Beware the Ides of March
Six books to help contemplate our world at what seems like a supremely dangerous moment. Or is it?
My daughter asked me this week whether a big war would break out on Friday, as some people are apparently saying. I pointed out that we had several big wars going on already, and I thought I heard a sigh, though our discourse was by text. I added that we should always beware the Ides of March, and she seemed to sigh once more. I have that effect on millennials sometimes.
As readers will surely know, the 15th of March marks the assassination of Julius Caesar by a group of Roman senators in 44 BC, in an event immortalized by Shakespeare. One tends to sympathize with the doomed Caesar, but the plotters are motivated by his egomania and by reasonable fears that he might abolish the Roman Republic and establish himself as a monarch. The result was a period of turmoil and ultimately the end of that version of the Rome.
The lessons, one might conclude, relate mainly to moral ambiguity and unforeseen consequences. Was it morally right or wrong to kill Caesar? Think of today’s horrible despots – or of Hitler. Was it a correct calculation? Senators tried to preserve a system they thought just and democratic – though in today’s terms that was a sad delusion – and then Rome fell anyway, perhaps due to their actions.
There might be lessons there for our current moment, which similarly seems pivotal. Our era is marked not just by extreme polarization but a feeling of great certainty on all sides – a combination that leads to conflict and instability. We see it everywhere: In wars like Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza, in the cultural conflicts between religious versus secular and town versus country, in the toxic societal rifts between progressives versus everyone and nativists versus everyone.
It almost seems as if we are headed toward a sort of permanent Ides of March. Or perhaps a global-historic figurative Ides of March. The landscape is a boiling cauldron of overlapping angers and howling agonies. Social media amplifies the craziness. I may be guilty of it too.
So as we approach this Ides of March on the actual calendar, I have been consulting some mostly recent books by writers who address what ails us and try to make some sense. I’ll present them in a certain order: from those that contain the most certainty to those which project the doubt and then on to the utterly cynical.
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