Karpowitz and Patterson, The Politics of Individualism

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In The Politics of Individualism (Oxford University Press, 2025), Christopher F. Karpowitz and Kelly D. Patterson make an important contribution by defining a new construct, moral individualism. They show that it is prevalent in the USA and may help explain various concerning outcomes, from resistance to public health measures to low voter turnout.

This post is a short review. Anyone who is attending this year’s Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association is welcome to an authors-meet-critics session about the book on September 6 from 8:00 to 9:30 am (early on a Sunday morning!) with comments by Michigan’s Yanna Krupnikov, Stanford’s Elizabeth Mitchell Elder, North Carolina’s Marc J. Hetherington, and me.

Karpowitz and Patterson define moral individualism as the conjunction of two beliefs: 1) any “authorities external to the self’ must curtail or abridge a person’s liberty, and 2) “only moral choices that are self-authorized are legitimate” (p. 32).

They measure this construct in nationally representative samples using an ingenious survey design. In part, they ask respondents to name who is most important when they’re deciding how to live their lives or what is best for society. The ten response options include a religious leader, a scientist or expert, and a family member, among others.

Respondents are then asked to evaluate ten statements about how to treat their chosen source, e.g., “Nobody, not even [the favored source] can decide what is right and wrong, except for me” and “The world has many truths, and whatever I learned from [the favored source] is just one of them.”

A moral individualist is someone who does not feel bound by what their own most important sources may say.

Scores on this scale do not correlate strongly with measures of economic individualism, such as “Any person who is willing to work hard has a good chance of succeeding.” Thus economic and moral individualism are not the same construct. Likewise, moral individualism does not have a partisan valence: it is found on both sides of the aisle. It does not correlate strongly with attitudes toward Donald Trump or MAGA.

Moral individualism does, however, correlate with important outcomes, even when other factors are controlled. It predicts lower odds of voting and serving other people, less commitment to family, less religious attendance, weaker sense of efficacy (confidence that one can make a difference), less support for patriotism, much less support for public health measures during COVID, and more suspicion that other people were violating COVID restrictions. Controlling for party, ideology and support for Donald Trump, moral individualism correlated with less opposition to the riot on January 6.

Traditionally, governments have tried to counteract moral individualism. For example, public schools and colleges (as well as private and parochial ones) not only instruct students to honor various external authorities–from the Constitution to science–but they also present the school itself as something that should be honored. Military recruitment campaigns often emphasize one’s duty to country. In WWI, Uncle Sam said, “I want you for U.S. Army!” Karpowitz and Patterson trace the evolution of the all-volunteer Army’s slogans from the communitarian “Join the People Who Have Joined the Army” (1973-1980) through “Be All You Can Be” (1980-2000) to the individualistic “Army of One” (2001-6).

State-supported efforts to combat moral individualism may not work today and could provoke a backlash. Indeed, there may be legitimate debates about whether and in what ways moral individualism is a public problem. Moral individualism correlates with outcomes like religious attendance and patriotism–but also voting and political confidence–which may concern some of us but not others.

In any case, institutions apart from the government have stakes. For example, the statements that measure moral individualism are explicit rejections of the various kinds of authority that religions tend to claim, and (as noted) the construct correlates with lower church attendance. So religions might want to work against moral individualism.

I couldn’t improve on the authors’ analysis of the American population (by way of large samples). But I am curious about distinctions that might emerge in more intensive qualitative studies, particularly if the samples included relatively thoughtful and self-conscious subjects. I think that people who are moral individualists could differ on dimensions captured by three broad questions:

1. To what extent are you concerned about other people’s moral autonomy?

You can believe that your life is your own business and that no one should interfere with it. That belief can be the basis for not feeling compelled to do anything for anyone else. Or you can believe that you and all other humans have the right to be the authors of their own lives and that this principle is worth fighting for.

Let’s say you are an American who believes that every human being has a right to moral autonomy. You should probably conclude that your own moral autonomy is pretty extensive and safe but that other people (from those incarcerated in US prisons to all citizens of North Korea) are not able to decide for themselves what is right. This is a reason to work and even sacrifice to enhance all people’s moral autonomy.

Karpowitz and Patterson ask people to respond to the statement, “Only I can decide what is right. I cannot even trust [my preferred source] to help me decide.” I am curious whether respondents would say that other people should also be allowed to decide what is right for them (most Americans would probably agree so far) and that they have an obligation to defend other people’s freedom (which would probably be rarer). This distinction would divide selfish or egoistic moral individualists from altruistic ones.

2. How demanding is it to decide for yourself what is right?

Karpowitz and Patterson ask for responses to this prompt: “My own judgment is more important than [my favorite source’s] judgment.” Moral individualists agree with that statement.

But what must an individual do to make a judgment? Some people may think of judgment as synonymous with “preference” or even “desire.” Nothing should be binding on me except what I happen to want. But at least some people may think that the burden to decide what is right falls on the individual and is a heavy one.

In breaking with the Catholic Church, Martin Luther upheld the individual obligation of each sinner to discern the actual truth. He was not relativistic or morally permissive (at all) but was a kind of moral individualist.

Michael Foucault defined spirituality as “the search, practice, and experience with which the subject carries out the transformations on himself that are necessary to have access to the truth” (Foucault 1982). According to practitioners of spirituality, to know the truth, one must make oneself deserving of it, which may require intensive study, prayer, meditation, confession, direct engagement with the original Word, or even fasting and self-mortification.

To be sure, spiritual practices can be collective, but they can also be individual or even solitary. Science, on the other hand, presumes that truth arises from organized, transparent, cumulative work that does not require any particular kind of spiritual preparation. Thus we might imagine that some serious practitioners of spirituality are moral individualists, whereas scientists should not be.

We could divide moral individualists between those who think that deciding what is right is hard and those who think it comes automatically. Emerson, cited several times in the book as a moral individualist, may also be a serious spiritual striver, in the way that Foucault means.

3. What is the role of other people in supporting your moral individuality?

Reformation theologians offered a particular kind of moral individualism when they preached the Priesthood of All Believers and the doctrines of Faith Alone and Scripture Alone. They removed the mediation of the organized Church, claiming that each believer stands alone before God.

The question then arose: Why should there be Protestant churches at all? The dominant answer was that although each person is ultimately responsible, we need other people’s support. Someone who holds this view might agree with this item in Karpowitz and Patterson, “My own judgment is more important than [my favorite authority’s] judgment,” even if they’ve chosen their pastor as their authority. God judges you as an individual, weighing your personal faith; you get no points from the clergy’s behavior. Nevertheless, most Protestants have assumed that they are more likely to find their way to truth and good behavior if they belong to an organized community whose congregants and leaders can give them reminders and encouragement.

In sum, I think that moral individualism could be compatible with some altruistic, introspective, and communitarian values. I suspect that those combinations are rare and that most Americans who score high on Karpowitz’ and Patterson’s scale are also selfish, unreflective, and isolated. But the exceptions might be important.

Source: Michel Foucault, L’herméneutique du suject: cours au Collège de France (1981-2) (Gallimard, 2001), pp. 16-18. See also: the classical liberals versus the “egoists”; bootstrapping value commitments; Foucault’s spiritual exercises; why be introspective? etc.

How Do We Renovate American Democracy at the 250th?

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You might think that the USA must change deeply over the next decade, which will unfold 250 years after the decade in which our republic originally took shape and will include the first eight years after the Trump Administration.

You might also think that this change should be “civic.” Perhaps we need reforms to make our republic and society more civic, or we should change our economy, environment, and other aspects of our world in civic ways–or both.

To advance this conversation, we need sharper definitions of the word “civic” and concrete ideas about what civic reforms should look like in the late 2020s and 2030s.

One of the best places to look is the new special issue of Daedalus entitled “How Do We Renovate American Democracy at the 250th?” It grew out of the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship and is edited by Danielle Allen, Stephen B. Heintz, and Eric P. Liu. It is entirely open-access. I have not yet read every article, but all the contributors are excellent, and the topics are compelling, ranging from congressional reform to high school civic education, from local journalism to tech. platforms.

I offer the concluding contribution, entitled “Building Institutions to Improve Civic Culture.” The abstract says:

Americans must disagree better to sustain a healthier civic culture. This is not only a matter of individual behavior and values but also a question of institutional design. An example of an institution that generally supported disagreement, conversation, and collaboration in the twentieth century was the metropolitan daily newspaper, but its business model has collapsed. To recover civic culture, we need business models (defined broadly) for new institutions that can enable discussion and self-governance.

In the article, I actually argue that disagreeing well is insufficient. We must also produce and protect common-pool resources. For me, that combination comes close to defining the word “civic.”

To quote a bit more from my piece:

I think the main challenge of our moment is to develop civic organizations that can flourish and grow, teach civic skills and values, and serve as venues for constructive disagreement. The “upswing” that furnishes the title of the book by Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, … was an impressive period of innovation and expansion in U.S. civil society from 1900 to 1960.6 If we saw a similar civic renaissance today, not only would more people participate in familiar groups that discuss issues and manage common-pool resources (such as congregations and other traditional associations) but new forms would emerge to meet the needs of our time.

For example, during the period that Putnam and Romney Garrett label “the upswing,” reliable daily newspapers became prevalent in the United States. By 1972, 69 percent of Americans told the General Social Survey (GSS) that they read a newspaper “every day.”7 It is easy enough to envision a daily publication about serious matters, written by professionals to inform a whole community. The hard part is the business model. Why would many people pay for such a product? The recipe that sustained metropolitan daily newspapers during the 1900s included hard news plus human-interest stories, comics, sports, gossip, and other features aimed at various members of each household, all funded by a combination of revenue from subscribers and occasional readers and advertisers. Once the internet captured advertising revenue, this model disintegrated. By 2014, just one-quarter of respondents told the GSS that they read a newspaper daily; the GSS subsequently retired the question, as it ceased to be a useful measure of news consumption.

Also during the upswing, many colleges and universities offered some measure of civic education while contributing knowledge and culture to their communities and serving as significant venues for public debate. Universities collected state subsidies, tuition, philanthropy, and clinical fees, and they offered economic mobility, access to licensed professions, ambitious research prized by industry and the military, vigorous social life, and quasi-professional sports, along with civic benefits. This model is now under considerable stress, though it has not fully collapsed, as with the daily newspaper.8

Similarly, Putnam and Romney Garrett show that after 1910, high schools rapidly spread across the United States and became another pillar of civic culture, not only preparing students to be more capable citizens but also serving as foci for adult community life.9 No national policy made this happen. Instead, most communities found that they needed at least one high school to be economically competitive, and they taxed themselves to build and maintain their own schools. This model worked in many localities, although spending was never adequate in poor communities or for students of color. This model survives, notwithstanding consolidations that have removed high schools from some smaller towns and growing state subsidies for private schools.

Today, it is not hard to envision a social media platform that serves as an excellent venue for disagreeing well. Any platform must use an algorithm to decide what material each user sees, and a good algorithm would favor substantiative content from a deliberately diverse range of views. The question is how to capitalize such a platform so it can expand to rival the huge for-profit social media outlets of the present, which do the opposite for billions of users, favoring material that induces outrage and reinforces users’ prior assumptions. In other words, the problem is the same as the one that confronted proponents of professional journalism circa 1900, but we haven’t yet found a workable business model for our time.

Source: Peter Levine, “Building Institutions to Improve Civic Culture,” Daedalus 155(3) Summer 2026, pp. 203-207. See also: Putnam and Garrett, The Upswing (a video discussion with me).

the humanities for specialists and for everyone

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Imagine a person giving attention to an artifact, something that another human being has made. A toddler listens to a story, a runner hears a song on a headset, a tourist observes a painting in a museum, or a believer listens to a sermon.

This is one fundamental experience of the humanities. Notice that anyone can do it, even a baby.

Now imagine that several people attend together to something that one or many other human beings have created. Perhaps several students discuss a written text, or a congregation responds to a sermon about a passage of scripture, or a musical group explores a composition.

Attention has now become far more complex. One may attend to the object (such as the text, the song, or the image) and perhaps to the person who created it; to the other people who are also attending to it; to the thoughts and emotions that arise in one’s mind; and to whatever one expresses, often to one’s own surprise. The situation is dynamic in the sense that your view of the artifact can change, eliciting a response from you that others may hear and counter, changing your view again.

Third, imagine that the participants in a discussion are concerned about issues and problems beyond the artifact and beyond their group. In a book club about a current novel, a reader may offer a comment or a question about gender roles in our society. A purpose of a musical performance may be to motivate the audience to take action. Congregants may discuss what they should do in response to Amos 5:24, “But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.”

The complexity of the actual world vastly exceeds our capacity to reason about it. We must reason using models, which are simpler artifacts that resemble selected aspects of the world. A cultural artifact is often a model of the world that we can employ or criticize.

To summarize the argument so far: the three fundamental experiences of the humanities are private attention to an artifact, collective attention to an artifact, and participation in a public sphere in which an artifact serves as a model for deliberating on what we should do.

These experiences should remain connected. Even in a public debate, one has–or ought to have–a private relationship to the artifact, what we might call a space of “solitude” even when in company. The public sphere gains its richness from the contributions of many people who have retained their individuality.

We can explore the benefits of these three categories of experience. As just one example, a meta-analysis of the effects of reading fiction finds benefits for literacy, empathy, happiness, and even longevity (Mar, Dunk & Shoemaker 2027).

However, I would not rest the case for the humanities on their outcomes. Results probably vary. Other activities may also have benefits, perhaps even clearer ones. If you try to maximize mental health by finding the optimal mix of reading, running, meditation, and medication, reading might drop out of the formula. Finally, whether an experience of the humanities yields positive returns depends on how we do it. Reading fiction (for example) is not like a pill that lowers cholesterol. It is part of a life, and what happens next depends on us.

Instead of resting the case for the humanities on their outcomes, I would emphasize their intrinsic value. After all, what is the point of living at all? Not to boost our abilities to accomplish the next task until we die, but rather to use our time well. One way–not the only way–to employ our time well is to attend to what others have made, both alone and in company.

I noted that all human beings can have these experiences of the humanities, and probably almost all do so, at least to some extent. Expertise is not required. At the same time, any exercise of attention can deepen with time, focus, and guidance from other people. I can get more out of a poem by Elizabeth Bishop today than I would have gleaned from the same work 30 years ago. Fifty years ago, I was alive but had not even heard of Bishop. And today, some other people can get more from her work than I can because they have developed more relevant expertise. In this sense, anyone can be on a journey to heighten or enrich or broaden our attention.

Today we have expert humanists, such as professors of the humanistic disciplines, curators, editors, critics, and clergy and schoolteachers. Considering that all human beings can experience the humanities, what is the value of their expertise?

First, the scholarly humanities are valuable for their ultimate influence on the layperson’s experience of artifacts. This does not mean that every specialist must always address a lay audience directly. Specialization allows experts to exchange ideas efficiently without having to reexplain their methods, background knowledge, or basic concepts every time. Jargon has immense practical value. Nevertheless, the purpose of a whole body of scholarly literature is ultimately to influence the experience of non-specialists.

Elizabeth Bishop died in 1979, and I never came close to meeting her. A vast amount of verse by all kinds of people is available on the Internet. Why then do I sometimes read Bishop? Scholars and critics, who have read much more poetry than I have, have made her canonical. She features in anthologies that I (as a light reader of poetry) am likely to encounter. Sometimes, an anthology offers useful notes or prefatory comments or a biographical sketch that helps me to understand a poet in her context. When things go well, an extensive and perhaps somewhat technical scholarly discussion can filter down to an entry in an anthology that gives me an experience that I would otherwise miss. Similarly, a professional jazz performance benefits from musicology, often transmitted to the performers during their education. And any k12 or college course should benefit from scholarship.

Scholarship can have a positive valence, helping us to see why and how to enjoy an object more. It can have a neutral valence, simply helping us to analyze an artifact. Or it can be critical, in the sense of negative–revealing flaws in the original. The point of scholarship is not to maximize the pleasure that we take from any given artifact or to convince us to value it more, but rather to help us attend to it better. In the extreme, research can persuade us to turn away from a text after we know more about it, although in that case, I think we should turn to another work rather than giving up.

Second, just as ordinary people employ cultural artifacts to make points about the social world, so do professional humanists. Because a cultural artifact is a model of our world, professionals and experts can use it effectively to argue about the world beyond.

I agree with at least two points from the Washington University/Vanderbilt Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. First,

The problem is not that many scholars are politically active, or that they see their scholarly work as relevant to their activism. Scholars are members of the polity who rightly take an interest in social problems. Moreover, insofar as their scholarly competence provides them with relevant expertise, it is perfectly acceptable — some would say obligatory (Chomsky 1967) — for scholars to advocate for concrete reforms in light of their expertise

Second:

The problem is not that scholarship in these areas is often critical or oppositional, aiming to debunk or correct the presuppositions of previous scholarship and the wider set of established cultural norms that scholarship reflects.

For the authors of this report, the main problem is not either of these but rather “distortion,” which arises in its “most straightforward form … when otherwise traditional scholarship is constrained by disciplinary norms to yield results that have been determined in advance to be required by a political or social project.” The report claims, “Every field we have studied shows some signs of … a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity.”

I recognize examples that meet this description, but I am not sure that I would characterize them as prevalent or getting worse. Instead, I would ask the following evaluative question (which I do not find in the Report): Do humanist participate in the public sphere?

To enter a public discussion, you can have a political agenda; in fact, it can be a contribution. You can adopt radical and unpopular views. And you can even come from a homogeneous community of thinkers. Intellectual diversity is an asset, but not the only one; and in any case, groups of people who appear philosophically homogeneous from afar are often focused on their own worthy debates–whether they happen to be comparative literature professors or evangelical pastors.

However, to participate genuinely in the public debate, you must attend to a real audience. Attending to them means figuring out what they think, value, and aim for. You might decide to change your own mind or at least adjust the questions that you consider timely and pressing. Or you may want to change their minds, but that requires knowing them. If your goal is to inflience the world, you must also thoughtfully choose which audiences to engage. No change will come from offering persuasive arguments to people who already agree.

One reason that some humanists–I do not know how many–fail to engage the public is that they reject or abhor millions of their fellow citizens on moral grounds. Another obstacle is a romantic view that all real people agree, or would agree if only they were liberated from propaganda. Effective rhetoric requires investigating what other people really think, in all their diversity and complexity. This is partly a question for research, but there is no substitute for interacting with a variety of fellow citizens and paying attention to the response.

To conclude: the core of the humanities is a set of solitary and collaborative experiences that all human beings can have and whose primary value is intrinsic, although the humanities also help us to debate the social world. Expertise and professional scholarship can enrich those experiences, even when the scholarship is critical. Experts need not always be directly engaged with non-experts, but the scholarly discussion and the public sphere must be connected.

I would ask to what extent the public and professional humanists are genuinely attentive to each other, in the sense of striving to understand and influence one another. If there is a gap, I would charge professional humanists with fixing it. Perhaps laypeople would be well advised to pay more attention to scholarship. However, only the scholars themselves can convince everyone else to give us tuition, donations, royalties, and tax revenues and to entrust their children’s education to us. And that requires attending to them.

Source: Raymond A. Mar, Rebecca J. Dunk, Lilly H. Shoemaker, “The benefits of Reading Narrative Fiction,” Current Opinion in Psychology, volume 73, 202; the Washington University/Vanderbilt University Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. See also: “The world wants the humanities”; why the humanities could never be automated; the humanities as civic education; paradigms of attention, etc.

Does reflective patriotism depend on a positive assessment of one’s country’s history?

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The Educating for American Democracy roadmap asks all educators (and policymakers–and perhaps students) to address this challenge:

“How can we offer an account of U.S. constitutional democracy that is simultaneously honest about the wrongs of the past without falling into cynicism, and appreciative of the founding of the United States without tipping into adulation?”

I suppose my personal assessment of America’s record would lean toward the critical side, emphasizing the centrality of conquest and slavery in the American story and the oscillation of liberation and subjugation in our history. For example, I would want students seriously to consider “the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil.”

That does not mean that my view is entirely negative. I once tried to capture my conflicted take in a palindrome:

America, you Jerusalem reborn!
No profligate, old-world, ruined people, you.
Behold: peace. You’re principle without pain and dishonor.
Dishonor and pain without principle: your peace.
Behold, you people: ruined world!
Old, profligate. No reborn Jerusalem you, America.

How to assess America is an appropriate topic for disagreement and debate. Educating for American Democracy invites students to debates of this kind. The Tocquevillan concept of “reflective patriotism” is broad enough to encompass various responses to America’s overall record.

But my question expands to three related ones.

First, the value-judgment itself: How should we reason about America’s record? How should we think about progress and failure, sin and redemption, promissory notes and accumulated balances? Is it helpful to evaluate the US in comparison to other countries, including the one from which we won independence or the former British colony just to our north? Should we still tremble for our country when we reflect that God is just?

Second, a normative/conceptual issue: Should patriotism depend on a positive assessment of a country’s history? I believe that I am a patriot, and I view my work on topics like civics as an everyday example of patriotism. I’ve described my motivations for visiting Kyiv and Nablus in 2025–in opposition to my government’s policies–as patriotic. But I do not base my commitment to my national community on a positive view its past. That seems too contingent to me, like loving one’s children because they’re so well behaved.

Besides, I would advocate constitutional patriotism as a virtue for people whose national histories are clearly problematic, such as citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany. Like other forms of love, love of country is about concern and sacrifice, not about giving the object a high rating.

Finally, an empirical question: Would teaching students to hold a more favorable view of America cause them to act more patriotically?

As with most empirical questions, the answer is probably: It depends. One set of variables involves the inputs: requirements, assignments, pedagogical methods, and teachers who are prepared for the subject in various ways. Another set of variables involves the students, who vary in age, background assumptions, and experiences with our polity. (For instance, it is likely that America should be presented differently to kindergarteners and teenagers.) And a third set of variables measures the outcomes, which may include beliefs, habits, and dispositions.

I have not found compelling empirical research on this topic. One body of evidence that is gaining attention involves measuring two different psychological constructs. One construct is identifying with one’s country, measured with items like “Being an American is an important part of my self-image” and “In general I’m glad to be an American.” The other construct is national narcissism, an internationally replicated scale that captures a feeling that one’s country has superior qualities that are being disparaged, particularly by foreigners (Cichocka & Cislak 2020). While national identification correlates with support for constitutional democracy, national narcissism predicts authoritarian populist views (Marchlewska et al 2022).

This cross-sectional evidence does not tell us whether schools can promote national identification, nor whether they can do so without enhancing national narcissism. I would favor patriotism without narcissism if schools can accomplish that. But I think that one of the most serious threats to our republic is national narcissism, and I would guard vigilantly against it.

The palindrome is distantly inspired by Yehuda Alharizi’s “Palindrome for a Patron” [12th or 13th century] as translated by Peter Cole and cited by Harold Bloom in “The Lost Jewish Culture,” The New York Review of Books, June 28, 2007. Other sources: Aleksandra Cichocka, & Aleksandra Cislak. “Nationalism as collective narcissism.” Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 34 (2020): 69-74; Marchlewska, Marta, Aleksandra Cichocka, Aleksandra Furman, and Aleksandra Cislak. “Who respects the will of the people? Support for democracy is linked to high secure national identity but low national narcissism.” British Journal of Social Psychology 61, no. 2 (2022): 599-621. See also: American exceptionalism, revisited; anxieties about American exceptionalism; Teaching Civics in Kyiv; more on teaching patriotism (2006); a pluralistic 250th and a palindrome (2007).

on translation as spiritual practice

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“The feeling that the world is a bounded whole–that is the mystical.” — Wittgenstein

The Spanish word quedar can be translated as to remain, to stay, to meet, to fit, to suit (as in Ese color te queda bien), to be located, to end up, to agree, or to be left with (as in Me quedan 20 euros).

One of those meanings is “to agree.” That English verb can be translated back into Spanish as estar de acuerdo, acordar, convenir, coincidir, aceptar, or, again, quedar.

One of those meanings is acordar. Rendered back in English, that verb can mean to agree, decide, or make an arrangement, or–if it’s in a reflexive form–to remember. In turn, “to decide” could be conveyed in Spanish by decidir (or decidirse), resolver, acordar or determinar.

I chose quedar because it has a famously wide range of meanings, a bit like rendre or tenir in French. But notice that each of the words that I’ve mentioned connects to a unique list of words in the other language. This is typical. Putting two languages together creates a pattern of intertwined connections, like an arabesque design.

When you study a language, you memorize foreign words as sets of distinct words in your home language. In a given context, quedar means one thing, such as “to stay” or else “to agree.” A translator should know–or look up–the full list of meanings for each word and must pick the best one for each sentence. Sometimes there is no single best choice.

But once you know the language reasonably well, a word no longer decomposes into several words in a different language. Now it covers its own space. Presumably (I don’t have good enough Spanish to know) each use of quedar carries an implicit trace of its whole range of meanings.

Todo pasa y todo queda, 
pero lo nuestro es pasar, 
pasar haciendo caminos, 
caminos sobre el mar. 

Everything passes and everything stays,
But ours is to cease to be. 
As we go, we make a highway,
A highway on the sea. 

Antonio Machado, Proverbios y Cantares (1912): XLIV

Here I’ve rendered the first line with the verbs “to pass” and “to stay,” but I had other choices. Pasar could mean to go through, to happen (¿que pasa?), to spend time, etc. And we have already seen the range of meanings for quedar. Its other senses are missing in the English word “stay,” but that verb has its own range of meanings, including to visit and to prevent something from happening. Those are absent in Machado’s original.

I chose “to pass” for several reasons, including the sonic resemblance to pasar as well as some vague sense of English allusions, such as “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh” (Ecclesiastes). I chose “to stay” as a single syllable that was a near-rhyme for “ways.” Translation is not only about matching words but also about syntax, rhythm, and sound.

Artificial Intelligence is good at translating prose. It generally chooses an appropriate equivalent for each word. Thanks to AI tools, I have been able to read articles in languages, such as Japanese, of which I know nothing. I have also developed a careful practice of asking Claude to list all the dictionary definitions of words in languages, such as Sanskrit and Pali, that interest me. I hope that viewing these lists gives me some sense of how the words work in their original languages, although I must look through that glass darkly.

What AI cannot do is give a person the experience of parsing the whole world a bit differently by beginning to think in a different language. In turn, that experience teaches us that anyone’s model of the world is limited and contingent, and much always remains beyond anyone’s grasp.

A language is a whole system of meanings. It allows us to work with the world, yet it coexists with other systems that present the world differently. Those other systems include not only human languages (which are, after all, rather similar and interconnected), but also other consciousnesses. To glimpse this plurality is to see our own world as if from beyond it.

In the detail from a 13th-century Persian mihrab that accompanies this post, each arabesque field could stand for a pair of intertwined human languages, but there are also fields across the boundaries formed by the Quranic calligraphy. And the whole mihrab is a threshold to the beyond.

Wittgenstein writes, “Das Gefühl der Welt als begrenztes Ganzes ist das mystische” (Tractatus 6:45). Acknowledging that this sentence could be translated in many ways, I will render it: “The feeling that the world is a bounded whole–that is the mystical.”

It’s another way of saying that we make our highways on the sea.

See also: Machado’s Glory is Never What I’ve Sought and Highways on the Sea; paradigms of attention; why the humanities could never be automated; and thinking both sides of the limits of human cognition. Photo credit: detail of a mihrab from Kashan (1226) in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin, via Wikimedia Commons.