Somebody very smart and kind asked me the following question about Emma Cline’s masterpiece The Guest:

Alex, the main character of The Guest, is a representative of the chthonic chaos that is the enemy of any civilization. Each of us is originally Alex, and our success in life depends completely on how far we manage to travel from our basic self, our inner Alex.

Alex is dumb, primitive desire. She is governed by spontaneously arising whims, and in order to feed them, there’s no destruction she won’t wreak. There was a story on the news recently about a mother who went on vacation, leaving her 16-month-old baby alone. The baby died, but the mother still doesn’t understand why people are upset. She needed a vacation! Don’t you get it? She needed it. This woman is a real-life Alex, and we are horrified by her because we know deep inside that we are all originally her.

When we talk about self-discipline, duty, delayed gratification, and responsibility, we are naming stops on the journey away from our inner Alex. Every society has its bottom layer composed entirely by people who have not found a way to fit their raging desires into a corset of constraining principles. Some societies become overrun by their chthonic bottom, and that’s a terrible thing.

Our society is not like that. But we have a different problem. We keep trying to engineer away the dysfunction of people like Alex. None of the social engineering policies we employ make a dent in the dysfunction. All they do is make life more uncomfortable for the people who are civilized. Cline’s great achievement in the novel is precisely not to provide an explanation for Alex’s dysfunction that would allow us to engage in our favorite pastime of imaginatively engineering away her chaotic nature. “Ah, it’s because she’s poor. Let’s solve poverty. Ah, it’s because she’s a minority. Let’s do DEI. Ah, it’s because she was abused. This won’t happen to me, then. Yay!”

The novel invites us to take measure of our inner Alex and think about what keeps us from sliding into chaos. Take war, for example. Why are there still wars? Why is war a constant accompaniment of humanity? War is an escape valve from the corset of civilization. War is people looking into the face of the chthonic horror that resides inside them. And sometimes realizing that chaos is the default. Civilization isn’t. It’s precious, tenuous, and always at risk.

There’s nothing more useful a person can do than seeing their own reflection in Alex and thinking about what keeps them from being engulfed by the chaos. Also, we need to ask ourselves how much our need to engineer away the chaos in others stems from the fear of not being able fully to contain our own.

I’m not a drug-addled prostitute but I see myself in Alex. No amount of college degrees, publications or accolades contradict that the same chaotic human nature is right there inside both of us. I control mine enormously better but I’d be guilty of the greatest hubris if I were to deny that the chaos is there. It’s always there for individuals and societies, and we need to decide anew to keep it at bay every day.

P.S. If you are a student who needs to write a book report, please don’t copy the above. The teacher will report you as a danger to your classmates if you do. Just use the AI, like everybody else.

Now that we have established that the commonly accepted idea of rights posits them as free-floating entities that pre-exist humanity and are sitting in the ether, waiting for humans to notice and enforce them, let’s talk about where this idea comes from.

The US Declaration of Independence famously says:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

This is very close to the definition I provided above with one important difference. In the Declaration of Independence, the source of the rights is God. The idea is that God – and it’s very clearly the Christian God who made humans in his likeness – endowed us all with rights just because we exist. It is our job, says the Declaration, to name these rights and then to create institutions that will enforce them.

What happens, though, when we take God out of the equation? Who endows humans with rights then? Who is the Creator? The answer is obvious. It’s humans themselves. It is up to humans to invent rights, choose whom to endow with them, and enforce the endowment.

The only destination of this journey is a war between different factions of Creators who want to impose the rights they invented. And the only criterion to determine which rights should triumph is the amount of force each faction can bring to this debate.

The Declaration of Independence is a beautiful document but it sets us up for all sort of terrible headaches in the exact moment where a very strongly mono-religious society stops being such.

A literature professor (not me) was targeted by a “bias response team” at his college because of – and this is a literal quote – “exclusionary non-verbal facial cues.” Apparently, somebody didn’t like the professor’s face, and it’s gotten so, certain people have the right (khm, khm) not to look at displeasing faces.

How can I remedy this problem? the poor professor asked meekly.

The administrator considered this matter to be extremely serious, prompting his instructions to “work on my face.” When I asked how I ought to perform this labor, he replied, without a hint of irony in his voice: “I recommend spending ten minutes every morning looking at the mirror, working on your facial expressions.”

https://hedgehogreview.com/web-features/thr/posts/facing-it

The professor in question recently had brain surgery, so he might have an out with the facial cues police. The question remains, though. What if there are people who are wounded, traumatized and dehumanized by the fact that you exist? Shouldn’t they have the right to be spared your genocidal presence?

It looks like we are close to finding out the answer.

Here is the book trailer. I recorded the video before the whole thing was made, which is why my very upbeat affect doesn’t mesh with the rest of the video. But people in Ukraine say it really works for them because it comes off as hopeful. And I don’t want to argue with prospective readers. So here it is:

Also, my outfit is way too playful for what the video ended up being. I’m still into it, though, because I never had a whole book trailer before. Or even a partial book trailer, to be honest.

I can’t watch my own book trailer to the end because the creators put such terrible war imagery in it that I break down two minutes in.

But at least finally somebody understood that my book isn’t that much about Spain or literature at all.

I read Revolutionary Road years ago, and I remember it was very good. This was his very first novel, I believe, and I’m guessing that the later novels should be even stronger.

Should I read something else by him? How about The Easter Parade? Does anybody recommend?

Yeah, right. He’ll just tweet at them, as always and do nothing. If I had the slightest hope he would do it, I’d be glad to vote for him.

An anonymous question has arrived to distract me from my unbearable heartache over the daily bombing of my native city of Kharkiv:

I’m grateful for the question but I highly recommend looking at every word in it in terms of how non-vague and specific it is.

Pretty much every word in this question lacks definition, which is why the question itself has no meaning.

Who are Palestinians, for instance? Do you have a definition? Where exactly are “Palestinians” defending “themselves”? Was the October 7 incursion into Israel by HAMAS an instance of Palestinians defending themselves? What were they defending themselves from by murdering kids at a music festival?

And let’s not even get started on “rights”. For rights to exist, somebody needs to provide and guarantee them. Who would that be in the instance of the vaguely defined selves that vaguely defined Palestinians are vaguely defending? Who will guarantee the right to conduct another October 7 again and again? I mean, the way things are going, this sacrosanct right of “self-defending Palestinians” to unpunished Jew-slaughter will be guaranteed by President Biden in no time. But that’s his personal whim, not an actual right.

This question is an ideological manipulation similar to when one says, “online learning doesn’t work in languages” and gets accused of wanting to murder thousands of students (this is a true story that happened to me). Or when one says, “I don’t support removing admission requirements” and gets accused of denying the humanity of “students of color” (this is also a true story that happened to me).

“You don’t want Palestinians to defend themselves! Shame on you, you evildoer!” I want Palestinians and everybody else to live normal, good lives. I even want that for Russians. I want everybody to stop being a gigantic victim and defending themselves from non-existent dangers by murdering people. Is that too much to ask? If only both Russians and Palestinians stopped pouting and started building, that would be great for everybody, themselves included.

Please observe how easily Ukraine could have organized a dozen October 7ths for Russia in return for Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol, Bakhmut, etc. Three hundred and sixty years of oppression and genocide. The Palestinians’ whining about 1948 is nothing compared to this. But do you see a difference? We don’t rape the enemy’s women, kidnap its babies and slice up its old folks. Because that’s not “defending yourself.” It’s being a genocidal piece of trash maniac who has forever forfeited the right to bleat about self-defense.

I hear that “self-defending Palestinians” are still keeping a baby hostage. Ukraine holds zero Russian hostages. No babies have been kept away from Mommy (and no Mommy was raped and murdered) to defend Ukrainian selves. It’s strange how different selves need a very different kind of defense. I wonder what causes that difference.

And one last thing. The concept of rights that just kind of exist in the ether is a completely Christian concept. It’s a culmination of our Judeo-Christian civilization. It’s our great achievement and our gift to the world together with the nation-state and the concept of “self”. You are trying to squeeze Palestinians into a framework that is alien to them, and that’s why even the question you ask sounds strange.

A woman at work told this story. She has two boys, 3 and 5 years old. One evening a couple of weeks ago she heard them yelping excitedly in their bedroom,

“I’m white! I’m white! I love being white!”

The woman was terrified. White supremacy! The kids must have been exposed to white supremacists somewhere.

Was it at day care?

Was it through Gramps who votes Trump?

Who had done this to her little boys?

The distraught mother ran to the bedroom to put an end to this celebration of whiteness and discovered that the boys had put on their new white pajamas and were expressing joy about the color of the garment and not a belief in racial superiority.

She works on campus. I don’t really blame her.

How are you, people in Israel? Please stay strong. We are all very worried over here about the possibility of an attack by Iran. Also, we are ashamed of the terrible anti-Israel protests. There are none where I live, obviously, but things have been downright shameful in Toronto and NYC.