I, Nazgûl

The Nazgûl were not always slaves to the ring.

The terrible hooded beings you know from the Lord of the Rings were men once. They were not necessarily evil men. But being men they were prone to certain evils. They desired power and mastery. They lusted after wealth and influence. Kings and princes among them were given rings of power by the chief evil of their age and were slowly corrupted as they used the power conferred by those rings to defeat their enemies and conquer their world. It would be easy to say that the rings corrupted those men simply by giving them the capacity to take what they wanted. Power corrupts, after all.

It is a good story. But it isn’t this story.

For Tolkien, the story of the Ringwraiths was slow to come together into a cohesive Narrative. What would become The Lord of the Rings was the evolution of a simple children’s story about a hobbit named Bilbo who had found a magical ring. Over many years, this simple story merged with a vast philological project and an ambitious legendarium to create the archetypal model for all high fantasy fiction forevermore. The nature of the rings emerged most clearly with the writing of The Mirror of Galadriel, the seventh chapter of the second book of The Fellowship of the Ring. Galadriel, probably the most powerful non-angelic being remaining in Middle-Earth¹, already possesses Nenya. This ring of adamant, one of the three fashioned for the elves and unsullied by Sauron’s hands, has allowed her to preserve her land against threats which ought to have overwhelmed it. It is but a rearguard action. Her people decline and so does she. There is one thing in this living world which could sustain them: The One Ring. When the young hobbit comes before her bearing it, he offers it to her freely.

Galadriel’s response to this temptation², not the loyalty of Samwise Gamgee nor the bravery of the Three Hunters nor the wisdom of Gandalf the White nor the lesson that a heroic spirit does not require us to be among the truly great, is the central idea of the novel. She rejects the tool which whispers salvation, knowing that it contains her damnation³. That is what distinguishes her from the men who would become Nazgûl. But the story of the Ringwraiths is not a story of Faustian bargains. It is a story of delusion. It is a story of men telling themselves that they were mastering a thing, oblivious to its encroaching mastery over them. It is a story of men who saw a one-way road to manifest their will, but who unwittingly submitted themselves to the will of another.

There are magic rings in our world, too. Yet they are fashioned not from gold and sorcery but from symbols.

With one hand, these symbols guide us to perceive them as the product of our own reason, yet with the other they supplant that reason with meanings determined in the minds of other men.

They bind our will not to the reason which first led us to our beliefs, but to the symbol with which we now identify them. Once the symbol becomes our point of attachment, we no longer have to be convinced to follow those who determine the meaning of the symbol to some new end. They need only tell us the new meaning of the symbol.

If we are not careful these rings will make wraiths of us all.

Prisoner’s Dilemma(s)

Not every age is fit to make wraiths of us.

That is not to say that powerful symbols do not always exert influence over how we humans process information about our world. They do. Social networks have exaggerated this effect, enveloping us at all times with systems of symbolic relationships our brains evolved to incorporate into cognitive processes with little need for our conscious intervention.

It is also true that certain social conditions seem almost engineered to saturate society with symbols of externally mediated meaning which twist our thinking without our knowledge and against our will. The most conducive such conditions are those which possess a small number of strong, incompatible modalities. That is an elaborate way of describing an environment where the politically engaged citizen basically has only two real and intentionally oppositional choices. Within that meager menu, every social, political, moral, cultural, religious, and economic question is already ‘answered’.

Why and how do those conditions form? Through the transformation of the public square into a prisoner’s dilemma.

Probably the most famous example of a social game, the prisoner’s dilemma has a simple story and payoff structure. I suspect it will be familiar, but it goes something like this: You and a colleague are arrested for a crime. When the detective comes calling, there are really four things that could happen. First, you could both keep your mouths shut. Sure, they can still get you with a lesser charge, but you’ll skate on the big one if you both zip it. We call that mutual cooperation. Alternatively, you could rat on your buddy and expect him to be silent. If you manage to do so, you get off scot-free and he gets 15-20. But the reverse is true, too. He could rat you out. If you both turn on each other, however, the prosecutor has little incentive to give you much of a plea deal. You won’t go away for 15-20 – he doesn’t want to take this to trial either – but you’re still doing hard time. We call that mutual defection. In the standard table below, the first value is the payoff to you, and the second is the value to your colleague.

While the devil is in the details of the plea deal, the lesson of the prisoner’s dilemma is that there is one equilibrium: mutual defection. In other words, the consequences of cooperating when the other party defects are so high relative to the benefit gained from mutual cooperation over mutual defection that rational parties will converge on that (1,1) payoff above.

The public square in America in 2024 is a prisoner’s dilemma.

It’s why we talk about every election being a turnout election now. It’s why congress votes all but exclusively on party lines. It’s why the extreme language of political violence is rising. It’s why every population distribution chart of the electorate and congress looks like two steep mountains gazing at one another across a wide chasm. It’s why everything from the beer you order, the bands you listen to, the books you read, the people you follow on social media, the vaccinations you give your children, the church you go to, the neighborhood you live in, the flag you fly, and whether you ‘heard’ an apostrophe signal which of the two possible political modalities you belong to. It is interesting to discuss when and how this came about, and we have done so frequently on these pages. But it is enough to know that we are here, where cooperation is punished, and where no degree of defection against the other political tribe is considered excessive. Crossing the aisle is for suckers. Missing an opportunity to own the libs or find an “I never thought leopards would eat my face” MAGA moment is the only true error.

But the real world isn’t some lofty game theory exercise. The whole idea of an equilibrium in which the optimal strategy is to always choose to oppose and thwart the other political tribe reflects the strategy associated with playing a single prisoner’s dilemma game. The real world is a game played continuously and over long periods of time.

So does the iterated prisoner’s dilemma game work differently? Yes! Or, well, maybe. Sometimes. In long versions of iterated play, the actors have the opportunity to send multiple signals that can change the way the game plays out. Probably the most famous basic strategy from the literature – where you start as a cooperative player and simply repeat whatever your opponent does thereafter in a tit-for-tat pattern – sends signals that you are friendly, willing to cooperate, willing to forgive, and willing to punish defection. The payoffs of the game may never allow it to be a true trust-building coordination game, but signaling our humanity almost always has some value in iterated play. Historically, that pattern has generally carried the day. There have been many times in American history that our public square resembled an isolated prisoner’s dilemma for some period, but very few where we could argue that mutual opposition and animosity became an equilibrium in practice. There were polarizing figures in American history before Donald Trump and there will be polarizing figures when he is gone, and we’re not going to go through existential crises every time.

But we will this time, apparently.

You see, there are two main things that can steer the equilibrium of the iterated prisoner’s dilemma game away from the more benign outcomes we have experienced historically: the relative size of the various payoffs and the perception of the time remaining in the game.

To transform an iterated prisoner’s dilemma back into a game where everyone must defect you must simply make losing to a defector very costly⁴ and create the perception that the game might end at any time.

This should be intuitive. If you think it may be your last bite at the apple and if the payoff to screwing the other side is big enough, there is no amount of friendly, cooperative signaling either of you can do to change the other’s behavior. More importantly, you both know it. That’s what makes it an equilibrium. You can bluff or false signal all you want, but no one is buying it.

Observing compression in the perception of time remaining in the game in the real world is trivial. If you are paying attention, you can see it in real-time.

But what would have to happen in the real world to make defection more profitable and cooperation more costly?

In a party-driven political context, the same pressures which make mutual defection in a single game an equilibrium also change the payoffs and time horizon in an iterated game. Given enough time and the absence of cooperative signaling, we should generally expect iterated prisoner’s dilemma games in the American political sphere to converge to the same equilibrium of mutual defection as a single game.

That is, once the inter-party game punishes cooperation with and rewards defection from the opposing group, the intra-party game will inevitably be structured by rational actors to increase the rewards for in-group coordination and the punishment for in-group defection. What we have referred to on these pages as the Widening Gyre is simply a shorthand for the effects of accelerating interaction between these diverging intra-party and inter-party games. Each modality successively permits less internal diversity, exaggerates its difference from other modalities, and draws more and more features of society into its gravity. That’s why the party you chose based your belief in [limited government / social justice] now means you are morally opposed to [Bud Light / Chick-fil-a]. Again, you can navigate your way out of this cycle early on with generous tit-for-tat signaling, but once the natural incentives for isolationary intra-party behavior and time horizon shortening take hold, those strategies cease to be effective.

But the widening gyre isn’t just an analogy for the widening distance between us as citizens. It is also an analogy for the widening distance between our symbols and the reality to which they were once tethered⁵. Both of these features of the widening gyre emerge because the only feasible systematic mechanism for increasing the rewards for in-group coordination and the punishment for in-group defection is to transform in-group loyalty to The Party’s symbols independent of the principles they used to arrive at similar ideas.

For The Party to survive the widening gyre, autonomy of mind must be replaced with seductive symbolic attachment.

Over time the symbols of each party drift away from each other AND from any semblance of underlying reality because this is the natural effect of the equilibrium of the game within and between The Parties.

There is no cabal or mastermind sitting at the helm steering this game, although savvy politicians will influence it intuitively, or in more skilled cases with more direct intent. In general, the creation of these rings of power should be thought of as an emergent property of tribal modalities in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma. The transformation of everything into a symbol whose meaning can be revised again and again to reflect the competitive pressures facing the tribe is inevitable. That is doubly true in the age of social networks.

What is also true is that these rings make their bearers – that’s us! – feel immensely powerful. We are more aligned with our peers. We feel the momentum of The Party. Rallies become more exciting and posting on social media becomes more rewarding. We feel like, for once in our lives, The Party is finally moving in the same direction as we are. The symbols make it easier for us to have influence and impact with our words. They lend themselves readily to rhetoric. They’re more easily understood. They make the right people excited and the right people mad. We are in the fight of our lives, the most consequential election of our lives^(tm), and we are winning! It is easy to see why we consider ourselves the masters of these rings we were given.

But we are deceived. Rings of Power replace principled reasoning from our most deeply held values with symbols of candidates and policy platforms. To believe a thing is now to vote for The Party.

There are many such rings. But you can understand all of them by understanding the two most important: the Ring of Faith and the Ring of Science.

The Ring of Faith

To say that there is a Ring of Faith at work in American politics is not to say that there is anything untoward about faith-based beliefs influencing any person’s political engagement. To the contrary, citizens earnestly influenced by their beliefs have not only the right but the duty to incorporate those into how they vote. Neither should it be taken to conjure some specter of a “religious right” bogeyman exerting malignant and underhanded influence.

The Ring of Faith is the transformation of the Christian faith into a symbol which is, means, or represents voting for the Republican Party.

This is what it looks like.

These are all statements made by various evangelical public figures in the past two weeks or so. They are not appeals to reason. They are not arguments. Over any such convictions and considerations they impose a new symbol, a Ring of Faith: that to be an American Christian IS to vote for Donald Trump.

It is the framing of this as an identity relationship – that one thing quite literally is or means another thing – that makes this kind of argumentation technique equally effective as an engine for corruption and for punishing in-group defection. There can be no gray area, no middle ground, no uncertainty. You exist at this pole or at the other, and if you believe there is room for disagreement you are to be ostracized and excluded. The difference between an identity relationship and something that we believe, that we have concluded, and even that we might argue for with great energy is not a difference in magnitude. It is a difference in kind.

As a citizen, it is crucial that we understand this distinction. If we cannot believe fervently, conclude rationally, and argue boldly without falling into the trap of perceiving the target of our attention as an identity relationship, we will forever be ensnared by the inexorable precession of the widening gyre. I think there are many millions of Christians who absolutely follow a path of principle and reason to vote for and support Donald Trump for president. I’ll get hate mail for even suggesting it, but please know before you hit send that you are wrong and I am right. But it IS getting much harder to avoid the corruption of the relentless onslaught of symbols conflating Christian faith with support for Trump rather than arguing that it is the most appropriate choice.

Part of the reason it is so difficult has to do with the nature of the Ring of Faith we can observe in the outbursts from our panel of enforcers above. They all relate to one of the most complicated, emotionally evocative, and scientifically ambiguous issues in our world: abortion. Oh, to be sure, none of the identity statements I gave you above mentions anything explicitly about abortion. In some cases, that is simply because the context is sitting just outside the excerpt I’ve provided you. A few go on to name Harris/Walz as the most radically pro-abortion ticket in history. A couple would be found before statements suggesting that the Democratic platform was designed to appease the god Molech. In case you’re rusty on your Milton or Phoenician epithets, Molech is the king of fallen angels, besmeared with the blood of child sacrifices.

In other cases, the context is simply the Common Knowledge of the American evangelical church that abortion policy is the only dimension of public policy which could warrant such certainty. If you listened long enough, you might hear rattles of concern about parental rights and transgender policy, or Marxism, or even various immigration or border policies, but those are bit roles in this great play. Abortion policy is both necessary and sufficient to explain any argument put forth that a Christian cannot, by definition, vote for Kamala Harris.

Let us set down the Ring of Faith for a moment and consider a thought experiment. What might the principled reasoning process of a Christian look like on the question of the relationship between his faith and his vote? Throughout this experiment, note to yourself any places where your irritation starts to rise. The places where something starts whispering that the answer to this or that question is ‘self-evident’ or ‘settled’. It’s the ring. This is not going where you think it is going.

First, of course, there are theological considerations. Does scripture, in fact, explicitly forbid abortion⁶? Do certain scriptures suggest ensoulment at some point before birth⁷, implying that it simply falls under proscriptions against murder? Is it clear whether this takes place at conception or at some other point⁸? If it is an evil practice, is it clear that Christians are called to weight and resist this evil above others⁹? Is it clear that Christians have an obligation to use their vote to restrict and punish acts Scripture describe as sinful or evil¹⁰?

Presuming that the Christian has concluded that abortion amounts to murder at a certain point of fetal development, that it represents a weightier matter of evil, and that he is obliged by Scripture to resist it through his political engagement, he must then pose additional questions about the candidate and party. How confident is he that the candidate or party will propose policies or take actions (e.g. nominating originalist justices, etc.) that will reduce the number of abortions of the kind he has concluded must be proscribed? How confident is he that those proposals have any chance of being passed? He would need to ask the same questions in reverse for any candidates or parties expressing a desire to relax restrictions on abortions, as well.

Presuming that the Christian has evaluated the risk of successful policy proposals in both directions he favors and disfavors and judges them to be material, he must now weigh them against the jurisprudential and rule of law implications of those proposals. Do they honor the restrictions placed upon the state by the constitution and do they respect the contracts between state and citizen? If they did not, how must, say, the inherent injustice of an unconstitutional law be weighed against the evil he believes must be suppressed?

Presuming that the Christian has evaluated the prospective laws and come to conclusions about the justice (or lack of justice) embedded in each platform’s expected actions, he must now judge the real-world effect the proposed policies would have. Would abortion restrictions of the type contemplated actually reduce the number of abortions performed¹¹? Would liberalizations of the type contemplated by the other candidate actually increase the number of abortions performed? Would the policies create new harms, and what is the scale of those harms relative to the perceived good achieved¹²? Are there risks of unintended consequences?

Presuming the Christian has concluded that the differing policies could be expected to have an effect on the number of abortions performed and evaluated, and once he has evaluated that against the related consequences and harms of both policies, he must then consider how the rest of the platforms in question might affect the number of abortions performed. Is there evidence that their policies concerning funding for various social support systems might affect the number of abortions¹³? What about the likelihood that they will implement policies affecting access to contraception and sex education¹⁴? What about how their policies might affect the availability and funding of pre-natal care? Poverty? Education more broadly? What about policies making adoption easier, less expensive, or otherwise more accessible? On an aggregate basis, he would have to determine whether the ‘pro-life’ candidate’s platform would have the real-world effects that were so important to the calculus in the first place.

And once he has done that, presuming he continued to feel strongly that the real-world effect of the ‘pro-life’ candidate’s policies would be more favorable, he would consider and weigh that conclusion against similar conclusions he made about the other policies present on each candidate and party’s platform. He would evaluate the appropriateness, wisdom, and justice of the effects he expected them to produce. He would evaluate the effect he expected on his national culture and what he judged to be desirable. He might evaluate the character, temperament, discretion, honesty, and capabilities of the candidates. And then he would have to weigh these matters, the effects he expected on his country, his countrymen, and whether it reflected the whole of his values, experience, and intellect.

Does this sound to you like a glorified apologia for a pro-choice vote? If so, I’m afraid that’s just the ring talking. As it happens, this is part of the process through which I reasoned and concluded that Kamala Harris could not receive my vote for the presidency¹⁵. Theology is not the binding constraint on my view that post-viability abortion without risk to the mother constitutes murder, the reduction of which should be a primary goal of the state – my consideration of natural law and liberty are a stricter governor to my judgment in this case. But my weighing of the questions I listed above after that point guided me to this conclusion. The point is not to convince you that my reasoning or even my process is correct. If you disagreed, you’d have every right to express that with whatever fervor you deemed appropriate for the gravity of the subject. The point is to convince you that there are a dozen stages in this or a similar evaluation process at which a reasonable person could come to a different conclusion which would change the platform he supported on the basis of his faith, his secular moral values, his political theory, or any other number of influences.

It is not unreasonable to suppose, for example, that a wide system of tariffs might cause more harm to innocents through diffuse economic impacts, inflation, and shortages than the real-world differentials in policies on abortion. Or that the public health impact of introducing Bobby Kennedy to dismantle faith in and access to vaccines could dwarf the real-world death caused by differentials in proposed abortion policies. Or that adopting the subsidized pre-natal healthcare access programs that we conservatives find so expensive, or expanding the contraceptive access and education programs we find so icky, or embracing the poverty-suppressing redistributive policies we find so oppressive to economic freedom might have a far greater effect on the actual number of abortions than the restrictive policies we might otherwise favor. Neither is it unreasonable to suppose that a person might in good faith concede all of that and still conclude that it is good for a nation to start with just laws and to work out the real-world problems from there – even if that means passing abortion restrictions that do not have an immediate net beneficial effect. Neither is it unreasonable that a person might feel himself unfit for the task of weighing the expected outcomes of such complex events, erring on the side of aligning his vote with the candidate whose stated principles most align with his own.

The point is that it is precisely this kind of principled reasoning that the The Party cannot tolerate in the widening gyre. It cannot abide autonomy of mind. It cannot abide deviance. Intra-party deviance, especially with America’s first-past-the-post, winner-take-all election system is how you lose that game in the political world. More importantly, The Party must be able to quickly draw more issues, topics, and political positions into its gravity. It must achieve unity on new questions not through the slow process of persuasion and reason, but by simply restating and expanding the scope of, in this case, “what Christians must do to remain Christians.”

Look, there are entirely reasonable political arguments in opposition to student loan forgiveness, excessive restrictions on movement during lockdowns, and open borders. But here they have been drawn into an assertion that they represent the antithesis of Christianity in the same as third trimester elective abortion might. This is what the ring does. It makes us feel like we are seeing the connections between features of our world view! What a powerful insight we had! We are mastering it! Beneath the surface, however, all we are doing is allowing the symbol’s changing meaning to corrupt our very beliefs to reflect the existential needs of The Party in the widening gyre.

Over time, the inevitable result is that that list of what it means to be a Christian will look less and less like what someone studying his Bible might arrive at through principled reasoning and prayer, and more and more like The Party’s current political platform.

This is the corruption of the ring.

The Ring of Science

To say that there is a Ring of Science at work in American politics is not to say that there is anything untoward about belief that scientific research, expertise, or data-driven analysis ought to influence any person’s political engagement. To the contrary, citizens earnestly influenced by their informed assessments of real-world data, experiments, and thoughtfully constructed models have not only the right but the duty to incorporate those into how they vote. Neither should it be taken to conjure some specter of a “liberal elite universities” bogeyman exerting malignant and underhanded influence.

The Ring of Science is the transformation of the belief in scientific principles into a symbol which is, means, or represents voting for Democratic candidates for public office.

This is what it looks like.

These are all statements made by various figures from the scientific and Democratic political establishment. They are not appeals to reason. They are not arguments. Over any such convictions and considerations they impose a new symbol, a Ring of Science: that to be an American who cares about science IS to vote for the Democratic Party.

It is the framing of this as an identity relationship – that one thing quite literally is or means another thing – that makes this kind of argumentation technique equally effective as an engine for corruption and for punishing in-group defection. There can be no gray area, no middle ground, no uncertainty. You exist at this pole or at the other, and if you believe there is room for disagreement you are to be ostracized and excluded. The difference between an identity relationship and something that we believe, that we have concluded, and even that we might argue for with great energy is not a difference in magnitude. It is a difference in kind.

As a citizen, it is crucial that we understand this distinction. If we cannot believe fervently, conclude rationally, and argue boldly without falling into the trap of perceiving the target of our attention as an identity relationship, we will forever be ensnared by the inexorable precession of the widening gyre. I think there are many millions of scientifically minded Americans who will absolutely follow a path of principle and reason to vote for and support Kamala Harris for president. I’ll get hate mail for even suggesting it, but please know before you hit send that you are wrong and I am right. But it IS getting much harder to avoid the corruption of the relentless onslaught of symbols conflating science itself with support for Kamala rather than arguing that it is the most appropriate choice.

Part of the reason it is so difficult has to do with the nature of the Ring of Science we can observe in the outbursts from our panel of enforcers above. They all relate to one of the most complicated, emotionally evocative, and scientifically ambiguous issues in our world: climate change. Oh, to be sure, none of the identity statements I gave you above mentions anything explicitly about climate change. In some cases, that is simply because the context is sitting just outside the excerpt I’ve provided you. A few go on to name Trump as the most radically anti-climate candidate in history. A couple would be found before statements suggesting that a vote for the Republican platform is a vote to set the world on fire.

In other cases, the context is simply the common knowledge of the American academy and Democratic political establishment that climate policy is the only dimension of public policy which could warrant such certainty. If you listened long enough, you might hear rattles of concern about public health policy and trade policy, or fascism, or even various immigration or border policies, but those are bit roles in this great play. Climate policy is both necessary and sufficient to explain any argument put forth that an American who believes in science cannot, by definition, vote for Donald Trump.

Let us set down the Ring of Science for a moment and consider a thought experiment. What might the principled reasoning process of a scientifically-minded American look like on the question of the relationship between his convictions and his vote? Throughout this experiment, note to yourself any places where your irritation starts to rise. The places where something starts whispering that the answer to this or that question is ‘self-evident’ or ‘settled’. It’s the ring. This is not going where you think it is going.

First, of course, before he considered various forms of evidence about climate change or climate policy, the scientifically-minded American would explore epistemological considerations. What constitutes sufficient empirical evidence to establish confidence of causal relationships in complex systems? How should we evaluate the relative strength of observational vs. experimental data? Can scientists be confident that we have identified the factors which influence dimensions of climate important to policy determinations? Are policy proposals prone to begging the question on global policy coordination? Do scientists truly have the capacity to project reflexive relationships among climate change, economic adaptations, economic growth, demographics, and dimensions of geopolitics that would affect global policy coordination?

Presuming that he concluded that it is possible to know the things necessary to make credible claims about both climate science and climate policy, he might then explore the evidence and assertions made by scientists. He would explore data measuring whether and by how much global temperatures have changed¹⁶. He would explore claims and evidence about the share of such changes that might reasonably be attributed to anthropogenic sources¹⁷. He would evaluate claims based on models which projected the effects of existing and future greenhouse gas emissions on future air and sea temperatures. He would consider the strength of claims of consequential effects on related activity and systems, such as tropical cyclone formation probabilities and intensity variability, rainfall patterns, desertification, effects on sensitive biomes, and changes both positive and negative to arability and livability¹⁸. He might consider analysis of both mean effects and extreme effects as distinct risks¹⁹.

Presuming that our scientifically-minded citizen had concluded that the evidence for anthropogenic climate change and projections of consequential effects was strong, he might then be persuaded to consider attempts to model the various effects on human life at different levels of projected warming. He might consider the credibility of models of future economic damage. He might consider projections of non-economic changes in quality of life, global stability, crime rates, or other second- and third-order effects. He might consider the importance of tipping points in ecosystems, the permanence of species loss, and the risk created by compound disasters and effects (e.g. extended heat waves, sequential droughts, clusters of flooding). He might evaluate models of human adaptivity and how decades of encroaching effects might cause humans to naturally reduce their exposure over time, or how resources and technological emergence driven by economic growth might be over- or understated in various projections. And since he’s voting for an American leader, would it be odd for him to consider the extent to which these impact projections differed materially for the United States relative to other regions?

Presuming that he was convinced scientists had demonstrated credible claims of some expected cost of inaction on climate, we might expect him to explore the menu of climate mitigation policies being proposed. He might review projections of the economic costs of decarbonization and consider their effects on human freedom. He would have to consider the modeled effects of such policies, but he would also have to come to conclusions about how realistic it was that they could be implemented globally. Would there be any avoiding the tragedy of the global commons, freeloading countries, and the almost impossible-to-suppress desire of two billion Chinese and Indian humans to consume like the global middle class they would soon join? He would need to consider whether the decarbonization in developing countries necessary to achieve target mitigation levels would create material harm in non-economic terms, and how his values weigh those matters together.

Upon developing a view of the each of the various response models and policies proposed, he would then have to evaluate the actual policies proposed by the candidates before him. He would take into account some sense of costs, benefits, the context of realistic global coordination, and the strength of evidence. He would consider the likelihood that the policies could make it through the legislative process. He would consider how those effects would fit into and influenced the global policy response. He would also probably combine this with an evaluation of the candidates’ policies in dozens of different areas, some of which might be significantly more or less important to him. After all, just as Christian voters think and care about many issues, so too do many scientifically-minded citizens.

Does this sound to you like a glorified apologia for a climate change denial vote? If so, I’m afraid that’s just the Ring talking. As it happens, this is part of the process through which I reasoned and concluded that Donald Trump would not receive my vote for the presidency, either. My weighing of the questions I listed above guided me to the conclusion that anthropogenic climate change is real – despite the efforts of a manipulative, doom-predicting news media to make me dismiss the evidence out of irritation and principle. I remain deeply skeptical of the net benefit of large scale decarbonization and am utterly dubious of our capacity to reach aggressive targets in the face of an emerging global middle class. I am also furious with those who justify inaction of things we can do – like improving how we develop in vulnerable areas (where losses will inevitably be socialized) – by using the corruption of the Ring of Science as an excuse for inaction.

The point is not to convince you that my reasoning or even my process is correct. If you disagreed, you’d have every right to express that with whatever fervor you deemed appropriate for the gravity of the subject. The point is to convince you that there are a dozen stages in this or a similar evaluation process at which a reasonable person could come to a different conclusion which would change the platform he supported on the basis of his values, his weighing of multiple types of data and evidence, and his skepticism about variables outside the realistic modeling capacity of scientists. The point is that it is precisely this kind of principled reasoning that the The Party cannot tolerate in the widening gyre. It cannot abide autonomy of mind. It cannot abide deviance. Intra-party deviance, especially with America’s first-past-the-post, winner-take-all election system is how you lose that game in the political world. More importantly, The Party must be able to quickly draw more issues, topics, and political positions into its gravity. It must achieve unity on new questions not through the slow process of persuasion and reason, but by simply restating and expanding the scope of, in this case, “what people who believe in Science must believe and vote for.”

Over the last three decades, Americans have been subjected to a parade of curious new entries into the definition of the symbol we call science. Pro-GMO, then Anti-GMO. Critical theory and DEI. Gas stove bans. Noble lies. Constantly shifting educational models. Scientific conclusions can change and improve as evidence evolves, of course, but that isn’t what I mean. I mean that at various points we have been told that believing in science meant political support for these things. This is what the ring does. It makes us feel like we are seeing the connections between features of our world view! What a powerful insight we had! We are mastering it! Beneath the surface, however, all we are doing is allowing the symbol’s changing meaning to corrupt our very beliefs to reflect the existential needs of The Party in the widening gyre.

Over time, the inevitable result is that that list of what it means to believe in science will look less and less like what someone committed to rigorous, data-driven research might arrive at through principled reasoning, and more and more like The Party’s current political platform.

This is the corruption of the ring.

Götterdämmerung

There is another, older ring story.

In many ways, it is very like its spiritual and literary descendant we have in Tolkien’s Anglo epic. Except for the ending. I am referring to the grand Germanic legend of the Nibelungs. Even if this much older story is not familiar to you, its imagery, themes, and traditional treatments are. The crossdressing Bugs Bunny Brünnhilde from What’s Opera Doc, the hero’s triumphal funeral pyre at the closing curtain, the Valkyrie aesthetic, and the fat horn-helmed soprano (inaccurately, in this case) are all familiar elements of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen and the epics from which it draws inspiration.

As it is for The Lord of the Rings, the Macguffin for Der Ring des Nibelungen is a magic ring with glorious properties, a ring which when stolen curses its bearer with misfortune and woe. Unlike Tolkien’s work, however, in the Ring Cycle there are none wise enough to realize that they cannot master the ring’s power over them. Oh, the ring is taken and hidden by the Rhinemaidens in the end, but not before its corruption has consumed the world. Valhalla itself burns along with Brünnhilde and Siegfried in the final scene of Götterdämmerung, the Twilight of the Gods.

This is a possible path. Maybe even a likely one. No, it’s probably not a literal burning of the world, but an ugly period where society just doesn’t function. A world where our dislocation from reality and our dislocation from one another makes it impossible to do simple and important things. We have already written about the world it produces.

It’s not just those two rings, either. Obviously not. Remember, this game draws everything into its gravity. Any axis which can be used to make inter-group cooperation costly and intra-group cooperation valuable will be used. Imagine a single dimension of identity that really matters deeply to you. Culture. Ethnicity. A trait you treasure, like courage, bravery, honesty, or success. A feature of America you value, like freedom, industry, or democracy. Now try to think about any one of those that hasn’t been marshaled as a symbol in the public square. Just one that you haven’t been told means that you must do, believe, or vote for something.

Now think about one that you haven’t thought about or used that way. How can anyone who believes this support that? How can anyone who is this do that? There is a reason I put that ‘I’ in the title of this essay. I am not good at this. I am not above it. I am not beyond this. I am not immune to this.

Neither are you.

It is fiendishly difficult to resist the temptation to succumb to identity symbols when our reason leads us to the same conclusion every time. When our principled reasoning leads us to preferences for one party or candidate again and again, it feels like a small thing to conflate the two. It is not a small thing. When it comes to our autonomy of mind and the autonomy of mind we grant to our neighbors, they are not differences in magnitude but differences in kind. Unfortunately, we don’t have the luxury of throwing these rings into the fire once and being done. There are no Rheinmaidens coming to drag them out of our reach. Long after this election is in the rearview mirror, seductive symbols will continue to impose encroaching, shifting meanings on our beliefs, identity, and judgments. Every day.

It will continue to be our duty to resist their corruption. Every day.

Does that mean not feeling strongly? Not arguing boldly, even aggressively? Not identifying the flaws in arguments we hear? Not drawing some conclusions about people who argue poorly? Not resisting a bad direction for the country out of fear of being thought too rude or loud or unfriendly? Never being angry at what you think is a bad faith argument or a oppressive public policy built on poor logic?

No. It doesn’t mean any of that.

It simply means realizing that every time we build our political engagement on a foundation of symbolic identities, we surrender more of our autonomy of mind.

The more we surrender our autonomy of mind, the more we fade into nothing more than a wraith – a slave to someone else’s will.

1. Cirdan is certainly the oldest. Power in Tolkien’s legendarium is always vague, multidimensional, and difficult to ascertain, but among the Children of Ilúvatar, only Glorfindel has a legitimate claim, and there only in martial terms. ↩︎
2. Mirrored by the responses of Gandalf and Faramir and contrasted with the response of Boromir. ↩︎
3. One could argue that the Doom of Mandos against the Noldor, including Galadriel, for their kinslaying of the Teleri, already constituted a sort of damnation within this cosmology, but that is neither here nor there. ↩︎
4. This is not always the case, but in a bimodal political distribution of this kind, costly cooperation and profitable defection affect the calculus in similar ways. ↩︎
5. Martin Gurri wrote about this compellingly recently as The Endarkenment. I recommend it. ↩︎
6. It is difficult to say definitively, but many Christians take this view on the basis of Exodus 21:22-25. Others contest that Numbers 5:11-31, the only scripture to explicitly discuss the process of abortion, at least suggests that Torah did not have categorical restrictions against the practice. ↩︎
7. Perhaps not definitively, but there are enough that this is a very common and historically consistent view. Jeremiah 1:5; Psalm 139:13-16; Isaiah 49:1; Luke 1:41-44; Genesis 25:22-23; Job 31:15; Galatians 1:5; Isaiah 44:24. ↩︎
8. A very literal reading of Psalm 51:5 could indicate this. ↩︎
9. There are a wide variety of potentially valid interpretations of this. Jesus acknowledges ‘weightier matters’ in the Gospel of Matthew, but they are ‘justice and mercy and faith.’ Jesus clearly ministers specifically to children, but his sternest warnings are not for those who harm children (more than they might harm anyone else) but for those who cause children to sin. Scripture is deep, however, with special attention to violence against the innocent. It is one of the things God detests in Proverbs 6:16-19 and which Scripture calls out explicitly in Jeremiah 22:3, Matthew 25:40, Deuteronomy 27:25, and Exodus 23:7. Likewise, many of the stories of the Old Testament describe God’s anger against the Moloch worship and purported child sacrifice practiced by the Canaanites, which could reasonably be read to consider harm to children and (if one had concluded ensouled fetuses to be children) the unborn a weightier matter than other evils. Leviticus 18:21; Leviticus 20:2-5. Jeremiah 32:35; Psalm 106:37-38; 2 Kings 23:10; 2 Kings 17:17. ↩︎
10. This one is too much for a footnote. Read Augustine’s City of God, Calvin’s On Civil Government, Kuyper’s Common Grace or Calvin lectures, Grudem’s Politics According to the Bible, VanDrunen’s Natural Law and the Two Kingdoms, A Theology of Liberation from Gutiérrez, Wallis’s God’s Politics, Yoder’s The Politics of Jesus and Christian Witness to the State, O’Donovan’s The Desire of the Nations, and Pecknold’s surveys on the matter and you’ll have a pretty good menu of perspectives on the wide-ranging relevant Scriptures and their historical treatment. ↩︎
11. The literature on this question is challenging to draw concrete conclusions from, largely because of an astonishing number of confounding factors (e.g. different countries, different cultural backdrops, different times, different economic conditions, different healthcare systems, different rural/urban dynamics which affect access, etc.). Anecdotally, for example, we might observe that the Dobbs decision was followed by an increase in the number of abortions. The WHO and Guttmacher Institute, not exactly unbiased parties to the question, have generally asserted that restrictions tend to have “modest effects” on the absolute number of abortions, and that the key distinctions between countries with strong restrictions and liberal laws are safety and maternal mortality. I think a reasonable person could and should be skeptical that the available data are strongly predictive of either conclusion. ↩︎
12. There is evidence that certain abortion restrictions create ancillary harm that would be of concern to a Christian citizen of a similar type, if not scale, to his concerns about abortion. Some diffuse correlations like the one between abortion rates and crime famously recounted in Freakonomics probably wouldn’t merit inclusion in a principled analysis. Explicit cases where poorly written laws with gray areas resulted in delayed evacuation of non-viable fetuses and the death of or injury to mothers probably would. So, too, would long-term studies demonstrating that restrictions in some nations have not always been accompanied by significant changes in maternal mortality. See:
    
    Koch, E., Thorp, J., Bravo, M., Gatica, S., Romero, C. X., Aguilera, H., & Ahlers, I. (2012). Women’s education level, maternal health facilities, abortion legislation and maternal deaths: A natural experiment in Chile from 1957 to 2007. PLoS ONE, 7(5).
    ↩︎
13. .Possibly. See:
    
    Singh, S., Remez, L., Sedgh, G., Kwok, L., & Onda, T. (2018). Abortion worldwide 2017: Uneven progress and unequal access. Guttmacher Institute.
    ↩︎
14. Possibly. See:
    
    RAND Europe. (2016). Reproductive health and wellbeing: A review of trends and interventions in Europe. RAND Corporation.
    ↩︎
15. My related conclusion that Donald Trump is manifestly unfit for any public office, village dog catcher not excepted, is a separate one arrived at on a different basis. ↩︎
16. There might be some room to quibble on details, but evidence for the core assertion of warming is pretty overwhelming. See:
    
    IPCC. (2021). Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Masson-Delmotte, V., P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S.L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M.I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J.B.R. Matthews, T.K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, and B. Zhou (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. ↩︎
17. As above, the evidence for substantial anthropogenic influence, even within a system as complex as climate, is quite strong. Still, it would not be humanity’s first time to demonstrate hubris about our capacity to understand and model such systems accurately. ↩︎
18. Here the quality and consistency of analysis is much more uneven. The views of reasonable people and scientists alike diverge significantly. One of the most instructive such disputes can be found in the techniques used in the normalization of tropical cyclone damage over time. While often presented in popular media as ‘settled science’, there remains disagreement on how much present-day monetary damage from natural disasters can be attributed to anthropogenic sources specifically, as opposed to changes in property values, development approaches, differences in reporting quality over time, and population growth in hazard areas. Some scientists have asserted that data used even in IPCC’s periodic metastudies for this purpose is stitched together from humorously unreliable sources – and that claims of demonstrable anthropogenic emission relationships with natural disaster damage become dubious after adjusting for it. ↩︎
19. Here, again, popular media is largely at odds even with IPCC, which maintains low confidence in assertions that the effect of anthropogenic emissions on the severity and incidence of many kinds of extreme weather-related disasters can be distinguished from normal variability. ↩︎