I finally went to see Christopher Nolan’s new movie, “The Odyssey,” to watch a summer blockbuster — and it more than delivered. I didn’t intend to comment on the various controversies surrounding the movie, from the attacks that it is woke to the claims that it is historically inaccurate. (For goodness’ sake, it is a nearly 3,000-year-old yarn that is filled with gods and goddesses, one-eyed giants and magic!) But Ezra Klein’s commentary on the movie did lead me to think about the broader issues the movie raises, which strike me as interesting and important.
Klein argues that while the critique of Nolan’s “Odyssey” as woke — because he cast a Black actress as Helen — is trivial and superficial, the movie is liberal in a more profound sense. Nolan fundamentally replaces the morality of the ancient world, in which conquest and victory were celebrated unabashedly, with a morality that is more nuanced. While Homer’s Odysseus was constantly lauded for his clever, guileful ways, Nolan’s Odysseus is haunted by the ravages of the war and by his own deceit that was at the center of the victory — the Trojan horse.
Beginning with Christianity, the West gradually replaced the pagan ethic of naked conquest and domination with one centered on universal human dignity, compassion and empathy. “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth,” says the Gospel according to Matthew — words no Homeric hero would ever utter.
Pre-Christian values are having a revival these days, as the populist right, often joined by a new cadre of tech billionaires, looks back with admiration to an older world in which strength, domination and victory mattered more than empathy and equality.
For Donald Trump, “winning” is all that matters, justifying all means. He uses the word incessantly. In a “60 Minutes” interview in 2018, when asked about his demeaning comments about Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, Trump said simply, “It doesn’t matter. We won.” In his bestselling book “Suicidal Empathy,” Gad Saad — one of Elon Musk’s favorite writers — argues that the West is declining because it cares too much about too many: outsiders, minorities, even its foes.
In fact, the greatest moral achievement of the West over the last two millennia, and especially since the Enlightenment, has been the expansion of the circle of people who are considered fully human, having equal dignity and equal rights. We have come to recognize the humanity of people once dismissed as slaves, serfs and second-class citizens — foreigners, women, racial minorities, people with differing sexual orientations. These ideas spread throughout the world because they are, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, “self-evident.” This is one of the West’s greatest achievements, not a decadent sickness.
But there is a serious critique buried beneath the crude MAGA attacks. It is one that German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche leveled, and it is being reprised by some of the tech bros today. Nietzsche worried that Christianity’s egalitarian ideas made us less likely to be wildly ambitious, risk-seeking and reckless. Have we become so humane that we have lost the primal urges that made us heroic?
We should not romanticize civilizations built on blood, gore and conquest simply because they produced heroes. But they built more than that. The pyramids, the Gothic cathedrals, the voyages of discovery, the Industrial Revolution — all emerged from societies animated by ambition, confidence and a willingness to sacrifice. They often came with hierarchy and a single-minded focus on greatness. Some of populism’s appeal today lies less in specific policies than in a promise to restore national greatness — to build, to achieve, to win.
But must we choose between greatness and goodness? After all, Western nations in the 19th and 20th centuries were the most liberal societies in human history in their day. And they were hardly timid. They built railroads across continents, abolished slavery, industrialized the world, built the atomic bomb, rebuilt Europe and Japan, landed men on the moon and created the internet. Think of America of the mid-20th century, the country that created the modern welfare state, defeated fascism, built highways and airports, battled Communism and began to dismantle the legacy of slavery. These were civilizations of immense ambition.
Liberals should not apologize for believing that every human being possesses equal dignity. The world’s great liberal democracies managed to expand our moral universe while also expanding our physical universe. The challenge is to recover that older liberal tradition. This spirit will be sorely needed as we build out what may be the most transformative technology ever, artificial intelligence, because we will need to make sure that its awesome power is rooted in a system of ethics and values that prizes human dignity and equality — just those values that Christianity pioneered and the West enhanced so powerfully.
We don’t need to go back to Homer. Recovering the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt would be enough.
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