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The Grace of Being Wrong.

Public life has lately offered a familiar spectacle: leaders making sweeping claims, supporters defending them, and facts becoming secondary to loyalty. Commentators have examined this dynamic not only for what it reveals about politics but also for what it reveals about us. Why can acknowledging a leader’s error feel like acknowledging our own? The longer we have defended a position, the more expensive changing our minds becomes. We have argued with friends. We have spoken publicly. We have defended people whose behavior made us uncomfortable. Perhaps relationships have been strained or broken. Eventually we are no longer reconsidering a proposition. We are reconsidering ourselves. People often rationalize their decisions rather than endure the discomfort of saying, “I was wrong.” Political identity intensifies the difficulty when changing one’s mind also seems to vindicate people one has regarded as opponents. Christians recognize the problem. We have another name for the practic...
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​When a Kingdom Forgets Itself: Part Five

Earlier, I suggested that Homer invites us to judge a civilization by what happens at its thresholds. Now the lens narrows. We return to Ithaca. The kingdom appears unchanged. The palace still stands. The fields are still cultivated. The servants continue their work. The forms of public life remain in place. But the reader knows that something is profoundly wrong. The absence of Odysseus has created more than a political vacuum. It has revealed a moral one. The suitors have occupied the palace, but they have done something even more destructive than seizing another man’s house. They have forgotten what a house is for. In Homer’s world, a household is not merely private property. It is where guests are welcomed, justice is practiced, children are formed, and obligations are honored. The household is the smallest school of civilization. The suitors consume it instead. They feast without gratitude. They compete without honor. They mock restraint. They turn hospitality into entit...
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​Part Four: At the Threshold of a Civilization

I suggested that Homer measures a person’s character by what happens when a stranger arrives at the door.   He is also asking a  larger question. What if hospitality measures not only individuals, but entire civilizations? We should be reading The Odyssey with that question in mind. Its most memorable societies are distinguished not by their wealth or military power, but by the way they receive outsiders. Consider the Cyclopes. When Odysseus and his companions enter the cave of Polyphemus, they expect the customary obligations of host and guest. Instead, they find a world without hospitality, without assemblies, without laws, without shared life. Each Cyclops, Homer tells us, lives for himself and his own household. Polyphemus does not simply violate the customs of hospitality. He cannot imagine why they should exist. The result is not merely cruelty. It is isolation. The opposite appears among the Phaeacians. Odysseus arrives exhausted, nameless, and utterly depen...
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