Do It Again

Were We wearied by the first creation? No. It is they who are in doubt about a new one.

Humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles.

I. Again

Throw a two-year-old into the air and catch her. Before she has finished laughing she says the one word she has for this: again. You do it again. She says it again. Around the tenth throw your shoulders start to burn. Around the twentieth you are looking for a way out, and she is exactly as delighted as she was at the first. She could do this until dark. You are the one who cannot.

We read this scene backward. We assume the child wants the same thing over and over because she is simple, and that the adult tires of it because he knows more. In 1908 an English journalist named G. K. Chesterton looked at the scene and saw the reverse. The child asks for it again because she has more life in her than the adult has. Boredom is not sophistication. It is fatigue. The adult has not risen above the game. He is too weak for it.

Then Chesterton made the move on which everything below depends. Look at the sun, he said. It rises every morning. Every daisy looks like every other daisy. We take this sameness as proof that nature is a machine, wound up once and left running. But sameness is also exactly what we would see if the opposite were true: if behind the sunrise there were something with a child's appetite and none of our tiredness, something that says to the sun each morning what the child says to you. “Do it again.” Perhaps, he wrote, it is we who have grown old, and the one who made us who has stayed young.¹

There was an argument under the image. What we actually know about the sunrise is that it has happened every day so far. That is a record, not a reason. Two and two must make four; you cannot picture it otherwise. But you can easily picture an apple that does not fall. What we call a law of nature is a repetition so dependable that we have stopped being surprised by it. Science describes the repetition with great precision. It does not tell us why there is one.

So there are two ways to read a sunrise. It is a machine still running, long after anyone last touched it. Or it is an act, performed this morning. Every measurement comes out the same under both readings. They differ on one point only: whether anything new can happen. In a machine, tomorrow is already inside today. In an act, tomorrow has not been made yet.

That sounds like a question for a seminar room. It is the most practical question a civilization ever answers, because a people's answer decides what they will attempt. Both halves of the world have answered it wrong, from opposite sides, and both are paying the same price.

II. The Finished World

Start with the price.

In July 1969 men walked on the moon. The last of them left in December 1972, and no one has walked there since. By 1977 a paying passenger could fly from London to New York in three and a half hours. That aircraft was retired in 2003, and the same trip now takes about seven. Meanwhile the telephone became a marvel. Where things are made of information we have moved fast. Where they are made of matter we have largely stood still.

The most persistent witness to this is Peter Thiel, the investor who co-founded PayPal and wrote the first outside check into Facebook. His firm put the complaint in one line: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”² His book Zero to One supplied the vocabulary. There are two kinds of progress. The first copies what already works: one typewriter becomes a hundred typewriters. He calls this going from 1 to n. At the scale of the planet its name is globalization. The second kind makes something that did not exist: the typewriter becomes the word processor. That is going from 0 to 1. His charge is that since the early 1970s, outside of computing, the West has done almost only the first kind and has described it to itself as the second.³

Look at the word he reaches for when he describes the second kind. He calls it a miracle. It is a theological word, and he uses it because no secular word exists for the arrival of something that was not there before. Hold on to it.

The complaint is the least interesting part of Thiel. The interesting part is his explanation. To make something new you must first believe there is something left to find. He calls such a thing a secret: a truth that matters and that almost nobody yet sees. His claim is that we stopped believing in secrets. We came to think that everything important is either already known, in which case you ask an expert, or unknowable, in which case you do not bother. The map is complete. Nobody outfits a ship when the globe has no blank spaces.⁴

That is not an explanation about money or regulation. It is about what sort of world people take themselves to be living in. They take it to be finished. The belief came first, and the stall came after.

Thiel reached that conclusion by studying Silicon Valley. To see how far down it goes, it helps to look at a body.

III. Two Ways a Body Dies

You began as a single cell. There is no more literal case of zero to one. That cell became some thirty trillion cells of about two hundred kinds: neuron, bone, the clear lens of the eye. Every one of them carries the same complete set of instructions. What makes a heart cell a heart cell is not what it has. It is what it gives up. It silences nearly all of its genome and commits to one thing. A cell that can still become anything is, so far, nothing in particular. A body is built out of accepted limits.

Chesterton, who was no biologist, had the principle exactly. A picture, he said, exists by its frame. Draw a giraffe with a short neck if you like; what you have drawn is not a giraffe.⁵ The limit is not what stops the thing from being. It is what makes it that thing.

Medicine knows two ways for this to go wrong.

In the first, a cell drops its limits. It loses its identity. Pathologists grade a tumor by exactly this, by how far its cells have slid back from being liver or lung toward being nothing in particular. The cell stops answering to the tissue around it. Then it does the one thing left to a cell with no vocation, which is to make more of itself. A tumor is growth without development: enormous activity and nothing new, the same cell again and again. And the moment a growth is called malignant is precise. For the commonest cancers it is the moment the cells break through the membrane that bounds their tissue. Cancer is defined by the crossing of a limit.

The second way is quieter. One of the body's main defenses against the first is to freeze a suspect cell so that it never divides again. The freeze is called senescence, and it is protective. But the frozen cell does not leave. It stays where it is, alive, doing no work, and leaking signals that inflame and age the tissue around it. Collect enough of them and the organ fails, not from wild growth but from cells that will neither die nor make anything. Researchers call them zombie cells.

Life without form, and form without life. Keep both in view, because civilizations die the same two ways.

Some three centuries ago the West began taking down its frames. Many of them had earned it: churches that burned people, kings who owned them. The project was called the Enlightenment and its theory was simple. Remove every outside limit on a man and what remains will be the man himself, original and self-made. That was a hypothesis about human nature. It has now been tested on a few billion people, and the result is in.

The man who read the result was René Girard, a French scholar of literature who taught for years at Stanford and counted Thiel among his students. He began with novels and ended with a theory of man, and its first claim is unflattering. Human beings do not know what to want. Hunger and thirst we are born with. Past those, we look at someone else to learn what is worth wanting. We want the job because the impressive classmate wants it. Desire is copied.⁶

While the person we copy stands far above us, a saint, a king, a hero in a book, the copying does no harm, because you cannot compete with someone who lives in another world. Take away every frame and everyone stands on one level. Now the only models available are neighbors. And a neighbor who shows you what to want is, in the same instant, the rival standing between you and it. The outcome is envy, rivalry, and the strange sameness of people who each insist on being unique. Girard's sharpest observation is that the rebel is no exception. The man who does the opposite of the crowd takes his orders from the crowd as faithfully as the conformist does. He is reading the same instructions upside down.

So the experiment came out the opposite of its hypothesis. A man with no frame does not become himself. He becomes a copy of whoever is standing nearest. It is Thiel's 1 to n, seen from inside a single person. And borrowed wanting thins with every borrowing. Thiel reports asking a class at Stanford to name one concrete thing they wanted, and the best they could manage was a vase, a grade, a yacht. A copy of a copy fades.

The Muslim world failed in the other direction, and has been at it longer.

In February 1258 a Mongol army took Baghdad, for five centuries the first city of Muslim learning. Muhammad Iqbal, the poet and philosopher who studied at Cambridge and Munich and is remembered as the spiritual father of Pakistan, described what the scholars did next in a set of lectures he published in 1930. Fearing that the community would break apart completely, they closed ranks. They shut out every innovation in the law as the early masters had left it. Iqbal grants that they were partly right, since organization does slow decay. He also shows that it was fatal. A tradition that by his count had produced nineteen schools of law in its first three centuries now announced, in effect, that the thinking was done.⁷

The practice has a name, taqlid, and the word means imitation. Its root is the word for a collar: the imitator hangs his judgment around another man's neck. Its opposite is ijtihad, which means exertion, the labor of reasoning afresh from the sources. The phrase that came down through the centuries is that the gate of ijtihad was closed. Modern historians have gone looking for that gate and found that no council and no text ever shut it.⁸ Iqbal had already called it a fiction and said where it came from: the laziness of a tired age, which makes idols of the thinkers it ought to be answering. The gate was closed in nerve, never in law.

Here a reader of Thiel should stop and think. For several years Thiel has been giving lectures on the Antichrist, mostly in closed rooms; he is giving one in Nashville as I write. His Antichrist is no tyrant with horns. He is a figure who rises by talking without pause about catastrophe, nuclear war, runaway machines, a wrecked climate, and who offers in exchange for control the old scriptural phrase, “peace and safety.” The price is that everything stops. This is the future Thiel fears most for the West: a frozen world sold as a safe one.⁹

It is a fair description of the Muslim thirteenth century. A catastrophe. The fear of another. Guardians who promise to hold things together. The price, nothing new. What Thiel dreads as prophecy is on the record as history, and we know what the frozen world looks like seven hundred years on. It looks like the senescent cell. The form is perfectly kept: the prayers at the right minutes in the right words, five times a day. Around them stand societies that for centuries originated less and less, in a religion whose first revealed word was the command to read. On this road the East is not behind the West. It is seven centuries ahead.

When Muslims at last rebelled against their stagnation, most reached for the only other move a copier knows, which is to change the model. Stop copying the ancestors and copy Europe: the hat, the alphabet, the legal code, the ideology, imported whole. The clearest warning came from a European. Muhammad Asad was born Leopold Weiss, an Austrian journalist who became a Muslim in 1926 and later a friend of Iqbal's. In a short book of 1934, and again in a memoir twenty years later, he drew the line that mattered. Science belongs to no civilization. Algebra is not Muslim and gravity is not English, and Muslims must learn all of it. But a way of life cannot be borrowed like a formula. Copy how a people dress, eat and govern, and by degrees you take on the view of the world that produced those habits. He added the harder point. There was a time when the traffic ran the other way, and Europe took its numerals and its method from Baghdad and Córdoba. A civilization that only imports has nothing to trade. It has become a customer.¹⁰

Iqbal said the same thing more bluntly. He told a colonized audience that Europe was itself “the greatest hindrance in the way of man's ethical advancement,” and he asked them to believe him. They had little reason to. Europe ran the planet.

Ninety-six years later the most influential investor in the West stands up and says that the West has stopped. The witness has come over from the other side.

Iqbal's own summary, from the same lecture, is still the cleanest. A society needs something permanent to stand on, and it needs to move. Europe had shown what becomes of movement with nothing permanent under it. Islam had shown for five hundred years what becomes of permanence with no movement in it. What he lacked was Girard, and so he could not see that the two failures are one act. Girard's word for what the frameless man does is mimesis, imitation. The jurists' word for what the frozen man does is taqlid, imitation. One copies the living and the other copies the dead. One looks sideways and the other looks back. Neither looks up. And under both lies the conviction Thiel found beneath the stagnation. The West believes the secrets have all been found. The East believes they have all been handed down. Either way, the making is over.

IV. The First Copier

The Quran has an account of where copying begins, and it is stranger than one expects.

God tells the angels that He is placing a deputy on the earth. The angels object. This creature will spread corruption and shed blood, while they do nothing but praise. God does not argue. He teaches Adam the names of things, then turns to the angels and asks them for the names. They cannot give them. Their reply is one of the most exact sentences in the book: “we have no knowledge except what You have taught us” (2:32). Then Adam names them.¹¹

Read that as a statement about minds. The angels are complete. Whatever they have been given they possess without error, and that is all they possess. Adam's distinction is not better behavior. The angels have just predicted, correctly, that he will behave worse. His distinction is that he can stand in front of a thing and bring out a word for it. He is the creature built for the first time.

Then comes the turn. The angels are told to bow to Adam, and they do, all but one. Iblis, the Quran's Satan, refuses and gives his reason in a line: “I am better than him. You made me from fire and him from clay” (7:12).¹²

Three things about that line. First, Iblis is no atheist. He is speaking to God, directly, calls Him “my Lord” (38:79), and a few verses on swears an oath by God's own might (38:82). Whatever his sin is, it is not disbelief. Second, the line is an argument, and a tidy one. Fire is nobler than clay; I am fire; therefore. Two of the early authorities said that the first to reason by analogy was Iblis.¹³ His reason was in perfect order. It was doing the only thing reason can do by itself, which is to measure one thing against another. Third, look at what he measures himself against. Not God. Adam. A moment earlier Iblis had a place defined entirely by whom he served. Then a newcomer appears beside him, and he looks sideways, and from that moment he knows who he is only by comparison. Girard would know him at once: the rival who cannot take his eyes off his neighbor.

There is an older reading in which he also looks back. On this reading Iblis thought he was defending monotheism. He had been taught to bow to none but God, and he would not bow to clay. The Cambridge scholar Abdal Hakim Murad has called him a literalist: so fixed on the letter of yesterday's rule that he missed today's command.¹⁴ Either way the result is the same. A live instruction arrives, and he answers it with a ranking of things already made.

So the Quran's story of the fall does not begin with a doubter. It begins with a believer who looked sideways, instead of up.

The first crime on earth repeats the pattern. Two sons of Adam each make an offering. One is accepted and the other is not. The rejected brother does not ask what was wrong with his own gift. He looks sideways at his brother's and says: “I will kill you” (5:27). Girard returned to this murder again and again, and the Quran adds a detail he would have prized. The other brother refuses to mirror him: “if you raise your hand against me, I will not raise mine against you” (5:28).¹⁵ The first rivalry among men begins over an offering, with a glance at someone else's worship.

Iqbal understood what these figures were for. In one of his best-known poems the angel Gabriel meets Iblis and asks, kindly, whether the tear in his robe might still be mended. Iblis answers that heaven is too quiet for him now; that his refusal is what put ambition into the handful of dust; and that Gabriel only watches the storm from the shore and chants while Iblis actively engages.¹⁶ Iqbal gives the devil the better lines on purpose. The angel has the frame without the fire. Iblis has the fire without the frame. Neither was offered the deputyship. It went to the creature of clay and breath, who was built to carry both.

That changes what idolatry means. We picture statues. The Quran's word is shirk, which means partnering: giving something a share in a place that belongs to God alone. And the book says plainly that the partner need not be stone. “Have you seen the one who takes his own desire for his god?” (45:23; 25:43). It asks this twice.¹⁷ Set that verse beside Girard. If my desire is not mine, if I borrowed it from the people around me, then in obeying my desire I am obeying them. The idol is the crowd. It simply lives inside the man, where he cannot see it.

There is a scene in the hadith, the recorded sayings of the Prophet, that needs no commentary. Some of his companions are sitting together discussing the Antichrist, the great deceiver of the last days. The Prophet comes out to them and asks: shall I tell you what I fear for you more than the Antichrist? They say yes. He says: hidden idolatry. A man stands up to pray, and he makes his prayer beautiful because he sees another man watching.¹⁸

The man who understood this best learned it in his body. In 1095 Abu Hamid al-Ghazali was in his late thirties and the most celebrated professor in the Muslim world, with three hundred students at his lectures in Baghdad. In his autobiography he describes examining, one day, why he taught. The answer he found was reputation. For six months he tried to carry on. Then one morning he stood before his students and could not produce a word. His tongue would not move. He gave away his wealth, left Baghdad on the pretext of a pilgrimage, and vanished for the better part of eleven years. When he wrote again, in the central work of Muslim ethics, he gave the craving that had nearly finished him an exact definition. Wealth is owning things. Status is owning a place in other people's hearts. And the man who must own that place is owned by those who can give it or withhold it.¹⁹

Now the claim at the center, stated flatly. To take your wanting from the people beside you is the sin of Iblis. To take your thinking from the people before you, when you were given a mind and told to use it, is the same sin facing another way. Iqbal said as much when he called the great names of a tired age its idols. The frameless man who thinks he is free and the pious man who thinks he is faithful are doing one thing. Each has put a creature where the source should be.

V. The Unfinished World

If copying is what follows from a finished world, the way out starts with the question from the beginning. Is it finished?

Ghazali took the question up with a flame and a piece of cotton. Touch the one to the other and the cotton burns. The philosophers of his day said that fire burns cotton by necessity: it lies in the nature of fire and could not be otherwise. Ghazali asked them how they knew. What anyone has ever observed is that the burning comes with the touching, every time. Nobody has observed the must. The link between the two is not a logical one, like the link between two and two and four. It is a regularity. And a regularity, he argued, is better called a habit than a law. Fire burns cotton because each time the burning is made.²⁰ Hume would say something very like it six and a half centuries later, Kant would say it woke him from his sleep, and Chesterton would put it in a nursery. The school of theology Ghazali belonged to went further still: nothing in the world carries itself from one instant into the next. It is renewed, moment by moment.

This sounds like pure metaphysics until you look at your own hand. The lining of your gut is replaced every few days. Your red blood cells last about four months, the surface of your skin a few weeks. Much of what you are made of was not here a decade ago, and yet your mother knows you. You are not an object that persists. You are a form that is continuously remade. This is the third possibility, the one that neither the tumor nor the frozen cell has: renewal inside a frame. It is close to a definition of being alive. And it is exactly what the child's body is doing, faster than yours, while she shouts again.

The Quran says the same of the whole. “Every day He is at some work” (55:29). The fiftieth chapter says it twice. First as a question, put to people who assumed the making was over: “Were We wearied by the first creation? No. It is they who are in doubt about a new one” (50:15). Then as a flat statement: “the heavens and the earth were made in six days, and no weariness touched Us” (50:38).²¹ No rest is recorded. Chesterton guessed that God might be strong enough never to tire of the sunrise. Here it is given as a fact.

The book also has a vocabulary for this, and two of its words are worth learning because English has nothing as exact. “His is the creation and the command” (7:54). The creation, khalq, is what has been made: measured, weighed, located. “We made everything in measure” (54:49). It is everything science studies and everything that can be counted. The command, amr, is the making itself, the word “Be” (36:82). “Our command is single, like the blink of an eye” (54:50).²² There is the made, and there is the making. Iblis's error now has a name. He held the made, fire and clay, against the making.

Thiel's distinction can be put precisely too. Going from 1 to n is work on the made: arranging, copying and scaling what is already there. It is honest work and most of what an economy does. Going from 0 to 1 belongs to the other order. It is the arrival of something that was not contained in what came before. If the world is only the made, a finished stock of things, then 0 to 1 is impossible in principle and every apparent novelty is a reshuffling. Thiel knows it happens, and he called it by the right name. What his book never says is where a miracle comes from. In a finished world it cannot come from anywhere.

The Quran answers in a verse about the human self. “They ask you about the spirit. Say: the spirit is of my Lord's command” (17:85).²³ Not of the creation. Of the command. The self belongs on the side of the making. Iqbal built a philosophy on that verse. A self, he said, is not a thing. It is a direction, an act. And he drew the consequence without flinching: man is invited to share in the making, to take the initiative in reshaping himself and his world, and when he does, God Himself works alongside him.²⁴ That is why Adam was taught to name. That is what a deputy is. Zero to one is not the trick of a few exceptional founders. It is the job description of humanity.

Reason and Enlightenment rationality cannot do it alone, and it matters to see why, because we have just built reason a body. Reason works on the made. It measures, compares and extends. Recall the Quran's great breaker of idols, Abraham, who as a young man took an axe to the statues of his people and was sentenced to burn for it. They built the fire. Iqbal has a couplet about that moment. Love, he says, leapt into the fire without a second thought, and reason is still on the rooftop, absorbed in watching.²⁵ The Quran reports the command that followed: “Fire, be coolness and safety for Abraham” (21:69).²⁶ For once the habit of fire was not renewed. Reason, reckoning from every fire that had ever burned, was right about the odds. It is always right about the odds. The odds describe the made. And safety, in that story, was not on the roof.

In the last few years we have manufactured the watcher on the rooftop. A language model is built out of nearly everything that has been written, and what it gives back is, by construction, the likeliest continuation of it. It is an astonishing instrument. It is also the most complete answer ever given to the question put to the angels, because it knows what it has been taught. It makes the work of the made close to free. Which leaves scarce exactly one thing, the thing that was always the point. When the rooftop is crowded without limit, the only question left to ask about a person is whether he will jump.

VI. The Frame

All of this could be taken as a case for burning every frame. If the making never stopped, why hold anything fixed? The West drew that inference. It is the wrong one, and the body has already shown why. Renewal without form is the tumor.

Chesterton has a second argument, less famous than the giraffe and more useful. You cannot make progress toward a target that keeps moving. To improve the world you need a fixed idea of better. If the idea itself is revised every generation, each generation starts again from nothing, and the world stays as it was.²⁷ The fixed end is what makes it possible to change the means.

Look at the West in that light. It is enormously inventive about ends. What a person is, what a family is, what a life is for: these are redefined every decade or so, and each revision is defended with moral ferocity. And by Thiel's own evidence it has spent half a century copying in its means. Then look at the Muslim world. It kept the ends, and it froze the means along with them, as though the plough and the syllabus had been revealed too.

The tradition knew the difference and wrote it down as law. In worship nothing may be added: whatever was not prescribed is forbidden. In the affairs of the world it is the reverse: everything is permitted unless it has been specifically forbidden.²⁸ Two sayings of the Prophet carry the whole system. On worship: pray as you have seen me pray. On the world, a story. Newly arrived in Medina, he passed farmers pollinating their date palms by hand and remarked that he did not see what good it did. They stopped. The harvest failed. When he heard, he told them: you know the affairs of your world better.²⁹ The man Muslims hold to be the last messenger of God was corrected by a date crop and said so. Imitate in worship; originate in the world. The East's error was to take the rule for worship and apply it to the world. The West's was to take the rule for the world and apply it to the ends.

And the limits did more than simply allow the new. They produced it.

The Quran lays down rules for dividing an estate: this fraction to a daughter, that to a mother, another to a spouse, in combinations that grow complicated quickly. Directly afterward it names what it has just laid down. “These are the limits of God” (4:13).³⁰ The word is hudud, the same word the modern ear hears as a cage. In Baghdad around the year 830 a mathematician named al-Khwarizmi wrote a short book and said in its preface what it was for: the everyday arithmetic of dividing estates, settling bequests, resolving lawsuits and doing trade. Its longest part consists of inheritance problems.³¹ The book's title gave the world the word algebra, and its author's name gave us the word algorithm. The book that named algebra was written to help people stay inside the limits.

Five prayers at times set by the sun, facing one city from anywhere on earth: that is two problems in spherical astronomy, due every day, in every town from Spain to China. The great mosques employed a timekeeper to solve them. One of these, Ibn al-Shatir of Damascus, built models of the planets' motion in the fourteenth century that turn up again, in their mathematics, two centuries later in Copernicus.³² Notice the date. That is a hundred years after Baghdad fell. The freeze was a choice. It was never a fate.

One question is left, and it is the one a skeptical reader should be asking. Why this frame? Every tyranny calls itself a frame. Pharaoh was a frame. The answer comes from Girard, and it may be the most important thing he found. A model turns into a rival under two conditions: he is close enough to compete with, and what you both want cannot be shared. Take away either condition and rivalry cannot begin. Every human frame fails both tests sooner or later. The king is a man. The party is men. The crowd is men. And what they hold, rank, attention, power, is scarce. That is why human frames end by crushing the people inside them. Whoever stands above you is also competing with you.

One sentence is built to that specification. In Arabic it runs la ilaha illa Allah: no god, but God. It comes in two strokes and the order is fixed. The first stroke is a demolition. There is no god. No king, no crowd, no ancestor, no market and no self may sit in that seat. It is the most thorough act of contrarianism ever put into words, and the modern West has performed it magnificently. For three centuries it has pronounced the first half of the sentence. Nietzsche is its patron saint, and Iqbal's verdict on him, in his Persian epic of 1932, is the epitaph of the whole project: he stuck fast in the No and never reached the Except, and so passed as a stranger by the station the Quran calls “His servant” (17:1).³³ Thiel is the honest heir of that estate. He gave a lecture on where it leaves a civilization and titled it “Nihilism Is Not Enough.”

The second stroke fills the seat with the only occupant who passes Girard's test: one who is not near, since “nothing is like Him” (42:11), and whose favor is not scarce.³⁴ You cannot envy God and you cannot be His competitor. A man whose only audience is that One has been let go by every other audience. The old teachers of the inner life, Ghazali among them, called this servanthood and held it to be the only freedom there is, on the plain ground that a man with no master above him has a thousand beside him. There is a second reason, and it is simpler. The One who drew these limits is the One who drew you. That is the whole difference between a cage and a neck.

The Quran does not abolish competition, which would mean abolishing man. It moves the prize to what cannot run out: “race one another toward the good” (2:148). And it has a phrase for what one person looks like inside this frame. “Abraham was a nation” (16:120).³⁵ One man, standing against the whole of his society, and the book counts him as a people.

The Muslim world has had the second stroke on its lips for fourteen centuries. What it lost was the first stroke turned on its own idols: the stroke that knocks the great jurist, the glorious century and the revered school out of the seat. Ghazali noticed as a young man that Christian boys grew up Christian, Jewish boys Jewish and Muslim boys Muslim, and concluded that a creed held that way is an heirloom, not a conviction.³⁶ Nobody inherits the first stroke. A creed said without its demolition is a habit. So the sentence sits in two halves, one in Palo Alto and one in the lands of Islam, and a sentence only works whole.

One more thing about that sentence, and it should unsettle the West's careful writers more than anything else here. Their tradition holds, from Plato's noble lie to the Straussian moderns who put their real conclusions in epigraphs, dead languages and other men's mouths, that the deepest truths are dangerous, that the city cannot survive them, and that what a philosopher knows he must hide. Here is a truth that was never hidden. The sentence that demolishes every idol and names the only exception is called out from towers, aloud, five times a day, in every city of the Muslim world, and has been for fourteen hundred years. The best-kept secret in the history of philosophy is a public announcement. The cities are still standing.

VII. Do It Again

Thiel's essay on nihilism carries two epigraphs. One is Tolkien's Bilbo, a hundred and eleven years old, saying he feels worn thin. The other is Chesterton's child, the passage this essay began with. He set the tired adult beside the untiring child at the top of his own page, and then wrote the adult's essay. The essay under it runs through six sections and ends with a prayer: that “the puppet shows can go on for a while longer,” that what remains of the old restraints may hold for our time, and that the last day may not come soon.³⁷ It is a serious prayer and nothing here mocks it. But it is a request for more time, addressed to a world assumed to be running down. If the world is being made this morning, the right response is not to ask for a delay. It is to go to work.

Iqbal closed his lecture by naming three things humanity needed: a spiritual reading of the universe, the emancipation of the individual, and principles to direct the movement of a society.³⁸ Thiel's three subjects are the same three, reported missing: a universe with no source for the new, an individual with no anchor against the crowd, and a politics that can imagine only the Antichrist or Armageddon. The first need has been the argument of these pages. The world is unfinished. The rest is practice, and its unit is smaller than a government. No organization, Iqbal said, saves a people in decay. The only power that does is “the rearing of self-concentrated individuals,” people who show by what they make that the surroundings were never fixed. One person, four disciplines.

Fix your audience. The seat does not stay empty. The only choice is one judge or ten thousand. A secret, in Thiel's sense, is by definition something nobody is applauding yet, so a person steered by applause cannot find one, however intelligent he is. The precondition for going from zero to one is therefore not a technique. It is a kind of person, one who can work for years unwatched. Ghazali's audit is the most practical sentence in this essay: your work is clean when its being seen and its being unseen are the same to you.³⁹ The Islamic tradition has the training, and has had it all along. Five times a day you stop, whatever room you are in, turn from every face in it, and face one direction. One month a year you tell your most dependable wants no from dawn to dusk, with nobody able to check. These are drills for a creature that would otherwise take its wants from the room. From the rooftop the prayer looks like the deadest repetition on earth. From inside it is the child's again: the same words at dawn for fourteen centuries, because the life in them has not run out. The Muslim world does not need new rituals. It needs to perform the ones it has as acts. And a reader who is not Muslim can still run the audit. Find the work you would do unseen. Everything else is someone else's desire.

Freeze the ends, free the means. Stop redesigning the human being and start redesigning everything else. For the West this is the missing half of what Thiel calls a definite future. You cannot plan toward a good you intend to revise. For the Muslim world the maxim is already in the books: outside worship, the default is permission. Every inherited method, institution, curriculum and tool is a draft. The scholar who declares the engineering of the seventh century holy is making the same mistake as the liberal who declares its worship obsolete. The frame is the ends. Everything else is a construction site. The ancestors who produced nineteen schools of law in three centuries were not asking to be embalmed. To honor them is to do what they did, which is a different thing from repeating what they said.

Leap. The new cannot be reasoned into existence, because reason compares what exists and the new, by definition, does not exist yet. Every real zero to one, a company, a proof, a marriage, a migration, is underwritten by something reason calls unjustified, and the tradition's name for the force that clears the roof's edge is love. This is not softness. It is the hardest doctrine here. Iqbal says God Himself took the risk: in making creatures free enough to refuse Him, He staked something on man, and it is for man to justify the stake.⁴⁰ A civilization justifies it by building, and by the most literal again there is, which is children. A birth rate is a referendum on whether creation should continue. It is falling across both worlds, and Thiel himself calls that the most disturbing sign of all. The child in the air is not this essay's metaphor. She is its policy.

Work, finish, begin again. By Ghazali's ruling, medicine and arithmetic are obligations on a community as a whole: if a town has nobody who has mastered them, the whole town is at fault.⁴¹ He is often accused of having killed science in Islam, usually by people who have not read him. Apply his ruling honestly. A civilization of two billion people that designs almost none of the world's advanced chips, builds none of its airliners and discovers almost none of its new medicines has an obligation outstanding, and no quantity of prayer discharges it, because the prayer was never meant to be the whole. Iqbal quoted the Prophet's saying that the whole earth is a mosque and concluded that no ground is profane. The laboratory is inside the mosque. The Quran states the condition without ornament: “God does not change the condition of a people until they change what is in themselves” (13:11). And it gives the rhythm of a working life in a single line: “when you are free of one task, labor on, and turn to your Lord with all your longing” (94:7–8).⁴² Finish; begin again. Rest is not the wage. The next labor is.

Go back to the child. She is still there with her arms up. Everything in these pages was already in that scene. She is inside a frame, your hands and her certainty that you will catch her, and the frame is what makes the flight possible; a child thrown by someone she did not trust would not laugh. Every throw is the same, and she meets every one as the first. She is copying no one. The only audience she cares about is the one doing the throwing. And she has one word.

Thiel's last line is a question from the prophet Malachi: “who can endure the day of his coming?” (Malachi 3:2). Islam heard that fear fourteen centuries ago and answered it with an instruction about gardening. If the Final Hour comes, the Prophet said, while one of you has a seedling in his hand, and he is able to plant it before he rises, let him plant it.⁴³ One of his companions said the same about the Antichrist: if you hear that he has appeared while you are setting out young palms, do not hurry; finish the planting.⁴⁴

Not because you will eat from the tree. Because planting is what the servants of a still-creating God are found doing when the Hour comes. The world is not a finished object to mourn or a museum to guard. It was not finished on the sixth day, and no one rested. It is a garden at dawn, in the middle of being made, and its Maker, who has never tired, is already commanding the sun.

Plant it. Then tomorrow, do it again.