The German Turn

The great question in every human life is the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything” -- for me. But this meaning has changed over the years and millennia, particularly in our own time. Many of us can’t accept the religion of our ancestors, and the religion of the Prophet Marx that they force-feed kids at our government schools and universities inspired the worst slave states in history. There seems to be a “glitch” in the Matrix. And yet still we yearn for meaning, for, as Roy Rappaport has written, “No society known to anthropology or history is devoid of what reasonable observers would agree is religion,” the attempt to find meaning in life.

I experienced my “glitch” in the Matrix decades ago when reading F.S.C. Northrop’s The Meeting of East and West. In Chapter V: German Idealism, he begins:

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature, which defined the foundations of traditional modern French and Anglo-American democratic culture, has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

What did that mean, I wondered, a young man educated in the Newtonian mechanics of pre-relativity physics and perfectly content with the mechanical world view of the British empiricists? What was their problem? Well, I now understand, it means the German Turn: Kant and Hegel and Goethe and Schopenhauer and Marx and Wagner and Nietzsche and Freud and Jung and Heidegger and Marcuse and Habermas and their Anglo-Saxon adepts like Joseph Campbell and Jordan B. Peterson. They were all dealing with the fact that, for them, the “Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature” didn’t do the job of explaining the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything,” and they set out to do something about it.

OK, so what does that mean? For me, it means that after you have read all those Germans the problem of the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything” looks a lot different than the logic and reason and mechanical world of the Anglo-Saxons. And downstream from that, so is any religion, and culture, and politics that you might want to conjure up to solve that little problem of meaning.

And you appreciate, or at least I do, why there seems to be a bit of a cock-up these days on the religion, culture, and politics fronts, especially wherever lefties are involved.

And there is this: Downstream of religion, downstream of culture, there is the fact that nobody, but nobody, has yet come up with a politics that goes one better than the politics invented by our Founders 240 years ago. How come? But there have been a ton of people -- from Marx to Marcuse -- who have taken ideas from the German Turn and made a complete dog’s breakfast out of them: murderous religions, poisonous cultures, and dysfunctional politics.

What does that mean? That the German Turn was a wrong turn, or that Marx and Marcuse were wrong’uns? My faith is that the Marxes and the Marcuses were fools rather than wrong’uns, and made a very simple, and very foolish mistake: that the answer to the question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything in the new world could be found in politics and political power, pretending you were some kind of an Earthly god. But for me, the German Turn is not about power, but everything else.

Indeed, I would say that the one thing to take from the German Turn is that politics and power are not the answer.

But what are the positive takeaways from the German Turn? It starts, at least, that with Kant we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only sense impressions conjured up into a theory of reality. It means, with the Romantics, that there is something that comes before logic and reason. It means, with Wagner, that there is a lot more in those ancient myths than mere superstition and something more in medieval romances than rescuing damsels in distress. It means, with Nietzsche, the Peck’s Bad Boy of philosophers, that any time a God is Dead the former believers cannot avoid a revaluation of all values, even though the journey leads through decadence and nihilism and will probably tip them into madness. It means, with Freud, that 90 percent of our mind is the unconscious mind, and that probably it is the unconscious mind that is directing our lives with its repressed mania and not the magisterial logical Ego of the conscious mind. It means, with Jung, that we’d better understand our unconscious and the archetypes with which it is programmed to interpret and interact with the world before we boldly head out to bend the arc of history towards justice. It means, with Horkheimer and Adorno, that “Enlightenment behaves towards things as a dictator towards men. He knows them in so far as he can manipulate them” and with Habermas that humans do not live in a mechanical world but in a “lifeworld,” Heidegger's being-there in a face-to-face culture of shared experience in the world.

All cool stuff, but does it matter? Well, here’s my take: you be the judge.

I’ve come to think, over the years, that Kant’s dictum about not knowing things-in-themselves is the most astonishing idea in human history. He was trying to synthesize the antithesis -- before Hegel! -- between Cartesian rationalism and Humean empiricism. 

In my view, Kant's dictum that we do not know things-in-themselves but only appearances gave physicists permission to break out of the certainty that we live in a world of matter and absolute space and time. It gave them permission to dare to suggest that space and time are relative. And his ideas also led to the mad, mad world of quantum mechanics where matter is no longer matter. Another thing: with the Uncertainty Principle we have a foundational reason to believe in Free Will, or at least unexpected accidents, again. I’d say that Kant matters.

But what does it all mean? The truth is that we still don’t have a clue: that is the point of saying that we cannot know things-in-themselves -- or, if you like, the man behind the curtain -- so we are reduced, we will always be reduced, to making it up as we always have, filling in the blanks with a Narrative. And that, I presume, is the meaning of Douglas Adams’ little joke about the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything.” Nietzsche is on to it in The Will to Power §853 with a characteristic insult:

Metaphysics, morality, religion, science -- in this book these things merit consideration only as various forms of lies: with their help we can have faith in life.

Nietzsche’s lie, his “faith in life,” his Narrative, is the free spirit, the Übermensch, with increasing vigor, will-to-power, exploding forth to overcome decadence, nihilism, and the Groundhog Day of eternal recurrence. Maybe that is a bridge too far; maybe humans can never become Übermenschen, since Nietzsche collapsed into insanity at age 46.

Maybe Nietzsche is giving us a clue, that he could not bear the weight of suffering in his life, and so retreated behind the cloud of insanity. For suffering seems to be front and center in human religion, ancient, modern and postmodern, in our human attempts to understand the meaning of life.

Next: The Question of Suffering
The question of meaning revolves around the differing analyses of suffering

Or back to Contents

But What Is Fascism, Really?

As with most things, our lefty friends have completely emptied the word "fascism" of meaning, except as a pejorative. (Boy, they certainly are the world champs when it comes to pejoratives!)

But what is fascism, really, and who is a fascist?

First of all, I would say that AntiFa is not fascist. Do you know why? Because up to now AntiFa has enjoyed a "nod nod, wink wink" relationship with the ruling class. AntiFa has been useful to the ruling class because AntiFa acts as its bully boys breaking up the peaceful assemblies of Commoners petitioning for a redress of grievances. When AntiFa intervenes, as in Charlottesville in 2017, the ruling class gets to blame the "white nationalists" for the violence. What's not to like?

But now Trump has blown the whistle on AntiFa. It will be interesting to see what comes of that.

Also, I would say that government control or partnership is not fascism. Nor is gubmint health care, nor the regulatory state, nor mass transit. Why? Because all those activities operate under the benevolent eye of the normal ruling class and benefit the usual suspects.

The point about Italy's fascists and Germany's Nazis is that they were genuine populist rebellions. And Mussolini and Hitler were nobodies. They both realized that class conflict as a basis of politics was a dead letter, or at least far inferior to the nation as a basis for politics. Boy, were they right!

But as they climbed to power the various interests climbed aboard the fascist train. And the various interests, from the old aristocracy to various advocates for free stuff, were able to persuade the fascists to hand out some of the free stuff to them.

The flaw at the heart of fascism and Nazism is the reversion to the old truth of the homeland being the source of food. Mussolini called it a spazio vitale or "vital space," and Hitler spoke of Lebensraum. Understandable, because up until the day before yesterday land was life, the food-growing land that fed its people.

It is normal, when things go wrong, to lurch back to the past for inspiration.

Except that in the industrial era, everything is for sale. You don't need your own food-growing land. Lebensraum needs to be reduced to a nostalgic dream, not an actual reality. Ships sail the world with grain, and really it is better to be making cars and computers than growing food. Unless there is a war!

And in the industrial era war, in the old way of loot and plunder and slaves that fed the Roman Empire, doesn't work. Because now wealth is "intangible capital" or the ideas and techniques of how to make a car or design a chip. If you roll over your neighbor state and kill all the men and rape all the women what have you got?

So in the fascist era after World War I you had the failure of the old regimes that killed off a generation of young men in a fruitless war, and failure to rebuild afterwards. Into that gap sprang the former corporals Mussolini and Hitler. Only their ideas were just as clueless as those of the discredited pre-war elites, and they in their turn led their peoples to disaster in yet another war.

The ruling class that inherited the developed world after World War II determined that fascism and Nazism and agressive nationalism should never rear their ugly heads again. But what political principle should they substitute in its place? Fortunately Stalin provided the answer. The rulers would be the Free World fighting against the Communist Menace.

But what should we do after the end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union? The answer of the educated ruling class was globalism, in which the educated elite would administer the world. But there had to be some kind of domestic politics in the nation state before they were subsumed into supranational entities like the European Union. You can see that intersectional politics with all kinds of helpless minority classes would fit the bill, and provide the means of dividing and mobilizing voters at election time. Meanwhile the ruling class could rule, above the fray of the intersectional battlefield, while their woke battalions kept the plebs safely divided.

Is it fair to say that this ruling paradigm has reached its sell-by date? It had a point in the advocacy for the working class, except that its program actually imprisoned the working class in union jobs that looted corporations and killed them. And it had a point in the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, outlawing discrimination by race. 

And then, in 2008, the US repaid the debt of slavery by electing an African American to be president. Been there, done that.

The problem with a top-down, activists-only politics, is that it misses the point of politics, which is not to afford lordly rulers and eager activists their chance to bend the arc of history towards justice -- as defined by them and their lackeys in the universities and media.

The purpose of politics is to afford the people a chance to choose the people that will rule over them and also to permit a discovery process by which the inevitable injustices of the world bubble out into the public square. For it makes sense that the rulers and their bribed apologists in the media, the deep state, and the universities are not going to be that sensitive to the unjust effects of their noble rule.

And in recent years there have been various failures and blindnesses in the ruling class and their bribed apologists, such as the Iraq War going beyond merely punishing the Afghans for allowing the 9/11 terrorists safe haven in Afghanistan, and the once-in-a-generation financial crash of 2008 caused by the mortages-for-deadbeats policy forced upon us by our rulers. Oh, and the underhanded Obamacare to inch us towards a government healthcare system.

So you would expect that in time political movements would emerge to give voice to injustices perceived by various subordinate groups in society. These movements might be sponsored by the ruling class or they might not.

Now it is my belief, on my Little Darlings notion, that today we have three groups, at least, suffering from the injustices forced upon them by a proud and foolish ruling class. We have the white working class, abandoned by the rulers in the 1960s, the blacks, led into the wilderness of government dependence and quotas, and women, led into the barren waste of careers far away from their natural instinct to bear children and run the neighborhood.

Of course, these groups know that something is wrong. But that is all. I don't think it is patronizing to say that people petitioning for a redress of grievances may not have a clue what the real problem is. And this is the more understandable when you remember that we are living in a world completely changed from the world inhabited by our ancestors even 500 years ago. So we are programmed for a world completely different from the one we inhabit.

Now there are two ways to present your grievances to the rulers. One is to form a spontaneous movement -- like the Tea Party that nobody saw coming. The other is to work under the ruling class in a ruling-class sponsored movement, like Black Lives Matter or the Women's March.

If you go the Tea Party route you will be called fascists and Nazis. Why? Because our rulers have learned to call any movement that they do not control "fascist." And they are right: Mussolini and Hitler led movements from below that were not sponsored by the rulers. Not good.

If you go the Black Lives Matter route then your movement will be subsumed into the ruling-class's agenda.

Either way, you may still end in disaster, because while it is easy to point to a problem it is not so easy to propose a good solution.

If the populist rebellion ends in disaster, then the fault is fascism and the latest incarnation of Hitler. If the ruling-class reform ends in disaster, well, they did their best, and the problem is white supremacists and toxic masculinity.

But if the populist rebellion is co-opted by a Trump, then what? Well, then the ruling class and their bribed apologists all combine to hobble the guy; that goes without saying.

But suppose the Trump guy actually has a good plan? Well, the jury is still out on that. Meanwhile, the safe thing to do is to call him a fascist. That way your women friends won't be murmuring behind your back: "I can't believe she..."

What is the Meaning of Life?

In his review of Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds, Spencer A Klavan complains that Murray doesn’t really come up with a solution to the problem of the current gender, race, and identity madness. Murray does not offer an alternative, “a vision of the good life more compelling than the fanatical march toward a virtuous future that the Left offers.” 

Exactly. It is not enough to critique the Left. Or to offer political alternatives. “Politics is downstream from culture,” said the late Andrew Breitbart. And culture is downstream from religion, adds John C. Wright. And religion, I would suggest, inspired by The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is downstream of the eternal question that every human yearns to answer: the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

Everything -- religion, culture, politics -- is downstream of the question: what is the meaning of life? Indeed, you could say that life is an endless attempt to answer that question.

In the following pages I will attempt to construct "a vision of life more compelling than" the left's vision. It will be a vision suitable for use by anyone in the modern "educated class," and it will be based on what I call the German Turn, that is the revolution in philosophy, in science, and in the sciences of the mind, that begin with the philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century.

The modern problem, I believe, is that moderns no longer experience life and the universe as either a complete mystery known only to the gods, or a program handed down by God to humans in a divine creation and a program of divine law. Instead the modern imagines himself the creator of his own life. He is a discoverer, an explorer, and expects to develop an individual, and creative, approach to the age old question of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." Far too many moderns also believe that their wondrous creative vision entitles them to force the rest of humanity onto their Procrustean bed -- in their own best interest, of course.

But I believe that we moderns underestimate the enormity of this project. That is, after all, why our ancestors assigned this honor to God: who are we to think that we could ever have the answer to the mystery of life, let alone forcing the answer on our fellow humans? It is not just a question of stepping out and writing a book, or leading a revolution, or doing a bit of activism, or inventing a new theory, or bending the arc of history towards justice. It is a personal existential journey, full of peril, and most likely to end in disaster, or at least in failure. So I believe that the creative explorer, the man who will show his fellow humans a new meaning of life, cannot be a proud egotist but instead a humble investigator that well knows and deeply accepts the odds against him, "that durst defy th'Omnipotent to arms."

There is a name for this kind of man: the Sacrificial Hero.

But now let us examine how it is that I think that the Germans, notorious aggressors and monsters of the 20th century, have a lot to teach us.

Next: The German Turn
The Germans invented everything

Or back to Contents

Activism Culture in Brief

In my Great Reaction concept, where I experience the Left as a lurch back to the past, even to primitivism, I take a high tone with "activists," for I regard

activism [as] a return to revolution, rioting for the ruling class, part medieval knight-errantry, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a school play for their parents;

Our modern activists, or activistes, are not really revolutionaries fighting for the powerless against the powerful; they are really fake revolutionaries, the stooges of the ruling class. The tip-off is the remarkable indulgence that our rulers have for left-wing "peaceful protest." Real revolutionaries get roughed up by the police, and sent to jail or exile.

So I say that today's activists are actors, play-acting revolution for the benefit of the ruling class and helping the ruling class advance its agenda with an AstroTurf version of revolution.

It's remarkable really. Your lefty activist gets taught an entire Activism Culture by his professors in college, from the philosophy and religion of activism to its street organization and practice.

Thus, I would argue, the university has really become an activism seminary, training young activists to become the priests of the state church of activism. This is not remarkable. Back in the day, universities were built by states like Britain to train priests in the state church so they would go out and teach ruling class wisdom. And in the United States the marquee colleges like Harvard and Yale were built by the Puritans to evangelize the faith.

It is almost as if there has grown up a literature of activism, like the medieval romances that celebrated the ruling-class knights, rough tough feudal thugs that wanted to be thought of as activists for Jesus Christ. Only now it is ruling-class activists wanting to be thought of as allies of the oppressed.

What’s the difference between an activist and a revolutionary? The activist is building his resume; the revolutionary is burning it.

Activism Culture Table of Contents

Allyism in Brief

Ever since Marx, the educated class has practiced an over/under politics where the educated ruling class parades as the protector of the poor against some malevolent foe.

In our present era this political formula is advertised as "antiracism."  I call it Allyism. According to Matt Taibbi,

It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

If you do a Google Search on "allyship" you will see what is going on.

You will notice that this "antiracism" Three Layer theory parallels the Marxist theory of class. For Marxism, we could say that

It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of the proletariat, Communists, and bourgeois capitalist oppressors.

So nothing has changed, except that the left now operates a race theory of oppression whereas in the old days it imagined merely a class theory of oppression.

Hegel, it should be said, argued that a thing was the same as its opposite: thus the north pole of a magnet was identical to a south pole, except opposite.

So, just as the Marxists were and are classists, the Allyship chappies are racists.

There are other parallels. Back in the day, we now know, the proletariat as a class was rapidly rising in prosperity in step with the Great Enrichment that started about 200 years ago. The so-called oppressed peoples of today enjoy full rights under the Civil Rights Act and the patronage of the ruling class. So how bad could things be?

Back in the day, the Communists were rich kids, Marx the son of the leading lawyer in Trier, Engels the son of a textile manufacturer. Today the "allies" are all educated-class Gentry. Ibram X. Kendi, né Rogers, is the son of a business analyst and a tax accountant with a Ph.D from Temple University.

Back in the day the capitalists were mostly jumped-up Commoners: Rockefeller started out as a store clerk, Carnegie, son of a handloom operative, started out as a telegraph messenger. Today, Steve Jobs was the adopted son of a Coastguard mechanic.

I say that in the Allyism concept there are Three Lies:

Lie No.1: The so-called "oppressed peoples" are in fact the lower class that is particularly privileged by the rulers with diversity and inclusion and welfare-state loot and plunder.

Lie No.2: The so-called "allies" are in fact the ruling class -- oppressors by any other name -- that uses the notion of "oppressed peoples" as a political formula to justify its power.

Lie No.3: The so-called "white oppressors" are just ordinary middle-class whites that don't have any particular political power with which to oppress people. They are people that the rulers can cancel in a New York minute as "racist" if they step out of line.

In my opinion the over/under politics of Marx and Allyism Makes Things Worse. In my view, the so-called "oppressed peoples" are better understood as new migrants to the city and the wage economy that have not yet assimilated the middle-class culture of the city, by obtaining basic numeracy and literacy, adopting the middle-class culture of trust and responsibility, and surrendering to the judgment of the market. By telling these people "you was robbed" the left in fact delays the progress of lower-class people up into the middle class.

But at least it gives the allies political power. Which, I assume, was the point all along.

Allyism Table of Contents

Brief Takes - Table of Contents

Brief Takes on Major Topics

1. Activism Culture in Brief
   A critical theory of leftist Activism Culture


2. Critical Theory in Brief
   Critical Theory starts with Kant
   
   
3. Downstream-ism in Brief
   Politics is downstream of culture is downstream of religion is downstream of...


4. Dutch Finance in Brief
   How the Dutch invented central banking
   
   
5. German Turn in Brief
   How the Germans invented everything, from Kant to Jung
   
   
6. Good Life in Brief
   How to live as a Sacrificial Hero


7. Great Reaction in Brief
   The left experienced as a Great Reaction, a lurch back from the modern to the primitive


8. Little Darlings in Brief
   The sad fate of the Little Darlings of the Ruling Class


9. Perfect Plan in Brief
   Help the migrants to the city; tolerate the commoners
   
   
10. The Ruling Class in Brief
    Mosca's The Ruling Class and more
    
    
11. Three Layers in Brief
    Three Layer Theories, including my own Three Peoples theory


12. Three Peoples Theory in Brief
    The Three Peoples, a reductive theory of modern humanity


13. Three Peoples Religion in Brief
    What gods do the Three Peoples believe in?
    
    
14. Wrong Turn in Brief
    The left's errors, crimes, and conceits

The Three Realities of the Three Peoples

I live under the notion that my reductive Three Peoples theory explains everything. 

OK, of course I don't believe that. Humans come in an infinite diversity of types. But I do think that it is helpful to divide people in these United States into three lumps, for the purpose of religious, cultural, and political analysis. Anything more complicated and you lose their attention.

In recent weeks, under the influence of Mircea Eliade in his book The Myth of Eternal Return, I have shined a new light on my theory, especially because of this pull quote:

The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

When you think about it, we all have a tendency to do this, and the reason is pretty obvious. Our brains and our five senses are in the business of noticing things out there in the world that might affect us, beneficially or otherwise. This means that we are inclined not to think of everything that happens in the world as completely random. Survival in this world means tying events together into something meaningful when appropriate.

It doesn't take too much to imagine that a tiger or a wolf that is stalking you is malevolent. Hey, the darn animal is treating you like dinner. And the worst thing in the world for you right now would be to end up as someone's dinner.

So I propose that the basic reality of the People of the Subordinate Self is that the world is out to get them. Malevolent. And you will note that our lefty friends are pretty strong on suggesting to the various People of the Subordinate Self that they wish to recruit into their political army that there are malevolent racist-sexist-homophobes in our society that are out to get them. The ongoing riots over the death of forgery suspect George Floyd is an example of this lefty approach to politics. Who really cares about a 40ish night-club bouncer that has a heart condition and, it seems, a drinking and/or drug problem? Why would the eevil white supremacists care a whit about him?

But, obviously, the malevolence gambit works. People of the Subordinate Self vote, overwhelmingly, for lefty parties that sell the malevolence schtick. So I propose that, for the People of the Subordinate Self, an assumption of malevolence, of evil powers ganging up on you, is front and central in their world view. And this aligns with my view that People of the Subordinate Self live in a world prior to the advent of the Axial Age religions.

Now we come to the People of the Responsible Self, and I propose that People of the Responsible Self believe that the world runs on rules. That, of course, is the logic of having a God that created the world and then created His divine law. In this reality it is up to humans to take the world that God has created and be fruitful and multiply. Only, watch it. You don't want to break God's laws; that way lies disaster.

Now, I am not saying that Responsibles are perfect beings that soldier on irregardless without suspicion that their neighbor might be up to no good. Of course not. There is a lot of subordination in all of us. Humans are hierarchical, and that means that we are all subordinate to someone, and very often we hate it -- and them.

Obviously this kind of clockwork world that operates according to rules takes us right up to the beginning of the modern era but no further. Because the whole point of the modern era, starting with Hume, is that we cannot prove cause and effect. Correlation is not causation. We can't reduce the world to a set of rules.

After a couple hundred years of philosophizing about the problem that Hume set forth the geniuses came up with quantum mechanics and the "state function" to explain how the world works.

At the fundamental level -- or at least at the current understanding of the fundamental level -- subatomic "particles" are not really particles, but a fuzz of possibilities that only condense into something definite when an event occurs. And even then:-- when a single quantum of light goes through a double slit it forms an interference pattern when it hits a receptor.

What this means is that, at the fundamental level, God plays dice. You never know what is going to happen: it might rain or it might shine.

Now, I propose that the People of the Creative Self understand this. They have to, because when an artist creates something new he knows that the creation does not come out of a deliberate process of 2+2=4, but in a contingent process, an inspiration. 

In my own life I tend to say that my ideas come to me from my unconscious. When I encounter a problem, in ideas or in my usgovernmentspending.com website, I do not grind away at the problem; I get up and walk away. And then I find that the solution to a problem comes to me, irrationally, in the middle of the night. Or, as with Puccini, you could say that your music comes directly to you from God.

Now this applies to creative people whether they are writers, artists, business start-ups, whatever. There is always an aspect of chance, or good luck, or an unanticipated inspiration. or just being in the right place at the right time.

Let us call this the "creative state function." All the pieces that might come together in a creative act are fuzzing around in a state of probabilities. And if they come together into a wonderful creation it is the result of unknown probabilities. We have various ways of describing the flash of creation, the condensation of probabilities.

The most obvious example is the creation of every human life at the moment of conception where a single egg is beset by a crowd of sperm. Which one will break through the walls of the egg to start a new life? It's all a matter of probability, a "state function."

Of course, People of the Creative Self also believe in malevolence, and Rules. There is a lot of the Subordinate and the Responsible in each of them. But each creative lives in the hope of being the Chosen One, the result of a condensation of probabilities into a miraculous creation never before seen on this Earth. 

Personally I prefer the idea of life as a "creative state function," so I must be a People of the Creative Self. But I also respect the need for rules, and regretfully, I realize there is a lot of malevolence in the world, particularly where lefties are concerned.

So there is reason for hope, and also reason to despair. As it ever was.