The Bewilderment of the Citizen: When RESPECT Was Written in Chalk

By Donald S. Yarab

“Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”
— Matthew 22:39

“I hate them too. I really do. I hate them. I cannot stand them, because I really do believe they hate our country.”
— President Donald J. Trump, July 3, 2025, Iowa State Fair, speaking of Democrats as the internal enemy

It is not the demagogues who bewilder me.
The political class, the oligarchs who sponsor them, and the ambitious mediocrities who ride their coattails—these I understand. Their motives are ancient and ever-recurring: power, wealth, the intoxicating delusion of being above others. History has never lacked for such befouled souls. What confounds me is not their corruption, but the ease with which so many of my fellow citizens—ordinary men and women raised in homes of decency—abandon their values, their civility, and even their reason to follow such selfish and manipulative men.

Reading Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism brings a sense of recognition as much as revelation. Her breadth of learning and depth of judgment are immense, yet her insight feels uncomfortably near. She wrote of loneliness, of the dissolution of shared reality, of the loss of what she would later name “the common world.” These, she warned, are the preconditions of tyranny. Her warning about that loss recalls a time when the common world was still carefully, even tenderly, built in classrooms.

When I taught as an educator at a Catholic junior-high school years ago, I once wrote on the blackboard—in chalk, for those were chalk days—the single word RESPECT. My pupils were told that respect, for oneself and still more for others, was the foundation of our classroom and of the larger world. It need not be earned, but it could be lost. Respect was the first principle of civilization: acknowledgment of another’s humanity, even in disagreement or uncertainty.

In my religion class, that same word deepened through Christ’s commandment: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Respect, I told them, was the beginning of that love—not the sentimental kind that flatters or excuses, but the disciplined recognition that others, too, are made in the image of God. Such love is not mere emotion but moral vision. It binds community, restrains cruelty, and demands humility; for I believed then, as I do now, that if children learned that lesson, the rest would follow—discipline, fairness, empathy, and truth.

Yet today, the nation seems one in which respect has eroded into mockery, disagreement into contempt. Men and women who once prized civic decency now sneer at simple kindness as weakness and mistake public cruelty for laudable candor. Forgotten are the lessons once taught by parents and teachers—forgotten that respect is not submission but recognition, not indulgence but acknowledgment that every person bears the image of something sacred.

Arendt helps to explain part of this descent. She wrote that the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced ideologue but the person “for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” In our time, that confusion has been engineered deliberately by those who control mass media, public discourse, and civic conversation. Facts are now optional, reality malleable, and truth a commodity sold to the highest bidder. Noise replaces discernment; pundits and influencers, preachers of grievance and merchants of outrage, fill every silence until the ordinary citizen, weary of discerning, yields to the comfort of belonging. To be part of a movement—any movement—feels safer than standing alone amid uncertainty in an increasingly fragmented civic community.

But belonging comes at a cost. The price is moral collapse. Once fear replaces thought, hatred becomes easy. Once truth becomes relative, cruelty seems justified. Once self-respect erodes, submission feels like relief. It is with great grief that one watches people trade the humility of faith for the arrogance of fanaticism, the rigor of science for the comfort of superstition, the patience of democracy for the immediacy of mob emotion.

Some will say it is economics—that poverty, inequality, and insecurity drive people to such extremes. There is truth in that, but not the whole truth. Others will say it is ignorance, the failure of education. That too plays its part. Yet beneath both lies a deeper malady: spiritual exhaustion, a weariness with freedom itself. To think for oneself, to weigh evidence intelligently, to question authority doggedly—these require effort and courage. Many—perhaps most—prefer the narcotic of certainty. It is easier to be told what is true than to bear the burden of finding out responsibly.

That is why propaganda works—not because people are fools, but because they are tired, frightened, and longing for meaning. The demagogue offers them belonging, moral clarity, and enemies to hate. He tells them their failures are someone else’s fault. He gives them a cause grand enough to drown their doubts. And in surrendering to him, they mistake obedience for faith, vengeance for virtue, and ignorance for authenticity.

Hannah Arendt understood this weariness well. She observed that “mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived, because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.” That insight reaches beyond politics into the realm of spirit. When cynicism becomes habitual, truth itself grows unbelievable; when every statement is assumed false, the liar becomes prophet, and the soul, deprived of trust, welcomes its own deception.

What bewilders most is not the malice of my fellow citizens but their forgetfulness. Gone is the decency of parents, the moral instruction of their faiths, the civics once taught in schools, the respect once owed to fact, reason, and one another. Forgotten is that fear corrodes the soul and that hatred is the cheapest imitation of strength. Forsaken is the understanding that self-government depends not on leaders but on citizens—on the willingness to think, to listen, to doubt, and to care for one another.

Fifty years from now, scholars will no doubt write of these years with the detachment of hindsight. They will trace the algorithms, the demography, the disinformation networks, and the economic despair. They will find causes, correlations, and turning points. Yet they will still struggle to answer the simplest question: how did so many, knowing better, choose worse again and again?

For the manipulators, history has an answer—ambition, greed, vanity. For the manipulated, the explanation is more tragic: surrender not out of evil but out of weariness; not out of ignorance but out of fear; not because the way was lost, but because memory failed.

That is the lesson of our time. Evil will always exist; it requires only opportunity. But tyranny of the spirit—this quiet decay of conscience—thrives only when the many forget that decency is a daily act, not a tribal badge.

This reflection is written not to condemn but to plead—for remembrance. To remember what was taught when we were young: that truth matters, that kindness binds, that facts are not partisan, that faith without humility is idolatry, and that freedom demands thought.

When RESPECT was written on that blackboard years ago, it was in the belief that children were being prepared for a world that valued it. That belief endures—if enough choose to live as if it were true. For if it is forgotten, then no constitution, no scripture, no science can save us. We will have undone ourselves, not by conquest, but by consent.

Echoes of the Republic

The old fiction that America’s two major parties represent opposing interests—one for business, the other for working people—no longer persuades anyone who pays attention. Nor does the claim that they meaningfully occupy the ideological poles of right and left. The observant voter, that dwindling minority, sees that both parties have long answered to the same masters: corporations, financiers, and those who profit from the machinery of endless growth and permanent inequality. In 2024, the top one hundred billionaire families poured $2.6 billion into federal elections—one of every six dollars spent. Dark money reached a record $1.9 billion, more than double the amount in 2020. Corporate lobbying hit $4.4 billion, with Big Tech alone spending $61.5 million and employing one lobbyist for every two members of Congress. Their quarrels are theatrical. Their policies, however dressed in partisan language, converge upon the preservation of the same order.

But something darker has taken hold. The oligarchs who once influenced the system now rule it directly. They have seized one party outright, hollowed out the other through dependence on the same donors, and reduced the national contest to absurd theater. Thirteen billionaires with combined wealth exceeding $450 billion now hold cabinet positions in the federal government—the wealthiest administration in American history. The man who spent between $277 and $290 million to help elect the president—the largest individual political donation ever recorded—was rewarded with a government position granting access to Treasury Department systems containing Americans’ Social Security numbers and bank accounts. The performance conceals the deeper reality—that the constitutional balance envisioned by the founders has collapsed, not from sudden assault but from gradual surrender. We have kept the shell of the Republic while its substance has been drained away.

Today, all three branches of government serve the same masters—and it is not the people.

The Executive

On June 7, 2025, a president deployed approximately 2,000 National Guard troops and 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles after immigration raids sparked protests, claiming “incidents of violence and disorder…constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government.” The governor actively opposed the deployment, stating local police could handle the situation. Three months later, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer ruled the action violated federal law, writing that “there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.” Judge Breyer described the administration’s rationale as “contrived” and warned of an apparent attempt at “creating a national police force with the President as its chief.” It marked the first time since 1965 that a president deployed National Guard over a governor’s objections.

By October 2025, the president has authorized federal troop deployments to at least five American cities on fabricated claims of civil disorder, including to Washington D.C. claiming a “crime emergency” despite violent crime being at a thirty-year low, to Memphis despite crime at a twenty-five-year low, and to Portland where a federal judge found protests “generally limited to fewer than 30 people and were largely sedate.” When courts issued restraining orders, the president threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, declaring at an August cabinet meeting: “I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States.”

He orders the Justice Department to prosecute political opponents and protect allies, compiling an enemies list reminiscent of the darkest regimes of the twentieth century. On September 25, 2025, former FBI Director James Comey became the first senior government official indicted under the second Trump administration—four days after the previous federal prosecutor was fired for refusing to pursue charges he considered baseless, and four days after Trump’s former personal attorney was installed as the new prosecutor. She presented the case to the grand jury alone, without a single career prosecutor present. The president had posted on social media five days earlier: “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility.” A grand jury probe of New York’s Attorney General stretched five months despite federal prosecutors finding insufficient evidence. Investigations were ordered into a philanthropist’s foundation for potential racketeering charges. The Attorney General stated on national television: “Whether you’re a billionaire, funding organizations to try to keep Donald Trump out of office, everything is on the table. We will investigate you.”

He threatens to revoke media licenses for unfavorable coverage and uses emergency powers as instruments of ordinary governance. After a comedian criticized the president’s supporters on September 16, 2025, the FCC Chairman appeared on a conservative podcast the next afternoon threatening license revocation. That same evening, major network affiliates announced they would not air the program, and the network suspended it indefinitely. During the suspension, the company lost close to $5 billion in market value, employees received death threats, and approximately twenty affiliate stations refused to air the program even after its return. The president stated aboard Air Force One: “They give me only bad publicity or press, and I mean, they’re getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away.” The FCC Chairman followed: “I don’t think this is the last shoe to drop…the consequences are going to continue to flow.” An FCC Commissioner responded: “The FCC does not have the legal authority, the constitutional right, or the ability to revoke a license just because the president does not like what that broadcaster is broadcasting. But the threats are the point.”

On his first day in office, he declared a “National Energy Emergency” claiming “precariously inadequate and intermittent energy supply” despite government research showing fossil fuel production had reached record levels. In April, he invoked emergency powers to impose tariffs, declaring that trade relationships with “each and every country in the world” posed “unusual and extraordinary threats”—including nations he dismissed as places “nobody has ever heard of.” He declared a border emergency claiming America’s sovereignty was “under attack” despite December 2024 recording the second-smallest number of border encounters since August 2020, representing an 81% decrease from the previous year. He invoked emergency powers eight times in his first hundred days—more than any modern president in the same period—transforming what were meant to be extraordinary measures into instruments of routine policy preference.

When Congress appropriates funds he dislikes, he withholds them in defiance of the Impoundment Control Act. The Government Accountability Office issued six formal findings by September 2025 that the administration violated the law requiring presidents to spend funds as Congress appropriates. Congressional investigators estimate the administration has frozen, canceled, or fought in court to block more than $410 billion in funding—for electric vehicle infrastructure, early childhood education, school upgrades, emergency shelter programs. When challenged, the budget director dismissed the findings as “non-events with no consequence. Rearview mirror stuff.” The administration removed public access to agency funding data until a federal court ordered its restoration in August 2025. On September 26, the Supreme Court allowed the withholding of $4 billion in foreign aid just weeks before the funds would expire, despite a lower court finding the administration had no discretion to refuse spending what Congress had appropriated. Justice Kagan warned in dissent: “At issue is the allocation of power between the Executive and Congress over the expenditure of public monies.”

When statutes require Senate confirmation of senior officials, he ignores the Appointments Clause, leaving “acting” loyalists in place indefinitely. One official simultaneously served as Senate-confirmed Secretary of State and acting administrator of another agency before that agency was closed entirely and its workforce reduced from over twelve thousand to seven hundred eighteen employees. Federal courts found multiple violations of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. Criminal defendants challenged appointments in federal court, arguing the administration’s interpretation would allow “never-confirmed, FVRA-ineligible shadow officials” with “no limits or eligibility requirements” to serve “indefinitely.” The executive branch has become not an executor of law but the law itself.

The Legislative

Congress, paralyzed by faction and captive to donor interests, has ceased to function as a coequal branch. For fiscal year 2025, it enacted zero of the twelve full-year appropriations bills required by law—the last time all appropriations passed before a fiscal year began was 1997. Instead, on March 15, 2025, it passed a continuing resolution extending the previous year’s funding levels, eliminating $15.9 billion in approved projects, and mistakenly omitting routine provisions that threatened the nation’s capital with over $1 billion in cuts.

On October 1, 2025, the government shut down. As of October 8, approximately 750,000 federal workers remain furloughed, with 420,000 working without pay. Air traffic control towers have closed due to sick calls, causing flight delays. National parks began shuttering. The Senate has failed three times to pass funding bills—on September 30, October 6, and October 8—with the Majority Leader stating the chamber would “keep voting on the same competing bills over and over.” The Speaker canceled the House’s return to Washington, keeping members in their districts, and declared: “The ball is in the court of the Senate Democrats.” The Minority Leader responded: “His members aren’t even here doing their jobs, they’ve been home for weeks.” A controversial administration memo suggested furloughed workers may not receive guaranteed back pay, contradicting a law the president himself signed in 2019. Congress cannot pass a budget without brinkmanship and shutdowns.

It cannot enforce subpoenas or conduct genuine oversight. In August 2025, the House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas for closed-door depositions to multiple former officials, including five former Attorneys General, two former FBI Directors, and various political figures. Yet courts have given little legal help to congressional committees, causing subpoena fights to drag out for years with no conclusive ability to enforce them quickly. Following a 2020 circuit court ruling, Congress lost a key option for civil enforcement and now faces three inadequate choices: referral to the Justice Department it seeks to investigate, slow and uncertain civil suits, or an inherent contempt power unused since the 1930s and described as “cumbersome, inefficient, and unseemly.” The Afghanistan withdrawal investigation exemplified these challenges, with the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel claiming subpoenas were unenforceable because they interfered with presidential powers.

It legislates by continuing resolution and press release. In its abdication, it resembles not the Roman Senate of the Republic but the Senate of the Empire—still meeting, still debating, but powerless to constrain the ruler it nominally advises. Sixty-four percent of Americans believe major donors have “a lot” of influence on how members of Congress vote, compared to only fourteen percent who believe constituents have such influence. Research published in 2023 found “a robust relationship between donors and speech” in Congress, with donor activity shaping not just votes but legislative priorities and agenda-setting. One study found that sixty percent of billionaire wealth now derives from “inheritance, monopoly power or crony connections” rather than merit. These are the masters Congress serves.

The Judiciary

Most perilous of all, the Supreme Court—once the guardian of limits—has become the instrument of their removal. On July 1, 2024, in Trump v. United States, the Court grants the president immunity so sweeping that criminal accountability for official acts effectively vanishes. Chief Justice Roberts writes for the majority that presidents have absolute immunity for actions within their “conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority” and presumptive immunity for all official acts unless prosecution “would pose no dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” The decision covers actions “so long as they are not manifestly or palpably beyond [his] authority.” Critically, Roberts rules that courts may not inquire into presidential motives when dividing official from unofficial conduct, calling such inquiry “highly intrusive.”

Justice Sotomayor opens her dissent with words that will echo through history: “Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.” She concludes: “Whether described as presumptive or absolute, under the majority’s rule, a President’s use of any official power for any purpose, even the most corrupt, is immune from prosecution…In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law. With fear for our democracy, I dissent.” A former federal judge states: “There is no support whatsoever in the Constitution or even in the Supreme Court’s precedents, for the past 200 years, for this reprehensible decision.”

In abandoning the Chevron precedent on June 28, 2024, the Court strips regulatory agencies of authority to interpret and enforce the laws Congress enacts, transferring power from the legislature to the judiciary and, by extension, to the executive the judiciary favors. Chief Justice Roberts declares that courts, not agencies, must “decide all relevant questions of law” and claims agencies “have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.” The decision overturns precedent cited in over eighteen thousand lower court decisions and seventy Supreme Court cases. Justice Kagan warns in dissent that the Court “gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law…the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.” She provides examples of technical questions courts must now decide without deference: “whether and when an ‘alpha amino acid polymer’ qualifies as a ‘protein’ under the Public Health Service Act, or whether one population of squirrels is ‘distinct’ from another under the Endangered Species Act.”

The Court declines to enforce the Impoundment Control Act or the Appointments Clause, ignoring clear statutory and constitutional text. On September 26, 2025, it rules that private parties lack standing to sue over spending law violations—effectively making the Impoundment Control Act unenforceable except by a comptroller general the executive could simply ignore. Judge Florence Pan warns in an appellate dissent: “The Supreme Court and our court have stated in no uncertain terms that the Executive, as a constitutional matter, has no authority to disobey duly enacted statutes for policy reasons. Yet that is what the majority enables today.”

On June 27, 2025, the Court rules that federal district courts generally lack authority to issue nationwide injunctions protecting non-parties from executive orders. Justice Barrett writes for the majority that such injunctions “likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts.” Justice Jackson warns in dissent: “The Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law…a zone of lawlessness within which the executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes.” Rights now depend on geography and litigation status. For the first time in modern history, constitutional protections may vary by state depending on whether parents sued.

Through emergency orders on its shadow docket, the Court allows the president to fire officials whom statutes protect from at-will removal—commissioners of independent agencies that Congress deliberately insulated from political control. On September 22, 2025, the Court grants full review signaling likely overturn of the 1935 precedent protecting such officials. Justice Kagan dissents, writing that emergency orders reveal “how that eventual decision will go” and criticizes “the impatience to get on with things—to now hand the president the most unitary, meaning also the most subservient, administration since Herbert Hoover (and maybe ever).”

It strikes down precedents by ideological fiat while leaving standing decisions that expand corporate and executive dominion. What was once judicial review has become judicial complicity. Legal observers characterize the Court’s current term as “executive power, executive power, executive power,” noting the Court’s decisions “may be fueling Trump’s maximalist approach to executive power” in 2025.

Thus the separation of powers, the very architecture of the Constitution, exists now only as echo. The branches that were meant to check one another instead reinforce one another’s dereliction. Congress surrenders; the president seizes; the Court sanctifies. The forms persist—elections are held, opinions are issued, sessions convene—but their meaning is gone. We recite the rituals of democracy while living under the logic of autocracy.

The timeline of 2025 makes visible what might otherwise remain abstract. In June, federal troops deployed to Los Angeles over a governor’s objections—a federal judge would later call it an attempt at “creating a national police force.” In September, the Justice Department indicted a former FBI Director four days after the president’s personal attorney was installed as prosecutor. That same month, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to withhold $4 billion in congressionally appropriated funds, while Justice Kagan warned of executive power unchecked. By October, the government had shut down, 750,000 workers furloughed, and Congress had passed zero of its twelve required appropriations bills. The oligarchs who funded this transformation—thirteen billionaires in the cabinet, one man’s quarter-billion-dollar investment yielding a government position with Treasury access—now govern directly. The forms persist: courts issue rulings the executive ignores, Congress meets but cannot fund the government, elections are held but determined by billions in dark money. What was constitutional architecture has become constitutional theater.

It did not happen overnight. For decades, both parties courted the same wealth, privatized public life, and distracted voters with culture wars while dismantling the civic foundations beneath them. Oligarchic money captured the means of communication, turning news into spectacle and grievance into commodity. In 2024, billionaire wealth grew by $2 trillion—$5.7 billion per day, three times faster than the previous year—creating 204 new billionaires, nearly four per week. Meanwhile, median household income increased just $1,040, a statistically insignificant change, remaining essentially flat compared to pre-pandemic levels. The top one-tenth of one percent saw income growth of 1,003% from 1979 to 2021 while the bottom twenty percent experienced 132% growth—meaning top earners’ incomes grew 7.6 times faster. The top ten percent of earners now own 66.6% of all wealth.

Yet on his first day in office in 2025, the president signed executive orders declaring war not on this inequality but on diversity programs, defining sex as “immutable biological classification,” and mandating only two gender options on federal forms. Within two weeks came orders banning transgender military service, pardoning abortion clinic protesters, and threatening to withhold education funding from schools allowing transgender athletes in women’s sports. Five hundred seventy-five anti-LGBTQ state bills were introduced in 2025, with fifty-four passing into law. Twenty-seven states now ban gender-affirming care for minors, affecting 40% of transgender youth. The Attorney General launched a “Civil Rights Fraud Initiative” to prosecute diversity programs while the Civil Rights Division lost sixty percent of its workforce.

When discontent grew, anger was redirected away from the architects of inequality toward the scapegoats of convenience—immigrants, minorities, the powerless. A survey of thirty-six countries found sixty percent of respondents identified “rich people having too much political influence” as the primary cause of inequality, and sixty-six percent of Americans want major economic system changes or complete reform. Yet analysis of the president’s inaugural address and major speeches found he “spent most of his time on the ‘invasion’ of illegal immigrants” and “surprisingly had little to say about his economic plans,” focusing instead on what he termed a “revolution of common sense” emphasizing cultural grievance. Greed, hatred, and fear again proved their ancient utility: they divide the governed and unite their governors.

The result is the government we now inhabit: a Republic that remembers its own name but not its meaning. The Constitution functions as civic décor—invoked ceremonially, ignored in practice. Statutory law becomes optional, precedent disposable, truth negotiable. The president acts; the Court justifies; Congress applauds or cowers. The citizen, bewildered and exhausted, retreats into private life, convinced that participation is futile.

And yet, elegy need not end in silence. The very act of recognizing loss is the beginning of renewal. What has been hollowed out can, in principle, be refilled. But it cannot be refilled by faith in institutions that have already abdicated their purpose. It must begin where the Republic began—in the conscience and courage of ordinary citizens who refuse to mistake ritual for reality. Renewal, if it comes, will come not from those who rule but from those who remember what ruling was meant to serve.

For now, we inhabit echoes. But if we still possess the capacity to listen—to hear the faint music of the Republic beneath the noise of power—then the silence need not be permanent. The dance may yet begin again, not at the command of the puppet master, but when the people cut their strings and remember they were never meant to dance to another’s tune.

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).

Three Morning Meditations

When I awoke this morning, I found that I had, as usual, a productive night of contemplation while I slept. Three meditations were ready to write, and write I did. Here are the results.

I. On Being

The contemplation of being—its beginning and its ending—rather than being itself, is humanity’s fascination. We exalt its creation with ceremony, and we weave endless tales of its defeat, as if death might be outwitted by story. We fear its ending with such intensity that we grant it more weight than the fact of life itself.

We revere its beginning with awe, we dread its end with terror, yet the middle—being itself—we profane with neglect.

We curse the day, the hour, the minute, for the slightest disappointment or inconvenience, real or imagined; the weather, our companions, our labor. We curse the brevity of joy, the length of sorrow, the depth of our feelings, the complexity of our thoughts, the idleness of time, the busyness of our brow. All that is given becomes a target of our disdain.

Yet here is the paradox: if we are so careless with being itself, why then do we revere its beginning and tremble at its end? Why fear the loss of what we do not value? Why guard so jealously what we daily scorn?

The truth is simple, if difficult: life deserves more than our curses. If we cannot greet each moment with wonder, let us at least receive it with gratitude. If not embrace it as miracle, then with appreciation. If we cannot bless every hour as holy, let us at minimum acknowledge it as gift. For being itself, squandered though it may be, is all we have.

II. On Equality and Power

Men will not endure the scourge of equality with those they deem beneath them. They will sooner suffer the loss of station and status, wealth and power, even willingly and against their own interests, so long as those they despise remain below them. The humiliation of parity weighs heavier than the burden of deprivation.

The clever puppet masters—those who truly govern—have always known this. They stir enmity where alliance might have been, teaching one man to scorn his neighbor, to measure himself not by his own condition but by the imagined inferiority of another. Thus, the poor man may rejoice in the poverty of one poorer still; the dispossessed may take comfort in the greater dispossession of another.

And so men pit themselves blindly against those who should be their allies. They are content to yield treasure and status to the puppet master, provided only that they may stand athwart the “inferior.” Thus do they squander their strength, mistaking themselves for masters of destiny when in truth they are but marionettes in another’s play.

III. On Tears and Salt

There is salt in tears. Salt—the preservative—preserves remembrance. Even sorrow is instructive to heart and soul, for grief keeps memory alive.

So it was with the wife of Lot, who looked back for love of her daughters, lost to the destruction of divine wrath. Preserved in salt, she became remembrance itself: a monument to sorrow, fidelity, and the peril of divided love.

Thus every tear carries its trace of preservation, holding fast what might otherwise be lost: a fragment of love, a lesson of pain, a reminder that sorrow, too, endures as teacher.