By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, July 24, 2026
There is a reason it’s not called the “Pretty Good
Canyon” or the “Better Than Average Canyon.” If anything, the Grand Canyon
undersells it. As awesome as the view is from the rim, the view from below is
even more humbling. I’ve never been someplace where for days on end the view in
every direction is so staggering and intimidating. Eventually it starts to feel
foolish to keep taking pictures because it becomes a kind of arbitrary choice.
Simply everything is scenic.
I am what you might call a great indoorsman, so there’s
much about camping in general, and expeditions into blisteringly hot desert
canyons in particular, that isn’t really for me. Without ever really thinking
about it, I’ve organized much of my life to avoid not just rattlesnakes and
scorpions, but crapping in buckets. Nonetheless, it was worth it.
There’s a wonderful scene in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to
the Galaxy where the alien Ford Prefect walks into a pub. He buys a pint
and tells the barman to keep the change. “The barman looked at it and then
looked at Ford. He suddenly shivered: he experienced a momentary sensation that
he didn’t understand because no one on Earth had ever experienced it before. In
moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny
subliminal signal. This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic
sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth.”
Having grown up in New York City, culturally—or perhaps
psychologically—the Grand Canyon arouses a similar sensation in me. After
quizzing my river guide about what would be involved in hiking to the nearest
rim (which would entail an epic desert hike before scaling and rappelling one
cliff after another), it became clear that, for vast stretches of the canyon,
humans simply couldn’t reach that spot – or that spot, or that plateau,
butte, cliff, cave etc – without
descending from the belly of a helicopter or climbing from below. It dawned on
me that, in every direction I looked, there were spots—many, many spots—where
no human had ever set foot. That’s a wild—literally and
figuratively—revelation, particularly about arguably the most famous national
park in the United States.
As best we can tell, when the Spanish—the first Europeans
to “discover” the Grand Canyon—encountered it, they didn’t describe it with
romantic awe and marvel at the beauty and grandeur of it. They described it as
an absolutely impossible obstacle to cross. Indeed, the closer they got to the
bottom—which they never reached—the bigger the thing got. A group that got
about a third of the way down discovered that they hadn’t comprehended the scale of the
thing. “Those who stayed above had estimated that some huge rocks on the sides
of the cliffs seemed to be about as tall as a man, but those who went down
swore that when they reached these rocks they were bigger than the great tower
of Seville.”
When John Evelyn successfully traversed the Alps in 1646,
he described the “strange, horrid, and fearful crags and
tracts.” Indeed, the Alps were considered ugly until the 18th century.
In 1724, Daniel Defoe described the Lake District—now one of England’s poshest
natural retreats—as “all barren and wild, of no use or advantage either to Man
or Beast.” No less than Samuel Johnson, upon finally visiting the Scottish
Highlands in 1773, wrote,
“An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and
repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility. The appearance is that of
matter incapable of form or usefulness, dismissed by nature from her care and
disinherited of her favours, left in its original elemental state, or quickened
only with one sullen power of useless vegetation.”
I could make a number of political or ideological points
here, some of which I agree with and some I disagree with. For instance, I
might point out that our appreciation for natural beauty—and the desire to
protect and conserve it—is a product of wealth and prosperity. When we needed
forests for fuel or construction material, we saw forests as resources to
exploit. When we got rich enough, we saw the beauty of the forests without
getting hung up on the decreasing economic value of the trees. Or, I might channel
a certain strain of environmentalist, anti-Western, or anti-capitalist thought,
and note that we only see nature as a thing to conquer and extract value from.
But that’s not what I want to talk about. What I think is
more interesting is how our understanding of nature, including human nature,
has evolved. There was a time when being pale was considered the height of
aristocratic beauty, while being tanned suggested you were a peasant who toiled
in the beating sun. When the lower classes left the fields and entered the
factories, having a tan became a mark of leisure while being pale was a sign of
laboring like dwarves in the mines or factories.
When the fictional Robinson Crusoe is stranded on an
island, the author just says he started a fire. When Tom Hanks’ character finds
himself similarly lost on a desert island, some 20 minutes of Castaway are
dedicated to the heroic struggle to start a fire. When he succeeds, Hanks celebrates
like he is a demigod: “Look at what I have created! I have made fire!” No
doubt both characters would have welcomed the “luxury” of defecating in a
National Park Service-approved bucket, never mind sleeping in a rainproof tent.
Today, sleeping in such a tent—certainly for me—is “roughing it.”
But as Homer writes in The Odyssey, “A man who has
been through bitter experiences and travelled far enjoys even his sufferings
after a time.”
Of Homer and Nolan.
Which is the best I can do for a transition from my
odyssey along the Colorado River to the movie I saw in Las Vegas when I
finished.
I liked the movie. I didn’t love
it the way John Podhoretz did, nor did I hate it the way a lot of social
media jabronis who probably didn’t see it claim to. Nor did I think the movie
was “silly” as The Economist does.
But The Economist’s review does address a related
point to the above. The Odyssey is the second-oldest work in Western
literature, and The Economist is right that the film is
“emblematic of its time.” I don’t think that’s the insult that it seems to
intend. After all, I am a huge admirer of Christopher Nolan, but I don’t think
even he could manage to depict a hero who slaughters and butchers people the
way Homer’s version does. You can say it’s “woke” to leave out the hanging of
female slaves, or you can simply admit that modern audiences would struggle to
keep rooting for a protagonist who does such things unapologetically.
You can also argue that Nolan is a creature of the
Christian revolution in Western civilization and that pre-Christian, explicitly
pagan conceptions of heroism and morality are consigned to the vault of
antiquity.
There’s been a lot of discussion about whether Nolan has
smuggled in Christian morality under the guise of “Zeus’ law.” In the movie,
this is a form of “the Golden Rule.” Treat strangers well, because they could
be a god in disguise. As many have noted, “Zeus’ law” is an invention of
Nolan’s not found in the text, but the Greeks definitely had a concept of the
Golden Rule called xenia, a divine exhortation to treat strangers well.
I’m no expert in xenia or ancient Greece, but I do know that Thales of
Miletus, one of the founders of ancient Greek civilization, advised that one
should “Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing.” Indeed,
Christianity didn’t invent the Golden Rule—it’s an ethical standard found, to
one extent or another, in countless civilizations and traditions. It’s all over the
place in Judaism. As Hillel famously said, “What is hateful to you, do not do
to your fellow: this is the whole Torah; the rest is the commentary; go and
learn.”
That said, no force in human history did more to
establish the primacy of the Golden Rule as an ethical standard than
Christianity. This is why Ben Shapiro argues
that “a lot of conservatives are missing the Biblical forest for the woke trees
in Nolan’s Odyssey.” Nolan’s Odyssey treats Zeus’ law as a Christian conception
of the Golden Rule. I think Ben overstates his case, but there’s merit to it.
Yes, xenia is a major theme in Homer, but Homer would never dream of
suggesting—spoiler alert—that Odysseus should feel guilty for his Trojan Horse
maneuver.
Still, there’s a big difference between Zeus’ law and
Jesus’ Golden Rule of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” As
suggested in the movie, Zeus’ law amounts to an admonition against getting your
a— kicked (or being turned into a toad) by a p—ed off god in disguise whom you
treated poorly. Jesus’ instruction rests on the idea that we are all made in
the image of God.
That’s a big difference. But that difference is made
smaller because Nolan uses the law of Zeus like it’s closer to Jesus’ version
than Homer’s.
Now, as Nolan has explained in interviews, his case for the Golden Rule is less
theological than it is practical. “It’s the only way society can function,” he told the New York Times. “That became very important
to the film, and as soon as you start drilling down on it, you realize
nothing’s changed. That’s everything in terms of holding civilization together,
or even defining civilization.”
I think this is wrong. That’s okay. If Homer can nod, so can Nolan. I agree that civilizations need some
notion of Golden Rule-ish reciprocity, but the world of the ancient Greeks was
very different from the modern world, and Nolan’s film demonstrates that.
“Although later generations of Greeks could treat the
gods as metaphors or personified forces,” Tomer Persico writes in In God’s
Image: How Western Civilization Was Shaped by a Revolutionary Idea, “during
Homer’s time and beforehand, the pantheon on Mount Olympus was thought to exist
as a straightforward reality. Moreover, for these ancients, the gods not only
existed and not only influenced world events, but they also influenced people’s
feelings and decisions. It was the gods who suffused warriors with courage,
stoking their confidence to run into battle.”
In Nolan’s time, humans, or at least heroes, have more
agency. They do good and noble things not because a mischievous god put (one
might say “incepted”)
the idea into their heads, but because they choose to do them. If I had more
room, I’d meditate on how a lot of modern psychobabble is pagan because we
dismiss so many willfully wrong or evil acts as the products of “root causes”
or “structural inequities” or decisions made by long-dead people whose choices
are the ghosts in the machines of modern institutions. But heroes? Heroes are
people of will and agency who choose to be heroic. Indeed, the truth is, it’s both/and
not either/or. Odysseus’ journey is the point, but so is the
destination. The former—both in Homer’s and Nolan’s telling—gives meaning to
the latter. This has been the case in nearly every great epic tale of adventure
and triumph in the Western canon.
An even more modern—or even postmodern—trope is that the
greatest struggle for heroes is conquering not an enemy or landscape, but their
own doubts and demons. That’s Nolan’s Odysseus in a nutshell. The gods become
psychological demons, rather than real deities. The cliché “it’s the journey,
not the destination” has much truth to it. But the reverse can often be true.
Sometimes, the journey is less important than the destination.
There’s stuff to lament about this turn in Western
culture, but there’s also much to celebrate. The pre-Christian world took it as
a given that our fate was in the hands of others and that cruelty could be
tightly bound up with notions of glory and virtue. Save for a small (but sadly
growing) group of Mao, Hamas, and Hitler fans, most Westerners accept Judeo-Christian
morality, even those who struggle to admit that their moral and ethical views
are shaped by Judeo-Christian ideas.
I see this as a form not just of moral evolution, but of
moral progress. I want to live in a world where we see nobility and beauty in
heroism—both in the triumph over external evils and in victory over internal
demons—just as I want people to see the Grand Canyon or the Scottish Highlands
as sources of beauty and awe. I want us to live in a world where we see the
forests, not just the trees.
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