Jamison is a retired attorney who is now a writer in Fresno, Calif.
Civil War veteran and early 20th century U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., once said about the human condition that “logical method and form flatter that longing for certainty and for repose which is in every human mind. But certainty generally is an illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.”
With reliance waning on organized religion for understanding the human condition, how can the religiously unaffiliated find peace with Holmes’ observation? Three philosophers offer ways.
In the 18th century, Immanuel Kant theorized that we are born with an innate but always imperfect sense of morality. Unlike our ability to determine what is true or false according to the laws of nature that are deducible from physical observation of the natural world, we are incapable of knowing the laws of morality that would provide answers to moral questions. Moral questions include whether it is always morally wrong to lie when telling the truth could have catastrophic consequences. For another example, should the West, with its full conventional force and on moral grounds, promptly stop Putin’s slaughter of innocent Ukrainians when this could risk untold deaths in a devastating nuclear war? No law prescribes the correct moral choice. Kant posits that we are in an unending futile pursuit of seeking to achieve uniformity of the human will to the moral law. For Kant, our sense of morality means there must be a superior intelligence, namely God, in which the moral and natural laws come together in complete harmony.
For the religiously unaffiliated who nevertheless feel there must be a higher power that is the source of our sense of morality, Kant’s view may be helpful.
Two other philosophers reconcile Kant’s futility without resort to God. Ludwig Wittgenstein in the early 20th century found a measure of contentment in knowing and accepting the ultimate limit of human knowledge. In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein described how with language, we can express propositions that can be empirically shown to be true or false, and thus have meaning, but where our language is inadequate to verify a statement, such as statements of faith or ethics, our knowledge stops. At 6:44 of Tractatus, Wittgenstein states: “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”
For Wittgenstein, human language is like a cage. Its bars stop our trying to speak of ethics or religion. Slamming ourselves against the bars will not break them. Wittgenstein concludes in Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” Despite this futility, Wittgenstein professes a deep respect for the tendency in the human mind nevertheless to want to try to say something about virtue, ethics, and the meaning of life. The nonreligious can also honor this tendency.
Scientific advances in the 21st century do not undercut Wittgenstein. Michio Kaku concedes in The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything that scientists have so far not found that theory and that even if they do, it cannot explain where the theory itself came from. Can artificial intelligence (AI) become a new inscrutable language---a new unknowable intelligence that undercuts Wittgenstein in rendering human language as the limit of human knowledge, but not the limit of a knowledge? But AI is human language. It can be inscrutable only because humans have designed it to connect patterns in data vastly faster than humans can.
Later in the 20th century, in the Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus reduced the futility that Kant and Wittgenstein addressed to one stark philosophical question: should we commit suicide or press on? For Camus, the leap to God to explain our existence abandons forthright acceptance of the human condition. Like Sisyphus, who was condemned repeatedly to push a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down just before he reached the top, we are condemned to futility in trying to know why we exist. For Camus, although it is hopeless and absurd, our unending pursuit of meaning is to be embraced as the essence of human dignity. In not giving up, Sisyphus enjoyed a measure of happiness.
Shared moral values and peace with Holmes’ observation lie in striving to do what is morally right by the light we have.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.