Harper’s Notes (10/28/24)

Towers of Babel: In The Harper Review’s second essay of the autumn quarter, contributing editor Francesco Rahe transports us back to the spring of 2024, when the University of Chicago’s campus became the staging ground of political protests regarding the war in Israel and Gaza. Specifically, Rahe remembers a religious studies class in which his professor, with hands over his eyes, “asked why we were here, studying in such circumstances.” Rahe takes up his professor’s question in earnest. Turning our attention to R. F. Kuang’s Babel, the Rāmāyaṇa, the Mahābhārata, and C.S. Lewis, Rahe asks: what is the point of scholarship in the face of real moral struggle? Does it amount to mere “fiddling as Rome burns?” Or might its “quiet, constant labor” carve out the very space for humanity that, on the outside, we find ourselves so dreadfully without?

Crises of faith: Written in terse, trenchant prose, Pär Lagerkvist’s novel Barabbas is the ultimate exploration of the crisis of faith. Barabbas, the criminal acquitted in Christ’s stead, is a haunted man, witness to things nobody can explain. Darkness descending on Golgotha at the moment of the condemned rabbi’s death; the empty tomb where the crucified man’s body was laid to rest; a man with strange, lusterless eyes, reportedly brought back from the realm of the dead by the one some call the Son of God. Now, hopeful whisperings around Jerusalem tell of the crucified man’s triumphant return, the overthrow of Israel’s oppressors, and the world’s cleansing by fire. Even Barabbas, ever skeptical, begins to wonder: perhaps the man who died in my place really is the son of God? In the end, however, Barabbas cannot bring himself to accept Christ’s divinity; all he can say is I want to believe. In relating Barabbas’s tragic descent into doubt and despair, Lagerkvist raises troubling questions about the basis of belief and the hope of salvation in a world ruled by cruelty and injustice.

Fantastic machines: In “Elon Dreams and Bitter Lessons,” acclaimed technology and business writer Ben Thompson of Stratechery applies his usual sharp analysis to two SpaceX and Tesla events. Thompson perhaps understandably lets the linked video, depicting the breathtaking catch of the most massive spaceship ever designed, speak for itself. But rather than simply marvel, Thompson contrasts SpaceX’s success with examples of historical skepticism—and present regret—of various European officials, who not long ago derided spacecraft reusability as a “dream.”
This word, to Thompson, only revealed that the European bureaucrats viewed (and often still view) the “world as static.” To Thompson, it was precisely because Musk had a dream that SpaceX blew Arianespace (a French company) out of the water. By acting unlike a business, SpaceX set a goal of manufacturing dramatically cheaper rockets and worked backward.
But extrapolating further, Thompson then applies this approach to explain—and defend—Tesla’s mediocre-at-best “We, Robot” event which previewed the company’s new “Robotaxi.” As it stands, Tesla is far behind competitors like Waymo, mostly because Waymo can use fancy LiDAR sensors that Tesla cars do not have. Waymo, however, cannot dream. Citing Rich Sutton’s 2019 article “The Bitter Lesson”, Thompson reminds his readers that autonomous systems forced into human-designed categories will always lose out to systems that ride the wave of Moore’s law. Though Tesla certainly has much to prove, their massive deployment makes a path towards full autonomy possible—something that Waymo has shut itself off from. For Thompson, starting with the dream brings one the necessary clarity to fulfill it. In other words, Wenn ihr wollt, ist es kein Märchen…

No country for old women: “Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?” says an enticing voiceover in Coralie Fargeat’s new body horror film, The Substance. The movie depicts a celebrity past her prime (Demi Moore) who attempts to reverse her aging with a black-market drug. This substance literally births a younger version of the celebrity (Margaret Qualley). The woman’s two bodies embrace radically different lives, one as a reclusive hag and the other as a hedonistic ingenue, until their greed and jealousy lead to mutual destruction.
The Substance is darkly humorous, but under the gore, its message feels too conservative. In this story, a woman’s desire to transcend the fate that her society has put on her is anything but normal: the woman dreaming “of a better version” of herself must be a narcissist. The substance in The Substancesymbolizes a hyperbolic form of plastic surgery or weight-loss drug. Through its body horror, the film crafts a cautionary tale about artificially changing oneself, instead of accepting that these substances could be valid forms of self-transcendence.
But is it not also a normal human urge to want to escape ourselves? The desire to transcend is intrinsic to the human experience, especially for women, whose aging often leads to their further subjugation. And who’s to say that a tool for attaining this transcendence can’t be plastic surgery or weight loss drugs that promise a lighter, tauter, or more voluptuous self? Women are caught in a Catch-22 where they are judged for being themselves and also judged for the methods they use to escape that self.
Humans are preoccupied with transcending to something other, greater, or past themselves. The problem is that our societies judge different forms of transcendence unequally. In Western culture, transcendence for women requires abandoning some of their femininity. In The Substance, a woman attempts the opposite and transcends to the uber-feminine, younger version of herself liberated by youth and beauty. She uses the substance to make this fleeting freedom into something everlasting, but the film turns her fate into a cautionary tale, and she becomes a slave to the drug. The Substance sets out to be a feminist critique about the treatment of aging women, but in doing so, it unfairly judges the forms and devices women turn to for transcendence in the real world.