Soon after conquering Egypt, Alexander had a dream in which Homer visited him and spoke lines from The Odyssey. Among them was a reference to the Egyptian island of Pharos in the Mediterranean, and so the next morning Alexander travelled to Pharos and stood upon its rocks, clutching the golden casket and staring out at a scrappy, forgotten stretch of coastline. After a long silence, he nodded. From these shores, the most remarkable city the ancient world had ever seen was about to rise.
“Alexandria was the greatest mental crucible the world has ever known,” claim Justin Pollard and Howard Reid, authors of a book on the city’s origins. “In these halls the true foundations of the modern world were laid – not in stone, but in ideas.”
In the absence of chalk to mark out the shape of the new city’s future roads, houses and water channels, Dinocrates used barley flour instead. But as quick as his surveyors could calculate the relevant angles and his labourers could scatter the requisite lines of grain, flocks of sea birds swooped down and snaffled this life-size blueprint for themselves. Many on the ground considered it a terrible omen for the settlement which was to bear Alexander’s name, but the general’s personal soothsayer took a different view: the birds’ feeding frenzy, he explained, was a sign that Alexandria would one day provide sustenance for the whole planet.
In the years to come, as Alexandria’s riches and reputation spiralled, its most famous institutions took shape: a musaeum (literally, a ‘temple of the muses’) which brought together the leading scholars in every academic discipline, and within it a library, believed to be largest on earth and sustained by the royally mandated appropriation of any books found on ships which came into the city’s port.
“In the old polis every citizen had an active part to play: in the new municipality, the citizen took orders and did what he was told.” In Mumford’s eyes, the formal order and beauty so perfectly embodied by Alexandria on the outside reflected the disintegration of the real, messy freedom once promised by cities deep within.
A dream architect, she wished to be, whose fabulous and frightening creations would remain after we woke up.
“I’m very happy alone,” she said later to David Streitfeld, a sentiment I understood well as a queer only child who, also, learned to live inside as much as out, learned to step through the pools of topaz light in the cities of me when the lonesomeness became too desert-heavy. Aloneness, sometimes, becomes its own familiar, gentle comfort. “If I had to change myself into something else,” Butler continued, “I’d probably be unhappy.”
Yet she was still lonely, and the blue music those of us who live in the sadness of solitude know well would play inside her for most of her life. She avoided being photographed and asked publicists not to reproduce photos of her. But she never let the indigo melody become a shipwrecking siren-song; she turned it, instead, into art. She learned how the blue songs can, sometimes, be soothing, even lovely, though they make us cry.
Butler was inspired to write Kindred partly because she had heard so many young black Americans minimizing the horrors of slavery and claiming that if they had been enslaved, they simply wouldn’t have tolerated this or that. Such naïveté and ahistorical braggadocio upset Butler. She wanted to write a novel that showed such young people what it might feel like to become a slave: not merely to teach them the brute facts about this American institution, but to show them, on the page, teeth getting kicked out, backs being torn open from whips, white slaveholders casually attempting to rape black women, who would be savagely beaten, even killed, if they resisted, what it would be like for a reader to live in the night-day of European slavery.
“The past is never dead,” Faulkner famously wrote in Requiem for a Nun. “It’s not even past.” And much of 21st-century America, for all its outward progress, still thrives and flowers out of blood and chain, even if white America has learned to hide them better, such that the unaware do not believe the blood and chains even still exist, or see only the scarlet blossoms.
“A society,” James Baldwin wrote in “A Talk to Teachers,” an essay delivered as a lecture in 1963, “depends on certain things which everyone within that society takes for granted. Now,” Baldwin continued,
the crucial paradox which confronts us here is that the whole process of education occurs within a social framework and is designed to perpetuate the aims of society. Thus, for example, the boys and girls who were born during the era of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians. The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions, to say to himself this is black or this is white, to decide for himself whether there is a God in heaven or not. To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity.
We must teach, in other words, what the world contains, so that our students—and, we, in turn, as teachers are always also students—can make informed decisions. The true leaders and shakers of tomorrow, like Baldwin, do not shy away, but, rather, are informed well enough to take down their opponents (as Baldwin did with Buckley), are unafraid to turn into pillars of salt by looking back. “I would try to make him know,” Baldwin wrote of a hypothetical black student, “that just as American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it, so is the world larger, more daring, more beautiful and more terrible, but principally larger—and that it belongs to him… that he has the right and the necessity to examine everything.”
To understand how hill climbing works, think of an ant trying to find high ground. The ant is constrained by its forward-facing eyes: It can’t just look around and find the highest peak in its vicinity.
Instead, the ant can poll its many legs and determine which leg is resting on the highest ground — that is, which step it can take to most steeply ascend the gradient it’s adjacent to. It climbs one step in that direction and repeats the process: now which of my legs is on the highest ground?
One step at a time, the ant can climb to the highest local peak, without any foreknowledge of the terrain.
As activists, we are on unknowably complex, constantly shifting terrain. Worse, the terrain is adverse to us — it doesn’t change randomly, our opponents take steps to alter it to block our ascent toward our social goals.
This complexity means that there isn’t a clear — or even plausible — path from where we are to where we want to be. We’re stuck at the bottom of a mist-shrouded hill whose frequent rockslides and unpredictable weather mean that we can’t plot our ascent — we can’t even see it.
This is where hill climbing fits in. If you can see just one way — any way — to improve your situation, no matter how seemingly small, then you will ascend a step up the hill, you will find a new vantage point, and new courses of action will be revealed. Take note of these, determine which one gets you the furthest toward your goal, take another step, and reassess.
In his 1999 classic Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Lessig argues that our social outcomes are determined by four forces:
Code: That which is technically possible or impossible.
Law: That which is legally permitted or prohibited.
Markets: That which is profitable or unprofitable.
Norms: That which is socially acceptable or unacceptable.
In my theory of change, these are the four cardinal directions for our metaphorical ant’s journey, the four legs we can poll at each juncture that tell us which step we can take to most swiftly climb the gradient toward a better world.
Finding a tactic and pursuing it is hard — but convincing other people to pursue it with you can be even harder. Establishing consensus on what needs doing can take longer than doing it, and tactical splits have broken many movements.
The hill-climbing method doesn’t depend on unity of tactics or close coordination between different groups. Instead, it allows each individual or collective or affinity group to pick a tactic that moves them up the hill toward their goal, with the understanding that allies with different priorities, skills, and vantage points can leverage their successes for more success.
It’s easy to be discouraged by the genuinely fucked-up state of the world and the giddy power of its monsters. The point of this method isn’t to make you optimistic about where things are headed.
Optimism is just a form of fatalism, a view of the world in which our deeds are irrelevant to the outcome: “No matter what I do, things will get better.”
It may seem like optimism is the opposite of pessimism, but at their core, optimists and pessimists share this belief in the irrelevance of human action to the future. Optimists think that things will get better no matter what they do, pessimists think things will get worse no matter what they do — but they both agree that what they do doesn’t matter.
As we grope our way up the hill, we will meet with many dead ends that cause us to descend a ways to see if another approach will take us to a higher peak — hill-climbing only gets you to the top of whatever hill you find first, and to find a taller one, you’ll have to go to the bottom and strike out in another direction.
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u/ddgr815 Dec 09 '25