Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution: The Book That Explains Why Revolutions Keep Failing

 Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution is the book people come to later, after reading The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. On Revolution explains why modern political movements, even well-intentioned ones, so often collapse into chaos, violence, or empty spectacle. Why nearly all revolutions begin with a cry for freedom and end under tyranny. Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, has called On Revolution Arendt’s most important work for our time. 

I didn't read On Revolution to learn about 18th-century history, but that aspect fascinated me the most from my first (of three) readings. I read the book to understand why most revolutions fail. Why do today's movements and “moments” of rising against tyranny today feel simultaneously urgent and powerless—why they generate outrage and mobilization but fail to produce lasting freedom.

Arendt’s central claim: "most modern revolutions confuse liberation with freedom, and the confusion destroys them."

Liberation is not freedom

Liberation means being freed from something—tyranny, poverty, occupation, oppression. Freedom, in Arendt’s sense, means the ability to "act politically with others in a durable public space." It means founding something that lasts: institutions, laws, assemblies, and a shared world where people appear to one another as equals.

The American Revolution, she argues, succeeded because it understood this difference. The French Revolution (and the Russian Revolution) failed because it didn’t.

The American founders, to their eternal credit and our benefit, were obsessed with founding.  They fought to write constitutions and found legislatures, courts, and lasting programs. They worried less about the social questions such poverty, hunger, and inequality and more about how to build a political structure that could outlast them. They created a space for citizens to act together across generations.

The French revolutionaries, by contrast, became consumed by suffering. Once “the people” were redefined as the hungry masses, politics was no longer about public freedom—it became a moral crusade to eliminate misery. And misery, Arendt insists, has no natural limit. Once the revolution defines itself by alleviating suffering, it must keep escalating, because suffering is endless. That is how revolutions devour themselves.

In Arendt’s formulation, compassion is a terrible political guide.

Not because suffering isn’t real—but because it can’t be organized into stable institutions. You can relieve hunger. You cannot found freedom on pity.

Why revolutions radicalize

This is where On Revolution becomes eerily contemporary.

Arendt shows how revolutions tend to slide from political action into moral absolutism. Once a movement defines itself as the voice of “the people,” anyone who disagrees becomes an enemy of humanity itself. Violence becomes justified. Due process evaporates. The revolution must keep purifying itself to remain “true.”

That logic did not die in 1794. It is alive in every movement that substitutes "moral righteousness for political construction."

Arendt is not saying people shouldn’t care about injustice. She is saying that "you cannot build a republic out of rage, resentment, or suffering alone." Those are forces of destruction, not creation.

What the American founders understood—better than almost anyone before or since—is that politics is not primarily about justice in the abstract. It is about "creating a space where people can argue, act, compromise, and govern themselves without killing each other."

That space is fragile. It must be designed, protected, and institutionalized. Once it disappears, no amount of moral fervor can replace it.

The lost tradition of councils

One of the most fascinating parts of On Revolution is Arendt’s recovery of what she calls the “council tradition.” In almost every major revolution—American town halls, French sections, Russian soviets, Hungarian workers’ councils—ordinary people spontaneously create local bodies to govern themselves. These are moments of genuine political freedom: people speaking, voting, deliberating, acting together.

And then, almost without fail, (except in America) these councils are crushed—by parties, bureaucracies, or charismatic leaders.

Why? Because councils represent horizontal power, while modern politics is obsessed with vertical power: seizing the state, controlling the apparatus, winning elections, commanding the police and military. The councils threaten elites of every ideology because they distribute power too widely.

Arendt believed the greatest tragedy of modern revolutions is not that they fail—it’s that they destroy their own most democratic institutions in the process of “winning.”

That insight alone makes On Revolution worth reading in the 21st century.

Why Berkowitz is right

When Berkowitz calls this Arendt’s most important book for our time, he is pointing to something uncomfortable: we live in an age of permanent political agitation with very little political creation.

Everywhere you look, people are mobilized. Very few are building.  Social media creates movements without institutions. Outrage without constitutions. Protests without durable structures. Everyone feels morally outraged; almost no one is founding anything that can last.

Arendt would recognize this instantly. She would say we are drowning in liberation movements that cannot produce freedom. We are very good at tearing down. We are terrible at building a shared world.

On Revolution is not a book you read once and “get.” It is deeply critical of the modern left and deeply skeptical of the modern right. It admires the American founding while being merciless about its blind spots. It honors revolutionary courage while condemning revolutionary excess. And it is written with Arendt’s characteristic clarity: sentences that are lucid and full of insight, but often complex. 

[An aside:  I shared my enthusiasm for Arendt with a friend who is an Arendt skeptic.  There are a lot of Arendt critics who dislike her conclusions in Eichmann in Jerusalem. I had the book with me when we met for coffee. My friend opened the book randomly to the opening sentence of chapter 3, read it aloud and said, "What does that mean." It was 82 words with three dependent clauses. I stammered "I'll get back to you."]

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The hardest thing On Revolution asks us to accept is this: Freedom is boring.

Not in lived experience—but in structure. Freedom requires procedures, rules, institutions, compromise, and limits. It requires people to lose elections and accept it. It requires citizens to live with people they dislike. It requires slow, frustrating, incremental change. It requires grace. And as Arendt says explicitly, it requires forgiveness. 

Revolutionary passion, by contrast, feels alive. It feels pure. It feels righteous. And it burns itself out.

Arendt understood that if you want a society where people can keep acting together, you must give up the dream of moral perfection. You must choose a flawed, procedural, human republic over the intoxicating fantasy of total justice. That's why the woke left felt so wrong with its on line banishing of people. When the Trump right silences critics with death threats they are no better than the left.

In an age of endless crisis and constant mobilization, Hannah Arendt’s message is quietly radical: the goal is not to feel righteous—it is to build a world where freedom can endure.

Arendt might say we’re watching a classic revolutionary pathology play out in slow motion: movements replacing politics with moral crusade. When that happens, institutions stop being arenas for disagreement and start being treated as obstacles to righteousness. Courts, universities, media, legislatures—once they fail to deliver the “correct” outcome, they’re declared illegitimate. That’s how democratic organs get hollowed out from the inside.

You see it on both ends of the spectrum. One side tries to discredit elections, the other to delegitimize speech and process. Different flags, same impulse: “If you disagree, you don’t belong.” That’s exactly the move Arendt warned about—the moment when “the people” becomes a moral category rather than a political one.

The tragedy is that Americans are still surrounded by the very tools Arendt thought precious—local institutions, courts, assemblies, constitutional processes—but more and more activists treat those tools as corrupt by definition. They want purity, not procedures. That’s the road that leads away from freedom, even when it’s paved with good intentions.

Sadly, On Revolution predicts nothing good in the current situation in Iran.  The Jihadis that run the country have already murdered thousands. They could murder tens or hundreds of thousands and believe they are doing God's will. And if the mullahs fall whatever follows them will be more interested in power than freedom. 

 

Living on the Edge: Reading All of Sebastian Junger

Sebastian Junger

Over the past fifteen months I read all six of Sebastian Junger’s books. I didn’t plan it as a project, but once it started it took on the coherence of one. It began in October 2024, when I heard Junger speak at the Hannah Arendt Center conference at Bard College. His talk focused on Tribe, but what stayed with me afterward—especially over lunch—was not any single argument, but his way of seeing the world. He spoke about danger, belonging, and the fragile structures that hold people together in crisis with the clarity of someone who had tested those ideas with his own body.

I had already seen Restrepo in 2010, the year I returned from Iraq. I watched it in a small theater in the Village with Jim Dao, then the New York Times’ war correspondent embedded with the 10th Mountain Division. Dao had encouraged me to see it, and he was right. The film didn’t feel like most war documentaries, which are shot from relative safety or filtered through official narratives. Junger and Tim Hetherington were in the middle of the firefights. The camera shook because bullets were flying. It was impossible not to feel that the filmmakers were risking their lives alongside the soldiers they were recording. Whoever in Army Public Affairs allowed that film to be released was either extraordinarily brave or quietly suicidal. Nothing in it was sanitized.

What struck me most at the time was how exposed Camp Restrepo was compared to my own deployment. I spent much of my Iraq tour on a large airbase. We had missile attacks, and we took badly aimed fire on night flights, but it was nothing like being in an isolated valley surrounded by hostile forces. The men at Restrepo were under threat every hour. When I later read War, Junger’s written account of that deployment, I gained a deeper understanding of the unit and of his own presence there. It only increased my respect for what he and Hetherington had done.

After the Arendt conference, I decided to begin with Tribe. It was the conceptual bridge between Restrepo and everything else Junger had written. I have known the comfort and intensity of belonging, and I also know how fleeting it can be. My best tank crew—the one I trained for months and that shot at the top of our battalion gunnery—fell apart within weeks. One man was reassigned. Another left the Army. Another went to a different unit. As Junger makes clear in both Tribe and Freedom, a tribe can be for life, or it can be for only as long as the mission lasts. Either way, while it exists, it feels more real than almost anything else.

Freedom extended that insight. It argues that human beings are built to endure danger, risk, and uncertainty, and that safety, while pleasant, can be psychologically corrosive. Junger’s stories of people choosing hardship over comfort made me rethink my own career, my own decisions to re-enlist and to seek out difficult environments. Comfort is not always the same as meaning.

Two of Junger’s books unexpectedly returned me to my childhood in the Boston suburbs. A Death in Belmont brought back the fear that hung over our neighborhoods during the era of the Boston Strangler. I was a kid then, but I remember how adults spoke in hushed tones, how doors were locked, how an invisible threat hovered over everyday life. Junger treated that story not just as true crime but as a social mystery, a way of examining how communities process terror.

The Perfect Storm did something similar through nature. Growing up near the Atlantic, I always knew the sea could turn deadly. I had seen nor’easters from shore. Junger turned that abstract danger into a gripping reality, showing how ordinary working men—fishermen just doing their jobs—could be swallowed by forces far beyond their control. Like Belmont, it is a book about how thin the line is between normal life and catastrophe.

Then there was In My Time of Dying. That book forced me to look again at my own near-death experiences. I have had two. One was an explosion that left me blind. The other was a racing crash that broke my neck and nine other bones. I faced mortality, but not in the prolonged, grinding way Junger did. His clarity about what it means to cross that threshold and come back from it is unlike anything I’ve read. It is not mystical. It is analytic, almost clinical, and because of that it is profoundly unsettling.

After finishing all six books, something shifted. I realized that, for all my brushes with danger, I had lived a comparatively sheltered life. Junger had gone farther—to the edge of war, to the edge of the sea, to the edge of his own biological existence—and then returned to tell the story with discipline and precision. He did not glamorize risk. He examined it.

Taken together, Junger’s books describe a world more dangerous than I experienced and more honest than most of what passes for contemporary nonfiction. He writes about soldiers under fire, fishermen in storms, families stalked by a serial killer, and a man dying on a hospital bed, but the subject is always the same: how human beings behave when the structures that protect them fall away. Reading him in sequence revealed a single, sustained inquiry into what it means to live on the edge of disaster—and how, sometimes, that is where life feels most real.

Sherlock Holmes, The Dog That Didn't Bark, and Protests in Iran

 

The phrase “The dog that didn’t bark” is one of my favorite metaphors from Arthur Conan Doyle’s imagination.  In this case part of the 1892 Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze."

In the story, a valuable racehorse disappears and its trainer is murdered. Inspector Gregory is puzzled because the watchdog in the stable made no noise during the crime. Holmes points out that this is exactly the key fact.

Here is the crucial exchange:

Gregory: “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

The implication:

The dog knew the intruder. If a stranger had come, the dog would have barked. Because it stayed silent, the culprit must have been someone familiar—an insider.

Since then, “the dog that didn’t bark” has become shorthand for:

An important absence — something that should have happened, but didn’t, and therefore reveals the truth.

The people of Iran have been protesting the tyrannical murderous Jihadi regime that runs their country for a month, at the cost of their lives. Yesterday 200 protesters were killed.  

Why are the campus protesters who were out in the street in support of Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters since October 7, 2023, not out in support of the people of Iran?  

Where were those campus protestors when the Iranian people strove for freedom in 2022? In 2009?  

No Jews, no news. 

The people who chant "Globalize the Intifada" in America and are silent about Iran are showing how much they care about the suffering of Islamic people.  

They don't, unless they can blame the Jews.

While protesters in Iran were slaughtered by security forces, the pro-terrorist Jew haters were on the street in Manhattan chanting: 

"There is only one solution; Intifada, Revolution!" "Death to the IDF" and "Say it loud, say it clear, we support Hamas here."

George Orwell’s Three-Power World—and Ours

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four does not present a world of many nations. It presents a world of three empires—Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia—locked in permanent, shifting conflict. The alliances are deliberately fluid. One day Oceania is allied with Eastasia against Eurasia; the next day it is the reverse. The public is required to instantly forget yesterday’s enemy and embrace today’s. The deeper purpose of this system is not military victory but mental control. If the Party can change who the enemy is, it can change what reality itself means.

What Orwell was describing was not a fantasy of chaos but a theory of stability: a three-power system in which no one wins, no one loses, and conflict never ends.

We now live in something very close to that world.

The United States dominates the Western Hemisphere and the Atlantic order. China dominates East Asia and increasingly the Pacific and much of the global manufacturing system. Russia dominates a northern arc—from Eastern Europe through Central Asia—using energy, war, and coercion to compensate for its weaker economy. None of these powers is strong enough to rule the world, but each is strong enough to enforce a regional sphere.

And just like in Orwell, alliances are not moral commitments; they are tools.

Europe is “America’s ally” while being economically bound to China. India works with Washington while buying Russian oil. Turkey is in NATO while coordinating with Moscow. Saudi Arabia shifts between the dollar and the yuan. Nothing is permanent. Everything is transactional. The public is told these are contradictions. In reality, they are the system working exactly as designed.

This is where Trump fits in.

Trump does not think in terms of rules-based order or international law. He thinks in terms of turf. Venezuela is in America’s hemisphere, so Washington gets to decide what happens there. Ukraine sits in Russia’s historical sphere, so Putin’s actions are something to be bargained over rather than confronted absolutely. Taiwan sits in China’s orbit, so deterrence is maintained rhetorically while real red lines quietly soften. None of this requires Trump to admire Putin or Xi. It only requires him to accept that great powers get their neighborhoods.

Africa, in this worldview, is what Orwell called a “disputed zone”—a place where all three powers operate, extract, and interfere, precisely because no one controls it. China builds ports and mines. Russia sends mercenaries and weapons. The U.S. applies aid, sanctions, and pressure. The people who live there are not the point. The denial of territory to rivals is.

Orwell’s insight was that a three-power world does not bring peace. It brings endless, low-level conflict and constant narrative manipulation. Today’s ally can be tomorrow’s threat. Yesterday’s outrage can be erased by tomorrow’s deal.

The real war, then and now, is not over land. It is over memory—who gets to say what has always been true.

Orwell is the Prophet of Trump's Brave New World

I am among those who believed the Aldous Huxley predicted the future in his Brave New World. It was not Big Brother who crushed us individually and as a people.  We would simply sell out for drugs and entertainment.  

Which is true. And electing a game show host President underlined that truth with a Sharpie.  

And yet, world politics really is devolving into the spheres of influence Orwell predicted.  Huxley saw our individual fall into oblivion. Orwell saw the new world order.

Poet Flyer by E. John Knapp, a Review

 

E. John Knapp’s Poet Flyer surprised me. The beginning of the story is routine and predictable as a war memoir. Whirlwind love. Whirlwind training. Go to war on arrival in England. On the surface it looks modest: a slim volume of poems written by a former B-17 navigator, telling the story of his life in verse. Then with no warning, tragedy rips through Knapp's life.  From that fatal day forward the book becomes an account of survival. Not survival in the cinematic sense, but the quieter, lonelier kind—the survival of the man who lived while his crew did not.

Knapp does not frame his story as a war epic. He begins with training, with the formation of a ten-man bomber crew that becomes, by necessity, a family. Anyone who has served in a tightly knit unit will recognize the texture of those early pages the way shared danger forges intimacy faster than time ever could. Knapp makes us feel how completely his identity became bound up with theirs.

The central tragedy of the book is brutally simple. Knapp is grounded for a mission. The crew flies without him. Their aircraft is shot down after returning over the target—a fatal decision by the mission leader. Other crews see three parachutes. Six men, at least, are dead. Knapp survives because of an accident of paperwork and timing. 

What makes Poet Flyer extraordinary is how Knapp refuses to soften that fact. There is no melodrama, no attempt to turn the event into a lesson. Instead, the poems circle it again and again, the way a mind circles a trauma it can never resolve. He writes about guilt not as a single emotion but as a permanent companion, one that walks beside marriage, fatherhood, career, and old age. The war ends. His life goes on. But his empty seat in the bomber never disappears.

And yet this is not a book of despair. One of Knapp’s great achievements is to show how a person can carry unbearable knowledge and still live fully. He comes home to his wife. They raise children. He works. He loves. But always, somewhere in the background, there is the image of a burning aircraft and three white blossoms of parachute silk. The happiness is real—and so is the haunting.

The choice to tell this story in verse is crucial. Prose would have invited explanation and narrative smoothing. Poetry allows Knapp to write the way memory actually works: in flashes, fragments, images that refuse to be put in order. His language is plain. He writes like a man trained to calculate courses and distances, now measuring the space between what happened and what should have happened.

Poet Flyer is a war story that does not pretend war ends when the shooting stops. It is about survivor’s guilt—but also about moral luck, about the terrifying truth that who lives and who dies is often decided by chance.

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A particularly painful aspect of the story for me is how John lost his comrades.  My uncle Jack was on active duty with the U.S. Air Force from 1958-1978. He was a navigator on a KC-97 tanker plane in 1963.  He was on stand down to get married.  Just before his wedding his entire crew was killed in a midair explosion. I was 10 years old and attended the wedding with my family. I can vaguely remember a very somber event.  Jack did three full-year tours in Vietnam and three shorter tours after that tragic event.  

Sachsenhausen Nazi Death Camp.

Sachsenhausen occupies a grim but central place in the Nazi camp system. Located just north of Berlin near the town of Oranienburg, it was established in 1936 as a model concentration camp—designed not only to imprison enemies of the regime but to demonstrate how the entire terror apparatus was meant to function. Unlike Auschwitz or Treblinka, Sachsenhausen was not primarily built as a mass extermination center, but it became a central node in the machinery of murder, forced labor, and bureaucratic control that made the Holocaust possible.

Because of its proximity to Berlin, Sachsenhausen took on a special role. It housed many political prisoners, resistance figures, and high-profile detainees, including German dissidents, foreign politicians, clergy, and later Allied prisoners of war. Just as important, it was the administrative and training hub for the SS-run camp system. The SS Inspectorate of Concentration Camps was headquartered nearby, and Sachsenhausen became the place where guards were trained and procedures standardized. What was learned here—how to break prisoners, how to organize forced labor, how to manage mass death—was exported to camps across occupied Europe.

Sachsenhausen was also a killing site in its own right. Tens of thousands of prisoners died from starvation, disease, exhaustion, beatings, and execution. In 1941, the camp was used to murder at least 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, many shot in a specially constructed execution facility known as Station Z. Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others deemed “undesirable” were imprisoned and killed here. While it did not have the industrialized gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sachsenhausen had gas vans, shooting installations, and crematoria designed to process bodies efficiently.

The camp’s layout itself reflected Nazi ideology. Prisoners’ barracks were arranged in a fan shape around a central parade ground, allowing guards in a single watchtower to survey the entire compound. This was not accidental. Sachsenhausen was built as a demonstration of how surveillance, discipline, and terror could be made architectural. The prisoner was never meant to escape being seen—or being controlled.

Sachsenhausen’s role in the broader death-camp system was therefore structural as well as lethal. If Auschwitz was the industrial heart of genocide, Sachsenhausen was part of its brain. Procedures for registration, punishment, labor deployment, and extermination were refined here before being implemented elsewhere. The men who ran Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz often trained in or passed through Sachsenhausen.

When Allied forces closed in during 1945, tens of thousands of Sachsenhausen prisoners were forced on death marches westward; many died along the roads. Those left behind were liberated by the Red Army in April 1945. The site later became a Soviet special camp, where thousands more prisoners died, adding another tragic layer to its history.

Sachsenhausen is the place where bureaucratic murder was organized, tested, and perfected—a reminder that genocide does not begin with gas chambers, but with offices, training programs, and men who learn how to make cruelty efficient.

 

My Books of 2025: A Baker's Dozen of Fiction. Half by Nobel Laureates

 

The Nobel Prize 

In 2025, I read 50 books. Of those, thirteen were Fiction.  Of that that baker's dozen, six were by Nobel laureates in Literature: four of whom I never read before. Early in the year, I was talking to one of my well-read friends about Nobel laureates in Literature. She reads the leading author of a country before she visits for the first time.  She had read Blindness by Jose Saramago before visiting Portugal. He won the Nobel Prize in 1998. I decided to read it and was stunned.  It was terrifying. If asked for a genre for this book, I would say Horror! Brilliant and frightening.

Next was The Vegetarian by 2024 winner Han Kang.  Another beautiful and haunting novel.  When I hear the word vegetarian now, I think of the crazy beginning of this novel. Until this year I never read Ernest Hemingway the 1954 laureate.  I finally read The Old Man and the Sea and loved it. Later I read In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who won the prize in 1970.  I had meant to read this novel for more than a decade. It is so good.  It says so much about life in the Soviet GULAGs that could not be said in the relentless reporting of The GULAG Archipelago. 

The fifth was A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux the 2022 winner. I bought the book at The Red Wheelbarrow English-language bookstore across from Luxembourg Gardens in Paris in November and read it on the plane back to America.  It’s about her father and her family’s life in the years after World War II.  On a long flight back from Asia, I re-read The Remains of the Day by 2017 Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. I have read all of Ishiguro’s books.  This one is my favorite.

I read a history book by the 1953 Nobel laureate: The Great Democracies by Winston Churchill, bringing my total to seven winners of the Nobel Prize in literature. Next year I plan to read Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn, A Happening by Ernaux, and For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway.

Leading the list of the other seven novels I read was Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald.  It is a novel that begins two decades after World War II but is very much about The Holocaust. It unfolds slowly showing how that tragedy radiated through life far from the horror of the camps. 

Another friend recommendation was Piranesi, a strange fantasy novel with many references to C.S. Lewis and the Inklings. My wife read the John Grisham novels The Firm and The Exchange to me on long car trips.  The Firm was great.  The Exchange not so much. 

The last three are re-readings: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera was just ss strange and good a decade after my first reading. Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers confirmed my delight in the world of Lord Peter Wimsey. This month I re-read The Killer Angels by Michael Shaaara.  I first read this book in 1980 after three years as a tank commander in West Germany. I toured Gettysburg soon after and could not believe Lee ordered Pickett to charge across that field or Hood to charge up Little Round Top.  In re-reading it seemed much clearer that Longstreet was the moral center of this brilliant story. 

God, Human, Animal, Machine by Megan O’Gieblyn, A Review

Megan O’Gieblyn’s God, Human, Animal, Machine is not a book about technology so much as a book about belief—specifically, what happens to belief when God disappears but the habits of faith remain. Its animating insight is that much of our contemporary language about artificial intelligence, consciousness, and human enhancement is recycled theology. O’Gieblyn is unusually well positioned to see this, because she did not arrive at the subject as a detached critic. She was raised in a Christian fundamentalist household, homeschooled for much of her youth, and enrolled in the Moody Bible Institute, one of the most conservative evangelical Bible schools in the United States, with the intention of studying theology and entering ministry.

That formation matters. Moody is not a vague spiritual environment; it is doctrinally orthodox, Scripturally literalist, and saturated in eschatology. O’Gieblyn absorbed a worldview in which truth was absolute, history was teleological, and human life had cosmic significance within a divinely authored plan. When she lost her faith and left Moody, she did not leave those habits of thought behind. Instead, God, Human, Animal, Machine shows how they reemerged—transposed into secular keys—when she encountered the metaphysics embedded in modern technological discourse.

The book’s central claim is blunt and persuasive: many of the grand promises surrounding AI and digital consciousness are not scientific conclusions but metaphysical inheritances. When technologists speak of “uploading” minds, achieving immortality through data, or creating systems that transcend human limitation, they are echoing Christian doctrines of resurrection, salvation, and divine omniscience. O’Gieblyn does not argue this as a cheap debunking move. She understands the appeal. Having once believed in a world governed by transcendent meaning, she recognizes the emotional force of narratives that promise continuity, purpose, and escape from death.

What gives the essays their bite is her refusal to sneer. She knows from experience that belief systems are not held because they are foolish, but because they answer real human longings. At the same time, she brings a former-believer’s suspicion to secular dogma. She examines metaphors—mind as software, brain as hardware, self as information—not as neutral explanatory tools but as formative commitments. Once adopted, they quietly reshape ethics, politics, and how we value human life. Optimization replaces dignity; intelligence displaces wisdom.

Throughout the book, O’Gieblyn reads technological futurism the way a theologian reads doctrine: testing coherence, tracing hidden assumptions, and noting where rhetoric outruns evidence. Her fundamentalist background sharpens this instinct. She knows how totalizing systems protect themselves from doubt, and she sees similar mechanisms at work in certain strains of techno-utopianism.

God, Human, Animal, Machine ultimately resists easy conclusions. It does not argue for a return to faith, nor does it celebrate disenchantment. Instead, it offers something rarer: an account of intellectual afterlives. The gods may be gone, O’Gieblyn suggests, but the structures of worship persist. Technology has not freed us from theology; it has given it new names.

Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels is one of the war novels that improves with rereading—not because it grows more comforting, but because it grows more unforgiving. I first read it in 1980, just after leaving active duty in the U.S. Army, having spent years as a tank commander training for a war that everyone assumed would be fought on the East–West border in Germany. I read it because a friend recommended it. I was expecting a good historical novel. Which it is, and much more. It is a study in command failure, moral and physical courage, and the limits of men who have more trust in faith than reason.

Shaara’s great achievement is that he makes Gettysburg intelligible without making it heroic. The novel is built around a small number of viewpoints—Lee, Longstreet, Chamberlain, Buford, and a few others—and that restraint is its strength. Each man is intelligent. Each is serious. And yet the catastrophe unfolds anyway. There is no incompetence big enough to explain the slaughter. That is what makes the book unsettling. War here is not chaos; it is order pushed to the point of failure by men who believe too much and reason too little.

After reading the book in 1980, I went to Gettysburg and walked the field. Anyone who has done that knows the moment of disbelief Shaara keeps circling. Pickett’s Charge—an infantry assault across nearly a mile of open, rising ground against entrenched troops behind a stone wall—is not just tragic; it is tactically insane. Having spent years training in German terrain, rehearsing attacks and defenses down to the last contour line, I could not make it make sense. Shaara doesn’t try to justify it. Instead, he explains it, which is something else entirely.

Lee emerges as the most troubling figure in the book. He is dignified, paternal, deeply religious—and disastrously wrong. Shaara portrays him as trapped by his own past successes and by a vision of honor that no longer matches reality. Lee believes his men are invincible because they have been before. He believes moral force can substitute for artillery, terrain, and logistics. This is not villainy; it is worse. It is faith masquerading as judgment.

Longstreet, by contrast, feels like a modern officer stranded in the wrong war. He understands defense. He understands firepower. He understands that attacking fortified positions is madness. Shaara gives him the clearest moral voice in the novel, and the most painful one. Longstreet knows what will happen, says so repeatedly, and is overruled. Any soldier who has watched a bad plan move forward because rank demands obedience will recognize this dynamic immediately.

On the Union side, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain provides the book’s narrow beam of light. His stand on Little Round Top is deservedly famous, but Shaara resists turning it into a simple triumph. Chamberlain’s decision to fix bayonets is not glorious—it is desperate. The men are exhausted. Ammunition is gone. The choice is not between victory and defeat but between annihilation and a slim chance to survive. That distinction matters, and Shaara never lets us forget it.

What makes The Killer Angels endure is that it refuses to flatter the reader. It does not celebrate war, and it does not reduce it to absurdity either. It insists that intelligent, honorable men can make catastrophic decisions and that those decisions, once made, grind forward with terrible momentum. The book understands something soldiers learn early: bravery does not cancel bad terrain, bad intelligence, or bad orders.

Standing at Gettysburg after reading Shaara, the landscape itself becomes an argument against romanticism. The slope is real. The distance is real. The stone wall is real. And the idea that courage alone could overcome those facts feels not noble, but grotesque. Shaara knew that. The Killer Angels is not about why men fight so well. It is about why they die so predictably when leadership confuses belief with reality.

Don Quixote and Friendship a Review by James Como in Memorium

 

James Como, professor of rhetoric, 

a founder of the New York C.S. Lewis Society

Last month while I was traveling in Poland and Germany visiting Nazi Death Camps, my friend Jim Como was speaking as a C.S. Lewis conference in Romania.  After his lecture, Jim died suddenly. He was 79.  I read the article below and meant to write to Jim when I returned from Europe. I loved the article and loved Don Quixote. My wife read much of it to me from an unabridged translation.  I re-read War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy last year and was thinking of re-reading Don Quixote in 2026.  Jim's article confirmed my plan to re-read this wonderful book. 

Whether you have read Don Quixote or not, read the article below and see how friendship propels this wonderful tale.

Rest in Peace Jim.

[From the Hedgehog Review]

The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha has been examined, re-examined, and cross-examined. And yet, astonishingly, we have yet to get to the bottom of it, and perhaps never will. That may be one reason Samuel Johnson could say it is the only book he wished were longer. I hope to add to the fun by revealing a storytelling device (hiding in plain sight) that I believe is, first, of very great value; second, propulsive throughout the narrative; and, third, responsible for bringing out two thematic features that matter transcendently.

Think of the beginning of things, according to Genesis. “Then God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” God did not manufacture light, because He did not have to. Speaking was enough. Later we are reminded that “In the beginning was the Word”—the logos, fraught with meaning—“and the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.” So all of creation, including us, are Him speaking. And not only that. Such is the generosity of God that he gave us the power of speech.

In The Kingdom of Speech (2016), Tom Wolfe reminded us that we are Homo loquax, alone in the regnum loquax, the Kingdom of Speech. After rigorous research, he concluded that “the most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever.” Furthermore, “in the one hundred and fifty years since the Theory of Evolution was announced [linguistic researchers] have learned…nothing.” As Wolfe emphasized, “speech is not one of man’s several unique attributes—speech is the attribute of all attributes.” And then he concluded elegantly: “To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved into Michelangelo’s David.”   

We most often practice this uncommon ability in common conversation, which to many of us is like wetness to a fish, taken for granted. Conversation: from com and versare, “to occupy oneself along with”; and from conversus, the past participle of converter, “to turn about.” The great Michel de Montaigne, in “On the Art of Conversing,” said of it: “The most fruitful and natural exercise of our mind, in my opinion, is discussion. I find it sweeter than any other action of our life; and that is the reason why, if I were right now forced to choose, I believe I would rather consent to lose my sight than my hearing or speech.”

Montaigne knew that iden­tity is at the heart of healthy conversation. Who are you? Would you like to know who I am? I favor both. The process entails a burden of accountability: for being voluble, for discovering, choosing, designing, examining, arguing, judging, making and expecting sense, and finally for performing, as though others matter greatly and we owed them our best. After all, our attitudes toward law, duty, and morality, as well as a common language, religious beliefs and rituals, our reverence of iconic people, places, and things, our folklore and myths—these are all formed by conversations great and small. John Durham Peters (in Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication) pierces to the center of the act:

“communication” is…from the Latin communicare, meaning to impart, share or to make common.…The key root is mun-, related to…“munificent,” “community,” “meaning”…munus has to do with gifts or duties offered publicly.

And, I add, socially. That is why we can see it clearly as a portal into, and then sustenance for, friendship, always an enormous gift.

Personal display and recreation, examining the culture around us as well as the one in our own head, whether by argument, exhortation, musings, pontification, joking, diagnosing, wise counsel, or other—these are all in Don Quixote, mattering more than almost any of the Hitchcockian McGuffins (e.g., those windmills), along with the many subjects that arise in conversation. Except one: the Don’s presumed madness. 

His conversations with others are like a doctor’s differential diagnosis: If not this, then…what? In the Second Part, with layers of disputed authorship at issue and much satire and irony at work, this awareness begins to arise—until he snaps out of it and dies, at peace. By then, Cervantes has taken us through a labyrinthine consciousness as engaging as any, even Hamlet’s. He is mad, of course (or probably), certainly often, but always he seems possessed of a glancing awareness of his authentic self.  

How did Cervantes “occupy us” with this “turning about”? Of the 126 chapters, forty-one feature conversation and twenty-four of those are preponderantly, if not wholly, conversational, and, of those, several are pivotal. (We should keep in mind that Cervantes was also a playwright.) He converses with his reader, but also with Quixote, who converses with everyone, including himself, or so it seems. Most notably Quixote (and so Cervantes) continually talks with the character who may be the greatest sidekick and friend in literary history, Sancho Panza. Together the two of them quibble, quarrel, explain, justify, console, advise, rhapsodize, lie, confess, forgive, and love. Who wouldn’t want a friend like Sancho, clueless though he often is? 

Choose any one of those forty-one chapters and you will likely find a conversation that develops character, expands a theme, or moves the action. But, in the case of such randomness, a pattern would be lost, because conversations become slightly more laden and consequential as Cervantes takes his hero, and us, through the story. For example, in Part Two, chapter eighteen, Sancho has been beaten and is drop-dead tired, having been unaided by the Don. He allows (in Edith Grossman’s translation) that “the better and smarter thing, to the very best of my poor understanding, would be for us to go back home.” So we are at a juncture, early in the story, where the two (and the sane reader must agree) could sensibly turn back.  

But the Don answers, “How little you know, Sancho…about the matter of chivalry.” Sancho replies that, yes, victory is fine, if only they’d had one. And in this way, they proceed: the Don giving his reason for going on, Sancho filing objections—except the obvious one, that his master is crazy. Not until much later does Sancho realize (we recall that he has been promised an island to rule) that the chivalric code is dead, and has been for some time.  

The chapter proceeds with a battle against goats (taken for an army) and ends with the Don missing some teeth. Sancho says, “Your grace has no more than two-and-a-half molars, and in the upper part, none at all.” The Don answers, “A mouth without molars is like a mill without a millstone,” and tells Sancho to lead the way to lodgings. Conversation has run the cycle from suggestion, to debate, to diagnosis, and (except for the loss of molars) nothing has changed. Nowhere does Sancho note (though Cervantes knows) that the Don is delusional.

Later, in chapter thirty-one, still nothing has changed. Don Quixote has given Sancho a letter to deliver to Dulcinea. Has she read it? She was making bread, is the answer. She is a high lady. Yes, taller than I. And what of her smell? “Did you not smell the perfume of Sheba?” Sancho answers, “I smelled a mannish kind of odor.” And on it goes: a delusional supposition countered by an empirical response, whether about the graces of Dulcinea, her activities, or the behavior of those around her. The lunacy is reinforced, with the Don explaining that the other knights serve her simply for the implicit pleasure of such service.  

At that point the penny drops. “That’s the way…. I’ve heard it said in sermons, we should love our Lord for Himself alone, not because we hope for glory or are afraid of punishment.” The Don: “What intelligent things you say sometimes! One would think you’ve studied.” But Sancho points out that he cannot read. And yet he has struck upon a main theme: goodness as a sign of love for our Lord. Sanity, from Sancho, affirmed by the Don, has irrupted.  

Approaching the end of the First Part (written some years before the Second), conversation becomes Cervantes’s primary method of both jogging in place and moving us along. This goes on, not only for the final five chapters of that Part, but fluently into the first seven chapters of the second, with at least two of those chapters being, as Cervantes might have said, contundente, rich and full nearly to overflowing. 

We hear theories of the theater and of the dangers of the state licensing art. But then a change occurs, and we hear Sancho talking sense, insistently. “By the Blessed Virgin!… Is it possible that you are so thick-headed…that you cannot see that malice has more to do with your imprisonment [another McGuffin]…than enchantment?” The conversation becomes intimate, finally therapeutic. The canon (a friend) listening in asks, “Is it possible, Señor, that the…idle reading of books…has made you believe that you are enchanted?” Conversation has turned into what these days walks about as “the talking cure.”  

This could be a turning point—until, once again, the Don answers patiently. He accuses his interlocutors of being the crazy ones. Convincing him that he is deluded is, he says, “the same as trying to persuade [a] person that the sun does not shine.” With that the talk goes downhill, devolving into an argument over courtship and justice, in which the Don gains the upper hand. How? His “reasoned nonsense” has drawn in his interlocutors!

The questions become: What is real? How can we know it? Or, put another way, whom do we trust? We are near the middle of the whole (the end of the First Part) when conversation pauses. Instead, the narrator describes a box containing some poetry, doggerel really, except for the final two poems, both epitaphs, one of Dulcinea, the other of the Don. We are given to understand that the Don himself has written these, not “reasoned nonsense.”   

We are told that the author could not “find nor learn anything about Don Quixote’s final end.” Would there be a third sally? All we are told—we are now in conversation with Cervantes—is that “the author does not ask for compensation from his readers” and that they give to his narrative “the same credit that judicious readers give to the books of chivalry that are esteemed so highly in the world”—which is precisely none. Then he will be “encouraged to seek and publish other histories,” that is, to keep the conversation going.

And so he does. Early in the Second Part, there is much satirical talk as literary investigation: How reliable is the First Part? Is there any truth in it? At one point, the Don insults Sancho; he wants nothing to do with an “ignorant gossip monger,” but the anger passes quickly. Soon we learn that the Don’s niece and housekeeper truly love the Don but are intolerant of his madness, the niece shouting at him, “You have been struck by such a great blindness and such obvious foolishness.” The Don, as always, answers calmly, with a disquisition on lineage, of all things, and then utters a telling truth: “an impoverished knight has no way to show he is a knight except through virtue [my emphasis],” and here, along with friendship, is the second thematic solvent.

When Sancho converses with the Duchess and her ladies, the Duchess, from impure motive (she is not of a generous spirit), calls the Don “a madman, a fool, and a simpleton” and Sancho a “dimwit.” Here Sancho answers, with maybe the most telling passage in the entire book:  

I can’t help it, I have to follow him: we are from the same village, I’ve eaten his bread, I love him dearly, he’s a grateful man, he gave me his donkeys; and more than anything else, I’m faithful; and so it’s impossible for anything to separate us except the man with the pick and shovel.

He concludes with a touch of sarcasm: “I have seen more than two jackasses go into governorships, and if I take mine with me, it won’t be anything new.”  

Earlier I claimed that most of the adventures are mere MacGuffins; now the truth will out. Indeed, all of the adventures were tests, but not of the Don’s courage. Rather, they were tests of friendship, pure and simple. What Sancho has endured for what appeared to be a preposterous promise of a governorship was actually for the sake of his friendship with the Don, a display of virtue (a word deriving from the Latin vir, “man”). And there we have our two thematic features, the double helix at the center of the book.

Approaching his deathbed, the Don, with his friends the barber, the priest, and the bachelor looking on along with Sancho, says to them (the women especially) who urge him to be calm and to keep on living, “Be quiet, my dears…for I know what I must do…whether I am a knight errant or a shepherd on the verge of wandering, I shall always provide for you, as my actions will prove.”

At the very end, the Don would repent, but the reader must wonder, of what is there to repent? He renounces tales of chivalry and settles his affairs as Alonso Quixano. So much for the McGuffins, but whether mad or sane, Don Quixote de la Mancha was true. His conversations reflect his madness, certainly. But, “in the the beginning,” that is, from his enchantment by way of books, to the end, he epitomized, always, guided by friendship and virtue, the sanity beneath all madness. C.S. Lewis, I think, says it best. All along, he writes,

a secret Master of Ceremonies has been at work…friendship is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others…. It is He [who] always should preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.

Cervantes, a devout Catholic, would not, I believe, dispute that.