Watching Nolan's Odyssey? A Reflection for Civic Leaders
- Kalen Academy
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Tomorrow, Christopher Nolan's film of The Odyssey arrives in theatres, and millions of people who have never opened the poem will meet its story for the first time. For anyone who does, there is something far richer waiting than an adventure at sea. Beneath the storms and monsters lies one of the oldest and most useful handbooks on leadership ever written, offering timeless wisdom across the nearly 2,700 years since it was composed.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus, a king trying to sail home to Ithaca from a long war. While he is gone, his household is overrun by men who camp in his halls, eat through his wealth, and behave as though the place belongs to them. His journey home is not just a voyage across water. It is the harder passage back home, to reestablish order and justice in your household, community and city. A reflection for civic leaders...
Author and civic leadership expert Diane Kalen-Sukra has spent a season of her sabbatical back inside this poem. What has struck her again and again is how directly it speaks to civic leaders, to anyone who serves a community, a city, or a public trust.
This reflection she is sharing concerns the stop in the hero's journey at the island called Scheria.
In the story, Odysseus washes ashore, exhausted, on the island of the Phaeacians, a people who live in almost perfect comfort. Their halls are golden, their orchards never stop bearing fruit, their ships sail themselves. Homer tells us they live "far from those who toil," set apart from the hardship of every other shore in his world. Their manners are flawless. Their hospitality is famous. By every outward measure, they are the most civilized people Odysseus meets on his entire journey.
And yet Homer means for us to notice something uncomfortable beneath the beauty. The Phaeacians live apart from suffering, and so they are free to sing of it, to lament it, even to celebrate it, without ever having to bear it. Their civility is safe only so long as it stays a performance. For when they finally do something costly, when they ferry the shipwrecked Odysseus home, Poseidon punishes them, turning their great ship to stone within sight of their own harbour. The lesson is severe: on this island, sympathy is admired, but action carries a price. Scheria is not a paradise to imitate. It is a warning.
That warning is the heart of Diane's reflection. She believes we have built islands like Scheria in our own time, and that civic leaders, of all people, cannot afford to live on them.
We have gatherings of the influential and the comfortable, conferences and think tanks and institutions, that speak beautifully about renewal, responsibility, and the good society. Much of what they say is true and worth hearing. But there are questions they rarely ask, and voices they rarely let in.
Who actually owns the wealth of a country, and how did it come to be held by so few?
Why do so many people work harder each year and own less?
And why is it that the person who raises these questions plainly is so often dismissed, not answered, but dismissed, as envious, or unserious, or simply not worth hearing?
Diane's reflection grew out of a video takedown by conservative commentator Konstantin Kisin against an economist named Gary Stevenson, who came from a modest home and rose to the top of the financial world, creditialed from the London School of Economics and Oxford, before turning to warn ordinary people about the engineered concentration of wealth and what could be done about it.
Konstantin's video, "The Rise and Fall of Gary Economics", begins as a sermon on civility and then proceeds to extend none to Stevenson, attacking his character and credentials before dismissing him as an illegitimate voice.
The comfortable, it seems, would rather discredit the person asking the hard question than sit with the question itself. That is the false civility of Scheria.
And here is where it becomes a matter of civic duty. The real work of a civic leader is not to keep the peace by keeping quiet.
It is to pursue justice in the life of the city, even when that means naming an injustice the powerful would prefer to leave unnamed, and standing up to large and entrenched interests who benefit from the silence.
That path is not comfortable. It has always asked something of those who take it. Odysseus does not get home without loss, without struggle, without paying a price. Neither does any leader who chooses to serve the good of the whole community rather than the ease of the few. The sacrifice is part of the calling. That, too, is what the poem has to teach us.
So whether you are about to watch the film, thinking of reading the book for the first time, or simply care about what it means to lead a community well, Diane invites you to sit with this ancient story a while.
Diane Kalen-Sukra's full reflection, on Scheria, on insulated elites, on the questions the powerful do not want us to ask, and on the courage civic leadership requires, is published in full below.
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