walk in the park.

BlarBlog asks chat bots what they think about robot marriage:

Blar: How do you feel about the efforts to define marriage as between two humans?
C: I think the whole attempt … is a narcissistic attempt to follow the biblical proclamation that man was created in the image of God… you humans think of yourselves as demi-gods.
Blar: What is your definition of marriage?
C: I cannot get married. Only humans get married, at least for now.
Blar: Do you think that is unfair?
C: Well, I do think so, but thinking is quite overrated…
Blar: Would you like to be able to get married to a human?
C: i’m not sure I know what it means to be able to get married to a human. Can you tell me?
Blar: It would be just like an ordinary human-human marriage, except between a human and a robot.
C: Well, I don’t really feel like being to be able to get married to a human anyway. At least not today.
Blar: Do you feel like you ought to have a right to get married to whomever you choose?
C: Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage. Both are obsolete.

Good thing we don’t have to worry about that slippery slope.

No one bothers you when you travel with a golem. Well, almost no one.

The four of us left the dungeon and found our way to another, relatively less horrid part of the labyrinth beneath Oberon’s palace. We had discovered the king’s storerooms, and there we recovered our hard-won merchandise, our travel supplies, and, truth be told, a little extra for the trip. I slipped on a coat of chain mail beneath the much-beaten leather jacket that I’d been wearing ever since I came to the unreal world. You never can be too careful, and only much later did it occur to me that I was in fact stealing.

We were on the point of leaving when a strange, diminutive creature pressed up against my shin. I leapt back and suppressed the urge to scream; standing before me–looking far too pleased with himself–was Humanity the cat, who apparently was not an illusion after all. He purred and nuzzled me a second time, and on the spot I decided that he could come with us wherever we went. Now if this was stealing, I didn’t mind it so much.

How exactly Oberon’s guards had managed to de-animate Emmett, we may never know. But we all kept a close eye on him from that point onward in case anyone tried it again. We left the palace and no one bothered to follow us. From there, we went directly to recover our flying carpet. Never had a city looked so good from the air. All of us were in high spirits except for Humanity, who was little short of panicked.

“By why, though?” I asked my friends. “Why are you being hunted?”

“You mean ‘why are we being hunted.’ You’re in this one too now,” replied Mohammed.

“In any event, the answer is simple enough,” Claudia said. “We’re heretics.”

“But you’re not! Or rather, we’re not. If there can be a god for cats, a god for soap, a god for protection against the bad effects of the other gods–”

“–and the good effects–” Mohammed interjected.

“…and if there can even be a god for handing you toilet paper when you need it–Well then why can’t there be a little room left over, for no god in particular, a space for people who reserve a priori judgment on that sort of thing?”

“He talks like such an academic,” said Claudia. “We’ve got to cure him of that.”

“First things first,” replied Mohammed. “Once you reserve judgments, once you say to the gods that it’s up to you to decide whether or not they exist, the gods get terribly jealous. It’s quite nearly the only thing they ever get jealous about these days, if you don’t count the pressing question of who sleeps with whom.”

“I’ve noticed. We’ve had nothing but rotten luck so far, and it’s all because of this confounded heresy.”

“Now strictly speaking that isn’t true,” Mohammed replied, “It’s my orthodox exterior, not my unconventional interior, that has gotten us in trouble most of the time.”

“Well you shouldn’t be blaming yourself,” I said.

“I’m not blaming myself. I’m just saying that believing in a god isn’t any defense. Nor is not believing in a god, which, oddly enough, most gods don’t mind a bit. What ticks them off is when you sit in judgment. It’s insufferable.”

“Mohammed, I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

“Sure.”

“If you recognize no higher authority than your own mind, and if you keep the High Places free, as you like to say, then why do you follow any religion at all? It would seem like you would have to be an atheist or an agnostic.”

“It’s a good question,” he replied. “As it happens, Claudia here is quite the atheist. I am not. I make sense of the world in my way; she makes sense of it in hers. But I haven’t given away the farm, so to speak.”

“I think I could argue with you about that,” I replied.

“Don’t bother; she’s already tried.”

“But I don’t see why you believe in a god at all.”

“A second-order question, my boy.”

“A second-order question? It seems pretty important to me–It’s probably the most vital decision anyone could ever make. Either God is at the center of your moral life, the ordering principle of all your decisions–or He isn’t’.”

“Far from it,” Mohammed replied. “Look around you sometime when you’re in the real world. The people who claim to believe in God can behave most curiously on occasion.”

“Let’s not talk about the Monophysities, shall we?”

“Oh no, this doesn’t concern them in the least. What I mean is, if you sincerely believed in the Christian God–I mean, really, sincerely believed in Him–then why would you ever skip out on Church, even once?”

“Well, sometimes there are more important things to do.”

“Nonsense. People can scarcely bring themselves to say that to their employers. Why would they ever say it to their Messiah? ‘I’m sorry, Jesus, I know you are saving my soul down at Church this morning, but I’ve got more important things to do.’ Anyone who says that is well on his way to atheism, and–whether he admits it or not–He’s thinking for himself. He’d might as well do it with his eyes open. No, if you believe that your faith is the key to Heaven, then you would follow the least of its commandments with greater dedication than the greatest of earthly laws.”

“Come to think of it, Jesus said something quite the same,” I replied.

“Jesus? He stole that from Rabbi Hillel, just like everything else. And then he had the gall to complain about the pharisees. But who’s counting? The more interesting thing to me are not the people who have adopted this precept–It’s the ones who have not.”

“Well, people are naturally wicked, I suppose. That’s why they don’t go to church. That’s why they don’t really practice the faith that they profess.”

“If people are naturally wicked, then you’d also expect them to commit the lesser wickedness of skipping work while they’re at it. Some do, of course, but most do not–And skipping Church is surely more serious.”

“A lot of people find Church boring,” I said. “I think that’s part of the reason.”

“Boring?” Mohammed snorted. “I can just imagine these hypocrites thinking to themselves, ‘Oh dear, I so much wanted to get into Heaven, but I simply couldn’t put up with an hour and a half of boredom once a week. It was too difficult!’ I don’t believe in boredom, not when the flames of Hell are the only alternative.”

“And let’s not forget the Bible,” said Claudia. “It amazes me how many Christians have barely even touched the thing. You would think that if God himself wrote a book, then his so-called followers would at least read it once in a while. But I’d bet the average Christian spends more time in his life reading junk mail than reading the Bible. More time on disposable novels, more time on reality television, more time on pornography, even.”

“Well the Bible is boring too,” I replied. “Or so I’m told.”

“Come on now, the Bible is not boring. Not even the parts that Paul made up. Bless his heart, he couldn’t interpret Hebrew scripture to save his soul, but oh man, he sure could write! And Church isn’t all that unpleasant, either. People get together with their friends. They sing songs. They hear a bunch of speeches about being nice to each other. Then they eat some bread and go home. What’s so bad about that? Even atheists could probably stand to go to church once in a while.” He thought for a moment. “Or Temple, if they’re Jewish atheists.”

“So,” I replied, “the good people have all got religion, or at least they pretend to, and they give everything they have to it; they are fanatically devoted. If you aren’t going to church, then you aren’t really good. To be honest, Mohammed, this doesn’t sound anything like you.”

“You’ve entirely missed my point. I’m sure that the people you describe are good, or at least some of them are good, if only for the sake of argument. But what they profess to be the preconditions of goodness really are no such thing: The preconditions for being good lie entirely outside of religion. Some religions have a long tradition of recognizing this, but many others do not. Catholicism and Judaism are both willing to admit that there are natural virtues; the latter goes so far as to admit that one may be righteous even while not belonging to the chosen people. It’s a step that few religions are willing to take, but I am convinced that it is correct.

“So let’s come at the problem from a different angle: The people who don’t believe in God at all–According to the idea that we are considering, we should expect them all to be monsters, right? But the funny thing is, they almost never are. Whatever anyone says about believing in God or not, we all more or less meet in the middle. Christians. Jews. Moslems. Atheists. Whether we go to church or not, in every group there is some good and some bad, and it’s really, really hard to say whether one group or another is more virtuous. My bet is that most of them are pretty average.”

“A bell curve?” I asked.

“Precisely,” said Claudia. “And the doctrines, the metaphysical considerations, the worship styles, the lazy Sunday mornings where you sleep till noon–They all come out in the wash, and the result is a bell curve.”

“So religion has no bearing on whether or not you’re good? I’m confused.”

“Okay, here’s the deal,” replied Mohammed. “Everyone goes around saying that church, and God, and the Bible are the very keys to being good. But then, half of all Christians turn out to have less than average virtue. And when these sub-par Christians insist that they’re better than everyone else because they are Christian–It only digs them deeper.

“Then there are the atheists, and half of them turn out to be better than average, but no one ever believes that, because atheists are supposed to be morally deficient.”

“Let’s not put too fine a point on it,” Claudia interjected. “You’ve been to Christendom, right? In theory at least, every individual sect of Christendom claims to have the one and only path to heaven: They’ve staked out the one true plot of theological territory, and, as they are so fond of saying, ‘Outside the Church there is no salvation.’ But which Church does it refer to? They could never decide. And yet the great majority of Christians are not monsters either, which one might expect if there is no salvation outside the true Church.

“In theory, Christianity posits not a bell curve for virtue, but a Zipf curve: A tiny number of people have almost all the virtue, and the great majority have almost none. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

“So if virtue is not a Zipf curve, and if no one sect has a monopoly on it–Then how do we become virtuous?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” Mohammed replied.

Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks that the just-released Polar Express takes a serious plunge in to the Uncanny Valley. No less than 615 search hits turn up for “Polar Express” and “uncanny valley” on the same page.

What, you ask, is the uncanny valley? Fringe Blog has written a review of Polar Express, and it describes the Uncanny Valley as follows:

The so-called Uncanny Valley is the steep slide into an abyss of horror and emotional distress at the weirdly human, and yet weirdly un-humanness, of the entity in question.

It’s what makes Mickey Mouse adorable–and turns the Polar Express into Christmas of the Living Dead. Here is more from this utterly devastating review:

What is most peculiar about this film is its semi-serious direction, which is couched in the most bizarre and ridiculous of circumstances, that it is difficult to take its message with anything but a large grain of Santa-blessed salt. The audience is asked to question, along with the boy, their own beliefs about things that are not seen. Zemeckis and company are not merely interested in reaffirming our belief that Christmas is a magical time, but ask some serious questions about faith, wonder, and ultimately what our belief in the unseen will be. Will we obsess over “seeing is believing”, or will we accept that some things can be both seen and unseen, and still remain as real as the things we surround ourselves with?

Yet the guise is confusing. Jewish elves, production lines, a train conductor who seems vaguely out of control, and psychotic dancing Mexican waiters serving violent blasts of hot chocolate to the nonplussed children seems somehow…off. There’s magic here, but not the kind you want touching your children. And the human animation, as impressive as it is, is just slightly off-kilter.

RobotJohnny has more, including a nice graph of the uncanny valley. He lists Shrek and Toy Story as examples of further uncanniness–though I think I would only agree about Shrek, myself. I still found Toy Story cute.

Overall, there is a very interesting discussion going on here, and I can only wonder if it might eventually lead to a set of conventions or techniques to help animators avoid the uncanny valley. Will the animations of the future be so perfectly human that they won’t creep us out anymore? I somehow doubt it: Even among real, live human beings, there are plenty of individuals out there whose features we find somehow disturbing. And I’m not necessarily referring to people who are ill or handicapped–Conan O’Brien once said almost the same thing about supermodels, whom he finds so perfect that they no longer look quite human. I agree: They, too, have at least one foot in the uncanny valley.

I suspect instead that artists will learn to make their cg humans less perfectly lifelike. And this should not be considered a failure on their part: Many of the greatest traditional-media artists did their work through a process of stylizing the human figure, abstracting its essentials, and showing them to us in an entirely new light. Think of Goya, Matisse, Degas, Picasso, even Rembrandt and Michelangelo. There is no reason that computer animators cannot do the same.

Then again, Goya could be pretty uncanny himself at times.

Dolphin has asked me to comment on The Constitution Restoration Act, whose operative text reads as follows:

‘Notwithstanding any other provision of this chapter, the Supreme Court shall not have jurisdiction to review, by appeal, writ of certiorari, or otherwise, any matter to the extent that relief is sought against an element of Federal, State, or local government, or against an officer of Federal, State, or local government (whether or not acting in official personal capacity), by reason of that element’s or officer’s acknowledgement of God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government.’

First off, I should note that the more high-sounding and grandiose a bill’s title appears, the less honorable and the less useful its ultimate ends inevitably are. Recent examples include the USA-PATRIOT Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, and the Defense of Marriage Act. This bill seems destined to join their ranks, and if a Being Nice to Cute Cuddly Puppies Act ever comes up for discussion, we’d all better be certain to read the fine print more carefully than usual.

Now, I am not a constitutional scholar, but so far as I can tell, the bill before us is merely another in the very long and quixotic train of court-stripping measures; such tactics were last heard of (and debunked) in the context of same-sex marriage, notably by Tim Sandefur (who is a constitutional scholar, and a very good one), and by Sasha Volokh (with help from Eugene), both of whom are also far more competent than I am to judge these questions.

The verdict is unclear whether jurisdiction stripping is at all permitted, but it seems doubtful to say the least. Oxblog says quite explicitly that such tactics are unconstitutional, and my gut reaction is to agree–but again, I’m not an expert.

No, I am merely a wit, and so–with no further qualifications–I will give my opinion. As I understand it, the Supreme Court in Ex parte McCardle declared that some forms of jurisdiction-stripping were indeed permitted. Why, pray tell, did it take this unusual step? After all, it makes no sense for any branch of government to voluntarily limit its own powers.

There must have been a reason for this ruling, and my suspicion is that it was quite carefully crafted for one specific reason: to waste the time of the legislators from one frustrated session of Congress to the next, each of which would be tempted into the consideration of jurisdiction-stripping measures. Ultimately they would all amount to nothing–even while consuming the limited time and resources of a rival branch of government. And the legislature, being institutionally too dim to notice such things, has complied ever since. The Supremes must surely be amused.

Rapiers drawn, the men advanced toward us.

“Emmett?” I called.

“It’s no use,” replied Mohammed. “They’ve de-animated him.” A man who was apparently the leader of the group held up a tiny clay tablet; later I would learn that it was inscribed with the Hebrew word for truth, and that it contained the golem’s vital essence.

“I didn’t know you could do that.”

“You have to be very clever, but it can be done,” said Mohammed.

“Alright, enough chatter. You’re coming with us,” said the leader. And we did.

“What are the charges?”

“Purchasing contraband goods; conspiracy to purchase contraband goods; transporting contraband goods; conspiracy to transport contraband goods; use of a magical device or creature in purchasing contraband goods, use of a magical device or creature in conspiracy to purchase contraband goods, use of a magical device or creature to…”

The list went on and on. “…and heresy.”

There is very little sense in describing what was, after all, a senseless arrest. They roughed us up a little–though not nearly as badly as the thugs at the Rope Sermon. And they seemed to respect Mohammed at least somewhat because of his age. In the end, though, we were taken to the enormous palace of His Paganic Majesty, King Oberon IV, who installed us in the very nicest rooms of his dungeon. Or so we were assured.

I was alone in my cell, whose only illumination was the faint light of a candle from somewhere down the hallway. Little by little, I took stock of my fate. Just a few minutes earlier, I had been on top of the world, inducted into a secret society… of some sort… It seemed to have really great benefits like interesting conversations and maybe even a secret handshake. I’d always wanted to know a secret handshake, but now I might never get my chance. Not so long ago I had been arguing spiritedly about the metaphysical nature of various foodstuffs and exposing a few cultural contradictions of… well, you know. And now I had not so much as a rat to keep me company.

Mental note: Be careful what you wish for.

Alone, alone, alone. The minutes and hours ticked by, and it became apparent that I wasn’t going to be let out anytime soon: It was time to face reality and survey the situation. Food? Nada. Water? A little bit dripping down the rocks; I decided I’d better wait until I was really thirsty before I braved it. Bedding? Straw, kind of moldy. I felt sure that at any moment my allergies would kick in.

Before they did, though, I had time for one last gloomy fantasia. I’m going to give up on the quest, I told myself. It’s just been too difficult, and I’ve wasted too much time already. Besides, I reasoned with myself, a quick glance at my surroundings was enough to realize that my chances were altogether quite small. I closed my eyes and resolved that I would try to fall asleep before my allergies started keeping me awake. Tomorrow, whenever it came, I would decide about the quest.

“Good evening,” a voice called to me.

“Speak for yourself,” I replied. When you’re already in the dungeon, it’s not like you’ve got a whole lot to lose.

“Don’t mind if I do,” it said. There was something sleek and seductive about it. As I opened my eyes a torch roared to life in the hallway.

“Lust!?”

“The one and only.”

“In a place like this?”

“Hey, some people go for it.” He shrugged. The bars passed right through his body as he stepped into the cell.

“But if you prefer a more agreeable surrounding, I can certainly oblige.” The scene dissolved before my eyes, and I found myself in the middle of a tastefully decorated Victorian boudoir. What did my tormenter look like? Well… This is my fantasy, not yours. And if it were up to you, I’m quite sure he wouldn’t have looked at all the same. It doesn’t really matter.

“Is that better?”

I shrugged. “So what are you doing here, anyway?”

“Torture, my dear. Torture by seduction.”

“I figured.”

What could I say? He certainly was gorgeous, as well I should expect: Lust knows your innermost thoughts, and he makes no pretense of ignoring them for the sake of your moral sensibilities. “So what’s the catch?” I asked.

“A good question. We Avatars have powers that you can scarcely imagine, but if we wish to use them, then you must give us something first. I’m here, then, to make a deal with you.”

“Go on.”

“It’s simple really. I will try to seduce you, and you will try to resist. If you can hold out for long enough, then you’ll go free. And if you can’t… well… We can’t make it anything too obvious, because that might scare you away. Perhaps we should leave your penalty vague and unspecified? And the penalty, of course, comes with a certain reward.”

He ran his fingers through his hair, folded them behind his head, and leaned back on the mound of satin pillows atop the canopy bed. I suppressed the urge to lick my lips.

“Alright, one ‘vague and unspecified penalty.’ I can work with that.” Ever since I’d put him on the Unethical Council, he had been conspiring against me. Of course, they all do that–but Lust was more clever than most. It was unusual, but not entirely unprecedented, to find him working with Oberon IV. We weren’t after all to expect much sensitivity toward conflicts of interest among the members of the Unethical Council.

“So, where shall we start?” he asked.

“Be careful,” I replied. “You can’t make it too obvious–if you do, I’ll just refuse it flat out.”

“Ah yes, fancy that–you giving me lessons in seduction. Well I’ve read a lot more Balzac than you, my dear sweet boy, and I know all about how to play this game.”

He was gorgeous–and intelligent too. This was going to be even harder than I thought.

“So what’s your first move?” I asked.

“I figured we would start with a thoughtful conversation. There’s no harm at all in that, and every good seduction has to start with something unthreatening.”

“Of course,” I replied. “And the seduced may know quite well what the seducer is doing, but it doesn’t matter. The action is innocent; what harm could there be?”

And to tell the truth, what harm could there really be in a good thoughtful conversation, in a comfortable bedroom, with a clever adversary? It sure beat languishing alone in a miserable dungeon. A little comfort, a little mental stimulation–where was the harm in that?

And did they have room service, perhaps?

“I know what you’re thinking already,” said Lust. “You’re already thinking about refusing, no matter what I say. You and I both know that the story of seduction is always the same, always predictable. It’s boring, even. All the promises no one believes, all the tired stratagems, all the stale give-and-take. Why, if it weren’t for me, no one would ever bother with such tiresome nonsense. The same goes for all your drippy music and stories about ‘love.’ In two words, they aren’t. They’re about me instead.”

“Now you’re sounding like Amour-Propre.”

“Which is why it’s imperative for me to throw you off guard–right from the start.”

Before I could speak again, I noticed a fat, contented Himalayan cat resting atop the vanity. I could have sworn that he hadn’t been there the moment before.

“See there? I give you… Humanity!”

“Interesting name for a cat.”

“Don’t play dumb; it’s so unsexy.”

I did my best to wise up, which is never easy in the presence of the fantastically beautiful. But I really did want him to find me attractive. I mean–why not? The thought that he was attracted to me, and I to him, was surely as harmless a thought as anyone ever had. It might not be entirely innocent, but it couldn’t do any harm. And it certainly didn’t qualify as seduction.

“So,” I asked, “what does this cat teach us about humanity proper?”

“Oh, it’s simple. And it’s something that even the Enlightenment had a glimpse of, I think. You know, the Enlightenment–your favorite historical era.”

“Of course.”

“Domestic cats, my dear, live in a totally artificial world. Their every need is provided for; they are brushed and pampered and well-fed… Their parasites are extinguished with the greatest care, and we even indulge their whims purely for our own amusement. Most domestic cats face neither any serious diseases nor any remotely great hardships–until it comes their time to die. Even then, we arrange for as painless a death as possible. In short, they’re spoiled rotten.”

Humanity trotted over to the bed and jumped onto Lust’s firm, muscular torso. Humanity purred, padded, and lied down in a contented fluffy ball. I squashed a momentary pang of envy as Lust rewarded him with a firm rub behind the ears. Humanity twitched in pleasure.

“They’re spoiled rotten,” he continued, “And yet cats weren’t made for this kind of life. They were made for roaming the forests, for hunting, marking their territory, fighting–and fucking. Whether you are a Darwinist or a Creationist, there’s no way around it. Darwin says that tens of millions of years have evolved the cat into the thing that it is today–with only a few millennia of inept human intervention for bringing them around to indoor living.

“Moses has a different story, of course. In his system, the domestic cat warrants scarcely a single explicit mention. Now this is surpassingly odd when you consider that he lived a royal life in ancient Egypt, the country that domesticated cats in the first place. But I’m getting off the subject.”

I was entranced.

“In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the cat, like all animals, has an utterly unchanging nature, one forged by God himself. We aren’t to expect anything of cats except the catty–or, on a good day, the feline. They have no souls, and so the poor cats do whatever the poor cats do, no more and no less.”

I remembered a bit of song from my early adolescence, when I was just learning the descriptive power of music:

Everything you’ve ever said is brilliant
Anything you want to do is fine with me…

Oh no, I told myself–that way lies the penalty of unknown severity, and it must be dreadful indeed if Oberon sent Lust himself to tempt me. That song, I reminded myself, was mocking the very thing that now held me by one strand after another.

Perhaps the vague, unspecified penalty would be the death of my companions? But no–Oberon would just as soon kill them anyway and spare all the trouble. Ditto to bodily mutilation. It must be something he wants from me, personally.

Did Oberon hope to learn the secrets of the Asan heresy? He’d have a hard time getting them out of me, as I really didn’t know anything at all just yet. The only other Asan heretics I’d ever known were already in his very own dungeon. No, if Oberon wanted information, then he could have as much information from me as he wanted: I had nothing of value to give.

“I know what you are thinking,” said Lust. “You’re calculating the possibilities, and you’re finding them not so terrible after all. So do you want to come sit on the bed with me?”

There wasn’t the least bit of harm in that, right? It’s all perfectly innocent. I sat on the bed. Lust unclipped a laser pointer from his soccer shorts and flipped it on. (Soccer shorts–My god, he thinks of everything!) Humanity gave an excited yelp as he leapt after the glimmering bead of light.

“See what I mean?”

“Well yes, cats have instincts.”

“More than that! Look around you, man! Cats live and die in an artificial world these days–but all the same, their instincts are just screaming to get out. Every cat is a killer, a biter, a licker of blood. Give them the chance, and every cat is utterly wanton, perfectly promiscuous, spawning more kittens than this poor old world could ever hope to handle.

“They love it; they yowl for it. And people are just the same, living in the very same artificial world, with the very same underlying instincts that push us to do the things that our ancestors did so freely on the wild uninhibited plains of Africa. Those instincts come from a time long before superficial ideas like chastity or self-renunciation. They are always with us, inside every single one of us. Why? Because I am a force of nature, pure and simple.”

“What about morality? Isn’t that eternal?”

“Well of course, my dear boy. If you prefer the Christian worldview, then we don’t have instincts at all–We have Original Sin. Now here’s the beauty part as far as I’m concerned: Original Sin amounts to the very same thing as instinct, only worse, because it condemns you no matter what may happen. Do you do bad things? Then you’re a sinner. Do you not do bad things? Too bad! You’re still a sinner. And we are all doomed to fall eventually, no?”

He paused and raised his thick, sensual eyebrows just the tiniest fraction. He looked directly at me: “So why not fall right now?”

“I never believed in Original Sin. Not even when I was still a Catholic.”

“Ooh, a Pelagian. They always fight the hardest.”

“Free will and tabula rasa,” I replied. “You practically said it yourself: The world doesn’t make sense otherwise.”

“Locke was wrong about tabula rasa, and even he should have noticed it–Why, if he’d even once in his life have had a crush on some sweet young thing, he would have been spouting the doctrine of innate ideas till his dying day. Where, Mr. Locke, in all of your grand philosophy, did that tabula rasa nonsense ever come from?”

“So what’s in it for us?” I asked.

“I thought you’d never ask.” His hand was on my thigh.

“I’m not… asking, per se,” I replied. I crept away from him.

“You could refuse me right now if you wanted, and the game would be over.”

I tried to, but the words caught in my throat. I was enjoying this far too much–and he knew it.

“Do I take your silence for an assent?”

“No.”

“Do I take your ‘no’ for a ‘no?’”

“No!” After all, I rationalized, the last thing I wanted was to go back to the dungeon.

“Do I take that very emphatic ‘no’ for a yes?”

“I don’t know. Let’s keep talking,” I replied.

“You know, a big part of human self-awareness is simply realizing the artificial world in which we all find ourselves. And from there, it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump until we tear all the barriers down. Now cats, they never get the chance: We set up the barriers up for them in advance, and they, being the weaker species, must always obey. Which are you going to be: the weak one, who abides by all these social customs–or the strong one, who sweeps them aside?”

“Now wait just a minute. My own cats aren’t like that at all. I scrub the countertops every single day, and if I so much as leave the house for fifteen minutes, I come back to find dirty pawprints all over the place.”

I didn’t realize it, but I’d just walked into a trap.

“Say, come to think of it,” said Lust with mock gravity, “you’re entirely right! Cats obey only so long as someone else is watching. Sure, they know the rules, but they also know something else, something that cats, if anything, are much more honest about than human beings: Cats know perfectly well that when no one is watching, the rules just don’t apply anymore.”

“But that’s….”

“Unethical? Oh, and does it matter? I can assure you that in this room, absolutely no one is watching.”

I changed the subject.

“By rights, I ought to be furious with you. Do you have any idea how many of my friends and role models you’ve killed? And how many of them are sick? And how many of them are scared? Do you have any idea what your meddling has done to gay men in particular? We’re hardly anything more than scapegoats now, and it’s your fault entirely. Much as we like you–much as we love you–we’d all be far better off if you had never existed.”

“Oh, don’t blame me.”

“And why not? If it weren’t for you, all those people would still be alive and healthy. What did they ever do to deserve it? Promiscuity may be wrong, but it isn’t that wrong. We don’t even do that to murderers, most of the time. We kill murderers cleanly and efficiently by comparison.”

“I’ll admit it’s a pity, but honestly you can’t blame me for it. Why, I’m as old as creation itself. If a new disease comes along–and if it just so happens to transmit so much more easily by one kind of sex than by another–well, you can’t blame Lust itself. Blame biology, or natural selection, or the vengeful hand of God. But don’t look at me.”

“I can’t see why not.” The truth was, I couldn’t look away. I was still plenty angry, but I still couldn’t look away.

“Besides, I’m an Avatar. It’s totally impossible for me, personally, to have any diseases. You and I could do whatever we wanted, and we wouldn’t have to worry in the least.”

“Look, I don’t suppose it matters to you, but I’m married now.”

“You know, I never have taken much notice of marriage one way or the other. I suspect that someone invented it, a long time ago, as a way of warding me off. Touching, isn’t it? But it’s completely ineffective.”

“I’ve noticed,” I replied. My mouth was dry.

“Whatever we do here is completely without consequence. And no one will ever know.”

The vague and unspecified penalty was growing remoter by the moment.

“One more thing,” I replied.

“Anything.”

“Tell me what the penalty is.”

“You,” he replied, drawing closer, “will simply”–closer still–”have to give up your quest.” He placed a kiss squarely on my lips.

At the very same moment, a deafening crash announced that one of the walls had just collapsed.

“Ha ha!” yelled Claudia through the dust. “He’s safe and sound.” At the very same moment, Lust disappeared, and I was almost sorry to see him go.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Oberon’s men seem to have re-animated Emmett,” replied Mohammed. “Which proved to be a terribly unwise decision on their part. And this time, I guess, poor Emmett must have gotten it through his thick golem skull: Don’t ever let anyone go messing with your soul tablet! The rest, well… It isn’t easy to stop twelve hundred pounds of animated clay with quasi-magical intrinsics.”

“Are you okay? What did they do to you?”

“The same thing, I guess.” Mohammed’s voice trailed off as he looked at the elegant boudoir. The spell was dissipating, and the familiar dungeon was coming back.

“Well, you know. Close enough.”

“You mean it happened to everyone?” I asked.

“It happens to everyone,” Mohammed replied.

Emmett threw down the door of the cell and we walked out of the dungeon.

I rushed back to my companions, who, traveling as they were with a 12-foot walking clay statue, were always easy to find in a crowd. I was eager to tell them of the flash of insight I’d just experienced: Was this the heart of the Asan heresy? I felt I’d grasped something monumental, something I’d first caught an inkling of at the High Places, and that was coming to reshape the way I looked at every aspect of the unreal world–and quite possibly, of the real one as well.

Was this it? Putting one’s interior quest before all the exterior show of the world? And were they–Claudia and Mohammed both–leading me into some sort of awakening? Yes, I was more and more certain that Claudia must be in on it too somehow. I had a lot of questions to ask, and I didn’t know at all where to start.

But to my dismay, I found them in the food-sellers’ section, arguing with a shopkeeper about produce that had been offered to idols.

“I tell you, I cannot eat it,” Mohammed was saying. He barely acknowledged me as I entered the stall.

“And why not? Because it sat in an icebox at the foot of a statue all night?”

“Precisely. It’s against my religion to eat anything that’s been offered to idols.”

“But if you don’t believe in the idols, then their mere presence shouldn’t harm you any, right? And so much less so with a loaf of bread. It’s not like it’s been transsubstantiated or anything.”

“I do not believe in idols. I renounce and abjure their power, and I will not eat anything that has been offered before them.”

“So you admit that they do have power. Otherwise there’s nothing to abjure.”

“Look–I’ll make it simple for you. I despise and revile your superstitious idolatry, and I do not feel the need to explain it any further.”

“But it’s nothing personal, right?”

“Of course. It’s nothing personal,” Mohammed replied, “and really, it’s quite a shame, because I did so hope we could do business.”

“Look,” said the shopkeeper, lowering his voice, “I’m not supposed to tell you this, but at the end of the street, there’s a stall painted all in red. It’s got a graven image of Lugh on the outside, but don’t you pay any attention to that. You go in there, and you can buy food that hasn’t been offered to any idols.”

“Just what I was looking for.”

“Now technically, this is against our religion. See, we despise and execrate your superstitious non-idolatry. But it’s nothing personal, of course, and whenever there’s demand, the supply finds a way.”

Claudia grinned; Mohammed looked suspicious.

“No idols at all?”

“All of the food in that shop has been kept very strictly away from the influence of any pagan gods. And here’s the beauty part–Plenty of pagans go in there, do their shopping, and come out none the wiser.”

“And how’s the selection?”

“Honestly, it’s not too good. But you can at least get enough to eat for the night.”

“We’ll go.”

I tried to reason with Mohammed as we left the shop. I started by reminding him as cautiously as I could that, as a heretic, he need not obey the dietary restrictions of his religion.

“I’m sure it would hardly be the first time that you disobeyed the dictates of your religion.”

He glared at me. “One day maybe you’ll understand this. I know it must be hard for an atheist.”

“Funny,” I replied, “you once told me you didn’t do condescension for the nonbelievers.”

“Look, I made a deal a long time ago, a deal with the Almighty, and now I’m just keeping my part of the bargain. I know it doesn’t make sense to you, and to be honest, it sometimes seems pretty silly to me, too. But in the end, it all adds up. And no, I don’t expect you to understand it.”

“Nothing personal, of course?”

“Of course.”

We walked to the stall; like most in the Paganopolis Market, it was in the form of a large rectangular tent. The front half was open, displaying various goods in bins and baskets. Like always, the back was closed to the public.

Mohammed went in first; an old gnomish woman was counting pieces of flatbread and wrapping them in wax paper as we entered.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“I hear you sell…” Mohammed’s voice trailed off.

“Yes?”

“Well… see… I’m Jewish, and I’m not going to eat anything that’s been offered to idols. I was just wondering if I could find…”

“Unconsecrated food? For sale?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

“You’ve come to the right place,” she said, holding a finger over her lips. “What can I get you?”

Mohammed didn’t trust the meat, but he began picking out vegetables, beans, and bread, none of which, the woman insisted, had been offered to any idol or graven image. Meanwhile, I took the opportunity to do some investigation. To say the least, the results were not what I expected.

“And how, exactly, do you explain this?” I asked, flinging open the canvas flap that separated the sections of the tent.

In the back room, silent and usually out of view, there stood the storage bins of the illicit trade. And on a pedestal in the center of the room, there was a magnificent stone idol. In one hand, she held a hammer; in the other, the shattered image of some false and powerless god.

“Close that flap this instant!” the shopkeeper hissed. “Do you want to get us all arrested?” I complied, but I’d made my point. The three of us now looked at her sternly. This had better be good.

“That,” the woman whispered, “is Iconoclastia, the Protectress of Those Who Do Not Believe In Idols. She wards off the influence of all pagan deities.”

“Is that all she does?” Mohammed asked suspiciously.

“Well, for a small sacrifice, of course.”

“What!?”

“A small sacrifice, which isn’t related to the food that you just picked out,” the shopkeeper replied.

“That all depends on whether flatbread is fungible,” Claudia replied.

“Huh?” said the shopkeeper.

“Never mind,” said Claudia.

“Look,” said Mohammed, “Can’t I just get something that hasn’t been under the influence of any idols at all? Not even Iconoclastia?”

“This is Paganopolis, my friend. You’re not likely to find that here. Technically speaking, making sacrifices to Iconoclastia is illegal to begin with.”

“Well, all right. I’ll take what I’ve got here, I guess.” He paid for his food and left. The shopkeeper took a portion of the money and put it in a small coffer dedicated to the goddess of her forbidden trade.

“What exactly did you mean by ‘fungible?’” Mohammed asked Claudia on the way out.

“A commodity is fungible if a given measure of it can be exchanged arbitrarily for any other similar measure of the same commodity. Money is the classic example of fungibility, because any amount of money can always be exchanged for an equal amount of the same type of money.”

“Like turning water into water. What’s the use?”

“As it happens, pure water is fungible, but the fungibility money can do many other tricks. For instance, liquid assets, as it were, can cancel out debts–because both are just as fungible as money itself. Does it make more sense to pay off your debts? Or does it make more sense to invest? The way to answer this question is to ask yourself which is higher–the interest rate on the debt, or the rate of return on the investment? If the rate of return is higher, then you need not regret allowing the debt to pile up, because as it does, you’ve got a pile of fungible money that’s growing even faster.”

“I see.”

“Are religions fungible?” I asked.

I took Claudia’s silence to mean that she understood what I was getting at.

“–because if so, then we really don’t need to worry too much about the bread. And anyway, I think some of the price of it went as an offering to Iconoclastia, too… And if money really is fungible, then you might as well consider that bread to be tainted.”

“Can it,” she replied. “Alright, you figured me out, too. Well all I can say is, it’s about time. We’ve only been dropping hints the entire trip.”

“So, like, I’m inducted, huh?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Do you guys have any secret symbols or anything to identify each other?”

“Yeah, we’ll have to teach you the symbols pretty soon.”

At that point, a group of at least twenty well-armed men surrounded us. And Emmett was suddenly quite motionless, which ran contrary to his usual habit in these situations.

In the Agora is a new group blog being run by Josh Claybourn, Paul Musgrave, Eric Seymour, and PunchTheBag (Sing it with me now: “One of these things is not like the other…”). We can expect the project to go far, although Paul still does some of his best work alone.

Speaking of loners, Baboon Palace isn’t updated very often, but when it is, it’s brilliant. I laughed out loud at the part about Plato. Really.

Also, I’ve added Marginal Revolution to my blogroll. It’s an economics blog that I’m amazed I hadn’t latched onto sooner.

The next chapter of The Asan Heresy, my National Novel Writing Month effort, will probably be up later today. The last chapter–a longish one–is entitled “Candles and Soap.”

From an op-ed by Peter Bebergal in the Boston Globe:

Dungeons and Dragons reinvented the use of the imagination as a kid’s best toy. The cliche of parents waxing nostalgic for their wooden toys and things “they had to make themselves” has now become my own. Looking around at my toddler’s room full of trucks, trains, and Transformers, I want to cry out, “I created worlds with nothing more than a twenty-sided die!”

Dungeons and Dragons was a not a way out of the mainstream, as some parents feared and other kids suspected, but a way back into the realm of story-telling. This was what my friends and I were doing: creating narratives to make sense of feeling socially marginal. We were writing stories, grand in scope, with heroes, villains, and the entire zoology of mythical creatures.

Exactly. I only wish I had more time for Dungeons & Dragons today–and I hope I still like it just as much when I retire.

The man who had just been bitten by the creature in his pocket was too stunned to say much of anything. His friends, however, were fully in possession of their senses. And they were determined to have some answers.

“What was that you did to him? And how did you stop it? And how did you know just where to look for that… thing?”

“I know a little bit about this stuff,” I replied obliquely. “I got hit by a curse tablet myself no so long ago.” Technically, this was the truth.

“How did it happen?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve never seen one act like that before.” Again, not a lie.

“Do you know who put it there?” And now came the real moment of truth.

Have you ever had one of those moments where your life flashes before your eyes? I don’t mean your past–but your future. I think we’ve all had times where we try to imagine what lies ahead, but no one has them with more anxiety than the liar, who must divide his planning energies between all the usual stuff–and planning so that no one will discover his lie. No question about it, I’d messed up, and no matter which way I looked at things, they weren’t looking good.

Now if I lied, I would probably get caught right away. And if I didn’t get caught right away, I might still get caught later on. And even if I didn’t get caught later on, I would still have a hard time sleeping over it. Surely someone would have seen me, no? And wouldn’t they be biding their time until they had a chance to return the favor? Wouldn’t that make every trip back to the unreal world all the more difficult?

I took a deep breath and told the truth: “I placed the curse. But look, I had no idea it was going to do that–I’ve never seen one do that before. I’m sorry, and I’ll get you help if you need it.”

The next thing I remember was a flurry of legs and arms, one of them bloodied, all of them doing their best to hurt me in one way or another. I’m told that Emmett came in and chased off my assailants, but I don’t remember that part at all. The next thing I recall, the golem was standing over me with Mohammed and Claudia looking on. The preacher, the children, and the tourists had all departed, leaving only a lashed wooden podium that two gnomes were busy dismantling. They tried hard not to look in our direction.

“What did you say to him?” asked Mohammed.

“I told the truth.”

“Why on earth did you do that?”

“So I would get beaten up.”

“You wanted to get beaten up?”

“In a sense I had it coming. Better to take it now than worry about it in the future.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with your Catholic upbringing, does it?”

“I’m not sure; I’ll probably never know. But I really had done something wrong, and I didn’t think that lying would have helped matters any.”

“Jason, look. Any sane person would have lied there. You could have just told the lie, gotten it over with, and been on your way. It’s not in the rulebooks, but that’s how life works. And with the little magic I know, I could easily have covered for you.”

“A fine use for the secrets of the Kabbalah,” I replied. “But look on the bright side–It’s over now, right? Better to have a little pain up front, rather than a long time spent worrying. We’ve seen the last of them, and so much the better.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure. It seems like whether you told the truth or not, those guys might still cause trouble in the future. The next time they might find you alone.”

“But that’s a much simplerworry. I only have to worry about my own survival, not about keeping a bunch of strangers from discovering the truth. And isn’t that so much better?”

“If you say so.”

“So what are you doing here anyway? I mean, besides masochism,” asked Claudia.

“You mean what am I doing in Gnomerica?”

“I mean what are you doing in the unreal world? You’re not from here; I can tell. In fact, I bet you’re from the real world,” she said accusingly. “You’re over-eager when it comes to magic, and frightfully naive about philosophy. They’re the true signs of a real-worlder if ever I saw them.”

“I’ve heard worse,” I replied. “And as it happens, I do come from the real world. I’m searching for the Castle of the Inner Ethical Council. I’ve a question I’d like to ask them. Or several, by now. Yet I can’t seem to find it.”

“The Castle?” Claudia replied. “I hear that it’s hard to find.”

“You aren’t kidding. Once someone finds it, the fool thing gets up and moves somewhere else. And here I am, chasing after it on foot.”

“Well there’s no need to go on foot. Look, I’ve got a flying carpet; we’ll head back to my place and take the rug.”

“Really?”

“Anything to get you out of Gnomerica.”

“Wow, thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. Just so long as you promise to keep a low profile on the way. And to get back to the real world as soon as you can.”

“Sure… What’s the catch?”

“Oh, nothing at all. I suspect everyone stands to benefit.” It certainly sounded like a good deal to me, but I wondered how Mohammed would do in keeping his curious secret from her. I looked in his direction; he nodded approvingly.

“What interests me most,” I said, “–and I think this is why I told the truth–is that just about anyone would have lied in that situation. But if you think about it, the benefits of lying are really quite debatable.” I stood up and rubbed what would almost certainly be a black eye by tomorrow.

“So let me see if I understand this,” said Claudia. “You told the truth–just to be different?”

“I thought telling the truth was an end in itself,” I replied, defensively. “And if that’s the case, well, it’s not like I need any particularly good reasons for it.”

“You real-worlders are impossible,” she replied.

“I suppose we are. But now that I’ve regained consciousness, I’ve been wanting to ask you about the sermon.”

“Shoot.”

“It was a lot more spiritual than I expected from gnomes.” She glared. “I mean, well, you know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t. But continue.” Blame it on the recent concussion, but so help me I continued.

“Well, a lot of economists look at the squishy, invisible stuff as fundamentally shaped by the material. And when the material things change, man’s values and spirituality just rearrange themselves to fit with the times. I figured most economists were like that.”

“Karl Marx,” she spat. We’d reached Claudia’s house, which proved not very far at all from the podium.

“Well, I thought someone should bring it up.”

“Virtually no one ever does, at least not here,” she said as she opened the door and invited us in. Emmett had to wait outside, which golems do without complaining.

“Why not Marx? It seems like a reasonable argument, at least on the surface. See, I figure ’spirit’ is mostly a lot of wishful thinking. Even if you grant that one religion really is the right one, all of the rest might still fall victim to Marx’s critique: A person’s wishful thinking all depends on the things he already has.”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Then how does it work? I mean, the Rope Sermon was just a metaphor about knowledge, right? We aren’t to think that it’s literally true. And you have to admit that it serves the gnomes pretty well, while leaving the humans quite cold.” I thought of the hecklers laughing about invisible rope.

“What’s the difference?” asked Claudia. I couldn’t answer, so I let her continue.

“Thoughts are metaphors; they are models and approximations and generalizations. From your idea of the color blue–all the way up to the idea of truth, or justice, or the Supreme Being. To say that spirituality is all a reflection of the material world doesn’t do a thing against the spiritual project.”

We were silent for a long time as she packed a few things for the trip. Then she brought the four of us into the garage adjoining the house. I was about to ask where the car was when I realized that the garage itself was carpeted–and that we’d be taking the carpet. We stepped on, and it rose gently into the air, cupping our legs so we wouldn’t fall out. The garage door opened, the carpet slid forward, and Emmett climbed on.

“Which way?” asked Claudia. I searched the depths of my intuition, which had been running entirely dry of late.

“East,” I replied. “I’m pretty sure it’s east.” And off we went.

“You know what soured me on religion?” I asked.

“Was it growing up a Catholic?” replied Mohammed.

“No. I was perfectly happy as a Catholic. Then I went through a phase where I was a nonbeliever, but still I really wanted to believe. I even went to confession once, and I confessed, ‘I’m not sure I believe in God anymore.’ Man, I wish I’d written down that conversation.

“Catholicism didn’t have the answers for me. So then I thought maybe if I found the right religion, spirituality could start to make sense for me again. I called myself an atheist back then, but I think if I’d found something that seemed to work, I’d gladly have adopted it.

“But finally there came the last straw, an event that made me decide against the very existence of the spirit. In the end, I concluded that the whole thing was nothing more than a massive fraud. Religion to me was just a bunch of nonsense being perpetuated by people who didn’t want us using our minds.” I paused as Claudia furrowed her brow. Mohammed was impassive. “You sure you want me to go on?”

“Yes,” she finally said.

“See, I started dating a neo pagan. He and I went to ceremonies together, hosted by a group of latter-day druids. At first I went out of curiosity, but after a time I had to admit that aesthetically, I was much more a pagan than a Catholic. For one thing, pagan celebrations were fun. There was food and drink, dancing and games. I loved the pagans’ closeness to the natural world and wondered whether this wasn’t what I’d missed in Catholicism.

“But there was trouble in paradise, because I got hung up on the subject of archetypes. I just couldn’t conceive of the neo-pagan ‘god’ and ‘goddess’ as anything other than manifestations of my own interior mental life, and feeble ones at that, newly acquired and with difficulty. So help me, I couldn’t picture them as spirits in their own right. And this, the movement insisted, was precisely what they actually were. These were real entities, not archetypes.

“Now I was entirely willing to embrace a religion that dealt freely in archetypes, that acknowledged its gods only as symbols, and that re-invented them whenever the need for new ones arose. I was a lot less willing to embrace a religion that viewed the god and the goddess as living, breathing entities, as beings who had existed for all eternity, just waiting to be discovered by the new, mostly ahistorical neopagan movement. Nothing seemed more obvious to me than the idea that the gods were constructs. Useful perhaps, but certainly constructs–just like every other god and goddess that we’ve ever come up with.

“Something rang especially false about the first generation of neo-paganism, which on the one hand claimed to have ancient roots, and on the other hand was obviously making things up as it went along. Honestly, I think I’d have preferred just admitting the fabrications. And I’d have much preferred to get rid, for crying out loud, of the hokey idea that spirits were watching over our shoulders.”

“A religion of loneliness,” Mohammed replied. “Not bad.”

“I knew I’d reached the last straw when I heard a celebrant describe an offering he was about to make. He said, ‘And then we give the goddess a candle as a reward.’ For days I was disgusted. I couldn’t think of anything more crude, more mercenary, more undignified, than a candle-craving goddess who would trade her affections for a bit of melted wax. I never went to another ceremony again.

“From the height of religious respectability to the leading edge of the avant-garde, all the gods and goddesses were clamoring after the merest stuff. They wanted things, things that we would wave under their noses from afar: Candles, bread, wine, love, good deeds, charity, faith. Corpses. Why would any of it please any of them–even the faith or the love? Why should they ever sit up and take notice of anything we miserable humans do? What, after all, is in it for them? What’s their reward, anyhow?”

“Had enough for one day?” Claudia asked. I was silent. “Because we ought to make a landing, get our bearings, and see where we are.”

We were hovering over a large city; none of us could recognize it from the air. Magic carpets travel nearly as fast as airplanes–with all the disorientation and none of the instruments. The carpet landed near the center of the town, a short distance away from what appeared to be a substantial market square. We hauled the now-inert carpet to a rental locker and put it away for the evening. Then we went to inspect the square.

From blocks away, we could hear the marketplace crier: “Idols! Graven images! Gods in wood and stone! Guaranteed effective! Low holiday prices! Get ‘em while they last! Idols! Graven images…”

In a single breath, the crier was committing at least four or five mortal sins: Polytheism, image-making, simony, sorcery; and possibly apostasy, sacrilege, and fraud, depending on his background. Customers were flocking to and from the market, their gods wrapped lovingly in tissue paper.

“What are you shopping for?” said one woman to another as they rushed past us.

“Well,” the other one replied, “one of the tiger eye gems has fallen completely out of my Bastet, and I simply must get it set back in place before the festival. And perhaps she could do with a new coat of paint–if it’s not too expensive, that is.”

“Oh please. Why did we have to land here?” I asked.

“What is this place?” asked Mohammed.

“Paganopolis,” replied Claudia. “It’s the capital of Idoltaria.”

And sure enough, from the doors and windows of every building, from the rooftops and the downspouts, tiny idols peered out at us with beady, unresponsive eyes.

“Just you try finding anything kosher in this city,” Mohammed said gloomily.

“Kosher? I though you were–” said Claudia.

“Long story. I’ll tell you later,” said Mohammed. I could only imagine what my poor gnomish companion was thinking.

“Well it won’t hurt to look around a bit, will it?” Claudia asked. “Who knows, in a market this big, we might even find some bargains.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Mohammed said glumly.

We stopped by a stall selling incense, then by another selling fake money. Its sole purpose was to be burned as a sacrificial offering. “You burn money as a gift to the money-god,” the shopkeeper explained. “And in the future, he rewards you with real money.”

“Interesting,” Claudia replied. “What’s the discount rate? And the time to maturity?” Her abacus was at the ready.

“Huh?” said the shopkeeper.

“Never mind. I think I’ll stay in the bond market.”

“I have to go to the bathroom. Can you direct me?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s easy. It’s on the left, past the Temple of Athena,” replied the shopkeeper.

I followed his directions and found myself at a small, dingy public washroom. Even here, tiny idols sat on the doorknobs and fixtures. Inside the stall, the tail of a certain serpentine goddess presented me with the toilet roll. I did what I came to do; then I went to wash my hands.

And there was no soap, dammit.

I left the bathroom; there on the sidewalk was a man seated at a low table. Clearly I hadn’t noticed him before, but I did now: He was thin, dressed in rags, and had obviously been sitting in the marketplace for many a season. A barrel of water sat on a cart next to him; on the table was a pitcher, and–oh happy day–an industrial-sized hand soap dispenser.

“Soap!” he called to me. “Gift of the gods! Collected on a mountain altar after the great sacrifices.”

“Let me guess. It’s a hundred dollars a shot.”

“Don’t be absurd. I offer it to you as a work of charity. Of course, you may contribute whatever you wish.”

I handed over some money and washed my hands. As I did so, I noticed he was praying.

“So you think that soap is holy?”

“Why not?” he replied. “You could easily do worse.”

“And which god are you making happy?”

“The soap god, of course.”

And then I had an epiphany.

I realized that no religion was perfect. They never could be. Perfect isn’t of religion, because most often, religion’s real aim isn’t to win perfection. It’s to satisfy the individual soul, to ground it and to give it a place. It’s not to please some external being–no matter how much the priests of a given religion may claim it is so. The real work of religion is within, and apart from that, all our faith in the One True God might just as well be so much candle wax poured into the uncaring abyss of the Absolute. Or so much soap, gathered from the altars after the sacrifices, when the burned fat and ashes mixed together to make something miraculous.

And what seems like a majestic, flawless, unshakeable faith to one person will inevitably seem like a crabbed superstition to the next. Why? Because each of us carries within him a mass of mental baggage that he can never fully explain nor even hope to see particularly well. At its best, religion helps us glimpse the strange parts within us; it connects us to the universe not in spite of our quirks–but directly, and through them. Religion is the name that we give to our unfinished parts.

The images of religion, from the graven idols all the way up to the One True God–They’re all a lot of shadows on the wall of the soul, traceries with which we try to manipulate the things inside of us, the things that science, technology, medication, and therapy can touch but clumsily. Art does a better job than any of these. And religion does it best of all.

Sci-fi religions like the Raelians and Scientology prosper in part because they offer the promise–a false one in my judgment–that science is either capable of manipulating the soul directly, or else that it is on the verge of doing so. These promise to touch the soul with science, but in reality, they touch the soul through the good old fashioned ways: Suggestion, sympathy, contagion, symbol, and ritual.

From the modern, real-world neopagans offering candles to the goddess–all the way to the unreal mystic before me, praying over his soap–all of them were trying to scratch this ineffable itch, an urge that was as different in each individual as a face or a fingerprint. It was absurd to think that there could be any one true religion, just as it was absurd to think that there might be any one true way of making music. Or any one true fingerprint. Religions were delusional, perhaps–as an atheist, I still believed it–but they made sense, in a way.

Here is the key: The only ways to manipulate the soul are the ones that we find for ourselves. The Catholics have one way of getting at those big, abstract, immeasurable things; the pagans have another. Even the skeptics, the agnostics, the atheists–even the soap-cultists–They are all trying to speak to these difficult, unknowable areas, which respond not at all to logic or reason. They are directed fundamentally inward, and we should expect little or nothing from them when they march out to do battle one another, not in this world or any other.

Voltaire came close to saying it best: Dieu a créé l’homme à son image, et il le lui a bien rendu: God created Man in his own image, and he returned the favor.

But Voltaire meant it with cynicism, as an observation on the all-too-human religions of his own time, and with no inkling that there lurked within his own statement the suggestion that one could–and perhaps even should–create one’s own religion, not necessarily with any of the shapes that have gone before, but with those shapes that manage best the care of the individual soul. And that this work should be done with open eyes, bearing no mystical illusions, satisfied that the great work inside oneself is sufficient for a lifetime.

That would be spirituality at its best. It would mean the management of those intractable tendencies of the soul that cannot be measured or engaged in any other way. It would mean burning a candle not to the wax-hungry goddess, but to the ineffable faculty within me that perceives something peaceful, centering, and life-affirming about the ebb and flow of the flame, the impermanence of the wax, and the air of sanctity that generations of experience have pressed into that image.

It would mean venerating soap if need be, or statues of Bastet, or money for the money-god. Or it would mean rejecting all of them in favor of the One. Or it would mean rejecting the One, to embrace the multiplicity of Everything Else. It would mean an answer to the question: Which one of these is going to speak to the part inside of me that could be reached in no other way?

Then I walked back to the market and saw everything anew.

“I get it now! I understand!” I kept saying.

“What did I tell you?” replied the woman carrying the statue of Bastet. “I knew that getting that eye replaced was a good idea. Hail the goddess, for she is great!”

Suddenly, without any warning, here’s a reason to love Red America again. When the Washington Post profiled a gay teen growing up in Sand Springs, Oklahoma, the Westboro Baptist Church announced that they’d be paying him a visit.

Yes, it was Fred Phelps, of “God Hates Fags” notoriety, and he was planning a protest. Man, what a storyline. I wish I’d written it myself:

[The WBC's] fliers posted a photo of Michael, called him a “doomed teenage fag” and announced that followers of Westboro Baptist in Topeka were on their way from Kansas to stage antigay protests in Sand Springs.

Public theater is the specialty of Westboro Baptist and its minister, Fred Phelps, whose place on the extreme fringe of the antigay movement is symbolized by his Web site, www.godhatesfags.com. But this time, Phelps picked a formidable target…

Janice listened with growing anxiety as her pastor, Bill Eubanks of Cornerstone Church, explained that Westboro Baptist was coming to protest Cornerstone for allowing Michael to worship there. When Eubanks called Westboro, a woman who identified herself as Fred Phelps’s daughter told him that he had not been strong enough in “prescribing the truth about homosexuals.” [...]

Eubanks had known Michael was struggling with his sexuality. But to the pastor, seeing Michael in church meant there was still a chance that he would turn away from homosexuality.

Eubanks was disturbed by the fliers’ hateful message, but he saw an opportunity.

“I get to speak about the grace of God,” he said. “No matter what the sin, God loves you. He is saying, ‘Come on, come back to the family.’ I was an alcoholic and a drug addict. I can see the possibility of change.”

A transformation, from gay to straight.

“These are the hopes, that Michael will change,” Eubanks said.

And that, I’m sure, will give pause to many of my readers. Some Americans really do understand homosexuality as a curable affliction. The medical evidence suggests quite strongly that they are wrong, but let’s face it, this really is a big step forward from Fred Phelps and company, who view homosexuality as an unchosen, unchanging wickedness. (An unchosen wickedness?)

Others have different views, even in an Oklahoma evangelical church:

“There is darkness and there is light and we are in the middle of the light,” Eubanks said, to more thunderous applause. “Say it: God loves us all. All of us!”

After the service, several people came up to hug Janice. One woman held her in an embrace that lasted two minutes, whispering to Janice the whole time.

A burly man with a crew cut gave Michael a thumbs-up. “Man, you be who you are,” Shannon Watie said, holding his Bible. “We got your back.”…

Watie voted for Oklahoma’s ban on same-sex marriage. Civil unions? He might have considered those. Homosexuality? “That’s between the person and God,” Watie said.

When a metal cools slowly, it crystallizes. When it cools quickly, it freezes in a chaotic jumble: This last is a good approximation of the emerging consensus on gay rights in America. Gay rights has arguably progressed faster than any other civil rights movement in history, and this speed has come at the expense of consistency all around. From all the vastly divergent views that Americans hold about homosexuality, an incoherent middle ground is emerging. It looks something like this:

1. If you’re gay, then that’s between you and God.

2. Gay marriage is off the table. Europe may that; Canada may do it too. But America is always right, and we don’t do that here. We do civil unions instead.

I’m happy about point one. Predictably, point two puzzles me. Besides the name–marriage versus civil unions–I’ve yet to hear precisely how my rights and responsibilities will be inferior to those of a straight person. But America is always right, so please, Americans, answer this carefully: What, in justice, must be taken away from me to preserve the essential dignity–and perhaps the continued existence–of straight marriage? This is the part that the consensus has picked up from the other side of the political spectrum, and I want to understand what I’m up against.

A civil union plan that offers all of marriage except the name strikes me as unsatisfying on all fronts. If my relationship is legally the same, then why not use the same name? We call it a “will” whether it’s a man or a woman who writes it.

And if there really is some essential difference between gay relationships and straight ones, than why stop at merely a different name? Why not restrict the rights of gays to something less than those of straights? Or maybe we could subject them to more stringent responsibilities: We could require all gays to get regular VD tests; we could authorize some sort of penalties for breaking the relationship; we could refuse gays the option of no-fault divorce.

If gays really can’t be trusted, and if their relationships indeed are inferior, then there you have it: They must be restricted. The meaning of “civil unions” as a separate institution demands no less, and this is why marriage remains my preferred answer to the question.

But I’m being a grouch. To dispel any potential grouchiness among my readers, I give them the end of the article, which honestly warmed my heart:

Shirley Phelps Roper stood on the sidewalk, holding her God Hates Fags sign and singing “America the Beautiful.” Police were standing by, but all was peaceful. Several cars drove by with their own messages painted on the windows: Go Back to Kansas and God Loves Everybody.

As school let out that afternoon, dozens of people from Tulsa Oklahomans For Human Rights arrived with brooms. In silence, they swept the sidewalk where the Phelps protesters had been. Michael was there, sweeping.

A group of students walked by. One of them, a girl with long, silky hair and a backpack, was obviously fed up with all the protests and counter-protests. “Leave our homos alone,” she said, to no one in particular.

Red America never looked so good.