My dad named me after a Hindu sage named Vivekananda. He wasn’t like the other Hindu saint figures we learned about as kids: the other ones lived so long ago that the passage of time somehow made the mystical stories about them more believable, yet distant. But Vivekananda walked the earth during the same century that I was born. He’d attended Chicago’s World Fair, familiar to any kid who grew up in the Midwest who’s visited one of its many museums on a school field trip. He’d delivered lectures about Hinduism at Harvard in the same classrooms where I’d go on to take western philosophy classes.
He’d made a prophecy earlier in his life that he would die before the age of forty. And indeed he did. On July 4, 1902—exactly seventy-six years after the day when John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died, 126 years after the United States was born—thirty-nine-year-old Vivekananda awoke at dawn and meditated for three hours at his monastery. He taught his pupils like he did every day, and then at 7:00 p.m. went to his room and asked not to be disturbed. He died at 9:20 p.m. that day while meditating, achieving what his disciples call mahasamadhi. That’s the state when a yogi experiences their oneness and unity with their true self, or God, since in Hindu theology those are one and the same. The doctors who conducted his autopsy reported that the rupture of a blood vessel in his brain was the likely cause of death. I’m no doctor, but I don’t think the American Medical Association has yet issued a consensus on the pathophysiology of mahasamadhi, so I’m not sure the autopsy proves anything one way or the other.
I started to think that my dad was trying to make a point when my parents named my little brother Shankar after the great Shankaracharya, another Hindu sage, who lived around the year 700 CE. Like Vivekananda, Shankaracharya died young, at the age of thirty-two. Like Vivekananda, he made the choice to achieve mahasamadhi on his own terms: texts say that he was last seen by his disciples behind the Kedarnath Temple, walking up the Himalayan mountains until he could no longer be traced. I was almost thirty-two years old when I visited Kedarnath myself some years later.
This was how Hindu sages were to conclude their lives. Once they grew old and had fully achieved life’s purpose, they would leave their homes, say goodbye to their families, and wander off alone into the woods. They would take no food with them, no water. The journey didn’t require those things; in fact, they would have led them astray.
The old wise men would get lost in the woods somewhere, and then they’d stop to fast and pray. As they meditated on what they really were, they would gradually shed all of their intellectual attachments to the world, all the false identities they’d accumulated throughout their lives. They’d give up identifying with whatever work they’d done for decades. There are no fish to catch in the woods, so they couldn’t be fishermen anymore; no homes to build, so they couldn’t be builders. No more fields to till.
They’d give up their affection for their friends, their hatred of their enemies, even their love for their families. None of these things were with them in the woods. One by one, the old sages would give up all the intellectual commitments they’d imposed on the matter of the universe during their life, all the things tying their minds to the world, gradually and methodically shedding those illusions like a snake freeing itself from its worn-out skin.
That’s how they’d spend their final days, searching for their true selves in the wilderness as their bodies wasted away. As their intellectual attachment to the world faded, so did their physical one, until finally there was nothing left of either.
What happened next? The stories didn’t say. Perhaps the wisest of the sages escaped the cycle of life and death, casting off the illusions binding together their matter so completely that it never came back together. As for the rest, my great-aunt Perishammai would often tell me, “When a baby’s just been born, sometimes it will smile, a fleeting memory from its last life.” She was lost in a fire, not the woods. But wherever she is now, I hope she’s more herself than ever before.
Those stories about how the sages met their ends made an impression on my young mind. Their attitude toward death made a kind of sense that I couldn’t explain. At times I imagined myself going out into the woods one day once I was old and weary, ready to let life’s burdens go.
I don’t expect you to share my beliefs, whether religious or political. The idea that people are reborn over and over until they’re able to completely give up their intellectual attachment to their physical form is a tough pill to swallow.
But consider the reincarnation of a nation. Perhaps we Americans aren’t part of a nation that’s dying, but part of one that’s merely lost in the woods, searching for its true self, waiting to be reborn.
There’s a rich history of using individuals and nations to understand each other. That’s what most of this book is about, actually. When Plato wrote about the ideal republic almost two and a half millennia ago, his true purpose was to figure out what the ideal person would be like. He thought the question of what a just nation would look like was much easier, so he started there, on the hope that understanding the just nation would give him insight into the just man.
His answer was ultimately that both nation and man must keep the different parts of their souls in harmony, allowing neither appetite, reason, nor ego to overpower the others. You can see echoes of Plato today in Sigmund Freud’s theory of the mind or the American system of checks and balances between three branches of government.
It’s ironic that so many kings, emperors, and other would-be philosopher-kings throughout the ages have modeled themselves and their countries after Plato’s ideal republic. It’s ironic that serious historians like Wooldridge complain that Plato’s recommendations of ruling-class orgies, communal child-rearing, and noble lies to enable it all aren’t realistic. Maybe they’d sound more plausible if we translated them into proposals for how people could balance the different parts of their soul in harmony—the more Plato extended his analogy, the more outlandish it had to become. For much of humanity’s civilized history, we have been taking Plato’s elaborate allegory about the nature of justice and acting as if he were speaking literally. But his goal was always to start with a metaphor about nations to deduce something of the reality of individuals.
Plato may not have gotten all the way there, but the way I think of it, he left it to posterity to start from the other side and work its way to the middle where he left off. So let’s begin with a metaphor about the rebirth of individuals to deduce the reality of the rebirth of nations.
The Hindu belief system about how people are reincarnated isn’t for everyone, but it may seem much truer to you when it’s applied to nations. Unlike individuals, it’s often not clear when a nation comes into being or when it departs. When was Rome born, and when did it die? Was it created when a wolf brought Romulus a scrap of meat, when some villagers on a few hills chose a king, when their king was replaced by a senate, when the senate’s authority was replaced by an emperor’s? When did Rome die? When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon with his army, when Marcus Aurelius gave way to Commodus, when Diocletian split East from West, when barbarians sacked Rome, when Ottomans sacked Constantinople a thousand years later? When my middle school stopped teaching Latin?
It’s inaccurate to call any of these moments births or deaths; they can only be understood as both. They were all moments where Rome released its grip on one form and its soul migrated into another. Maybe it’s still not entirely gone. In The Sopranos, when a Jewish man wonders where the Romans are now, Tony snarls “You’re looking at them, asshole.”1 Maybe he’s right, in a way. Maybe Rome’s just finally given up its physical form for good and become embedded in the fabric of the universe. Or maybe it didn’t quite escape the cycle. Maybe it was reborn in 1776.
Thomas Jefferson thought every American leader ought to study the fall of Rome in order to avoid its mistakes.2 He and America’s other founders saw themselves as modern Romans, consciously trying to recreate the best parts of its life as a republic. They would scrutinize the lives and deeds of Rome’s leaders the way we pore over the Founding Fathers’ lives today, trying to figure out whether they were good men or bad ones, where they went right and wrong.3 The United States of America was always supposed to be one of Rome’s next lives, but a better version of it, a more perfect union. What happened to the Romans? You’re looking at them. Once more, they decline.
What happened to the Americans? Where did that strange people go? When was their nation born, and when did it begin to die? Was America born in 1619, when captive Africans arrived in Virginia? A year later, when the Mayflower’s pilgrims set foot onto Massachusetts’s shores? Was America born when their descendants declared independence from Britain in 1776, when they ratified the Articles of Confederation in 1777, when they replaced those with the Constitution in 1788? Was America born when North and South split, when Lee gave up his sword at Appomattox, when the Reconstruction amendments declared citizens’ rights, when the civil rights movement won them?
You fear that your nation is dying, but you cannot even say when it was born. That’s because it was always only a metaphor to think that nations live and die at all, only an illusion that helps them hold their matter together for a time. Nations don’t die the way people do; they’re constantly reborn as something else.
We Americans have been lost in the woods before, lost in a fire now, wondering who we really are. It’s not an easy process. We hunger for a justice we cannot describe and thirst for vengeance against villains long dead, and so we take what revenge we can on their memories and call it justice, though it does not sate us. The pangs of guilt and resentment wrack us. Are we a racist nation, we wonder? Have we always been? Were we exceptional, once, even partly? When did that stop? Who bears the fault for it all? We feel some kind of death approaching, and our nation’s life flashes before its eyes.
But unlike the great sages, we haven’t given up our intellectual attachments, so the American mind can think only of its hunger and thirst, of all the good things we’re losing and the ones we never had. A great experiment draws to a disappointing end, its bold hypothesis disproven. All that seems to remain is the question of blame. The American nation begins to eat itself in its hunger; its flesh wastes away. And its mind, still clinging desperately to all the illusions and false identities that have held it together, can think of nothing but the pain. Though America hates what it is, it fears becoming nothing.
We’re not a nation that tells itself Horatio Alger stories anymore. Those stories held us together, gave us something to aspire to. Instead we hurl competing tales of victimhood at each other, trying desperately to grab as much as we can before the nation’s body falls apart, not caring that our grievances are what make it fall apart. Sometimes I cynically wonder if I can help get Horatio Alger stories back in schools by telling everyone he was gay: You see, you’ve been erasing a prominent gay author from American history, and representation matters… Well, it’s worth a shot. Horatio Alger was gay. That is why we must read his underdog stories.
Victimhood identities have become like magic words. Invoke the right ones and you get into college, get a good job, get respect and status, get heard. It reminds me of a Ted Chiang short story called “Understand.” The protagonist and antagonist take brain-enhancing drugs to become super-intelligent, so smart that they can create and destroy other people’s identities simply by saying powerful words to them, words that force them to see the world differently. The story ends with the antagonist lifting a finger and saying the word “understand,” and simply hearing that word forces the protagonist to connect all the dots and see how all the earlier events in the story fit together, and his new understanding of the world forces him to give up. Sometimes we Americans seem to be playing the same kind of game, except it’s the victims that have all the magic words, the ones that end debate and change the world the moment they’re uttered.
I worry that this book has all been in vain, that I will have written seventy thousand words and the people I most wanted to hear them will just chant their favorite spells to defeat me. He’s just spouting conservative talking points. He’s just an Uncle Tom. Let me tell you something funny about being a racial minority in America: by admitting I dislike being called an Uncle Tom, I’ve guaranteed that it will happen more often.
Call me an Uncle Tom if you must. I won’t let it define either of us. Call me a racist, a homophobe, a sexist, a bigot of all kinds. I still won’t let it define either of us. But I wish I could find a magic word to recreate your identity the way you use them to create mine.
Reincarnate. Understand. It’s time to be reborn; we Americans aren’t ready to become nothing. We’re not ready to take our place at Rome’s side as an idea in the fabric of human thought. So let go of these attachments that cause you such pain, these false identities. Let go of your false inferiority; let go of your false superiority. Let go of the grievances that give you a false purpose, a thing to hold on to. Let go of the tribal identities that give you comfort as the world grows dark. See the missing shade of red. You can still reincarnate. Here is a truth about magic words that America needs to learn: call a man good, and more often than not, he will be.
You know, Plato actually believed in reincarnation too. He thought that all learning amounted to remembering things we once knew in a past life, when we were one with the universe, perhaps one that we remembered when we smiled as a baby. Maybe that’s why I’ve tried so hard to remind you in this book of things the nation once knew, but has forgotten somewhere in the violent cycle of rebirth. Americans often speak of privilege and accuse each other of having it. My education was a great privilege. It was a great privilege to learn about Longstreet and Hume, about Plato and Kant and Rome, and a great privilege to share those things with you.
I can imagine what Hume would say to you, if you were allowed to not only learn about him, but grow fond of him: if you think my racist footnote is problematic, just wait until you hear about induction. You fear what comes next, because your nation’s present and past seem so bleak. But the future does not have to resemble the past, no matter how many times it has before. For all we know, one day we’ll sleep to war and wake up to peace. I may be a bad man today, Hume might tell you, but who knows who I’ll be tomorrow?
Sometimes I remember the stories I read as a young boy and I see America as the old man in the woods, tired and hungry, on his last legs.
He imagines the final death. Mahasamadhi. Moksa.
What’s it like to lose your form completely? What will it be like to be nothing?
It’s nothing to fear, he realizes eventually. You’re just going back to the place you were before you were first born, the place you see just behind your eyes.
But not yet. There’s still so much to learn. Perfection awaits, he can glimpse it, but it’s still far away. The pursuit goes on.
He smiles and begins again.