[See Part 3 here.]

When Marlowe adapted the Faust story for the stage, it is only a slight exaggeration to say it was “ripped from the headlines”—the original German chapbook had been published only a few years prior, followed by an English translation. By the time Goethe took up the same material over two centuries later, Faust was an established legendary figure in a much more assertive and confident modern world. Far from being an edgy countercultural tale that had to be wrapped up in traditional piety for plausible deniability, the Faust legend in Goethe’s Germany was a story for children, commonly performed in puppet shows. (Indeed, Goethe himself seems not to have read Marlowe’s play until very late in his life, when he was already working on Part 2 of his massive drama.)

In many ways, as with our contemporary glut of adaptations of established cultural legends, Faust is an exercise in nostalgia—nostalgia for a lost naïve faith, nostalgia for the pure emotional receptivity of childhood and youth, even nostalgia for itself, given the fact that Goethe composed the play over the course of many years. The opening poem, skipped by many readers and only added at the very last stages of composition, connects the play to Goethe’s own lost youth, and Faust himself is preoccupied with childhood. When he is on the verge of suicide after his failed encounter with the Earth Spirit, Faust is saved by a children’s chorus that reminds him of his youthful faith and, even more, his immediate connection to nature in those days. His trip to town on Easter morning brings up painful memories of childhood, as the praise he receives for his role in his father’s medical practice reminds him only of the deadly effects of the dangerous poison they unwittingly distributed as medicine. And of course much of what attracts him to Gretchen is precisely her youth and naivety, which he believes will help him reconnect with that more authentic part of himself. (This is, incidentally, an aspect of the play that renders it somewhat difficult to teach to undergrads.)

As should be clear by now, Goethe freely reworks the material, most notably by revising Faust’s background (giving the former orphan a physician/alchemist father) and introducing a love interest. At times, he seems to be almost embarrassed to be adapting the Faust legend, introducing “meta” elements to highlight the silliness of previous versions. The clearest example is the scene at “Auerbach’s Tavern in Leipzig,” where Mephistopheles plays elaborate pranks on a group of drunks and Faust has only one line: a request to go home. This is a way of having his cake and eating it too—including the pranks that were such an integral part of the legend, while at the same time marking his distance from that vision of Faust. Indeed, by the end of Part 1, we seem to have forgotten the devil’s bargain altogether, as the story has become the tragedy of Gretchen more than that of Faust. In the unforgettable scene where Gretchen refuses to accept Faust’s offer of escape even knowing that she will be executed the next morning for the death of her baby, only an over-literal pedant could possibly be concerned with the dangling thread of Faust’s soul.

This displacement of the central element of the legend is surprising in light of the fact that Goethe’s own reworking of that theme is what gives his version such philosophical depth. As with his pranks in the tavern, Mephistopheles’s attempt to secure Faust’s soul represent an attempt to enact the script of the traditional legend, which this Faust continually derails. Scorning earthly pleasures, Faust seeks something more profound—a holistic grasp of the full range of human experience, of which he has been deprived in his life of scholarly isolation. In my favorite exchange, Faust declares (quoting David Luke’s excellent translation):

Poor devil! What can you offer to me?
A mind like yours, how can it comprehend
A human spirit’s high activity?
But have you food that leaves one still unsatisfied,
Quicksilver-gold that breaks up in
One’s very hands? Can you provide
A game that I can never win,
Procure a girl whose roving eye
Invites the next man even as I lie
In her embrace? A meteoric fame
That fades as quickly as it came?
Show me the fruit that rots before it’s plucked
And trees that change their foliage every day! (ll. 1671-1688)

Clearly something very strange is going on here, but Mephistopheles simply responds: “I shall perform as you instruct; / All these delights I can purvey” (ll. 1689-1690). Can you give me worthless, self-undermining pleasures? Yup, can do!

In place of the traditional devil’s bargain, Faust proposes a wager: if he ever ceases striving, if he ever allows himself to rest in full contentment, Mephistopheles can take him. Mephistopheles should presumably be more suspicious in this moment, because he has heard similar rhetoric before. In the “Prologue in Heaven,” Goethe had staged a dialogue between Mephistopheles and the Lord much like that found in the Book of Job—except this time, it is Faust whom God declares to be his servant. Mephistopheles is understandably puzzled, and God clarifies that it is precisely Faust’s implacable striving that he admires so greatly. When Mephistopheles again echoes the more traditional story by offering a wager, God responds with absolute confidence in Faust and even claims that Mephistopheles’s constant negativity will productively spur him from his stagnation and complacency.

Again, all of this is seemingly forgotten by the end of Part 1. Yet when Goethe returned to Faust late in his life, he apparently felt constrained not to leave this divine wager unresolved forever. In the end, Goethe famously—or infamously—engineers Faust’s redemption, in part through the intercession of the late Gretchen’s spirit. The path from Gretchen’s jail cell to this unexpected outcome is a long and winding one. Part 2 is much longer than Part 1, and much more allegorical in its storytelling. On the one hand, this approach allows Goethe to radically reimagine the Faust legend as an epic encompassing all of European modernity—including the rediscovery of Greek antiquity, as suggested by Faust’s famous encounter with Helen of Troy. On the other hand, the result is a self-indulgent slog that—if the two parts are taken as an integral work—retrospectively ruins the effect of the fragmentary but unforgettable original.

Be that as it may, for the sake of my goal of connecting Faust to our Anthropocene predicament, Part 2 is more relevant. The main plot—leaving aside various fanciful digressions and the entire interlude with Helen—reminds me of a scene from the classic HBO police procedural The Wire. After months of surveilling the cautious and methodical gang leader Stringer Bell (played by Idris Elba), an investigator has an epiphany: “He’s worse than a drug dealer, he’s a property developer.” The same could be said of the Faust of Part 2—he’s worse than a demon-summoner, he’s a property developer.

Act 1 opens with Faust quite recovered from the trauma of losing Gretchen and ready for new challenges. Contemplating a waterfall, he has an epiphany: the ocean is constantly churning, but it all amounts to nothing. Dismayed by the waste, he determines to conquer the sea and turn all that wasted energy toward human ends. Mephistopheles hatches an elaborate plot to fulfill this ambition: Faust will present himself as a powerful wizard who can help the emperor defeat his foes, in exchange for land rights that are currently located under water. Faust can then reclaim the land from the sea, creating a utopian kingdom on soil truly untouched by humanity.

This plot obviously pushes the fantasies of settler colonialism to an extreme. Although it also seems to evoke the unique topography of one of the most successful colonial and mercantile states, namely the Netherlands, Faust’s vision of life in his new kingdom sounds more to me like the idealization of the American dream:

I see how
To give those millions a new living-space.
They’ll not be safe, but active, free at least.
I see green fields, so fertile: man and beast
At once shall settle that new pleasant earth,
Bastioned by great embankments that will rise
About them, by bold labor brought to birth.
Here there shall be an inland paradise:
Outside, the sea, as high as it can reach,
May rage and gnaw; and yet a common will,
Should it intrude, will act to close the breach.
Yes! to this vision I am wedded still,
And this as wisdom’s final word I teach:
Only that man earns freedom, merits life,
Who must reconquer both in constant daily strife.
In such a place, by danger still surrounded,
Youth, manhood, age, their brave new world have founded.
I long to see that multitude, and stand
With a free people on free land!
Then to the moment I might say:
Beautiful moment, do not pass away! (11559-11582)

The last phrase echoes Faust’s original wager. Even though it is a hypothetical statement about a future possibility, Mephistopheles seizes upon it, but, as I have said, his plans are ultimately foiled. And implicitly, this final labor, which actualizes Faust’s endless striving on the social, economic, and political plane, is part of the justification for Faust’s redemption. Regardless of its human costs—not only Gretchen and her baby, but also an elderly couple who are killed when Faust orders Mephistopheles to remove them from their land so he can have a better view of his kingdom—Goethe expects us to admire the grandeur of Faust’s project and to agree that he deserves the chance to continue striving eternally through the heavenly spheres.

Though this may initially seem like a reversion to the Christianity Faust dismisses early in the play, it is really a free reworking of Christian concepts and images (particularly Catholic ones, which do not reflect Goethe’s own religious background) to craft his own personal mythology of the “Eternal Feminine,” much as he had reworked Greek mythology to his own purposes in the Helen interlude. Finally, it seems, the Faustian modern man has triumphed so decisively over his Christian baggage that he doesn’t even need to reject it—instead, Goethe can treat it as indifferent material for his own goals, just as Faust treats nature itself. Where Marlowe had used Faust to dramatize the fraught transition to modernity, then, the Goethe of Part 2 recasts Faust as not only the embodiment but apotheosis of modern man.

[Continue on to Part 5…]

[See Part 2 here.]

This dynamic plays out almost literally in the opening monologue of Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, which was written only a few years after the publication of the original Faust chapbook. When we meet Faustus, he is surveying the fields of human knowledge to determine which is of most value. He starts with Aristotelian logic, which claims foundational status and yet achieves no more than to help one “dispute well.” Faust is dissatisfied: “Is, to dispute well, logic’s chiefest end? / Affords this art no greater miracle? / Then read no more; thou hast attain’d that end” (1.1.8-10). Already we can see the mismatch—surely disputing well is not miraculous, but neither does it claim to be. He then moves on to medicine, again quoting and rejecting this field’s promised result: “The end of physic is our body’s health. / Why, Faustus, hast thou not attain’d that end?” (1.1.16-17). He then lays out an impressive résumé of his achievements as a physician but concludes: “Yet art thou still but Faustus, and a man. / Couldst thou make men to live eternally, / Or, being dead, raise them to life again, / Then this profession were to be esteem’d” (1.1.22-24). Again, Christian presuppositions are producing inappropriate expectations. Faustus then dismisses law as a matter of “paltry legacies” that “fits a mercenary drudge, / Who aims at nothing but external trash” (1.1.28 and 32-33). In place of an explicit comparison to Christian standards—the obvious source of his contempt for mere worldly possessions—Faustus then turns to the study of divinity itself. Apparently flipping through the Bible at random, he turns first to Romans 6:23, “for the wages of sin is death…” and then 1 John 1:8, “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and / there’s no truth in us” (1.1.38-42). In combination, these verses seem to Faustus to indicate that his situation is hopeless—he is constained to sin and therefore to die, a prospect that seems to render life meaningless.

One is tempted to say that the way out of the deadlock he points out can be found in the second half of the verse from Romans—“the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord”—but surely we must give a theology PhD the benefit of the doubt that he knows the Bible. Rather than assuming he is simply making a mistake, I propose that he is lodging a deeper objection to Christianity when he claims that it amounts to a doctrine of “Che serà, serà” (1.1.46) The issue isn’t that there is no hope of salvation, but that the believer is rendered completely passive and powerless. By contrast, his books of magic seem to promise “a world of profit and delight, / Of power, of honour, of omnipotence” (1.1.52-53)—rather than relying on God’s arbitrary gift for his salvation, by becoming a magician Faustus can “gain a deity” of his own (1.1.61).

Yet when Faustus reaches the pinnacle of the magical art by allying himself with Mephistopheles, he spends his life squandering his supposedly divine power on a series of stupid pranks. The sense of pointless dissipation is echoed on the formal level by a plot that never seems to cohere into anything meaningful—defying Aristotle’s prescription of tragic unity in favor of a formless concatenation of episodes. On the level of plot and character as well, Marlowe’s Tragical History seems to defy Aristotle’s standards for tragic drama from the Poetics. There Aristotle defines tragedy as follows (quoting from the Joe Sachs translation):

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action of serious stature and complete, having magnitude, in language made pleasing in distinct forms in separate parts, imitating people acting and not using narration [by which he means that it is a play], accomplishing by means of pity and fear the cleansing of these states of feeling. (1449b)

As we have seen, far from being serious and complete, the play is a disjointed collection of mostly comic anecdotes. While Marlowe does hit the marks of using pleasing poetic language and literally writing a play rather than a prose narrative, it is not clear to me that we really experience pity and fear in relation to Faust’s fate. The apparent disconnect deepens when we consider Aristotle’s definitions of the tragic character and tragic action. For Aristotle, the tragic hero should be “the sort of person who is not surpassing in virtue and justice, but does not change into misfortune through bad character and vice, but on account of some missing of the mark,” and the action of a tragic play should depict “changing not into bad fortune from good but the opposite way, from good fortune to bad, not through badness of character but on account of a great missing of the mark” (1453a).

In Greek, the term for “missing of the mark” is the famous hamartia, which Christianized interpretations of Greek tragedy have construed as a “tragic flaw”—often pride. In reality, though, Aristotle means that the tragic hero should have made an understandable mistake. Oedipus doesn’t suffer because he’s a bad person—he’s a smart and capable guy who is trying his best to carry out his royal duties, but he got caught up in something really terrible through understandable ignorance. I don’t know how rigorously Marlowe read Aristotle or whether this distinction would have been available to him, but I do think it points toward two possible readings of the play—both of which turn on how we interpret Faustus’s objection to the doctrine of original sin. If we accept the Christianized notion of a “tragic flaw,” we would have to say that Faustus’s pride blinded him to the true nature of Christianity, leading him down his demonic path. If we think more in terms of Oedipus, who was attempting to do good things (e.g., avoiding murdering his father and marrying his mother, or looking out for his city) without realizing the trap he was in, the play becomes more interesting.

This second reading challenges us to look for what is admirable in Faustus, and when we do that we realize that it all hinges on his thirst for knowledge. Among the conditions of his devil’s bargain is the demand that Mephistopheles must answer all his questions—the only power that Faustus actually tests out before signing on the dotted line. We are also told that Mephistopheles takes Faustus to see both the heavenly spheres and a good chunk of the earthly sphere as well, though presumably Marlowe’s special effects budget was insufficient to show those actions directly. To the extent that Faustus seeks eartly power, it is as a servant to the king who helps enrich the kingdom—an ironic echo of the figures of Joseph or Daniel from the Bible, as well as an enactment of exactly the promise that the modern professions and academic disciplines made for themselves. Despite his initial dreams of domineering power from the opening monologue, he never commits irreversible violence and never seeks power for his own sake. Aside from petty amusements and some sexual satisfaction, the only thing he really desires is knowledge—which I personally find to be an admirable desire.

From this perspective, the tragedy of this Tragical History is not that Faustus has chosen damnation but that he was, like Oedipus, born under the wrong circumstances. His mistake is to seek out pure disinterested knowledge in a world where it can only appear as demonic and can only lead to damnation. Marlowe may not have succeeded in crafting a cohesive play, but if my reading does not miss the mark, he did intuitively, and profoundly, grasp the potential of the Faust legend. The original Faust chapbook amounted to a salacious gossip rag laundered with a superifical moral lesson (“don’t sell your soul to the devil, kids!”). In Marlowe’s hands, it becomes an existential meditation on the deadlocks of a world where Christianity appears as a legacy that is at once “paltry” and inescapable.

[Continue on to Part 4.]

[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.