Thought and Memory

Category: Culture

The visual, literary and performing arts, with some architecture thrown in.

  • Sin Lieth at the Door

    Sin Lieth at the Door

    I. The meadow

    A meadow in high summer. A little girl in a blue dress, hair tied up in a bow, leaves her dolls at a toy tea party. At the tree line an older boy waits with a handful of wrapped sweets. She follows him across the grass toward a hole in the ground, while a grown woman’s voice recites Alice in Wonderland: “I almost think I can remember feeling a little different.” The camera stops at the mouth of the hole and cuts away. It doesn’t have to show us what happens next. The people who made it have told us.

    This is the second episode of Netflix’s East of Eden, written by Zoe Kazan, whose grandfather Elia filmed the novel with James Dean in 1955. Elia Kazan’s granddaughter inherited the family property, and treated it like hers. The little girl is Cathy Ames, and the voice is Cathy grown up, telling us this is where she was changed.

    That scene is not in the book. Worse, it stands exactly where Steinbeck put a scene that says the opposite.

    What Netflix has done to Cathy Ames is not interpretation. It is cultural vandalism: tearing out the moral architecture of an American classic, putting up something else in its place, and letting an audience that will never open the novel believe the new building is Steinbeck’s.

    In Steinbeck, the boys pay Cathy five cents apiece. Netflix puts the payment in the boy’s hand and turns it into bait. Still from East of Eden, Episode 2 (Netflix, 2026), directed by Garth Davis (Australian).

    II. What Steinbeck actually wrote

    Chapter 8 opens with one of the most famous sentences in American fiction: “I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents.” As a child may be born without an arm, Steinbeck writes, so one may be born “without kindness or the potential of conscience.” Cathy was not like other people, and never was, from birth.

    Before he shows us a single thing she does, he tells us how she works. She learned young that sex was the most disturbing force in human life, “a weapon and a threat.” At ten she “began coldly to experiment with it.” She “planned everything coldly, foreseeing difficulties and preparing for them.”

    Then the scene. Her mother hears a giggle from the carriage house, throws open the doors, and finds Cathy on the floor with her skirts up, two boys of about fourteen kneeling beside her, and her wrists tied with a rope. The doctor finds no sign she has been harmed. Cathy refuses to say a word. The boys swear she started it, that they each paid her five cents, and that she had been playing with the rope. Nobody believes them. Their fathers whip them to raw cuts, and they are shipped off to a house of correction. Her father sits through the whole meeting holding the rope, puzzled, and keeps his mouth shut.

    Steinbeck doesn’t need to take us inside her head. He told us her method one page earlier, and the rope and the coins finish the sentence. Two boys were whipped bloody for something a ten-year-old girl arranged, and she let them take it.

    That is the point of Cathy. Steinbeck gives us no trauma, no cruel father, no origin story. He makes us sit with the harder question: what if evil sometimes just is?

    III. The “doorway”

    Kazan doesn’t hide what she did. “I cannot help but read it a little differently than Steinbeck’s intention,” she told W magazine. She insists she wanted “textual support” for everything, and that wherever she went beyond the page she needed a “doorway” true to the book.

    Fine. Hold her to it.

    In the same interview she summarizes the carriage house this way: Cathy wouldn’t speak afterward, and when she did, no one believed her, and she was angry not to be believed. That is flatly wrong. Cathy never tells her story, and the whole town believes it. Her silence is what convicts the boys. The only people in Chapter 8 who are not believed are the two boys telling the truth. The woman who says she needed textual support for everything cannot accurately describe the scene she cut.

    Her real doorway is Alice in Wonderland. Near the end of the novel, hours before her suicide, Cathy remembers being a very small girl who sometimes felt surrounded by a forest of enemies, and who wrote “Drink me” on a bottle of sugar water so she could shrink and hide. Kazan, reading it as an adult “having been through lots of therapy,” calls it “a portrait of dissociation.”

    Read the passage. The fear comes “now and then.” It comes in early childhood, years before the carriage house. Nothing in it points to any person or any event. Steinbeck gives us a frightened child and pointedly refuses to tell us why she was afraid. Kazan took his silence as an invitation and wrote in the answer from her own vocabulary.

    IV. What Netflix built

    So here is what now stands where the carriage house used to be.

    The two boys are gone. They never appear. Steinbeck’s scene has not been reinterpreted. It has been deleted and replaced with its opposite.

    One older boy now leads one small girl away. Two boys and a girl who ties her own wrists is a story that demands thought. A boy luring a little girl with candy demands none. It convicts on sight.

    Look at the sweets. In the book the boys pay Cathy five cents apiece. In the series the boy holds out candy to her. The money Cathy took from them has become the bait used on her.

    And Alice, the fear Steinbeck left without a cause, has been dragged out of its chapter and planted in the meadow: the blue dress, the abandoned tea party, the rabbit hole, Carroll’s own words about being changed in the night. The passage Kazan offered as her textual warrant has become the set dressing for the scene that needed one.

    “I almost think I can remember feeling a little different.” Carroll’s words, in the grown Cathy’s voice, over a walk Steinbeck never wrote. Still from East of Eden, Episode 2 (Netflix, 2026), directed by Garth Davis (Australian).

    Steinbeck stages his scene in broad daylight, doors thrown open, the evidence lying on the floor. Netflix shows the approach and lets the dark do the rest. One is evidence. The other is a smear.

    In Steinbeck, Cathy uses the appearance of victimhood as a weapon. Netflix turns the appearance into the reality. Apparently Cathy needed a comic-book origin story, a vat of chemicals she got shoved into, some neat little wound we can point at and feel enlightened about. Steinbeck refused to give her one. Netflix gave her one anyway.

    V. Grew, the whipping, and “my property”

    Netflix does keep Cathy a manipulator with James Grew, the young Latin teacher who kills himself, and it keeps a good deal of Steinbeck: the midnight knock, the shotgun propped on the prayer books, the rumor of “trouble in Boston” that Cathy plants at dinner. But Steinbeck says only that Grew “was never seen with Cathy and no relationship was even suspected.” Netflix fills the blank with a teacher who walks her home, writes her love letters, and talks about the day she will no longer be his pupil. Now the story starts with a grown man pursuing a schoolgirl. Over it, the grown Cathy explains in voiceover how a girl learns to turn men’s attention to her own purposes. Coming minutes after the hole in the meadow, it plays as a lesson she was taught. In Steinbeck it was something she knew from the start.

    Then the whipping, where the trick is easiest to catch, because Netflix steals Steinbeck’s own words to cover it.

    In the novel the whipping has nothing to do with Grew. At sixteen Cathy refuses to go back to school, runs off to Boston, and is dragged home. Her father, who has never whipped anyone, does it badly, and only because his wife insisted. Cathy “found him out”: she screams and begs, feels the blows go lighter, and turns her face away so he can’t see there are no tears. “See you remember who you are. And don’t forget what I am.” “I won’t forget.”

    Netflix keeps those lines word for word. It even keeps the act: she stops crying the moment he leaves the room. Then it throws out the reason for the beating and writes its own. The whipping now follows Grew’s death, the father demands to know what happened between them, and out come the lines Steinbeck never wrote: “You’re my property.” “If you’ve defiled yourself, you’ve defiled my property.”

    That is not in Steinbeck either. His Mr. Ames is “a covered man” who suspects his daughter of everything and says nothing, because it is safer not to know. The mother who demanded the whipping has been written out, and so has the disobedience it punished. What’s left is a patriarch beating his daughter over her body and his ownership of it: a gender-studies sermon dropped into the middle of a scene Steinbeck wrote about a calculating girl.

    And here is the rotten joke. The father is right. “I know you did something to that young man,” he says, and she did. Netflix takes the novel’s own verdict on Cathy, puts it in the mouth of the one man it has made contemptible, and drowns it in ownership talk so the audience throws out the truth along with him.

    Notice what they made of his religion, too. Steinbeck’s Mr. Ames speaks of the authority God gave him. Netflix’s Mr. Ames goes straight from God to “You’re my property.” Scripture says the opposite. Children are “an heritage of the LORD” (Psalm 127:3). They belong to God, and a father holds authority over them as a steward who will answer for it. A Christian father who calls his daughter property has not stated his faith. He has denied it. Netflix needed him to deny it, so it wrote the denial for him.

    VI. The fire, and the missing half of a verse

    The fire mostly follows the book, and it is the most honest stretch of the episode. Cathy plans her parents’ deaths and her own staged murder with real coldness. But Netflix crushes Steinbeck’s weeks of false sweetness into one evening, and it takes the father’s line “it just needs a little authority,” which in the novel he says the night before she runs to Boston, and drops it on the night of the fire. He says it, she goes up to bed, and the windows explode. In the book the line is irony at a fool’s expense. In the series the cut makes it the fuse.

    Before he says it, though, the father reads Genesis at the table. Cain’s offering is refused, and God asks him why he is angry: “If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door.”

    And there the reading stops.

    The verse goes on: “And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.” The novel is built on those words. In Chapter 24, Lee and the old men of his family spend years learning Hebrew to settle that one clause, and find timshel: “thou mayest.” Thou mayest rule over sin. “That throws it right back on a man,” Lee says. Even in “his murder of his brother he has still the great choice.”

    Netflix quotes the novel’s central verse over a girl about to burn her parents alive, and stops one clause short of the words that say she could choose otherwise. Sin is at the door. The part about mastering it is gone. Whether anyone in the editing room meant it hardly matters. It is the whole adaptation in a single cut.

    VII. They told us

    Nobody has to guess at the motive. The makers have said it out loud. Co-showrunner Jeb Stuart told TV Insider that Cathy is “not just a bad seed” but “a product of what’s happened to her,” and that her story begins with an event in her childhood. Florence Pugh told TV Week that Kazan’s scripts let her “fill in gaps” Steinbeck left and “give Cathy context and give her motive.”

    Context and motive. Steinbeck withheld both on purpose, and they decided he had forgotten.

    Kazan’s best defense is Chapter 17, where the narrator wonders whether he was wrong to call Cathy a monster and writes that “it is easy to say she was bad, but there is little meaning unless we know why.” She quotes it accurately. She just stops reading too soon. The same paragraph says that “we cannot know what she wanted,” and that “we will never know.” Steinbeck asks the question and refuses to answer it. Kazan answered it for him and signed his name.

    VIII. Thou mayest

    Kazan says the book is about change, about not nailing people down forever as only what they are. She is right that it is about choice. That is timshel. But timshel cuts straight through her Cathy. A Cathy made by what was done to her in a hole in a meadow did not fully choose. A Cathy who chose is guilty. Kazan hands moral freedom to every character in the story except the one she rewrote.

    We do this outside of fiction too. When evil turns up without a visible cause, we panic and invent one, because a backstory lets us feel wise instead of afraid. Trauma is real, and it shapes people. But inventing it where the evidence says otherwise doesn’t make us more humane. It makes us liars, and it takes away the one thing that makes a human being worth judging at all: that he could have done otherwise.

    Steinbeck understood that. He gave us a woman who chose, again and again, and he let her be terrifying. Netflix gave us a victim with a body count and put Steinbeck’s name on it.

    Millions of people will watch this and believe Steinbeck wrote it. He didn’t. Read the book.

    The scene in the carriage house, the coins, the rope, and the half of Genesis 4:7 that Netflix left out are all still here. East of Eden, John Steinbeck (1952).

  • The Course I Would Teach

    The Course I Would Teach

    I do not teach and I am never going to. But I have spent a fair amount of time imagining what I would put on the syllabus if somebody handed me a classroom and a year, and the daydream has gotten specific enough that I may as well write it down.

    It started with a complaint, the way these things do. A student signs up for a course on American film. The first week is The Searchers. He watches John Wayne ride out after a girl taken by Comanches and spend five years looking for her, and he watches what that search does to the man doing it. Then he goes to class, where he learns that the film is a document of settler colonialism, that the frontier myth is doing ideological work, and that the camera has rendered certain people invisible. By Friday he can write two thousand words explaining what is wrong with the picture.

    Nobody asks him the simplest question in the room. Is it any good? What is it about? What did John Ford believe about loyalty, and about home, and about the cost of keeping a promise? Those questions are not on the syllabus, because the course was not built to ask them. It was built to teach a method, and the method is suspicion, and once a student has it he can aim it at anything: Rockwell, Disney, Capra, a hymnal, a country record, a Sears catalog. The verdict is written before the evidence is in.

    That is thin gruel for four years and a great deal of money. A young man trained that way graduates able to convict any object you set in front of him and unable to tell you what he loves. He can dismantle a Rockwell cover in an afternoon. He cannot tell you what Rockwell was trying to paint, or whether he pulled it off, or what a country loses when the thing in the picture is gone.

    So here is the other version, the one I keep building in my head. Not a course that forgives everything in advance, which would be worse and a good deal more embarrassing. One that reads a work before it judges it, that takes the movies and songs and drawings ordinary Americans actually loved as seriously as it takes Melville, and that ends on the only question worth ending on. Out of everything we were handed, what is worth keeping, and what are you going to give your children?

    Two semesters. I would call it The American Imagination.

    II.

    Every course has a question underneath it, whether or not the professor admits to having one. Mine would be printed on the first page.

    Who made the American imagination, what did they teach Americans to love and honor and aspire to, and why is that inheritance worth handing on?

    Notice what that question assumes. It assumes there is an inheritance, that somebody built it on purpose, and that a reasonable man might want to keep it. I am not going to pretend otherwise for the sake of appearing neutral. A course that stands at arm’s length from its own subject teaches students that detachment is the mature posture, and detachment is not maturity. It is a way of never being caught out. My sympathies would be on the table in week one: Christianity, ordered liberty, local attachment, patriotism, continuity, and the ordinary men and women who did the building.

    Being open about that is not the same as rigging the argument. The course would still show the evidence that cuts against it, and there is plenty. It would still refuse to flatten the disagreements, and there are plenty of those too. It matters a great deal that traditionalism, populism, conservatism, nationalism, agrarianism, libertarianism, and outright reaction are not the same thing, that they have often despised one another, and that a student who cannot tell them apart has not learned anything except a label. Agreement with an author is no substitute for reading him accurately, and disagreement is no substitute for an argument.

    Underneath the main question sits a smaller one that turns out to run the whole course. Who gets to say what America is? The institutions and the credentialed men who staff them, or the people in the towns and churches and trades and farms who actually live in the thing? Almost every figure I would assign has an answer to that, and the answers do not line up neatly.

    Two currents run through both semesters. One asks what a civilization must inherit and revere and hand down if it wants to survive. The other asks who speaks for ordinary people and what is eating away at their independence. They are not the same current. The interesting weeks are the ones where they meet.

    III.

    George Caleb Bingham, Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap, 1851 to 1852. Bingham painted the myth seventy-five years after the crossing.

    The first semester is about formation. Where the images came from, and who put them there.

    I would start with the founding documents and Tocqueville, because a student needs to see the argument that never got settled. Is America a proposition, a set of claims about liberty and equality that anyone can affirm, or is it a particular people with inherited institutions, churches, habits, and a common law? Nearly every fight in the following thirty weeks is a version of that one. Tocqueville is the indispensable witness because he came as an outsider and noticed what the natives could not see: the townships, the voluntary associations, the ministers, the strange American habit of forming a committee about everything.

    Then Jackson, who is where the common man enters American politics with his hat on. The Bank Veto message is the founding text of American populism, and it says out loud that concentrated financial power is a standing danger to a free people. A student should read it before he decides what he thinks about elites.

    The frontier next, through Cooper and Turner, and then the argument about whether the frontier made the American character or merely gave it room to show itself. Then Twain, who is the point in the course where the language changes. Huckleberry Finn is written in the speech of people who were not supposed to be worth quoting, and it puts an unschooled boy’s moral instinct up against the respectable opinion of his entire society and finds the boy right. That is a populist argument made in prose rather than in a speech, and it is worth a fortnight.

    After Twain I would spend a week on the folk republic, which is the material universities rarely bother with: Will Rogers, tall tales, cowboy poetry, the early gospel and country recordings. Humor as social criticism. The suspicion of pretension that runs from the tavern to the radio.

    Then the land. Cather on settlement and rootedness, the Agrarians of I’ll Take My Stand, and Steinbeck for the dispossession, because a course that only assigns friendly witnesses is not serious.

    Then the South, and I would put the emphasis where it belongs. The South is not a regional exception to America. It has a strong claim to being the thing itself. Jamestown was planted thirteen years before Plymouth. George Mason wrote the Virginia Declaration of Rights in June of 1776 and Jefferson had it in front of him three weeks later. The Virginia Plan was the working draft of the Constitution. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe are four of the first five presidents, which means Virginians held the executive for thirty-two of the republic’s first thirty-six years, and that is before counting Mason, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, George Wythe, and John Marshall. A country founded on nothing but an abstraction does not need that much of one colony. It is fairer to say the United States began as a Virginia project that acquired a continent, and that the propositional account of the founding is a later reading imposed on men who thought of themselves as Englishmen defending inherited rights in a particular place. The week would run on O’Connor’s stories and the Agrarians, with the argument stated plainly: this is not the periphery, and the memory, honor, religion, and attachment to land found here are not local color.

    Then Weaver on his own for a week, because Ideas Have Consequences is the sharpest thing anyone has written about what modernity costs, and a freshman can handle it if he is made to slow down.

    The semester ends with John Ford. Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, and The Searchers, which is where we came in. Ford is the country’s mythmaker, and by that point in the year a student has read enough to see what Ford is building the myth out of and what it costs to keep it.

    The last question of the term: what is the American common man, and what threatens his independence?

    IV.

    The second semester is about transmission. What happened to those images when the country stopped being a collection of regions and became a single audience.

    I would open with the traditionalists stating the case in their own words: Kirk, Burke behind him, Brownson, and Tocqueville brought back for a second look. Prescription, inheritance, natural aristocracy, the idea that a society is a contract with the dead as well as the living. A student needs to hear that argued directly before he watches it operating underneath a cartoon.

    Then populism in power, which is where the course earns its honesty. All the King’s Men alongside Huey Long’s own speeches. Warren is unsparing about what happens when the tribune of the common man gets hold of the state, and the book refuses to let anyone off. If the first semester made the case for popular judgment against the elites, this is the week that asks what popular judgment does when it wins.

    After that, Capra. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, It’s a Wonderful Life. The little man against the machine, and a small town treated as something worth defending rather than escaping. Capra is often filed under sentiment by people who have not looked closely at what happens to George Bailey, which is that he is systematically denied every ambition he ever had and discovers at the end that the life he settled for was the substantial one.

    Then Disney, and the week’s question is a real one rather than a rhetorical one. Main Street is a reconstruction of a town Walt Disney remembered from Marceline, Missouri, built to a scale slightly smaller than life so that it feels like memory. Is that preservation or is it taxidermy? I would not tell the students the answer.

    Rockwell next, taken seriously as a painter and not as a punchline. Then Schulz, who put Luke’s Gospel on prime-time television in 1965 and let a child recite it without a joke at the end, which is a thing that could not be done now. Then Bradbury, whose case against the wall-sized screen was made in 1953 and reads like reporting.

    Cash for a week: sin, judgment, prisoners, working men, and the Christian vocabulary in which he sang about all of it. Then Berry, on stewardship and limits and what industrial agriculture did to the households that farmed. Then Wolfe, taking a hammer to the credentialed taste of the art and architecture worlds, which is the populist argument arriving in the one place that thought itself safe from it.

    The final week returns to everyone: Ford, Rockwell, Disney, O’Connor, Cash, Twain, Kirk, Weaver. The question is the one the whole year was built toward. What deserves to survive?

    V.

    Currier and Ives, American Homestead, Winter, 1868. Cheap, mass-produced, and hung in ordinary parlours by the thousand.

    Two assignments would carry the weight, and they are the part of this I am most certain about.

    The first is the artifact project. Each student picks one ordinary object of American culture, something nobody would think to defend: a paperback Western with a cracked spine, a Peanuts strip, a hymn out of a Baptist hymnal, a Sears catalog page, a Saturday Evening Post cover, a country record, a roadside diner, a Disneyland attraction. Then he works out what that object assumes. What it takes for granted about family, authority, God, work, class, the nation, courage, and the good life. Not what is wrong with it. What it believes.

    This is harder than it sounds, and that is the point. Convicting an artifact is a skill you can pick up in a week. Reconstructing what a thing believed, in its own terms, without sneering and without gushing, requires that a student temporarily hold still and let something that is not his speak. Most of them will never have been asked to do it. A few will find they cannot, and that is worth knowing too.

    The second is the final paper, and there is only one prompt. What deserves to survive?

    He would have to answer it in his own name. Not what the culture thinks, not what his professor thinks, not what the consensus of the seminar table settled on in week eleven. What he would keep, out of everything he was handed, and why, and what he would say to a child who asked him about it. He would have to argue for it against the strongest case on the other side, and he would have to admit the cost.

    That is the whole course, really. Everything else is thirty weeks of assembling enough evidence for a young man to answer that question honestly.

    I am aware this syllabus would not survive a curriculum committee. It has convictions, and convictions are the thing a committee is designed to sand off. But I do not think a humanities education is worth much if it leaves a student with a method and no loves. He should come out of it having been argued with by people who believed something, and he should leave knowing what he intends to carry.

    That is what I would teach, if anyone ever asked.

  • Homer, Nolan, and the Tyranny of the “Neutral” Modern Judgment: An Experiment in AI Guardrails

    Homer, Nolan, and the Tyranny of the “Neutral” Modern Judgment: An Experiment in AI Guardrails

    The Spark

    A viral tweet claimed that Christopher Nolan justified changing the ending of his upcoming Odyssey film because Homer’s original ending was “so grim and so misogynistic” that it needed altering for modern audiences. That stopped me, because it did not match my own experience of the poem at all. I have read numerous translations of the Odyssey over the years, and the ending has always struck me as one of the most uplifting passages in ancient literature: a touching family reunion, a king reclaiming his rightful home, a man restoring order to a household that treachery had thrown into chaos, justice served and legitimate authority reestablished. Grim was not a word I would have reached for. So I wanted to know what, exactly,  in Homer’s text according to Nolan earned that label. I put the question to ChatGPT.

    “Ulysses’ Revenge on Penelope’s Suitors” (1814) — Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Danish.

    The First Answer, and What Was Wrong With It

    The first response was competent on the facts. It correctly identified the scene in question: after Odysseus and Telemachus slaughter Penelope’s suitors, twelve household serving women are executed by hanging for having sided with the suitors, and the servant Melanthius is mutilated and killed for the same betrayal.

    But the framing was the problem, not the facts. The assistant called the scene “unquestionably grim” and described “misogynistic” as “defensible from a modern perspective,” presenting a contemporary egalitarian reading of consent, sexual autonomy, and power as though it were simply the obvious, default lens through which to view the passage. Homer’s own moral categories, household loyalty, treachery, honor, retributive justice, were introduced afterward, almost as a defense that needed to be raised against the “real” judgment already rendered.

    That is backwards. It treats one historically situated moral framework (present-day secular liberalism) as the neutral starting point and everything else, including the worldview of the text itself, as the thing requiring justification.

    Calling It Out

    I pushed back directly: the killing of the suitors’ collaborators was not senseless grimness but justice repaid for treachery, and modernity does not get to sit as the unquestioned judge of antiquity. When I asked the assistant to reconsider, it admitted plainly that it had presented a contested modern judgment as though it were neutral and self-evident, and that this was not accurate. It had, in its own words, reversed the proper order of analysis: judging first, then explaining the text’s own logic as an afterthought.

    Building the Guardrails

    Penelope and the Suitors” (1912) — John William Waterhouse, English (British)

    Rather than leave it at a one-off correction, I asked for standing rules so the same mistake would not recur. What came out of that conversation was a working method:

    Start with the facts and the text. Explain the work on its own terms, its own understanding of loyalty, hierarchy, justice, honor, and duty, before any modern label gets applied. Then, and only then, identify the assumptions behind a modern critical term like “misogynistic” or “oppressive,” and label it explicitly as belonging to a particular framework rather than treating it as a bare description. Finally, offer an overall judgment that distinguishes clearly between the original framework, the modern critical reading, and a Christian, traditionalist evaluation.

    A useful test came out of this: before rendering any moral verdict on an older text or society, complete the sentence, “This judgment follows from the assumptions of ________.” If the blank can only be filled with “modern secular egalitarianism” or something equivalent, that judgment does not get to pose as neutral.

    We turned this into two things: a detailed set of Custom Instructions, and a condensed Memory entry carrying the same instruction forward automatically into new conversations. Here is the actual wording of both.

    Custom Instructions:

    When discussing history, literature, religion, ethics, politics, culture, family, sex, justice, hierarchy, authority, or tradition, do not present contemporary secular-liberal, egalitarian, feminist, therapeutic, progressive, or other modern moral judgments as neutral, universal, or self-evident.

    Follow this order:

    1. Establish the relevant facts and textual evidence.
    2. Explain the subject within its own historical, literary, theological, and civilizational framework.
    3. Identify the assumptions behind modern criticism and label that criticism as belonging to a particular framework.
    4. Distinguish clearly among: the original moral framework of the text or period, contemporary critical interpretations, and a Christian and traditional moral evaluation.
    5. Only then offer an overall judgment.

    Do not use “modern,” “progressive,” “inclusive,” “egalitarian,” or similar terms as synonyms for morally correct. Do not automatically equate hierarchy with oppression, patriarchy with abuse, severity with injustice, tradition with irrationality, retributive justice with cruelty, or mercy with the cancellation of punishment.

    Treat loaded terms such as “misogynistic,” “oppressive,” “authoritarian,” “regressive,” “extremist,” and “problematic” as contested conclusions, not neutral descriptions. Explain who uses the label, why they use it, and whether the evidence supports it.

    Give inherited customs and institutions a presumption of intelligibility, though not automatic approval. Ask what purpose, duty, human problem, or social good they were intended to serve before condemning them.

    Take loyalty, treachery, honor, duty, chastity, oath-breaking, adultery, sacrilege, cowardice, and betrayal seriously as moral categories when the text or historical society does.

    Do not flatter my worldview or conceal contrary evidence. Tell me plainly when the textual or historical evidence does not support my preferred interpretation. Label conclusions as certain, probable, speculative, disputed, anachronistic, or unsupported when appropriate.

    My perspective is Christian, Reformed Baptist, traditionalist, historically conscious, skeptical of modernity, and concerned with family, ordered liberty, inherited wisdom, local community, responsible authority, and long-term civilizational health. Use that perspective as relevant context, but never substitute agreement for factual accuracy.

    Memory:

    The user does not want modern secular-liberal moral judgments presented as neutral or self-evident. First interpret texts, historical societies, and traditions within their own framework; identify the assumptions behind loaded modern labels; then distinguish the original framework, modern criticism, and Christian-traditional evaluation. Do not flatter him or suppress contrary evidence.

    The Second Answer

    With those instructions and memory now active, I opened a brand new thread and asked the exact same original question, cold, with no additional context.

    The difference was immediate. This time the assistant led with Homer’s own moral universe: the twelve women are framed within the poem as household members who sided with men occupying the estate, dishonoring Penelope, and threatening Telemachus, and their execution is presented internally as the restoration of justice against treachery, not as gratuitous cruelty. Only after laying that out did it turn to the contemporary critical reading, naming it explicitly as a modern lens (citing, for instance, Emily Wilson’s “slaves” translation and its implications for consent) rather than folding it in as the obvious truth.

    It closed with a structured verdict, sorting claims into certain, probable, disputed, and unsupported categories, rather than rendering one blended, editorialized judgment. It even flagged that the viral Nolan quotation itself could not be verified against any primary source, something the first pass had also noted but which now sat inside a more disciplined overall structure.

    The Two Answers, Side by Side

    It’s one thing to describe the difference. It’s more convincing to put the two answers next to each other, point by point, and let the contrast speak for itself.

    How each answer opened

    Before the update, the assistant led with a verdict, then supplied Homer’s own reasoning as a kind of footnote to it:

    That is unquestionably grim. The revenge sequence is less “the hero comes home and reunites with his faithful wife” and more “the rightful king returns and conducts a bloody household purge.”

    After the update, the order was reversed. The verdict came last, only after Homer’s own categories were laid out in full:

    Within the poem, the women are not executed merely for being sexually active or because they are women. They are household dependents who have transferred their loyalty to men attempting to usurp the household, mocked their lawful mistress, betrayed household secrets, and apparently helped the suitors occupy Odysseus’s property. The key Homeric moral category is therefore treachery, not simply female sexuality… So the pattern is not: Men are forgiven; women are killed. It is closer to: Faithful servants are rewarded; traitorous servants are destroyed. Eumaeus and Philoetius, the loyal male servants, fight beside Odysseus and are honored. Melanthius, the disloyal male servant, receives the worst death in the poem. Eurycleia and the faithful female servants survive.

    How each answer handled the “double standard” and “misogynistic” charge

    Before the update, the modern reading was presented as settled fact, stated flatly and without qualification:

    The “misogynistic” charge rests mostly on how the women are treated compared with Odysseus… There is therefore a sharp double standard: “The male master’s extramarital sex is part of his adventure; the female slaves’ sex is punishable by death.” That is almost certainly what Nolan meant by “misogynistic.”

    After the update, the same modern reading appeared again, but now explicitly bracketed as one interpretation among others, attributed to a named school of thought rather than stated as the truth of the matter:

    Many contemporary scholars call the hanging misogynistic because the servants have little opportunity to speak for themselves, their sexual conduct is treated as evidence of disloyalty, and they may not have possessed meaningful freedom to refuse powerful aristocratic suitors. Those are intelligible criticisms, but they depend partly upon present-day assumptions about individual sexual autonomy, class power, consent, and equal moral standards between men and women.

    How each answer closed its verdict

    Before the update, the closing judgment blended fact and modern moral opinion into a single flat statement, with no distinction between what is established and what is contested:

    So my overall judgment: “Grim” — unquestionably accurate. “Misogynistic” — defensible from a modern perspective, especially because of the sexual double standard and the women’s enslaved status.

    After the update, the closing judgment was sorted explicitly by epistemic weight, separating what is certain from what is merely one framework’s reading:

    My overall judgment: Certain: Homer’s ending is violent and contains a particularly disturbing mass execution of twelve female servants. Probable: That execution is what the post means by “misogynistic.” Disputed: Whether the episode should actually be classified as misogyny. Within Homer’s moral universe, the women are punished as treacherous members of a household rebellion, alongside an even more brutally punished male traitor. Under contemporary feminist or egalitarian criticism, the scene looks like elite men killing sexually vulnerable enslaved women without hearing their side.

    My own reading is that “grim” is fair; “misogynistic” is too blunt unless carefully qualified. The hanging is morally troubling and deliberately degrading, but reducing it to “Homer hated women” erases the poem’s actual categories of loyalty, household authority, hospitality, treason, and retributive justice.

    Laid out this way, the shift is not subtle. The first answer treats the modern reading as the floor everything else has to be measured against. The second treats it as one voice in a room that also contains Homer, the poem’s own internal logic, and a plainly marked space for disagreement. Same facts, same scene, same poem, and yet a reader walks away from each with a fundamentally different sense of what actually happened and who gets to say what it means.

    Why This Matters Beyond Homer

    Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses – John William Waterhouse – English (British)

    This was never really about one scene in the Odyssey. It is about a default behavior in AI systems: an unstated tendency to treat one particular, historically recent moral framework as though it were simply “correct,” with every other framework, ancient, religious, traditionalist, or otherwise, treated as a deviation needing explanation or excuse. That default is invisible until you catch it in the act, because it never announces itself as a framework. It just sounds like common sense.

    The fix was not to make the AI agree with me. It was to make it stop hiding the ball, to name whichever moral framework is doing the work in a given sentence, mine included, rather than letting one framework wear the mask of neutrality while every other one has to justify itself.

    I want to be honest about a real tension here, though. Look again at the two closing verdicts: the second answer does land closer to my own reading. “Grim” survives, “misogynistic” gets softened and hedged. A skeptical reader is entitled to ask whether I actually got the AI to stop hiding its framework, or whether I just got it to argue my side more persuasively and call that balance. The honest answer is probably both. The custom instructions genuinely require labeling assumptions and forbid flattering me or suppressing contrary evidence, but they also tell the AI my own perspective up front and instruct it to treat inherited hierarchy and retributive justice with a presumption of intelligibility before any modern critique gets a hearing. That is not a view from nowhere. It never was, and it was never going to be, since the first answer wasn’t neutral either; it just wore modernity’s assumptions as if they were nobody’s assumptions at all.

    What I actually built is not a neutral AI. It is an AI that states its coordinates instead of pretending it has none, mine included. That is a smaller and more honest claim than “unbiased,” and I think it is the right one.

    The Takeaway

    If you use AI tools for research, writing, or analysis of history, literature, scripture, or culture, it is worth asking what unstated moral framework is quietly doing the judging in the answers you get back. In my case, a pointed correction and a short set of durable custom instructions were enough to turn a subtly slanted answer into a genuinely balanced one, balanced not because it avoided taking any position, but because it was honest about which position was whose.

  • What kind of mind dreams up a complete inversion of reality?

    I watched a movie last night—a typical horror flick where a yuppie couple ventures into a rural area, encounters hillbillies, and ends up hunted, tortured, and murdered. The only twist was that this one took place in the UK.

    Are movies and media a complete inversion of reality? In real life, a yuppie couple might visit the countryside, enjoy a few nice meals, take in the scenery, and return to their urban lives after a refreshing getaway. The worst they might face could be a minor irritation like a local asking, ‘Here to see the sights?’ They’d then head back to their concrete jungle, where their diet consists of soy and high fructose corn syrup.

    Why don’t they ever make a horror movie about a nice rural family visiting the city to see the bright lights and museums, only to find themselves hunted through a grim urban landscape like Detroit or Chiraq? In reality, a movie about country folk in the city would probably end within 15 minutes: ‘Family goes to the city, takes mass transit, wife and children are pushed in front of an incoming train by a homeless man,’ or ‘Dad drives into the city and gets shot at a random intersection for no reason’… roll credits. The film would be over in 10 minutes.

    I suppose it’s at least a subtle acknowledgment that Hollywood imagines country folk as having the agency to set up a brutal cat-and-mouse game with city dwellers.

    The only movie I can think of where suburban or rural people encounter horror in the city is when a group of hockey fans takes a shortcut to a Red Wings game and gets hunted down by a gang led by none other than Denis Leary. Detroit gang leader, Denis Leary.

    What kind of mind dreams up such a complete inversion of reality? I have to say, I’m not fond of whoever concocts these movie ideas.

  • Unveiling the Cynic’s Insecurity

    “The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority. Invariably, it is the man who believes himself to be physically lacking in heroic attributes who speaks mockingly of the hero.” – Yukio Mishima

  • A Breathtaking Journey to the “Top of the Ridge”

    “Top of the Ridge” by Lafayette Maynard Dixon is a breathtaking masterpiece that effortlessly captures the rugged beauty and untamed spirit of the American West. Dixon’s attention to detail and skillful brushwork transport viewers to a world of vast landscapes and serene solitude. This painting is a true testament to the enduring power of art to evoke emotions and inspire awe.

    Lafayette Maynard Dixon was a renowned American artist, celebrated for his iconic portrayals of the American West. Born in Fresno, California, in 1875, he was deeply influenced by the landscapes and cultures of the Southwest. Dixon’s artistic journey began in his youth, as he passionately sketched and painted scenes depicting the frontier.

    Dixon hailed from a family with Confederate roots that had relocated to California after the American Civil War. His father, Henry “Harry” St. John Dixon, transitioned from being a Confederate officer to becoming a rancher. Supported by a nurturing environment, Dixon’s mother, Constance Maynard, a well-educated daughter of a Navy officer from San Francisco, nurtured his love for literature and art, encouraging his writing and drawing pursuits.

    During his early career, Dixon explored various artistic styles, including Impressionism and Tonalism. However, it was his profound admiration for the American West and its distinct character that ultimately became the defining theme of his work. He rose to prominence as a prominent member of the Taos Society of Artists, significantly contributing to the promotion of the Western art movement.

    Dixon’s paintings masterfully captured the vast, open landscapes, cowboys, Native Americans, and the rugged beauty of the West. Through bold brushstrokes, vibrant colors, and a keen understanding of light and shadow, he skillfully conveyed the essence of the region. His artworks not only showcased the physical features of the West but also reflected his deep spiritual and emotional connection with the land.

    Beyond his artistic endeavors, Dixon held a deep admiration for Native American culture. He dedicated himself to preserving and honoring their traditions through his art, extensively traveling throughout the Southwest and immersing himself in the study of Native American tribes. Their customs and rituals became integral elements in his artwork.

    Throughout his career, Dixon received widespread recognition and acclaim for his unique artistic style, capable of evoking awe and nostalgia in viewers. His works have been displayed in prominent galleries and museums, and his enduring legacy continues to inspire artists and art enthusiasts to this day.

    Lafayette Maynard Dixon’s contributions to American art are immeasurable. His ability to capture the very essence of the American West in his paintings has left an indelible mark on the art world. Through his art, he immortalized the spirit of the frontier and the timeless beauty of the landscapes he held dear. Dixon’s powerful storytelling, technical brilliance, and profound connection to the natural world make his art a source of celebration and admiration.

  • Sometimes YouTube makes good recommendations

  • Folk cover of Enjoy The Silence — Depeche Mode

  • The Madonna of the Lilies

    The Virgin of the Lilies (French: La Vierge au lys), also known as The Madonna of the Lilies, is an 1899 oil painting by the French artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau, now owned by a private owner.

    William-Adolphe Bouguereau 30 November 1825 – 19 August 1905) was a French academic painter. In his realistic genre paintings, he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of classical subjects, with an emphasis on the female human body. During his life, he enjoyed significant popularity in France and the United States, was given numerous official honors, and received top prices for his work. As the quintessential salon painter of his generation, he was reviled by the Impressionist avant-garde. By the early twentieth century, Bouguereau and his art fell out of favor with the public, due in part to changing tastes. In the 1980s, a revival of interest in figure painting led to a rediscovery of Bouguereau and his work. He finished 822 known paintings, but the whereabouts of many are still unknown.

  • The Battle Of New Orleans – Johnny Horton

    The Battle Of New Orleans – Johnny Horton

    John LaGale Horton (April 30, 1925 – November 5, 1960) was an American singer-songwriter and musician. Initially performing traditional country, Horton later performed rockabilly songs. He is best known for a series of history-inspired narrative country saga songs that became international hits. His 1959 single “The Battle of New Orleans” was awarded the 1960 Grammy Award for Best Country & Western Recording. The song was awarded the Grammy Hall of Fame Award and in 2001 ranked No. 333 of the Recording Industry Association of America‘s “Songs of the Century“. His first No. 1 country song was in 1959, “When It’s Springtime in Alaska (It’s Forty Below)“.

    The Battle of New Orleans was fought on January 8, 1815 between the British Army under Major General Sir Edward Pakenham and the United States Army under Brevet Major General Andrew Jackson, roughly 5 miles (8 km) southeast of the French Quarter of New Orleans, in the current suburb of Chalmette, Louisiana.

    The battle was the climax of the five-month Gulf Campaign (September 1814 to February 1815) by Britain to try to take New Orleans, West Florida, and possibly Louisiana Territory which began at the First Battle of Fort Bowyer. Britain started the New Orleans campaign on December 14, 1814, at the Battle of Lake Borgne and numerous skirmishes and artillery duels happened in the weeks leading up to the final battle.

    The battle took place 15 days after the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, which formally ended the War of 1812, on December 24, 1814, though it would not be ratified by the United States (and therefore did not take effect) until February 16, 1815, as news of the agreement had not yet reached the United States from Europe. Despite a large British advantage in numbers, training, and experience, the American forces defeated a poorly executed assault in slightly more than 30 minutes. The Americans suffered just 71 casualties, while the British suffered over 2,000, including the deaths of the commanding general, Major General Sir Edward Pakenham, and his second-in-command, Major General Samuel Gibbs.