Christopher Nolan's "Odyssey": The Platonic Censorship of Homer and the Bourgeois Virtues of Liberalism

 

                                          Surveying the Filmed Adaptations of Homer's Odyssey

In 1956, I was seven years old, and my parents took me to see the new movie Ulysses, with Kirk Douglas starring as Ulysses (the Romanized name for Homer's Odysseus).  I was fascinated by the adventures of Ulysses.  But I remember feeling slightly uncomfortable with Ulysses's raging violence.

In 1967, as a college freshman, I read Homer's Iliad and Odyssey for the first time, and I began to understand why I found Homer's heroes disturbing.  I wondered, why did these men think fame and honor were to be earned through cruel violence in war that often lacked any moral justification?

In 1977, I taught a course on The Iliad in the Basic Program in Liberal Education for Adults at the University of Chicago.  I knew Greek well enough that I could check the translation (by Richmond Lattimore) against the Greek text.  So sometimes in the class we would talk about the problems of translation.  

Since all of us in the class had read Socrates' criticisms of Homer in Plato's Republic, some of our discussions were about whether those criticisms were fair, and particularly whether Socrates was justified in arguing that the guardians in the best city should not read Homer's poetry because its models of conduct--the gods and the heroes--were immoral.

So when I saw Christopher Nolan's Odyssey and read about the debates over the movie, I began to think again about the strangeness of Homer's Bronze Age gods and heroes and about how they have been depicted in American popular culture.

I have come to two conclusions.  First, Nolan's movie is actually a Platonic revision of Homer's Odyssey.  Second, the intellectual response to the movie shows how thoughtful--even philosophical--American popular culture can be in considering what counts as a virtuous life.

CENSORING HOMER

As far as I can tell, the movie has been well received by audiences and most of the movie critics.  But I've noticed that the harshest criticisms are from people who have read Homer's poem, and they criticize the movie for how it distorts Homer's poem to the point that the original meaning of the poem is lost.  

Critics have identified four kinds of distortions.  First, while the world of Homer's Odyssey is full of gods, in Nolan's film, people refer to the gods, but the only member of the classical Greek pantheon who appears is Athena; and consequently the story of Odysseus is an almost totally human drama.  

Second, while Homer's Odysseus wins glory through cruel violence without ever feeling guilty for the injustice of what he has done, Nolan has Odysseus confess to Penelope his crippling guilt.  He has an extended flashback to the atrocities that the Greeks committed during the fall of Troy, and he tells Penelope about the guilt he feels for the Wooden Horse episode:

We left them a gift, an offering of peace that they took into their home.  We violated all that is held sacred between people and turned a fight into a hunt.  To burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire. . . . What if [Odysseus] knew, that very night, as he walked through the fires of anarchy and pain and in the days of sweaty celebrations that followed . . . what if he knew exactly what he'd done?

In The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn--who is the author of one of the best translations of Homer's Odyssey--observes: "this resounding speech . . . sounds nothing like the heroes of Homer--who, after all, gleefully vaunt over the mutilated bodies of their slaughtered enemies--but a lot like the heroes of Christopher Nolan movies. . . . Nolan has merely remade Homer's hero in his own image, just as he has imposed on Odysseus's adventures values utterly foreign to Homer."

The third distortion of Homer's story in the movie comes from what some critics have identified as Nolan's "woke" feminist interpretation of the Odyssey as showing the toxic masculinity of male dominance in war, politics, and marriage.  This biased reading of the Odyssey could have come from Nolan's reading of Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey, and indeed Nolan has stressed the importance of Wilson's translation as an influence on him.  Wilson was the first woman to write an English translation of The Odyssey.  And many readers have seen a modern feminist slant in her commentary on the book and in her translation.

The fourth distortion is in Nolan's changing Homer's story--perhaps most importantly in Nolan's giving the story a new ending.  Homer's ending comes when many of the people of Ithaca start a civil war in rebellion against Odysseus because the suitors of Penelope killed by Odysseus were their sons.  Athena orders the fighters to stop the war.  The Ithacans drop their weapons and go back to the city.  But Odysseus chases after them to continue the war.  Zeus then sends down a thunderbolt, and Athena orders Odysseus: "Odysseus, you are adaptable; / you always find solutions.  Stop this war, / or Zeus will be enraged at you."  Homer then writes: "He was / glad to obey her.  Then Athena made / the warring sides swear solemn oaths of peace / for future times" (24.448-549).

For thousands of years, many of Homer's readers have found this ending unsatisfying.  Nolan's alternative ending has Odysseus giving up his throne to Telemachus and leaving Ithaca with Penelope, seeking peace in exile, sailing west to honor the dead.  The pair muse that people will know the Trojan war only as a song, the songs will forget Odysseus' mistakes, and a new civilization will arise to replace the old Bronze Age civilization.

I believe that all four of these distortions in Nolan's movie come from the influence of Wilson's Odyssey--both her translation and her commentary in the Introduction.  I also believe that Wilson's criticisms of the Odyssey ultimately coincide with the criticisms coming from Plato's Socrates in The Republic, which have to do with the immorality of Homer's gods and heroes.  And while I have no reason to believe that Nolan has read Plato, Nolan could have absorbed Plato's critique of Homer from reading Wilson's book, which motivated him to write a script for his movie that is in effect a Platonic revision of The Odyssey that corrects its moral failings.

This would explain why Nolan plays down the importance of the gods.  Wilson says that Homer's gods "are self-interested beings, whose interventions in human lives are motivated primarily by their own desires, whims, and preferences rather than by a consistent commitment to uphold moral law" (30).  Nolan probably anticipated that such gods would be confusing to his modern audience, who assume that divine powers must uphold moral law, and so he pushed the gods largely offstage except for Athena.

Actually, as Wilson indicates, many readers of Homer have seen evidence in his poems that the gods--or at least Zeus--generally enforce moral conduct by punishing the bad and rewarding the good.  After all, The Odyssey begins with Zeus defending the justice of his providence before an assembly of the gods.  He points to the example of Aegisthus, who took the wife of Agamemnon and then killed Agamemnon when he came home from the war, but then Aegisthus was killed by Orestes, Agamemnon's son.  Zeus says that he sent Hermes to warn Aegisthus not to take Agamemnon's wife or murder him because surely Orestes would grow up and then take his revenge.  Aegisthus was foolish in rejecting this good advice.  "But now his death has paid all debts" (1.31-45).

Similarly, Odysseus often invokes the justice of the gods in taking vengeance against Penelope's suitors. He tells them: "You did not fear the gods who live in heaven, and you thought no man would ever come to take revenge" (22.37-40).

I am reminded of John Alvis's book Divine Purpose and Heroic Response in Homer and Virgil: The Political Plan of Zeus (Rowman and Littlefield, 1995).  Alvis argued that both Homer's Zeus and Virgil's Jupiter (in The Aeneid) show divine providence in the service of justice.  Alvis saw the principle of divine providential justice explicitly stated by Virgil, and then he tried to find this in Homer, although it is only "barely implied in Homer" (259).  This is an important issue for Alvis because "the gods must be known if human conduct is to be measured against the most authoritative standards" (vii).  I have written about this as posing the question of moral cosmology versus moral anthropology: must the moral law be grounded in a divine cosmic law, or can it be grounded in a human natural law?

Nolan's Odysseus feels guilty for violating that moral law through his unjustified violence against the Trojans.  But this is not clear in Homer's poem.  Wilson directs our attention to a scene in Book 8 of The Odyssey where Odysseus asks Demodocus, the Phaeacian bard, to sing the story of the Wooden Horse.  Inspired by a god, the bard sings the story of the Trojan Horse--of how it tricked the Trojans into bringing the Wooden Horse--full of Achaean fighters--into the city, and of how Odysseus and the others poured out of the horse and slaughtered the people of Troy.  Now, one would think Odysseus would be happy to hear this song of his glorious triumph.  But instead, he weeps!

Odysseus was melting into tears; / his cheeks were wet with weeping, as a woman / weeps, as she falls to wrap her arms around / her husband, fallen fighting for his home / and children.  She is watching as he gasps / and dies.  She shrieks, a clear high wail, collapsing / upon his corpse.  The men are right behind. / They hit her shoulders with their spears and lead her to slavery, hard labor, and a life / of pain.  Her face is marked with her despair. / In that same desperate way, Odysseus / was crying.  No one noticed that his eyes / were wet with tears, except Alcinous (8.521-535).

Wilson suggests there are two possible interpretations of this passage:

The simile compares the desperate weeping of Odysseus, a military conqueror, to the grief of a woman who is a victim of war, a woman whose husband is dying and who knows that she herself, and her children, will soon be led off into slavery by the victors.  Perhaps the comparison suggests that Odysseus himself feels some kind of deep guilt over the suffering that he himself has caused, in his instrumental role in sacking not only Troy but may other towns and settlements.  Or perhaps the simile works to downplay Odysseus' responsibility for the suffering he has caused, by inviting us to see him as a suffering victim, even in his role as the sacker of cities (68-69).

Nolan preferred the first interpretation, and so he has Odysseus feeling deeply guilty for what he has done, and the image of the suffering woman who is a victim of war becomes the flashback memory of Odysseus stunned by the cruel desolation that he caused in leading the sack of Troy.  This interpretation supports Nolan's new ending for the story because it shows Odysseus seeking some atonement for what he has done by going into exile from Ithaca and giving up his throne to his son.

This interpretation might also explain why Plato's Socrates in telling the "myth of Er" in The Republic says that in the afterlife the soul of Odysseus "from memory of its former labors had recovered from love of honor," and it had chosen to live "the life of a private man who minds his own business" (620c).  Elsewhere Socrates says the philosopher "minds his own business" (496d).  It seems that Odysseus had learned from his mistakes in living as a glory-seeking warlord, so that in the afterlife he chose the obscure private life of a Socratic philosopher.  At least that was Allan Bloom's reading in his "Interpretive Essay" in his translation of The Republic (p. 436).

And yet Wilson's second interpretation of the simile comparing Odysseus' weeping to the weeping of the woman suffering in war is well supported by the textual evidence--the idea that this simile invites us "to see him as a suffering victim, even in his role as the sacker of cities."  Alcinous asked Odysseus to "please explain why you were crying, sobbing your heart out when you heard him sing what happened to the Greeks at Troy" (8.576-578).  Odysseus answered him by telling him "my own sad story" of the many ways he had to suffer in his adventurous travels to finally achieve fame and honor.  His storytelling stretched over four books of The Odyssey--from Book 9 to the end of Book 12.  Early in the story, he relates his attack on the Cicones: "A blast of wind pushed me off course towards the Cicones in Ismarus.  I sacked the town and killed the men.  We took their wives and shared their riches equally among us" (9.40-44).  He gives no justification for this act of piracy.  Nor does he express any sense of guilt for this and other acts of piracy.  At the end of the poem, once he has returned to Ithaca and Penelope, Odysseus tells Penelope that he will resume his piracy: "I have to go on raids, to steal replacements / for all the sheep those swaggering suitors killed, / and get the other Greeks to give me more, / until I fill my folds" (23.355-360).  This is not a man who feels any guilt for his life of piracy.

Like Plato's Socrates, Nolan worried that reading, or hearing, or seeing this story on a movie screen of Odysseus' winning heroic glory through immoral conduct would either endorse such immorality or provoke the moral disgust of the audience.  To avoid that, Nolan censored Homer by revising his story so that Odysseus regrets his life of unjustified and cruel violence and seeks atonement for his guilt.

THE BOURGEOIS VIRTUES OF AMERICAN LIBERAL CULTURE

As I have indicated, some of the critics of Nolan's movie have complained that he is being dishonest in hiding the true meaning of Homer's Odyssey from the audience.  Moreover, some have argued, the special thrill that comes from reading Homer is in seeing the great gulf that separates our modern moral sensibility from Homer's Bronze Age world of warlords glorified by poets for their brutal cruelty; but Nolan's movie does not allow his audience to have that experience of being provoked by the violence and mystery of Bronze Age life.

That is not a fair criticism, however, because Nolan has talked openly about how he has changed Homer's story, particularly under the influence of Wilson's translation, and he has encouraged his audience to read, or reread, Homer's Odyssey for themselves, and then argue about how the movie differs from the book.  In fact, in recent weeks, Wilson's translation has become one of the top five books on the Amazon and New York Times bestsellers lists.

This refutes the claim of those Nietzschean critics of American popular culture who say that it has become degraded--perhaps to the level of the "last man"--because people watch movies and television, but they don't read books, particularly "great books."  On the contrary, Nolan's movie has spurred many Americans not only to read the Odyssey in translation, but also to read the original Greek text.  Google Trends reports that people searching "learn Greek" has increased by 400% over the past month compared with the same period last year.

I am reminded of my years teaching in the Basic Program of Liberal Education, which is a Great Books program established in 1946 by Mortimer Adler and Robert Maynard Hutchins, who believed that cultivating human excellence in a liberal democracy required opening liberal education to all adults.

I have written about how Leo Strauss praised Great Books programs like the Basic Program and explained:  "Liberal education is the ladder by which we try to ascend from mass democracy to democracy as originally meant.  Liberal education is the necessary endeavor to found an aristocracy within democratic mass society.  Liberal education reminds those members of a mass democracy who have ears to hear of human greatness."

Here we see that what Deirdre McCloskey calls the "bourgeois virtues" of a liberal social order can include the intellectual virtues of a liberal education for a philosophic life.

In a liberal popular culture like America, popular media like movies and television can complement the liberal education based on reading classic books.  In the Basic Program, we had Fall and Winter Weekends, where we would meet for a weekend at a lodge in a state park.  One classic text of literature, philosophy, history, or science would be the assigned reading for the weekend.  We would have a series of lectures and discussions centered around that text.  But we would also usually have a movie of some kind that was related to that text, so that we could talk about the intellectual questions raised by both the movie and the book.

At this blog, I have written essays on various movies (such as The Lord of the Rings, The Last Duel, Song Sung Blue, Nuremburg, and Disclosure Day) and on various television shows (such as The Good Place, The Big Bang Theory, and Hill Street Blues).  And in each case, I have argued that these filmed productions of popular culture can raise profound intellectual questions and that they can prompt viewers to read some books that might probe those questions at a deeper level.

Christopher Nolan's Odyssey does that.  In her review of the movie for The London Review of Books, Emily Wilson recognizes this point:

In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the "death of the humanities," translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves.  Some of those who buy the book or show up in cinemas to watch Tom Holland may go on to study ancient Greek.  Perhaps the film will persuade a few college administrators not to cut their literature, language, and history departments.  Nolan, who studied English at University College London--where students still study The Odyssey as a first year "foundational text"--is doing his best to get the general public reading again, and I am grateful.

But except for this one passage praising Nolan, Wilson's review is relentlessly dismissive of his movie--as when she says, "I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script." 

As I have said, Wilson's interpretation of Odysseus' weeping in response to Demodocus' singing of the sack of Troy as a sign of his feeling guilt seems to have prompted Nolan's depiction of Odysseus' deep sense of guilt over what he has done.  So as I read her review, I wondered what she might say about this.  I noticed this passage:

The representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie's imagined world.  We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it--a very different point.  Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar--but Nolan doesn't.  The Trojans are dehumanized by their masks; we know none of them by name or face.  The hands of Odysseus and Telemachus are bloodied only by the most righteous, computer-game modes of killing, and we feel no pity or horror at the deaths of their victims, whether Trojans, giants, suitors, or slaves.  During the sack of Troy--which he supposedly organized--Odysseus gazes around in bewilderment and horror, as if he has never seen a massacre before.

So Wilson suggests that Homer's Odyssey is better than Nolan's Odyssey in helping us to reflect on the moral complexity of a world in which warlords pursue glory through cruel violence, because Homer allows us to see the perspectives of both perpetrators and victims, and to see that even if a warlord might sometimes feel guilty about what he is doing, that does not lessen his enthusiasm for his life of glorious violence. 

People might learn this if watching Nolan's movie prompts them to read Homer's book.

In Defense of Darwinian Classical Liberalism: A Reply to "Darwinian Reactionary"

In "Darwinian Reactionary vs. Darwinian Conservatism vs. Darwinian Left," Darwinian Reactionary (DR) claims that he and I are the two contenders "for the crown of The One True Darwinian Social and Political Theory."  He argues that his "Political Theory of Teleoformalism" is far superior to my Darwinian Lockean libertarianism.

In response, I will make three points.  First, what I am defending is Darwinian classical liberalism--not libertarianism.  Second, my Darwinian classical liberalism largely agrees with DR's Teleoformalism and its four principles of justice.  Finally, DR fails to see that those principles of justice motivate us to act only insofar as they appeal to the natural desires of evolved human nature.  

Although I often lean towards libertarianism, my thinking has been mostly in the tradition of evolutionary classical liberalism as represented by John Locke, Adam Smith, Edward Westermarck, and Friedrich Hayek.  I have also embraced the tradition of Ordoliberalism that began at the University of Freiburg in Germany in the 1930s. The central concept of the Freiburg School was captured by the German word Ordnung or the Latin word Ordo.  Liberalism, the Freiburg theorists argued, requires a market order that is a constitutional order, and thus true liberalism must be an ordo-liberalism.  Some proponents of laissez-faire liberalism sometimes convey the impression that free markets can function best without any rules enforced by government, and indeed some of them (like Murray Rothbard, for example) have been anarchists.  But the Freiburg ordo-liberals have argued that a free-market order is not anarchistic, because it depends upon a constitutional framework that sets the rules of the game of free competition, in which all economic agents meet as legal equals and coordinate their activities through voluntary exchange and contract.  This constitutional order of liberty includes both the informal norms that arise through cultural evolution and the formal norms of legal and political design.

This might seem to violate the classical liberal principle of spontaneous order as an unintended order that is free from governmental planning.  But while arguing for the deliberate planning of a constitutional framework of general rules within which markets work spontaneously, the ordo-liberals argue against the attempt to deliberately plan an economy to achieve specific outcomes.  The deliberate planning of the constitutional order can indirectly improve the economic order by facilitating the spontaneous emergence of free economic coordination, but this is very different from the effort of economic planning through specific interventions to achieve directly some desired outcome.  Liberal planning creates general or abstract rules enforced equally over all individuals, so that government does not create special privileges for anyone.  This ordo-liberalism is very similar to James Buchanan's "constitutional economics."

According to DR's teleoformalism, the end of the state is to advance the four principles of justice that serve four biofunctional norms of interpersonal behavior: "tit-for-tat non-interference, kin altruism, mutually beneficial exchange aka reciprocity, and cooperative conventions."  DR claims that while his teleoformalism and my libertarianism agree on the first principle--tit-for-tat non-interference--my libertarianism does not support the other three principles.  But DR is mistaken.  Because my Darwinian classical liberalism agrees with his teleoformalism that the state must advance all four of these principles.

THE FIRST PRINCIPLE OF JUSTICE

"The first principle of justice," DR explains, is "the common belief that the state's primary function is to protect individuals from harm from other individuals, groups, or itself.  Teleoformalism interprets harm bioformalistically: harm is any human behavior that reduces an individual's ability to live out its form of life as excellently as he or she is willing and able."  This ability to pursue the good contains "the traditional Lockean notions of life, health, liberty, and property."  So, with respect to this "primary function" of the state, DR agrees with my Lockean liberalism.

THE SECOND PRINCIPLE OF JUSTICE

The second principle of justice is "kin altruism" in the "private sphere" of "genetically related family members."  Evolution has shaped our human nature so that one of the primary natural ends of life is finding a sexual mate with whom we can produce children and then rear them in the best possible environment for their development into adults.  

DR notes that Locke recognized this in the First Treatise: "For Children being the course of Nature, born weak, and unable to provide for themselves, they have by the appointment of God himself, who hath thus ordered the course of nature, a Right to be nourished and maintained by their Parents" (para. 89).  This right of children to parental care creates a duty for the parents to provide that care (para. 90).  DR doesn't cite the pertinent passages in the Second Treatise, where Locke affirms that parental authority is derivative of parental obligation: "The Power, then, that Parents have over their Children, arises from that Duty which is incumbent on them, to take care of their Off-spring, during the imperfect state of Childhood" (para. 58).  DR also doesn't mention that Locke wrote a whole book--Some Thoughts Concerning Education--about the duties of parents to nourish, protect, and educate their children morally and intellectually.

DR complains that Locke says nothing about what should be done if parents refuse to care for and educate their children or otherwise neglect or even abuse them.  In that case, the teleoformalist norms of kin-selection dictate that the state enforce some child protection laws.  By contrast, DR says that some libertarians claim that children are the property of their parents, and therefore they have the right to treat their children as they wish without any interference from the state.

But DR does not recognize that parental ownership of children is only one of four competing theories of the parental role that libertarians have proposed.  The other three are parenting as charity, parenting as voluntary social contract, and causal parental obligations in the creation of peril.  Jake Desyllas (2025) has made a persuasive argument that the first three theories are flawed and that the theory of causal parental responsibility in the creation of peril is the most defensible libertarian theory of parenting, and it is the only theory that is compatible with Lockean liberalism.

Creation of peril is a legal principle in both tort and criminal law that imposes a duty to act when a person's own conduct creates a dangerous situation for someone else, even if the initial act was accidental or unintentional (Alexander 2017).  For example, while you do not generally have a duty to rescue people in a burning building, if you have accidentally started the fire, then you do have a duty to rescue the people who are in danger because of your action.

Similarly, if you engage in sexual intercourse, there is some chance that your gametes will be fertilized, and you will create a child who will be born in a condition of mortal helplessness.  Having put that child in a state of peril, you are positively obligated to care for that child, because refusing parental care would be an act of aggression against that child.  And under the Lockean principle of non-interference or no-harm, the state can intervene to protect the child's natural right to be free from aggressive harm.

Desyllas lays out the argument in five steps:

1. People are responsible for the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions, whether intended or not.

2. As a consequence of creating a child, parents have put another human being (the child) in a state of peril.

3. Children cannot consent to being born.

4. Since the child did not create their own state of peril nor consent to it, the child's peril is entirely the responsibility of the parents.

5. Therefore, parents have a positive obligation to do whatever is necessary to remove the child from a state of peril, since not doing so would constitute an act of aggression as a form of tort (197).

Notice that the positive obligation of parents to care for their child is ultimately rooted in the negative obligation to refrain from an act of aggression that would lead to the child's death and thus violate the child's right to life.  Having created a child who is utterly helpless, parents who would refuse to properly care for that child would allow that child to die, and consequently they have a positive obligation to prevent that mortal peril from happening.  

A Lockean government has the authority to enforce that natural duty of parental care under the non-interference principle of justice--that no man has the right to aggressively threaten the life of another.  Locke suggests this when he says that parental power cannot "extend to Life and Death, any time, over their Children, more than over any body else" (ST, para. 170).  So just as we have no right to aggressively take the life of any other person, parents have no right to refuse to care for their children and thus allow them to die.

But while Locke implied this argument, he did not elaborate it explicitly.  The first clear statement of the causal responsibility for parental care from the creation of peril was in William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765).  In his chapter on the rights and duties of parent and child, Blackstone explained:

The duty of parents to provide for the maintenance of their children is a principle of natural law; an obligation, says Pufendorf, laid on them not only by nature itself, but by their own proper act, in bringing them into the world: for they would be in the highest manner injurious to their issue, if they only gave the children life, that they might afterwards see them perish. by begetting them therefore they have entered into a voluntary obligation to endeavor, as far as in them lies, that the life which they have bestowed shall be supported and preserved.  And thus the children will have a perfect right of receiving maintenance (1979, 1:435).

Blackstone added to the parental duty for maintenance of the child the duties to protection and education.

Desyllas sees here the essential elements of the causal parental responsibility argument:

1. As a result of their action of bringing children into the world, parents are responsible for their children's condition of helplessness.

2. If parents were to fail to care for their children, the result would be that the children would perish.

3. Therefore, parents have an obligation to maintain their children to prevent this from happening.

A Lockean liberal government can rightly enforce this parental duty to care for their children and the right of the children to receive such care under the principles of no-harm and kin-altruism.  Therefore, DR is wrong in arguing that Lockean liberalism cannot legally enforce the parental duty to care for their children.

Indeed, liberal political thinkers have generally recognized the need for the legal enforcement of parental care.  For example, in his Lectures on Jurisprudence, Adam Smith observed that as a matter of general legal practice in civilized societies, the duties of familial care are often legally enforced.  Similarly, in The Constitution of Liberty, Friedrich Hayek argued that while it is usually in the best interest of children to be left to the care of their parents or guardians, 

this does not mean that parents should have unrestricted liberty to treat their children as they like.  The other members of the community have a genuine stake in the welfare of the children.  The case for requiring parents or guardians to provide for those under their care a certain minimum of education is clearly very strong (377).

Moreover, it is clear that DR's teleoformalism generally agrees with Lockean liberalism in seeing the private sphere of life as a realm of liberty.  DR writes: "Other than the rules of non-interference and kin altruism, the private sphere is the place of liberty to direct one's life as one sees fit: what books and media to consume, what sexual activity one wishes to partake, religious practice, hobbies, amusements and entertainment are completely free from state regulation.  Even the wish to not pursue the human good is of no concern to justice."

THE THIRD PRINCIPLE OF JUSTICE

The third principle of justice is that there should be reciprocity or mutually beneficial voluntary exchanges in the commercial sphere.  According to DR's teleoformalism, the state must regulate the commercial sphere to facilitate these reciprocal exchanges.  "All of the contemporary ways the state regulates business-contract enforcement, union rights, workplace conditions, environmental regulations, nondiscrimination, health regulations--are perfectly just under teleoformalism."

By contrast, DR argues, "although Arnhart includes property and trade among his natural desires, his theory that justice merely entails these desires be allowed to occur cannot accommodate Norms of trade be enforced, and relies on a caveat emptor system where fraud and cheating may be rampant."  But DR cannot cite me as ever having said this.

On the contrary, as I have made clear in my chapter on Adam Smith in Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker (4th edition, 2016), classical liberals like Smith recognize that markets must be regulated by the rule of law.  For example, in The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek observed: "If there is to be an efficient adjustment of the different activities in the market, certain minimum requirements must be met; the more important of these are, as we have seen, the prevention of violence and fraud, the protection of property and the enforcement of contracts, and the recognition of equal rights of all individuals to produce in whatever quantities and sell at whatever prices they choose" (229).

THE FOURTH PRINCIPLE OF JUSTICE

According to DR, the fourth principle of justice is supporting cooperative conventions in the public sphere that allow the cooperation of strangers in public spaces.  Following Ruth Millikan ("Language Conventions Made Simple"), DR recognizes that language is one of the most important examples of  cooperative conventions:

These are common rules that allow mutually beneficial cooperation to occur among strangers.  The conventions are widely distributed so that even people who do not know each other can be on the same page and not have to create mutual understanding over and over again with each new interaction.  Language conventions such as using the word "dog" to refer to dogs are the clearest example.

Another example that he takes from Millikan is driving on the right or left side of a road.  This allows drivers approaching one another to coordinate with one another for safe driving.  To achieve regular conformity to this rule, governments have mandated it as a traffic law.

Classical liberals like Locke explain the "cooperative conventions" that establish "common rules that allow mutually beneficial cooperation to occur among strangers" as arising from popular consent.  Locke's teaching that government arises from the consent of the people is well known.  But it's not well known that Locke explained the emergence of all social institutions as created by popular consent.  Human beings have created not only government (ST, 95-99) but also languages (ECHU, III.2.8), families (ST, 74-83), morality (ECHU, 28.10), and money (ST, 36) by consenting to their existence.  This creation of social institutions by consent expresses the uniquely human capacity of the mind for symbolic thought.

Symbolic thought allows human beings to create laws as moral rules for choosing sides in conflicts by impartial rules of action.  Classical liberals recognize that the history of law shows a transition from the illiberal conception of laws as identity rules to the liberal conception of laws as impartial rules.  Henry Sumner Maine called this the move from status to contract.  

In medieval and early modern Europe, for example, the laws were applied differently based on one's social identity.  In many parts of Europe, the nobility either did not pay many taxes or were assessed at a lower rate of taxation than were commoners.  Under the criminal law, the punishments for nobles were less severe than for commoners.  Jews, Protestants, and Catholics faced different treatment by the law.

But Lockean liberals agree with Peter DeScioli that "laws as identity rules" are what he calls "fake laws that are really threats in disguise" that support the dominance of powerful factional coalitions--such as the "nobility"--against "commoners."  Originally, in prehistoric forager societies, the many (the commoners) enforced impartial customary laws against dominant individuals and the ambitious few.  But then with the emergence of centralized states, kings, nobles, and priests were able to enforce fake laws that were really threats to suppress the many.  In a few more liberal societies (like ancient Athens), laws as impartial rules could restrain to some degree the dominant power of the one and the few, which restored to some extent the egalitarian liberty of the foraging state of nature.

Then in modern liberal states, the laws are understood as general rules that apply impartially to all regardless of differences in social status, which goes even farther towards approximating the equal liberty of the evolutionary state of nature.  These are what Douglass North and his colleagues called "open access societies."  Laws as general rules are crucial for the liberal conception of the state as securing individual freedom and social cooperation.  This liberal understanding of the laws as impartial rules of action approximates the law of nature as it arose in the evolutionary state of nature.

 

THE NATURAL DESIRES AS THE MOTIVATIONAL GROUND FOR THE FOUR PRINCIPLES

Although I agree with all four of DR's principles of justice, he fails to recognize the motivational grounding of those principles in the natural desires.  Understanding these principles will not move us to act in accordance with them.  As Aristotle said, "thought by itself moves nothing," because any human action that is deliberately chosen requires a union of reason and desire.  A deliberate choice manifests either "desiring reason" or "reasoning desire" (NE 1139a36-b6).  

DR disagrees, because he thinks that as long as we understand the principles of justice as natural norms, "there is no need for the messy quagmire of sorting through desires for the good."  Really?  Why would we act to fulfill those principles if we thought their fulfillment was not desirable?

Why do we act to fulfill the principles of tit-for-tat non-interference and reciprocal altruism?  Because they satisfy our natural desire for justice as reciprocity.

Why do we act to fulfill the principle of kin selection?  Because it satisfies our natural desires for parental care and familial bonding.

Why do we act to fulfill the principle of cooperative conventions?  Because cooperative conventions as impartial rules of action satisfy our natural desire to be free from the exploitative dominance of powerful factional coalitions.

Why do we pursue the good of justice?  Because the good is the desirable.

REFERENCES

Alexander, Larry. 2017. "Duties to Act Triggered by Creation of the Peril: Easy Cases, Puzzling Cases, and Complex Culpability." In The Ethics and Law of Omissions, eds. Dana Kay Nelkin and Samuel Rickless, 180-196.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Blackstone, William. [1765] 1979. Commentaries on the Laws of England. 4 vols. A facsimile of the First Edition of 1765-1769. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Desyllas, Jake. 2025. "What Is the Libertarian Theory of Parental Obligation?" Journal of Libertarian Studies 29 (1): 186-209.

Hayek, Frederich. 1960. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

"Disclosure Day": The Religious Longings Behind Spielberg's Belief in ETI Visitations

 

                                                  

                                               The Final Official Trailer for Disclosure Day

                          Steven Spielberg's Extended Interview with CBS Sunday Morning

                                                       Steven Spielberg's AP Interview

                                  The Trailer for The Age of Disclosure (2025) Documentary

                                  Three Declassified Videos of UFOs Released by the Pentagon

Stephen Spielberg's new movie, Disclosure Day, has had its first weekend in the theatres.  Spielberg directed and produced the movie.  He also wrote the story that was turned into a screenplay by David Koepp.  The music is by John Williams.

This is the fourth of Spielberg's science fiction movies on extraterrestrial intelligences (ETI) visiting the Earth.  It was preceded by Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), ET, the Extraterrestrial (1982), and The War of the Worlds (2005).  So this theme has stretched across Spielberg's entire movie-making career.

Disclosure Day has two sides to it--action and contemplation.  The New York Times reviewer--Manohla Dargis--describes the action side as "a feature-length chase involving some likable, enigmatically connected people who are racing toward a shared destiny while evading powerful forces."  But she also sees the contemplative side of the movie--"sober interludes that touch on belief, reason, trauma, self-governance, the common good, and higher powers."

This shows the cinematic genius of Spielberg in combining thrilling action that appeals to a popular audience and contemplative moments that appeal to those who like pondering the big questions of human life in the universe.  Dargis conveyed the popular excitement in the movie when she reports that she scribbled in her notebook I am having so much fun.  But she also saw in the movie that Spielberg "has something to say about the world and our place in it."

These two sides are presented in the final trailer, which moves between fast-paced action scenes from the movie and clips of Spielberg speaking about how the disclosure of ETI visitations to the Earth could deepen our understanding of the cosmic meaning of life in the universe.

Here I'll begin by saying something about the active and contemplative sides of this movie.  Then I'll raise four questions suggested by the movie.

ACTION

Spoiler alert: I'm recounting the plot here.

The movie begins in the middle of the chase that will stretch throughout the movie.  Cybersecurity specialist Daniel Kellner (played by Josh O'Connor) has been chased down by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the head of the Wardex corporation, who is leading his Wardex agents in trying to capture Daniel.  Daniel escapes and goes into hiding at a convent with his girlfriend Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson).  

Later, we learn that Daniel has stolen a piece of extraterrestrial technology and extensive files of photos and videos of human-alien contact collected by the Pentagon dating back to 1947.  The Wardex Corporation is a secret arm of the U.S. government charged with holding these files and making sure they are never revealed to the public, because it is believed that if they were ever made public, this would create a mass panic reaction around the world that would undermine all social order.

From the beginning of the movie, we hear news reports in the background of military and political movements around the world that are leading to a nuclear World War III provoked by North Korea.  We see mobs of people at gas stations and grocery stores stocking up supplies in preparation for a global nuclear holocaust.

In Kansas City, television meteorologist Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) is preparing for work when a cardinal flies into her home, briefly observes her, and then flies away.  This stirs up her latent psychic abilities for intuitively understanding the thoughts and experiences of others and for speaking in languages she has never learned.  During a live weather broadcast, she begins speaking in an unknown language.  Footage of the broadcast goes viral.  People at Wardex identify the language as extraterrestrial, and so Wardex agents quickly go to Kansas City to chase down Margaret.  After she is hospitalized by people who fear she has had some kind of mental breakdown, Margaret is almost captured by Wardex agents, but she intuitively understands that the agents are out to kill her, and she escapes and goes into hiding.

Daniel reveals the stolen files to Jane.  He explains that Wardex has been experimenting on captive aliens to understand their mental and biological powers, and they have also been reverse engineering their technology so that humans can use it.  

And indeed, Noah Scanlon has learned how to use an alien device to give himself telepathic powers.  He uses this to get into the mind of Jane (Daniel's girlfriend) to discover that they are hiding in a motel.  Jane escapes with another alien device.  But Daniel is captured.

Margaret has visions of Daniel and follows him to the secret site where the Wardex agents are holding him.  Margaret and Daniel escape when Margaret uses her empathetically telepathic powers to persuade the agents to stand back and let them leave.  But one of the agents has not been controlled by Margaret.  He chases down Margaret and Daniel and rams his car into theirs, so that their car is lodged into the side of a passing train.  Daniel pulls Margaret out of the car just in time for them to climb onto the train and make their getaway.

Margaret and Daniel are rescued by a team of Wardex employees who have decided to become whistleblowers under the leadership of Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who has been working with Daniel.  Hugo has brought Margaret and Daniel into a secret warehouse.  There's a reconstruction of Margaret's childhood home in the warehouse.  Hugo tells her that to understand what has been happening to her, she will have to go into the house and recover her suppressed memories of how the ETIs contacted her as a child.  Inside the house, Margaret remembers that she and Daniel were abducted by ETIs as children and subjected to experiments that gave them their supernormal powers.  She also learns that the unusual animals that have appeared to them throughout their lives are ETIs who assumed animal form so that they could observe them without scaring them.

Margaret also remembers that as a child she and Daniel entered a Gingerbread House, as if they were Hansel and Gretel of the Grimms' fairy tale.  My wife and I were confused by this scene when we saw it because it didn't seem to fit into the story.  But now I think it evokes a lot of themes in Spielberg's movies.  Children are open to the magic of fairy tales in a way that adults are not.  And for that reason, they are more open to empathetic contact with ETIs than are adults.  Remember that in Spielberg's ET, it's the children who befriend ET, and they save ET from the adults from the government officers who want to capture and exploit ET.  Moreover, the story of Hansel and Gretel, like many of the Grimm fairy tales, is indeed a very grim story of how children are vulnerable to being betrayed by adults--parents who abandon them in a forest to starve and witches who want to eat them--and therefore children must be clever and resilient in helping one another to escape the harm from adults.  

We also know from Spielberg's The Fabelmans that he suffered from his parents' divorce and his mother's betrayal of his father by having an affair with his father's best friend.  We also know from that movie that Spielberg became a "fable-man" through making movies as a way of working through some of his childhood problems.  He waited until his parents died to make The Fabelmans.

But let's get back to the ending of Disclosure Day.  Margaret and Daniel, along with the whistleblowers, break into Margaret's television studio in Kansas City to make a public broadcast of "Disclosure Day"--dumping all the photographic and video files that Daniel has stolen into a broadcast that can be sent out to news broadcast outlets around the world.  Noah Scanlon and his agents try to blow up the power grid for the television studio.  But Jane arrives and gives her special extraterrestrial device to Margaret, who uses it to restore the power.  Noah feels defeated, and he decides to stand back and watch.

The television transmission spreads around the world's broadcasting systems.  We see people in all countries stunned by the images of extraterrestrial contact with humans and the work of governments in covering this up.  We also see news that as an effect of this broadcast, political and military leaders are pulling back from nuclear war.

The whistleblowers roll into the television studio a cage that has one of the extraterrestrials, who is freed from the cage.  He is a humanoid figure--a large head on a thin bodily frame with two arms and two feet and walking bipedally.  He whispers something to Daniel, who passes it on to Margaret.  Margaret prepares to broadcast the message to the world by saying, "Listen."

CONTEMPLATION

That's the end of the movie--leaving us wondering what the message from the extraterrestrial could be.  But I'm sure many audience members were like me in picking up the hints in the movie that the extraterrestrials have been empathetically watching humanity become ever more divided by conflict and now moving towards nuclear war.  Presumably, the message from the extraterrestrials to the world would be the message that Spielberg himself has intimated--that the discovery that the universe is filled with extraterrestrial intelligent life that feels empathy for all of humanity should move us to extend that circle of empathy to make peace rather than war on the Earth.

Spielberg suggests this message in what he has said about this movie in the final trailer and in various broadcast interviews over the past few weeks.  In the trailer, he says:

I am much more inclined now than when I made Close Encounters to believe that we are not the only intelligent civilization in the universe.  How will this change us?  I think for the better.  It will remind us of the capacity for empathy and that there is something bigger out there than just ourselves.  I used to say to myself wouldn't it be wonderful if all of this turned out to be true?  Wouldn't it be wonderful for people to know all of this is true?

In his recent interviews, Spielberg has said that his sense of wonder about the universe--about what there is "out there"--began in his childhood.  He tells the story of sleeping in his bed in his New Jersey home when he was somewhere around 6-7 years old.  His father woke him up and told him he had to go somewhere in the middle of the night.  He was confused by this.  His father took him to a park where people had spread out blankets so that they could lay down and look up at the Perseus meteor shower.  Spielberg remembers this wonderful sky show of falling stars.

He also remembers his father's collection of science fiction magazines of the 1950s like Analog, which started his interest in science fiction.

Then, after his parents moved to Arizona, he had a telescope in his back yard where he could study the stars and the planets in the night sky.

Spielberg has said that what convinced him that eyewitness sightings of UFOs were conclusive evidence for ETI visitations of the Earth were the series of articles in The New York Times beginning in 2017 about how the Defense Department was hiding the evidence from the public, which led to testimony by military officers to Congress in 2023 about a secret government program to cover up this evidence (Cooper, Blumenthal, and Kean 2017).

Spielberg is silent, however, about the fact that in response to a congressional mandate, the Pentagon issued a 63-page report in 2024 that investigated all of the government programs for studying UFOs from 1945 to the present and concluded that these UFO sightings provided no clear evidence for ETI visitations of the Earth (Barnes 2024).  Now, of course, Spielberg might say that this report is part of the government's continuing cover-up of the truth.  But to substantiate that charge, he would have to show that there really is conclusive evidence for ETI visitations.

EVIDENCE?

Do you see a triangle here?  If you do, your brain is filling in the gaps in information to "see" a triangle where none exists.  This is the famous "Kanizsa illusion," named after the Italian artist and psychologist Gaetano Kanizsa.  This could explain some of the triangular-shaped UFO sightings that Spielberg takes as evidence for ETI visitations.  (Here my thinking has been influenced by Michael Shermer's new book Think [2026: 198-226].)

Leslie Kean was one of the co-authors of the 2017 New York Times article that so impressed Spielberg.  She is a journalist who has been one of the leading advocates for UFO sightings as evidence for extraterrestrial intelligence visiting the Earth.  In 2010, she surveyed this evidence in her best-selling book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record.  Remarkably, she began the book by admitting that roughly 90 to 95 percent of UFO sightings can be explained:

Examples of phenomena sometimes mistaken for UFOs are weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planet Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, sundogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off clouds, lights on the ground or lights reflected on a cockpit window, temperature inversions, hole-punch clouds, and the list goes on!  Yes, the vast majority of reports can usually be explained by one of the above, but of course it's only the ones that can't that we're interested in (12).

So she has to point to the few cases that cannot be explained in one of these ways as demonstrative evidence for UFOs of extraterrestrial origin.

She begins her survey of the evidence "on very solid ground" with "one of the most vivid and well-documented UFO cases ever"--a two-year wave of UFO sightings in Belgium that began on November 29, 1989.  Over two-thousand cases were reported.  Belgian Colonel Wilfried De Brouwer described the first night of the wave: "Hundreds of people saw a majestic triangular craft with a span of approximately a hundred and twenty feet and powerful beaming spotlights, moving very slowly without making any significant noise but, in several cases, accelerating to very high speeds" (17).

As Shermer suggests, there might have been three sources of light in the sky (such as small planes) that appeared triangular to people on the ground as their minds filled in the space between the lights, as happens in the Kanizsa illusion.  Kean does not consider this possibility.

Moreover, it's strange that with thousands of people reporting these eyewitness sightings, almost no one took a photograph of what they saw, even though film cameras were widely available to Belgians at that time.

Kean does report, however, that on April 4, 1990, at 10:00 p.m. in the town of Petit-Rechain, one person with a camera did take a photograph, which was published in a French magazine.  Kean reproduces that photograph in her book.  Here it is:

Kean reports that experts carefully studied the original color slide, and their major findings were:

• No effect of infrared radiation.
• No indication of any tampering with the slide.
• The camera was stable, but the craft was moving slowly and had approximately a 45-degree bank when the picture was taken.
• The rotation of the spotlights did not occur around one central point.
• The middle light is very different from the three other lights.
• The lights are positioned symmetrically with respect to the structure of the craft.

She also reports that the experts concluded that the picture could not have been faked (30).  This became one of the most famous pieces of evidence for extraterrestrial UFOs.

But then in 2011, one year after the publication of Kean's book, a man by the name of Patrick Marechal explained in an interview for a Belgian TV channel how he had created the photo as a hoax: he cut a piece of styrofoam into a triangle, painted it black, embedded flashlights in each corner, hung it from a string, and then photographed it. 

HAPLESS ALIENS?

In many of Disclosure Day videos of ETIs, we see ETI corpses being recovered from spaceship crash sites.  If the ETIs are so superior in their intelligence and their technology, why are they so often crashing into the ground?  It doesn't make sense.

And why is it so easy for the humans to capture them alive, hold them in captivity, and torture them through brutal experimentation?  The ETI at the end of the movie is brought into the TV studio in a cage.  If he's so smart and so powerful, why did he allow this?  Why didn't he kill the humans holding him captive?

This meek submission of the ETIs to their human captors in this movie is especially strange because of the contrast to Spielberg's War of the Worlds, in which the ETIs are aggressive in conquering and killing the humans.

In his recent interviews, Spielberg has said that he's changed his mind--that he no longer accepts H. G. Wells' depiction of extraterrestrials as bellicose enemies of humanity.  But he is vague in explaining why he changed his mind.  He does invoke his theme of empathy.  But he doesn't explain why we should assume that extraterrestrial intelligences will be empathetic in their caring for human beings--particularly, when they're so badly mistreated by human beings.

A THREAT TO RELIGIOUS FAITH?

Disclosure Day also raises the question of whether the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligent life coming from distant planets beyond the Solar System would threaten religious faith, and particularly Christianity.  I have written about this question in previous posts.

The question is whether the plurality of worlds in the universe can be reconciled with the central doctrines of Christianity--particularly, the Story of Creation and the Story of Salvation.

The Genesis account of Creation says nothing about extraterrestrial life in the universe, although it does of course speak of divinities and spiritual beings (such as angels) as living in the heavens.  The Earth is identified as the only planet in the universe.  And the Moon is the only moon in the universe.  The stars do not have any planets orbiting around them.  Moreover, Genesis seems to present a geocentric cosmology with Earth at the center.  That's why Galileo got into so much trouble with the Church in defending the Copernican heliocentric universe.

But then we could say that God gave us the Bible not as a science textbook but as a book to tell us what we need to know about salvation.  Or, as Galieo put it, the Bible tells us "not how the heavens go," but "how to get to heaven."

In Disclosure Day, Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel), the Abbess of the Monastery of St. Clare of the Dawn, is asked about whether the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence would contradict the Creation Story.  She responds by asking why God would "make such a vast universe, yet save it only for us," which seems to be speaking for Spielberg.  At the end of the movie, when the "Disclosure" is broadcast around the globe, we see Sister Maura watching the broadcast, and she smiles in an expression of wonder at God's creation.

And yet, many Christians--such as the creationists affiliated with Ken Ham's Answers in Genesis--will argue that the Bible clearly implies that the Earth is unique in the universe--that it was made for humans to inhabit and call home--and that God did not create alien life on any other planet (Faulkner 2015).

There is another theological question here that never comes up in Disclosure Day--whether the existence of alien life would be compatible with the Story of Salvation.  This is the story of how Adam's sin put a curse on all humans, how Jesus was incarnated to become the Savior, and how His resurrection creates the promise of redemptive salvation for all of humanity.  If Christians discovered that there really were extraterrestrial intelligences on distant planets, wouldn't they have to wonder how they could be saved?  Did Jesus go to those planets to save them?  Or is it possible that they don't need to be saved because Adam's curse did not affect them?

A SURROGATE FOR RELIGIOUS FAITH?

Rather than being a threat to religious faith, belief in extraterrestrial intelligences can be understood as a form of religious faith.  Disclosure Day suggests that in many ways.  For example, Margaret shows many of the traits of the Christian mystic--such as speaking in languages that she does not know.  On the Day of Pentecost, Christians filled by the Holy Spirit spoke in foreign languages that they did not know.  Margaret can do this because she is filled by the ETI Spirit.

If there is a natural desire for religious transcendence--as I have argued--then we should expect that even many atheists will long for some kind of religious experience--or what I have called atheistic religiosity.  This has been manifested in recent years in some surveys of religious belief where a growing number of people identify themselves as "spiritual but not religious."  They don't belong to any traditional religious institutions, and they don't believe in traditional religious doctrines.  But they still long for some kind of spirituality.  On Rebecca Goldstein's "mattering map," these people belong to the continent of the "transcenders": they believe that they matter because they matter to some transcendent intelligence in the cosmos.  For traditional religious believers, that transcendent intelligence is God or some kind of divinity.  For the believers in UFOs, that transcendent intelligence is the extraterrestrial intelligence that comes from a distant planet.

Clay Routledge is a psychologist who has studied the belief in extraterrestrial intelligence as an expression of the "religious mind" (Routledge 2017; Routledge et al. 2017).  Routledge argues that many studies have shown that traditional religious belief satisfies our natural longing for meaning or significance in the universe.  When we think about how small and unimportant we seem in the grand scheme of things, we look for some way to give our lives some cosmic significance.  Religious belief satisfies that longing by giving us stories about how supernatural beings are watching over us, and how they will rescue us from death and extinction. 

Studies have shown that traditional religious believers are less inclined to believe in extraterrestrial intelligence than are atheists and agnostics.  The likely explanation for this is that since atheists and agnostics lack the religious faith that gives their lives some cosmic significance, many of them will choose to believe in UFOs and alien visitors, because then they can say that "we are not alone" in the universe, and there are superintelligent beings out there who are watching over us, who feel empathy for us, and who will save us from extinction by delivering their message to all of us from a TV studio in Kansas City.

That would explain the revelatory way Spielberg speaks about Disclosure Day: "Wouldn't it be wonderful for people to know all of this is true?"

REFERENCES

Barnes, Julian E. 2024. "Pentagon Review Finds No Evidence of Alien Cover-Up." New York Times, March 8.

Cooper, Helene, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean. 2017. "Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious UFO Program." New York Times, December 16.

Dargis, Manohla. 2026. "'Disclosure Day' Review: Spielberg Plays His Greatest Cosmic Hits." New York Times, June 11.

Department of Defense. 2024. "The Department of Defense All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office: Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP)."  Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense.

Faulkner, Danny. 2015. UFOs and ETs: A Biblical and Cultural Exploration of Aliens. Petersburg, KY: Answers in Genesis.

Kean, Leslie. 2010. UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record. New York: Three Rivers Press.

Routledge, Clay. 2017. "Don't Believe in God? Maybe You'll Try UFOs." New York Times, July 21.

Routledge, Clay, Andrew A. Abeyta, and Christina Roylance. 2017. "We Are Not Alone: The Meaning Motive, Religiosity, and Belief in Extraterrestrial Intelligence." Motivation and Emotion 41:135-146.

Shermer, Michael. 2026. Truth: What It Is, How to Find It, and Why It Still Matters. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

"We Are Creatures of Matter Who Long to Matter": Goldstein's Mattering Map

                                                                    The Mattering Map

"The Areas of the Continents and Regions Are Determined by Estimations of the Comparative Percentage of Inhabitants" (Goldstein 2026:xiii).  SBNR on the Transcenders continent stands for "spiritual but not religious."  You can click on the image to enlarge it. 

In her new book, The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein thinks through the central paradox of the human condition, which she expresses by saying: "We are creatures of matter who long to matter."  

We are material beings governed by physical laws of nature that are indifferent to our existence--impersonal natural laws that do not care about or for us.  And yet we are obsessed with the significance or meaning of our lives as something more than mere matter that is destined by the laws of nature to disappear in death.  We want to matter in the sense that we are deserving of attention and truly deserving of all the attention that we must give to ourselves to pursue our lives.  We long to prove that we subjectively feel that we matter because we objectively do.

We have to feel that we matter if we are to feel our lives worth living.  Goldstein observes:

We don't want to live if we become convinced that we don't, can't, will never truly matter.  The paradigmatic words of the suicidally depressed are "I don't matter."  It's no accident that the URL for the US Hotline for Suicide Prevention is https://youmatter.suicidepreventionlifeline.org (2).

I have not been able to find this website.  But I have found a suicide prevention organization named "You Matter" at https://www.youmatterawareness.org. 

Previously, I have written about Goldstein's book, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.  In that book, she suggests that the deepest emotional attitude supporting religion is the feeling that my life has no meaning or purpose if I am not a creature of God who loves me and cares for me and will give me eternal life. I cannot bear the thought that my appearance in this universe was an accident, the product of cosmic causes that have no special purpose in mind, and that when I die, the world will go on without me. How can my life matter--really matter--if it's not all about ME? This is the thought that moves existentialist Christians who say that Darwinian science cannot explain everything if it cannot give cosmic meaning to the life of human beings as unique persons who don't want to die.

But as Goldstein indicates, this shows the Fallacy of Wishful Thinking. Wishing for something doesn't make it so, even when the wish expresses an anguished human longing. If there's no good reason to believe that it's all about ME, then my wish that it should be so is unwarranted narcissism. If I undergo an existential crisis as I seek the cosmic reason for my personal existence--why am I here? what am I here for?--there may be no reason, because it might be that my personal existence is ultimately just a contingency of the universe.

And yet, even as Goldstein reaches this conclusion, she gives her reader a novel that suggests that most human beings will never accept this, and so they will turn from reason to religion. Even those few who understand most fully the fallaciousness of the transcendent longings of human beings might feel compelled to yield to those longings by an emotional necessity that overpowers rational necessity.

FOUR CONTINENTS ON THE MATTERING MAP

In her new book, Goldstein identifies these people who rely on religious belief to demonstrate that their lives really matter as "transcenders."  But if you look at Goldstein's Mattering Map, you'll see that transcenders are one of four continents that represent the four kinds of "mattering projects."  These are four ways of answering the question--Do I matter?  The transcenders say, I matter because I matter to the spiritual presence that is the transcendent ground of the universe.  The socializers say, I matter because I matter to others.  The heroic strivers say, I matter because I can achieve a standard of excellence in my chosen area of striving.  The competitors say, I matter because I matter more than others.

Each of those four continents is divided into regions that represent subgroups within each category.  The different kinds of transcenders correspond to different religious movements, such as Christians, Muslims, and Hindus.  The socializers differ in the people they identify as the others to whom they matter: so, for example, some socializers want to matter to their friends and lovers, while others want to be famous and thus matter to many people who are not known to them.  Heroic strivers differ in their chosen areas of achievement--intellectual, artistic, athletic, and ethical.  Finally, competitors differ as to whether they compete as individuals against other individuals or as members of a social group against other groups. 

Notice that most of the transcenders continent is covered by the "Axial Age" religions identified by Karl Jaspers--the major religious traditions that originated in roughly the same period, from 800 to 200 BCE (202-206).  The "folk/traditional" category would include shamanism, the original evolutionary seed of all religious experience.

Goldstein claims that since the Axial Age, for "much of our history," almost all human beings have been transcenders.  The ancient Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle) introduced a "secular approach" to mattering, which was lost during the Middle Ages, but then renewed by modern secular philosophers such as Spinoza and Locke (204-205).

Notice that the dimensions of the four continents suggest that about one-third of human beings today are transcenders, while two-thirds are not.  And of those that are not transcenders, about half are socializers, who think they matter because they matter to others.

FOUR PEOPLE WHO MATTER

Goldstein fills in her Mattering Map with narratives of the lives of people who represent the different kinds of mattering projects.  So, for instance, the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal is an example of a transcender.  For a long time, he worried about the insignificance of his life in the cosmos: "When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space that I occupy, and even that which I see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I am terrified."  But then, in one night, he had a mystical experience of being in the presence of God and Jesus Christ.  He wrote down some notes about his experience on a scrap of paper, in which he concluded: "Let me never be separated from Him.  He is only kept securely by the ways taught in the Gospel: Renunciation, total and sweet.  Complete submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.  Eternally in joy for a day's exercise on earth.  May I not forget your words.  Amen" (200-201).  From that moment, he knew that his life mattered because he mattered to God--the divine creator of the infinite immensity of spaces that had previously terrified him.

Angela Rubino is an example of a socializer who found the purpose of her life when she became a cult follower in Trump's Make America Great Again movement in 2020.  She lives in Rome, Georgia, in the congressional district represented by Majorie Taylor Greene.  Before 2020, she had never felt that she mattered as a citizen.  But then she became captivated by Donald Trump because he seemed to be speaking for her.  She became one of the leading political activists for the MAGA movement in Georgia.  She was determined to find evidence that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump through fraudulent vote counting.  She was sure that the county election board in Rome had destroyed many of the ballots cast for Trump.  So one night, she jumped into the dumpster outside the election board office.  She found two plastic bags crammed with paper shavings.  She took the bags back to her home where she tried to put the strips of paper together like a jigsaw puzzle that would show voting ballots for Trump that had been shredded.

She said that her being part of the MAGA movement made her feel "recognized and even important" for the first time in her life.  She had found her purpose.  She said that her wondering about the purpose of her life began when she was eight years old, sitting in the back seat of her mother's car on the way to a religion class.

The thought just came into my head.  I was thinking, "What are we doing this for?  What are we doing any of this for if we're just going to die?  You die, and it's over.  So, what's the point?"  I felt afraid.  Afraid to the point of not wanting to think about that anymore.

Speaking to a journalist with the Washington Post, she confessed:

Sometimes I'm like, what if I'm wrong?  It crosses my mind.  Then I ask God: If I'm doing something wrong, please give me the strength to figure it out.  Because I really want to understand what the point is.  This can't be what life is, that you get up and go to work and come home.  That as humans, we're nothing (19-20).

Goldstein quotes this as showing the most melancholic thing about the longing to matter--we can never be sure that we have chosen the right way to make our lives matter.  But even if we can't conclusively know that we matter, we must somehow appease the longing to matter--perhaps by becoming a political cult follower--if we are to get on with our lives. 

William James is an example of a heroic striver whose striving was for intellectual achievement in philosophy and psychology.  But for many years as a young man, James could not identify the project that would make his life worth living, and consequently, he fell into long periods of persistent depression.  He suffered such a disgust for life that he would lie in bed for days contemplating suicide.  In 1860, at the age of 18, he became interested in art, and he spent a year studying with the prominent artist William Morris Hunt.  But he decided art was not his calling, declaring, "Nothing is more contemptible than a mediocre artist."  In 1861, at age 19, he entered Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard.  But after three years there, without getting a degree, he switched over to the Harvard Medical School in 1864, at age 22.  He received his medical degree in 1869, at the age of 27.  But he never practiced medicine.  And shortly after leaving the Medical School, he fell back into a severe depression, in which he felt a "horrible fear of existence" (127-132).

Finally, in 1872, at age 30, he began to teach at Harvard, first teaching comparative anatomy and physiology, and later teaching psychology and philosophy.  At that point, it seemed that he had found his life's calling, although he continued to endure occasional bouts of depression.  The publication of his book, The Principles of Psychology, in 1890 made James the founder of American psychology.  The publication of his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, in 1902 made him the first evolutionary psychologist of religion.  The publication of his book, Pragmatism, in 1907 made him one of the founders (along with Charles Sanders Peirce) of the pragmatist tradition of philosophy.  

These intellectual achievements arose from his conviction that he could decide what matters in life, and in that decision he could make his own life matter.  As he once said, he could "believe in my individual reality and creative power."  Or, as he said in his lecture entitled "Is Life Worth Living?": "Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."

                                   Frank Meeink Tells His Story--From Neo-Nazi to Faithful Jew

Frank Meeink is an example of a group competitor who thought that his life mattered because he belonged to a neo-Nazi group of white supremacists who mattered more than the targeted groups--particularly, Blacks and Jews--whom he hated.  He grew up in the brutal neighborhoods of South Philadelphia, where he faced daily violence not only on the streets but in his home, where his stepfather regularly beat him and called him a retard.

Then, at age 14, spending a summer with relatives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he came under the influence of a cousin who was a neo-Nazi skinhead, who persuaded him to join a white supremacist group.  Later, he explained:

They knew what to do and say to snag the interest of a fourteen-year-old half-Irish, half-Italian kid from Philly whose real dad was an addict, whose stepdad was an asshole, whose mom was indifferent, whose school was a war zone, and whose only real desire was never to feel like a fucking victim again: they gave a shit about me.  The Lancaster County white supremacists talked to me like they cared about what I thought and what I could become.  Then they told me I had a destiny.  They told me I could become a warrior.  They told me all I had to do was look in the mirror and see the truth: I was white and that was all that mattered. . . . For the first time in my life, I felt like I mattered (261).

By the end of the summer, he had earned the red shoelaces in his combat boots by having shed blood.  When he returned to Philadelphia, he organized his own neo-Nazi group, and he became a charismatic leader.  But at one point, he had so many warrants out on him that he was sure he would be soon arrested.  So he left Philadelphia, and eventually ended up in Springfield, Illinois, where he organized a skinhead group.  

But then, at age 17, when he was convicted of kidnapping and torturing another teenager, he was incarcerated for three years.  In jail, he became friends with two Black inmates.  When he was released, he found that he could no longer hate Blacks.

Out of prison, he was looking for jobs, but someone with his record had dismal prospects for employment.  He was so desperate that he took a job with a Jewish antique dealer in New Jersey who needed someone to move his heavy merchandise.  But when it came time to be paid, the boss was not around.  Frank assumed that the Jew was going to jew him out of his pay--because he had heard people talking about jewing as what you should expect from a Jew.  But instead, his boss paid him a little extra for his good work and offered him a full-time job.  Now Frank could no longer believe the stereotypes about Jews.

One day, Frank accidently broke a piece of valuable furniture.  He apologized for being so "stupid."  But his boss became angry that he so often called himself stupid.  He told Frank: "Listen hard to what I'm saying.  Smart people can fake being dumb, but dumb people can't fake being smart.  You are just smart.  Get used to it."

Those words had a powerful effect.  When Frank quotes these words today, he tears up.  That was the beginning of his transformation.  He explains: "When people started to talk to me like I was a fellow human, it changed everything.  We have to start talking.  It's human beings being human beings among human beings."

He became a cofounder of "Love After Hate," an organization that helps to rehabilitate people who have been members of hate groups.  An avid hockey fan and player, he organized "Harmony Through Hockey," associated with the Philadelphia Flyers, to teach kids from disadvantaged backgrounds, from different racial groups, to play together on a team.  He has also lectured widely about his life.  And he has testified before the U.S. Congress about the threats coming from white supremacist groups--particularly, the police brutality that comes from neo-Nazis who have joined police departments.  

So at that point, Frank's self-mattering came from his moral activism against racist hate groups.  He had changed his location on Goldstein's Mattering Map--moving from being a group competitor to being an ethical heroic striver.

But then another change in his sense of how his life matters came when he discovered that he was Jewish!  He talked with a rabbi who told him that Meeink was clearly an Ashkenazi Jewish name, and that Frank also looked Jewish.  Frank then discovered that his mother's maternal great-grandmother had been Jewish.  Since Jewish identity is matrilineal by Jewish law, this lineage makes Frank Jewish.

Now, after years of studying Judaism under the instruction of rabbis, Frank has become an observant Jew.  He frequently invokes Ha-Shem, which is a Hebrew word which means the Name.  This is the way observant Jews refer to God to avoid violating the divine commandment against taking God's name in vain.

Now, as Frank goes through his day, he reminds himself to STAY--"stop thinking about yourself"--and instead think about serving Ha-Shem and praying to him at least an hour and a half every day to ask for his guidance.

He has changed his position on the Mattering Map again--he is not just an ethical heroic striver but also a Jewish transcender.

DONALD TRUMP AND ABRAHAM LINCOLN ON THE MATTERING MAP 

                               Planned Kim Il Trump Statue at the Trump Presidential Library

Donald Trump is an example of an individualist competitor who thinks that his life matters only if he matters more than anyone else.  That's why he becomes so angry when someone disagrees with him, challenges him, or just doesn't profess to love him as much as he loves himself.  That's why he must hate every person who stands up to him or who does not bow down to him.  That's why he can never have any friends because friends respect one another as equals.

When Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic interviewed Trump a year ago, they asked him if his second term felt different from his first.  He said it did.  "The first time, I had two things to do--run the country and survive--I had all these crooked guys.  And the second time, I run the country and the world."  A few days ago, Parker and Scherer reported that a Trump confidant had told them: "He's been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live."

Previously, I have written about Trump's grandiose narcissism and the belief of his followers that he has been chosen by God.

For Trump, his life matters because he thinks he's the most powerful person to ever live--because he thinks he runs the country and the world--and therefore he matters more than any other human being who has ever lived.

Trump often compares himself with Abraham Lincoln.  But while Lincoln was politically ambitious, his ambition was different from Trump's.  Although Goldstein never mentions Lincoln, he is a good example of a political fame-seeking socializer whose noble ambition makes Trump's juvenile craving for attention look petty by contrast. 

I have written about Lincoln's ambition and his suicidal depression when he thought that his ambitious strivings might never be fulfilled.  For example, at age 32, Lincoln was plunged into one of his deepest bouts of melancholic misery while serving as an Illinois state legislator.  He withdrew into his room in Springfield and stopped attending sessions of the Legislature.  He considered committing suicide, and his friends removed all sharp instruments from his room.  He spoke with his best friend--Joshua Speed--who later reported the conversation to William Herndon:

In the deepest of his depression, he said one day he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived; and that to connect his name with the events transpiring in his day and generation, and so impress himself upon them as to link his name with something that would redound to the interest of his fellow-men, was what he desired to live for.

22 years later, shortly after Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, he reminded Speed of this earlier conversation about his ambition for doing something great so that he would be remembered forever, and he told Speed: "I believe that in this measure, my fondest hopes will be realized."

Lincoln thought his life would matter if he could link his name to the vindication of the American principle of equal liberty by the emancipation of slaves.  Trump thinks his life matters if he can exercise such absolute power over the world that everyone will be forced to pay attention to him.

THE MATTERING OF TRANSCENDERS IS SPECIAL

Goldstein does not rank any of the different kinds of mattering projects as better than the others.  And she warns against the mistake of universalizing one's own mattering project by moving from "this is what most matters to me, if I'm to matter" to "this is what ought to matter to everyone, if they're to matter."  

She does say, however, that the transcenders are special in that "there is no greater sense of mattering than that experienced by transcenders" (193).  She explains:

To be a transcender is to believe that your personal existence has a role to play in the narrative of eternity.  You would not be at all unless you had a role to play in the drama of all of existence.  There is no greater mattering that you can conceive for yourself, short of imagining that you are yourself a transcendent being existing on an exalted plane beyond other mortals--in other words, short of lunacy.  Compared to transcendent mattering, any other sense of mattering limps far behind, which again explains why psychologists keep producing data showing that the religious and spiritual report comparatively higher levels of life satisfaction (197).

What I see here is a suggestion of Goldstein's envy of the transcenders for having a greater sense of mattering than she does.  Or perhaps it's a regret that she lost the transcenders' sense of mattering when she lost her ultra-Orthodox Jewish faith at age fourteen.  As she reports in her book on Spinoza, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, she attended an ultra-Orthodox all-girls high school, where her favorite teacher--Mrs. Schoenfeld--warned the girls that they must never read Spinoza because he was a Jew who became an atheist.  But then as Mrs. Schoenfeld described his atheistic philosophizing and how the Jewish community in Amsterdam had excommunicated him as a heretic, Goldstein felt an attraction to him: "The thought occurred to me that he must have been a lovable man.  I sat in Mrs. Schoenfeld's class, and I felt that I loved him" (47).

Goldstein became a professional philosopher whose sense of mattering comes from her being an intellectual heroic striver who finds her life's purpose in achieving intellectual excellence.  But she still feels some faint longing for that most intense sense of mattering that she once had as an ultra-Orthodox high school girl.

She hinted this in one of her conversations with Frank Meeink:

Frank asked me once about my own Jewish faith and observance.  We were in an Uber returning from the quirky marina where his waterlogged boat is still docked.

When I come clean to him about my lack of religious belief and observance, he gave me his lopsided grin and tells me that it's all okay, but he hopes I know I'm going to hell.  (A joke.  Frank doesn't believe in hell.)

Wait a minute, I say, grinning back.  You of all people have got to believe in redemption.

"Yeah, you're right," he says.  "Me of all people.  I gotta believe in redemption even if it ends up killing me." 

Doesn't their awkward joking about believing in redemption suggest their aching longing for religious transcendence? 

In my next post, I will argue that Darwinian Lockean liberalism supports Goldstein's theory of the Mattering Instinct.