A Million Little Gods

Cafe La Morenita. “The little dark-haired girl.” Ehn. Should’ve made Yerba Mate or something. All right, let’s get back to it.

Once people around the world had finally caught on to the fact that they’d been the marks in a shell game they’d foolishly been betting on since the industrial revolution—that their personal labor had been structured within a set of legal and economic institutions and had been measured in standardized units (hours of work) that could be traded and sold on a market for a set value—they had reacted with . . . predictable indignation.

You might think that I am alluding to another feature of the reality Perón found himself lodged in before the junta: “dialectical materialism”—what some call Marxism. And you certainly cannot explain Perón’s rise devoid of that half-baked theory of everything. But there is another way you can strike out on once you face up to the abuses suffered by the subservient.

By the early 1940s, Communism, the purest distillation of Marxist thought, had long-since made its expansiveness apparent: Its most basic dictate—that the lowest level of human experience (the struggle for power and “material” possession) subsumes every other facet of human behavior—was voracious. Everything else—family bonds, career ambitions, fealty to nation, altruism, charity, . . . and (famoulsy) religion—was consumed in the monomaniacal maw of this basic principle, according to which human coexistence is necessarily impelled to one inevitable conclusion: a classless, stateless society where all property is collectively owned and wealth is distributed based on need.

The adherents of this principle believed that some further evolutionary state hidden beyond the veil of those ends might be possible; but that we are culturally blind to that possible state because we cannot look past the aforementioned institutions: the state, the family, religion. In order to achieve those ends, the seductive phantasms of institutions holding them back had to be exposed and brought into synthesis with them.

As you can imagine, the Catholic Church was not amused. It didn’t like being called an institution. It didn’t consider itself the work of humans at all. But much worse: to be rendered a mere diversion—to be labeled as priestly magicians, pressing made-up concerns to distract the people, all the while fleecing the people of their needs, and of the means to attain those needs, either for the gain of the Church itself or, worse yet, in the service of secular powers—that was more than flesh and blood could stand.

Now, you can explain away this reaction as angry deflection or denial. “Of course the Church would resist such a conclusion,” you might say. And, well, maybe. Alternatively, I can call you a self-important cynic. What you might call deflation or reduction, I might call nihilism. Your psychologizing of the Church, or of the Clergy, presupposes the very things you are claiming are “merely” instruments of class domination: values, principles. Marx himself had wavered before leaning into “revolutionary materialism.” He was enthralled not merely by Hegel’s dialectic, but by his idealism.

I’m just gonna help this guy out. So, you should note that when he says “idealism,” he doesn’t mean it in the common way people use it to mean having high ideals or aspirations. He’s using the philosophical term of art: The notion that our minds, our consciousness, our ideas—our values and principles—are real; and alternatively that reality is, at least somewhat, shaped by our minds and ideas.

In Phänomenologie des Geistes, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, Hegel argued that we do indeed encounter the “things” of the world. They are outside of us. But we also “make” them, in every facet. Outside of our ideation they are never fully real. Their reality is tied to the process of our conceiving and understanding them. When we begin to understand the things we have conceived in thought as separate from us—and especially when we perceive ourselves as objects, separate from us—this is estrangement.⁠

However, Hegel contends that this process is, nevertheless, an essential part of our becoming complete selves—for the things of the world are separate from us; yet we are objects in the world. When we reconcile ourselves to this paradox, we are alienated, but we are free.

Marx turned this idea on its head. In Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844, what in English we abbreviate as the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx borrowed the notion of “estrangement.” But where Hegel saw “alienation” as the positive version of estrangement—a stage in the development of self-consciousness—Marx saw only the worker's estrangement⁠ from labor, production, and ultimately, their human essence. And as he “matured,” Marx jettisoned ideas and self-consciousness altogether.He criticized Hegel for viewing ideas as the primary drivers of history, arguing instead that material conditions and economic structures determine consciousness. In the set of manuscripts by Marx and Engels (and probably a few others) that we call The German Ideology, they famously declare: “Es ist nicht das Bewußtsein der Menschen, das ihr Sein, sander umgekehrt ihr gesellschaftliches Sein, das ihr Bewußtsein bestimmt.” (“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”)

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Unto the breach rode Gioacchino Vincenzo Raffaele Luigi Pecci. Alternatively known as Pope Leo XIII. From one perspective, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that Pope Leo wanted to provide the Church with a philosophical and theological bulwark against the encroaching influence of modern ideologies. You could of course think of him as a CEO whose one job is to secure the bottom line—butts in pews, knees on prie-dieux, pesos in collection baskets—for the red-cassocked board of directors. But that begs the question that was at hand: What was wrong with those ideologies?

Hegel’s philosophy of reality as a dynamic unfolding of contradictions through thesis, antithesis, and synthesis—and especially his views on God and his nigh-on deification of historical progress—those didn’t sit well with Leo. But he understood where they were coming from. The diversity of beliefs, and the difficulty of living together in peace given that diversity, make Hegel’s model of reality appealing. If God is an end toward which things evolve, a self-directing principle that governs or animates reality; and if the truth itself evolves over time; then you can fudge your way through moral quandaries in God’s good graces. It was an enticing notion, but by Leo’s lights discernibly wrong.

Meanwhile, Marx. Marxism denied the spiritual dimension of human existence altogether and placed the onus of virtuous “progress” on the struggle between the classes. If the good is simply all the means necessary to effect the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist structures, then there are no moral obligations for the lower classes—as long as they break the chains of oppression, whatever the lower classes do is, by definition, good.

Leo believed this purely economic and materialist view of history dismantled any moral and metaphysical order. So in one of his first acts as Pope, he released the 1879 encyclical Aeterni Patris, which reintroduced the world to a figure once dismissed by the likes of Voltaire and Diderot, d’Holbach and Hume: St. Thomas Aquinas.

It’s not enough to say Leo’s revival of Thomism was simply an academic preference; nor that it was a strategic intellectual or theological response to the challenges posed by Hegelianism, or Marxism, or logical positivism, or whatever other philosophical movement was ascendent in his day. Yes––unlike Hegel, who subordinated theology to philosophy; or Marx, who eliminated theology altogether––St. T…

Uki Goñi was born in the United States. Much to the chagrin of folks whose political fortunes—and embarrassment of power—have lately been restored, that would normally mean that Goñi was an American citizen. But his father was an Argentine diplomat stationed at that country’s embassy in Washington, D.C. when he (Uki) was born. The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (the first section of which achieved enfranchising freed slaves) does state that anyone born on US soil is “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” but it excludes the children of foreign diplomats from that jurisdiction.

So, Uki Goñi spent most of his first 14 years living out an American childhood not unlike my own: saying the pledge of allegiance in the courtyard of his local Catholic parish’s parochial school; wearing that AAA Safety Patrol belt the neon color of candied orange peel, making sure his classmates didn’t jaywalk; and hearing stories every November about the exploits of captain Myles Standish, Squanto, Massasoit, and a bunch religious dissenters—who, if they agreed on one thing, it was that they didn’t like Catholics; but who also (crowded in the hull of a beat-up Dutch cargo fluyt anchored in what’s now Provincetown harbor, in November 1620) signed a compact that they would “covenant and combine [themselves] into a civil body politic for their better ordering and preservation.”

But eventually the services of Goñi’s father were needed elsewhere, namely the Argentine diplomatic mission in Ireland. Just as his juices were flowing and his sense of self was taking shape, he landed in the middle of that country’s charms, and its notorious troubles. He was mostly sequestered from those convulsions, though, at a private prep school in Dublin; a place not devoid of its own darkness. His French teacher was dead-eyed and sadistic, and, as it turned out, was a native Breton who had enthusiastically joined the Nazi Schutzstaffel (the S.S.) in the Second World War and who was enjoying protection from prosecution for war crimes.

The strange juxtaposition of earthy homeyness he felt in Dublin with absolute injustice being willfully ignored (or maybe even furtively desired) was jarring—and all the more troublesome when he started getting used to it. But he was happy in Ireland, with high hopes of being a poet and musician. Youthful plans fall apart, however; or the scales fall from your eyes (I guess it depends on how you look at it), and when he turned 19, Uki’s family had to return to Buenos Aires. Having no financial means to stay behind and make his own way, he moved for the first time in his life to the country whose passport he carried.

Normally he would have had to fulfill military duty, but his situation in a diplomatic family gave him some leeway. So he set off in search of a job. His Spanish being tinged (how could it not be?) by flat American and lilting Irish vowels (making finding a job a bit tricker), he turned to the Buenos Aires Herald, the storied English-language daily newspaper, which was preparing to celebrate its centennial anniversary the next year year. And boldly (naively) he asked if they wanted to publish some of his poetry—which they promptly laughed off, saying they didn’t publish poetry, but that he could write some articles for them, if he liked; and if he proved to have a knack, they would hire him. As it happens, he did have a knack, but that might have had more to do with the confluence of factors outside his own proclivities (what people of a different age or bent of mind called destiny.) You see, Uki’s father had been summoned back to Argentina because his country was enduring troubles that—improbably—far outweighed those of Ireland.

Even though it’s chauvinistic, I doubt any American can help but feel like the story of Argentina’s path to Independence sounds a little like some imposter has copied clauses and phrases from a US history book and reassembled them—with a few fake bits to hold up the creaky syntax—into a pastiche about a thinly veiled, fictional, analogue country, whose history takes twists and turns that feel familiar but wind up with a completely different outcome. And the forger has pasted his cancel pages into an 80s hardback with a cocked spine and a plastic foiled dustcover, foxed with studiously sporadic brown dots, and has snuck his fabulation onto the shelves in the the public library of some run-of-the-mill town where no one would find it. But we do.

Spain’s grip on the South American colonies had grown weak because it was distracted by the Napoleonic wars in Europe. Either from valid grievances about colonial trade and yearning to decide their own fate, or simple post hoc justification of their motives (why not both?), Enlightenment ideas swarmed through the mouths, pages and streets of San Migel de Tucumán, Córdoba, and Buenos Aires. Local elites and intellectuals ousted the Spanish viceroy and established a provisional government. And on July 9, 1816, Argentina ratified the Declaration of Independence at the Congress of Tucumán.

General José de San Martín defeated the Spanish, but independence was fraught with internal rivalries between Centralists and Federalists (advocates of provincial autonomy).

Mneh. If he’s gonna stick his forgery on an American library shelf, that’s kind of a confusing way to use the word “federalism.” It’s basically the opposite of the way Hamilton meant it. Whoever this faker is, he spins a good tale, but when it comes to the niceties of style, he’s kind of a hack.

A flourishing sense of national identity among the fiercely independent rural and working-class folks finally achieved something like unity. Throughout the 19th century, leaders like Bartolomé Mitre and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, prioritized modernization and economic development—but they favored landowners and elites, laying the groundwork for new unrest.

By the early 20th century, industrialization had taken hold on the backs of European immigrants who came in droves, yearning to breathe free, but those immigrants brought along socialist and anarchist ideas, which fueled labor movements, culminating in the formation of the Radical Civic Union, whose leader Hipólito Yrigoyen became the first democratically elected president of Argentina in 1916, with overwhelming support of the working class, who had finally gained the right to vote. And a sense of genuine steadiness settled in for a time.

But then an alternate reality, with its own history—which its inhabitants call American history—infiltrated this reality, causing a rift in its history.

Ho ho man, this guy has gone off the rails.

In that other history, following what they brazenly call the Spanish-American war, the United States, (which these strapping, young people—so cock-sure of their manifest destiny—named themselves) had a good thing going in the western hemisphere, and they did their best to intervene in their neighbors’ affairs to make sure things went to their liking.

I think he’s talking about the Monroe Doctrine, Teddy Roosevelt, “speak softly, but carry a big stick,” and all that.

These “United States” began fighting the so-called “Banana Wars”; supposedly policing the “ne’er-do-well” tropical states with their “corrupt and lawless” politicians. But that alternate reality was not left untinged by its encounter with this one. A figure not known to many in that alternate reality—because there were those who preferred his name and hierophantic knowledge never get out—Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, a man whose soul was a melted wax clotted and embossed by the filigreed arrows clenched in the talon of the Eagle on the great seal of his country.

This Maj. Gen. Butler had fought in the Philippine–American War and the Boxer Rebellion in China. But though he won the Medal of Honor for bravery in the occupation of Veracruz and again in Haiti, and fought with valor in Honduras, by the time he arrived in Nicaragua in1910, to help begin a 21-year occupation of that county, he had begun to subm…

. . . with this teaser.

Hello. Hi. My name is Aaron Gowen, and I’m here to tell you about this show that you’re listening to: A Million Little Gods. A Million Little Gods has been around for—I’m just gonna keep saying “A Million Little Gods” until it gets stuck in your synapses. A Million Little Gods. A.M.L.G.

A Million little Gods is celebrating its tenth anniversary today. You might be saying to yourself, “Gosh, that’s a long time for a podcast to be around and for him to still be previewing it. And you’re right. But this isn’t a relaunch, because, well, I just take a longer view in terms of breaks between seasons.

Back in 2015, I was like Kermit the Frog after an accidental overdose of gamma radiation alters his body chemistry, and then he throws a tantrum when the Muppet Show gets out of hand: really, really, green. By the time I finished that first season, I realized I hadn’t been making one-off episodes. I’d been making a case over a series of episodes for what it means to be a self, and why that might—or might not—be important.

So I retroactively named the first season Book I: “What is a Self?” Then I got a new job at the University of Hamburg as a tenured lecturer in English language practice and applied linguistics. I enlisted students to help out with the show in exchange for elective credits. And a colleague, who’s now one of my best friends in the world, Ben Feddersen, became my co-host. Together between 2018–2019 we conducted scores of interviews with journalists, scientists, philosophers and other podcasters—and stylistically pushed as far as we could to figure out what a podcast could be. The result was a gonzo-academic mix of nine audio essays/radio plays, ostensibly about the scientific third-rail of racial categories, but really about much bigger questions. We called it: Book II: “Race—Is That a Thing?”, vol. 1. Then in 2020 we produced a coda, three last episodes: Book II, vol. 2. (Episode 10 of Book 2 is still my favorite episode of our show that we’ve released—so far!)

Three years ago, however, Ben decided to devote his massive brainpower—and uncanny skills as a raconteur—to helping a multibillion-dollar startup give the world a better battery that can store more energy. (Sad for the show; good for the planet. But you’ll still be hearing from Ben on occasion.) Meanwhile, over those three years, I’ve emigrated the show to Substack, where I began publishing little newsletter essays as I planned out the the next season. I also jumped back into interviewing and collaborating with guests and co-hosts, all of whom I’ve left wondering, “What the heck, man!? Where’s the podcast we worked on?”

Well, there were a couple of things I realized I wanted to accomplish with the pod. The focus in the first two seasons, the first two “Books,” was philosophy and culture studies. And that’s not going to change. But linguistics has always a subterranean facet of the show. And that’s my trade. That’s my jam. So I’ve brought the linguistics communication more to the fore. And beyond that—at the risk of sounding pompous—I have literary and artistic ambitions for the podcast.

By the way, if you’re saying to yourself, “Speed it up, man! Stop taking such log pauses,” . . . no. Stop mainlining TikToks and doomscrolling your way through the trenches of your own inner demons. I’m making art. Art has it’s own rhythms, man. I want to see what you can do with language in this medium—and music, and sound design.

On July 31, I’ll be back in full swing with part one of the Introduction to Book III. And like every upcoming chapter, the Introduction immerses you in spatial audio. So do me a favor: If you’re listening to this at home or work on a set of speakers, or a Sonos bar, or on an Alexa or something, please switch over to headphones so you can hear the actual sound design. And even though I know it’s convenient to speed up your podcasts, please listen to this at normal speed. (And if you use a smart speed controller to shorten the silences, you’re a monster, and I hope you get a painful hangnail on your big toe.)

One last thing, and this is important: If you’re listening to this in a car with Dolby Atmos, or surround sound, or even just with stereo and decent speakers—the audio you will hear mimics three-dimensional sound, and it can cause spatial confusion, and possibly an accident. So turn this off and listen later. (And when you do listen to it, use headphones.)

Ok. That’s it. I might have a couple of surprises for you before you listen to the Introduction (with headphones).

It’s my favorite holiday again, and even though I’m hunkered down trying to produce the most complex, intricate, creative season of the podcast yet, there’s no way I’m going to skip a chance to celebrate. This time our guest is Bryon White, CEO of Yaupon Brothers, an organic producer of Yaupon Holly, a climate-change resistant plant once revered as a drink by all indigenous people of the Southeastern United States, beloved for its salubrious properties for body and soul. He and his colleagues are trying to return Yaupon to the place of dignity and value that, from a long-term perspective, it’s always had in North America.

It’s Thanksgiving. My heart is just a little more conspicuously on my sleeve at this time of the year, and childhood is somehow always on my mind. In that vain, I have something old and something new:

First, a reflection from Book 1, Episode 3 on letting your kids be themselves—whatever a self even is.

Second, I’m joined by my colleague Natalie Roxburgh to discuss Julie Beck’s recent article in the Atlantic, “Why Did We All Have the Same Childhood?”

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Steve Metcalf seems to shed urbanity and passion like I shed dandruff. His off-the-cuff manner of speech is as trenchant as his writing, and he is able to say wise things about any subject.

Here he discusses with me the topic that launched an episode of this podcast and my three-part essay “Best Behavior” (part three coming soon): the weird fact that we all changed our entire outlook on Woody Allen’s film Manhattan to fit our changing moral priorities—how we cannot just bracket out the lechery on display and heap praise on an indisputably brilliant and entertaining movie, even though that’s exactly what we did for decades! Steve and I chew over this terribly troubled—and terribly interesting—question before digging deeper into where our moral judgements hail from.

In order to entice more people to become subscribers, here is our full interview (complimenting my three-part essay “The Razor Blade in the Apple,” which I released last month and you can read here) with two scholars who have much to say about the formation of the scientific consensus on race:

* Nathaniel Comfort, historian of genetics and the relationship between modern genomics and 19th-century eugenics

* Ayah Nuriddin, historian of the lived experience of black Americans over the past 100 years and how they’ve navigated questions of racial science, eugenics, and hereditarianism

Part II of the essay “Best Behavior” will appear in inboxes next Thursday! Meanwhile, enjoy the interview.

To coincide with the three-part essay “The Razor Blade in the Apple” (Part 3 hits inboxes Thursday), here is an excerpt of our interview with two scholars who have much to say about the formation of the scientific consensus on race:

* Nathaniel Comfort, historian of genetics and the relationship between modern genomics and 19th-century eugenics

* Ayah Nuriddin, historian of the lived experience of black Americans over the past 100 years and how they’ve navigated questions of racial science, eugenics, and hereditarianism

If you‘d like to hear the entire interview, become a paid subscriber to get access to that and much more material!

We've reached the heart of the part of our series "Race: Is That a Thing?" devoted to statistics and data. Having laid the groundwork for understanding Bayesian techniques and machine learning—as well as the limits and discontents of those tools—in episodes nine and ten, we turn to how they've been used to understand the history and diversity of the human population.

Carl Zimmer, New York Times science journalist and author, and Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther, Professor of the Philosophy of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, help us unpack just how difficult it is to justify using our cultural inheritance of "race" to talk about our genetic inheritance.

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