Make it New

“Make it new!” cried Ezra Pound, quoting an ancient Chinese story about an even more ancient emperor who had the phrase inscribed on his washbasin. Pound seems to have mistranslated some things—the Chinese may actually be better rendered as “do it again”—but he was certainly aware of the irony. “Make it new” is really just a new translation of an old idea about what “new” really means: a renovation of the present that is achieved by renewed attention to what is old, to what has lasted, to the “permanent things.”

Among T.S. Eliot’s (and later Russell Kirk’s) “permanent things” are permanent works of literature (we can argue about what they are), and they are permanent because they present permanent truths in forms that endure beyond the context that inspired them. We shouldn’t be surprised if certain of these stories come to command special attention when the center fails and things fall apart. The stability of a cultural world depends on that world’s capacity to keep mundane affairs of everyday life connected with the transcendent, and when things fall apart it’s because that connection has failed. The meaning drops out, so the world stops working. The residents of such a time will look for stories that bring the meaning back in. They’ll look for new stories, because the familiar ones, the ones they grew up with, the ones that guarded the connection for their parents’ world, now seem hollow and witless. But the “new” stories will often be older ones, because old stories only survive by preserving the permanent things, and that’s what people who can no longer take the permanence of their world for granted want most. Maybe it’s in “interesting times” that the old has its best chance of being made new.

It’s enjoyable, if not necessarily productive, to speculate regarding what our new American story is going to be, now that we are more than twenty-five years into a twenty-first century defined mainly by the collapse of every story that defined the twentieth. That century’s story, as Alec Ryrie argues, was the story of the Second World War, of what led to it and what came after it. It was “the Age of Hitler,” and the stories that brought us together, like Star Wars, were always reenactments of our fight against the Nazis. The question, as Ryrie puts it, is how we will survive when the living memory of that age dies and there are no more Nazis to order a moral universe increasingly populated by strange new threats that don’t easily fit into the old schema. We will, of course, spend a lot of time trying to manufacture Nazis out of our political enemies. And many of our political enemies will be happy to twist themselves into Nazis. The old schema will die hard. But our culture will only survive if we can recover a larger story. For Ryrie, that’s the story of Christ—the hero to be emulated by sacrificing ourselves rather than the villain to be defeated by force. Amen. But for us Americans, that’s a story about where we’re from and might be going; it’s not where we are. There may be other stories more suited to the uncharted waters of a post-Christian world, wracked with guilt, pulled apart by competing invitations to dull our wits and senses with the endless scroll or to replace our bodies and minds altogether with something godlike, confronted by monsters of our own creation, and seduced by influencers who promise paradise to those willing to forget what they know.

This year, sales of the Odyssey in the US were up 76 percent. Christopher Nolan’s film has driven enormous interest in the text, which is about as old as it gets (it was composed in the eighth or seventh century B.C., about the same time as the Book of Amos). It’s probably too hopeful to assume that all those bookbuyers are actually reading the epic poem, but neither should we be too cynical. The story, in Nolan’s hands, has struck a nerve. The buzz will fade, but I think whatever drew people in runs deeper than the fading lure of a summer blockbuster in the era of “netflix-and-chill.” I don’t know if it’s the new American story, but I think it’s a good candidate.

Like most Westerners, I’d picked up the tale of Odysseus by osmosis long before I picked up a copy and read it for myself. I had that first direct encounter only a few years ago, and I didn’t actually read anything. Ian McKellan read it for me (here’s the audiobook), and that’s probably the best way to experience something that was only written down after hundreds of years of oral tradition. Much later (last month), I read it on paper, and I must say I worry that many of these new readers won’t be able to make it through. It’s very exciting, but it’s a lot of words (about 12,000 lines), and one of those “strange new threats” that define our time is the apparent death of literacy. Some people have suggested that the Internet is taking us back to something like an oral culture, but of course this is wrong. The rhapsodes who recited Homer had all these words memorized, and our capacity to remember our own phone numbers is the first thing our “shining devices” took from us.

Do you remember the story? The Odyssey starts with the suitors. They’re infesting the palace of Odysseus, who’d left Ithaca twenty years earlier for the Trojan War and never come back. The suitors are locusts, parasites, extractors, shameless gobblers of resources, content to feed their desire for food and drink night after night till faithful Penelope chooses one of them as her new husband and gives him the crown. Penelope hates them, and all she wants is for Odysseus to return, but she can’t do anything about that, and she knows that she’ll eventually have to accept the inevitable. Her son Telemachus decides that things are so bad his best option is to sail off in search of news about his father. Hijinks ensue.

After a lot of rosy-fingered dawns over wine-dark seas, we finally get to what we came for, which is the story of Odysseus, which is told by Odysseus himself. How he’d left Troy, done a little pillaging, met some lotus-eaters and a Cyclops, come close to Ithaca before getting blown off course by a windbag, fought giant cannibals and outwitted a witch, descended into hell, tied himself to the mast, found a way between Scylla and Charybdis, lost the few men who hadn’t already been eaten or transmogrified to the ocean (which rose up in anger after they’d eaten the cattle of the sun god after being warned not to), and washed up alone on Ogygia, where he lived for seven years with a nymph named Calypso, who offered him immortal life with a beautiful woman on an island paradise, which he turned down because he wanted to go home.

So he spoke. He’s been telling the story to the Phaeacians, who load him up with treasure and take him in one of their well-built ships back to Ithaca. There, disguised as a decrepit beggar, he walks into the palace, where Penelope has finally given in and told the suitors that whichever one of them can string Odysseus’ bow and shoot an arrow through a line of axe-head rings will be her new husband. Nobody can do it except the beggar, who is now revealed as the returned king, and promptly kills the suitors. And then, depending on how you interpret the ending, he and Penelope live happily ever after, thanks to a deus ex machina in the form of Athena, who intervenes to stop the blood feud that would otherwise have started with the slaughtered suitors’ relatives.

Nolan’s claim is that this is a story for us. His film is a reading of the Odyssey, and he reads it as a reading of our times—“a time of apparent magic” (the words appear on the screen before the movie begins). It’s about our political condition, broadly understood. He makes it new. Of course the Odyssey has a long history of inspiring serious political thought. FPR co-founder Patrick Deneen’s first book, The Odyssey of Political Theory, traces that history in detail, and offers its own reading of the text. Deneen’s newest book, American Odyssey, returns to the theme and makes a case that the Odyssey has special relevance for Americans, especially now. Both Nolan and Deneen are interested in “what an ancient story reveals about our divided souls” (as Deneen’s subtitle has it). Surprisingly, I think they broadly converge on what exactly it reveals, though that depends on how you read Nolan’s film, which has certainly done its part to divide viewers.

I read American Odyssey with delight. It’s written for a broader audience than Odyssey of Political Theory, and Deneen clearly enjoys placing his love for the Odyssey in conversation with great works of American literature and film. The core idea is that the figure of Odysseus, and the story Homer tells about him, is about a tension at the heart of the human condition. Odysseus wants to go home, but he doesn’t only want to go home. As much as he’s the symbol of nostos (homegoing), he’s also the great explorer. The Odyssey is about the conflict between the desire to explore and the desire to settle, the drive for adventure and the love for peace and quiet, the faith that limits are made to be broken and the conviction that limits are sources of strength. And for Deneen, this is a story whose “tensions are perhaps more present in the American soul than in any other.”

The argument of the book is that everything depends, for persons as well as for political communities, on keeping the Odyssean tension from collapsing into one pole or the other. The character of Odysseus, in Deneen’s telling, is special because in him the love for home and the pull of the frontier are in conflict, but the conflict is not an error. It is not the result of a logical or moral contradiction that can or should have been avoided. It is, rather, a part of being human that we want both things. And because of our history and temperament, Americans want both things with special intensity. The Odyssey “disclose[s] a profound truth about Americans’ divided souls: We are at once creatures who settle and creatures who seek more. . . . In this dualism, we Americans are like all humans. Yet in a particularly powerful way, this dualism is a constitutive aspect of American character” The story of Odysseus can call us back to this aspect of ourselves, to this tension which has at various times been unbalanced by the elevation of one pole over the other.

Deenen develops his idea by exploring the Odyssean tension in several works from the American mythos: The Wizard of Oz (“somewhere over the rainbow” leads to “no place like home”); Huckleberry Finn (like Odysseus, Huck would rather die and go to hell than betray his friends and earn salvation from death); Field of Dreams (Doc Graham chooses the heroism of civic commitment to particular people over Achillean greatness in the halls of fame); and It’s a Wonderful Life (George Bailey, consumed by the ambition to get out, discovers the beauty of staying put). Set in conversation with the Odyssey, Deneen’s readings of these vital stories are deeply satisfying and often fresh (Bailey, for example, is not quite the localist hero we all take him to be). Combined, they carry the reader home to a concluding chapter that makes a brief but compelling—and perhaps surprising—argument about what kind of politics we need for our time.

That chapter begins with a gentle rebuke to the greatest living defender of homegoing in American literature. “The American imagination,” writes Deneen, “tends to gravitate to individuals who embody these two seemingly opposite yearnings. By externalizing these longings in the form of human ‘types,’ though, the American social imaginary obscures the extent to which these longings are deeply embodied in every American . . . soul.” Wendell Berry does this, for example, when he talks about Wallace Stegner’s “boomers” versus “stickers,” and praises Odysseus as a “sticker.” For Deneen, this is an “overly straightforward conclusion, . . . clarifying yet reductive. By parceling out among different people and types those longings which persist within each individual soul, we are prone to resolving the tensions of the human condition too easily. We also reduce the story of our own nation . . . to a conflict between two archetypes, rather than understanding their deeper interconnection, intermingling, and inextricability.” Berry often imagines a choice that “makes America easy. It eases our pain to believe that [there are] two opposing sides.” For Deneen, there are not two sides; each of us has both sides. The trick is to chart a judicious course between them.

But in politics, there are sides. The question then is, Which side can do this? Which political position or coalition is most committed to recovering and sustaining rather than dissolving the Odyssean tension? Or, if no such coalition is available, how do we forge it, and out of what existing material? It is interesting to observe the various attempts to do this—to achieve what might be called a new “fusionism.” What does it mean, for example, that Bari Weiss’s Free Press publishes kid-glove interviews with Marc Andreeson, mover-and-breaker-in-chief and author of the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” as well as essays by Paul Kingsnorth, a techno-pessimist who thinks AI is perhaps literally the devil? For some, this is just further evidence of the alliance of convenience between Silicon Valley and the Far Right, as symbolized by former tech-exec and current trad-Catholic Vice President Vance. It’s certainly true that politics makes strange (i.e., logically incompatible but strategically useful) bedfellows, and that publications like The Free Press might genuinely be interested in curating a wide range of voices. But it is too cynical to explain political landscapes as the outcome of pure cynicism, and it is naive to think that magazine editors don’t have ideological agendas, even if the agenda is to build a big tent. I think that at least in the smaller corners of the conversation, there is something more interesting going on. And American Odyssey sheds some light on it.

Deneen’s “proto-American” Odysseus speaks to a moment in which even and especially those of us who are most committed to a politics of homegoing do not only want to go home again. As keenly as we feel our rootlessness and long for the peace and quiet of the before-times (whichever times those were), we also sense with growing dread that we have lost that special American capacity for adventure and invention. Things feel stale, fake, “decadent.” We’ve become a “nation of homebodies.” Forget Left and Right: our political landscape is now defined much better by conflicts between these two feelings, or rather by conflicts between different ways of handling the tension between them. As always, the loudest voices call us toward Charybdis or Scylla, “Progress” or “RETVRN,” and it can seem like the only two options are to join a polycule and build data centers till the Singularity arrives, or LARP as a trad-wife who thinks it all went wrong with the nineteenth amendment. But the way home is obviously along the course between Charybids and Scylla, the golden mean between extremes.

This is precisely where it is most important to avoid the danger of oversimplified appeals to a vapid political unitarianism. As Deneen is careful to point out, Odysseus does not steer straight down the middle. That would have meant the destruction of the whole ship in the whirlpool. Instead (as instructed by Circe), he steers closer to Scylla, a monster that proceeds to devour six of his men. The trick is to tack toward the lesser danger, and to accept the trade-offs it involves. And that depends on knowing which is the lesser danger—something that depends entirely on circumstances. This is what Aristotle’s “golden mean” actually means. The argument, then, is that we have to know what time it is. Do we live in a time when the balance has shifted too much toward the “boomer” part of us, or too much toward our “sticker” aspect? For Deneen and probably for most of us the answer is obvious: we have been living in a boom time, a long “unsettling of America,” and we need to learn how to settle again. The political position and coalition we need is one that steers us toward Scylla, which certainly involves its own dangers and trade-offs, even if they are not those imagined by people who think that the search for “roots” leads straight to The Handmaid’s Tale. (Though we should remember that Ezra Pound fell for Mussolini).

Such a conclusion may gratify those of us who would rather build front porches than data centers, but we are the choir to whom Deneen is preaching, and the message for us is actually more like the opposite. We critics of the status quo already incline toward our “sticker” side, in theory if not in practice (part of our theory is that the general unsettling has made it difficult to stick in practice even if we want to). When we fail to sustain the tension—when we succumb to a fruitless nostalgia or withdraw into fearful and self-satisfied tribalism—it is because we are failing to appreciate or cultivate our need to explore. Just as the emphasis on “liberation” has led many of our fellow Americans to overstep life-giving limits, so our own counter-emphasis on limits can, if not the result of reflection that is both prudent and passionate, lead us to accept and recommend limits that diminish our lives or the lives of others.

Deneen concludes American Odyssey with the simple but crucial point that it is precisely because we are increasingly homeless that we are stuck in the doldrums. Our either/or political imaginary makes home-making and adventuring, “conservation” and “progress,” into mutually exclusive options. But our increasingly obvious failure to make anything like “progress” (in a non-ideological sense) is part and parcel of our failure to conserve the order from which all progress comes. Deneen sharply observes that “[t]he deracinated modern individual is not marked by a spirited and courageous ambition for exploration, but by risk aversion,” and suggests that this is because “personalities formed by a strong sense of home are most likely to possess a spirit of adventure and exploration.” As a political prescription, nostos is not a call to turn inward. It’s not a brief for Netflix-and-chill. The work of settlement is not about settling for the status quo; indeed, to do this work thoroughly would be to upend the status quo. It would mean putting a stop to the constant extraction of value from communities and individuals, the constant privatization of public goods, the mindless gobbling of resources, the relentless fracking of the common good. A lot of suitors would lose their lives. A lot of data centers would never get built. And we would build new things in their place—better things, more beautiful things, things that make homes instead of wrecking them.

Nolan’s film might well have been called The American Odyssey. Matt Damon’s Odysseus is “dad” to Telemachus, and the cast is a proper American melting pot. But it’s not the absence of British accents and the presence of an African Helen that make it so clearly a movie about America in 2026. I liked those choices, “woke” or not, in part because they help Nolan tell a story that can point us past the surface-level arguments that are bogging us down. We are in the realm of myth; the question is whether the myth can tell us a truth, not whether the telling is “historically accurate” or consonant with our own imaginations. And, with due regard for the fact that Christopher Nolan is a trickster, a man of many turns whose intention is to hold attention regardless of whether the story holds together, I think Nolan’s movie turns our attention in the right direction (I also think it holds together). Like Deneen’s book, his Odyssey is about our political condition, which is defined by the feeling, if not the reality, of collapse.

That it is a story about the collapse of a civilization, and that the civilization is our own, is made a little too clear by the script’s repeated reference to “the sea peoples.” (It’s made even clearer by Nolan’s indulgence in some expository dialogue about how “our age of bronze is collapsing”). There are no “sea peoples” in the original story, but Nolan seems to be working not only with the generally accepted idea of a “Bronze Age Collapse” that provides context for the Iliad and Odyssey, but with the episode in Book 14 where Odysseus tells the famous “Cretan lie.” Still in disguise, our hero tells the loyal swineherd Eumaeus that he is a Cretan adventurer who had raided Egypt and lost all his men in the battle with the Egyptians, whose king spared his own life. The Cretan lie comports fairly well with historians’ understanding of this era, in which “peoples from the sea” began migrating and raiding throughout the Mediterranean, leading to the destruction of most of the established kingdoms in the region, except for Egypt, which was able to repulse the newcomers.

We think of the Greeks as victims of this collapse, but the Cretan lie can be read as a suggestion that it was the people we now call “Greeks” who were themselves the perpetrators. For while Odysseus is lying about being a Cretan, the story itself is true enough (though as you may recall from your undergrad philosophy class, all Cretans are liars). After leaving Troy, he and his men sail around raping and pillaging to their heart’s content. All those inhospitable monsters who assault them, like the Cyclopes, are only encountered after the Greeks themselves have acted monstrously and without much regard for “hospitality” and its obligations. Such judgments can certainly be dismissed as anachronistic, since Bronze Age morality did not involve any notion of “human rights,” and hospitality was for ethnic confreres, not foreigners. But so Nolan judges, and there is much truth to be gained by doing so. (There are also good reasons, in both the text and in the long history of its many adaptations, to insist that it is not entirely anachronistic. But leave that aside.)

During Odysseus’s 20-year absence, the Ithacans have been hearing rumors of these “sea peoples,” and Penelope wants her husband back in no small part because she fears them. The king must return, she thinks, if we are to be ready when they come. In the end, when he does come back, the twist is revealed, and she learns the truth, which is that the “sea peoples” are just the Greeks returning from Troy. In case it wasn’t clear to the audience, Nolan has her state it plainly, as a rhetorical question: “We’re the sea peoples?” she asks, with a note of sickening recognition that Nolan wants us to share. (Are we the baddies?) This casts new light on an early scene in which Odysseus and his men are burning a village where they have stopped for supplies. All the villagers have fled except one old man, who does not speak their language. “Are you the sea peoples?” he asks (one of the crew translates). “No,” the crewman says. “We’re Greeks from Ithaca.” The language the villager is speaking, of course, is Greek, and he is played by the only Greek actor in the movie. Nolan is very clever; he is not very subtle.

Like Odysseus’s men being turned into pigs by their own appetites, the “civilized” Greeks have turned into the “barbarian” sea peoples by the greed that led them to violate what Nolan’s characters constantly refer to as “Zeus’ law.” This is xenia, or the law of hospitality, of giving and receiving under conditions of trust between host and guest, and if it is the central theme of the original text, it is even more central to Nolan’s adaptation. All of the obstacles and enemies that Odysseus encounters on his way home, and at home, are monstrous because they violate the unwritten law of trust on which civilization depends. They trust the owner of the empty cave they find to welcome them and give them something to eat; instead, the Cyclops eats them. They trust the owner of the empty house to welcome them and give them food that sustains; instead, Circe gives them food that turns them into mindless eaters, fit only to be eaten. But all these encounters—occasions for some truly fantastic filmmaking (the scenes with the Cyclops and especially with Circe are terrifying)—are table-turning versions of what Odysseus himself did at Troy with the Trojan Horse. Odysseus, in Nolan’s telling (and again, it is anachronistic but not entirely so) was the original trust-breaker. His trick worked. The Greeks won the war, which was not fought for the noble cause of Helen (assuming that was noble), but for money and power, to wrest control of trade routes from Priam’s city. But they won by breaking the world that had been built by xenia. Odysseus took advantage of his enemy’s trust in the mutual respect of Greeks and Trojans for the sanctity of a gift, and for their common gods. Now he can only get home by finding a way through the wreckage of his own actions. When he gets home, the suitors are there, taking advantage of Penelope’s hospitality to eat him out of house and home. He must find a way through them, too—even though he may well conclude he is no better than they are.

Nolan’s claim is that despite all this, Odysseus deserves to go home. Or let us put it like this: whether or not he “deserves” it, he is still responsible for going home and restoring order, even though, or precisely because, he is responsible for the disorder that now threatens it. He is responsible both because he is guilty of bringing about disorder by employing his capacity for deception, and because that same capacity is what is necessary to restore order (he defeats the suitors by entering the palace as a harmless beggar, just as his Trojan Horse looked like a harmless wooden statue). We might say, as Deneen puts it in another book, that Odysseus uses “Machiavellian means to Aristotelian ends.” We may be more or less comfortable with the idea that deception is a part of virtue, but perhaps we can agree that successful homegoing is about Odyssean competence and persevering compromise in the face of real-world trade-offs, not black-and-white lotus-flower dreams of a Leave it to Beaver world that never really existed. Odysseus must go home and clean house not because he is worthy of it, but because he belongs to it and must become worthy of it.

The “woke” reading of the American story is that we are the sea peoples, and that’s it. We’re the barbarians who don’t deserve to go home. The “anti-woke” reading is that we’re the Greeks facing the barbarians at the gate, or inside the house. Nolan’s reading is that we’re the sea peoples, and that we have to go home, because the people we love are waiting for us. We have done our part to tear the world apart; now we must do our part to put it back together.

I want to think more about xenia, about the idea of gifts and loss of trust. As Deneen points out in American Odyssey, the word “gift” comes from a German word that also means “poison.” The Trojan Horse is the original symbol of a “poisoned gift”—something we take into our city from the outside on the assumption that it is given in good faith, while inside the gift waits something that will destroy us once we accept it. Poisoned gifts destroy trust; mistrust destroys culture, which cannot survive on written rules designed to obviate the need for trust itself. It seems clear that the “collapse” that we feel all around us is fundamentally a collapse of trust. We can see it even more clearly if we understand the loss of trust as the fruit of poisoned gifts.

Poisoned gifts are everywhere. Think concretely about this: more and more of the things and ideas that we buy and sell, and the words we use to grease the transactions, are poisonous, often literally. Think of our food system, and think of it in terms of gift, of xenia, of hospitality. It’s easy to rant about how bad our food is, and how bad it is for us. Yet the cultural problem is not that we have bad food; it’s that food is one of the main kinds of gifts we give one another, and it is increasingly the case that accepting a gift given in love means consuming something that harms you. Anybody who thinks at all about food is familiar with the conundrum; parents of young children (like myself) are especially familiar with it. Food connects us to each other, which is good. Bad food is bad for us, which is bad. Avoiding bad food—your Grandma probably hasn’t heard that the food dye in her homemade candy has been banned in Europe—often means avoiding connection. This is not because your Grandma wants to poison you. It’s not even because the food companies want to poison you. It’s because the food companies want to make money, and they’ve created a food system in which it is exceedingly difficult to balance both things: the need for the good of sharing gifts; and the need for the gifts to be good.

Nor is it a simple matter of distinguishing the good gifts from the bad. It’s enough that the gifts are only sometimes poisoned; the result is a general loss of trust which is perfectly rational, even if in any particular case the gift is good. We can no longer trust one another’s gifts, because they are manufactured by people who don’t care whether they’re poisoned or not. This loss of trust in gifts is the loss of the common good, which we should understand in precisely this sense. There is only a “common good” when both terms apply, when the goods in question are shared, and when they are themselves actually good. What leads to the conundrum, to the constant low-level sense of moral dilemma that grips us (or doesn’t, since we can also tune it out), is the fact that sharing is itself a good, separate and distinct from the goods themselves. This means it’s possible for the goods to be in conflict. Maybe it’s better to eat your Grandma’s cookies even though she put Red 40 in it, because maybe what matters most is that your Grandma made them. That would be alright, except that this decision for commonality over goodness, for trust in your Grandma’s goodwill, obviously redounds to the benefit of the food company, which makes its money by taking advantage of your relationship to her. And then, of course, another food company—or a subsidiary of the same one—will take advantage of the people who decide for goodness over commonality, by marketing dye-free foods (at a significant markup).

Our whole culture is increasingly defined by this situation. “They reached out for the good things that lay at hand”—a formula often repeated in the poem. We reach out, and find that the things we have to share with one another, the things others have to share with us, are good in the sense that they make sharing possible but bad in themselves. The “common” and the “good” are increasingly pulled apart, and as a result we are pulled apart into warring tribes, tribes united by our shared ideas about what is “good” and “bad,” separated from other tribes by the fact that we cannot eat together. Food makes it easy to see, but it’s everywhere. This is the problem, the cultural problem (to say nothing of the environmental catastrophe) of screens and social media, for example. It is harder and harder to participate in society without using devices and apps, and much of what we share, both good and bad, is shared via the Internet. I am sharing this essay via the Internet, and I hope it is good. But the devices and apps, without which we cannot connect to each other as easily as we used to, are also the things that are disconnecting us and tearing us apart. To opt out because the gifts are bad is in many cases to opt out of the giving entirely, and that itself is bad, because gift-giving is good.

Thus we live in the wreckage of a common good. With Nolan’s film in mind, I think homegoing, nostos, means finding our way toward a new common good. This will require a great deal of exploration and Odyssean craftiness, and there will be many episodes of failure along the way, where we are taken in by people of bad faith, and where we trust that others will be acting in good faith, only to find that their gifts have been poisoned by those who manufacture them. This is why the figure of Odysseus, as rendered by Deneen, is so important, and it is why the Odyssey might be the new American story that we need. We can only find our way back to the common good if we sustain that Odyssean tension between the desire to explore and the desire to settle. In the situation I have just described, where the common and the good have been pulled apart, especially by unfamiliar technologies, we can no longer rely on familiar ideas about what is “good.” We have to enter into the difficult work of discerning, with others. This means being open to the possibility that nostalgia for the old goods will mislead us: it may well be that our Grandma’s home cooking was just not very good, even if it was very good that we all enjoyed it together. We may have to “make it new” precisely when we are most inclined to settle with what we know. But this kind of difficult work, a cultural work of exploration under conditions of tremendous uncertainty which we may understandably resent as an intrusion, an imposition on our hospitality, can only be done if we are strongly rooted in communities that strive to maintain a connection with those permanent things, those lights by which people of all ages have always carried out the work of discernment.

I wonder if there is something in the reception of the Odyssey that points to a new weariness with the politics of pure deconstruction. As always, there is plenty to deconstruct, and even a mindless wrecking ball can do some good when the edifice is rotten. But the hermeneutic of suspicion only gets you so far. It can protect us from poisoned gifts, but it is itself a kind of poison. Either way, suspicion can’t forge a new common good, and it often plays a role in separating commonality from goodness. In the end, as Berry says, it all turns on affection. When Odysseus finally meets his aged father, Laertes, his first impulse is to play another trick, to test him by telling him a lie about who he is before revealing the truth. “And then he considered in his mind and in his heart whether he should embrace and kiss his father and tell him everything, how he had returned, back to his ancestral land, or if he should first question Laertes about everything and test him. And as he pondered this seemed to him the better course, first of all to put his father to the test with teasing words.” He does so, pretending (as usual) to have been a friend of Odysseus. But as translator Anthony Verity points out in his note on this passage, “the scene . . . shows how lying has become an ingrained habit for Odysseus, and how his caution and guile may verge on cruelty because of his need to test everyone. Odysseus’ attempt to control and delay the recognition here, however, will soon backfire when he is overwhelmed by his father’s emotional response.”

Only let our criticism be motivated by our affections, not by our fears, and we may by virtue of what we love build homes, and a common home, that banishes fear and makes us bold for adventure again. Only let us love what is old, what is always there, and we may make it new.

Image Credit: Wikipedia