political philosophy – Page 2 – Northcoast Antiquarian

The Man with One Map

“Non confundar in aeternum.” This Latin phrase—”Never let me be confounded”—comes from Psalm 30:2 and Ambrose’s Te Deum. In my parable “The Man with One Map,” I use it ironically: as a caution against the very rigidity it seems to champion. To refuse ever to be confounded is to turn away from the facts, the bends, the contingencies of the world. When reality contradicts our preferred map, we face a choice: revise the map or insist the world is wrong. My parable follows a master cartographer who chooses his certainty, his facts, his reality, over truth itself—until the world teaches him otherwise. It is a story about the cost of ideological capture and the wisdom of holding our frameworks lightly, with humility. Every map we create is provisional. Wisdom begins not with denying the world’s power to confound us, but with acknowledging that power, and revising our maps when warranted.

πόλλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog one great thing.

—Archilochus, Fragment 201

“Non confundar in aeternum,” the cartographer muttered as he unrolled his chart upon the council table. He said it whenever someone questioned the authority of lines.

The map was exquisite: vellum washed with pale seas, ranges shaded as if they were slumbering beasts, towns stippled in careful ink. It bore a golden stamp of the Guild and a marginal note in the cartographer’s own fine hand: Ex universis legibus terrarum—From the universal laws of lands. He had made it in his youth, riding the marches with soldiers and surveyors, triangulating sun to steeple, steeple to hill. Kings had trusted it. Merchants folded it close to their hearts.

Now he was old enough to have students and adversaries, but not so old as to doubt the charter of his life.

The city had summoned a council because caravans were vanishing on the southern road. The map showed a simple passage between river and ridge, a straight corridor to the salt ports. Yet messengers returned late or not at all, and those who survived spoke of marsh and misdirection, of sudden fogs and roads that forked where no fork should be.

In the council hall, the cartographer smoothed the vellum and placed lead weights upon the corners. “The error,” he said with gentle authority, “lies not in the chart, but in your conduct. The road is straight. If your men lose it, it is because they stray. Cleave to the line.”

Across the table, a surveyor of lesser years cleared her throat. She carried a case stuffed with flimsy, oil-smudged sheets: tidal charts, sketches of fallen bridges, diagrams with dates scribbled in the margins.

“With respect,” she said, “the river moved.”

“Rivers do not move,” the cartographer replied, “except in the imagination of those who fear getting their boots wet. The river is here.” He tapped the braided blue with a well-tended nail. “The law of the land agrees.”

“The law was written when the old poplar still stood by the ford,” she said. “The poplar is now a stump, and the ford is a sink. The river took a bend during the spring floods and laid down a swamp where your corridor was drawn. The road you show is no road, but reeds.”

The guildmaster’s eyebrows rose. The cartographer, who taught that the shortest route was a moral as well as a geometric virtue, returned the stare unblinking. “Then drain the swamp,” he said, “or bridge it. The line remains. The task is to make the world fit its description.”

He won that day, as he often did. He was learned and calm, and his one map had become a kind of liturgy. “Non confundar,” murmured the clerks when they indexed the city archives. “Let us not be confounded.” The council funded embankments. Engineers hammered piles into the mud where the vellum demanded that firm ground should be. The road reappeared, for a season, and wagons creaked forward with their cargoes of wool and salt and rumors.

Then the road vanished again.

This time it was not the river, but men. A brotherhood of armed riders—some called them bandits, others privateers, others still “the new keepers of the peace”—began to charge a passage fee at the bottleneck where ridge pressed river. The cartographer disdained such contingencies. “Tolls are marginalia,” he said. “We do not redraw coastlines for the graffiti of pickpockets.”

But the brotherhood entrenched. The toll grew from coin to cargo, from cargo to tribute, from tribute to decree. They built a timber hall and planted banners along the ridge. By the winter’s end a priest had blessed them, and in spring a scribe copied their schedules onto parchment with the city’s very ink. What began as extortion acquired a rubric, a calendar, a seal.

“Shakedown gussied up as law,” muttered the surveyor.

“Law tames force,” replied the cartographer. “If wolves must exist, better they wear collars.”

“But whose collars?” she asked.

He did not answer. He had begun to feel an ache behind the eyes whenever she spoke.

In the taverns, men told a story—simpler than the truth and catchy as a sailor’s tune—about two travelers: a man with one map and a woman with many. They set out separately for the salt ports. He studied his single chart with monastic devotion. She carried a handful of scraps, some borrowed, some smudged by rain, some contradicting one another. He mocked her disorder privately and, when pressed, publicly.

The man with one map made excellent time upon leaving the gates, for every step he took confirmed his certainty. The woman lagged, stopping to ask her way, sketching fresh lines on her scraps, erasing others.

When he came to the place where the river had laid down its new will, he stepped forward into reeds and found the earth at once solid and treacherous, like old philosophy. He tested each step against the chart. Where the ground disagreed, he corrected the ground by fiat. When the reeds rose to his chest, he raised the chart higher lest it be wetted. The map stayed true—dry in his fingers—while the world soaked his bones. He declared this a triumph of principle.

The woman with many maps, meanwhile, hired a boat.

By late summer, the man with one map had reached the brotherhood’s hall. He read his charter to the toll-keeper, who listened with a polite boredom common among men whose reality includes rope. “The corridor is free,” the cartographer recited. “Ex universis legibus—by the universal laws.”

“Universals,” said the toll-keeper, and reached out a hand. “Pay the particular.”

The cartographer paid nothing. He appealed to the city seal, to the king’s commission, to the guild’s stamp, to the algebra of lines. The toll-keeper shrugged toward the timber hall and the men beside it who understood that a rope is a sentence and a coin is the clause that spares it.

The woman with many maps had joined a convoy two valleys over, where a miller’s cousin kept a bridle path the guild had never deigned to chart because the bends were spiteful and the gradients rude. The convoy moved at the pace of old songs, full of hesitations and reprises. They crossed under night through a pass where the stars punched cold pinholes in the sky, and someone—no one later agreed who—began to call the constellations by unfamiliar names that nevertheless led the feet more safely than the sanctioned titles.

When the woman reached the salt ports, she folded her scraps, added a new sheet, and sent a letter to the council: The road you fund is not the road your wagons take. Your line is an aspiration; your merchants follow possibilities.

The cartographer, at last returning to the city after having been relieved of his money, his dignity, and a fair measure of his certainty, found the surveyor waiting in the archive. She did not gloat. She brought him a jar of ointment for the bites the marsh had left upon his ankles, and a thin book of poems copied by a monk who loved rivers.

“This does not disprove the map,” he said hoarsely.

“Of course not,” she said. “It proves the river.”

That winter, the council convened again—not to condemn the cartographer but because the harvest had failed west of the ridge, and the city needed grain. There were three possible routes: the corridor (in theory), the bridle path (in practice), and a coastal voyage via the river (in hope). The guild argued for the corridor as a matter of jurisdiction and dignity. The merchants argued for the bridle path because they had mended its bridges with their own coin. The sailors—men from the salt ports who had come upriver to trade—argued for the voyage because they feared neither storms nor land clerks.

A philosopher of the town—one who had read widely of systems that claim to be universal—rose to speak. He praised the aesthetic beauty of the single chart, the vigor of the bridle path, and the enormous patience of the sea. He then said what made everyone scowl equally:

“Friends, the grain does not care which theory carries it.”

The cartographer felt the ache behind his eyes widen into a room. He looked down upon his vellum. The coastline had always been elegant, the hills chaste, the road a melody of certitudes. But for the first time he seemed to see, not the thing depicted, but the hand that had drawn it—the youth that had believed the crispness of ink could render the world obedient.

In the margins, a faint earlier line showed through where the vellum had been scraped and redrawn, a palimpsest of a road abandoned because the mathematics proved it suboptimal. He remembered the day: a peasant had told him of a spring beside that older line, where travelers might drink and horses lower their heads in gratitude. He had erased the spring with a cold clarity. A road was not a sequence of mercies; it was a rule.

“Bring me your scraps,” he said to the surveyor.

She blinked, uncertain whether he mocked her. He did not. He cleared a corner of the table and laid the flimsy sheets beside the vellum—the flood sketches, the tally of fallen poplars, the toll schedules copied from the brotherhood’s hall by a clerk with neat hands and no illusions, the sailors’ soundings, the miller’s cousin’s memory of the pass where the stars had strange names. One by one, he set weights to keep the restless papers from curling back into themselves.

“Now,” he said, “show me the world as it is endured.”

They worked through the night. The archivists brought candles and, later, broth. The surveyor corrected with a carpenter’s pencil. The cartographer used a silver knife to lift old ink without flaying the skin of the map. He learned where to leave a line tentative, where to mark a ford as variabilis, where to note in small script a spring, an inn with bread, a shrine before which fools and sages had both confessed their need for luck. He engraved upon the vellum the best-known extortions as if they, too, were features of the land—for what was law but a toll that had learned to write?

Near dawn, the guildmaster entered and stopped in the doorway, startled to see the one map begetting a family.

“You would surrender the authority of form?” he asked, half-sorrowing, half-accusing.

“No,” said the cartographer, without looking up. “I would surrender the pretense that form is the world.”

In the spring, the city sent for grain by two routes: along the bridle path that wound through the western valleys, and down the old straight road that now led to the river’s new course. There, wagons gave way to barges that followed the current to the sea, and ships that hugged the coast like prudent lovers brought back their cargoes from the salt ports. Both routes skirted the brotherhood’s tolls entirely, leaving their banners to flutter over an empty pass. By land and by water alike, the grain returned not because the council had chosen the correct theory of roads, but because they had chosen to reach the hungry.

The brotherhood along the ridge—now styling themselves wardens—sent a deputation to complain that the map had given their toll an air of legitimacy by drawing it as if it were a hill. The cartographer listened and replied, “Hills may be leveled, but only by a labor you have not yet met.” The wardens, hearing in this neither blessing nor threat but an accounting of how the world answers those who insist, returned to their timber hall and argued among themselves whether to become sheriffs or pirates.

Years passed. The cartographer’s students learned two ways of looking: first at the vellum, then out the window. They learned to mark on the chart the places where certainty thins, and to go there kindly. The surveyor left the archives for a time to ride with caravans, then returned to teach a course called On Bends.

People brought the map to their faces and breathed the scent of its animal skin and the ink that had turned from black to brown. They debated whether the marginal notes—those apologies to contingency—were betraying the purity of the art or saving its honor. They argued as citizens do: earnestly, with a stake. Meanwhile, the grain moved, the ships put in, the bridle path widened tread by tread of boots, and a new poplar grew by the new ford, which boys would someday mistake for the old. The river laid down another bend and reclaimed it; the city repaired; the wardens grew gray and learned to write better.

One late afternoon, the cartographer walked to the ridge alone. He carried no map. The light came slanting, rendering every furrow articulate. A boy was stacking stones beside the road into a little tower that would fall at the next good wind. The boy saluted, as children do when they sense they are seen. The cartographer nodded and passed on.

From the ridge he could see the bridle path like a thought the city had finally permitted itself to think. He could see the barges making their slow commandments along the river’s new grammar. He could see, far off, a white scrap that might have been a gull’s wing or a sail or a prayer.

He thought of the maxim he had repeated all his life—Non confundar in aeternum—and smiled at how, in the end, the only sure way not to be confounded is to admit, in time, that the ground is entitled to confound you.

When he returned to the archives, he took down the brass stamp of the Guild and pressed it into a blank corner of the vellum—not over a line, not over a named thing, but in a small open space, as if to confess that every map owes the world a margin.

Beneath the seal he wrote, in a hand that trembled more now than when he was a young man forcing springs to disappear: The law of the land is not the land. Use this to begin.

Beyond the One Map: Toward a Craft-Based Understanding of Human Inquiry

Modern scholarship’s great temptation—one that has often spilled into civic and cultural life—has been the pursuit of totality: to trace coherence from the disorder that followed revolutions, continental wars, and world wars, gathering fragments into systems that promised to restore meaning to the wreckage of history. Across disciplines—from medieval literary studies to economics, from art history to psychology—the twentieth century witnessed a striking convergence toward singular, systematic frameworks. Ernst Robert Curtius organized literature around recurring topoi;[1] Erwin Panofsky read art through iconographic programs;[2] Carl Gustav Jung distilled human experience into archetypes; and economists—whether Marxist or neoclassical (the dominant free-market orthodoxy, often traced back to Adam Smith)—sought universal laws governing production and exchange. Each claimed to reveal the deep structure beneath surface variation. Each, in claiming totality, shaded toward ideology—becoming, in some instances, rigid orthodoxy.[3]

This essay argues for another path: treat systematic frameworks as tools rather than truths; judge methods by the illumination they afford rather than by their doctrinal purity; and acknowledge the irreducible complexity of human phenomena. This is not relativism—some interpretations are demonstrably better than others. Rather, it is the recognition that inquiry dealing with meaning-making beings is fundamentally a craft requiring practical wisdom (phronēsis), not a science discovering exceptionless laws.

The Pattern of Capture

The mid-century turn toward formalism and structuralism did not arise by accident. Disciplines sought scientific legitimacy: systematic method, universal patterns, predictive power. The result was a proliferation of One Map systems.

In literary studies, New Criticism treated texts as autonomous formal objects; structuralists sought universal narrative grammars. Curtius’s monumental European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages catalogued the enduring armature of topoi that seemed to organize the Western tradition. In art history, Panofsky’s iconology promised the decipherment of hidden programs and symbolic orders, making artworks legible as texts within overarching schemas. In psychology, rival schools—psychoanalytic, behaviorist, cognitive—each claimed the key to the mind’s machinery; Jung added a transhistorical repertoire of archetypes as the psyche’s deep code. In economics, Marxism and neoclassical theory offered total pictures—historical materialism on the one hand; rational, utility-maximizing agents in equilibrium on the other—each confident that its lawlike structures governed the social world.

What these systems shared was the conviction that beneath diversity lay discoverable, general structures—topoi, archetypes, economic laws, narrative grammars. Master the structure and one could, in principle, explain everything within the domain. Deviations became error, noise, or “false consciousness” in need of correction.

Powerful incentives drove the turn. The prestige of natural science encouraged methodological mimicry. The chaos of revolutions and wars, whether on battlefields or in the life of ideas, created a hunger for stable foundations. Professionalization rewarded methods that could be taught, replicated, and certified. There was genuine intellectual exhilaration in finding patterns that seemed to recur across times and cultures.

The cost was equally great. Every framework, in sharply illuminating some aspects, systematically obscured others. The formalist who honed attention to technique missed history. The Marxist who foregrounded class dynamics missed irreducible symbolic or aesthetic meaning. The psychoanalyst who reduced motivation to the unconscious discounted deliberation and norm-following. The economist who modeled rational actors abstracted away meaning, culture, emotion, and power.

Worse, frameworks became tribal identities. Scholars and others did not merely use Marxist analysis or formalist reading; they were Marxists or formalists. To question the framework threatened belonging, status, and career. Method hardened into movement.

The Metacritical Turn—and Its Recurrence

By the 1960s–70s, reactions emerged. Poststructuralists such as Derrida and Foucault exposed the fissures and power-saturated operations of totalizing systems. Thomas Kuhn argued that scientific paradigms are historically contingent and periodically overturned.[4] Feminist and postcolonial critics showed how seemingly universal structures often encoded particular (male, Western) vantage points.

These critiques were clarifying. They revealed the politics of knowledge, the contingency of canons, the slipperiness of signification. Yet the tragedy is familiar: many of these movements reproduced the error they named. Poststructuralism ossified into an orthodoxy policed by jargon; feminist and postcolonial discourses fractured into camps, each claiming the right diagnosis; Kuhn’s paradigm talk became a ready instrument for dismissing unwelcome evidence (“that is just your paradigm”). The critics of ideology birthed new ideologies.

The recurrence is not mysterious. Academic, social, and political life rewards membership and defensible positions. Deep engagement breeds emotional investment. Intellectual communities cohere around shared tools, which then become badges. Psychologically, human beings prefer coherent worldviews; critiques of totality tend, over time, to totalize themselves.

The consequence is a landscape of warring camps, each armed with a schema, each convinced of its sufficiency, each systematically blind to what it excludes.

The Pattern Persists

The tendency has not abated. Contemporary scholarship, while more fragmented than the mid-century consolidations, continues to generate frameworks that, having illuminated genuine blindnesses, themselves become new orthodoxies.

In literary studies, identity-based criticism has made permanent contributions: revealing whose voices were systematically silenced, exposing how “universal human experience” often encoded particular (white, male, Western) perspectives, opening canons to previously excluded works, and showing how power operates through representation. These insights cannot and should not be reversed. Yet in many disciplines, identity analysis is in practice often treated as mandatory—as if race, gender, and colonial dynamics exhaust what makes literature significant. Aesthetic achievement, formal innovation, philosophical depth, or meanings that transcend identity categories risk dismissal as naive or complicit evasion. A tool that reveals crucial dimensions has become, in practice, the only lens deemed legitimate.

In art history, social approaches rightly challenged the fantasy of autonomous art divorced from material conditions. Examining how patronage, markets, institutions, and class relations shape artistic production has enriched understanding immeasurably. But when this insight hardens into orthodoxy, artworks risk reduction to mere symptoms of social forces—historical documents that could be replaced by period photographs without loss. What makes something art rather than illustration, what constitutes aesthetic achievement, why this painting rather than another—these questions become suspect, dismissed as formalist mystification.

In psychology, cognitive neuroscience has genuinely advanced understanding of how brain mechanisms underlie mental phenomena. Neuroimaging and computational models provide knowledge unavailable to earlier approaches, and any comprehensive psychology must integrate these findings. Yet when neural accounts claim completeness, they eliminate what phenomenological and psychodynamic traditions captured: what experience is like from the inside, how people create meaning, how culture shapes consciousness, and the reality of conscious deliberation. Persons become brains; intentions become activations; meanings dissolve into mechanisms.

In history, social history’s turn toward “history from below”—material conditions, ordinary lives, structural forces—corrected the great-man myopia of earlier approaches and revealed how the non-elite shaped events. This expansion of historical vision is irreversible progress. But the corresponding neglect of how individuals, ideas, and political decisions matter—how Lincoln’s choices, Robespierre’s rhetoric, or Empress Dowager Cixi’s interventions in succession and reform, which may be judged to have prolonged the Qing dynasty, hastened its fall, or proved irrelevant against structural inevitabilities—represents a new distortion. Agency disappears into forces; contingency into necessity.

In economics, behavioral approaches rightly demonstrate that people are not the perfectly rational calculators of neoclassical models. Incorporating psychology into economic analysis addresses real limitations. Yet these insights typically remain within the neoclassical framework as corrective patches rather than fundamentally reconceiving how culture, meaning, power, and institutions shape economic life. The model receives adjustments; the model’s adequacy remains unquestioned.

Each new framework sees genuinely what its predecessor missed. Identity criticism perceives exclusions that formalism could not. Social art history grasps material conditions that connoisseurship ignored. Neuroscience reveals mechanisms that behaviorism and psychoanalysis could only theorize. Social history captures structural forces that political narrative obscured. These are real advances, not fashions.

But each also misses what its predecessor saw—and tends toward its own totality despite beginning as correction. Identity criticism risks losing the aesthetic. Social approaches risk losing the artwork. Neuroscience risks losing the person. Social history risks losing agency. The tools that should be added to the kit instead displace previous tools.

What is not happening is accumulation—the steady building of a varied toolkit where new approaches supplement rather than replace useful older ones. A mature literary criticism would use identity analysis and formalist attention to craft and historical context and aesthetic response, depending on what the text requires. A comprehensive psychology would integrate neuroscience and phenomenology and social context and developmental history. The skilled interpreter today should command these multiple approaches—not choosing between them but deploying each where it illuminates. Exceptions exist: some cognitive scientists integrate neuroimaging with phenomenological reports; some art historians combine social analysis with formal attention; interdisciplinary centers occasionally foster genuine synthesis. But these remain minority practices, swimming against dominant institutional currents rather than exemplifying them. Whether such emerging synthetic approaches represent genuine accumulation or merely the next turn of the cycle remains to be seen. Meanwhile, disciplines continue to trade one narrow lens for another, each generation convinced it has finally escaped narrowness by adopting the current correction.

The pattern is structural, not accidental. Professional incentives reward sharp breaks over synthesis. Tribal dynamics require scholars to define themselves against predecessors, not as continuators. The genuine difficulty of using multiple frameworks simultaneously encourages retreat to single-method mastery. And every framework that proves illuminating in some cases tempts practitioners to apply it universally—if identity criticism works brilliantly here, why not everywhere? The cycle repeats: insight hardens into ideology; correction becomes constraint; the tool claims to be the only tool needed.

The Category Error

The deeper problem is categorical. Objects of natural science lack interiority. Molecules do not interpret norms, pursue purposes, or remember. For entities without meanings, general law is the right instrument.

Human beings, by contrast, are meaning-making creatures who simultaneously:

calculate and improvise,
follow scripts and invent norms,
respond to incentives and pursue ideals,
act from unconscious drives and exercise conscious choice,
inherit traditions and forge new symbols,
seek survival and cultivate gratuitous beauty,
are biologically constrained and culturally various,
experience wonder, fear, shame, delight, duty.

Any framework that captures only one dimension—economic calculation, unconscious motivation, cultural determination, biological drive—remains partial. The person buying bread engages in exchange, enacts identity, satisfies hunger, recalls childhood, manages anxiety, enjoys form and fragrance, and participates in a regime of power. No single map captures this simultaneity.

Disciplines that study such beings—history, anthropology, sociology, economics, psychology, literary criticism—are, at their core, interpretive arts. They require:

Judgment rather than algorithm,
Phronēsis rather than procedure,
Tacit knowledge learned by apprenticeship rather than fully codified rules,
Rule-following attunement that resists complete formalization,
Contextual sensitivity to what matters here,
Tolerance for ambiguity without surrendering evaluative standards.

Attempts to make these disciplines “scientific” by imposing formal models with universal reach typically expunge the very features that make human life human: interpretation, normativity, innovation, and freedom.

The Cartographer’s Lesson

A parable. A cartographer produces an exquisite chart—precise, elegant, guild-approved. When caravans disappear along routes the chart marks as clear, he blames the travelers. When rivers shift and roads become swamps, he demands that administrators “restore” the world to match the drawing. When armed men raise tolls at chokepoints, he dismisses them as “marginalia.”

Meanwhile, a surveyor carries rough packets: flood records, bridge failures, toll schedules, sailors’ soundings, fragments of local lore. She uses whatever map fits this terrain; when none suffice, she walks and looks.

The cartographer confuses map and territory. The surveyor knows every map is a partial, provisional tool. When the cartographer finally admits that “the law of the land is not the land,” he learns what the surveyor already knew: use maps to begin understanding, not to replace it.

This is the stance human inquiry requires. Marxist or neoclassical analysis, formalist poetics, psychoanalytic interpretation, rational-choice modeling—each is a map that foregrounds some contours while backgrounding others. The live question is never “Which map is true?” but “Which map (or combination) illuminates this terrain?”

Toward Methodological Craft

What does it mean to approach inquiry as craft?

Instrumental Pragmatism
Judge frameworks by illumination, not identity. Ask: does this help me understand this event, text, institution, behavior? Elegance is not a virtue if it casts decisive features into shadow.

Cultivated Eclecticism
Not dilettantism, but disciplined familiarity with multiple tools. A craftsperson keeps a varied kit and knows enough of each tool’s capabilities and limits to deploy it skillfully. This is harder than mastering a single framework—it requires years of practice with multiple traditions—but complex phenomena demand it.

Contextual Judgment (phronēsis)
No algorithm selects the right tool. Judgment forms through experience with cases, by seeing many patterns and exceptions, by learning what usually works where—and when to break one’s own habits. This is wisdom in Aristotle’s sense: the capacity to deliberate well about particulars.

Humble Acknowledgment of Limits
Every account is partial. The most honest claim is: “This framework reveals these aspects; others remain for other tools; still others remain opaque.” This is not relativism—we can distinguish better from worse interpretations—but recognition that comprehensiveness is impossible.

Results-Oriented Assessment
Evaluate interpretations by their explanatory and revelatory power—by whether they clarify evidence, accommodate counter-instances, and guide action—not by ritual conformity to a method. A method that violates orthodoxy but illuminates is superior to one that adheres but obscures.

Integration of the Shadow
Jung reminds us that the shadow we deny returns to trouble us.[5] What is true of the individual psyche is true also of our frameworks: each casts its own shadow, and what is banished comes back in altered form. The economic model cannot banish meaning and power; the formalist reading cannot banish history; the ideological critique cannot banish beauty and grace.

This posture is professionally risky. It builds no monolithic school, resists catechisms, and is harder to teach than technique. Judgment developed through apprenticeship cannot be reduced to steps in a textbook. The approach offers no easy tribal home. But it is the only posture proportionate to the subject.

This is not promiscuous eclecticism. Disciplined pluralism admits tools only insofar as they illuminate evidence, survive scrutiny against counter-instances, and cohere with established knowledge. The craftsman does not grab random implements but selects from a kit assembled through rigorous training. Bad interpretations remain bad—not because they violate methodological purity but because they distort evidence, ignore context, or fail explanatory tests. The point is that these evaluative standards are substantive (does it illuminate?) rather than procedural (does it follow the right method?).

Bread, Briefly

Consider bread. The economist sees prices and allocation; the anthropologist sees ritual identity; the historian sees revolutions sparked by grain shortages; the psychologist sees memory and comfort; the political theorist sees power over grain as power over people; the nutritionist sees macronutrients; the phenomenologist attends to the experience of crust and crumb. Each lens discloses a real aspect; none exhausts the thing. The person buying or baking bread engages all these dimensions simultaneously—and more besides, including whimsy, habit, and ineffable preference—and yet retains a mystery and irreducible particularity even after comprehensive analysis.

If bread—daily, simple bread—eludes total capture by any single framework, what hubris imagines that a theory could comprehend a people, a polity, an epoch?

The Political Parallel

The same craft logic applies to political economy. The modern state is neither pure predation (libertarian fantasy) nor pure salvation (vulgar statism). It is at once:

necessary infrastructure for complex life,
a perennial object of capture by interests,
the guarantor of freedom through law and its limiter through coercion,
creator and creature of market relations,
supplier of public goods and vector of exploitation.

Markets, likewise, excel at coordinating dispersed knowledge in some contexts and fail dramatically in others. The craftsman’s question is never “state or market?” but “which functions, organized how, accountable to whom, balanced by which constraints, under these conditions?”

Statesmanship, like scholarship, is an art of fitting means to circumstances. The statesman confronting an economic crisis needs to ask: Is this a moment for market incentives? For regulation? For direct provision? For some combination? The answer depends on diagnosis, not doctrine. Different problems require different tools. Ideological commitment to a single framework—whether libertarian, socialist, or technocratic—produces the intellectual equivalent of using a hammer on every problem because hammers are the only tool one recognizes.

Lineage of Craft

This essay’s argument stands within a tradition of pluralist and anti-foundationalist thought, indebted particularly to Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism, Richard Rorty’s pragmatism, and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics, though it extends their insights across a broader range of disciplines and grounds them more explicitly in craft epistemology.[6]

Accordingly, this methodological stance is not a novel invention, nor is it “anything goes” relativism. It has a distinguished lineage. Aristotle distinguished epistēmē (demonstrable knowledge of universals) from phronēsis (practical wisdom about particulars) and technē (productive craft).[7] The human sciences, in his taxonomy, require phronēsis more than epistēmē—judgment about what to do in this case, not deduction from general laws.

Michael Polanyi taught that “we know more than we can tell,” that crucial expertise is tacit and transmitted by apprenticeship rather than explicit instruction.[8] The master craftsman knows when the wood will split, when the dough has risen enough, when the argument needs qualification—not by applying rules but through practiced sensitivity that cannot be fully articulated.

Wittgenstein observed that rule-following is socially embedded; the application of a rule is not itself rule-governed all the way down. At some point, as he wrote, “my spade is turned”—we act not from further rules but from trained judgment within a form of life.[9] This is not arbitrary; it is how competence actually works.

Clifford Geertz urged “thick description” in anthropology: embedding action in the “webs of significance” people themselves have spun, rather than subsuming it under general theory. [10] His interpretive approach recognized that understanding human behavior requires grasping the symbolic meanings actions hold for participants—meanings that are locally constructed and resist universal formalization.

These thinkers did not advocate methodological anarchy. They articulated rigors appropriate to human subjects: the discipline of attending carefully to context, of learning through practice, of acknowledging the limits of explicit formalization, of judging particulars wisely rather than applying universal rules mechanically.

Conclusion: Use This to Begin

The point is not to abandon systematic frameworks. Marxist analysis, formalist reading, psychoanalytic interpretation, economic modeling—all can illuminate. The point is to resist turning tools into totalities, to refuse the ideological capture that confuses method with truth.

What is required is methodological humility joined to practical ambition: admit partiality while pressing for understanding by bringing multiple tools to bear. This yields no catechism, no resting place, no easy fellowship. It is harder than certainty. It is also more honest, and more fruitful.

The best we can achieve is not final answers but better questions; not perfect maps but skillful navigation; not total theories but hard-won wisdom. The work asks for judgment, experience, humility—and the courage to say, at the edge of understanding, that the phenomenon retains depths we cannot plumb and possibilities we cannot predict.

The law of the land is not the land.
Light and shadow arise together.
Every map owes the world a margin.

Use this to begin.

Notes

[1] Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983; first published 1953).

[2] Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 2018; first published 1939). See especially “Introductory: Studies in Iconology,” 3-31.

[3] In principle, these approaches can serve as complementary tools—free market and Marxian analysis, for instance, each shedding light when applied together to an historical situation. Yet in practice, frameworks often ossify into rigid ideologies. Marxism once held this place in the USSR; neoclassical economics has increasingly assumed it in the United States. A striking example is Ohio’s 2025 mandate requiring all public universities to incorporate Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations into a three-credit American civic literacy course, alongside the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, Lincoln’s addresses, and King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. See Ohio Revised Code § 3345.382 (2025).

[4] Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012; first published 1962).

[5] Carl Gustav Jung, “The Shadow,” in Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, The Collected Works Works of C.G. Jung vol. 9, part 2, ed. and trans. by G. Adler & R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979; first published 1959). Jung argued that the shadow comprises those aspects of the psyche that contradict the conscious self-image and are therefore repressed or denied; when unacknowledged, the shadow returns in distorted forms, and psychological wholeness requires consciously integrating what has been excluded.

[6] Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009; first published 1979); Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Continuum, 1989).

[7] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, 1139a-1142a.

[8] Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966), 4.

[9] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and J. Schulte (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009; first published 1953), §217: “‘How am I able to follow a rule?’—If this is not a question about causes, then it is about the justification for my acting in this way in complying with the rule. / Once I have exhausted the justification, I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’ / (Remember that we sometimes demand explanations for the sake not of their content, but for their form. Our requirement is an architectural one; the explanation a kind of sham corbel that supports nothing.)”

[10] Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

Epic of Gaza

Proem

Weep, Angelic Host—sentinel Cherubim, laudific Seraphim—weep,
Recall, O Memory, the deeds of men most mean, their bitter striving;
Of those whose wrath, though born of dust, consumed the fields of nations,
Whose hands, unclean with envy, loosed the cry of widows and orphans.
From their hearts rose pride, and with their pride came hunger unbounded,
Till hearth and altar alike lay broken, the ploughshare shattered,
And souls unnumbered went down to the shadowy regions,
Leaving their fathers bereft, their children untended, their homes in ashes.

Thus was the earth made desolate, and Heaven itself grew weary;
For even the Seraphim, laudific, grew silent in their praising,
And even the Cherubim, sentinel, let fall their flaming vigil.
Yet still, O Memory, sing on, that generations yet unborn may tremble,
Lest pride unmeasured, and meanness cloaked in strength, rise once more,
And angelic hosts be called again to witness man’s undoing.

Gaza Before the Storm

Remember first how Gaza stood beside the ancient sea,
Her markets bright with oranges, her harbors filled with song,
Where fishermen cast nets at dawn, and children ran the shore,
And olive groves grew silver-green beneath the turning seasons.
The Great Omari lifted high its Byzantine dome,
Saint Porphyrius kept its vigil, fifteen centuries strong,
And in the evening hour of prayer, a thousand minarets
Sent voices skyward, weaving threads of worship into twilight.

Here was a city rooted deep, her stones drunk full of time,
Her people bound by blood and earth to this small patch of shore.
The old men sat in coffee shops, playing backgammon and speaking
Of harvests past, of children grown, of peace that might yet come.
But Memory keeps what was, before the storm clouds gathered,
Before the sky grew dark with iron, and the earth with ashes.

Gaza Besieged

Hear now, O Memory, after the angelic cry, the tale of sorrow:
How wrath was loosed upon Gaza, the walled and crowded city,
Where children clung to their mothers, and fathers kept vigil in hunger,
And the streets ran red with fire, the stones made to weep with blood.

For men most mean, in pride unmeasured, cast down their anger,
And the sky, once blue with doves, grew black with the smoke of ruin.
Hospitals groaned with the wounded, mosques lay shattered in silence;
The cry of the muezzin was drowned by the thunder of iron.
Women lifted their arms to heaven, crying for justice;
Infants wailed without milk, and the wells ran red with despair.

Thus did Gaza endure, as Ilium once by the Scamander,
A city besieged, its name to be sung in lamentation.
Yet not Troy alone, but Sarajevo’s bitter winters,
Stalingrad’s rubble, Warsaw’s ghetto walls—
All cities that have tasted wrath speak Gaza’s name as sister.

Catalogue of Grief

Sing the children whose laughter was severed in silence:
Sing Amal, whose curls were bright as dawn, now dust-shrouded;
Sing Yusuf, who carried a ball through the alleys, forever stilled;
Sing Miriam, with eyes like lamps, closed by the weight of rubble;
Sing Omar, who drew birds in the sand, his small hands silenced;
Sing Laila, who danced to her grandmother’s songs, now voiceless;
Sing Ahmed, six years old, who asked why the sky was angry.
These were the blossoms cut down, their springtime denied them,
Their games unfinished, their dreams unspoken, their tomorrow stolen.

Sing the mothers, whose voices rose in lamentation:
Sing Layla, who cried to the heavens, clutching fragments of cloth;
Sing Hanan, whose arms grew empty, rocking the air with sorrow;
Sing Fatima, who counted days by her children’s breathing;
Sing Mariam, who sang lullabies to graves of stone.
They were the pillars broken, their wombs turned to tombs of memory,
Their milk dried up, their cradle songs transformed to keening.

Sing the fathers, silent with grief, their faces carved from stone:
Sing Khalid, who once ploughed fields, now sifts through the ruins;
Sing Samir, who carried no sword, yet bore the weight of the fallen;
Sing Mahmoud, whose hands built homes, now dig for his buried;
Sing Hassan, who taught his son to read, now reads only headstones.
They were the oaks uprooted, their roots torn from the soil,
Their strong backs bent, their protecting arms made powerless.

Sing the city herself, Gaza, heart of the seashore:
Streets that once bustled with trade, now choked with ashes;
Mosques that lifted their domes to heaven, now shattered and open;
Hospitals that groaned with the wounded, their floors awash in blood;
Schools where children learned their letters, now rubble and memory;
Markets where oranges gleamed like suns, now dust and silence.
Gaza endures, yet her breath is ragged, her beauty in ruins.

The Heroes of Gaza

Yet sing also those who stood against the storm:

Sing Dr. Hussam, who would not leave his patients,
Operating by candlelight when the power failed,
His hands steady though the building shook with bombs.

Sing Mama Zahra, ninety years old,
Who sheltered twelve children not her own,
Sharing her last crust of bread among them,
Singing them to sleep with ancient lullabies.

Sing the teacher Amjad, who carved lessons in the dust,
Teaching children their letters beneath the rubble,
That learning might not die with the schools,
That hope might live though hope seemed dead.

Sing the young father Rashid, who dug with bloodied hands
For seventeen hours to free his neighbor’s child,
Though his own house lay in ruins,
Though his own losses called him home.

Sing the nurse Amal, who walked three miles each day
Through streets of glass and metal,
Carrying medicine to the wounded,
Her white coat bright as a flag of mercy.

These were the lights that would not be extinguished,
The flames that burned when all else was darkness,
The proof that goodness lives even in Hell,
That humanity endures though inhumanity rage.

The Silence of Nations

Yet where were the nations when Gaza called for aid?
The mighty kingdoms sat in their towers of glass,
Counting their gold, weighing their alliances,
While children starved beneath the rubble of their homes.

Some sent words like empty vessels, hollow condolences,
Others turned their faces away, as if not seeing
Could make the screaming stop, the dying disappear.
The halls of justice echoed only with procedure,
While Gaza bled, and Memory wrote their shameful silence.

Even the sea turned bitter, tasting ash and sorrow,
And dolphins fled those waters where the harbors burned.
Only the wind remained faithful, carrying the cries
Across the world, though men stopped up their ears
And closed their eyes, and voted for blindness.

Wrath of the Aggressors

Yet grief alone is not the tale, but wrath that bred it.

For men most mean, enthroned in pride, decreed destruction:
The Stone-faced King, whose tongue was sharpened with iron,
Who called fire down from heaven, and loosed it on the helpless.
The Golden-Maned Ruler, who sat upon distant waters,
Sending arms and gold, as though to purchase silence;
He bore the name of peacemaker, yet his hands were heavy with blood.

These were the princes of the age, their counsel clothed in falsehood,
And their decrees were bitter, sowing ashes in the earth.
They spoke of safety while they sowed destruction,
Of defense while they dealt death to the defenseless.
Their words were honey, but their works were gall,
And History will write their names in letters black as smoke.

The Voice of Gaza

Yet not in silence did Gaza bow, nor wholly in despair.
From the ruins rose a voice, steadfast as stone in the storm:

“We are the living, though the dust has covered our faces.
Our children sleep in the earth, yet their names burn bright as stars.
Break our houses, yet from rubble we rise speaking;
Cut down our olives, yet new shoots crack the stone.

You call us shadows, yet we cast longer darkness
Than your towers, and our darkness teaches light.
You name us forgotten, yet Memory keeps us close,
And angels inscribe our suffering in letters of gold.

Count our dead if you can number the grains of sand;
Measure our sorrow if you can drain the sea.
We have drunk deep of anguish, yet we are not broken;
We have walked through the valley of death, yet we breathe.

O sons of men most mean, your wrath is but smoke on the wind.
You have the fire, but we have the ashes, and ashes endure.
You have the sword, but we have the word, and the word is eternal.
Know this: though you bury us, we shall rise in the telling,
For the earth itself whispers our names, and will not forget.

And if the nations turn their faces away, still we stand,
For Gaza is not undone, though her walls lie fallen.
We are the olive trees that grow from stones,
We are the songs that survive the singers,
We are the light that shines in darkness,
And darkness has never overcome us.”

The Desecrations

Nor were the sanctuaries spared, nor the places of the Most High.
The destroyers struck at temples, their minarets broken in silence;
They shattered the churches, where lamps once trembled in vigil,
Icons dashed in dust, crosses cast down in fire.
Thus was prayer silenced, whether in Arabic chant or in hymnal;
The faithful fled, yet the stones themselves groaned in lament.

And the olive trees, those elders of the earth, were uprooted;
Ancient roots torn from soil that had drunk the blood of generations.
Branches once heavy with fruit lay scorched upon the ground,
And the groves, where fathers had walked with their sons, stood barren.
No psalm was heard, no murmur of leaves in the evening;
Only the wind through ruins, whispering sorrow to heaven.

Even the dead found no peace in their appointed places;
Graves were torn open, bones scattered to air,
Ancestors made homeless, their rest disturbed.
For wrath respects neither the living nor the sleeping,
Neither the newly born nor the long-buried,
Neither the sacred nor the profane.

Catalogue of the Broken Sanctuaries

Sing the names of holy places undone:
The Great Omari Mosque, Byzantine-born,
Heart of Gaza’s Old City, December-felled;
Saint Porphyrius, fifth-century stone,
Twice-struck shelter, sixteen souls entombed beneath its ancient walls.

Khalid bin al-Walid Mosque, November’s ruin,
Al-Riad Mosque, March’s bitter fall,
Bani Saleh Mosque, August’s dust,
Yassin Mosque, struck in al-Shati’s crowded camp,
Ibn Uthman too, its centuries silenced.

Count them: of twelve hundred and forty-four mosques,
More than a thousand scarred by fire and iron,
Nine hundred leveled utterly, their prayers cut short,
Their faithful scattered like leaves before the storm.

Graveyards forty out of sixty struck,
Twenty-two erased from the earth,
Bones scattered to air, ancestors made homeless.
Palaces broken, markets burned, bathhouses unroofed,
Even Anthedon Harbor, Roman gateway, flattened into the sea.

Museums looted, libraries obliterated,
Memory itself made to bleed, the archives set aflame.
For they would kill not only the living,
But the memory of the living,
The records of their being,
The proof they ever were.

The Lamentation Chorus

The Mothers of Gaza cry:
“O children, blossoms cut before the fruit,
We held you in our arms, now we hold only ashes.
Your laughter is buried beneath the stones of our city,
And our breasts are dry, our songs turned into wailing.
Yet still we sing your names like prayers,
And still we dream your dreams unfinished.”

The Fathers of Gaza groan:
“Our fields are ruined, our ploughs shattered,
The olive trees uprooted, the roots torn from the soil.
We walk among graves unguarded,
Where bones lie scattered, denied even silence.
Yet still we remember the taste of our olives,
And still we plant hope in the ashes.”

The Faithful lament:
“Where are the mosques that once trembled with prayer?
The Great Omari lies fallen, Ibn Uthman silenced,
Saint Porphyrius struck, its saints entombed anew.
Our lamps are dark, our chants broken in the smoke.
Yet still our hearts are temples,
And still our prayers rise to heaven.”

The Children’s Voices rise:
“We who were silenced while learning to speak,
We who were buried while learning to walk,
We who were taken while learning to love—
We are not gone, though our bodies lie broken.
We live in the tears of our mothers,
We live in the dreams of our fathers,
We live in the songs that remember us,
And death has no power over song.”

The Angels answer:
“We weep with you, O Gaza;
For sentinel Cherubim have loosed their flaming swords in sorrow,
And laudific Seraphim, once ceaseless in praise,
Cover their faces in grief, and their hallelujahs are hushed.
Yet know that every tear is counted,
Every name is written in light,
And what was destroyed on earth
Stands whole in the halls of eternity.”

The Chorus of Gaza cries together:
“Who shall remember us if not the stones?
Who shall keep our names if not the dust?
If the nations turn away their eyes,
Then let the heavens bear witness, and let Memory sing forever.
For we are Gaza, and Gaza endures,
We are the voice that will not be silenced,
We are the story that must be told,
We are the love that conquers death.”

Catalogue of the Slain

Sing, O Memory, of the dead, the multitude unnumbered,
For Gaza has given sixty thousand souls and more to the grave.
Not warriors alone, but children in their play,
Mothers in their shelter, fathers in their vigil,
The aged bent with years, the newborn scarcely named.

Count fifty-eight thousand more wounded,
Their bodies torn, their spirits scarred in silence.
Two thousand struck while seeking bread,
Gathering in hope of relief, yet felled by fire.
Three hundred perished of hunger, seven and ten children,
Their lips dry, their bellies hollow, their cries unheard by the nations.

Even when truces were spoken, the killing continued,
Ten thousand more consumed like chaff in flame.
Who can reckon those incinerated, buried under stone and steel,
Whose names are known only to God,
Whose faces are forgotten by man
But remembered by eternity?

A leaked report from the destroyer’s own hand
Confessed the truth they would hide:
Four of every five were innocents,
The harmless marked as enemies,
The helpless slain as foes.
Thus did wrath devour the lambs of Gaza,
And the angels wept, inscribing their names in light.

The Judgment of Yahweh

Then did the heavens part, as once above Sinai,
And Yahweh Himself descended, wrapped in cloud and flame,
The Ancient of Days, whose voice shook the foundations,
Before whom cherubim veil their faces, and seraphim fall silent.

He brought forth the scales of ultimate justice,
Vast as the firmament, terrible as truth,
And weighed the works of men most mean:
Their bombs and decrees, their gold and iron,
Their speeches of defense while dealing death.

“I have seen this before,” spoke the Voice that split the Red Sea,
“The marking of a people for destruction,
The sealing of their fate in chambers of decision,
The systematic starving, the calculated killing.
Did I not hear the cry from burning ghettos?
Did I not see the smoke from crematoria?”

In the other pan He placed Gaza’s slain,
The bones of children, the tears of mothers,
And with them, the ghosts of all genocide’s victims—
Warsaw and Treblinka, Armenia and Rwanda.

The scales tilted under genocide’s weight,
And the voice of the Almighty thundered:

“Genocide! I name it what it is.
You who survived the furnaces of Europe,
How could you kindle furnaces for others?

I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
But I am also the God of Hagar and Ishmael.
I freed slaves from Egypt,
But I will not bless those who enslave others.

These deeds are genocide, and I have weighed them.
These rulers stand condemned, their glory is ash.
Justice will come, though justice tarry long,
And every tear will be counted,
Every life will be avenged.
Genocide!”

The Promise of Memory

Yet this is not the end, O sons of earth,
For Memory does not merely mourn but promises.

As from the ashes of the phoenix rises flame,
As from winter’s death comes spring’s green resurrection,
So from Gaza’s anguish shall come forth
A testimony that shall not be silenced.

The children who were slain shall live in song,
The mothers who were silenced shall speak through poetry,
The fathers who were broken shall stand tall in story,
And Gaza herself, though wounded, shall endure
Until justice rolls down like waters,
And righteousness like a mighty stream.

For this is the promise Memory makes:
That suffering witnessed becomes sacred,
That innocence destroyed becomes indestructible,
That love murdered becomes immortal,
And truth, though buried, always rises.

Epilogue

So sing, O Memory, lest silence fall and truth be buried.
Let cherubim guard the names, let seraphim whisper them in praise.
Let the children of Gaza, though slain, rise again in song,
And let the nations know that what was destroyed endures in remembrance.

For stone may be shattered, but the word cannot be silenced,
And ashes speak, though the fire consume them.
The olive trees shall grow again from their ancient roots,
The mosques shall be rebuilt, more beautiful than before,
The children shall play once more in streets made clean,
And Gaza shall rise, as morning rises from the night.

This is the epic of Gaza, written in tears and blood,
In ashes and in starlight, in sorrow and in hope.
Let it be read when tyrants sleep secure,
Let it be sung when justice seems to slumber,
Let it be remembered when the world forgets—

Sing, O Memory, of Gaza.

Weep, Angelic Host—sentinel Cherubim, laudific Seraphim—weep.

Ohio’s Tax Burden Inversion

How Two Decades of Income Tax Cuts for the Wealthy Shifted the Load onto Property Owners and Renters

During the most recent reappraisal for property taxes, thousands of Cuyahoga County residents opened their mailboxes to find reappraisal notices that made their stomachs drop. Property values had climbed by an average of 32% county-wide, with East Cleveland residents facing increases of 67% and Maple Heights 59%.

Michael Chambers, Cuyahoga County Auditor, reported that, for 71-year-old Parma resident Agnes Gallo, this meant her home’s value rose by $76,000, pushing her annual tax bill up nearly $950. “This is outrageous,” she said. “People can’t afford to live in their own houses.” He also said that single mother Roni Menefee, facing a 49% valuation hike, admitted she was considering leaving Ohio altogether: “We’re hardly living in Beverly Hills here.”

County officials insist that House Bill 920 prevents taxes from rising dollar-for-dollar with property values. But for seniors on fixed incomes or working families barely hanging on, even modest increases can be destabilizing. More than 20,000 residents filed complaints, with thousands of adjustments granted. Still, the anger lingers—and justifiably so.

The Long-Term Tax Shift

That anger is rooted in two decades of deliberate state policy. Since 2005, Ohio’s Republican lawmakers have steadily cut the personal income tax, reducing rates most sharply at the top. Over time, these cuts drained nearly $13 billion annually from state revenues.

With less money flowing from the state to schools, libraries, and local governments, communities were forced to raise more themselves. And because they are prohibited from taxing investments or capital gains—the kinds of income more common among the wealthy—the primary tool left was the property tax (although many municipalities also increased their local income taxes-Cleveland voters narrowly approved an increase in its income tax from 2 percent to 2.5 percent in 2016).

The outcome: in 2024, Ohioans paid $23.9 billion in property taxes—more than they contributed through sales taxes ($13.7 billion) or income taxes ($9.5 billion). The most regressive form of taxation has become the backbone of public services.

Put plainly: the legislature cut income taxes for the wealthy, and forced everyone else—retired, middle-class, working-class, and poor—to make up the difference through higher property taxes.

The Nonprofit Inversion

At the same time, Ohio has allowed exemptions and abatements to balloon. Nearly $90 billion in property value—17% of the state’s total—is exempt from taxation, up from 14% two decades ago.

The largest single category? Abatements, totaling $26.6 billion. These were meant as temporary incentives to spur growth but are now permanent fixtures. Even utilities, which have captive consumers and guaranteed profits, receive abatements for investments they would make anyway.

And then there are the so-called nonprofits. Their tax-exempt status rests on public benefit, yet their leaders are not infrequently paid like corporate executives:

Institution	Leader	Annual Compensation	Tax/Exemption Status
Cleveland Clinic	Dr. Tomislav Mihaljevic, CEO	≈ $7 million (2023)	Vast campus tax-exempt as nonprofit hospital
Ohio State University	Ted Carter Jr., President	≈ $1.3 million (2024)	University property tax-exempt
Ohio State University	Ryan Day, Head Football Coach	≈ $10–12.5 million (contracted 2025)	Public university benefiting from exemptions
Hawken School (Private)	D. Scott Looney, Head of School	≈ $1.05 million (2023, IRS Form 990)	Elite private school, property tax-exempt

These institutions are sheltered from taxes while ordinary citizens—many of whom can barely make ends meet—are expected to pay “full freight.”

Renters Pay Too

The burden does not end with homeowners. Renters also pay indirectly, as landlords pass on property tax hikes through higher rents.

In 2023, Ohio saw some of the steepest rent increases in the nation:

Cincinnati: one-bedroom rents up 17% year-over-year.

Columbus: also up 17%.

Central Ohio: squeezed further by Intel, Amazon, and data center developments.

Statewide: over 700,000 renter households are “severely cost-burdened,” spending more than half their income on housing.

Even those who do not own property are being priced out of Ohio’s communities.

Populist Anger and the Ballot Box

It is no wonder, then, that frustration has spilled into politics. In 2025, an all-volunteer group began gathering signatures for a constitutional amendment to abolish property taxes entirely. Organizers say they are moving forward “no matter what” lawmakers do, because people feel they “no longer have a voice in this government.”

The proposal is extreme. Abolishing property taxes would blow a $23 billion hole in funding for schools, libraries, mental health services, and parks. Replacing it with sales taxes could require rates as high as 20%. Yet the fact that such a movement exists—and is gaining traction—reveals how deeply citizens feel abandoned.

They no longer trust lawmakers who, for twenty years, cut income taxes for the rich while pushing costs onto everyone else, especially the working class, seniors, and the poor. They see abatements handed to billion-dollar institutions and “nonprofits” with millionaire executives, while seniors in Parma and renters in Columbus face bills that are unsustainable.

The Choice Ahead

Ohio’s property tax crisis is not an accident. It is the inevitable result of two decades of choices:

Cut income taxes for the wealthy.

Hand abatements to billion-dollar institutions.

Shift the burden onto homeowners, renters, and the poor.

The result is predictable: the young leave by choice, the old leave by necessity, and those who remain are angry enough to contemplate abolishing the system entirely.

Eliminating property taxes outright is likely not the answer—it would devastate schools, libraries, and local services. But for many Ohioans, it may feel like the only way to force state leaders to listen. When lawmakers protect the powerful and ignore the cries of ordinary citizens, radical proposals become the only language that carries weight.[1]

And the cry is not simply to be heard. It is to be relieved—to be lifted out from under a system of taxation that has become oppressive, unfair, and in many instances, unsustainable. Until that relief is real and tangible, until fairness is restored, the ballot box will remain the people’s only instrument. And if the choice is between leaving their homes or leaving the system as it is, more and more Ohioans will choose to abandon the system itself.

The choice is no longer between reform or complacency. It is between reform or rupture.

[1] Some might dismiss the property tax abolition initiative as folly that would devastate local services. But terror concentrates the mind wonderfully. When gerrymandered legislative maps silence voters’ voices in normal governance, when the legislature attempts to eliminate or dilute ballot initiatives entirely, and when even successful citizen initiatives are ignored by lawmakers and courts, extreme measures become rational responses. The terror that grips policy makers, and concentrates their focus if voters eliminate $23 billion in local funding, might finally force the political class that has spent decades redistributing wealth upward to confront the unsustainable system they’ve created. Sometimes breaking a captured system is the only way to build a fair one.

Reading the Iliad Again: The Voice of Reason in an Age of Manipulation

After countless readings of various translations of Homer’s Iliad, certain passages can suddenly leap from the page with startling clarity. It can feel as if I am encountering them for the first time. Such was my experience with the incident regarding Thersites in Book 2, brought into sharp focus by Emily Wilson’s brilliant new translation—whose story had barely registered in previous readings, now revealed as perhaps the most penetrating political commentary in all of ancient literature.

A quick review of the scholarship revealed that while I was hardly alone in this recognition, the political interpretation of Thersites remains surprisingly contested. Some modern scholars have recognized in Homer’s portrayal a sophisticated critique of power that transcends the heroic framework, but many others continue to read the episode as simply affirming aristocratic values.¹ Yet there is something to be said for arriving at these insights through direct encounter with the text—Wilson’s translation made visible what a handful of careful readers have long debated.

The setup is masterful in its cynicism. Zeus, hungry for blood and bound by his promise to Thetis, sends a false dream to Agamemnon. The king, ever susceptible to flattery, believes the lie that, after nine years without success, Troy will fall easily if he attacks immediately. Divine deception exploits human vanity to ensure more carnage—the gods conspire to prolong suffering for their own purposes.

But first, Agamemnon decides to test his troops’ resolve by suggesting they abandon the siege and sail home. The test backfires spectacularly—war-weary soldiers leap up and race toward their ships, desperate to escape nine years of futile bloodshed. Only Odysseus’s violent intervention stops the mass exodus.

Into this moment of barely restored order steps Thersites, described by Homer with deliberate physical grotesquerie to ensure we see him through aristocratic eyes—bandy-legged, lame, with little hair and a shrill voice. In the ancient world, such deformity was viewed as suggesting mental or moral deficiency. But as scholar Panagiotis Stamatopoulos observes, “the ugly hero is the personification of the ugly truth.” Homer introduces an insolent and fearless figure who points out truths that both the soldiers and the kings dare not see. Thersites emerges as “the voice of the people, of demos“—a vox populi expressing the position of the lower social class and opposing the aristocratic consensus. Tellingly, Homer gives him no patronymic surname, no family lineage to establish elite status; he represents not an individual but a class.

Yet Thersites’ words cut through the manufactured crisis with devastating precision. He challenges Agamemnon directly: what is your grievance? You already have gold, women, first choice of everything. After nine years of pointless war, he asks the question that should be obvious—why should common soldiers continue dying for the personal honor of the elite who have already been richly compensated?

This is the voice of human reason emerging amid divine machination and aristocratic ego. Thersites offers what the epic desperately needs: an exit ramp from tragedy. Had the Greeks listened and sailed home, Troy would have stood, Hector would have lived, Achilles would have returned to Phthia, and Odysseus would never have wandered. The commoner alone sees the madness clearly.

More provocatively, Thersites points out the fundamental dependency that the heroic code obscures: “Let him consume his winnings here at Troy, so he can see if we helped him or not.” Without the common soldiers doing the actual fighting and dying, what would Agamemnon accomplish? He would be one man with his treasure, powerless before Troy’s walls. The entire war rests on the backs of those excluded from its real rewards.

But Homer’s brilliance lies in what follows. Odysseus—wily, eloquent, a master of persuasion—does not refute Thersites’ logic. He silences it. The master of cunning speech, the man who could talk his way out of any crisis, abandons rhetoric entirely when faced with reasonable dissent. Seizing the divine scepter, he beats the man bloody while the other soldiers—the very men whose interests Thersites defends—laugh and cheer. Yet Homer’s subtlety continues: even after this violent suppression, it takes two additional speeches by the army’s finest orators, Odysseus and Nestor, to convince the troops to resume fighting. The laughter was hollow; Thersites’ logic had found its mark. In this single scene, Homer offers a devastating triple indictment: the gods manipulate, the elite brutalize, and the masses collaborate in their own subjugation.

What makes this commentary so sophisticated is its recognition that the problem is not simply bad leadership or divine caprice—it is the entire system’s complicity in silencing rational dissent. Homer shows us a world where every level of authority, from Olympus to the ranks, conspires to suppress the voice that points toward sanity and survival.

We live in an age of algorithmic manipulation designed to amplify division for profit. Our elites meet dissent with derision and suppression, while the public, misled or weary, often rallies to their side, cheering policies that erode their own dignity and livelihood. The machinery Homer diagnosed—divine deceit, aristocratic coercion, popular compliance—still grinds forward, indifferent to time.

Thersites asks the eternal question that every society must confront: “Why should we suffer and die for the vanity and greed of our leaders?” That his voice is not merely ignored but mocked—laughed into silence by those he would save—remains one of the most chilling recognitions in all of literature. Homer understood what many modern narratives refuse to admit: that exploitation and oppression do not come from above alone. It comes when the oppressed celebrate it themselves. And the greatest tragedy may not be the fall of Troy, nor the deaths of elite heroes, but the silencing of the one voice that might have stopped the tragedy before it began.

¹ See, for example, Panagiotis G. M. Stamatopoulos, “The episode of Thersites in the Iliad as an ideological and literary construction of Homer,” 28th Seminar of Homeric Philology, Ithaca Island, Greece (2014); and Siep Stuurman, “The Voice of Thersites: Reflections on the Origins of the Idea of Equality,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65.2 (2004): 171-89.