How to Think About Fallenness

A guide for the secular-minded.

Greetings from Croatia, where I’m visiting my parents and working remotely. As I write, war is in the air. When one is away from solipsistic Washington, where everything has somehow been reduced to a story about Kamala Harris, the logic of conflict is more difficult to ignore.

Outside of the hothouse of American politics, a wider war in the Middle East looms large. The endless pummeling of Gaza is paralleled by the real possibility of a bigger conflagration kicking off. The Biden administration has sent a lot of military hardware to the Middle East, ostensibly to defend Israel from incoming rockets. Should enough rockets fly, evade defenses and kill civilians, Israel is not likely to be held back by Washington from responding in turn. Once that kind of fighting starts, it feels unlikely that America will remain a bystander. In the United States, we don’t quite seem to perceive the momentousness of it all.

Ukraine looks ominous as well. I had already left Washington when President Zelensky took the remarkably bold (and potentially reckless) step of invading Kursk oblast in Russia. At time of writing, most of the Twitter chatter sounds glib, echoing Ukrainian talking points: The Russians, being caught surprised and having ceded hundreds of square kilometers virtually overnight, are an obvious paper tiger. Exerting themselves to capture a few yards a day in Ukraine, they have left their own territory unguarded. And look! With Ukraine invading sovereign Russian territory, none of the most dreaded scenarios have come to pass. Putin is not threatening nuclear war. He has not invaded NATO.

Maybe there’s no reason to be nervous. Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe Iran’s looming attack, if it happens at all, will once again be calibrated so as to be fully stoppable by combined Israeli and U.S. countermeasures. Or maybe, if the attack causes only insignificant damage or limited loss of life, Biden will be able to convince the Israelis to not return fire.

And maybe the Ukrainian argument is right: maybe the Russians bark a lot but are ultimately easily cowed. Maybe a sharp thrust into the soft underbelly will bring Vladimir Putin to the table instead of making him go harder.

Or maybe not.

Sitting here in Zadar, marinating in these thoughts, I reached for a copy of Homer’s Iliad (the Fagles translation). I read parts of the Iliad in high school and then picked at a few passages a few years ago. As the world teeters, I wanted to behold Homer’s brutal depictions of war, that man-killing machine. To remember how he describes the logic of violence. Or not its logic, exactly — maybe its rules are a better way to think about it.

The introduction to my particular edition of Homer pointed me to an essay by Simone Weil: “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force.” If you haven’t read it, do. It’s remarkable.

Below, in the spirit of a Tuesday Note, I’ll just quote some passages I’ve been reflecting on, in hopes they may resonate with you too.

“The true hero, the subject, the center of the Iliad is force,” she starts her essay.

For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, as the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and loveliest of mirrors.

People who know me know that I’m hooked right off the bat.

To define force — it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all.

But Weil is not just concerned with killing, which she admits the Iliad is completely unflinching in describing. She goes on to describe “force” as acting on everything. She notes that force can fall far short of killing, and instead enslave. She observes how a slave properly forced down cannot even have access to emotions.

And what does it take to make the slave weep? The misfortune of his master, his oppressor, despoiler, pillager, of the man who laid waste his town and killed his dear ones under his very eyes. This man suffers or dies, then the slave’s tears come. And really why not? This is for him the only occasion on which tears are permitted, are, indeed, required. A slave will always cry whenever he can do so with impunity — his situation keeps tears on tap for him.

She quotes a passage of a slave weeping over the death of Patroclus, using it as a pretext. And she continues:

Since the slave has no license to express anything except what is pleasing to his master, it follows that the only emotion that can touch or enliven him a little, that can reach him in the desolation of his life, is the emotion of love for his master. There is no place else to send the gift of love; all other outlets are barred, just as, with the horse in harness, bit, shafts, reins bar every way but one.

But the true masterstroke of the essay is when Weil turns to what force does to those who wield it.

Force is as pitiless to the man who possess it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. The truth is, nobody really possesses it. The human race is not divided up, in the Iliad, into conquered persons, slaves, suppliants, on the one hand, and conquerors and chiefs on the other. In this poem, there is not a single man who does not at one time or another have to bow his neck to force.

Indeed, there’s a kind of egalitarianism at play in the universe.

Perhaps all men, by the very act of being born, are destined to suffer violence; yet this is a truth to which circumstance shuts men’s eyes. The strong are, as a matter of fact, never absolutely strong, nor are the weak absolutely weak, but neither is aware of this. They have in common a refusal to believe that they both belong to the same species: the weak see no relation between themselves and the strong, and vice versa.

The man who is the possessor of force seems to walk through a non-resistant element; in the human substance that surrounds him nothing has the power to interpose, between the impulse and the act, the tiny interval that is reflection. Where there is no room for reflection, there is none either for justice or prudence. Hence we see men in arms behaving harshly and madly.

We see their sword bury itself in the breast of a disarmed enemy who is in the very act of pleading at their knees. We see them triumph over a dying man by describing to him the outrages his corpse will endure. We see Achilles cut the throats of twelve Trojan boys on the funeral pyre of Patroclus as naturally as we cut flowers for a grave.

These men, wielding power, have no suspicion of the fact that the consequences of their deeds will at length come to them — they too will bow the neck in their turn.

There is a lot more to the essay. I suspect those who have read it will accuse me of ignoring the best parts — where Weil uses her concept of “force” to explain a holistic Greek worldview, which she connects to the triumph of Christianity. It’s powerful stuff.¹

But for our purposes here, at this moment in time, with war looming seemingly everywhere, the passages above amount to a guide for thinking about fallenness outside of an explicitly Christian framework — a guide for how one might think about fallenness in a secular way. Weil’s gloss on the Iliad captures the roots of my pessimism and my priors more broadly.

The world is not a morality play where the just fight the evil, where oppression and resistance are the touchstones to a moral order. The human condition is violence, not peace. Peace is fragile, and once it’s shattered, it’s fiendishly difficult to rebuild. That’s not because human beings are incapable of cooperation or kindness or love, but rather because war quickly overwhelms all these things.

As I said, maybe we’ll get lucky. But all signs are pointing toward a lot more violence, not less. I do hope I’m wrong.

This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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1. Since the Weil essay is not readily available online, here’s a striking passage from the end for those who want to explore further:

The Greeks, generally speaking, were endowed with spiritual force that allowed them to avoid self-deception. The rewards of this were great; they discovered how to achieve in all their acts the greatest lucidity, purity, and simplicity. But the spirit that was transmitted from the Iliad to the Gospels by way of the tragic poets never jumped the borders of Greek civilization; once Greece was destroyed, nothing remained of this spirit but pale reflections.

Both the Romans and the Hebrews believed themselves to be exempt from the misery that is the common human lot. The Romans saw their country as the nation chosen by destiny to be mistress of the world; with the Hebrews, it was their God who exalted them and they retained their superior position just as long as they obeyed Him.

Strangers, enemies, conquered peoples, subjects, slaves, were objects of contempt to the Romans; and the Romans had no epics, no tragedies. In Rome, gladiatorial fights took the place of tragedy. With the Hebrews, misfortune was a sure indication of sin and hence a legitimate object of contempt; to them a vanquished enemy was abhorrent to God himself and condemned to expiate all sorts of crimes — this is a view that makes cruelty permissible and indeed indispensable. And no text of the Old Testament strikes a note comparable to the note heard in the Greek epic, unless it be certain parts of the book of Job.

Throughout twenty centuries of Christianity, the Romans and the Hebrews have been admired, read, imitated, both in deed and word; their masterpieces have yielded an appropriate quotation every time anybody had a crime he wanted to justify.