[See Part 1 here.]

So far I have emphasized how Life and Trust embodies the unique combination of forward- and backward-looking elements that have made the Faust legend such a fertile ground for reflecting on the dilemmas of modernity. In terms of its narrative frame, this immersive theatrical experience’s portrayal of Faust as a disillusioned banker also draws on a more understated theme. Again and again, we see Faust (or the stand-in character) as a member of one of the professions. In the film The Devil’s Advocate, for instance, Keanu Reeve’s Faustian character is a high-powered lawyer. Goethe’s own version winds up making a transition that I’m sure many of us have considered, moving from professor to political fixer and property developer. And both Goethe and Marlowe, drawing on the earliest versions of the Faust legend, agree that their hero mastered all of the professions of his day and held doctorates from all four major faculties of the university: divinity, law, medicine, and philosophy.

From the very beginning, then, Faust embodies a uniquely modern form of authority, that of the credentialed professional. It is worth pausing to reflect on this association, which seems to prefigure the growing distrust of professionalism and professionals in our contemporary society. What is it about the traditional professions that could seem so suspect, so sinister? Perhaps one hint is another persistent association with Faust, aside from the obvious wickedness of seeking alliance with the devil. I am thinking of the view that Faust is a deceiver. Already in the original chapbook legend that compiled the stories that gathered around the historical Johann Georg Faust, we see Faust identified as a magician and alchemist. Later variations on the theme build on this association with charlatanism and deception. One of the most interesting examples is István Szabó’s film Mephisto portrays the Faust figure as an actor who, ironically, made his name by playing Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. Not only is his profession intrinsically deceptive, but the Faustian character decides to pose as a committed Nazi in order to protect the theater from Hitler’s regime. Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus centers on the growing madness of Adrian Leverkühn, who is a master of the most seductive yet ungraspable of the arts—namely music. It does not seem like a stretch to say that both of these more modern Fausts are performing a kind of secularized magic, a disenchanted alchemy.

Going back to the most formative versions of the legend, both Marlowe and Goethe present these two sides of Faust—the credentialed professional and the magical manipulator—as intrinsically linked. In Marlowe’s play, Faust’s dissatisfaction with the power on offer from his four fields of study is what leads him to his magical and demonic pursuits, as though there is a continuity of aim between the professions and sorcery. Indeed, the Latin truisms that Marlowe’s Faust rattles off in the opening monologue seem almost like spells in themselves. Goethe characteristically pushes this Faustian theme even further, staging the assessment of the different fields of study as a dialogue between Mephistopheles (disguised as Faust) and a student who is trying to choose his course of study. In Mephistopheles’s cynical descriptions, the various professions are intrinsically false. Not only do they derive their power from obfuscation, but they license abuse—most notably when Mephistopheles suggests that the student choose medicine in order to have the opportunity to take advantage of his women patients. Even worse, earlier in the Goethe’s play Faust himself dismisses his father’s medical knowledge as worse than useless, claiming that his alchemy-derived drugs, far from curing victims of the plague, effectively euthanized them.

Life and Trust’s banker, driven to despair by the impending collapse of the fraudulent financial system he has presided over, is thus a natural extrapolation—Faust is, in essence, a credentialed expert who no longer finds himself credible. I use terms related to belief or faith advisedly here. If Faust is about a modern crisis of faith, it is also about a Christian crisis of faith. The trope of the deal with the devil contains a fatal paradox. In order to believe that such a deal is possible, that such an entity exists, one must accept the framework of Christian belief. But within that framework, such a deal can only lead to disaster and damnation! At the cusp of modernity, then, Faust simultaneously embodies a corrupted and self-undermining Christian faith and a corrupted and self-undermining professional authority. The most simplistic Whig narrative of modernity holds that medieval superstition was discredited and replaced by authentic modern rationality. In the Faust narrative, by contrast, the authority of Christianity has certainly seen better days, but its hold remains tenacious and insidious enough to damn Faust—and condemn the alternative modern forms of authority in advance. One is reminded of the classic Seinfeld episode where George claims God is cursing him. When Jerry reminds him that he doesn’t believe in God, George retorts: “I do for the bad stuff!”

So far I have spoken primarily of Faust as a professional and of the strangely preemptive collapse of professional authority in the legend. If we view the various professions through Mephistopheles’s cynical lens, there may seem to be no problem. Who cares if lawyers and bankers are consumed with self-doubt? Yet Goethe’s focus on Faust’s status as a medical doctor does point to a deeper problem. The credibility of modern professional credentials is not—or at least professes not to be—grounded solely in the empty self-assertion of a power-hungry clique. The modern credentialed profession claims to have a special knowledge that the professional guild exists to safeguard and expand. As the example of medicine shows, we all must hope that that knowledge is not purely invented or self-referential. We associate medicine more closely with scientific knowledge in the narrow sense, but ultimately all professions claim to have a knowledge that is scientific in the broader sense of the German Wissenschaft. Even if non-specialists are typically not in a position to assess the knowledge claimed by modern professionals, their knowledge is or should be rational, objective, and publicly verifiable. That association with science or Wissenschaft is why the university has always been the site of modern credentialization—and hence why Faust, as the professor who is fully credentialed in all fields, represents such a distinctively modern crisis of faith.

Here one may detect the influence of Hans Blumenberg’s monumental tome The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. As is well known, there Blumenberg forcefully rejects the claim of political theology that secular modernity is determined by its Christian roots. As a political theologian myself, I personally find his critique a bit beside the point, because he is not talking primarily about the political concepts and institutions that are political theology’s stock and trade, but about an institution that political theology mainly ignores: namely, modern science. For Blumenberg, modern scientific knowledge is at once genuinely new and genuinely authoritative—to use the German word for modernity, it is what is neu in the Neuzeit. Where the political theologian, in Blumenberg’s telling, is constantly seeking to undermine modernity as founded on the shifting sand of a disavowed legacy, Blumenberg insists that modern science is fully legitimate on its own terms.

This does not mean that modern science has nothing to do with Christianity, however. Science does not arise from Christianity, but it does arise in the midst of Christianity. And just as Christianity found that it had to provide some kind of answer to the questions raised by the most sophisticated and prestigious discourses of its time, namely Greek philosophy, so too does modern science have to respond in some way to the Christian milieu in which it happens to have arisen. In both cases, the attempt to answer the existential questions posed by the old regime is a case of putting new wine in old wineskins. In the extreme case, questions that were urgent in the context of the earlier paradigm become simply irrelevant in the new era—except that the handoff is never so neat and tidy. Even if those who inaugurate the new paradigm are able to cast aside the old values themselves, they must convince others who are still immersed in the old world.

One of Blumenberg’s clearest examples of this dynamic is the Christian theological conviction that the only knowledge worth having is knowledge about one’s relationship to God, or more abstractly, knowledge about the meaning and purpose of existence. As is well known, that is not the kind of knowledge modern science supplies—nor is it trying to. Yet the inertia of Christian expectations transforms that category error into a persistent disappointment, as though modern science is constantly trying and failing to supply a form of meaning that it in fact has no means or ambition to supply. And that disappointment always threatens to curdle into suspicion and hostility, because traditional Christianity—with its accustomed binary thinking—views knowledge that falls short of its standards not as indifferent or irrelevant, but as actively wicked.

[Continue on to Part 3.]

[Editor’s note: I was invited to give a keynote address for this year’s Romancing the Gothic online conference. Given that the theme was “Devils and Justified Sinners,” I chose to discuss the Faust legend, which has been a big part of my teaching for many years but not something I have devoted any concentrated writing to. Since it is my first experiment in writing about Faust, it is closer to a blog post than a formal article in spirit, and so I will be posting the talk here in serialized format over the course of the week.]

It may initially seem strange that I am proposing to connect the two themes in my title. What could the story of a deal with the devil have to do with our contemporary ecological crisis? Here I could invoke any number of superficial parallels—we “made a deal with the devil” of capitalist growth and now the bill is coming due, etc., etc. That would doubtless be a satisfyingly clever way of saying the things we already know to be true about climate change, but it would not shed much fresh light on either the Faust legend or the Anthropocene.

Instead of jumping right into the comparison, then, I will largely take everyone’s knowledge of climate change for granted and focus initially on an analysis of the most fundamental themes of the Faust legend.  I observe first of all that the Faust legend has always provided a way to use the old to think through the new. In its demonological themes, the legend seems initially to be grounded in “medieval superstition.” Yet it is based on a historical individual—a fact that I can never quite believe—who lived at the very cusp of modernity, and its many later interpreters and appropriators have always used it to think through distinctively modern dilemmas. This is true even at the level of medium. The original Faust chapbook was one of the first runaway bestsellers of the print era, and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus was among the most iconic showpieces of the Elizabethan era’s secular theater.

The Faustian fusion of innovation and old-timey-ness continues even to this day. This past weekend, I was fortunate enough to travel from Chicago to New York City to see the latest adaptation of the Faust legend, called Life and Trust. (In fact, I wrote a good portion of this talk in the hotel lobby after being stranded by a major storm that surely arose to punish me for so extravagantly indulging in my obsession with devils and demons.) Life and Trust belongs to an emergent but increasingly popular genre that we could call the immersive theatrical experience. The goal of this unique format is to break down the barrier between the audience and the players. Instead of watching events unfold on stage, the audience is thrown into the same space as the actors—a sprawling, even confusing space where everyone is free to wander. Even more radically, it shatters the unity of theatrical action by dispersing the actors and scenes throughout the space. Though many of the scenes play out in a kind of repeated loop, it is functionally impossible to see everything in one performance. And you have to work for what you do see, chasing after the incredibly athletic actors as they wind through a labyrinthine and stair-filled venue.

Life and Trust was developed by the producers of the best-known previous entry in the genre, the Macbeth adaptation Sleep No More, which recently completed a ten-year run. In the waiting area before the show, we talked to a young couple who had attended Sleep No More multiple times in the hope of seeing as much of its sprawling plot as possible. Some fans attended upward of a dozen times so that they could explore every nook and cranny of the elaborate set—audience members are allowed to dig through drawers, for example, which often include surprising background information or Easter eggs. Though Sleep No More had some limited dialogue, it was primarily a dance-based experience, something like a fragmentary narrative ballet. Life and Trust took that even further, all but dispensing with dialogue in favor of intense choreography.

In keeping with the tradition of Faust adaptations, this innovation was paired with a look backward—not to the early modernity of Faust, but to the Gilded Age and the Great Crash of 1929. For Americans, those events are a kind of pre-history, the threshold to the “American century” that began with Roosevelt’s New Deal, which profoundly transformed the American state and economy and laid the foundation for the postwar boom. But it is a past that continues to haunt the neoliberal era, where skyrocketing inequality and degraded state capacity threaten to return us to a new Gilded Age and recurrent economic crises inevitably raise the specter of a new Great Depression. The Faust avatar is a banker who is about to go bust in the Great Crash and sells his soul for the opportunity to relive his youth in the late 1800s. Once transported back to that era, the audience has the chance to follow any number of side characters from a variety of social backgrounds. One plot we were able to follow was that of a lesbian romance between a wealthy aristocrat and a servant girl, presided over by a demon who—as far as I was able to discern—was actually trying to get them to deny their love and conform to social norms, rather than egging on their supposed “sin.” This strikes me as a brilliant adaptation of the demonological theme for a world where the most serious sins are those against authenticity.

The audience in Life and Trust isn’t left completely rudderless. The drama is framed by two shared experiences, the opening scene that establishes the outline of the narrative and a dramatic conclusion. Even in those performances, it is impossible to take in everything at once from any particular standpoint within the theatrical space. But the basic outline of events is clear, especially in the final scene, where Faust’s side of the bargain inevitably comes due. As Faust pleads for his soul, dancers in demonic masks throw fake money down on the audience—and at times tear the bills to shreds, enacting the nearest secular equivalent to the death of God. Faust’s fate is also secularized. Instead of being pulled down into a literal hell, he is fitted with a strait jacket and consigned to an insane asylum, a potent image of being reduced to a non-person. For good measure, he is also drowned in a way reminiscent of magicians’ clones from the film The Prestige—an apparent reference to themes of uncanny doubles and echoes of The Picture of Dorian Gray that unfolded in parts of the theater I was unable to find. There is, in short, a lot going on.

[Continue on to Part 2….]

I’m gratified at the response yesterday’s post has received. It always makes one nervous to criticize what we used to call “political correctness,” because it can both open one up to unfair attacks and make one “sound like” bad political actors. The fact that I only really saw one response that appeared to conflate my critique of “political correctness” with a South Park-style advocacy of using offensive terms for their own sake was promising in this context. It seems like people really are tired of — quite literally exhausted by — this style of ostentatious self-righteous nitpicking. Nevertheless, for my own peace of mind I’d like to make it a little more explicit where I “draw the line” between the kind of common-sense courtesy and sensitivity we should all display and the kind of self-defeating signalling that we should try to avoid.

One clear case came out of a Facebook thread where one individual shared their gut-level offense at the term “moron” and their disappointment that I used that term as an example of PC overreach. In point of fact, I have eliminated “moron” from my everyday language, because I’m aware that those sensitivities exist. I believe they have been actively cultivated in a way that is ultimately counterproductive, but I can’t undo the fact that people have those sensitivities and there is no reason for me to offend them needlessly. I apologized for causing offense to that individual. By contrast, there was one time several years ago that I slipped up and used the word “moron” in a tweet, and a stranger — with no apparent connection to the disability community — direct-messaged me that such language could be offensive. When I shared my view that disability activists had actively cultivated those associations and created an occasion for offense where one needn’t exist, this person said they actually agreed with me.

To me, these two conversations are a teachable moment. One person was speaking on their own behalf, sharing that their experience and situation made a certain term hurtful to them. The other was speaking on behalf of a purely hypothetical other person who may potentially take offense. Basically, I think we should all respond with generosity and compassion to the former and we should stop doing the latter. We can perhaps think of other examples along these lines. For instance, it’s clear to me that all white people should treat the N-word as completely forbidden and taboo. There is no circumstance under which they should utter it, and they should call out their fellow white people if one of them breaks this taboo. By contrast, for a white person to correct a fellow white person who is still using the slightly outdated “African American” instead of the more current “Black” strikes me as not worth it.

Obviously in some sense the taboo against white people using the N-word is speaking on behalf of someone else — but it’s also speaking on behalf of oneself. We should all be offended by racism. It is a false and destructive pattern of belief and behavior that has no place in our shared life. We should not want to be racist and we should create conditions under which others do not feel comfortable being racist. It’s not only about not gravely offending Black people — though that is also urgently important. It’s also about what kind of person you want to be. Not keeping up with whether “Black” or “African American” is the preferred usage does not seem to have the same moral weight. (In fact, many older white people probably lived through a time when “Black” seemed vaguely insulting and “African American” was meant to signal greater respect.)

The case is clearer when some new coinage or practice is instituted. The odds that these innovations are responding to actual demands or even desires of the group in question are, in my experience, very very small. Even if members of thoses groups contributed to the proposed new norm, they likely represent an elite, unrepresentative strata of that community. A term like “Latinx,” for instance, clearly does not emerge organically out of the self-understanding of communities of Latin American descent. It is an ugly neologism that aims to “solve” the perceived problem that “Latino” does not appear sufficiently gender-inclusive from an Anglophone perspective. (I’ve also seen “Latin@,” which… a crucial aspect of words is that you have to be able to say them.)

Similarly, I’m not convinced that most land acknowledgments actually arise from genuine dialogue with the affect indigenous peoples — presumably many of them are based on internet searches for which tribes used to occupy a certain area, etc. If no one is asking for these acknowledgments and if no concrete change in practice results (is anyone doing land acknowledgments in the Chicago area actually reimbursing the Potawatomi People for the use of their unceded land, for example?), then I’m not sure what we’re trying to accomplish other than performing a certain “best practices” of righteousness. Of course, I can only assume that some land acknowledgments do result from such dialogue and engagement — but the awkwardly ritualistic nature of the practice leads me to believe that the vast majority of them represent a form of trend following.

I don’t presume to be the final arbiter on such matters. But that’s kind of my point — there can be no final decision of “where to draw the line.” We’re all just human beings and we need to negotiate a way to live together. The “politically correct” style of social justice denies that. It tries to set up in advance what the rules of engagement will be, often unilaterally on behalf of the very people it is supposedly empowering. But there is no system that is not gameable, no language that can’t be used to hurt. We all know people who have used politically correct categories to shame and silence others for individual gain or simply for the enjoyment of a power trip. We shouldn’t be afraid to call bullshit on that kind of behavior, and for too long we mostly have been.

To be sure, many people who reject political correctness (and especially those who deploy the term “woke”) are bad actors who simply resent that they aren’t allowed to make racist and sexist jokes anymore. But many are potentially reachable people who were turned off by the alienating neologisms and bad faith power plays — and when we can’t acknowledge that, especially when we conflate such excesses with “common sense” courtesy and respect, we are hurting the cause.

Again, to my mind the current messaging from the Democrats is well on “this side” of that line. They hold Trump, Vance, and their cronies up to ridicule for their blatant racism and sexism and homophobia. They presuppose that such attitudes and behaviors are unacceptable and expect their audience to agree — and the vast majority of Americans do agree. But more than that, rather than associating them with an inescapable all-pervading power, they present such attitudes and behaviors as ultimately pathetic. Look at these fools — why are they like that? Why would anyone want to be like that? In short, they respond like humans and invite their audience to respond like humans. That’s what makes it such a breath of fresh air compared to the kind of HR-inflected social justice jargon that has dominated such discussions for too long.

In the wake of Biden’s withdrawal from the race and Kamala Harris’s shockingly rapid and decisive ascension, I have begun feeling emotions that I haven’t allowed myself to feel in connection to politics in a long time: hope, excitement, even enjoyment. As many commentators have noted, there is a joyfulness, even a level of fun, to Harris’s campaign that is an almost shocking contrast to what came before. The fact that they are playing along with the JD Vance couch meme may be the clearest sign that they are in tune with contemporary culture, but the more general pattern of calling conservative leaders “weird” and “creepy” feels like a major turning point — not just in terms of political tactics, but in terms of liberal political culture. It marks the end of a certain fatalistic defensiveness on the one hand, and also of the joylessly self-righteous habits of policing and shaming allies on the left.

For all my life, conservatives have been the norm. Everybody (who matters) feels at best very uncomfortable about abortion and non-normative sexuality. Everybody (who matters) resents the burden of funding high-quality public service. Etc., etc., etc. Tactical observations from the early 90s hardened into inescapable truisms, even as they became less and less true. This produced a permanent defensive crouch, as Democrats seemed to believe that Republican rule was the norm and they could at best eke out a narrow win to take their turn — at passing a more nuanced and “smarter” version of Republican policies. Priority number one after each victory was to get bipartisan support, as though Democrats didn’t believe it was legitimate for them to legislate on their own. Attachment to the fillibuster rule among the older cohort of Democratic senators is the most destructive example of this built-in defeatism.

So the new confidence of the Harris campaign is refreshing, as is the contempt and puzzlement they express at conservatives’ increasingly unpopular and downright bizarre beliefs. More specifically, what is refreshing here is their willingness to be mean, to insult, to reduce their opponents to sputtering speechlessness. I cannot emphasize enough how much of a break this is with the joylessly self-righteous policing of language that has been the norm among liberals and leftists for my entire adult life. From that perspective, the parody responses write themselves — “we shouldn’t kink-shame JD Vance…” or “Republican leaders won’t read your post calling them weird, but your friends who could be viewed as weird for completely unrelated and totally harmless reasons will…” — and the fact that it’s so easy to come up with them shows how that mode of engagement has reduced itself to self-parody.

A key shift for me when I saw a white man worrying aloud about the tendency to refer to Vice President Harris as “Kamala” — there is of course a whole history of belittling people by refusing the respect of their last name, it’s especially fraught since she’s a Black woman, etc., etc. And I will be honest with you and say my first response was that this person should simply shut the fuck up. “Kamala” is a very distinctive name, whereas “Harris” is not. Her own social media team is called “Kamala HQ.” We do not need to get out ahead of the supposed “victim” herself.

More broadly, though, my strong gut reaction reflected my belief that we have just got to be done with this style of whiny preemptive strike against any hypothetical offense that may one day be perceived. Political correctness is a strategy that has failed. Aside from eliminating the grossest slurs and overtly bigoted jokes — which even conservatives themselves know not to share in mixed company — it has produced only irritation and insecurity.

People like to present it as simple common sense, but the euphemism treadmill and, more than that, the constant incentive to find ever more nuances of linguistic “oppression” ensure that the politically correct linguistic norms can never actually settle into a coherent common sense. It produces bristly defensiveness in those who can’t keep up and an unhealthy and counterproductive readiness to be offended among the avant-garde. My favorite example of the counterproductive nature of such language policing is the fact that disability activists are more or less singlehandedly keeping alive the etymological association of words like “moron” with disability. Linguistic usage moves on — take the win! But no, etymology is destiny when it gives you something to nitpick and alienate potential allies over.

Related here, I think, is the culture of constantly nitpicking headlines from the New York Times on social media. Again, the belief is that politics will take care of itself if everyone agrees to speak in just the right way. Obviously, the New York Times is a bad actor in many ways and the media establishment is artificially propping up Trump through the application of double standards. They are worthy of critique, but the obsessiveness and detail-orientation of the critique is what raises my hackles. It bespeaks a whiny wounded entitlement, as though we all believe that the New York Times should be a liberal actor or that a simple description of reality would automatically favor our politics.

In reality, to do politics, you have to do politics. The media is not an umpire, it is a terrain of struggle. The Harris campaign is engaging that struggle much more effectively than Joe Biden ever could because it does not embrace the false premise that the New York Times is or should be on her side by default. And she has received overwhelmingly favorable coverage! Not 100% — there is always something to whine about, of course. They don’t always put the word “falsely” in the headline, and sometimes they take too long describing Trump or Vance’s claims before debunking them. They achieved that not by whining about how unfair the Times has been, but by actively setting the agenda and setting the tone.

And that tone is mean. It is contemptuous. It aims to harm Trump and Vance and their reputations. It aims to make them personally angry and make people question their loyalty to such deeply flawed men. To achieve these goals, it is not overly concerned about petty details like whether JD Vance really engaged in an elaborate form of masturbation involving his furniture and described it at length in his memoir — much less whether other furniture-masturbation enthusiasts might be collateral damage of the joke. The joy and humor and fun of the Harris campaign, the way that it acknowledges the Republicans as enemies without setting them up as all-powerful, hopefully marks a decisive end to that kind of idiocy. From now on, entitlement and prickly defensiveness can remain in its more natural home — among the washed up losers who have coasted on white male privilege so long and spent so much time in the “safe space” of their ideological bubble that they don’t realize how pathetic they appear to anyone halfway normal — because eventually everyone complaining about unfair media coverage and moaning about how they aren’t being shown the proper respect will realize that… they sound like Trump.