Sing to Me, Muse, of the Man

The Catholic Thing

By Francis X. Maier.
Back in my years as a religion news editor (1978-93), one of my self-imposed penances was reading The Nation. A taste for diversity, we're told, is a good thing. And at the time, the magazine was remarkably "diverse," at least in its own peculiar way. It had a wide variety of outrage from the bitter Left, curated by a tribe of unhappy, closet Stalinists. Leaving it behind when I moved to a new job was a blessing. And the world today is a different place. But some things never change. The Nation is one of them, as I discovered this week wandering the Internet.
Writing for The Nation earlier this month, Orlando Reade posed the question "Why is the Right obsessed with epic poetry?" It turns out, he said, that right-wing heavies like Elon Musk are hijacking the work of the Greek poet Homer (The Iliad and The Odyssey) and Roman poet Virgil (The Aeneid) to justify their own self-serving objectives. "Epics have often shored up empires," Reade writes, and Musk's recent "daydreaming about the Trojan War" flows from his own appetite for political empire-building and a desire to colonize Mars.
An assistant professor of English in Britain, Mr. Reade has a flare for long-distance psychoanalysis. So there's more. In the case of Jordan Peterson, he suggests, epic poetry helps to "maintain his [own] dualistic psychology." The resulting right-wing "dog whistles [in Peterson's work] appear to encourage young white male readers to see their resentments of a pluralistic liberal society as justified."
Meanwhile, for wealthy venture capitalist Peter Thiel, the epic tale inspires his drive to "accomplish something world changing." And for Mark Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley royalty, the powerful characters that inhabit ancient history and its poetry undergird a "new epic vision of right-wing technocracy."
On the other hand, Emily Wilson's new translation of The Odyssey - the first by a woman, purged of "misogyny," but, alas, criticized as woke by some on the troglodyte Right - is admirable. Or so one might infer from The Nation.
The current fascination with epic Greek and Roman poems has spilled over into film. Christopher Nolan's next project - he directed Oppenheimer - is a massive-scale production of The Odyssey, set for release in 2026. On a more modest budget, Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche starred in 2024's The Return, already available for rental. The Return captures the last act of The Odyssey, wherein Odysseus (Ulysses in Roman tradition) finally returns home to his island of Ithaca and the woman he loves, his wife Penelope, after years of troubled wandering.
An obvious question poses itself, though: Why would any of this matter? And why would 2,500-year-old poems be suddenly relevant now?
For the cultural Left, the answer is easy. Homer and Virgil are just two more (among many) talented male writers unaware of their own historically determined thought crimes: patriarchy, sexism, slavery, racism - the Greeks regarded nearly all non-Greek peoples as barbaroi - violence against women, etc. Thus, they naturally appeal to ambitious men with dangerous designs. The poets' flawed brilliance, the astonishing genius of their work, has poisoned centuries of Western self-understanding.
All such literature interferes with necessary change. It subverts the arc of history. It needs to be confronted, deconstructed, revised. or simply purged. And the logic for such brutality is airtight. The past shapes the present, and the present shapes the future. In a classic Orwellian sense, controlling the past is the first step to a better future and a new humanity - whatever those might be, in the mindset of a particular ideology.
In a broader, popular sense, we live in a turbulent age, a time of radical unrest, innovation, and change when (as Marx said) "all that is solid melts into air, [and] all that is holy is profaned." People are hungry for anything grounded and permanent. Anything that can provide them with a meaningful story...