The past summer I worked in Washington alongside the offices of a new journal called IDEA. I was serving as Leon Wieseltier’s research assistant on a book project. In that capacity, I had the privilege of witnessing up-close the creation of what would likely have been a major new institution in American intellectual and cultural life. As is well known, it was not to be: Publication was called off when Wieseltier was accused of inappropriate workplace conduct that occurred a decade or more before I knew him. But I wish to testify that this embryonic institution meant a great deal to me, as an American, a woman, and a young thinker, and I want to explain why.
It is not easy to pursue an intellectual or cultural vocation in America today. The institutions that generated the ideas our parents and grandparents could take pride in have been brought low by a confluence of forces. Just as technology was “disrupting”—that is, distorting and in some cases ruining—the universe of journals and magazines, partisan politics was setting fire to even the possibility of reasoned and independent expression. Everywhere you look, bubblegum has replaced Mozart: Jeff Koons in the art museum, Donald Trump in the White House, Buzzfeed in the newsroom. Some celebrate all of this as part of the populist revolt against a venal elite; who needs all those “snobs” anyway? But as Wieseltier put it in an introductory piece for IDEA that now will never be read, “Mobs, actual and digital, are now referred to as ‘the people’.”
Liberal and conservative journalists are still playing a necessary role when they oppose Trump. They are responding to his nastiness and his idiocy, in many cases diligently and sharply, and with alacrity. But it is, almost all of it, merely rapid response. They only deal with today’s outrages, and only those that burn hottest (and there are plenty to choose from). The most valued skill among political and cultural analysts in the mainstream media is speed. But how consistent is speed with seriousness? The pace, the vernacular, and the content of most of our public discourse is dictated by the segment of the media that is most outspoken on Twitter and Facebook. But volume and haste are poor substitutes for authority. It makes little sense to try to crowdsource truth, let alone wisdom. That is not a use of vox populi to which the Founders would have subscribed.
Compare this to the quality of publications only a few decades ago. Commentary and the New Republic and Partisan Review and Encounter and other journals challenged and educated readers at a high level. They made real intellectual demands on their readers. Today readers are not expected to be intellectually challenged, but only to be emotionally aroused—perpetually shocked and infuriated—and to respond with outrage and contempt. Yet even in those cases in which outrage and contempt are called for, they cannot be adequately or lastingly communicated in tiny digital outbursts. Feeling is not analysis.
There are perils in such tempests. We are no longer taught by example to think carefully and deliberately. We are being conditioned to devalue thoughtfulness itself. Journalists have never been more subordinated to the business needs of their institutions. And journalists, whose job is to report, are now treated with the prestige once accorded philosophers, writers, and critics. Journalism has never been more urgently needed than it is now, but more is required for the formation of intelligent public opinion. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish the zeal for justice from the lust for a Pulitzer. Readers increasingly judge a political position based on how many times it gets retweeted, not whether or not they believe it is true. But when we align ourselves with a political view, we are taking a position on how human life ought to be lived, even if all we mean to do is align ourselves with a particular social group. It requires thoughtfulness. The media maelstrom often obscures the fundamental principles that are at stake in—and the depth of historical knowledge that is a condition of—our interpretation of events.
Has careful and reflective intellectual leadership ever been more in need in this country, or ever in such short supply? It’s a commonplace to bemoan the millennials’ addiction to their devices. (I tend to think that, having grown up with it, we may be a bit more wary of its pitfalls.) But our elders seem just as prone to being sucked down into the Twitterverse; indeed they created that world and, along the way, deprived us of the pedagogy and the example that we need and they had.
Young people have been scouring the digital mediaspace with little luck for intellectual and cultural leaders with the wisdom to step back from the fray, but such leaders are few and far between in the pages of the journals and magazines that once published them. Nuance requires an attention span, but the trendiest and most powerful publications are measured by the volume of clickthroughs they generate. Public discourse has become a brawl. Slogans and pithy “snackable” formulations have replaced extended analysis and deep knowledge. Who wants to grow up to be that—a clickfarmer? And this failure is politically ecumenical. Trump has one sort of mob, and liberals another. Both swim in the digital shallows that surround us all.
This brings me back to IDEA. It was intended to be a place where real thinkers and real thought were given a platform. Four of its six staffers were women; no one, so far, has mentioned in published commentary that the office was overwhelmingly female. I noticed this because I had spent years surrounded by female professors and peers who were often visibly intimidated by their male counterparts. I had been searching for female role models with sharp minds and commanding postures. It was exhilarating to be surrounded by women who honored the values I thought had been all but lost in this country. There was nothing defensive about their integrity: They understood the power and seriousness of their project, and they happened to be women. It was both a relief and an honor to work near them and learn from them. Such was my experience in an office with Leon Wieseltier. Every young woman deserves the chance to work in such a context.
The whiteboard in the IDEA office showed names like Breyer, Kagan, Applebaum, Faust, Grossman, Wideman, Ozick, Wilentz, Wu, Snyder, Homans, Perl—I could go on. This was what I had been looking for: a political and cultural publication that honored thoughtfulness. IDEA maintained that, in order to be a decent citizen, one has to be trained as a humanist. That is why, for example, Jennifer Homans’s piece about Balanchine was laid out alongside Kassem Eid’s memoir of a sarin gas attack in Syria: Both dealt with serious and complex expressions of human life. High culture prepares our souls and minds to confront hard truths. Without learning from artistic and literary masterworks, we cannot be prepared to think about the content of politics and culture, which is the mess of human life.
Clinging with thoughtless desperation to tired, prepackaged political orientations will not bring us where we need to go as a society. If we forget the serious content of politics and culture, political and cultural conversation will become tools with which we signal team membership, and little more. We will continue to confuse journalists with scholars, and we will not recognize the dreadful price of this intellectual laziness. Political and cultural conversation does not need to be perfunctory. It should not be perfunctory. And for an inspiring and hopeful two months in the offices of IDEA, it was deliciously rigorous.
During that brief period, and for the first time since November 2016, I had substantive, grounded hope for my country. But it’s gone. IDEA was blown to the ground by the very forces from which it offered respite: a man accused of making women sexually uncomfortable has received the same punishment as the most monstrous assaulters and rapists. As a survivor of sexual assault myself, and as a citizen of this country, I find the fact that nuance is once again anathema, that “Wieseltier” now appears after “Weinstein” on certain kinds of lists, both appalling and dangerous. Leon Wieseltier was just one casualty of the emotional tempests we confront without the benefit of a thoughtful anchor, but he is the one I know best.
No matter: I persist in believing that the America I encountered in IDEA’s office has not been sunk once and for all. It is too formidable, too important, too virtuous. We need it too much. Its steady, serious dedication to the values that make life meaningful will outlast this storm. I look forward to its future.