For Mario Vargas Llosa, a prince of our liberalism. With one foot on the platform and the other foot on the train For many decades I have participated like a good soldier in the war of ideas, by which I mean the application of philosophical notions to public affairs for the purpose of persuading readers for or against certain political and cultural outcomes. It is a private-public activity: you cannot be a “public intellectual” unless you are also a private intellectual. Otherwise you are merely a polysyllabic sloganeer waiting for CNN to call, a college education looking for a buyer. Without philosophy, politics is just a contest for power, and without politics, philosophy is just a pastime for professors. Who in their right mind would abandon power to interests devoid of ideas? The search for justice inexorably leads back to concepts. Don’t be cruel! But why should I not be cruel? Because it is wrong! But why is it wrong? Because it hurts people! But do you really believe in a hurtless world? Well, how would you like it if they hurt you? And just like that we are in the severe and magical kingdom of philosophy, because we are, even those of us who will not be reminded by that last question of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, even the most obtuse among us, self-interpreting beings. Sooner or later everybody wants reasons. One evening a group of Syrian friends, some of them refugees, all of them activists, asked if I could meet them for a conversation in the lobby of a local hotel. It was the Obama years, and we all despised him for his sanctimonious refusal to lift a finger against the savagery in Syria, but my friends did not want to discuss foreign policy. They wanted to talk about God — or more precisely, God and the chemical attack in Ghouta. A young man spoke first: “I was in Ghouta and I held dead babies and I resolved that I could never believe in Allah again.” Then a young woman in a lavender hijab remarked: “I was also in Ghouta and I also held dead babies and I never needed Allah more.” They asked me if I could help them make sense of the contradiction. The gravity of the request was not lost on me. I felt honored but mainly I felt humbled, since nothing like Ghouta had ever happened to me, though something was done to my mother in Nazi-occupied Poland that may have qualified me slightly to assist them in confronting their perplexity. (I did not mention it.) For almost three hours I discoursed on the multiplicity of God-concepts and the variety of theories of historical causality and the diversity of spiritual temperaments, and they responded with probing questions and more recollections of the horrors. The hotel might have exploded from the intensity. At one o’clock in the morning we embraced and said goodnight. They expressed their gratitude, but the gratitude was mine. I was drenched in sweat — the sweat of a non-recreational and non-journalistic exploration of ultimate meanings. As I walked out into the deserted street I was surprised by the wonderful thought that the entirety of my education, every single Penguin paperback I had ever read, was all for this night, so that I might be in some way helpful to these people, and leave them with some improvement in their understanding of the philosophical torment to which their brutal experience had sentenced them. The utility of the humanities! The intellectual agitations that I made in all those decades, and those that I assisted, sufficed for a defensible, even a justified life, as a thinking individual and a dissatisfied citizen. I am one of the lucky ones who has had not a career but a calling. “A life of significant contention,” as Diana Trilling famously described it. The significance to which she was referring was owed to the confidence that the disputations were not trivial, that the stakes for society were considerable. No doubt this led to a certain exaggeration of their — our — own importance (which for a while developed a small sub-genre of its own, the memoir of a visit to the White House); but the vanity is a small price to pay for the possibility that we really are clarifying our society and our culture to themselves. I recall many moments at my various desks when striking the keys felt like a form of national service. An open society seemed designed for precisely what I was doing, for how I was enthusiastically earning my living. It began to seem plausible that I might leave behind what a friend of mine called a scar on the map. It was in my time of service, which is not yet over, that the war of ideas spread from the “little magazines” and the medium-sized ones to the editorial pages of newspapers, when Aristotle and Mill were suddenly staining your fingers with fresh ink. One momentous morning William Safire decided that a column of seven hundred words should be named “Essay.” George Will helped to inaugurate what became a culture-wide addiction to quotation — a vernacular version of the old institution of prooftexts and the reverence for authorities that in the religious traditions frequently substitute for reflection. Now the editorial pages are replete with little middlebrow citation-ridden sermons on exceedingly profound themes: who knew that the form of the op-ed piece is adequate for the adjudication of the question of the existence of God, or the definition of a good life? Or that a column should be a regular report on the columnist’s ostentatiously serious reading? (As I write, David French has discovered Carl Schmitt.) The shallowness is deep. The war of ideas has become the board-game of ideas, which has achieved its apotheosis in the festival of ideas, in which analysis and erudition are reduced to entertainment for the affluent and training for their dinner parties. Intellectual life should
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence