The Odyssey is foundational to Western culture because it conveys a critical framework for understanding what man is: a mortal being situated between the beasts and gods, dependent on inherited bonds while capable of judging them, responsible for action even as he is exposed to forces beyond his control. The central lesson of the poem is that entropy is always at work, and civilization must be actively recovered through memory, intelligence, strength, and the striving for return. The importance of this lesson increases as modernity weakens the bonds constitutive of identity. To read the Odyssey well is to receive an education in the habits of mind needed for governance, including the ability to improvise beyond prior experience, command of speech and persuasion, and strategic concealment and timing.

None of this means that the Odyssey is a comfortable, familiar home. The late Bronze age in which the tale is set is different from our own time in undeniable ways, some of which strongly contravene modern sensibilities. For some, the work may seem to constitute a poetic house of the dead. To find a reliable path through the poem, we should consider the themes most salient for us today: the problem of entering an alien world, the modern experience of rootlessness, the confrontation of Homeric virtue with post-Christian morality, and the role of Homeric images in sustaining Western memory.

Reading the Alien

The world that Homer depicts has many features easy for us to recognize. Tears after calamity, fear of death, longing for home, and joy at delayed reunion are all present. Yet there are also features alien enough to trouble that recognition. We need to avoid either of two errors. The first is to treat Homer’s Greeks as early, if primitive versions of ourselves, projecting our own post-Christian values and therapeutic categories onto them. The second is to treat them as utterly foreign and entirely inaccessible, as though they were creatures from a distant planet rather than men from the European coast. Both errors close off our access to the poem, which requires instead that we attempt to enter into the world of the Greeks before we judge it by the standards of our own.

The elements of Homer’s world alien to modern sensibilities are numerous and unavoidable. A few are worth naming directly, as they pose the greatest challenges to reading the poem with seriousness and depth from our inherently modern perspective. First, the gods in the Odyssey are depicted as real powers, deathless, partisan, concerned with honor, sometimes in mutual conflict. Odysseus is, for the most part, beloved of the gods, and especially by Athena, who admires his cunning. Poseidon rages against the hero out of personal spite. Second, human responsibility coincides with divine action, with neither obviating the responsibility of the other. In the proem, Zeus rebukes mortals for blaming gods for suffering they cause themselves. Odysseus’ men perish due to violating an explicit divine warning concerning the cattle of Helios; the suitors at Ithaca receive a similar warning from Theoclymenus before meeting their deaths. Third, the ethics of the poem center on considerations of hierarchy, honor, and shame, understood within concrete social relations. These values are not taken, as in our world, to apply universally among persons presumed to be equal. The society of the Greeks is far from our modern universal and homogeneous state. Fourth, retribution is understood to be a necessary part of justice. Wrongs generate an obligation of repayment, and for some wrongs repayment cannot be made in material goods. Zeus, in the proem, declares Orestes’ killing of Aegithus to be a model of such just retribution.

The alien elements make Homer’s poem, read in a form as close as feasible to the original, all the more indispensable to us. Its salience as a salutary contrast only increases in a culture that embraces ever more far-reaching forms of utilitarianism, themselves extending sometimes to encompass not only all humans but all creatures capable of experience, such as shrimp. Adaptations of the poem, as delightful as they can be, tend to select, or even inject, themes an audience already finds legible. In our day, those may include trauma, guilt, or psychological recovery. At the same time, the alien elements are simply omitted or overwritten. Yet if we cannot read foundational poems on their own terms, we become dependent on intermediaries who transform difficult concepts into more familiar and acceptable ones, even when the originals are more functional or perceptive. The past becomes accessible only by using contemporary frames of identity for affirmation or accusation. What is not allowed is for the poem to judge the reader, to declare, like Rilke’s archaic torso of Apollo, “You must change your life.”

In the midst of the alien, Homer has a closeness to us that anchors his enduring relevance. He is not the West, but he stands at its beginning. The Greeks who came after Homer developed tragedy and philosophy through engagement with his questions. How does death grant or deny meaning to human life? How does excellence relate to political order? How can force be governed by speech? The beauty of Greek literature is the opposite of naïve. The measured lines of Greek poetry from Homer onward grapple with the most difficult aspects of life, including war and its consequences, reflecting a knowledge that civilization is achieved not by evading horror but by grasping it with image, rhythm, and limit. We need not ape Greek religion or cultural particulars to learn from Homer that courage includes a capacity for force, and that political order should place limits on that force. Homer’s alienness keeps his thought from being too easily assimilated to comfortable, familiar patterns; his nearness insists that it should not be ignored.

Odysseus the Displaced

The Odyssey, far from offering an uncomplicated affirmation of inherited identity, breaks down its traditional sources in name, father, land, and household, and offers a frame in which to think through its loss. At the beginning of the poem, Odysseus has lost each of these, and his return is complete only when all are regained. Thus, his arrival in Ithaca in Book 13 is only the beginning of his homecoming. In modernity, each of these bonds, now understood as unwelcome constraints rather than deep resources, has been weakened and made elective in a process that has carried both freedoms and spiritual ills. Modern man often suffers from a kind of homelessness, even sitting in his own house in his own country.

It now sounds old-fashioned, but even in modern English we used to speak of a man’s “good name,” meaning the reputation bound to his identity. A name is relational in that it allows one’s identity to be grasped by others over time, whether for good or ill. Through Homer’s account of Odysseus’ encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus, this ancient function of naming is put to the test. Odysseus calls himself Outis, Nobody, causing Polyphemus’ cries for help to misfire as his fellow cyclopes assume Polyphemus has been attacked by “no one.” The tactic seems to be a triumph of cunning. Odysseus, however, cannot ultimately bear this namelessness, as it would require him to forego his glory in the defeat of Polyphemus, glory which can attach itself to the hero only through the recitation of his deeds by name in song. He therefore reveals his name, allowing Polyphemus to draw down the wrath of Poseidon, dooming Odysseus to many years of woe. An analogous tension pervades modern concerns with the boundaries of legibility, from social media to financial technology to administrative bureaucracy. We often desire the many advantages and freedom of anonymity, but our social technology rests on the accountability and continuity of identity that is fixed by our names. The online “anon” is able to evade the punishment of the social order, yet to claim the fruits of his labor, he must take the risk of unmasking himself and revealing his name.

In the sphere of the family, Telemachus tells Athena that “No man knows his own begetting.” He is ostensibly referring to his uncertainty as to his literal paternity, but the statement resonates more deeply with the long absence of Odysseus and the void he has left in the political order. The Greeks understood fatherhood as the ground of social, economic, and political continuity among the generations. When Telemachus recognizes Odysseus in Book 16, it restores not only their personal relation but the possibility of coordination on the dangerous action needed to set Ithaca aright. When the scope of fatherhood is reduced, as in modernity, to a more minimal relation within the nuclear family, it naturally results in a kind of temporal parochialism in which the interests and preferences of a given generation are cut off from those that precede or follow. Long-term visions seem abstract and more difficult to act upon; the possibility of deep coordination between father and son is diminished.

A close reading of the Odyssey hardly bids us to return to ancestral villages or revive the worship of old gods. Its instruction penetrates more deeply to the relations on which identity rests, pointing us to those that most matter. Eumaeus the swineherd is a foreign-born slave, yet he is more faithful to Odysseus and integral to his household than the native elites who are besieging it. Loyalty, the poem shows, can be chosen, and betrayal can occur within one’s own class.

Emulating Excellence

The Greek Arete is often translated as virtue, but its sense in Homer is closer to excellence than moral goodness. It is the capacity to perform a needed function well, whether fighting, planning, speaking, or ruling. Odysseus’ excellence is manifold. He is a warrior capable of lethal violence, but he is not known chiefly for combat on the battlefield. Rather, he is exceptional in his range of action, surviving by adapting, improvising, and planning. His description as polytropos or “many ways” in the proem is later elaborated as polymetis or “many-skilled,” for his excellence cannot be reduced to a single disposition. He can turn in many ways without losing his orientation. Excellence in the modern world no less requires this ability to act effectively in novel situations where existing scripts are not available, to see the truths of a situation even when it differs from the institutional explanation.

What the Greeks possessed was a willingness to look without flinching at human mortality, recurring strife, human inequality, physical vulnerability, personal and social betrayals, and the frequent necessity of force. They had a certain clarity in rejecting the “just-world” fallacy: the expectation that outcomes must conform to some notion of moral fairness. The Odyssey embodies this austere clarity by showing that success depends on one’s navigation of the unfair. Odysseus returns to Ithaca not because his journey is safe, or because he deserves rest, but because he rises to the danger placed before him. He enters his own hall as a beggar and delays retaliation, because he does not assume that the world to which he is returning means him well. Penelope prevails because she conceals her intentions, postpones unfavorable decisions, and maintains a screening fiction through the weaving and unweaving of Laertes’ shroud. Arete demands command over the timing of action, however full of passion we may be to act.

The post-Christian societies of the West often elevate (and perhaps over-exaggerate) particular elements of the Christian moral framework, such as compassion, equality, and peacefulness, inflecting them with modern concerns of safety and therapeutic well-being. In this, post-Christian morality carries an antipathy toward social structures and practices that contradict these modern values, regardless of whether or how the promoted values may be pro-social or functional for human life. The Odyssey, in contrast, puts forward the case for moral discrimination as a necessary regulator of other values. Odysseus extends mercy to the bard and the herald in Ithaca, but only after he ascertains that they did not take part in the suitors’ offenses. He pursues particular loyalties to wife, son, father, and kingdom, minding that they form the structures through which social responsibility becomes possible. He employs craft and force against Polyphemus only when the Cyclops shows himself by his violent appetites to be outside the bonds of hospitality and reciprocity. He rejects the safety, pleasure, and even immortality offered by Calypso in favor of a hazardous journey to a rugged home, because he prefers the assertion of his identity over comfortable self-preservation. The navigation of life requires at different times mercy and severity, truthfulness and concealment, patience and attack. Any morality that does not embrace this full range of human action within its conception of virtue will not successfully orient man to excellence.

Retributive justice begins with a true respect for human agency. Whatever the gods may decree, men make choices for which they are responsible. The offenses of the suitors are deliberate, long-lasting, and severe. They drew down the resources of the household, corrupted its servants, courted its queen, and plotted to murder Odysseus’ son. They even receive repeated warnings, including demands to leave from Telemachus and omens of the consequences of persisting from Theoclymenus. Their terrible, savage slaughter by Odysseus—described in visceral detail by Homer—is a matter of moral and social necessity. Still, Odysseus forbids Eurycleia to rejoice over the deaths: as much as justice may require killing, even in the Greek world one ought not delight in it.

Homeric Virtues

The qualities of cunning, endurance, and memory, in which Odysseus mostly excels and sometimes fails, are central to the poem. Cunning, or metis, is intelligence adapted to concrete, difficult, volatile situations. It entails the knowledge of when to speak, hide, wait, test, strike, or yield, an embodied intelligence that goes beyond any intellectual understanding or decision procedure. The Cyclops episode richly illustrates the quality. Trapped by the giant stone Polyphemus rolls across the mouth of his cave, Odysseus observes, offers wine, and sharpens a huge stake before he and his men can together blind Polyphemus and ultimately escape by hiding under the departing rams of the Cyclops’ flock. More than mere deceit, his metis is the crafting and execution of an effective plan. Homer reinforces the admirability of this cunning when Athena meets Odysseus in Book 13, and the goddess praises him for it, indifferent to whether Odysseus adhered to our modern standards of “fair play.”

Throughout the poem, Odysseus is “much-enduring” or polytlas, keeping his mind fixed on Ithaka even as he suffers greatly. Endurance serves his goal of returning to and restoring his household. On Calypso’s island, he endures grief. When he suffers abuse and humiliation from his own servants on Ithaca, he brings to mind his captivity in the Cyclops’ cave and urges himself to endure yet more. Passion must not be vented in untimely action. In Homer, Odysseus is not defined by what has been done to him, but rather by his willingness to suffer to attain his goal. Yet suffering itself does not ennoble. The companions all suffer and die, some, such as Elpenor, absurdly. The suitors and corrupted servants suffer pain and terror, without gain. The endurance that rises to the level of excellence is governed by its end, its telos.

Memory in the Odyssey is constituted by the experience of being bound: to absent persons, to intangible institutions. It is the source of Odysseus’ desire to return home. Forgetting offers peace at the price of identity, exemplified by the lotus-eating in Book 9. The various recognition scenes on Ithaca all tie memory to the gradual reconstruction of identity. Odysseus’ old nurse-maid Eurycleia famously recognizes him through his childhood hunting scar, bringing to mind their ancient shared history. Penelope finally confirms her recognition of Odysseus through his knowledge of their marriage-bed. Laertes recognizes Odysseus through his memory of the precise trees the father gave his son as a child. Identity is a life-story, physically displayed in body, place, and action.

The Poem of the Future

Homer condenses complex observations about social institutions into memorable scenarios that allow the reader to recognize recurring human challenges. His images embody and illustrate abstract concepts with vivid narrative detail. Corruption becomes local elites who consume the resources of a kingdom while presuming to court the queen. Legitimate authority becomes a king who endures beggary until he can string a bow. A wife’s fidelity becomes a bed constructed with a secret shared only by her husband. Such images can, and for the Greeks did, deeply shape social perception and self-understanding. Rules may purport to state what one may or may not do, but images show the motives and drives that give rise to characteristic situations.

Homer’s key images illuminate the workings of his civilization and retain relevance to our own. The treatment of strangers, codified as xenia, entails reciprocal obligations of respect between guest and host. Xenia can be violated from either side, and the poem repeatedly shows the grave consequences of such violations, in contrast to a unilateral post-Christian humanitarianism. Penelope weaving and unweaving a burial shroud for Laertes provides a compact image of cunning through reversal in a work of familial and religious piety. Service toward an outward form and its quiet undoing can be an effective political action. Telemachus before the assembly illustrates the limits of political forms without power: he employs his authority as heir to summon the assembly and attempt to remedy Ithaka’s disorder, but cannot do so without the power of the king Odysseus. Odysseus’ exploits disguised as a beggar on Ithaca show that a leader must assess the true condition of his authority apart from its formal appearance. Over two millennia later, Shakespeare would employ this image as Henry V wandering in disguise among his men before the battle of Agincourt.

Yet, literature must be shared to be effective. When images such as Homer’s are no longer understood, our literature and our own self-understanding become impoverished. Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation The Odyssey seems to reflect precisely such an impoverishment has already taken place. Without great unifying texts, complex situations cannot as easily be referenced in shared figures, and judgment tends to literality and shallowness. Culture loses the ability to distinguish hospitality from exploitation, cunning from fraud, or retribution from sadism. Homer does not ask us to adopt a particular ideology or ethnicity; he holds open a space of human possibilities under the greatest civilizational duress.

Civilizations decline and sometimes collapse. The Bronze Age Mycenaeans did so dramatically, as did many of their neighbors in the 12th century B.C., and others before and since. To sustain itself or recover from decline, a civilization must repeatedly recover authority from chaos, obligation from appetite, and true names that have been hidden. The Odyssey relentlessly points forward, showing that every future worth building relies on human excellences that cannot be devised from scratch. Odysseus turned away from the life of the gods to fight his way back to Ithaca, a poor and rugged kingdom, to build it anew. It is best to live in a civilization that is vibrant and expansive. When we do not, the second best is to battle all the way home.

Bronze alloy is a fabrication, a man-made alloy. The formula was simple enough, a recipe known to smiths from the banks of the Nile to the hillforts of the Danube. You took copper, soft and plentiful and the color of the dying sun, and added tin in a proportion of about ten percent, a ratio arrived at not by calculation but by centuries of trial and error. The added tin made the difference between a metal that bends and a metal that cuts. This technological shift allowed for complex casting and a hard edge for tools and weapons.

Bronze was the strength of the age, the chisel that cut the stone for the Pharaoh’s limestone, the sword that severed the artery, the pin that held the cloak, a synonym for strength in poems written down on papyrus. The material divided the strong from the weak. Without the tin, you had only copper, which bent. You were soft and vulnerable and likely dead.

This necessity meant that for over two millennia, the great civilizations of the Mediterranean had a problem of geography that became a problem of survival. All of them, the Greek-speaking Mycenaeans in their Aegean citadels, the Egyptians along the Nile, and the Hittites on the Anatolian plateau, possessed copper in abundance. They had gold, timber, and grain. They had the favor of their gods and the discipline of their scribes. What they did not have was tin. They had built their political order, their armies, their economies, and their sophisticated diplomacy, on a metal that did not exist in their own soil.

This age of civilization was not a time of isolation. It was an era of globalization on a remarkable scale. A king in Mycenae could commission a sword whose blade was forged from copper mined in Cyprus and tin mined in Afghanistan, a weapon that was, in its molecular structure, a record of the known world. It was a time of far-reaching connectivity, a network of overland routes stretching across the Eurasian landmass and shipping across the Mediterranean Sea and even Indian Ocean—but a network that would ultimately prove to be fragile.

The Riddle of the Tin Mountains

For a long time, archaeologists didn’t know where the tin came from. This was the “tin problem,” a phrase that suggests a logistical hiccup rather than a centuries-long mystery that already baffled the historians of the classical world like Herodotus and Pliny. The texts were not so much silent as coy. The scribes of Mari and Ugarit listed the metal, annaku in Akkadian, AN.NA in Sumerian. They listed the prices, the weights, and the middlemen. But they did not list the mines. The tin came from “the East,” or it came from “the Mountains,” or it came from a market that had bought it from another market. It was a commodity with no origin, a ghost metal that seemed to simply appear in the palace workshops of Thebes and Knossos by magic.

We now know that, in the early centuries, tin came from far to the east, from Central and South Asia, from the Zeravshan Valley in what is now Tajikistan and the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan. There, in the high, thin air, miners dug into the rock, crushed the ore, smelted it into ingots, and sent it west by a relay of donkeys. The distance was striking. From the mines of Afghanistan to the furnaces of Mesopotamia is a journey of thousands of kilometers, across the Zagros Mountains, across the Iranian plateau, through the bandit country of Elam. The records of the Assyrian merchants of the 19th century BC tell of their trade network stretching out from their colony at Kanesh, in central Anatolia.

The Kültepe texts, in the form of twenty thousand cuneiform tablets found at Kanesh, are not concerned with poetry or myth but ledgers. They are the receipts of a family business. They record, with a dryness that borders on the hypnotic, the arrival of caravans from Aššur, the Assyrian home city. They record the movement of tin: about forty-eight tons of it over thirty years, carried on the backs of black donkeys.

These donkeys were the heavy transport of the Bronze Age. A single donkey could carry perhaps sixty kilograms, or two talents. It took a fleet of them, a convoy moving slowly through the dust, climbing the passes, paying the tolls, and bribing the local bandits. The merchants were focused on profit. They bought tin in Aššur for fifteen shekels of tin to one shekel of silver. They sold it in Anatolia for seven to one. They doubled their money—if they survived the journey, if the donkeys didn’t die, and if the taxes didn’t eat them alive.

The merchants, squeezed by the taxes of the local Anatolian rulers, established a smuggling route. They called it the harrān šūkinatum, the “narrow track.” They took their donkeys off the main highway to avoid the customs houses. Assyrian merchants in wool tunics, sweating in the Anatolian sun, goaded lines of donkeys laden with the strategic resource of an empire down goat paths to protect the enterprise’s profit. The hunger for margin and willingness to evade the state remain human constants. The donkeys stumbled under the weight of the metal that would make the sword that would kill the man.

This was the Eastern Route. It fed the early empires, relying on the stability of the lands between the Hindu Kush and the Mediterranean. It relied on Elam and Mari. It relied on a peace that was encouraged by the mutual necessity of the metal. As long as the caravans moved, the bronzesmiths in the west could work. The Assyrians were the middlemen, logistics experts who understood the art of geographic arbitrage in supply and demand. They moved the tin from where it was common to where it was rare but needed. However, the caravans were slow, and the mountains were high, and the kings of the Mediterranean looked for other options. The tablets tell us of the volume, but they also hint at the fragility. A war in the Zagros, a drought in the Khabur triangle, and the lines go dead. The furnaces go cold. The king waits for his armor, and the armor does not come.

The shift, when it came, was toward the water. By the Late Bronze Age, the kingdoms had turned to the sea. This was a cosmopolitan era of the great powers: New Kingdom Egypt, the Hittite Empire, the palaces of Mycenae. We have letters between pharaohs and kings in which they address one another as “brother,” complain about the quality of gold gifts, arrange marriages, and negotiate treaties. It was a club, and its members needed tin. The sea allowed for volume. A donkey carries sixty kilograms; a ship carries tons. The sea allowed the trade to scale up to match the ambitions of the empires.

Underwater Finds Reveal the Startling Scale of Trade

In 1982, a sponge diver off the coast of Grand Cape in Turkey noticed “metal biscuits with ears” on the seabed. He had found what came to be known as the Uluburun shipwreck. It is dated to the late 14th century BC, the high noon of the Bronze Age international trade. The ship was fifty feet long and built of cedar. It was a floating palace, a microcosm of the global economy, sunk in a single afternoon.

The inventory of the Uluburun ship is a litany of the era’s desires. It carried ebony logs from Africa, dark and heavy as stone. There was ivory from hippopotamus and elephant, the raw material for the inlay work on royal furniture. The hold contained ostrich eggshells, the ultimate novelty item, and terebinth resin in Canaanite jars, the scent of the Levant. It carried glass ingots colored cobalt blue and turquoise, meant to imitate lapis lazuli and turquoise stone, the synthetic luxury of the day. There were gold chalices and faience cups and cylinder seals.

But mostly, it carried metal. There were ten tons of copper, in the shape of “oxhide” ingots, mostly from Cyprus, the copper island. Perhaps most significantly, it carried one ton of tin. The ratio tells the tale: ten to one, the recipe for bronze. This was not a merchant-ship peddling trinkets, but a bulk shipment of industrial raw materials, likely a royal consignment, moving from the Levant toward the Aegean. The ship was a factory in kit form. Eleven tons of metal could outfit an army, enough bronze for five thousand swords.

For decades, the question of the Uluburun tin was a subject of vigorous academic debate. Did it come from the East, from the old Silk Road sources in Afghanistan, or did it come from the West, suggesting a connection to the Atlantic? As with much archaeology, the evidence was fragmentary. We knew about this trade network only because of its failures. Had the Uluburun ship reached its destination, the tin would have been melted down, turned into swords or plowshares, and likely lost.

The breakthrough also required an advance in geochemical techniques. Archaeologists had initially relied on lead isotope analysis, in which the decay of uranium and thorium creates a geological clock within the metal. While this proved particularly effective for copper, allowing scientists to trace many Bronze Age ingots to Cypriot ore, it had limitations for other metals. To trace the tin, scientists developed a multivariate approach, examining a number of isotopes and trace elements to create a broad signature.

The results of this analysis told a story of a diversified supply chain. Some of the tin appeared to match the signature of the eastern mines in Tajikistan. Other evidence pointed toward the Taurus Mountains of Turkey, suggesting Anatolia had its own sources despite previous assumptions that the Kestel mine was exhausted. The Uluburun ship proved a snapshot of civilizations operating at high efficiency, a network that could aggregate materials from three continents, trusting that the copper from Cyprus would always meet the far-traveling tin.

The real shock, however, came when this multivariate technique was used to trace ingots found in shipwrecks off the coast of Israel. These ingots did not come from Afghanistan or Turkey. The broad isotopic signature confirmed that they came from Cornwall, in the south-westernmost corner of Great Britain. This origin provided the definitive vindication for those who suspected an Atlantic link, proving that the trade networks of the Bronze Age were even more vast than previously imagined.

Tin Islands Hidden in The Atlantic Fog

Cornwall is a place of granite and gorse and a wind that feels like it originates in the center of the Atlantic. In the 13th century BC, to a resident of Thebes or Babylon, Cornwall was not merely foreign; it was theoretical, a place of mist and monsters at the edge of the map. Yet, the isotopes are clear. 

The lead isotope ratios, the trace elements of indium and antimony, all align. The tin found in the sunken cargoes of the eastern Mediterranean, the tin that was destined to become the weapons of the Israelites or the Philistines or the Egyptians, had been torn from the earth of southwest Britain. We have been accustomed to thinking of the ancient Near East as a self-contained drama involving Biblical prophets, Egyptian pharaohs, and perhaps seafaring Greeks and Romans; the rain-soaked moors of Devon, and their unknown inhabitants, have no role in this drama to us.

Nevertheless, the existence of these trade routes has been demonstrated. The hunger for the metal was so great that it pulled the North Atlantic rim into the orbit of the pharaohs. The tin mined in the streams of Cornwall was smelted into rough ingots, loaded onto sewn-plank oak boats, paddled across the English Channel to Brittany, then carried overland across France to the Rhône, or shipped down the Atlantic coast of Iberia, through the Pillars of Hercules, into the Mediterranean.

The supply chain was complex and multi-regional, suggesting a system of redundancy and efficiency. If the caravans from Afghanistan were cut off by war in Mesopotamia, the ships from the West could fill the gap. If a mine in Central Asia faltered, a mine in Britain could open. It suggests a market that was fluid, responsive, and able to source demand. By the Late Bronze Age, the sophisticated Mediterranean empires of the East were dependent on the tribal fringes of the West.

Yet, complexity is not a guarantee of stability; it is sometimes a correlate of fragility. Nodes in a network are potential points of failure. The Bronze Age world had constructed a machine of moving parts that spanned four thousand miles, reliant on the wind, the avoidance of pirates, and the credit of merchants. Above all, it relied on sufficient peace.

The Late Bronze Age Collapse

Ugarit, the great trading port on the Syrian coast, was destroyed in 1190 BC. Shortly before, the king of Ugarit wrote to the king of Cyprus with the concern of a man who realizes that the insurance policy has been cancelled. “If you have any information about enemy ships,” he wrote, “please inform me.” Maritime trade had become perilous. The end, when it came, was a systemic crash. Modern historians call it the Late Bronze Age Collapse. It happened around 1200 BC, with some offering the more precise date of 1177 BC. Though the dates are fuzzy, the devastation is clear. There was a coincidence of misfortune, including earthquakes, drought, and famine. There were the “Sea Peoples,” the mysterious confederation of raiders who swept down the coasts, burning the cities and cutting supply lines.

Ugarit burned, its clay tablets baked hard by the fires of its destruction, preserving the final frantic memos of the bureaucracy. The palace at Pylos burned. The Hittite capital at Hattusa was abandoned. The trade routes were severed. The tin stopped coming. The Cape Gelidonya shipwreck, off the southwestern coast of Turkey, provides chilling details of the collapse. Its cargo was not tons of fresh metal, but scrap. It carried broken bronze tools, bits and pieces, the detritus of a failing world. The crew were likely Cypriot smiths, traveling from port to port, scavenging what they could. They were recycling, melting down the past to make the present.

The supply of tin had been the artery of the age. As the systems of the age convulsed and the flow of tin faltered, each fed into the other’s decline. It wasn’t just that new weapons could not be forged; it was that the elite institutions of their societies, based on prestige, gift exchange, and technical superiority, broke down. Their descendants were forced to turn to iron.

Iron is ugly and difficult to work with. It rusts. It cannot be cast like bronze; it must be beaten into submission—cast iron, invented in China and introduced to the West during the Renaissance, is a carbon alloy. However, iron has one great advantage over bronze: the ore is everywhere. You don’t need far-flung trade routes to acquire iron. You don’t need a donkey caravan from Afghanistan or a ship from Cornwall. You can often dig it out of a mountain within sight of your city.

Iron is the metal of an ancient apocalypse. Bronze was the metal of the elite of an ancient globalization. When the trade network broke, the Bronze Age ended, and the Iron Age began: a grimmer, harder, more local world. A silence followed the collapse. For centuries after 1200 BC, the Mediterranean went dark. Writing vanished in many locations, including Greece. The great architecture stopped. The Phoenicians would later pick up the threads. They would sail to Tarshish in the western Mediterranean and bring back the metal. The Greeks would speak of the Cassiterides, the Tin Islands, with the vagueness of myth. But the integrated, high-speed, high-volume network of the 14th century BC was gone.

The Bronze Age tin trade has a certain resonance in the present day. Modern economies rely on cobalt from the Congo, lithium from the Andes, and semiconductors from Taiwan. They are machines of moving parts that span the globe. The partisans of globalization hold that the complexity of the system indicates its strength, that the market will find a way, that the supply chains will hold. The map of the tin routes, however, with its dashed lines crossing the Zagros and sea lanes hugging coasts from Anatolia to Brittany, suggests an enduring vulnerability.

The tin was geologically rare and geographically distant. It was nevertheless essential, so men went to get it. They invented letters of credit, customs unions, and diplomatic protocols. They conquered the distance, maximized the efficiency, and diversified their sources. They alloyed the copper and polished the bronze until it shone like gold. Then, one day, the ships no longer came. The lesson of the Bronze Age is not that the ancient world was primitive, but that it was sophisticated, and its sophistication was implicated in its death. A localized world can survive a local disaster. A globalized world, when it breaks, breaks in many places at once.

One can visit the Bodrum Museum in Turkey and see the oxhide ingots, copper slabs with the four handles, raised from the bottom of the sea after three thousand years. They are heavy, ugly things, sitting in a museum case, corroded and silent. They are monuments to trade, to political and economic effort, to the fact that, long before classical Athens, there was a network that connected the snows of Afghanistan to the fog of Cornwall, tied together by the desire for a metal that would make a sharper sword.

We still seek material resources, however much they change. Ours include oil, uranium, and rare earths, but the shape of the quest remains the same. The center is here; the resource is there. The line between them is a lifeline and a noose.

The tin trade was a dream of connection, a testament to human ingenuity and the willingness to risk. The men of that age built a world that relied on distant strangers, that required the horizon to stay open. When the horizon closed, they were left with fragments and scrap. We, in turn, are left with the story of the tin, a story of how we strive, whether in victory or ruin, to bind the world together.

The Medici pioneered a model in which art, architecture, and scholarship were not mere ornaments of power but integral components of its machinery. They understood that culture could be a functional instrument, that beauty could be more powerful than propaganda, and that the sponsorship of genius could yield returns far exceeding the investment. By funding the defining works of what would come to be called the Italian Renaissance, they cultivated an ecosystem that reinforced their own economic strength, legitimized their political authority, and catalyzed an explosion of creativity that reshaped the Western world. Over the years, Medici patronage funded extraordinary artists and thinkers ranging from Michelangelo to Machiavelli to Leonardo da Vinci, whose names still serve as bywords for genius today.

Weaving financial power, political ambition, and artistic innovation into a single tapestry was the particular genius of the House of Medici. To examine the Medicis’ method is to ask a question that remains highly relevant today: how can strategic cultural patronage alter the long-term trajectory of society and create a durable legacy, and what might its application look like in the centers of money and power today, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley?

The Engine of Commerce and Culture

The Medicis’ ascent was fueled by their bank. Founded in 1397 by Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici (1360-1429), the Medici Bank was a masterpiece of financial innovation in an age suspicious of open usury. Giovanni adopted sophisticated instruments like double-entry bookkeeping and letters of credit, establishing a network of branch partnerships that stretched across Europe. His financial acumen generated the immense capital that his son Cosimo (1389-1464) and later generations would deploy with surgical precision. The family fortune was the wellspring of their influence, the liquid asset that could be transmuted into the harder currencies of stone, bronze, and public admiration.

They did not treat this expenditure as a cost, but instead as a strategic reinvestment in the family’s enterprise. The beautification of Florence was more than good for business. When Cosimo de’ Medici financed the construction of Filippo Brunelleschi’s revolutionary dome for the city’s cathedral and underwrote the rebuilding of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, he was not merely engaging in civic philanthropy. He was enhancing the brand of Florence, and by extension, the brand of its most prominent family. A magnificent city attracted talent, trade, and wealthy visitors, all of whom might require the services of a reliable bank. The public works, from churches to libraries, served to secure the favor of the city’s powerful guilds and its ordinary citizens, creating a reservoir of goodwill that was a great intangible asset.

Local merchants and foreign potentates alike found it advantageous to associate with the prestigious Medici, a name that became synonymous with not only financial dependability but cultural sophistication. The Medici Bank’s appointment in 1420 as the Depositor of the Apostolic Chamber, effectively the financial manager for the Papacy, a role of immense profit and prestige, was secured and maintained in no small part through the family’s carefully cultivated reputation as pious and discerning supporters of Christian art and scholarship. They understood with great clarity that cultural capital was convertible and could be exchanged for trust, loyalty, access, and further economic opportunity. Their patronage drew clients, allies, and talent into their orbit. The artists and scholars they supported became nodes in a social and commercial network—a network that invariably led back to the Palazzo Medici. They created a feedback loop in which economic power funded cultural production, which in turn generated the social and political capital that solidified and expanded economic power. It was a cycle of such efficiency that their contemporaries, including their rivals, were compelled to imitate it, multiplying this social technology across Italy.

The financial mechanisms that sustained their patronage were as innovative as the art it produced. To navigate the Church’s prohibitions on usury, the bank perfected the use of exchange bills, which replaced interest with fees for currency conversion, allowing them to lend generously and profitably. A portion of these profits was then funneled into the glorification of Florence, God, and the Medici. Artists and scholars were offered stipends, long-term commissions paid in installments, or even pensions, providing them with a degree of financial stability that freed them to experiment and innovate.

This financial leverage was also applied to the political sphere. Cosimo extended enormous loans to the Florentine state to finance its wars. In return, he gained decisive influence over state appointments and policy. The officials who owed their positions to Medici largesse were naturally inclined to approve the family’s ambitious and expensive public art projects. By the late fifteenth century, under the stewardship of Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-1492), the distinction between the city’s and the Medicis’ balance sheet had become blurred. Florence’s economic vitality and its cultural preeminence were two sides of the same coin, a coin minted, managed, and circulated by the Medici. One could no longer tell if they were bankers investing in art or cultural impresarios who happened to run a bank. They were indivisibly both.

The Architecture of Political Legitimacy

For a family of bankers with no hereditary claim to rule, political power in a fiercely independent republic like Florence was a precarious asset. Culture became their primary tool for legitimizing a rule that was, for decades, unofficial. They used it to manufacture consent, to project an aura of destiny, and to transform their public image from that of powerful citizens to that of rightful, spiritually sanctioned leaders. Works were calibrated to communicate the family’s piety, wisdom, and unwavering commitment to the Florentine state. 

In the private chapel of the Medici Palace, Benozzo Gozzoli’s vibrant frescoes of the Journey of the Magi (1459-1461) offer a masterclass in this technique. The biblical procession winds its way through an idealized Tuscan landscape, and riding among the Magi are prominent members of the Medici family and their political allies, their portraits seamlessly integrated into the sacred narrative. The message was unmistakable: the Medici were not merely patrons, but pious participants in sacred history, wise men guiding their city in accordance with God’s will.

This blending of the sacred and the political was a recurring theme. Donatello’s bronze David, the first freestanding nude sculpture since antiquity, was placed in the courtyard of the Medici Palace. While a potent symbol of the Florentine Republic’s own underdog victory against its enemies, its placement within the Medicis’ private-yet-public space subtly tied that civic triumph to the family’s leadership. The message, absorbed by every visitor and dignitary, was that the city’s security and cultural flowering were underwritten by Medici strength and discernment.

This form of symbolic politics was complemented by a more direct cultivation of popular support. Cultural patronage was a way to win the hearts and minds of the Florentine people. Cosimo de’ Medici, a man of sober habits as well as immense wealth, gained a reputation as a benefactor of the common good. He earned the posthumous title Pater Patriae, “Father of the Fatherland,” not through military conquest, but through his funding of public institutions like the convent and library of San Marco, which were made accessible to the citizens. In a time when citizens of Northern Italian city-states had a strong sense of civic patriotism focused on the collective interest of their city, Cosimo’s acts of generosity created a deep well of public goodwill that proved to be a formidable political defense. When rival families orchestrated his exile in 1433, the city’s economy faltered and public discontent grew. His triumphant return a year later was supported by a broad coalition of citizens who had come to equate Medici leadership with Florence’s stability and glory.

His grandson Lorenzo refined this strategy into a high art. Lorenzo was less the behind-the-scenes banker and more the public impresario of Florence’s golden age. He organized lavish public festivals, tournaments, and carnivals, often featuring elaborate artistic performances and allegorical displays that celebrated the beneficence of the Medici regime. By positioning himself as the chief arbiter of Florence’s cultural life and the guarantor of its public happiness, Lorenzo garnered a level of popular affection that helped him survive political crises, most notably the violent Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478. In the wake of that bloody assassination attempt, the support of the Florentine populace, who saw the attack on the Medici as an attack on the city itself, solidified his power.

The Medici invested enormous sums in religious art and architecture, effectively forging an alliance with the most powerful institution in Europe: the Church. By funding the restoration and construction of major churches and by maneuvering their own family members into high ecclesiastical office—four Medicis would become popes—they added religious authority to their worldly power. Pope Leo X, born Giovanni de’ Medici (1475-1521), commissioned Raphael to decorate the Vatican apartments and initiated the grand project to rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica, all of which enhanced the family’s image as preeminent leaders of Christendom.

Funding the Renaissance

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Medici was not any single work of art, but an ecosystem of innovation. The Medici court, particularly under Cosimo and Lorenzo, became an incubator for the Renaissance, a place where disparate talents were brought into close proximity, creating a critical mass of genius. Their patronage system did not simply fund individual projects but also nurtured a collaborative and competitive environment where new styles, techniques, and ideas could emerge and cross-pollinate.

The House of Medici also cultivated the intellectual elite. Cosimo laid the groundwork by identifying and providing sustained support to transformative figures. He was the patron of Filippo Brunelleschi, the engineer who solved the seemingly impossible problem of the dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, and of Donatello, the sculptor who revived the classical tradition. But he also understood the importance of intellectual infrastructure. His founding of the Platonic Academy was a masterstroke, creating an institutional home for the revival of classical philosophy. By providing the scholar Marsilio Ficino with a villa and a lifelong stipend to translate Plato’s complete works into Latin, Cosimo was acting as a patron for humanism, itself a political project.

These scholars, dependent on Medici support, naturally produced works that praised their patrons’ virtues and lent philosophical weight to their rule. A powerful narrative was thus woven from the pulpit, the academy, and the artist’s studio: the Medici were not usurpers, but the spiritually sanctioned stewards of a new golden age. Through this multi-pronged strategy, the family turned culture into a fortress, securing their dynasty for generations.

Lorenzo amplified this effect, presiding over a court that was a constellation of the era’s brightest stars. At various times, his circle included the painters Sandro Botticelli and Domenico Ghirlandaio, the young sculptor Michelangelo, and the poet-scholar Angelo Poliziano. Lorenzo did not merely commission them. He brought them into his household, invited them to his table, and engaged them in conversation. The Medici court became a hub of intellectual ferment, a place where a discussion of Neoplatonic philosophy might influence the allegorical design of a painting, or a new understanding of anatomy might inform the musculature of a sculpture.

The Medici directly intervened with artists, encouraging them to push boundaries and excel. When Lorenzo recognized the prodigious talent of a teenage Michelangelo, he took him into his own home. Michelangelo ate meals with the family and was tutored alongside Lorenzo’s sons, including Giovanni, the future Pope Leo X. Lorenzo not only covered the boy’s expenses but gave him access to the family’s unparalleled collection of ancient Roman sculpture, which proved formative for Michelangelo’s innovative approach to the human form.

This patronage extended to science and technology. Later generations of the family, now the Grand Dukes of Tuscany, continued the tradition. Grand Duke Cosimo I (1519-1574) founded one of Europe’s first formal art academies, the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, in the 1560s, which sought to link artistic practice with scientific principles. This same spirit led a later Medici, Grand Duke Cosimo II (1590-1621), to become the patron of Galileo Galilei. The astronomer’s discoveries, including the moons of Jupiter, which he named the “Medicean Stars” in honor of his patron, were made possible by the funding and political protection the Medici provided.

The network effects of this ecosystem rippled outward. The Medici often acted as cultural brokers, leveraging their diplomatic ties to place their favored artists and scholars in other courts. The artists and artisans trained in the Medici ecosystem went on to mentor the next generation, propagating a culture of excellence and innovation across Italy and beyond. The institutions they founded and the collections they amassed, bequeathed to the city, became the cores of public museums like the Uffizi Gallery and libraries like the Laurentian Library, creating an enduring infrastructure for creativity. The Medici demonstrated that sustained, strategic investment in culture yields an innovation multiplier, creating a legacy that both enriches humanity’s artistic and scientific heritage and drives economic prosperity.

The Medici Method in a Modern Context

The world of 21st-century technology may seem distant from Renaissance Florence, yet the challenges and opportunities facing today’s entrepreneurs are analogous to those the Medici faced. How does one translate private wealth into lasting public good? How can recently acquired wealth earn social permission to impact and innovate? How can a center of economic power also become a celebrated center of culture? The Medicis’ approach, in its essential principles, offers a compelling blueprint. Adapting it for a modern hub of innovation, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, requires a translation of its core strategies into a contemporary vocabulary.

The first and most straightforward principle is direct financial sponsorship. The Medici identified and backed individual genius. Modern patrons can do the same, not by writing a check to a large, established institution, but by making targeted bets on hand-picked individuals. For a tech leader, this might mean funding a long-term fellowship at an innovative nonprofit, creating a writer-in-residence program at their company, or providing a no-strings-attached grant to an artist or scientist. This kind of direct, personal patronage, like Lorenzo’s support for Michelangelo, forges a relationship and sends a powerful signal that the patron values individual creativity, not only financial returns. It visibly directs wealth to pro-social ends and generates loyalty and goodwill. Importantly, the Medici did not outsource their judgment of genius to external institutions but used their own judgment of character and creativity, not shying away from the young, the untested, and outsiders. When Cosimo de’ Medici decided to refound Plato’s Academy, he put 29-year-old Marsilio Ficino in charge—his grandson’s tutor—not an aging, well-connected priest or scholar at the peak of his prestige.

The second principle is institution-building. The Medici built things that would outlast them: libraries, academies, public buildings, and more. The modern equivalent need not be a physical structure, though it could include one. The key is to create enduring institutions that advance knowledge and culture on behalf of the civic community. A tech billionaire might found a research institute dedicated to open-sourcing software or preserving other knowledge, build a new science or history museum, or establish an atelier that blends the latest fabrication technologies with an artistic studio. Such a strategy anchors a patron’s legacy in the civic landscape, deploying a personal fortune for particular public goods.

The third principle, perhaps the most crucial, is networking and convening. One of the Medicis’ greatest contributions was network cultivation. They created a salon, a court, a space where diverse minds could collide and collaborate. A modern Medici would not just fund projects but actively curate communities, which would also provide a source of talented outsiders with which to staff new institutions. This curation could take the form of invitation-only retreats, festivals, or interdisciplinary conferences that bring together a careful mix of technologists, humanists, and civic activists. The goal is to replicate the cross-pollination that took place in Lorenzo’s court, to create a space where new companies, projects, and friendships can be cultivated across domains. The Bay Area, with its concentration of specialized talent, is fertile ground for this kind of intentional serendipity. A patron’s greatest asset may not be money, but social capital and the power to convene.

The final principle is symbolic and philosophical patronage. The Medici used art to shape a narrative about their family and their city. Today’s patrons operate in a far more saturated media environment, but the principle remains the same. For tech leaders often criticized for a lack of civic engagement, strategic cultural patronage can demonstrate a commitment to humanistic values. Funding training in the arts, supporting public art inspired by history, or underwriting long-form journalism and analysis are all acts that generate social capital. They signal that the patron’s interests extend beyond technological disruption and profit to the health and vibrancy of their society. The most challenging aspect of such patronage is that it should reflect a coherent social philosophy, not disconnected attempts at public relations. Establishing prizes for innovation in art or selected technologies can be the modern equivalents of the competitions the Medici sponsored for the cathedral doors. They incentivize excellence while associating the patron’s name with visionary leadership.

These strategies can operate at many scales. One need not possess a huge fortune to apply them. Many successful engineers could engage in direct sponsorship by supporting artists and writers with smaller amounts of support, or practice convening by organizing salons. The point is not the magnitude of the spending, but the strategic intent behind it: to create a synergy between economic success and cultural flourishing. For the Bay Area, an undeniable engine of technological innovation, but one with a sadly mixed record of social achievement, a conscious embrace of the Medicis’ model could be transformative. By investing in the region’s cultural and intellectual vitality, innovators can help create a more resilient, cohesive, and creative society. In doing so, they would not only enrich their society but also secure their own legacies, demonstrating, as the Medici did five centuries ago, that the most profitable long-term investment is in human beings. The return on that investment, measured in the richness of a culture and the durability of a legacy, is incalculable.

Eliot had not only spotted his moment, but also his audience. Only four years earlier, Harvard graduates had gained the ability to elect members to the board of overseers, a privilege once held by officials of the Massachusetts state government and by local clergy. Eliot appealed not only to the powerful business interests in which Harvard alumni were increasingly well-represented, but also to the Transcendentalist ideals of self-realization which were increasingly popular in the mid-nineteenth century. “We are fighting a wilderness, physical and moral,” he informed his readers. The time of the “dead languages” was over, and the mission of national progress had fallen to the new industries and those in them. Later that year, Eliot became the youngest president in the history of Harvard.

The triumph of Eliot’s ideas was only possible because of the much broader, societal revolution that had already begun to change the values and goals of America’s national elites. What gets taught at universities and schools will directly impact a society’s power structure. Because of this, elites who participate in governance tend to favor the intellectual fashions that preserve the interests of those in power. These ideas in turn come to dominate and shape institutions of higher education. In other words, there is always a feedback loop connecting power and education, in both good and bad regimes.

This creates something of a paradox. While there are valid critiques of America’s elite educational institutions, the feedback loop between power and education means these institutions can never lead any useful reforms of education. After all, who would implement the reforms? The same academics and administrators who created the current consensus?

In reality, education under every regime is exactly as the regime wishes it to be. Therefore, the only way to change education is to change the regime. As Charles Eliot took the reins of power at Harvard, that change in regime had already occurred with the rise of industrial interests both in government and among the alumni of Harvard. Their values had once marked them as outsiders. But on the day Eliot assumed the presidency, they gained an important victory in the institutional landscape. American education would be utterly transformed as a result.

The Evolution of Harvard

History offers many examples of educational change brought about by regime change. The structure of elite education today traces its history to roots that, in their time, showed signs of great vitality. Harvard University, for example, serves as a representative for elite education in the U.S. Harvard’s prestige is largely due to it being the oldest and richest university in the country, but also comes from its profound influence on higher education curricula in general over the last two centuries.

However difficult it may be to get into Harvard, once a student begins their studies, the coursework is often shallow and undemanding. Grade inflation is pervasive, and since one’s grades are likely to be inflated anyway, a certain verbal facility—“bullshitting”—more than suffices to pass most courses, requiring little mastery of any challenging discipline. This condition is especially dominant in those fields called the “humanities,” which bear little resemblance to the rigorous studies that went by that name before the twentieth century. The telos of the Harvard undergraduate experience is no longer the formation of character. Most students now see a degree as a ticket into the upper reaches of the professional-managerial class.

This slow erosion of the curriculum has its roots in Eliot’s reforms, which he continued to zealously implement until the end of his presidency in 1909. Eliot’s own chemistry training made him keenly aware of America’s industrialization and he wanted higher education to better align with this trend. Eliot’s partiality to the philosophy of individual self-formation went hand-in-hand with influence from the utilitarian pragmatism popular in that era. These goals led him to insist on replacing Harvard’s prescribed curriculum with a system of electives. Over the course of his long presidency, he was quite successful in fulfilling this aim. By 1900, Harvard no longer had any required courses beyond the freshman year. As scientific specialization matured, Eliot’s successors introduced the concepts of majors and distribution requirements in 1914, giving birth to the modern system of U.S. higher education.

The history of the prescribed curriculum replaced by Eliot went back generations. Students read Latin, Greek, English composition, mathematics, natural science, philosophy, and theology. The entrance exam for 1869, the year Eliot became president, began with extensive exercises in Latin and Greek composition and grammar. Then came questions on history (such as “Pericles—The Man and His Policy”) and geography (students must be able to name the sources of the world’s major rivers). Finally, the exam presented arithmetic problems and questions about logarithms, trigonometry, algebra, and plane geometry—all of which would be difficult for any modern student, even with a calculator. Other topics, like natural sciences, philosophy, and theology, presumably awaited instruction at university.

This prescribed curriculum was not unique to the elite culture of nineteenth-century New England. American elites from the previous century held it in high regard as well.

In 1785, Thomas Jefferson wrote to his 15-year old nephew, Peter Carr, for whose education he had assumed responsibility upon the death of Carr’s father. The letter detailed Jefferson’s expectations for the boy’s studies, carried out to prepare Carr to enter the “public stage whereon [he] may begin to be useful” and so “pursue the interests of [his] country.” Carr would go on to serve in the Virginia House of Delegates and was instrumental in the founding of the University of Virginia.

Jefferson’s first criterion for Carr was that he should “encourage all [his] virtuous dispositions…and exercise them whenever an opportunity arises, being assured that they will gain strength by exercise as a limb of the body does.” He advised Carr to begin his studies with ancient Greece and Rome, “reading everything in the original and not in translations.” Carr’s studies were then to move on to Greek, Latin, and English poetry. In philosophy, the young man was to read Plato and Cicero. Jefferson also encouraged him to master Spanish and French: Spanish, for its practical value in the Americas, and French, because later studies in mathematics, natural science, and modern history were all to be conducted in that tongue.

In addition to bookwork, Carr was to exercise for two hours each day, not by playing ball games, “which stamp no character on the mind,” but in a more practical manner: “I advise the gun,” wrote Jefferson. Young Carr was to make his gun “the constant companion of [his] walks” while building up a high level of fitness through walking. Muskets in the 1780s generally weighed about ten pounds.

Jefferson’s ideas for the proper education of a rising elite were normal for the era. The curriculum he proposed to his nephew had its roots in the studia humanitatis, or “study of humanity,” launched by the scholar and poet Petrarch and his humanist contemporaries during the Italian Renaissance. Working in early-fourteenth century Italy and France amid decadent universities and turbulent regimes, Petrarch pursued his famous revival of classical Greco-Roman letters in culture and education both through his own writing and by creating a network of collaborators across Europe. He wanted to create a fellowship of learned men with interests spanning philosophy, literature, and politics, along with influential patrons who could fund and promote his work. Over the next century, this network connected dozens of ruling courts and universities, first in Italy, then all of Europe.

These early humanities curricula aimed to shape the character and capabilities of political and cultural elites. The intentions of the humanists very much extended to the political sphere, in that stable regimes that governed well were seen as necessary society’s highest aspirations. The humanists wanted future elites who were competent in the linguistic arts needed by rulers, diplomats, and administrators. They did not understand the practical dimension in a reductive, utilitarian sense. Rather, they understood that statecraft and the cultivation of the soul are inseparable.

For these early humanists, the true purpose of education was not the development of particular skills for commercial ends, but to nurture the virtues and build up a student’s character. Institutio, as they called this framework, gave students the moral and intellectual qualities needed to live as leading members of a polity. Practical wisdom was the essential virtue of a good education. They saw the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, especially Greek political writing, as an indispensable resource to develop such wisdom. Institutio was not simply about the individual either: they cared greatly about architecture, art, and music that could harmonize with and support a person’s moral and intellectual endeavors.

By the late fifteenth century, this profound humanities curriculum had reshaped the education of European elites in both Protestant and Catholic countries. A century later, the Jesuits adapted it into the Ratio studiorum to guide their famous schools. The logic of the humanists’ program was to reverse-engineer the mechanics of past, high-functioning eras of civilization so that the educated elites could apply those lessons in their own societies. It worked, and the social effect was comparable to the Confucian ethical revival that began in the Later Zhou dynasty and ultimately underpinned the renewed societal flourishing of the Han dynasty. Just as Confucius and his followers applied lessons from studying the social technologies of the Early Zhou, the humanists studied and applied the lessons from ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the dominant Christian traditions of theology. It lasted for centuries and was later the basis for all elite educational institutions in the New World.

Applied History For a New Regime

Petrarch created a curriculum for people willing to transform society and overcome what he saw as centuries of stagnation. His program taught students to read closely, think logically, write cogently, and speak persuasively. More importantly, it created a shared frame of reference among elites by imparting a mindset that enabled them to discuss social trends beyond immediate utilitarian concerns and prepare them for coordinated action.

An important aspect of Petrarch’s approach was that he made no attempt to reform existing institutions, such as the universities. That would come decades after his movement had gained influence and prestige. Just as today, he would have been ensnared by a quagmire of interest groups, all highly resistant to reform. Instead, Petrarch focused on developing his intellectual and cultural work, both personally and with fellow travelers. More important than fixing the dysfunction around him was educating a new elite who had the character to lead future reforms. Centuries later, the early founders and institutions that inspired Eliot did the same, establishing new scientific colleges with varying degrees of independence from the established, traditional ones. We can learn a lot from this wise strategy when thinking about the problems of today’s education system. Both Petrarch’s and Eliot’s reforms were only made possible by small groups that focused on their own private goals in learning and research, and cultivated intellectual cultures very different from those around them. Broader reforms only became possible once these had reached the right degree of maturity, and had found their natural bases for both students and patrons.

In the case of the “study of humanity” and of liberal education, the ethos they developed is one that we might call applied history. It is the study of everything students need to know to alter the course of history, informed by the goal of freeing them from the constraints of established narratives so that they can act on events as agents instead.

When Petrarch forwarded his humanist project, he believed Europe was the victim of civilizational amnesia. Deeply involved in the Renaissance rebirth of classical philosophy and literature, he obsessed over the relationship between contemplation and active life. His curriculum was about teaching students how to achieve this balance, regain the lost memory of their civilization, and carry it forward to future generations. Certain skills were necessary for this process. In order to engage with the intellectual output of antiquity, students had to learn the dominant languages of that era: Latin and Greek. And to engage with their own counterparts across Europe, students also needed fluency, or at least familiarity, with the languages of their own period. The result was a renewed intellectual culture that connected scholars from London to Florence. This was the fertile ground from which the liberal curriculum of education eventually grew.

Today we face a similar challenge to Petrarch, in that our institutions are no longer appropriate guides for navigating the chaos of history. To get the best of the future, we must train new elites that can replace these failing institutions with a new regime. But the tradition of liberal education we have inherited is all but dead, and substantially obsolete in its details. We no longer expect those trained in the liberal arts as they currently exist to be prepared to seize the course of history, as the curriculum was originally designed to do.

What kind of education prepares students to take the course of history into their own hands? The historical answer was to abandon the liberal educational paradigm in favor of developing expertise in a particular field. Through the twentieth century, the humanities and the so-called STEM topics (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) drifted apart, to the point where the fields largely no longer communicate. The social sciences, ostensibly replacing the humanities as bearers of ideological legitimacy, turned out to have neither the wisdom of the humanities nor the rigor of real sciences. The social sciences could not fill the vacuum left by our neglect of a liberal education.

Charles Eliot and other defenders of the current elective model of education argued that it would allow students to cultivate their private strengths without relying on a strict curriculum. But the ultimate result of stepping back from conditioning the minds of elites was that banks, private corporations, NGOs, and other institutions eagerly stepped in to fill the vacuum. These institutions are often involved in writing the educational scripts for what constitutes a desirable degree, course, and resume. The result is that students do not actually achieve new heights of self-realization. Instead, they join the upper-middle class.

Petrarch and his successors would shake their heads in despair. They saw no difference between teaching students the tools of self-knowledge and explaining their place in society. as well as what they should do with this position. Only once the student achieved this consciousness could they go on to break the mold in their own way.

Recovering the knowledge of the past was only part of the mission Petrarch and his colleagues were pursuing. Their admiration for the ancients was not based on their ability to merely pass on prior knowledge, but on their positive achievements. Studying the past was a way to give students a sense of destiny and of their place in the world, as well as of providing examples from which to learn. But the goal of liberal education was also to supply students with psychological and spiritual autonomy. The broad membership of an elite class must have confidence in their own judgments about truth and value, instead of relying on public acclaim.

Note how different this is from trade and professional education models. These seek to teach the practical knowledge and ideology of and for the productive middle of society that operates within an established order. Elites, on the other hand, must work both inside and outside the established order as they act on history. This also puts the student in apparent tension with the liberal curriculum’s focus on inheriting the traditions of the past. Although learning from them, the best students are not those whose ultimate loyalty is to tradition as such. Instead, they are those who cultivate the personal judgment and wisdom that let them break conformity with the past and make new contributions in their own right.

The work of cultivating elites has no set curriculum—either in Petrarch’s time or in ours. It’s often tempting to wholesale reinvent the programs of the past out of a sense of admiration, like some kind of totem that could let us replicate the achievements we admire most in history. But our context is very different from Petrarch’s, or even from Eliot’s. While America has deep roots in the classical heritage that make Latin or Greek worth learning, it also inherits modernity. The historical luminaries of our society wrote philosophy in French, translated science from German, and created poetry and literature in English. Spanish, Russian, and Chinese are now the languages that let us communicate with our spheres of influence in the Americas, and with our rivals across the globe. And in addition to the great religious traditions, an expanded wealth of knowledge about human evolution and our ancient past informs our sense of destiny in new and unique ways. The liberal curriculum of our own civilization is yet to be properly laid out.

What divides the liberal curriculum—both of the past and of the future—from the program envisioned by Eliot and his successors is its belief in the value of collective historical consciousness. Instead of homogenizing students, that consciousness reinforced the cultivation of individual abilities and contributions. It also had a universalistic impulse, believing that each society had its own chance to contribute to the greater whole of human knowledge and history. But unless a society’s best minds cultivated the right learning and character among themselves and the broader population, they would squander their chance and even lose what progress their ancestors might have made.

Our society’s institutions are buckling under the weight of accumulating dysfunction, and our higher education embodies the current regime’s neuroses instead of challenging them. Materially, we have the ability to shape history in ways few past generations could have imagined. But our historical consciousness is increasingly amnesic and the twin forces of learned collective helplessness and political conflict are crippling our ideas of what is possible. Whatever merits Eliot’s regimen of self-development might once have had, its evolved form has left our best students aimless.

We aren’t yet in the period of great reforms. The feedback loop still holds: applied history will only inform higher education when it also informs a new regime. But now is the time for private networks and seed institutions. Under these circumstances, it is Petrarch’s impulse that should inspire those who exit the universities and look for a different regimen by which to cultivate their souls.

Chinese spies penetrate major American companies, universities, and geopolitical allies. Chinese economic influence muzzles Hollywood and the NBA. The Chinese Communist Party condemns hundreds of thousands to concentration camps, and millions to cultural erasure, with impunity. Chinese industrial strategy has sucked the oxygen out of the room for a big chunk of America’s working class, and sent fentanyl back to fill the vacuum. The American dream has been off-shored to China. Pragmatic American strivers put their kids in Mandarin preschool.

Some are calling China’s rise an existential threat to America and the West. Others say it’s only a threat to the international elite. Either way, it’s obvious that something bad is happening here, at least for us.

Four Dimensions of Competition

“Existential threat” implies the highest level of priority and immediacy, the level of danger for which a first strike with strategic weapons should be considered if other measures aren’t working. That kind of hyperbole is unnecessary and inaccurate. China is a strategic rival, not a strategic threat in the way that, say, Japan was in 1941. Rather, the more useful frame is competition. We are in serious competition with China on four key dimensions:

1. Economic Power. Whoever controls the means of production, and the money, controls the motivations of many of the world’s actors, and can use and deny that productive capacity for military and other strategic purposes. This is an explicit part of China’s strategy to reorder the globe. It undergirds their domestic dominance of manufacturing and trade, their industrial espionage, and their mercantilist Belt and Road Initiative. Through the petrodollar and dominance in certain high-tech fields, it is also part of the U.S. imperial strategy.
2. Geopolitical Power. Military might via wealth, along with intelligence operations and diplomacy, feed into geopolitical power. China has been mostly conservative in its geopolitical adventurism so far, but is increasingly aggressive in asserting its claims. Its leaders are cementing control over Hong Kong, building influence in Africa and Eurasia, and penetrating even core states in the American alliance, like Australia and Canada. China’s endgame is to become the foremost hard and soft power in the international order, taking the position from America.
3. Ideological Supremacy. Nominally China is communist, but the more important point is that they are non-liberal, rejecting both liberal pieties and political structures. China has different ways of running its regime internally, and different ways of running an empire. China’s United Front efforts are learning to exploit the anxieties of Western liberalism. All of this makes China’s way of being a direct threat to modern liberalism, and vice versa.
4. Internal Challenges. Like a fight between two drunks, staying upright and in the game is often half the battle. China is dealing with significant demographic issues and an over-centralized party around Xi, which may cause trouble in the next 20 years. America has similar demographic problems, especially among its core middle class, and a growing crisis of elite competence and political breakdown. If either manages to solve these internal issues, it will get a major advantage.

China’s Threat Is Caused by American Decline

There are two ways to interpret our problem with China, which amount to different accounts of causality. First, we can blame China for bad behavior, or otherwise try to isolate the problem to China’s specific influence. Or second, we could recognize that the problem is bigger than China, and caused more by American decline than anything specific to its rival. To the extent that it’s the first, our strategy should focus on containment of China as a thorn in the side of an otherwise working international order. But if it’s the latter, we have a harder task ahead of us.

If China disappeared tomorrow, or suddenly became a compliant U.S. military-occupied liberal democracy like Japan or Germany, would our problems go away? We might worry less about Chinese spies or military expansion, and the ideology of liberal democracy would be safe for a while from external competition, but the fundamental problems would remain. China is growing, and America is dying. Shifts in the economic and cultural center of gravity are significant even if all parties are friendly. A friendly China would not fix America’s economic or cultural problems. Even a poor, miserable, and powerless China would not resolve our crisis.

In any case, China isn’t going away any time soon. Contrary to decades of wishful “prediction,” the CCP regime is not on the verge of collapsing or becoming a liberal democracy. The Chinese military probably isn’t as strong as it looks, but neither is ours, and the PLA is plenty strong enough that we could not simply push the CCP regime over, or even effectively resist its ongoing expansion. 

If we somehow orchestrated the greatest color revolution in history and overthrew the party-state, its successor would not be a Chinese liberal democracy. It would almost certainly come in the form of an ambitious general with a heightened dose of Han nationalism and utter contempt toward the CCP’s cautious preference for mostly economic imperialism. It’s unclear whether we have the strength to contain China at all, even if we put significant effort in that direction.

China is growing at our expense, but the center of our putative China problem is not China at all. The central problem is a crisis of governance in the West. Our institutions and economy are hollowed out, our ideological model is failing, and the vultures are starting to pay attention. This weakness on our part is creating a growth and power vacuum. China is simply filling it. Even if the Chinese government were reluctant to gain on us, they have little choice but to do so.

China’s leadership is firmly grounded in the high modernism that animated the West until the mid-20th century, with its confident use of engineering for large-scale social ends. America’s leadership last demonstrated such ability with the Apollo missions, ending in 1972. It is just this contrast that drives the neuralgic response of some American elites.

Our problem is a crisis of governance. This is neither a new idea, nor an unpopular one. But we have to be careful to acknowledge the extent of the problem. Looking beyond the cycles of particular administrations and problems, it’s clear that we have been stagnant in a dysfunctional mode since the early 1970s at the latest. Our problem cannot be dated to 2016, or 2008, or any other particular point of deviance. It is a systemic decay. There is no status quo ante to return to. Business as usual is not an option. We need fundamental reform.

The U.S. has deep strengths and resources that may help provide a path to recovery. It was founded as a frontier country, open to the pattern of exiting from legacy institutions and building new ones. During America’s first century, this pattern was established in terms of geography. Many left the settled areas of the east and moved west, but the pattern served the purpose of renewal and advance, not just migration. The project in view was to build a new nation, region by region, institution by institution. John Kennedy’s New Frontier, including the program of space exploration, explicitly appealed to this heritage. Exiting institutions that no longer function to build new ones, so fundamental to America’s past successes, will be equally necessary to its future ones. 

The U.S will not succeed by attempting to run old scripts, not even successful ones like the New Frontier. What is needed is a new synthesis that grounds leaders in a strong culture for building a strong regime. Regaining an effective capacity to build is more important for the U.S. than containing China, as necessary as the latter may be. One prerequisite is to grasp the ways we have been shooting ourselves in the foot and determine to stop doing so. Leaders must become honest about government policies that often sabotage sectors of our economy by subsidizing demand and restricting supply, as in education and health care.

The analysis is similar on the ideological front. In particular, the threat to liberalism is not just a vigorous external enemy that might defeat liberalism in power competition. The threat to liberalism is that China demonstrates, through its success, that there are other, even superior, ways of doing things. Further, our decline is very much influenced by the failures and obsolescence of our ideological model. Liberalism as we have known it can and will be legitimately defeated in intellectual competition.

This imminent ideological failure poses a problem for us, as much of the machinery of our society runs directly on our current ideology. We discussed this problem when we launched with “Towards the Post-Liberal Synthesis” and Palladium is our attempt at its solution.

In practice, this simply means that the vigorous reform needed to match China is not only institutional, but also deeply ideological. While we’re building a new elite consensus, a new industrial policy, and new institutions, we also need to be building a new worldview.

That our problems are mostly of our own making does not excuse China from vigorous scrutiny and containment, nor does it mean they won’t become an aggressive threat. But appreciating that our problem is largely internal is necessary to mount a real response that isn’t just bluster. Even where China has directly caused our problems with its behavior, our best strategy is to focus on fixing our own problems.

Short- and Long-Term Grand Strategy

In the short term, our major problem is American decline. To arrest and reverse it, we need a major overhaul of our governance paradigm and many of our institutions. That is a large project that goes far beyond the issue of our response to China, even if in the long run it is crucial to that response.

In the short term, we have three strategic priorities:

1. Rebuild hard economic power. This means reorienting our economy to actual high-value production, rather than the interests of ownership. This will help to restart progress, uplift our struggling working class, and build up our economic power to be able to match China. The central means is a vigorous industrial policy over several decades.
2. Retreating containment of China. The world will increasingly be divided into three zones of alignment: Firmly Chinese (Hong Kong, Iran, possibly Pakistan), Firmly Western (Australia, Japan, India), and Contested (Taiwan, eastern and southern Africa, possibly South Korea). We should not waste much on trying to interfere in the firmly Chinese zone. We should expect to lose much or all of the contested zone as we decline and China advances over the coming decades. Thus we should take a retreating containment strategy that focuses on slowing Chinese advance and removing valuable assets from contested territory. For example, Taiwan Semiconductor, a strategic asset, is unfortunately positioned. On a multi-decade timescale we risk losing or facing immiseration of even firmly Western territory unless we pointedly direct our attention to consolidating core political and cultural relationships, rooting out spies and United Front operations, and building up our core territories.
3. Integrate China’s ideological successes to reboot American governance. China’s success is partially to be expected from the catch-up development of a large and capable population, following Japan and Korea. But it is also because of a clear and superior ideological intention: they are trying to build up a strong society, economy, and regime, and they are pragmatically drawing on whatever ideas best serve that goal. The other Asian exemplars act similarly, even if they are less overtly outside of the liberal consensus. To get back on the path of development, the West needs to rediscover this pragmatic society-building intention, learning from China’s legitimate successes where necessary. But we also have to go beyond. China’s ideology isn’t suited to build the kind of civilization we need.

In the longer term, if the West can pull it back together in governance at home, China will again be on the back foot. The CCP may well struggle with a succession crisis after Xi, and a resurgent West might then challenge China in the same way China now challenges America. On the other hand, China’s prosperity will insulate it from ideological insecurity and confidence problems, unlike the USSR. The details can’t be foreseen, but that game cannot even be played without successfully executing the above short-term strategy.

Power Beyond Sovereignty

China sees itself as a peripheral province within the world-empire of capital, growing within that order, and eventually supplanting it. Similarly, in the wars of the 20th century, America partially traded its integrity as a sovereign country for the paramount place in the post-national empire of interlocking international institutions.

If we conceive of America and China as competing formal power provinces within a world empire of informal and hidden power, much of this analysis still holds. America’s decline is throwing the international order into imbalance. That order is itself suffering from the same disease as America. Both need to be reformed and rebooted, not just to match China’s rise, but for their own sakes as well.

The major difference is that as we renegotiate the Western order into a more functional pattern, it may involve redrawing borders, relocating capitals, reconstituting states, and even reconceptualizing beyond the nation-state.

America, as usual, can be the vanguard of these developments far beyond its formal power. The key is to balance China’s rise while we learn from its successes, and engineer a refounding of Western governance ideology and the Western order. If we are successful, China may even be forced to live up to its rhetoric about a peaceful international community of common destiny.

This article is part of our short-form series on pandemic strategy.

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History is replete with—even shaped by—those improbable and individually unpredictable events of disastrous import that nonetheless do periodically occur. While the frequent occurrence of the improbable may seem like a paradox, it makes perfect sense: history’s sampling of the relevant random variables is very large. Nassim Taleb has made a career of exploring the manifold implications of this phenomenon in popular books, detailed mathematical treatises, and outrageous rants on social media.

An important point which Taleb has made as of late is that pandemics are not black swans, the most popularized concept in his work. Since pandemics are predictable as events, they are white swans. Notably, another characteristic of white swan events is that they tend to be explained, after the fact, as human error: a gaggle of pundits rushes forward to explain how we, as a society, have been very foolish these past several years. Their favorite reproach is a morality tale centering on preparation. “We were warned again and again that this would happen,” the pundits cry, “and yet we didn’t prepare!” In their telling, we are the lazy grasshopper in some catastrophic version of Aesop’s fable.

The pundits are not entirely wrong. Just four years before COVID-19 broke out, Bill Gates gave a TED Talk warning of a coming epidemic, and U.S. policy changed little in the intervening years. Likewise, with 9/11 or the 2008 financial crisis, there were voices in the preceding years that clearly warned of such events.

Yet this response, berating our lack of preparation, is not quite apt. If we examine the countries that have responded best to COVID-19 (especially, the small Asian nations of the Pacific coast), we see that the factor that distinguishes them is competence. This concept is largely orthogonal to “preparation” as it is usually interpreted in the U.S. In an American policy context, preparation connotes warehouses filled with large stockpiles that “adequately funded” agencies plan, regulate, select, and—when the unfortunate happens—distribute. We might call this the Maginot Line mode of preparation; it is very attractive to those whose livelihoods rest more on the preparation than its results. While certain kinds of preparation do directly support competence, this seems to be largely untrue in the American context. The FDA’s poor performance has little to do with insufficient budgets, and everything to do with its unwillingness to adapt its regulatory norms to the crisis at hand.

The countries with the most effective responses to COVID-19 did not “prepare” in the Maginot Line manner. The policies they used—a mix of mask-wearing, testing, contact-tracing, and targeted quarantine—were directed early and vigorously by the state and amplified by a strong and cooperative community response. Taiwan, for example, has relied on a decentralized set of quickly developed digital tools, coordinated by its DIGI+ digital ministry but developed on the fly by private citizens. One tool is an online Face Mask Map to facilitate distribution of masks to the public. Another is a virus-exposure platform that collects voluntarily supplied symptom-reports and collates them by location. Citizens employ a mobile app to determine if their location histories intersect with the virus reports, indicating a possible exposure.

Just as important as the positive responses of these countries has been what they did not do. None of these countries allowed their equivalents of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to block virus-testing and the production of masks. In the U.S., the FDA possesses exclusive authority to approve tests once the Department of Health and Human Services declares a Public Health Emergency, which it did on January 31, 2020. The FDA proceeded to grant such approval only to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In February, the CDC developed a test on its own and distributed it to state labs. But the test kits had a bad reagent and did not work. During the entire month of February, as the virus continued to spread, the FDA granted no private lab approval to test. The first approval for a private lab was only issued on March 2, 2020.

This pattern of impedance is not unique to testing. Why have common surgical masks (and not only the higher-grade N95 masks) run short during the pandemic? Surely they are easy to produce. The answer is that, while they are physically easy to produce, the FDA treats them as regulated medical devices and requires extensive risk analysis and testing before they can be legally sold, making them difficult and time-consuming for a company to legally bring to market.

The syndrome at work here is clear. The American institutions charged with protecting public health are embedded in a bureaucratic culture that values turf-centered gatekeeping and control over effectiveness and outcome. Some might protest that the FDA’s manner of regulating is needed for public safety, but the small Asian nations have refuted this argument, showing that it is competence, not bureaucratic control, that protects the public.

The emphasis on preparation goes awry for a second reason. The event on which the public is now focused is, very naturally, a pandemic, but the number and kinds of identifiable events—black, white, or grey swans—for which we might prepare is essentially unbounded. A cottage industry has arisen around enumerating and urging preparation for a large range of “existential risks.” Many of these risks can be as large as we choose to imagine, ranging up to a massive asteroid strike. Indeed, professional study of risks often leads to a kind of imaginative “hunting” for them. Were we to “prepare” for each of them as their respective advocates deem appropriate, we might well have resources for nothing else.

Nations and states are complex systems inherently subject to both systemic and systematic risks. In the face of such risks, we should seek to make these systems as antifragile as possible. A high level of general competence, in both public and private sectors, is the greatest contributor to antifragility, much more than event-specific preparations. Competence comprises both the ability to act effectively and the will to do so, preferring outcomes achieved over bureaucratic process and control.

Many Westerners may resist the insight, but competence rests not so much on well-planned systems as on virtue, beginning with phronesis (φρόνησῐς), or practical wisdom acting in the world. Government planning in Western nations too often rests on an overextension of episteme (ἐπιστήμη), or rationally grounded knowledge, to areas of human life and organization in which it serves poorly. The future, more often than we wish to admit, is unknown and unknowable, and the effort that we might expend preparing for it is better spent preparing ourselves.