Mohammad Elikaei / Unsplash This weekend I watched Bugonia, the new Yorgos Lanthimos film. I won’t spoil the ending beyond what has already been written about it—but the short version is that the Andromedan aliens, a super-intelligent extraterrestrial civilization that has been running humanity as a kind of long experiment, having observed us long enough, conclude that the experiment is over. We are not worth saving. The last thing you hear, over the final shots, is Marlene Dietrich singing “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”—Pete Seeger’s anti-war anthem, rendered in her world-weary voice. Eileen Jones at Jacobin called it something you’ll remember for a long, long time. She’s right, it’s been haunting me ever since. But not in the way Lanthimos perhaps intended. I found myself resisting the ending, and not emotionally, which is how films usually get you, but philosophically. Something in it felt too easy, too pleased with itself. The idea that humanity is the virus, the cancer, the thing that must be written off for the good of everything else—it has the shape of a radical critique, but I think it is actually a form of laziness. Worse than that: I think it shares its structure with the logic it claims to condemn. Consider what it takes for the US to bomb a school in Minab, or for Israel to declare Palestinians in Gaza expendable. Or to decide, at the level of policy, that certain lives are, on the ledger of history, a net subtraction. What all of these require is a prior act of closure: the account has been examined, the verdict returned, the sentence carried out. The Andromedan logic and the imperial logic mirror each other precisely here: each demands that you have finished with a portion of humanity, that you know with certainty what these people are, finally and without remainder. I don’t have that certainty. And I’ve come to believe that the absence of it is not weakness but the beginning of ethics. There is a philosophical tradition—I’ll spare you the technical name, though it runs from Hegel through to several thinkers who found his resolution too tidy—that holds something like the following: the capacity for evil in human beings is not separable from the capacity for good. They arise from the same root: freedom. The ability to choose badly is identical to the ability to choose well. You cannot surgically remove the darkness from human nature and leave the light intact. What you would have left, after such an operation, would not be humanity at all—it would be something more like a very sophisticated machine, predictable and obedient and incapable of genuine moral weight. We are building a great many of those at the moment. This is not a comfortable thought. The goodness we find in people is always shadowed, always won against resistance. And the darkness, when it comes, rarely arrives from nowhere; it has structures behind it, histories, conditions that bend people toward it long before they make any choice at all. None of that excuses what people do, but it does mean that the darkness is never simply theirs alone, and that the account is not closed by the worst thing a person has done. It cannot be, if we believe that people are genuinely free, which means genuinely capable of transformation. I know this because I have been on the wrong side of it. The most hurtful thing I have ever said to another person—a friend, someone I love—was that he had irredeemably ruined his life. At the time, I thought I was just being honest. I delivered it with the confidence of someone who had done the accounting and come up with a final figure. I have regretted it ever since, and not merely because it damaged the friendship. I now understand what I was doing: closing the account. Performing, on a human scale, exactly the operation I find monstrous when states and empires do it. The logic is the same. Only the scale differs. What I should have said—what I believe now—is that there is no such thing as irredeemable. The harm was real, the consequences are real, but the person standing in front of you is always more than the sum of their worst decisions. To close the account on a person is to stop seeing them. And once you stop seeing them, you can do anything to them. The Jesuit priest who married my wife and I once told me something I’ve returned to often. I asked him what it was about the Jesuits—their particular history of social engagement, their presence in the places where the world is most broken—that produced this commitment (Pope Francis, for example, was a Jesuit). He said, “We have a positive theological anthropology. We are hopeful about human nature.” The word that matters there is not “hopeful” but “positive”—it is a claim about human capacity, about what people are able to do and become, rather than a prediction about what they will. The Jesuits have been present at enough of history’s disasters to have abandoned cheap optimism long ago. What they hold onto instead is harder: a refusal to declare the account closed, a commitment to keeping it open. That, I think, is what distinguishes hope from mere wishful thinking—not that you expect things to get better, but that you will not rule it out. In this newsletter, I have regularly quoted the words of Max Horkheimer—the Jewish critical theorist, who fled Germany as Hitler rose to power: “I do not believe that things will turn out well, but the idea that they might is of decisive importance.” I think about this as I think about my daughter growing up in the world she is inheriting. The dangers she will face are real, some of them structural, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But my wife and I have made a decision that runs underneath all the practical ones about her safety and education: we want her to move through the world with trust rather than suspicion. A life organized around the expectation of betrayal forecloses too much—including, eventually, the very capacity to be changed by other people—and we don’t want that for her. There is a Talmudic teaching that when a wedding procession and a funeral procession meet on the road, the wedding procession should go first. It is a profound statement of priority. The dead are honored, but the living take precedence—and the choice to keep going, to commit yourself to another person, to plant a garden you may not live to see mature, to bring a child into the world or take in someone else’s, to make any gesture that says “I am building something that extends beyond today”—is itself an argument, made under conditions of radical uncertainty, in the only form that actually counts: not in words, but in action. Ever since Israel and the US launched their unprovoked war on Iran and wrought devastation on humanity, I have been thinking of two films by the late Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (who is himself not without blemish. In 2022, his collaborator Mania Akbari accused him of sexual assault and of incorporating private footage she had shot into his film Ten without her consent. I hold that alongside what follows). The first is Life And Nothing More... It follows a film director driving through the villages devastated by the 1990 Manjil earthquake, trying to find the boys who had acted in his earlier film, to see if they had survived. Along the way, he encounters a young man who got married the day after the earthquake. Sixty-five relatives lost—aunts, uncles, cousins—and yet the wedding went ahead. How could he, the director asks, bewildered. “Those who died didn’t know what was coming,” the young man says. “We decided to enjoy life while we could. The next earthquake might kill us too. Am I wrong?” He isn’t. And I have been thinking about him alongside the images that have come out of Gaza these past months—couples marrying in the rubble, flowers in the hands of women standing in what used to be buildings. For this, there is an Arabic word we now all know: sumud. Steadfastness. Rootedness. The refusal to be unmade by what is being done to you. It is something harder and more deliberate than optimism, which would be obscene under the circumstances—rather, an insistence on continuing to live as if life has meaning, precisely when the conditions are designed to persuade you otherwise. The wedding procession pressing forward even when it meets the funeral on the road. Redemption has to remain possible. That is what I find myself believing, as a matter of practical commitment rather than theological consolation—the refusal to close the account on any person, any people, any life. And that refusal is what they are always, in the end, trying to take from us: the bombs in Minab and Tehran, the ending of Bugonia, what I said to my friend. I am not someone who tends to have favorites of anything. But if pressed, I might say that Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s House is my favorite film (Where Is The Friend’s House is also the film whose child actors the director in Life And Nothing More, a fictionalized version of Kiarostami, is driving through the earthquake rubble to find.) The plot is almost nothing. In a rural classroom in Koker, a stern teacher threatens to expel a boy if he completes his homework on loose paper one more time. It must be done in his notebook, or he is finished. That afternoon, Ahmad, the eight-year-old who sits beside him, goes home and discovers he has accidentally taken his classmate’s notebook along with his own. If it is not returned by morning, his friend will come to school with nothing, and the threat will be carried out. So Ahmad walks. His mother wants him home for chores. He goes anyway, across the fields to the neighboring village, knowing only his friend’s name—Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh—and the name of the village—no address, no directions that hold. A lot of the joy of the film is in hearing Ahmad call this name out as he goes, door to door, alley to alley, almost like a prayerful chant. He asks adult after adult. They misunderstand him, wave him off, give him wrong turns. An old door-maker walks with him for a stretch, talking at length, and leads him to the wrong house. Night falls. The friend is not found. Ahmad goes home, still holding the notebook. And so he does the only thing left: he completes both sets of homework himself, in both books. The next morning, the teacher inspects the notebooks. He opens the friend’s book and scans it. When he reaches the end, he pauses—and says, simply, “Good work.” Then the final shot of the film lingers on something unexpected tucked inside: a flower pressed between the pages. – William Shoki, editor |
