*The One and the Ninety-Nine* [review]

Luke Burgis's moving new book

I’m envious of authors who write about their families with candor. With happy families, it all seems easy: laughter and home-cooked meals and warm beds. With the less happy situations Luke describes, it is literally dementia, broken beds, and smoking cigarettes when you don’t smoke. In reading vignettes about his struggles as a caregiver for his father you can’t help but see the depths of Luke’s interest in the central human struggle to balance serving others (family, friends), serving God, and being true to oneself and one’s own talents and nature. At the same time, everyone is pulled between two drives, belonging to a group and differentiating into an individual, and it’s impossible to hold both at once. Always someone is disappointed.

I’ve been looking forward this new book, The One and the Ninety-Nine, for some time. The title is from the parable of the lost sheep in the Gospel of Luke: a shepherd with a hundred sheep loses one, leaves the ninety-nine in the open country, and goes after the one until he finds it. Who in their right mind risks ninety-nine to save one?

I’ve known Luke for some years and am a big fan of his 2021 book, Wanting, on how the philosophy of René Girard manifests itself in everyday life, as people copy the desires of others. I’ve grappled with Girard’s theory of mimetic desire for decades, since college, and only came to resolve my intellectual conflicts about his approach after the global conference on Girard that Luke organized in 2023. Luke’s superpower is convening exceptional minds and platforming unexpected conversations that always yield astonishing results.

The villain of The One and the Ninety-Nine, “social contagion,” is something Luke has been worrying about for years as well. In the online era, the online self is too often a “pseudo-self,” and the goal is finding and maintaining the “solid self,” a self “not dependent on social expectations.” The vast majority of people, he claims, have a low capacity to differentiate themselves from the groups they belong to. This is true.

Luke begins with a family trip on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland and ends in a Michigan memory-care unit, the family home already emptied and sold, with stops along the way in Las Vegas and Rome. This journey holds the book together the way families often ground individual trajectories, quietly and inexorably.

Luke tells the story of being thirty-five and sitting on the floor of his childhood home, weeping. The house had fallen apart during his years away. Six years earlier, in Las Vegas, after leaving Wall Street to launch multiple companies, he was restless, “numb, drained, feeling empty.” He had sought refuge in a twenty-four-hour coffee shop near the Vegas Strip, “reading classical literature and philosophy—sometimes until two or three o’clock in the morning.” He sheds the desires he had formed in his business and acquires new desires from the monks and the books he is reading at night.

Throughout the book, Luke writes of being drawn toward stories of people who left everything behind to confront reality more directly, and most of all toward the Desert Fathers of Egypt. Luke had seen himself as “living in a desert, literally and spiritually.” Antony, for example, around 270 AD, gave away the property he had inherited and went to live alone in the desert; hermits followed him into what became monastic communities. They are the first to take the paradox of the one and the ninety-nine “to an extreme.”

The years of rising early to pray and read, learning to cook, declining invitations, he writes, “led to a reorientation of my desires,” such that he no longer wanted the things he used to want. Friends of Luke know the story of his becoming a seminarian, going to Rome, leaving the seminary, falling in love with and marrying the wonderful Claire, starting a family.

So what should people do who don’t want to take the seminary path? Luke offers three antidotes. First, better and more effective rites of passage than anything on a screen. At Wyoming Catholic College, for example, every freshman spends twenty-one days in the backcountry without a phone. Second, instead of the restless hunt for information (curiositas) join a slow reading group and partake in the medieval virtue of studiositas. Third, remember the reason for the weekly sabbath rest and remember to rest, especially from the internet.

My go-to advice to young people has always been “recognize you’re not the first person to face this.” My son, now 32, half-laughingly calls this my predilection for telling him he’s not special. Every dilemma he faced when growing up I would say “well, what did other people do in this situation?” Other people have been cut from the varsity team and gone to the coach to plead to be put back on. Other people have locked their car keys in their car. With my son, at least, it seems that instilling habits of recognizing that other people have been in a similar position results in a certain equanimity and sense of humor.

A good part of the middle of Luke’s book is about the real-world frictions that seemed so normal a generation ago. Phones were attached to homes, not people, and to reach a friend you had to make a phone call to their house. More often than not, someone else answered the phone and you had to speak politely to that person before the phone was handed to your friend. Everyone who made phone calls in those days was formed by those conversations, by the need to be respectful to your friend’s family, by the understanding that your friends lived in their own family unit, that your call was noted by others, that you might not be assured of privacy.

About halfway through The One and the Ninety-Nine I began to count the books and authors whose theories and arguments Luke cites. Would you believe it? It adds up to ninety-nine.

It is clear that reading changes a person. And yet, as Luke writes, “No idea has truly changed my life without becoming incarnate.” What is important is real-world change, a new way of seeing rather than words alone that can be forgotten. His grandmother became a sculptor by apprenticing to a master, not “merely copying his methods but learning to perceive the world as he did.” Real solidarity, Luke writes, “is forged in shared experience, not in shared knowledge.”

Luke revives an old distinction between two kinds of knowing—ratio, reasoning that follows a procedure, and intellectus, the direct grasp of what is there—and says a language model does the first and never the second. He calls the machine an oracle that “sees for us” and points to Sam Altman’s “one-person company,” a business with no colleagues at all. Luke suggests that the distance between the solid self and the pseudo-self is the distance between a mind that knows something and a mind that can only summon it. A prompted mind retrieves; an educated one perceives. I would have liked Luke to spend a little more time on this claim. I would have liked a little bit more from Luke himself, not the ninety-nine people he has read, because Luke has a lot to say that is, in fact, more interesting and compelling than many of the stories he tells (Ornette Coleman’s story excepted).

Luke and I share a deep fascination with questions of who goes along with the crowd, and why. We dove into these questions in one of Anna Gat’s Interintellect salons five years ago, the first of two I did on “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Everyone knows the story of the town that agrees not to notice that their king is walking around publicly with no clothes on until a child pipes up to say “but he has nothing on!”

Toward the end of The One and the Ninety-Nine, where Luke writes about unifying virtues, there’s a section called “Should I test the community?” where he advises taking care beforehand:

Approach the group as a solid self and see how people react. Exercise parrhesia—the courage to speak truthfully and without calculation—at a gathering. Ask questions. Probe. Pay close attention to the spirit with which these things are received. Will joining make you more likely to become angry or resentful, or more patient and kind? How will it affect your relationships with your friends and family? We can begin to see answers to these questions before we have to cross the threshold.

Luke knows my argument that Hans Christian Andersen’s tale is about the fragility of constitutional monarchy, which, for it to work, requires a ruler to be open and transparent and still be a figure of respect. The child who pipes up is not necessarily a hero expressing his solid self. He may be a jerk rending a necessary social fabric. Those who “go along” with the crowd may not necessarily be demonstrating their pseudo selves; they may be weaving a more subtle group dynamic toward wholesome ends. Differentiation and virtue are two different things.

For me Andersen’s tale is about naked fathers, in a way, and how to approach them with respect, the way that in Genesis 9:23, after Noah youngest son laughed when his father passed out drunk and naked, his oldest sons stepped in:

And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness.

And so I return, at the end of this review, to the beginning of The One and the Ninety-Nine, where Luke’s father collapses on a mountain road on the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland where there’s no cell service and every building in the nearest town is shut. Luke finds the clinic by a stranger’s directions involving trees and landmarks. The old fashioned way.

The solid self is bound up with mortality and dependence, with responsibility for a person in real need. Luke’s father is both the lost sheep and the dying shepherd. The question “what happens to those sheep when their shepherd dies?” seems to me the real point of the book, personal, moving, and one every individual should think about, whether alone or surrounded by a hundred or so books.