As part of the research for a book that I am writing on civic education, I recently interviewed Dr. Matthew Spalding, the dean of the Van Andel School of Government of Hillsdale College, the conservative Christian institution that has supplied much of the intellectual heft for the war against “woke” education. I wanted to talk to Spalding about The 1776 Report, a highly patriotic account of America’s founding principles which the Trump administration had commissioned as a counter-blow to The 1619 Project, which places slavery and racism at the heart of the American story. (I find both insupportable and tendentious.) Spalding was the document’s chief author. I had been pursuing Hillsdale officials for the six months since I had written to Larry Arnn, the university’s president. I had done so in my own peculiar way, which often involves the hope that I can disarm with candor. “I will say, not to be coy,” I wrote, “that I do not share Hillsdale’s politics, but I do share a good deal of your pedagogical principles.” That was true: Hillsdale also runs a network of “classical” charter schools, which use an old-fashioned Great Books curriculum to which I am very much drawn. I share Hillsdale’s view of how to teach, though not of what to teach. And since even the most cursory Google search would have revealed my politics, I felt that it was in my interest to admit the obvious and then use whatever credit I would gain for honesty to demonstrate my bona fides. In the ensuing months I sought to persuade Hillsdale’s chief of communications, sincerely, that I was the liberal most likely to give Hillsdale a fair shake. Apparently I succeeded. As I prepared to interview Dr. Spalding, I was feeling rather proud of myself for having trolled the waters so laboriously and finally hauled in a prize fish. More would come; this was to be the first of a series of interviews. Dr. Spalding and I spoke by Zoom for slightly over an hour; the head of communications hovered silently and invisibly in the background. We found much to agree on: that the great defect of progressive schooling was not its ideological content but its lack of content; that most teachers want to teach, not to indoctrinate. Dr. Spalding told me about his graduate U.S. History class, in which, he said, he “tried to understand history as it was understood by those who were there,” rather than by imposing contemporary understandings on the past. We seemed to be getting along swimmingly. Now, going back over my notes, I can see, at approximately the forty-minute mark, where our conversation began to go off the rails. Spalding was talking about the natural law tradition upon which the Founders had drawn — the view that truths inhere in “nature” and are thus permanent and universal. Cultural conservatives argue that America lost its way when twentieth-century progressives abandoned natural law for “relativism.” One of the contributions that The 1776 Report makes to this debate is the bizarre and almost mischievous claim that John Calhoun, the theoretician of racial superiority, was the polluted fountain from which modern identity politics springs — because he thought rights inhered not in nature but “in groups or races according to historical evolution.” I said to Dr. Spalding, “Do you really think all this goes back to Calhoun?” My notes show: “Yes, defends Calhoun.” Then I asked Spalding if he believed, as the report implies, that the ubiquity of slavery in the eighteenth century should govern our judgment of our slaveholding Founders. My notes report, “Yes, palliating that slavery widespread” — that is, we should not judge these men harshly for doing what so many others did at the time. In short, I argued with my subject. I mistook the strategic candor that had enabled me to overcome skepticism or suspicion for the kind of unguarded exchange that is fraught with danger. I knew that. I had told myself beforehand that I must not do what I so often do in this kind of situation. I should instead show curiosity, pose open-ended questions, murmur ambiguously. If I argued adversarially, as I knew from painful past experience, I might snap the thread I had so laboriously tied with Hillsdale’s publicist. And that is exactly what happened. After the interview, she went silent. No more interviews with Spalding or any of his colleagues. I had done it again. Why? Why would I give a sharp yank on the pole when I knew it might let my fish off the hook? In The Journalist and The Murderer, which appeared in 1989, Janet Malcolm famously described misrepresentation, including lying, as a dark trade secret of her profession, too perilous to admit in public but too precious to abandon. She described the journalist as “a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.” I still remember how I recoiled when I read that. Betrayal, I thought, was a choice, not an imperative. Everyone has a justifying ideology to excuse self-serving behavior. Ours — the pursuit of truth — may have been the best of them, but we were still giving ourselves license to behave in a way that, as Malcolm readily conceded, would be regarded as inexcusable in almost any other context. And yet . . . In almost half a century as a journalist, I have let so many fish off so many hooks. In the days that followed my interview with Dr. Spalding, I began to ask myself the opposite of the question I had asked before: what, for a journalist, at least one in my line of work, can justify not lying, or at least not temporizing in a way that achieves the same effect? Malcolm had offered a worldly pragmatism that I could neither fully accept nor convincingly refute. As I thought back over my own work, I realized that I had migrated across the borderlands of honesty
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence