No Direction Home.

And no home either, come to that.

I haven’t decided yet whether to go to see Christopher Nolan’s new film about Odysseus. Like a lot of people, I suspect, I’ve been a little put off by all the artificial controversy being deliberately generated about the film, and by the use of a self-consciously “modern” translation which seems a bit dubious in places. But what’s interesting is that the film is being made at all, and, irrespective of how well it’s recounted, what its choice of subject tells us about our world and our culture today. The story has been told and re-told many times, of course, and, unlike many others (even the Iliad) it has lodged itself securely in the collective cultural memory of the western world. There’s a well-known story of how Allen Lane, the founder of Penguin Books, somewhat reluctantly agreed to publish a prose translation of the Odyssey in paperback, only to see it sell half a million copies in Britain alone within a year. Perhaps the most famous English-language novel of the twentieth century, James Joyce’s Ulysses is deliberately and explicitly based on Homer’s poem. And one enthusiast has identified more than thirty films based, on it, or riffing off it.

So what’s going on here? Well, there’s a theory that the number of basic plots in world culture is actually very small: anything from five to seven is often suggested. Among these is the plot of the hero’s return home, which is the plot of the Odyssey, but it’s important to understand that “the” plot has, in fact, several distinct elements to it. An individual is stranded far away from home. This individual decides to return, and makes use of his unusual abilities to overcome various dangers and problems on the way. These abilities may include strength and courage, but they often include intelligence and resourcefulness as well. So Odysseus is introduced as polytropos, usually translated as “man of many ways,” and throughout the poem (and in the Iliad as well), his shrewdness and cunning are emphasised, in contrast, for example, to the straightforward courage and ferocity of Achilles. And finally, when the hero arrives home, after many adventures, there is still work to be done to put things in order, and even the promise of further adventures to come.

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In fact, this is not the first time Nolan has told the story: it is the essential plot of his great war film Dunkirk (2017.) This is the story of the homecoming of an entire Army, given up for lost, but it focuses on Tommy (the traditional generic name for a British soldier), the only survivor of his group, who through his ingenuity and the commitment and courage of others, manages to return to the relative safety of England. The film explicitly uses the four Elements to recall Homer: the land represents safety, the sea represents danger, the air is the domain of godlike figures who intervene to threaten or help the hero, and fire is their weapon. (Yes, military historians, that’s why Spitfires appear in the film, not Hurricanes. It’s called symbolism.) And at the end of the film, one of the pilots, obliged to descend from the air, sets fire to his aircraft, on the land, next to the sea, as a sacrificial offering of thanks for the rescue. (For that matter both Inception and Interstellar include some of the same elements of the return home.)

And it’s fundamental to the Odysseus story that the homecoming is not the end of the action: he still has to kill the suitors and clean up the kingdom. Thus in Dunkirk, after the successful return to England Tommy finds himself reading a newspaper with Churchill’s sombre warning that “wars are not won by evacuations,” and his promise of “blood, tears, toil and sweat,” not peace any time soon. And what the viewer knows, and Tommy does not know, is that soon he will be sent off to fight somewhere else, in Greece or North Africa or the Far East, possibly to die, otherwise to fight on until 1945. In the Odysseus myth, it’s not over until it’s over. Which must have been in Tolkien’s mind when he ended The Lord of the Rings not just with a climactic battle, not just with a homecoming, but with the subsequent Scouring of the Shire.

Sometimes, real life obligingly repeats mythical patterns. As it happens, a very long film treatment of Charles de Gaulle’s, well, Odyssey between 1940 and 1944 has just been released in two parts. I hope it makes it to the Anglo-Saxon world intact. What’s really fascinating is how closely his real-world story resembles the Odysseus myth. De Gaulle, stranded in England in 1940, and effectively alone, manages to take on to himself the attributes of a symbolic King, as Odysseus had been King of Ithaca, and by force of personality and diplomacy rather than military power, avoids traps and snares, and makes his way back, via Brazzaville and Algiers, to be received in Paris as the rightful ruler. Indeed, even the story of Penelope makes a fleeting appearance. Just as she resisted the suitors, so La France (always feminine) and Marianne, the (female) symbol of the Republic, fought on through the Resistance and the Free French, against the French State of Pétain, and its collaboration with the Nazis. And finally, of course, there was the reckoning, the Purge, when some of the most egregious collaborators like Laval the Prime Minister were executed, even if for political reasons the carnage was less impressive than it had been on Ithaca.

This could go on for pages, but I’ll just briefly note how deeply the myth of the Hero’s Return insinuated itself into even the most popular of popular culture. In the decades following World War 2, there was an entire sub-genre of film and TV stories about escapes from German prison camps, using guile and deception, travelling across occupied Europe and usually escaping via Spain. The best known of these is probably The Great Escape, but would you believe there is one called The Wooden Horse that relates the true story of a literal wooden (vaulting) horse, used not to get into a city, but out of a prison camp? The idea of the return of the avenging hero is common in popular culture too, from Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider, to Michael Caine in Get Carter, which was itself based on a thriller novel called … Jack’s Return Home. The idea has also been satirised, of course, notably in Joyce’s Ulysses, where Leopold Bloom is very clearly Everyman, and his homecoming, as Joyce makes clear, is the homecoming of all of us, of “Sinbad the Sailor, Tinbad the Tailor, Jinbad the Jailer, Whinbad the Whaler, Ninbad the Nailer, Binbad the Bailer…” and unlike Odysseus, he does nothing. He does not even remonstrate with Molly, his unfaithful wife, who serves as a satirical counterpart to Penelope. And it’s not by chance that Joyce himself never went “home” to Ireland, and that one of his minor works is a play called Exiles. There are also satirical inversions of the same concept, like the character of Tyrone Slothrop in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, lost in a fantastic and surreal postwar Europe, seeing marvels and confronting obstacles, who does not manage to get home, but drifts passively around until he effectively “dissolves.”

So, (and with apologies if I’ve left out a work you’re attached to) we have three essential elements. An individual or group, not necessarily inherently heroic but wanting to return home, the successful overcoming of tests, trials and obstacles, and the rectification of the situation. So where, in today’s events, or in cultural productions set in the present time, do we encounter this tradition? Well we don’t, actually, which is why Nolan’s film is so interesting, and why it will be equally interesting to see how it is received. For the fundamental three-element structure I have described no longer corresponds to anything valued by current western culture or society. We are therefore required to look either backwards a minimum of half a century, or sideways to other cultures for examples. I’ll try to explain in the rest of this essay what we have lost, and why this is important.

The first obvious requirement is a society in which the possibility of doing challenging things exists. I put it that way, because a society may be extremely boring, conventional and unheroic, but there may still be space deliberately left at the edges for the possibility of challenges, and the surrounding world itself might provide them whether you want them or not. In his autobiography Stefan Zweig tries to reconstruct the mentality of the Europe of 1914 and the reasons why the War was initially widely supported. Now Zweig was quite close to being a pacifist, horrified by the approaching conflict, and he wrote his autobiography in exile at the height of the Second World War just before his suicide. But if his historical analysis was a bit shaky, he recognised, as did others, that for large numbers of people the War came as a blessed relief from the unbearable, stifling conformity and predictability of life at the turn of the Century. This was not necessarily because people wanted to fight, let alone kill, even less die, but because the War promised a period of time when the rules would be different, and there would be new opportunities and adventures and challenges. Wartime was a time of freedom from bourgeois constraints, a period when transgressive activity was available for all.

On the other hand, for those unlike Zweig who did serve in the trenches of the First World War, the experience was the defining one of their lives, and their Homecoming, after surviving many ordeals, was often a bitter disappointment. Many combatants saw their own countries ruined, poverty and inflation everywhere and an ungrateful population, whose wealthier elements had not fought themselves but had still done well out of the War. They returned to neglect and unemployment, and unsurprisingly began to feel that Something Needed to be Done. Insofar as it has a single origin, Fascism probably goes back to the sense of anger and disappointment in the Italy of 1919.

Paradoxically, times of great social conformity have in the past provided opportunities for challenges and even adventure. In the period that Zweig was writing about, there were semi-official mechanisms for this, generally involving travelling and working abroad. There were also those who deliberately exiled themselves, those who became involved in radical or even revolutionary politics, those who embraced new philosophies, sometimes from other civilisations, those who embraced new and shocking concepts of art and life. (It’s depressing, in fact, how much of our neurotically transgressive society and culture today is just a pale imitation of the social and cultural ferment of the years after 1919.)

But you could go further. There were many parts of the world that Europeans had never visited, and indeed some that no human being ever had. Explorers (including a number of women) went out to find them, and returned to a reception now associated with footballers or pop stars. Some of the journeys were true epics: Ernest Shackleton and his fellow explorers, attempting to cross Antarctica on foot, lost their main ship, the Endurance, and a group of them set out on a two-week voyage in an open lifeboat to find help in South Georgia, across more than a thousand kilometres of ocean, crossing a mountain-range at the end of the voyage. His men were all rescued safely. But there was nothing obviously extraordinary about Shackleton: he had no great wealth behind him, no influential family, a typical public education of the time until he was fourteen years old, service in the Merchant Navy, and no obvious qualities of leadership or courage until they were tested and revealed in extreme circumstances.

Yet he lived in a time when effort and difficulty were thought to be part of life for most people. Everyday life for both men and women involved far more physical effort than it does today, and often a higher level of difficulty in everyday things Attaining adulthood involved passing through a series of stages where you acquired new responsibilities and learnt to do new things. In most societies, young people began early, with hikes and camps and sports that would now be considered dangerous, and absences lasting days without any contact with their parents. Homesickness, discomfort and isolation were things everybody had to learn to overcome. Even the literature of the day reflected these assumptions: the children of RM Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857) are shipwrecked on the eponymous natural feature, survive and prosper and have adventures before safely coming home. A century later, I seem to remember reading an Enid Blyton book about a group of children going off on holiday on their own in a horse-drawn caravan: something that would get their parents arrested today.

I think it’s fair to say that our society no longer expects or encourages people to do original and difficult things. Ironically, the result of mass media, and the Internet in particular, has been to promote not diversity and challenge, but conformity, since everyone can see what everyone else is doing. I’ve talked before about organisations becoming more risk-averse and procedure-intensive, and less tolerant of the kind of person who can be a nuisance when things are fine, but whom you really need when things go wrong. Likewise, the emphasis today is on doing things more easily, and making them intrinsically easier to do. This is fine in some ways (who would want to go back to washing clothes by hand, for example?) but the overall effect has been a massive de-skilling of society, and a corresponding reliance on technology and on (sometimes expensive) substitutes for learning how to do things. We still want the results but are increasingly unwilling to put in the effort, so the system responds by making challenges easier, or ideally getting rid of them entirely. This is why “AI” used for cheating in universities is not a radical departure: it’s just the logical conclusion of decades of belief that everything should be made as easy as possible. Yes, degrees have been devalued and turned into credentials, yes there are too many graduates and not enough jobs, but the most fundamental purpose of any education is surely your own intellectual and cultural development. Use ChatGPT for your college assignments and you are committing a kind of intellectual suicide.

By contrast, I was part of the first generation of children from “ordinary” backgrounds to go to university in Britain, roughly during the period from the late 60s to the late 70s, and before the beginning of the neoliberal destruction of higher education. “Ordinary” scarcely describes most of us: some were working-class, and not a few came from homes where there were no books. To get through the education system of the time, up to and through university, and perhaps beyond, was extremely difficult anyway, and especially so for those who did not come from the educated middle class. Nonetheless, it was recognised by all in those days that you got nowhere without trying, and overcoming obstacles.

Today’s society has very largely disposed of the need for, and thus the expectation of, difficulty and challenge, and no longer understands the inherent importance of developing and maturing through overcoming those obstacles. That’s why, as I have often argued, we live in an essentially adolescent culture, where we want and expect things to be done for us. And we want results instantly, if not sooner, which is why, for example, apprenticeships have largely disappeared in the West, and the average overpraised Tech Lord is celebrated for having dropped out of university: it’s not as though there was anything of value there to learn. This is why I was amused to see Zuckerberg, in whom I have otherwise taken zero interest, flounder so hopelessly when the first moral and ethical issues arose with his Facebook toy. He looked like a kid completely out of his depth, encountering grown-up problems for the first time, as indeed he was.

But the instant tech billionaire fairy story is just a one example of the fantasy that you can have anything you want without putting in the effort. Go to the religion and spirituality section (if there is one) of your local bookshop (if you have one) and you’ll find it stuffed with books telling you how to become rich and successful without any effort, just by really wanting to be. Others will claim to teach you the success secrets of the Chinese Masters in the time it takes to read a couple of hundred pages. And the Internet is full of programs and recordings claiming to reproduce all the positive effects of meditation practice, without the inconvenience of actually practising meditation. Now in their defence, such programs can have a relaxing and calming effect, and there’s some evidence that they can affect brain activity, at least in the short term. But meditation is not about changing your brainwaves, but changing your life, and for that you have to invest time and effort. Lots of it.

All in all, not a very propitious environment for encountering and overcoming obstacles, or even acknowledging that they exist. For Shackleton and his team, it was precisely the difficulty of the expedition, and the understanding that success, and even survival, were not guaranteed, that constituted the attraction. As far as possible, difficulty is abstracted away these days, and challenges become purely formal. When I was a boy, Hilary and Tenzing were heroes for their first ascent of Mount Everest, after many other failures over decades, including some deaths. Today, commercial companies will take you to the top, even if you can scarcely climb a ladder. But the very idea that there might be circumstances where initiative and determination are absolutely required seems too much for our societies to contemplate. Surely, this at least partially explains the passivity about climate change, the dismissal of Covid as something that could be cured with a vaccination, even the economic and political effects of the Iran-US conflict. We simply don’t want to imagine situations where life for ordinary people like us could become difficult, challenging and even dangerous, because we know that we are not mentally equipped to deal with them. This has nothing to do with being “weak” or “decadent,” and people, as people, are much the same as they ever were. It’s just that whatever remains of our moral education and our process of growing up includes no acknowledgement that things can become tough for entire societies, and that What I Want may have to be put on hold for a while.

So by extension, not a very propitious environment for heroes therefore, or even just a recognition that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. For a start, you have to believe that people can actually behave that way, and that words like “heroism” “endurance” “decisiveness” and even “competence” refer to things that actually exist: increasingly, we don’t. One of the strengths of the De Gaulle film is its presentation of the battle of Bir Hakeim in 1942, where a greatly outnumbered French Brigade held its position for two weeks, inflicting massively disproportionate casualties on the attacking Germans and Italians, before withdrawing successfully and meeting up with the British, thus enabling the successful battle of El Alamein. And the Brigade itself was a hastily-improvised collection of units from the French Army and its colonies all over the world, many of whom were volunteers. I wonder what younger people, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, would think of that episode in the film. We sneer at such toxically masculine behaviour now: after all, there wasn’t any real moral difference between the Nazis and the Allies was there? (Hiroshima! Hiroshima!) and in the end it wouldn’t have mattered who won. Except that in reality hardly anyone actually believes this, and that in turn has consequences we’ll come to.

Which is to say you can’t have heroes, whether they are mighty warriors or just ordinary people, whether they do great things or just endure suffering, danger and privation, unless you know and accept what all those terms mean. Now for Odysseus and his age, we can give “hero” a recognised technical meaning: a man of great bravery and power, generally a demigod. But we now live in a society which not only lacks occasions for heroic combat, it tries to avoid challenges and difficulties of every kind, and to stay well away from even the possibility of danger. The practical actions of courageous and resilient individuals of the past, struggling for the rights of citizens and workers, the freedom of their country or a free political system, or simply enduring the unspeakable in sieges and famines, have been dematerialised away into “struggles” against amorphous abstractions like “racism,” “sexism” and even today “fascism,” which have no objective existence or agreed meaning, and so can be “fought” eternally and with no prospect of winning, like some gigantic video-game with endless levels: perhaps the best image I can think of for the activities of today’s Notional Left.

Today we have not heroes but victims, and we live in a world of competitive victimhood. This victimhood is a curious phenomenon, inasmuch as it is largely collective and identitarian. You are automatically a victim if you are a member of a “marginalised” or “historically disadvantaged” community, or one which suffers “structural discrimination.” It is rarely, these days at least, a status gained from identifiable personal experience, except of the kind “I was obviously discriminated against because I was …” Of course, the motives behind such assertions are comprehensible and even banal, if we understand that they are essentially entrepreneurial in nature, and amount to moral claims on others for money, power and influence, and special treatment. The problem arises when victimism becomes the default lens through which we view the world, and where people come to see themselves and others not as actual or potential actors, but just as passive victims.

We can see this in the way that coverage of conflicts and emergencies in the world is increasingly fixated on trying to count alleged victims, at the expense of trying to understand the issues. The classic example is probably the war in the DRC that began in 1996, and by some measures has never really ended. Often described as “Africa’s World War” it involved seven countries at one point, and is supposed to have caused three, or four, or even five million deaths. These deaths are almost all estimated excess deaths calculated by comparison with historical mortality statistics (themselves of unknown and unknowable accuracy): direct violent deaths were quite rare. But you could read many accounts of the war and its aftermath without ever discovering what the war was actually about. Likewise, the current fighting in the Sudan is usually presented in victimist terms (“already claimed X thousand lives according to estimates by humanitarian NGOs”) and the objectives and activities of the factional leaders are dismissed in a line or two, so that we effectively understand nothing. (How about “thousands feared dead in raid on US Naval Base” as a headline in December 1941?)

The result of all this is to reduce human beings to the status of nothing but victims, at every level from the most banal to the mega-strategic, and to encourage a sense of helplessness and passivity and lack of agency. At the individual level, you see it in the comments on any well-known Internet site, where some readers persistently claim that nothing is worth doing, it’s all impossible, “They” will always win, everyone is suborned and corrupt, apparent victories are only disguised defeats, and so on. More seriously, the problem infects political leaderships and their advisers as well. Problems are too big and complex to solve, nations are too powerful to oppose, the solutions are beyond our ability to formulate, let alone implement, so let’s restrict ourselves to hand-waving and performative gestures that will get us good publicity. (We can imagine Telemachus and Odysseus meeting up: “Dad, there’s just too many suitors so there’s no point in trying to fight them. Maybe we should look for a peaceful solution that addresses the underlying causes.”)

But of course identifying yourself as a victim only makes sense as a strategy if you can thereby persuade or coerce some greater power or authority into helping you, or intervening in your favour. It was always a favourite strategy of small countries to get someone else to fight their wars, but it has recently been generalised into a complete world-view, at all levels of domestic and international politics. Yet of course a benevolent and powerful outside actor (clearly substituting for God here) may not actually exist, or may be unwilling or unable to intervene, at which point the strategy breaks down. Domestically, much of the Grievance industry presupposes a state with the resources, will and competence to intervene on behalf of some group or other, with money and favours. But we may be moving towards a world where states no longer have the capability they used to (we are part-way there already) and also where our societies will be confronted with problems which will reduce Grievance politics to the status of background noise. It will no longer be any use demanding that Mummy and Daddy do something. It will no longer be any use asking not, What I can do for my Country, but Why hasn’t my Country done more for Me? No-one will be listening.

This is why the learned helplessness of victimism is so dangerous at all levels. There have been bad times in history before now—worse, I should say—but there has never been a time I can think of when the necessary mental and moral resources to address and try to overcome challenges have been so lacking. To be able to deal with problems competently, you have to understand what competence means, and then you have to be familiar with examples from the past. We have neither of these things. If words like “courage,” “determination,” “leadership” and “solidarity” are unused except on fatuous Powerpoint slides, if “leadership” means giving people lists of unrealisable objectives and “teamwork” means wearing funny hats, then communities will no more understand how to deal with even quite routine disasters than they would know how to mount a production of Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand from scratch, assuming anyone would want to.

We learn from examples and folk-memory: what our parents and grandparents did, what the communities in which we live did when there were communities, and how they coped with wars and emergencies, natural disasters, shortages and crises. None of that exists now. The only way in which it is generally acceptable to see the dead of our wars is as a “useless sacrifice.” Retrospectively, the generation that went through World War 2 has been re-classified exclusively as victims, from whose experiences we can learn nothing useful, although that would never have occurred to them at the time. (Even the cinema has joined in since the 1970s: notice that it’s Saving Private Ryan, not Ryan Saves Himself.) The grammar and vocabulary of mundane resilience and determination, let alone that of resistance and courage, has been deliberately abandoned, and appeals from politicians trying to resurrect it in the face of some Russian “threat,” might as well be in Martian for all that they mean anything today.

Declining societies begin by killing the old. The Oedipal tendency to re-interpret the past and critically examine historical myths, which is natural and healthy in itself, has got out of control in recent decades, and has now become essentially pathological. For many self-hating western societies, the past itself is so dark and questionable that it is better simply to cancel it, and consign great events and great figures to the Memory Hole. Which is fine as part of a political game, until genuinely serious and dangerous events start to happen again, and it turns out that that we have no cultural and political muscle-memory to help us understand how to react to them. Our political class is obviously completely lost: day-to-day management by image replaced competence and vision so long ago that such qualities can now not be recovered. Performative posturing is all they have left, and there is no longer even a genuine vocabulary of competence, cooperation, collective effort and endurance to appeal to. Our leaders sound like CEOs of technology start-ups because that’s all they know, and they treat us like their employees. That’s not going to be good enough.

Yet few of us are actually happy in a society like that. We want heroes and role-models to admire and imitate, and we want the problems of the world to be dealt with by competent and serious people. This is why the reaction to the two-part film about De Gaulle has been so interesting. It shows, especially in the second part, the solidarity and courage of ordinary people, in the Resistance and elsewhere, and the gathering together of a team of competent and determined people to save what could be saved of France’s honour and independence. But it also shows De Gaulle acting with determination and personal charisma to tell Roosevelt and Churchill to get stuffed on several occasions. Most media critics don’t know how to react to something so exotic, and have been taken aback by popular enthusiasm for the films, which, though long and complex, have been playing to packed houses. It will be interesting to see the reaction to the forthcoming film about the Resistance hero and martyr Jean Moulin, about whom I’ve written before.

In most other western countries, making a positive film about its history is a tricky proposition, especially where the military are involved. But the desire to learn about interesting, admirable people and the willingness to be impressed by displays of competence, dedication and courage, is eternal, and part of human nature. So today, we have outsourced hero-worship along with everything else. People who would never dream of cheering for their own countries cheer for Russia, Ukraine or Iran, projecting their own unmet needs on to them, and often reacting violently to any criticism with a kind of transferred patriotism. So Zelensky and a contingent of the Ukrainian Army were furiously applauded by the crowds at the Bastille Day parade in Paris this week. There’s a mordant irony in the fact that Zelensky is not a politician but an actor, playing the kind of heroic figure that western culture would like to have, but cannot bring itself to actually want. He enables those who would really like to admire Churchill or Roosevelt or even De Gaulle, but cannot take the risk of doing so, to find an acceptable replacement, for whom worship is not only permitted, but actively encouraged. And the carefully cultivated media image of the Ukrainian Army enables us to vicariously exult in all the qualities of bravery and determination that we have learned to despise in our own countries

This is not entirely new of course: small groups on the Left and those who considered themselves pacifists always had a tendency to externalise their need for heroes to others: the cult of Stalin had gone into reverse by the time I was at University, but admiration for Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Lumumba, Mao, even Pol Pot (basically anyone who was against the US) was in full flower. However, this affected only a small and unrepresentative part of western society and some enthusiasms (as for Pol Pot) did not last long anyway. What we are seeing these days is much more widespread, across very large parts of the political spectrum, and is unpredictable in terms of its choices of hero and its effects.

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, the fact that the very concept of “home” has been sabotaged and ridiculed, and that the world has been symbolically reduced to a vast hotel ecology across which people move freely, mean that there are no longer identities and homes to build resilience on, nor to demonstrate competence for, let alone to return to, so we have to borrow examples from elsewhere. And if you don’t like a hotel you complain and move to another one. That’s how the elites see nations today, insofar as they see them at all, but it’s not how the people see nations. Something like the reckoning at the end of the Odyssey has been talked about so much for so long that it is starting to seem inevitable. And by carefully exiling all of the issues I’ve discussed to the rubbish bin of the “extreme Right,” the political class has ensured that retribution, when it comes, will most likely originate from that direction. Unfortunately, the probable leaders will not be like Odysseus, calling a halt to the slaughter, or De Gaulle, constructing a necessary myth of salvation, but something altogether nastier. By then, it will be too late.

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That’s all for this week. As always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I’m pleased to add that versions of these essays in Czech will now be appearing regularly in translation on the site czstrat.cz. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know.