Last November, a study was published by a group of Harvard psychologists attempting to explain why some people are happier than others. The secret, according to the study’s authors, was that one should not think too much; a wandering mind was linked with unhappiness. “Many philosophical and religious traditions teach that happiness is to be found by living in the moment, and practitioners are trained to resist mind wandering and to ‘be here now,’” the study’s authors concluded.

On similar lines, “All Things Shining,” co-written by Herbert Dreyfus and Harvard philosophy professor Sean Kelly and published in February, argued that meaning in a secular world could be achieved by shaking off the burden of self-consciousness. Whether by losing oneself in the crowd at a political or sporting event, or by losing oneself in a ritual such as brewing the perfect cup of coffee, “the first step is to recognize moments in your existence when you’re absolutely taken over by the utter thrill and wonder and awesomeness of something going on in the moment,” as Kelly put it.

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In Brazilian Portuguese there’s an evocative word sertão, meaning “backlands.” It refers to the Northeastern interior, calling up images of cracked earth and cacti, vaqueros and bandits and vast blue sky. The region was the site of the epic 19th-century War of the Canudos—a rebellion against the government by sertanejos led by a Messianic preacher; it’s been the subject of books ranging from João Guimarães Rosa’s The Devil to Pay in the Backlands to one of Mario Vargas Llosa’s most famous novels; it’s where “life is dusty and wears,” as one poet immortalized it. To the public imagination in cosmopolitan São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro, while the sertão possesses an acknowledged swathe of rich dance and storytelling traditions, it remains primarily a place of poverty and instability—a slightly terrifying land where ghosts wander, leaders rise up full-formed from the ashes of poverty, and in the deep orange twilight anything can happen.

The U.S. media this week was dominated for obvious reasons by events in Libya and Japan, but much was happening south of our nation as well. Obama’s five-day tour of Latin America, which took him to Brazil, Chile, and El Salvador, drew Wednesday to a close. A Wall Street Journal editorial pointed out the “surreal” quality of the situation: while the família Obama was soaking up the sun in shorts and bare legs, the United States was undertaking intensive missile-based intervention in the Middle East. To many newspaper readers here, the entire region from Mexico to Cape Horn can seem at the moment to appear like a sideshow, a flamboyant but untrustworthy neighbor—in a word, a backlands.

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If accusing a politican of being “socialist” is like launching a B-52 Stratofortress-deployed cruise missile, calling him “Marxist” is like rolling up with a horse-drawn ballista—it may be an effective method of attack, but there’s something awfully old-fashioned about it. Reviewing Frederic Jameson for the London Review of Books, Benjamin Kunkel writes that “the U.S. remains a society in which Marxism can be advocated only a little more respectably than pederasty, and lately accusations of socialism erupt from the Republican Party more frequently than since McCarthy’s heyday.” The latter may be true, but I doubt the former is so edgy. Any self-identifying Marxist is likely to be looked on less as a threat than as a curiosity—a sandal-wearing ’60s relic, or a student of philosophy, or a European—at any rate, someone a bit naïve, yet to be initiated into the capitalist wonderland of iPads and Panda Express.

This is no manifesto for Marxism. There’s plenty in it that’s flawed and parts of it that simply fall apart when examined—far too much, in my case, to claim it comfortably as a political system. But it still deserves more than the dismissive brush-off it receives. As a conceptual tool, Marxism remains one of the best theoretical apparatuses for thinking about the modern world. Jameson, in “The Political Unconscious,” calls it the “hermeneutic code that subsumed all others”; Harvard English Professor Stephen J. Greenblatt has said that he is “uneasy with a politics and a literary perspective…untouched by Marxist thought.” Practically, Marxism might not work, but culturally, its resources run deep.

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“This is an extraordinary situation,” reads the Norwegian Air website, with the Scandinavian penchant for stony understatement. Vulcan, Roman god of fire and the being after whom volcanoes owe their name, is emptying his lungs this week, blowing out a slow stream of smoke and ash that drifts eastward still. While commentators grapple with the name of Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull—its ancient, unpronounceable appellation—European airlines as far east as Moscow are choking under the strain, losing hundreds of millions of dollars in refunds and transfers as whole departures columns read “Cancelled.” England, perhaps hardest hit, even announced it would send Royal Navy warships to rescue stranded Britons.

“It is impossible to attain the depths of reality by describing its surface manifestations,” a German writer once wrote. Something about this goes beyond the mere fact of the ash or any inconvenience. The volcano opened a window onto a reality that resists explanation, becoming a hot primeval eruption to counter the cold steel of airports, the efficiency of modern infrastructure. Ancients thought the clouds of dust emerging from the Sicilian crater Vulcan’s lip were the industry of the god’s forge as he beat out thunderbolts for Jupiter. Some of the incredulity behind that legend-making became comprehensible as in the midst of trying to arrange alternate routes home, punching variation upon variation of possible routes into the computer, one could see passengers and officials look up in amazement, turn to one another, say: “An Icelandic volcano…”

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“Sometimes western Europeans come here looking for communism. There’s a park a few miles from the city center where they can go see old statues and things if they want.” Evening, an upscale bistro, Budapest—a friend of a friend is talking. “But I don’t think it’s worth it. Today all the people who used to be communists are nationalists who just want to wear traditional Hungarian garb and speak Hungarian. It’s reactionary. In this country, you have to know English, Spanish, German to be competitive—at least.” How can so many have gone from wanting an international world order to advocating isolationism, I ask? “Simple people,” he scoffs, swirling his drink. “They can totally 180 just because they have to believe in something.”

That condescension for the “simple people,” felt by many well-to-do eastern Europeans who dismiss those who cling to certain ideologies as laughable or naive, can be contagious. The tendency to flip-flop for the sake of political expediency is on display all the time, in the U.S. included. Even this week, Obama’s administration finally helped protect the health of millions of Americans while simultaneously stripping protection from oil-rich areas off the eastern and Alaskan coasts.

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