James Wood: Let’s begin with a quote, as Jon Baskin does in his introduction from The Point, from the literary critic Lionel Trilling, from 1946: “Unless we insist,” says Trilling, “that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics of a kind that we will not like.” We’re here to discuss imagination and mind in relation to politics, and in particular, to discuss what liberalism’s imagination and mind—its imaginative vision, its idea of aesthetics, of the beautiful and the good—might be. The impetus is the recent issue of The Point devoted to just this question, which includes an article by Jon called “On the Liberal Imagination,” and an essay by Becca Rothfeld, called “Listless Liberalism,” on what she feels is some kind of visionary lack at the heart of contemporary liberalism. Becca was reviewing Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom by Cass Sunstein, both published in 2025. “Fascism,” notes Becca, in her review, “has its aesthetic, but what is liberalism’s? Who is its Leni Riefenstahl?”—assuming we want one.

Liberalism might be said almost to have an aversion to publicly stated aesthetics. But if the right has a powerful critique of liberalism’s failings and increasingly an interest in the common good, then liberalism must fight that fight on the same terms, says Becca. Can liberalism support and adumbrate what she calls an “ample humanism” in which we can see disclosed what is beautiful and sweet, in her words, and sustaining? She charges both books with failing to ask what “life under liberalism is actually like.” If Becca is right about liberalism’s failure to describe an enticing and lovely picture of the common good, we’ll have to ask why, of course, and I assume that these questions will occupy us tonight, as well as the larger question of what we think the common good is. If liberalism is listless—tired, vacant, technocratic, legalistic, or too negative (and I mean negative in that specific Isaiah Berlin sense of a liberalism that defines itself best as freedom from government intervention), is this because liberalism is too heterogeneous to pin down? Is it because liberalism generally holds that it’s not liberalism’s task to tell people what to do?

As Jon Baskin notes in his piece, the leading lights of postwar twentieth-century liberalism—John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Judith Shklar, Martha Nussbaum, and I’d add to that list Iris Murdoch and Bernard Williams on the English side—were largely agnostic about the ultimate questions. That is, in his words, they preferred to leave “the great spiritual and aesthetic projects to the private and semiprivate sphere.” But what are the ultimate questions? And if we don’t want government telling us what they are, perhaps we do still want liberal writers to expand on what they are.

Could it also be that liberalism’s officially uneasy, but actually very smooth, relations with capital are a major source of its contemporary inability to envisage the good life? Liberalism prizes free markets, says Cass Sunstein in his new book, but how free should these markets be, and how much should we prize them? It turns out, in fact, that Cass has extremely interesting answers to those questions. He argues that liberalism is no necessary friend of laissez-faire capitalism. If contemporary liberalism is currently bad at making a case for ample humanism, it’s sort of strange is it not, given that this has traditionally been one of liberalism’s greatest strengths? Isn’t there a tradition that stretches from Montaigne’s humanism to James Baldwin’s? I’m thinking of a line I love from James Baldwin, where he says, “I’ve always thought that the only way for someone to be saved is to be saved by another human being,” and such a tradition might include George Eliot, George Orwell, Tolstoy—maybe not the late, religiously fanatical Tolstoy, but certainly the Tolstoy of War and Peace. And it might include, say, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity. America has its own profound strand of what has been called “perfectionist liberalism,” which courses through Emerson, William James, and John Dewey, with a distinctive American emphasis on self-creation and cultivation of character over custom. Stanley Cavell called it “not a competing theory of the moral life, but something like a dimension or tradition of the moral life that spans the course of Western thought and concerns what used to be called the state of one’s soul.”

So without further ado, let’s dispute, prosecute and generally share this idea of liberalism’s lack, and also of liberalism’s strengths.

Becca Rothfeld: First of all, thanks, guys, for coming. It’s kind of my dream to have a Trilling revival going on. I’ve never heard Trilling mentioned so much in a public space or with such enthusiasm. I’m going to mention him a few more times, but this is already the happiest I’ve ever been.

The occasion for this conversation is an essay that I wrote for The Point, which came out a few months ago. The essay was a review of two recent books that bill themselves as attempts to reinvigorate liberalism on the eve of its decimation: Abundance by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein and On Liberalism by our friend Cass Sunstein. It is a mark in liberalism’s favor that the writers of both of the books I criticized in the piece have subsequently invited me to come discuss my objections, and I’m so grateful to be here tonight. That has never happened to me before. Most of the people I pan never want to see me again. So that speaks well of liberals already.

I’m going to begin by summarizing the arguments of the piece, and I’m going to conclude by raising a few questions that I’ve been brooding over since it came out, and there will be another Trilling quote. But before I get into the weeds, it’s important to begin with a terminological note. What we on this panel mean by “liberalism” is not what is meant by, say, political commentators in the Opinion section of the New York Times. We do not mean the Democrats. We are referring to a political philosophy that arose in the seventeenth century as an outgrowth of Enlightenment moral philosophy and various Enlightenment-era conceptions of the nature of the self. Its hallmarks are an enthusiasm for autonomy, a propensity for diversity and a commitment to egalitarianism. I’ve offered a vague characterization of liberalism rather than a more concrete definition because the specifics are very much up for debate, and there are as many accounts of liberalism as there are liberal theorists. What matters for our purposes is that what we are talking about here is very much not the historically particular political orientation of the Democratic Party, much less in 2026 when it is peak listless; rather, a much broader political philosophy that has developed over the course of at least two centuries.

An important divide among liberal thinkers is this: Some of them are perfectionist—that is to say, they think there is a substantive liberal conception of the good life, of the way that we ought to live. Their aim is to construct a political formation that reflects, protects and gives rise to this privileged form of life. Some liberal thinkers, however, are non-perfectionist. That is to say, in their view, it is the job of a liberal state to enable citizens to devise and realize their own conceptions of the good life. This doctrine, according to which the liberal state should not favor or disfavor a particular conception of the good is called the “doctrine of neutrality.” Here is an example of what I mean. Christianity takes a controversial and substantive stance about the nature of the good life. Christianity asks its adherents to believe certain contentious things about the world, for instance, that Jesus is the son of God, and thus asks his adherents to believe certain controversial things about how humans ought to live. For instance, that we ought to worship Jesus or emulate him. A non-perfectionist liberalism permits its citizenry to be Christian, but it remains neutral only insofar as it does not compel them to be Christian. The most prominent liberal thinker of the past century is my other patron saint, John Rawls, who embraced a non-perfectionist liberalism, as do I.

With that said, here’s the basic picture that my piece paints. It is no secret that there has been a violent reaction against liberalism in America and indeed across the Western world for the past decade. When this inchoate seething takes on a philosophical guise, or pretends to, it calls itself post-liberalism. Post-liberal figures like the pundits Sohrab Ahmari, the Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen, and Harvard’s own Adrian Vermeule, profess to make arguments against liberalism, but what I argue in my piece is that the crux of their distaste is just that: a distaste, a shudder of aesthetic revulsion. What they are reacting against is the texture of life under liberalism. And what is the texture of life under liberalism, or at least the brand of liberalism we’ve been living under lately? Here is a quote from my piece explaining: “Among the marquee mannerisms of recent liberalism we find chains selling salad bowls, mixed-use developments featuring glassy apartment complexes, the television show Parks and Recreation, the grocery store Trader Joe’s, the word “nuance,” glasses with rectangular frames, group-fitness classes, the profession of consulting, news startups focusing not on criticism or reporting but on commentary, and nonfiction that is a little too good for an airport bookstore but a little too slick and credulously economics-heavy for a literary magazine. The smug yet unconvincing performance of non-aesthetics amounts to aesthetics too.”

If this constellation of aesthetic artifacts is what the post-liberals react to and reject, then small tweaks to liberal policy will not assuage them any more than will academic arguments in favor of some of the central liberal tenets. My core objections to the books I critiqued, then, was that neither was really rising to the challenge that post-liberalism raises, which is to show that liberalism can give rise to a better aesthetic, a richer and more beautiful form of life than the one we are currently living under. One major issue is whether to rise to this challenge would require us to depart from non-perfectionist liberalism. I propose tentatively that it does not because I am not calling for the liberal state to mandate a better aesthetics. I’m calling for public intellectuals like ourselves, with some commitment to liberalism, to demonstrate that liberalism can give rise to a better aesthetics.

Now for a few questions I have yet to answer to my own satisfaction: First, what should a good liberal aesthetics look like? There are a few things that it could refer to. I could be talking, as I did in my piece, about the quality of life under liberalism. The texture of life is not unrelated to the art that that form of life produces, but those two are not the same thing. I could also be talking about art, and there’s a number of different forms that good liberal art could take: it could reflect or represent the whole of the liberal order, or the seething chaos that results under liberalism—someone I have in mind is the choreographer Balanchine, who creates an order out of chaotic movements that are dispersed across the stage. It could just be that good liberal art is actually illiberal, representing a strong embrace of a particular form of life, because the point of political neutrality is to allow people to be non-neutral in their private lives. So maybe just Dostoevsky or late Tolstoy is an example of what somebody should be doing when they make art under liberalism. Alternatively, liberal art could advocate for a substantive liberalism. It could demonstrate that pluralism is a positive good. An example of someone who does this is maybe E.M. Forster, whom Trilling described as a “liberal at war with the liberal imagination.” Or it could reflect the dilemma of somebody confronting disparate forms of life, as people under liberalism do, and people under different kinds of political organization infrequently do. An example would be a late Henry James novel, like The Ambassadors, or various Edith Wharton novels, where people choose between the confections of an inauthentic society and a more unconventional path.

My second spate of questions that remain unanswered are: To what extent is the connection between liberalism and bad aesthetics nonaccidental? Does liberalism tend to yield bad aesthetics? Is it likelier to yield bad aesthetics than any other political formation? There are two thinkers I like a lot, who have suggested that it has, and I’m going to read you quotes from both of them. The first is Trilling again from The Liberal Imagination:

Our liberal ideology has produced a large literature of social and political protest but not, for several decades, a single writer who commands our real literary admiration; we all respond to the flattery of agreement, but perhaps even the simplest reader among us knows in his heart the difference between that emotion and the real emotions of literature. It is a striking fact about this literature of contemporary liberalism that it is commercially very successful—at the behest of a liberal middle class, that old vice of “commercialism,” which we all used to scold, is now at a disadvantage before the “integrity” which it once used to corrupt. Our dominant literature is profitable in the degree that is earnest, sincere, solemn. At its best it has the charm of a literature of piety. It has neither imagination nor mind.

And if on the other hand we name those writers who, by the general consent to the most serious criticism, by consent too of the very class of educated people of which we speak, are to be thought of as the monumental figures of our time, we see that to these writers the liberal ideology has been at best a matter of indifference. Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats, Mann … Kafka, Rilke, Gide—all have their own love of justice and the good life, but in not one of them does it take the form of a love of the ideas and emotions which liberal democracy … has declared respectable. … This is to say that there is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.

And then in the Sixties, Susan Sontag wrote a review of Simone Weil in the New York Review of Books in which she doesn’t exactly echo Trilling—I’m trying, still, to figure out what exactly the relation between their remarks is, but she says something similar. She writes,

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. [… ]

Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination.

So my question is, to what extent are Trilling and Sontag saying the same thing, and once we figure out what they’re saying, we can figure out to what extent they are correct.

Jon Baskin: I’m going to start just by talking a little bit about the genesis of the issue in which Becca’s article appeared, and the larger topic of that issue, as well as some thoughts I’ve had since we’ve put it together, and some of the responses we’ve got. And then I’ll come back toward the end to some very similar questions to the ones Becca raised.

The Point ran a forum this winter on what we called “the left and the good life”— and by left, we meant left and liberals; there were articles about both. The issue was inspired in large part by an essay we had published about a year earlier, right after Donald Trump got re-elected, by a young writer named Mana Afsari. Mana’s essay was called “Last Boys at the Beginning of History.” The article consisted of series of extended conversations between Mana and young, ambitious Trump voters in Washington, D.C.—young men, mostly, who had expressed an almost unbelievable enthusiasm for Trump. The article drove home for me the extent to which, for a 21-year-old, Trump had been the most important figure in political life since they began being conscious of politics. But there was another theme that struck me throughout the article, which was the sense that a lot of these young people expressed, and which was shared by Mana herself, of being let down by what they had found in left-liberal intellectual spaces, whether those were their grade schools or their universities, which many of them had attended during the first Trump term. They discussed how their professors were coming in and crying during class and doing all this therapeutic moralizing about what was going on, as opposed to actually teaching them about the humanities, which is what they wanted. And despite the fact that, as Mana points out, you could hardly imagine a more anti-intellectual figure than Donald Trump, they had found during this period a kind of openness and richness in certain right-of-center intellectual spaces that they hadn’t found in the left-liberal ones. So this prompted a question for us, in the wake of the defeat—which felt like both a political and a cultural defeat—of progressivism, at least for that moment in 2024. We felt that there was a task here, for us as a magazine. Could we challenge our writers to try to answer some of these serious questions that these young people felt were not being addressed in left-liberal intellectual spaces? Could we ask them to contend with what the good life had to do with the left and liberalism?

Now, I want to bring up one immediate objection some people have to this theme, which is, What are you talking about that liberalism doesn’t have a vision of the good life? Don’t liberals never shut up about what they think is good? It’s an oft-recited criticism that liberals are always moralizing at you, always telling you how to be and what to do, especially coming out of this period of what some call “wokeness”—or what Becca likes to call “in-this-house liberalism.”

In truth, these two strands of liberalism—on the one hand, what we might call hyper-moralistic liberalism, and then on the other, the “neutral” liberalism that consists in a kind of retreat from morality entirely, which we sometimes describe as technocracy today—these two strands have been with us for a long time. And actually they come up in Trilling. He would have used different names. He would have called it “bureaucratic liberalism” instead of “technocratic.” At the beginning of The Liberal Imagination , he talked about how liberals were often attracted to simplified ideas, and didn’t like things that were complicated. So it’s an interesting question whether those two poles of liberalism are in some way related to this problem of not being able to put forward a substantive vision of the good life. In some way, what’s missing from both of them is the ability to just say, This is what we think a good life is, and we’re going to put it up in competition with these other conceptions of the good life. Instead, you get this boomerang between the two.

So how does aesthetics fit into this question about the good life? While I think Becca is asking a very related question, certainly, to the question of the issue, it’s not exactly the same question. To go back to the quote that James read from Trilling in the opening, part of what those people in Mana’s essay were saying was that they found more “imagination and mind”—a larger openness to asking fundamental questions, but also a better way of imagining themselves having agency politically—in these right-wing spaces. Now, to meet this challenge for liberals is not easy for many of the reasons that have already been described, and I’m sure Cass will say more about this next. As soon as someone committed to liberalism begins trying to address these questions of the good life, they run up against the fact that they are committed, in some sense, to not endorsing any positive doctrine of the good life over any others, or at least not a full one. And this comes with a commitment to pluralism.

To come back to the question of what the good life has to do with aesthetics, one of the things I’ve been asking myself is: What creates a powerful aesthetic? It comes from a very convincing way of seeing the world, a very convicted way of seeing the world. I don’t think it necessarily needs to come from a vision of the good life. It could come out of a vision of how bad life is. We certainly know artists that have had aesthetics that arose from either side. But I think there is a question whether liberalism can provide something like this at all. Even in some of the higher points of what I might call “liberal art,” what you tend to find is a portrayal of society as good enough—not exactly beautiful or deeply meaningful in the sense that we often think of when we think of a strong aesthetic. And this problem is particularly acute at a time when liberalism is challenged by actually possible alternatives. So I think one of the things to discuss is whether we might need to reconnect with the imagination, even if it makes us uncomfortable, at a moment when liberals are being challenged politically.

I’ll close by just giving my own two cents in response to the question of this panel: Do liberals want a beautiful world? This is still a tentative response, and maybe I’ll be talked out of it, but I think liberals do not want a beautiful world, at least not as or qua liberals. To put it in another way, I don’t think beauty will ever play the role in liberalism that it might play in certain forms of conservatism or in religious political systems, partly because of the hierarchical, inegalitarian nature of beauty itself. To say something is beautiful is always to rank it above something else. You can redefine beauty standards, but you can’t get rid of them. It’s to misunderstand the concept of beauty to think it could apply to everything equally, or remain agnostic in regard to the plurality of ways of seeing the world. This is, incidentally, I think, why liberals make for ideal literary critics, but not always artists.

But this inability to advance some official notion of beauty also makes it all the more important that liberal societies, in my view, provide a place—and the tools and resources—for the autonomous development of art, culture and ideas. Liberal societies need to show themselves capable of being a home for great art and culture, and this commitment should be regardless of whether these cultural products are liberal in their orientation or not; often they will not be.

This goes to what Becca just discussed, with regard to the Sontag and Trilling quotes about the great works of liberal society often being illiberal. This was one of the lessons of the 2010s, when progressivism did try to extend into the culture and make liberal art, in a sense: I don’t think the results were impressive. And so I don’t think the answer can be that liberals need to politicize art, but rather to make sure that we provide institutional structures and social arrangements that allow for the free development of art and ideas as much as possible. Another way of putting it would be to say that it is especially important for a society that does not offer a fully substantive vision of the good life politically, to create a public culture where we can work out our ideals and values for ourselves, including through art.

Cass Sunstein: I completely love Becca’s essay. I thought it was great, and on to some deep points.

So what I’m going to do in these remarks is say something about what liberalism is, something about aesthetic objects that correspond to liberalism, and then make two conceptual points. And the title of these remarks—you’ll see the connection at the end—is: “Play It Fucking Loud.”

So the three liberal ideals that stand as the holy trinity are freedom, pluralism and the rule of law. If we want an understanding of freedom, we would fixate on freedom of speech and freedom of religion. If we wanted an aesthetic object that captures liberalism’s conception of freedom, it’s Terrence Malick’s movie Days of Heaven. The most beautiful moment in the movie is when the female lead, who’s attached to her lover, almost husband, falls for someone else, and the line is “she loved the stranger.” That’s a moment of freedom. It’s unforgettable. It captures something about her soul and the human soul and the capacity for agency.

If we’re speaking of pluralism, which insists on the diversity of ways of life, the importance of experiments in living, liberalism makes space for this sort of pluralism and celebrates it and finds it beautiful, not threatening or ugly. And the best literary instantiation of the liberal commitment to pluralism is a surpassingly liberal novel—and the most beautiful novel in the English language. Don’t argue. It’s A.S. Byatt’s Possession. That novel is about a current love affair and an old one, which went unnoticed until uncovered by its contemporary protagonists. The two contemporary figures in the novel get together at the end. And the way Byatt describes it—I’m not going to have it exactly right—is the morning after their getting together, our two characters noticed that in the morning there was a strange new smell. It was a verdant smell, a tart smell, and it had some resemblance to the scent of bitten apples. Notice what that’s doing to the tale of the Garden of Eden. It’s turning it upside down and inside out. It’s celebrating the bitness of apples. It’s subtle, but not that subtle. And the idea that the morning after where the Tree of Knowledge has been struck is something that has a verdant smell, that’s lively and open and hopeful, and there’s something about that that captures the liberal commitment to pluralism.

The commitment to the rule of law is more difficult to aestheticize, though we lawyers marvel at its beauty. There is a fictional account which is more complicated than at least this once-teenage reader saw, and that’s George Orwell’s 1984. What makes it a surpassingly aesthetic work is that Orwell sees the human soul’s dueling tendency toward subjection to Big Brother and the desire for freedom from Big Brother. Something that the novel is playing back and forth with all the time is the potential beauty of horror.

We can add to the holy trinity of pluralism, the rule of law and freedom another titanic two: democracy and separation of powers. If we want an image of democracy that’s an aesthetic, we can look to the latest Oscar winner, One Battle After Another. That shooting at the end—if you saw the movie, you haven’t forgotten the scene. It is a beautiful scene. It’s a scene of resistance. It’s the scene that connects with what happened in Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, and it’s a plea for democracy.

The separation of powers, the fifth of our ideals, is very hard to turn into something beautiful. It was done in the movie Chariots of Fire, which is a movie about two Olympic runners, one deeply Christian, one Jewish—they both steal the show. The Christian won’t run on the Sabbath and says, in ways that reflect the defiance of the liberal spirit, I won’t run on the Sabbath. The Jew, who is excluded from everything, hires a professional and having been insulted and humiliated at every turn, says at one point, I’m going to “run them off their feet.” And the soaring point of the movie is when the mourners at his funeral, the survivors say to each other, well, he ran them off their feet. Chariots of Fire, in its celebration of Christian faith and of Judaism, is a deeply liberal movie.

There’s one answer, let’s call it the “head’s answer” to Becca’s challenge, which is that liberalism allows for and realizes the aesthetics of freedom, pluralism, separation of powers, democracy and the rule of law. But in the end, the liberal commitments aren’t aesthetic commitments. They say, Everyone in this room, go for it. Whatever your conception of the aesthetic is, liberalism says, that’s yours. Make it yours. Exercise your agency. That’s the head’s answer.

The heart’s answer is that liberalism’s peak aesthetic is when Bob Dylan went electric—do you know this reference, even? This was like the most important moment ever, in the world. He played “Maggie’s Farm”: “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more”—a song of liberty and pluralism. And he also sang “Like a Rolling Stone,” converting the state of rootlessness and of separation and exclusion into a song of freedom, a new national anthem. “How does it feel to be on your own / With no direction home, like a complete unknown? / Like a rolling stone”—sung with joy and celebration. When he was booed in England for not doing folk music, he said to his band, and it’s recorded on tape, “Play It Fucking Loud.” That’s a liberal aesthetic. That’s liberalism’s Riefenstahl.

James Wood: Becca, let me just ask you one thing: “politics are mind and imagination” says Trilling, but obviously enough, if we demonstrate and propose and put mind and imagination into policy in some way, then it isn’t quite mind and imagination in the same way. It certainly isn’t quite the way that that Trilling means when he talks about a culture’s “buzz of implication.” So as the conversation began, very interestingly, to drift away from the question of, “Does liberalism have a vision of the beautiful and the good in public life?”—the common good towards great liberal art we love—one of the questions I had is just where we press down on that distinction. You might say it’s unfair to go to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and say you didn’t talk about E.M. Forster enough.

Becca Rothfeld: I think you can say that to anybody at any time.

James Wood: You would, but let’s just get this going as a discussion. It’s this question, which, of course, absolutely bedevils the right-wing critique too, which is a form of: What’s the illness and what’s the remedy?

Becca Rothfeld: I guess the original way you were posing the question made me think that it’s about the relationship between the content of policy and the aesthetic results of policy. And I think that the right-wing has no problem answering, Yeah, we should mandate beauty. We should mandate, like, neocolonial architecture and bad lip filler or whatever. I have strong disagreements with them about what they think is beautiful, but they don’t have a problem with that. A liberal obviously would have a problem with that. You can’t mandate beauty for various reasons, even if justice permitted it, it doesn’t seem like it would be effective. But what I think you can do is have policies that at least permit the pursuit of beauty. Another thing that you can do that Trilling gestures at in various ways, is have policies that are founded on an anthropology that, in turn, is the basis of good art production. What I mean by this is that one of Trilling’s criticisms of what he calls bureaucratic liberalism—what we would call technocratic liberalism—is that it has a really impoverished account of what people are like. He really likes Freud, not necessarily because he thinks that Freud is even correct, but because he thinks that Freud provides us with the resources to create better novels and such. And so I think that you could at least be careful to sort of write policy in a way that doesn’t assume an impoverished anthropology.

James Wood: How would that be? I mean, just give me an idea.

Becca Rothfeld: That’s a great question, and I don’t write policy for a reason. If I did, you know, I would be mandating that people read The Ambassadors.

James Wood: I don’t want to be just pointlessly hard on you, because I don’t have the faintest idea how you do it either. It’s just that I noticed that you—and Jon was also talking about, we’ll have to enable spaces in which [good art can be made], and there’s an interesting way in which, before too long, you’re actually proposing sort of technocratic solutions for the enablement of the beautiful thing that you want, while at the same time critiquing people like Klein and Thompson for talking technocratically about, you know, median home prices and so on.

Becca Rothfeld: One answer to this is that it’s really the opposite. Like, the problem is that people who are doing technocracy in the domains in which they should be doing technocracy, are kind of expanding technocracy into all domains of human endeavor. I’m writing about somebody right now who I think does this. He applies the principles of economics and sort of shallow social psychology—things that it might be reasonable to appeal to in the formation of policy, he applies them relentlessly in the personal domain of human life. And so maybe this is not really an injunction for liberals in their capacity as political liberals. It’s an injunction to leave the liberalism at the door when you’re engaging in private life. And then there are answers like arts funding and stuff—those are obvious and should happen too, of course.

Jon Baskin: I just wanted to add that in Ezra Klein book, the authors leave themselves open partly because they start the book with this utopian ideal.

James Wood: If you wouldn’t mind, letting the audience know about that, just for those who haven’t read it, since both of you sort of started your pieces with the rather terrifying, to most of us, opening of the Klein-Thompson book.

Jon Baskin: The first three pages of Abundance are all written in italics. They’re supposed to be very inspiring. A person wakes up in their apartment—

Becca Rothfeld: They’re in the second person: you. You wake up—and it’s a threat.

Jon Baskin: Alone in a house somewhere, you go and get your—

Becca Rothfeld: Lab-grown meat from the fridge. You pick your herbs that have been growing in your, like, vertical plant grower—

Jon Baskin: You go outside and you see a drone delivering medicine to your neighbor.

Becca Rothfeld: You don’t see a person, there’s no person.

Jon Baskin: Yeah, there are two very detailed descriptions of drones, but no people in the first three pages—

Becca Rothfeld: You don’t have friends; you have your lab-grown meat.

Jon Baskin: And the most horrifying part is, you step outside and you get a ping in your earpiece that you that is attached to you, or something that your friend has just gotten to the airport. So Klein protests that there is a friend in the beginning. But one of the things I felt reading this is, first of all, this utopia is not very—

James Wood: It’s set in 2050.

Jon Baskin: It’s set in 2050. But it is actually not that different from the life a lot of middle to upper-middle class liberals live today. We have a lot of this technology, basically, or access to it. And in fact, it reminds us of many of the things that make our lives quite unsatisfying. The utopian aspect of it is that you’re able to live without any guilt because, you know, all this stuff is produced without oppression. But in terms of the day-to-day quality of one’s life, it actually seems quite impoverished.

My first job out of college, I worked at a think tank in D.C. There are tons of people discussing policy in liberal circles. There are tons of people discussing messaging. These are the two things they discuss constantly. I don’t have an issue with there being a sphere where people are discussing things like how to build more housing very deeply. These are important issues, and I don’t have a problem with Klein and Thompson’s book on the level it describes these issues. But for Becca and I both there was a sense that this technocratic approach to thinking about what is a best liberal society—Abundance presents itself as a kind of regulative ideal that liberals should be embracing both for practical reasons and because they think it will be inspiring—and I think our problem was on that level, of thinking that Abundance could answer those kinds of questions about what kind of life we want to live.

Becca Rothfeld: It also presents a sort of theory of authoritarianism, at times implicitly and at times pretty explicitly. The book’s assumption is that people have turned towards authoritarianism because liberalism is not delivering the material goods. And that was another thing that I think we probably both objected to. We think that delivering the material goods is good, but it’s not sufficient, if you can’t explain to people in a compelling way why the goods are goods. One of the examples I used in my piece is how liberalism delivered a ton of vaccines, but we weren’t able to convince half the population that those were, in fact, goods. So that’s another dispute we had with Klein.

Cass Sunstein: Okay, so I like the Klein-Thompson book. I regard it as a humble plea for reducing barriers to building things. And that’s a good plea.

So, in Vermont, there’s housing scarcity. There’s a guy who’s occasionally at the Kennedy School named Miro Weinberger, who was the mayor of Burlington, which was Senator Sanders’s job for a long time. Weinberger was spectacularly successful as mayor, and he said, We have terrible problems. People don’t have homes, and this is because of regulatory barriers which make it impossible for people to build things. I took the book to be basically about that. The objection that the first few pages are maybe a very thin conception—something like that that seems to me completely fair.

So, I worked in the government three times, and I was a technocrat, I guess. If you want to do something about, let’s say highway safety, you might create rules that reduce the likelihood people are going to be killed, and they’re amazing—it’s technocrats who can help with that. If you want to do something about climate change—I’m sounding a little bit like the first few pages of Abundance, I fear—but these are essential. And TSA Pre and Global Entry, you know, those programs, they’re kind of struggling now, but those were created by technocrats. They’re not going to deliver everything, by any means, but they’re important nonetheless.

So what can be done? One Battle After Another is a liberal cri de coeur. It wasn’t produced by politicians. If politicians tried to produce a movie like that, it would be didactic and wouldn’t be very human. If you look at texts, either literary texts or not, that are part of our culture, they’re frequently liberal in character, and they gave rise to, you know, the civil rights movement, the movement for same sex marriage—a thousand things like that. What I’m saying now has a thousand-flowers-bloom quality, but we find that not exciting only because we’ve heard it so many times. And the challenge, I think, for this generation, is to find a conception of liberalism that celebrates and doesn’t nod bored at the relevant commitments and makes them new and real. Making something new and real is going to make them different.

James Wood: One objection to the Klein and Thompson book is that the notion of abundance is simply one of greater capitalistic efficiency. That their vision of the fridge full of fake meat and so on is essentially a capitalistic one. It occurs to me that if you took Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed and simply replaced every iteration of the word liberal or liberalism with “capital”—capital destroys communities, etc.—you’d have a sounder critique, it seems to me. So let’s just talk a little bit about that.

Cass Sunstein: Deneen—is this a familiar name? Okay, so some of you were nodding, and the rest of you aren’t. Deneen is a post-liberal who thinks that liberalism is responsible basically for what ails us. And this might be, you know, divorce. It might be a feeling of rootlessness. It might be the disintegration of communities. It might be crime. Take your pick: liberalism is responsible for it.

To attribute social terribleness to liberalism is reckless. Liberalism isn’t a force in history. It’s not Voldemort. It’s not whispering behind married couples saying, sleep with your neighbor. It’s not telling fathers don’t pay attention to your kids. It’s not saying to people of faith, you should stop believing in God. This is recklessness. And I’d say exactly the same thing, if I may, about capitalism. Capitalism means people get to own things. So you get to own that green shirt and those blue jeans. Some of you probably own laptops; they can’t be taken from you because there’s private property. To believe in capitalism is to believe in something which is an engine of freedom from fear, which is a defining liberal ideal. The idea of post-liberalism, at least in some forms, is a recipe for subjection to fear, because freedom of speech starts to get smaller, and freedom of religion might get smaller too.

No one says, “I’m a neoliberal,” because neoliberalism is wielded as a word by people who hate liberalism. So, if I may, I don’t understand any of this. I like capitalism. I also think the social safety net is great. Opportunity for all is great. We don’t have nearly enough of the way of equality of opportunity and social safety now, and capitalism needs those things. It’s not a free-standing caricature of itself.

James Wood: Yeah, you know, George Orwell reviewed [Friedrich Hayek’s] The Road to Serfdom, and it’s a very liberal response. In fact, he says there’s plenty of good in this book, because we have to remind ourselves again and again that the collective is not democratic and is often tyrannical, and there’s plenty not to like in the book, because it could be, says Orwell, that if you just leave everything to the market, the market will turn out to be a greater tyrant, because it’s irresponsible, actually, than the collective. That’s sort of what I meant about where liberalism positions itself.

Cass Sunstein: If Orwell negatively reviewed Hayek, I feel like saying, “Mommy and Daddy are fighting!” because they are two of my intellectual parents. I’m not sure what the concrete disagreement between Orwell and Hayek is regarding celebrating the collective. If the collective is saying we’re going to have a clean air act, by all means, Hayek was for that. If the collective is going to say we’re going to forbid racial discrimination and sex discrimination and have an Americans with Disabilities Act, Hayek, I think would be potentially uncomfortable with those things. But so much the worse for Hayek. If so, we need an account by which those things fit with liberal principles, and look no further than Mill’s “The Subjection of Women,” which talks about liberalism standing firmly against a system of caste where people are subordinated on the basis of some characteristic of which one would be.

Becca Rothfeld: Many of the things that we’re describing as problems with liberalism are actually problems with capitalism. In most conversations, I would just describe myself as a leftist. I’m politically aligned with leftists, because I think that John Rawls as a pretty extreme New Deal liberal is actually quite radical. He calls for a mandatory minimum, which is like a universal basic income, but also famously, the second principle of justice is a really stringent redistributive principle. He thinks that every single inequality in material resources needs to be dramatically interrogated and justified according to this very stringent principle. And he says explicitly in A Theory of Justice, that a capitalist system is compatible with the principles of justice, but so is a socialist system. That that has led some people to question whether Rawls is really a liberal. But if you think that the true cause of bad liberal aesthetics is capitalism—I’m sympathetic to some versions of that claim—there is a suite of non-capitalist liberals to choose from.

Jon Baskin: Can I just say something a little bit to the side of this conversation, but related to it? One of the reasons we framed this issue in the way we did about the left and the good life is that the left is very good at doing criticisms of capitalism. I’m not discounting that as an important mode of criticism, and I’m glad there are magazines that are devoted to doing that. But whatever you think about what Cass has said about the defense of capitalism, capitalism gives people a lot of things. There are a lot of goods that people get from capitalism. And the question is, if you are going to ask people to fight for a different system than capitalism, what goods are you going to deliver that are not just material goods?

One of the premises of the issue was that to make a real critique of capitalism, and of a certain form of liberalism, we have to actually inspire people with an idea of what life will be like. And that’s not just a matter of saying you will have more stuff. Because there are leftists who say, by getting rid of capitalism, everyone will have more stuff. I mean, abundance is a leftist ideal too. Fully Automated Luxury Communism is quoted approvingly in the beginning of Abundance. So we were, in a way, trying to reframe both modes on the left, to say there are other kinds of goods to talk about as well, politically.

James Wood: I absolutely agree. I really dislike Deneen’s book and the critique, and I think it’s foolish in all sorts of ways. In fact, I think it’s an attack on humanism, not really on liberalism. But there is one moment where he’s talking about contemporary America, and he says liturgies of nation and the market join together at moments in the calendar, and his example is the worship of Super Bowl commercials, and he’s absolutely right, that there’s something utterly hollow about a culture that unites around talking about the Super Bowl commercials. That can’t be our idea of what the collective good life is. It’s neither beautiful nor is it good.

So let’s just go back to this question of what this common good might be, as defined by liberalism, and what’s beautiful about it. And I want, if possible, to exclude works of art that we just say that we like for their beauty and their liberalism—maybe that’s unfair to do that.

Jon Baskin: Sorry, what’s the question?

James Wood: The big question, the ultimate question.

Becca Rothfeld: …What does the good life look like?

Jon Baskin: Yeah. I mean, this is why I only wrote the introduction to the issue. These aren’t questions that have easy answers. But the term “the good life,” obviously, goes back to Plato and Aristotle, and in ancient philosophy the question of the good life was connected inextricably to the question of what it means to be a human being. There was a pre-political investigation into what a human being was and what a good life was, and then that was supposed to refract onto how to create the good society.

Politics that have a less tortured relationship with having a positive doctrine can translate those kinds of insights more naturally. But to push liberalism beyond some of the non-perfectionist bounds that all three of us have started with here, I think the question of what a human life is is actually a really deep one right now. And historically speaking, you could say that the answers to what constitutes a good life under liberalism has varied depending on what threatened the ability to lead a truly human life at that particular moment. At times, maybe that has been economic inequality, and that’s still a force that threatens us. But for me, right now, it’s technology that is the clearest threat. And one sector of our society that is not hesitant at all to offer a vision of the good life is Silicon Valley. Marc Andreessen says human beings are the greatest resource. Posthumanism is a view that is actually increasingly prevalent in our society. So one of the ways that liberalism can help advance a vision of the good life—and I actually do think this probably has policy implications too, in terms of how we think about regulating various technologies that are emerging, but especially in the cultural sphere—is by considering what it means to lead a properly human life today, given all the obvious threats to that endeavor.

Becca Rothfeld: Can I answer more tyrannically? So I was just thinking like when Jon was talking about how liberalism and criticism have some natural affinity. Actually, I could not disagree more. The greatest tension in my life is that, as a critic, I am constantly making judgments of taste, and it’s a presumption of my vocation that other people should agree with me; I’m inegalitarian. I think that there’s a hierarchy of taste, and I presume to have a kind of authoritarian status when I’m writing a book review. I’m trying to persuade you; I’m trying to get you to agree with me. But I also think that you should think what I think. So, this is only a limited answer about what the good life looks like—I’m not taking a stance about what you should eat or whether you should stay married. (I don’t think you should stay married if your marriage is unhappy.) But my positive view is: beauty is good. The pursuit of beauty is something that you should spend your life doing. You should devote at least some part of your life to the consumption of difficult and important works of art. That’s a substantive commitment about the good life that I have and that I am willing to express.

Cass Sunstein: We actually have a liberal account of the good life, and it’s half homegrown. That is, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have a liberal account. It’s called the “capabilities approach.” And the idea in Nussbaum’s hands is there’s a set of human capabilities that are essential to a functioning human life, and some of them are kind of minimal, involving food and environment that works, etc. And others are more maximal, involving affiliation—music and art, I think, come up either explicitly or implicitly in her account of capabilities. And this is, for both her and Sen, emphatically, the liberal account of the good life. It’s probably the best we have. And if everyone had the capabilities that the capabilities approach celebrates and the functionings that allow for enjoyment of the capabilities, then we’d hear a celestial music.

Michael Lipkin

I’m going to roll up my sleeves and attempt a dirty, but I think necessary, job. I’m going to try to defend the humanities, or at least humanities scholarship, as it exists in its current form. I should say, before I do, that my road to something like a permanent job in the humanities has been a winding one. I remember, as a graduate student, being driven absolutely insane by how sanguine my professors were about our discipline. They were trying to reassure me, I think. But they succeeded only in making me envy and then resent them. So, to you, the reader, I say: wherever you’ve been, I’ve been there, too. I know the adjunct life. I know precarity. I know indifference. I know downright hostility. I’ve taught at diploma mills and in the Ivy League and everything in between. I understand.

What I want to push back against is the notion, expressed in Ben and Becca’s dialogue, that it’s the uselessness or the arcane or jargony character of humanities research that is to blame for our current state of affairs. Undoubtedly, most humanities scholarship is useless. In fact, all of it is useless. It’s useless because we live in a society that takes only a passing interest in culture or the arts, and no interest at all in the culture of decades, let alone centuries, past. Certainly the pressure to publish is a product of the arms race among desperate junior faculty on the job market. But, at the end of the day, this is what the humanities do. They produce knowledge. The job of the university, as something comprised of fields and disciplines, is to decide what does and does not constitute knowledge, to set guidelines for investigating this or that thing we want to know about.

To this end, I think much of the mobilizing of the affect of academic life—“passion”; “delight”—and some of its higher goals—“to investigate what it means to be human,” or even “the free exchange of ideas”—is ultimately misleading. These things do happen at the university, but they are, ultimately, means to the end of producing knowledge. There’s a key difference between poring over, say, Moby-Dick every day for a year—as some Nantucket residents do—and the kind of work you do in an English department. While the work of an academic can touch on what it means to be human, the question it really tackles is what it means to know something about Moby-Dick. Given that a thing called literature exists, what can we know about it?

Now, what is it that makes something actual knowledge? And what ensures that that knowledge is valuable? My explanation is twofold. On the one hand, in the university you get to immerse yourself in an object and learn about it on its own terms. This would be the difference between learning about the Roman Empire from a video essay, or just flipping around on Wikipedia, and the years of contact with primary sources you’d put in as a history major. But, no less importantly, academic work also involves constant critical self-reflection on the tools and methods that you, the collective you, use to approach that object. This is why so much humanities work actually frowns on trying to transmit to the reader the passion, say, a work of literature might stir in you. You are instead expected to show your work, clarify your methodology, position yourself in the field. Note that this is not the same as “rigor,” since it’s possible to read and think rigorously without undertaking any of this stuff. Nor is it the only rewarding way to engage literature, history, philosophy, whatever. It’s just a qualitatively different endeavor. To me, its substance never lay with any kind of positive upshot or understanding that it’s given me.

One irony, I think, of calling on the humanities to be more “useful” or “interesting” is that the past fifteen years or so has seen probably the widest circulation of academic ideas to the wider public I’ve known. The fascism debate, common-good conservatism, the reawakening of the labor movement, the destruction of the gender binary, all began their life as ideas in the humanities. On their own merits, too, I would argue that, in the last thirty years—notwithstanding some falloff in the past ten, because of the sheer turbulence of the job market—the humanities are better than they’ve ever been. To me, at least, since deconstruction, readings have become more iconoclastic and creative, as well as more tolerant of textual ambivalence. Since New Historicism, the zones of research around literature and philosophy have expanded in all kinds of thrilling ways. And it seems inarguable to me that the post-Theory, pre-wokeness moment, stretching from the late Eighties to the early 2010s, was better suited to meet the political and cultural situation of the present than the wider world of ideas was.

On the flip side, even in academia’s heyday, most scholarship would not have “delighted” the non-specialist. Even work I think is truly great, like Friedrich Kittler’s defiantly anti-humanist readings of Goethe and Schiller—I am, God forgive me, a Germanist—has virtually no crossover appeal, not even in the country where those authors are cornerstones of the national culture. Of course, there are cases where truly great scholarship recovers, in the ultra-particularity of hyper-specialization, a kind of universality. Kittler’s reading of Don Carlos, which he argues is a kind of traumatic repetition of Schiller’s years at an “enlightened” school for the middle class run by the aristocratic regime of eighteenth-century Württemberg, is clearly not “just” an attempt to add to our knowledge about the play. Kittler advances something like a worldview—one that sees just how imbricated our highest ideals are with the systems of control they’re supposed to overcome. Clearly, this is very important! And yet, the argument, in its full drama, and its full reflective power, is only really accessible to scholars with a considered understanding of those reference points—Schiller, Don Carlos, humanism, revolution, reaction. Take the very same worldview, the very same conclusions out of that context, and it regresses into superstition: there’s no point because “they” “control” “everything.”

Kittler published that article about forty years ago. Most German studies stuff since then—and I include my own work here, believe me—is, well, not Kittler. And yet, without the collective knowledge even the most mediocre of articles helps transmit, we’d have nothing. A big fat donut hole. Most questions about the human story simply do not have nonacademic answers, precisely because answering them requires not just research, but also second-order debate and consensus about terms and definitions. Did industrialization raise living standards in the short term for agricultural laborers? Well, how do we measure what a standard is? Before concepts, approaches, ideas, even seemingly irrational and spontaneous things like affects and sensations can be of any use, they need to be hammered out the hard way, subjected to reflection and review. Otherwise, they become ideologies. In fact, I’d contend that, in this respect, the outside world is more plagued with jargon than academia is. (What does it mean, for example, to “actualize” yourself?) Or this stuff simply joins the torrent of information available to us all, which floats past you as given, self-evident, incontestable, interchangeable factoids, the daily firehose that sprays through, overwhelms, and immobilizes the mind.

I’ve tried to make the best case I can here, but I still feel like I’m sounding pretty fusty. Am I convincing you at all, Jon?

Jon Baskin

When I was working on my dissertation at the University of Chicago, I was often asked by fellow graduate students how my “research” was going. The question always made me laugh. My dissertation basically involved a series of readings of fiction by David Foster Wallace, performed against the backdrop of some very old questions about the status of literature and its relationship to philosophy. Nothing about what I was doing felt like “research” in the sense that I understood the term. I was not uncovering new facts, and I did not believe that I was producing any new knowledge. The closest technical term I could come up with for one part of what I was doing was “interpretation,” but even this struck me as a piece of jargon that obscured more than it revealed. I was thinking hard about some novels and short stories that had made a deep impression on me and then considering how they related to some works of philosophy, mostly about the role of literature in moral life, that also interested me.

It is true that the form of my dissertation was related to the disciplinary structure of the university, and that I abided by certain conventions like having to survey the “fields” I was intervening in—in this case, moral philosophy and literary studies. But when I surveyed these fields, I encountered hardly anything I would call knowledge there, either. I found instead readings and assertions and arguments at varying levels of coherence. I found, in other words, lots of people doing what I was doing.

This is one reason I have always been skeptical of the claim, common as it is, that the work of the academic humanities is to “produce new knowledge.” At the very least, I think this idea has to be specified according to the discipline. I can see how a historian might produce new knowledge—say by going into the archives and discovering previously unpublicized records. (Your question about industrialization could be usefully adjudicated in this way.) I can see how certain kinds of analytic philosophers might produce something like scientific or mathematical knowledge through the working out of complex formulas and logic puzzles. Social scientists can certainly be said to produce knowledge, although there is some question about whether this is the most important thing that they do. But for the disciplines that have always been closest to me, literary and cultural studies and continental philosophy, I find it very hard to understand what it means to produce new knowledge, or whether that is something anyone ought to be trying to do. (One solution to this problem in literary studies has been for scholars to produce “knowledge” about literature that basically just is history, or sociology. I do not think it is a good solution.)

In that sense, I am sympathetic to Becca and Ben’s impulse to worry about the “uselessness” of so much of what passes for “new knowledge” in the humanities today—and possibly forever. For reasons that Becca touches on in her discussion of the Strother Center, I disagree with your claim that “without the collective knowledge which even the most mediocre of articles helps transmit, we would have nothing.” I guess it depends what you mean by “we,” and “nothing.” But we as human beings had rich relationships with many of the deepest humanistic questions and texts long before there was any scholarship at all, and I am confident that we would still figure out how to engage with them in the future even if the academic disciplines all disappeared tomorrow. This is because I believe that the most important “collective knowledge” exists in the works of art, philosophy and literature themselves. That does not mean that no knowledge at all exists in the centuries of scholarship that orbit around those works, and you have given some good examples above of the virtues of that work of careful analysis and interpretation. But I am wary of the tendency of academics to elevate the kind of “knowledge” they create over the many other kinds of (what I would rather call) wisdom that can be gained from direct encounter with primary sources.

All that said, I do think that those of us who express skepticism about the production of knowledge as the mission of graduate education in the humanities have a challenge of our own to meet, and you articulate it well. If it is perfectly possible, as I have just asserted, to rigorously read and enjoy Moby-Dick without any interpretive methodology or historical context, then why should graduate education in literature exist at all? Even if we put aside the knowledge point for a moment, you mention many of the other essential things that define an academic discipline: methodological consistency, a sense of disciplinary history and a commitment to norms and standards that define what counts as acceptable work within a specific intellectual community. I like the point about going slow and “showing your work,” which is in fact a discipline that I felt myself learning in graduate school. (That’s not to say that nonacademic writers don’t also have to show the reader how they got where they are going, but there is something different in the painstaking way you learn to do this when writing for other scholars.) And even if I personally endorse much of the vision of humanistic education that Becca describes at the Strother Center, and that is practiced for undergraduates at places like St. John’s College and Deep Springs, it seems right to me that, as far as graduate education goes, this is not a model that can plausibly replace the one you are describing.

Which leaves me at something of an impasse. I remember a professor in graduate school explaining to me that literary studies, as a field, had been in crisis ever since it split off from philology, since nobody could ever agree about what it meant to “study” novels and short stories professionally. I left that conversation thinking, and still sort of think today, that perhaps it just was a mistake to try. That said, I do not believe it would be a net gain for literature or for intellectual life for these institutions, which have provided a home and career to so many people who care deeply about literature, to disappear tomorrow. And I also believe that undergraduates would be missing something (and are, in many cases) if they are not taught by professors who have spent large parts of their life studying literature and the other arts.

One question I want to put back to you to conclude. You make the case that academic disciplines should be left alone to decide what counts as knowledge within them. And you argue convincingly, I think, that there is a danger in trying to make the work of the academic humanities “useful” or “relevant” in some shallow or trendy way. But is there any way, on your understanding, that we could ever judge a discipline from the outside at all? Because it seems to me that while you are well articulating the view from inside the disciplines, there is something missing from your picture, which is what all this knowledge is “for,” in the broadest sense. I don’t mean by that that it needs to be immediately applicable to our lives in any crude way, but surely you must believe that the knowledge and methodologies these disciplines ultimately produce have some positive role to play in human life. But if that is the case then we would want some way of being able to tell if a discipline was somehow failing to fulfill this role—if, for instance, it had gotten lost in a rabbit hole of its own making, or become too enamored of one interpretation of its history and mission in comparison to others. I can hear you perhaps saying that this is something the disciplines ought to work out internally, but what if they don’t?

Michael Lipkin

You ask a lot of good questions here, Jon. If I had good answers to them, I might have had a very different career in the humanities than the one I’ve had.

I think, what I’m moving closer to, is that I see the humanities as, on the one hand, preservative: as maintaining and debating a corpus of knowledge. And on the other hand, as critical and reflective. I guess I’m a Kantian in that way. For me, scholarship is as much about setting limits and guardrails about illegitimate uses of knowledge—and Lord knows there are plenty of them out there—as it is about passing on something positive. But it does occur to me that we have a recent object lesson in trying to make the humanities “for” something handy. Isn’t this what “wokeness” was?

I’m using scare quotes here because I have serious reservations about filing the cultural changes the university’s gone through over the last decade under one heading. Outside observers always overlook how incredibly fractious the university is, how many competing interests and power centers it has.

But the story, as I experienced it, was this: as an institutional stance—and that’s what it is, since wokeness produced no intellectuals—wokeness emerged out of the havoc that the 2008 financial crash unleashed on the tenure-track job market. What sane business, after all, would hire employees you can’t fire at will? Wokeness brought the grassroots energy of Occupy Wall Street and Ferguson-era Black Lives Matter into the university, to demand that the corporate university, which had crashed in such spectacular fashion, regain its lost legitimacy by joining in the struggle for equality. On the level of individual departments, the hiring of new faculty, the “rebalancing” of syllabi, and the thematization of “justices” of various kinds rested on the promise that sinking enrollments could be offset by pulling in marginalized students, reluctant to register for the existing curriculum because they didn’t “see” themselves in courses on Provençal poetry or German realism. But, more broadly, I think wokeness asked a question that rhymes with the one you’re asking—how could you, as a researcher, as a producer of knowledge, distinguish the false from the true, without eventually coming to the problem of the false society? Without asking what would make it true? Wokeness promised to save the corporate university from itself, by restoring a real, human end to humanities education.

One place you could see the effect of all of this in my corner of the world, German studies, was the job listings every year. Here you could see departments attempt to restructure the field from the bottom up, one hire at a time. Virtually every job from 2016 on “strongly preferred” a candidate who did either migration studies, or Black German studies, or the “environmental humanities,” or work pertaining to Germany’s colonial past. (Interestingly, there was also a move away from literature and toward “visual culture.”) The idea was that, to staunch the bleeding, German departments would slough off a hidebound coverage model (“German Literature 1945-1990”) and align itself with what anyone would agree were the great and urgent fights of our time, the real stuff you could see out in the streets, especially once Trump came on the scene and the liberal center had to face the possibility that the radicals had had it right all along.

I know you guys at The Point were and are, to say the least, skeptical of this project. But I think it holds some object lessons for your own demand that graduate school be more “useful.” One upshot is that attaching the end of the humanities to any larger conception of the right life means pulling them further into the battle over the institutions of civil society. So long as America remains a democracy this fight will be fought—and fought hard. Understandably so. People feel strongly about the right life!

Another lesson is that, at least within the bounds of the classroom, or in the pages of an academic journal, questions of value and purpose still have to be formed as field-specific questions of knowledge. This is something that people who think the university “indoctrinates” students never seem to grasp. A professor can give a class the most leading title in the world—“Structures of Apartheid: South Africa, Jim Crow, and Israel”—but they will still spend most of their time in class teaching central debates, points of inquiry and methodological approaches rather than conveying normative judgments (“…and that’s bad!”). Students perceive these judgments as a use of the bully pulpit anyway—sometimes favorably, sometimes unfavorably, depending on their own orientation. In my experience, you can hector students into agreeing with you, at least in the space of an essay or a test question. But you can’t teach them to love or hate something.

You say that “we as human beings had rich relationships with many of the deepest humanistic questions and texts long before there was any scholarship at all.” We sure did—thanks to society’s division of labor into classes. One upside to this division, unjust though it was, is that for most of human history it made clear who culture was for. As late as the early twentieth century, the most common nonacademic scholar was the black sheep of a wealthy family, people like Georg Lukács or Walter Benjamin. There were definitely attempts to challenge the monopoly of the cultured class, but these, too—one example I’m thinking of here are the lending libraries that set up the mid-nineteenth-century workers’ movements—still did so with a clear sense of who was undertaking that challenge (the working class), and for whom (again, the working class), and to what end (the emancipation of the working class). This is a simplified history, I know, but the point I’m getting at here is that humanities education today exists in a far blurrier social-cultural picture, where it’s far from clear whose privilege or responsibility it is to undertake cultural inquiry. Nothing is really binding in the way it used to be. The university at least answers some of these questions. It houses the humanities because the university produces and safeguards knowledge, and literature, philosophy and so on are things we want to know about. What is there outside the university today? Just the free market—free in the same sense that someone who’s been tossed into the middle of the ocean is free to swim for it. One of the glummest experiences I have as a professor in the so-called elite context is realizing that, for almost all of my students, their humanities courses are the most sustained engagement with ideas or art they’re ever going to have before the cell door of the working world clangs shut on them once and for all. For all the news stories out there about students’ moral stridency, or their inability to read books, the most common experience I have with students is that they want more.

That leads me to one way I would answer your challenge about the need for “outside” checks on the development of humanities disciplines, which is by reorienting them dramatically around the teaching of undergraduates. Undergraduates, if you think about it, hold a conciliatory middle position between yours and mine—they’re neither in the discipline, nor are they part of the general public. If a corrective is going to come, I think it will come from the day-in, day-out contact we have with them. Certainly, the demand is there. A course on Kant’s moral philosophy will have a waitlist. So will a class on Marx. Or Freud. I taught snoozed-on Swiss realist Gottfried Keller to a full capacity seminar by calling it “Bad Romance.” (Score one for unwoke German studies, though we did do a lot of gender theory.) We owe it to our students to meet that demand, and to grow it. And here, by we, I mean humanities professors.

So I suppose in the end I am comfortable saying that humanities research does have an end—in determining what we pass on to students and how we pass it on. One belief I hold closely, which I do not think is shared in elite grad programs, is that it is the responsibility of the discipline to produce great teachers. At Columbia I quickly learned to avoid the celebrity professors at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, who were routinely terrible at laying out their ideas and, as a result, brought the worst habits out of the starstruck grad students in their classes. (“How do we… think the political?”) I learned to teach in the adjuncting salt mines. There, student disinterest and institutional hostility were seen as givens to be overcome with strategy, creativity and energy, not a reason to start catastrophizing.

I think you and I are in agreement that the times call for a kitchen-sink experimental approach to teaching, and Jesuitical zeal in recruiting students. Honestly, it’s this, more than anything else, that is my beef with “woke German”—if a class on “Minor Literature” packed in students by the dozens, I’d say, go with God. Looking at it cynically, the bigger undergraduate enrollments are, the weaker the case for slashing the programs, the greater the need for professors to teach them. Take the university’s logic and flip it on its head: If there’s demand, then surely there has to be supply?

More than that, it’s been my experience that engaging the basic questions of your discipline year in, year out with undergraduates who know absolutely nothing of them channeled up into my research, shaped what questions I thought needed answers, pointed me in a direction, helped me find a voice. I think that’s precisely the kind of reorientation the humanities need as a whole. Who knows? Maybe we might learn something.

Jon Baskin

OK, so, to start with your discussion of wokeness. Nothing you say about the way that wokeness attempted to become a justificatory structure for various humanities departments, including your own, at a certain historical moment seems wrong to me. But I’ve already conceded above that I agree with you about the academic humanities not trying to be of “use” in some shallow or trendy way. Moreover, the example you give of what happened in German departments during that time seems to me a perfect illustration of a situation where a discipline appeared ready to abandon core facets of what its mission had long been understood to be, without, for the most part, having undertaken any internal deliberation about the matter. The question I asked above was, Don’t we need some way of being able to judge when a department goes down this path and fails to self-correct? Doubtless, the professors and students who were posting and competing for the jobs in German that you mention above would describe what they are doing as “producing knowledge.” So what licenses you to say that this restructuring of German studies represented a wrong turn for the department, or that the knowledge it was producing was not “field-specific”? You must be operating with some set of criteria that allows you to make such a criticism. You are part of German studies, but your side was not winning this debate, to put it mildly. My question was whether there is in such cases any role for the public, or for some outside authority, to play, or whether we all have to stand deferentially by and allow departments to always decide for themselves what counts as knowledge at any given moment. I think it only makes sense that, if we are to defend the importance of graduate education and the disciplinary humanities, whether politically or intellectually, we have a responsibility to develop mechanisms for self-correction and self-criticism that make us accountable to some wider conception of what we are doing. If we don’t, we’ve certainly seen some of the options for who will step in and do it instead.

It’s with this in mind, though, that I like so much your proposal to reorient graduate school toward the teaching of undergraduates. At some level, every graduate student is already training to be a professor, but everyone knows that, in many programs—if not the majority—learning to teach undergraduates is fairly far down on the list of priorities, and often goes unrewarded professionally. It’s a familiar point—perhaps to the point of being overstated—that there is no necessary correlation between those who are great researchers and those who are great teachers. But you point in your proposal to a reason that graduate schools ought to think more about undergraduate teaching that goes beyond the need to produce better pedagogues. As you say, undergraduates can be that “outside” check on the pathologies and prejudices that might otherwise corrupt a discipline from the inside. Undergraduates show up every year fresh from eighteen years with their families and in most cases will reintegrate, four years later, into the “real world.” Excepting the small percentage who want to become academics themselves, then, their interest in the humanities is likely to be motivated not by a desire to contribute to the professional literature in a discipline but rather by basic questions about how to live in and understand the world.

In a way, this brings us back to Becca’s suggestion, at the end of her exchange with Ben, that “a good guiding principle for the humanities moving forward, perhaps, is this: if there is no way to explain to a curious and thoughtful civilian—my private word for nonacademics—why this question is relevant to her life, then perhaps it isn’t relevant, period.” You’ve made an argument for why “relevance” can be a dangerous criteria for judging the questions we deem worthy of research, and I am persuaded by your point that, if we are going to preserve graduate school in any form, disciplinary professionals need to have some level of autonomy in choosing which questions and topics interest them. Another potential challenge to meeting Becca’s criteria, I thought when first reading it, would be in coming up with ways for academics to test whether their questions were compelling to a “curious and thoughtful civilian.” But this discussion suggests a solution to both issues: every college and university has a constantly replenishing population of curious and thoughtful civilians coming onto their campus each year where, if things are designed as they should be, they will come face to face with the graduate students and professors in the various humanistic disciplines. If judging and evaluating the extent to which those disciplinary professionals are able to interest the students in the basic questions of their disciplines were to become a larger part of the evaluation of graduate students, this might go some way toward restoring what many (including me) believe to be a broken social contract between institutions of higher education and the public. The research universities get taxpayer money, as well as large spheres of autonomy in graduate programming in return for… what? In the sciences, discoveries may be made which cure diseases and improve quality of life. In the humanities, I still think most “civilians” would say that the endpoint is to produce teachers capable of inspiring students—“before the cell door of the working world clangs shut on them,” as you put it—with an appreciation for the fundamental questions, problems and texts that lie at the core of humanistic education, and by extension in the intellectual history of every academic discipline. This proposal would encourage graduate schools to hew closer to that mission, even without giving the “public,” imagined as some vague entity that can be measured by opinion polls, any right to interfere directly in their internal workings.

Of course, things are not designed as they should be right now, or we would not be having this conversation. And I guess I am less sanguine than you are that the students will simply show up if universities provide them with more humanities professors or marketing materials favoring the humanities. As you say, the message that it’s more practical to major in business than in comparative literature is broadcast by our entire society, and underscored by the obscene cost of higher education. In addition, I experienced firsthand in my undergraduate education a literary studies department that, having not thought hard about their curriculum for undergraduates or whether the problems they were focused on were of any interest to their classes of “thoughtful civilians,” managed to alienate large numbers of their own students, and would later lose significant percentages of them not only to computer science or business but also to a (just as useless professionally, but much more self-confident about its purpose) creative writing major.

The only viable solution to this problem, in my experience, is the core curriculum, which I first encountered when I came to University of Chicago as a graduate student. I became an immediate partisan of the Core when I had the privilege of teaching in it, and even before that, actually, when I saw the effect it had on the campus culture there. (Just the idea that every student had read certain of the same books transformed the campus into an intellectual community in a way I had never experienced previously.) What had never occurred to me before now though is how important the revitalization of core curriculums could be to the survival—and hopefully more than survival—of graduate education in the humanities. Not only is a core curriculum the most effective way for a university to communicate how much it values the humanities and ensure a steady stream of students for future humanities Ph.D.s to teach, but, depending on how it is set up, it can do exactly the thing you suggested had happened to you, by compelling graduate students and professors to regularly consider the meaning and relevance of the foundational texts and questions of their disciplines, not to fellow professionals in their fields, but to the undergraduate who just arrived on campus from the suburbs of New Jersey and already has plans to major in economics or biochemistry. (An underappreciated key to the Core working at the University of Chicago was that every professor on campus, no matter how famous, was required to teach in the Core every few years, and then required to attend weekly meetings with the other professors who were also teaching that quarter. Being at these meetings, and hearing some of the colossally accomplished professors from philosophy, classics, political science and sociology discuss how their students were responding to the week’s reading in Plato, or Nietzsche, or Max Weber, was a defining experience of graduate school for me. It also made me realize precisely what had been missing from my undergraduate education, where there was no evidence of such discussions ever having taken place.)

I want to finish with just one further thought, which is partly—but not only—about vocabulary. You began this exchange speaking about the virtues of “producing new knowledge” in a discipline, and we’ve ended it talking about the ways that graduate schools could do more to emphasize the transmission of knowledge to future generations. Not only knowledge, but also the questions, the debates, and the notable texts and chief insights that have defined the history of their disciplines. To me, one term that has been missing from our discussion—although you came close to it in talking about the “preservative” function of the disciplines—is “tradition.” Any good graduate student will acknowledge that it is necessary to learn the history and the traditional interpretations of one’s discipline in order to be able to add new knowledge in the first place. But another thing I like about finding ways to bring the college student’s perspective more centrally into the process of graduate education is that it might rebalance our conception of graduate education toward what I consider to be an equally important—and perhaps more legible, to the public—function that the disciplines have as custodians of traditions of thought, as defined by the discipline’s continuous engagement with, and revitalization of, its originating questions and subjects. This is not about idly venerating those traditions but it is also something different than considering them only as launching pads for something new—or merely as ripe objects for “critique.” You mentioned the pressure in German Studies to move away from “its hidebound coverage model (“German Literature 1945-1990’),” and I always wonder in such cases where the pressure is coming from. Who is bored by this coverage model—the professors or the undergraduates? I doubt it is the undergraduates, who have never read this foundational literature before. Perhaps the model of graduate education we are discussing would help prevent the graduate students and the professors from getting bored by it, either.

Stay tuned for further reflections in the coming weeks.

Further reading from The Point’s archive…

• Ben Jeffery and Becca Rothfeld’s initial exchange in this series of reflections on graduate education.

• Robert Pippin’s remarks on incommensurable domains of knowledge.

• Justin Evans on the English department and the “politically progressive humanities.”

• A survey of college students on what they think college is for.

Image credit: University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf2-06141, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library.

On the editors’ Slack, we tried to process this news. Many of us had been educated at UChicago, and almost all of us consider it a bastion of humanistic learning—a kind of “Benedict Option” for people who love books—at a time when so many universities seem to be abandoning their responsibility to provide a truly “higher” education. Even though it was part of a steady drumbeat of bad news for American universities, the pause at UChicago therefore struck us with particular force, causing us to reflect back on our own experiences in graduate school, both at UChicago and elsewhere. Was it ever possible to lead the life of the mind in graduate school? Is it now? And amid political attacks and the dimming job prospects for humanities PhDs, what are the best arguments for why universities ought to continue to support graduate programs in the humanities?

Those conversations inspired the series of dialogues we’ll be posting here in the next couple of weeks, beginning with this exchange between Point editors Becca Rothfeld and Ben Jeffery. Becca is the nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post and a Harvard philosophy Ph.D. student on “indefinite hiatus,” and Ben is a graduate of the Committee on Social Thought, who is now a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities at University of Chicago.

Ben Jeffery: One of the things I started thinking about in the wake of the admission freezes at UChicago is how the state of graduate education today compares to my own experience in a Ph.D. program. (I started in 2012, back in what was outwardly a more stable period.) Having spoken to a number of current graduate students, my impression is that there’s a lot of understandable shock and discouragement about the interruption, and a lot of lingering uncertainty as well—sure, if it is just a one-year pause then maybe there isn’t so much to be worried about. But is it? I think it’s telling that there doesn’t seem to be much instinctive confidence in the idea that this is only a temporary reset, rather than the herald of something worse to come. But I also think that in the circumstances it behooves us to reflect on the “normal” that it’s a departure from. Just how well was it working? Obviously, this is a question that goes far beyond UChicago.

So on that topic, let me start with an idea that seems pretty uncontroversial: humanities research as it’s been practiced, especially over the last two decades, produces a tremendous amount of waste. You could put this either in terms of the number of people coming out of graduate programs who are notionally qualified for jobs that they’re never going to get (a trend that’s been going strong for at least fifteen years, if anything getting worse) or more broadly—and perhaps more importantly, in a way—in terms of the sheer weight of books, articles, arguments and professors the system generates that have almost nothing memorable to say, and that hardly anyone could be expected to care about in good conscience. As I said, neither of these things is new. In fact, both of them have been almost quasi-permanent features of the background ever since I started in graduate education. But I think perhaps what’s new about the current moment is that it’s suggesting something about how structurally fragile and unhealthy that whole situation was. For a long time, I think my impression was that although the excesses of the system were unfortunate in some ways—as well as being fairly brutal in human terms—it was mainly a problem for individuals rather than the system itself. You could certainly do your best to adapt and survive and produce something worthwhile, but whether you succeeded or failed, the industry was still going to roll along more or less as it had before. Some people would get jobs. The programs at good universities would still fill themselves. The losers would have to figure out whatever they could.

That perspective seems slightly naïve to me now. On the one hand, I suppose it’s possible to make an argument that, despite appearances, it’s actually a mark of health in a humanities ecosystem that there can be room for a lot of activity that doesn’t seem to matter very much—because it’s like a sort of compost production?—and perhaps on those grounds we should regret whatever constrictions or collapses in graduate education might be coming down the pike. But for one, I don’t know if that perspective is true. More to the point, if the prevailing way that a training system operates basically has the effect of inculcating an underlying feeling of being useless or unwanted in the bulk of people who go through it, it seems to me that it then shouldn’t be a surprise if that eventually starts to eat into the institutional foundations, because of course it’s going to make the whole thing seem less like a way of life that’s worth being loyal to.

So perhaps my question here is about what a more confident or healthy world of graduate education would look like, if there can be such a thing, and whether thinking in those terms offers any help for trying to see our way past the latest evolution of the crisis. Somewhat connected to this, another impression I’ve had is that, especially over the last decade or so, the dominant way that people within the academic and para-academic systems have tried to defend themselves against feelings of superfluity and meaninglessness has been to valorize the idea of “the public,” and to think in terms of a gap between the academic world and public life that they wanted their work to be able to somehow bridge. The spread of little magazines is one expression of this, but so is the growth of public-facing academic books, and the kind of fusion of academic work and political activism that we’re all so dismayingly familiar with. I wonder if in some ways we’re now at the far end of that period—where the guiding problem isn’t going to be connecting with the public so much as finding ways to re-establish the boundaries between the academic world and its exterior. It turns out we might miss the ivory towers once they’re gone.

Becca Rothfeld: Forgive me, Father, for I do not want to have doubts about the academic humanities on the eve of their decimation—but I’m not sure that I will miss the ivory towers when they’re gone, or at least, what I will miss about them strikes me as incidental to their self-conception and their stated aims. I will miss the role they played, often despite themselves, and I will miss the people who populated them, often ambivalently and always in abominable working conditions. And it goes without saying that if the humanities ever ceased to exist, I would not merely “miss them”; I would cease to have a reason for living. But I’m not sure that the humanities could ever vanish—we need them too much, and we perpetuate them too helplessly, just by dint of being the kind of creatures we are—and I’m even less sure that the academy in its present incarnation provides the best forum for their continuation. That isn’t to say that I wouldn’t go to the barricades to protect the ivory tower, now that the philistines are at the gate. Rest assured: I plan to. But I’d rather go to the barricades for something I could stand behind with less trepidation.

What did I love about the university during my decade inside it? I loved the ideal, rarely realized, of an intellectual community—a group of people committed to thinking together rather than competing against one another for a vanishingly small spate of jobs. And I loved the promise, equally notional, that there might be a retreat from worldly preoccupations, a place reserved for thinking, just for the sheer delight of it. Above all, I loved the kind of people the university attracted (and often ended by demoralizing, if not completely destroying): people eager to pore over The World as Will and Representation line by line for over a year, people for whom the life of the mind is a necessity and, more importantly, a joy. And if I didn’t exactly love that academic humanities departments are pretty much the only durable and entrenched institutions in the anglophone world dedicated to the study and preservation of the arts, I knew that it was true. And if I downright hated that so many of us were consigned to conditions of poverty and precarity, I had no choice but to pretend our plight was justified by the project we were jointly committed to maintaining. But was it?

You’re catching me at a moment of acute skepticism. I’ve just returned from teaching at the Matthew Strother Center, a place that’s hard for me to describe in less than half a million words. In brief: five students of all ages and all professions come to a farm in the Catskills, where they stay for a week for free, without their phones or computers. They don’t know in advance what book the faculty will assign them, but they show up anyway. During the day, they work on the farm and attend a three-hour seminar. At night, they participate in “salons”: during our session, we staged a performance of Plato’s Symposium and sang an arrangement that one of the students, a retired choral director and organist in his late sixties, prepared for us. We were not expected to produce anything. The goal was the hardest and best thing in the world: to read a book together and try to understand it.

That book was The Gay Science—which is in large part about the shortcomings of the modern university. Nietzsche describes its resident specialists as “grown into their nook, crumpled beyond recognition, unfree, deprived of their balance, emaciated and angular all over except for one place where they are downright rotund.” I think I know what he means. I’ve taught Nietzsche in the university, and I’ve taught him on a farm in the Catskills, and there is no comparison.

So where does this leave me, a conflicted defender of the university, an academic exile by choice? We need humanistic institutions. The humanities are not the kind of thing we can—or would want to—do alone. But must we content ourselves with the humanistic institutions we have? Yet it isn’t obvious that the model of the Center could ever be scaled up to accommodate a whole nation, and it certainly is obvious that any broadscale change in humanistic education is a lamentably long way off. For now, for better or for worse (and I’m often convinced it’s very much for worse), the university is the best we have. I love it; I hate it; I resent that I need it. I wouldn’t miss it if it vanished—but of course, I also would.

Ben Jeffery: I do think that practically speaking it’s a matter of working with the university that we have rather than hoping for a wholesale reincarnation. But I agree with you about how vital the affective component is to thinking about the challenge. Personally, I loved graduate school—part of that was probably because I was in a lovably weird and serious Ph.D. program, and another part of it was almost certainly because graduate school consisted of a whole series of things I would have done even if I’d been left on my own. But it was also for all the reasons you’ve just articulated, however fitfully realized in practice—the sense of being amplified by the company of other people who wanted to think carefully; the feeling of collaborative otherworldliness; the sheer energy that you can pick up on by being around genuinely brilliant people. On the latter score in particular, top-end American universities still strike me as being pretty special places: you really do meet an unusual concentration of extraordinary individuals, and it has a catalytic effect (to me, in any case) that you mostly can’t replicate just from books or discussion groups. So there’s a sort of vertical thrill to it as well as a horizontal one.

At the same time, everything you’ve said about the institutionalized demoralization is also so obviously true. It feels like a force of nature sometimes rather than the effect of man-made structures. At the risk of repeating myself, it might be that the greatest perversity of the current system is that it takes an activity that has so many obviously happy and enriching emotions inherent to it and then forces the young people who are most drawn to that activity to filter everything through feelings of anxiety, disposability and anonymity. I suppose it’s true that to some extent that’s just to describe late-capitalist working conditions in general—but still, if it’s true anywhere that we can change what we’re doing by changing how we imagine it, surely it’s true in the world of the humanities. Aside from the question of what a better sort of “productivity” might look like in such a world (and I have mixed thoughts about that), is it really not possible to imagine an approach to graduate education that would be qualitatively more effective at instilling a sense of collective purpose in its members, and thus helping people to feel like what they’re doing matters? And when I say “collective purpose” obviously I have something connected to the value of the humanities themselves in mind, rather than any narrowly political targets. Call me a sap, but I’d like an institutional humanities that was better at taking care of its kids, so to speak. It’s a question of material support, but not just that.

The last thing I’ll say for the moment: I’m curious about what you think of the university at the graduate level as a place for intensifying and/or giving deeper shape to the sort of joy that attracts people to the humanities in the first place. Their role as emotional incubators, I guess. What are the good parts about how it works now, and what are the better possibilities? At the moment, what I suspect happens to a lot of people is that they succumb to a certain kind of ego rigidity that gets installed in the course of internalizing the various professional norms that are meant to (maybe, hopefully) one day land them a job. And this has the side effect of draining much of the vitality and creativity out of the enterprise, too. But I also don’t think that it is or has to be the whole story. (Albeit another thing Nietzsche said was that scholars are incapable of giving birth, so maybe in some deeper sense it is the real story.) Anyway, to speak again from my own experience, there are all sorts of ways in which my own ability to take pleasure from thought was developed and changed, and not just given space, by the infrastructure and discipline of the university, and especially the intellectual standards it introduced me to. That seems like a type of nurturing authority that’s worth defending.

Becca Rothfeld: I agree that universities are the only institutions entrenched and widespread enough to provide a humanistic education at scale, at least for the foreseeable future. But even the continued existence of universities in anything close to their present form is far from a given. Before Trump took a wrecking ball to higher education, reforming the academic humanities was a distant possibility, one that few if any of their foremost practitioners seemed to take seriously. Now, what some might call “the vibe” is very different. The humanities simply will not survive if they do not change dramatically. Reimagining them is not just a live possibility but our only hope.

The fact is, they have long been sick. Even before the recent upheavals in higher education, both at the University of Chicago and elsewhere, they were plagued by dwindling enrollments and vicious insularity. Much of the problem was material. Students forced to weather a brutal job market chose to major in more practical fields; academic humanists, desperate to win back some of their bygone cachet, took to imitating the tone and stylistic tics of scientists. However much I sympathize with the architects of this shift, it has been a losing strategy—both because it made the humanities singularly unappealing to most of the people who might otherwise have pursued them and because it warped them beyond recognition.

You ask which parts of the current model are worth keeping and which ought to be jettisoned. This is the question, given that the humanities have to change in one way or another, and I don’t have a satisfying or complete answer, much less one I could articulate in close to a thousand words. My strongest conviction is that extra-academic institutions like the Strother Center can help provide one. Maybe these projects can never grow large and powerful enough to facilitate the bulk of humanistic education in America—though maybe they can, and so many of them have sprung up in recent years that I’m almost optimistic—but they can certainly provide models for the more sclerotic institutions that are slower to change and experiment. What can they teach us?

One thing that ought to change—perhaps the primary thing—is the expectation of constant output. Another thing that ought to change is the fetishization of jargon. But as you note, something that’s both good and unbearable about the university in its current state is its commitment to rigor and expertise. A text isn’t a free-for-all; even if there are no definitive right answers about its interpretation, there are certainly any number of wrong ones, and years of study of an author and her tradition prepare us to identify them.

Yet the way rigor and expertise are often understood in the academy leaves much to be desired. I would be hard-pressed to explain in so few words—and this is already too long!—what distinguishes the distortive kind of expertise that Nietzsche railed against from what I regard as a fruitful kind. Perhaps the briefest way I can put it is that it’s good to know what you’re talking about, but the humanities are not like the sciences, and “knowing what you’re talking about” sometimes requires taking a lengthy detour. If the ultimate topic of any line of humanistic inquiry is what it’s like to be a person, then no artifact is irrelevant. Reading, say, Swann’s Way alongside The Tale of Genji can illuminate the theme of jealousy. And because humanistic artifacts occur within traditions, which are messy and capacious, reading only a single author and the secondary literature about her—or reading only work from a given period—is a liability. It prevents a humanist from understanding the context of the work at issue.

This claim brings me back at long last to one of the questions we started with: whether pivoting toward the “public” can save or at least reinvigorate the humanities. I’m biased—I’m a public humanist, after all—but I believe it can, precisely because I believe there need be no dichotomy between expertise and public interest. Expertise of the sort I have tried to paint as unnecessary, off-putting, and even, per Nietzsche, deforming—pseudoscientific expertise, cooked up as a way of artificially investing the humanities with the gravitas the sciences now command—may be incompatible with public intellectualism, since it helps itself to technical language, wades into arcane discussions and almost prides itself on its ugly aridity and incomprehensibility. But expertise of the sort I am commending is just a matter of learning more about something of obvious interest to everyone. Some people have additional time and inclination to learn more about things of obvious interest to everyone. But if something is not of obvious interest to every human being, it can be of no interest at all. A good guiding principle for the humanities moving forward, perhaps, is this: if there is no way to explain to a curious and thoughtful civilian—my private word for nonacademics—why this question is relevant to her life, then perhaps it isn’t relevant, period.

And if people have become incapable of mustering interest in gloriously useless subjects, like Sumerian grammar or the logic of conditional statements? What then? Well, then we need to create a different kind of person. And how could we hope to accomplish such a task without enlisting the public, which after all consists of the very people we need to convert?

Stay tuned for a follow-up to this dialogue, in which other editors on staff will reflect on and respond to the points Becca and Ben have raised.

Further reading from The Point’s archive…

• Lisa Ruddick on the “malaise without a name” that afflicts English grad students.

• Joseph M. Keegin’s “Commit Lit.”

• Nikhil Krishnan on Bernard Williams’s model of a life in philosophy.

• Andrew Kay’s twin journeys on the academic job market and the dating market.

• Helena de Bres’s online series on academic philosophy and the meaning of life.

On September 29th, Frey joined Anastasia Berg, Point editor and UC Irvine philosophy professor, to discuss the hostilities and challenges liberal education faces today. What is it that we’re seeking to defend by means of humanistic study? And in an age of decreasing literacy and the rapid creep of artificial intelligence into education, can this fight be anything but a losing battle?

Below you’ll find an edited and condensed version of their Interintellect salon, along with a selection of exchanges from the Q&A. To watch the original salon in full, click here.

Anastasia Berg: I want to start by trying to understand how we got to inhabit the educational-institutional situation that we do now. When we say “the humanities” today, in the American context, we’re referring, however obliquely, to two things. First, to a set of specific specialized disciplines—English literature and languages, philosophy and classics, sometimes history. But at the same time, what also refer by the “humanities” or “liberal arts” to something a little murkier—it’s that something that makes the American college experience unique compared to, say, European models of higher education. In addition to their major or concentration requirements, American college students must meet an independent set of requirements in other fields. This takes the form of anything from the University of Chicago’s Common Core to the general-education requirements of the large public universities. Jen, could you tell us a little bit about how we got to this place, and how you see the relationship between these two different things we’re talking about when we say “liberal arts” or “humanities”?

Jennifer Frey: I could talk all night about the history of higher education in the U.S, but I’ll just give you a really quick-and-dirty version of what happened. In the late seventeenth century, you started to have institutions of higher education in the United States, and they were all small private liberal arts colleges. All these institutions were very intentionally established to be about what the Germans would call Bildung, or what the Greeks would call paideia—they were about the formation of leaders. The course of study was “liberal” in the sense that it wasn’t for the sake of some specific trade or line of work, but it was really about forming you into a free person and citizen. Non-accidentally, in these institutions, the capstone senior courses, which were taught by the university president, were in moral philosophy or moral theology. And the course of study was entirely prescribed: learning classic languages—your Greek and Latin, obviously—as well as classic literature, history, philosophy.

There is a sea change in higher education in the nineteenth century. To make a long and complicated story short, the federal government gets involved with land-grant universities. But the more fundamental change is that we decided that we needed to be like the Germans, taking the German research university as a model. And from there things start to switch: the lecture becomes the primary modality of learning—so you sit quietly and listen to your professor profess about specialized disciplinary knowledge. Knowledge becomes the thing that the university is about, rather than character formation, which had been the goal of liberal education. Around the same time, knowledge gets balkanized into specialized departments while general education becomes mostly elective. This started with Harvard——and everybody wants to be like Harvard, so it just kind of proliferated from there. The idea was that the students’ passions and interests should be determinative, and you just study what you want, whatever floats your boat.

By the time you get to the twentieth century, you have things like the Higher Education Act of 1965, where the state really gets involved in higher education. And you also have an academic landscape in which hyper-specialization becomes the norm. If you look at what happens to general education—undergraduate education outside of disciplinary knowledge—instruction gets, by and large, transferred over to graduate students, to nontenured professors or adjuncts a variety of kinds. For universities in particular, it’s an afterthought. After all, what’s really going to move you up in the rankings and the Carnegie system? It’s research dollars, research outputs. How are professors hired or fired? It’s based on their knowledge productivity—this is how the idea of the “knowledge worker” and “knowledge economy” emerges. This is the thing that really interests me as a philosopher: that the gold standard, the epistemic norm is expertise; it’s no longer wisdom or something broader that everyone is thought to need. The university becomes balkanized into completely siloed forms of expertise. If you’re an academic, that’s the university in which you live and move and make your make your living.

And, as a philosopher, I think that that situation hasn’t been great for philosophy. It’s unclear why more than a very small minority will need expertise in metaphysics or the things that philosophers work on. Only about 7 percent of incoming freshmen at Harvard will report planning to major in any humanities, any single one of them.1 How can that be? Well, I think a lot of it obviously comes down to the fact that we are told that education is for work. If education is for career, philosophy looks like a bad bet. (Actually, empirically, it’s not that bad, but prima facie, it looks like a bad bet.) And so when higher education is no longer, in any meaningful sense, liberal, it’s not the sort of education that everyone needs to be a free person and citizen. It’s reduced to a credential that you need, or a set of skills that you need to get a high-paying job.

It’s really no surprise that the humanities are suffering in that context. I believe that they will continue to suffer until that sort of status quo is disrupted somehow. So, if I had to put a thesis on the table for us to discuss it would be that the crisis of the humanities cannot be solved until general education is fixed, and general education should be unapologetically liberal in the strong sense of an education that befits a free person and citizen. We can talk about what that sort of education might entail, but I think we need to go back to the origins of that way of speaking—that there was a difference between a liberal and a servile education. And what marked off a liberal education was that it’s an education that is not yoked to some specific trade or line of work but just makes you free.

Anastasia Berg: How much of that old model of liberal arts should we aim to preserve? And how much of it can we realistically preserve today?

Jennifer Frey: That’s a hard question to answer, but let me just say this. When we think about general education, it’s what we think everyone in an institution of higher education needs to study. Whatever it is that we come up with there, we need to be asking: What is it that is going to make them wise? “Higher” education shouldn’t be higher just in its cost or in years—like it’s your thirteenth or fourteenth year of school. No, we should be thinking in terms of your highest aspirations as a human person. And to me that means that you need to be searching for something more than expertise; you need to be searching for wisdom.

Why do you need to be searching for that? Well, because you have to live when you graduate, right? You have to make choices. You have to be a person. And it turns out that systematic, serious reflection on what it means to be a human person and a citizen, and to live right as a tiny thing in the vast cosmos, is something that you need to have a real grip on. I have my own very particular ideas about what course of study might help you with that, but I think, just as a framing mechanism, we need to be thinking in that way about higher education. And we are absolutely not thinking in that way.

I can tell you how most universities are thinking when it comes to general education. Every balkanized department is just thinking how they can benefit from whatever the system is. Nobody’s actually thinking about the student, because nobody’s incentivized to think about the student. And, quite frankly, nobody even really knows how to think about the student. The student is just an abstract unit. When we think about general education, we need to be thinking about the student. And what is it that we actually think the student needs to know? I would suggest the student doesn’t need to know how to do scholarship in any of these fields; they don’t need to know how to publish or be up on the latest literature or analytic methods or whatever. They need to know how to think and reflect and communicate in a serious and disciplined way. They need to know how to write—not merely as a skill, although there is a skill and a craft there, but as a way of expressing how they have learned to think about things that actually matter to them as human beings and citizens.

Anastasia Berg: Your interest in the “humanities” is in them as the foundation for liberal education. Do you think that disciplinary expertise in the humanities has any role to play in general education, vis-a-vis that special liberal education? Or do you think that the condition of successful liberal education requires rethinking the idea of disciplinary expertise in the humanities altogether?

Jennifer Frey: I don’t want to completely get rid of disciplinary expertise. I just want to put it in its place. It’s just a fact that the emphasis on disciplinary expertise has been bad for the humanities—we just have real data on this. Most papers in the humanities are read by literally no one, they’re cited by no one. So whatever new knowledge you’re producing, it’s not really making a dent in anything. And, look, it’s still knowledge—it’s good in itself; I don’t deny that. But we need to understand ourselves as teachers, not only as experts. Because if you’re the expert in the room, then really, most questions should just be settled by you. As in, if you want to know what Aristotle said, ask me—I’m the expert, right?

That’s a terrible model for the humanities. What our students need isn’t an expert who can just convey information—frankly, we’re entering a world where artificial intelligence can probably do that pretty well if you just want information-delivery services. What we really need is a space where we are actually forming students, and that means a space where they can enter into a conversation that is much bigger than themselves—that they learn how to enter that conversation in a deep and serious way, that they learn habits of thinking and reflecting with other people. These are not merely intellectual habits; they’re actually moral habits that are required for conversation about difficult, contested topics to go well.

So it’s not the university’s job to tell you how to live, but it is the professor’s unique privilege to help you figure out who you are and how you ought to live in a serious way. The reason that I became me is because I did have professors who helped me enter that kind of great conversation. And we really need most professors to be able to help their students do precisely that. But we’re not trained to do that. We don’t seem to care about it. In fact, we think it sort of reeks of charlatanism or demagoguery, and I think that’s really to our discredit.

Anastasia Berg: I heard you say recently that the contemporary university is the place where authentic liberal education is least likely to thrive. We’ve been talking tonight about all these oughts and shoulds with regard to the university, but why do we insist that the university is where we should be fighting for authentic liberal education in the first place? Do you think it can be revived within universities? What would it take for that to happen? And if, as your own experience at Tulsa might suggest, the university is no longer reliably the place for that authentic liberal education anymore, can it take place anywhere else?

Jennifer Frey: These days if I’m in a hopeful mood, I’m like, Yes, of course! All we need are the right administrators and we can do this. All we need is to show that it works. But of course I did that and it was still a disaster. So, I’m a bit chastened by reality.

At the same time, for me personally, I came to the university when I was eighteen, and it just changed my life. It changed me. It changed the imaginative possibilities that I had for myself, and I just want that for other people. I came to the university a very smart idiot, and I received a real education.

I just want to call universities back to their purpose. I think it would be enormously devastating if we gave up on them. I’ve spent my entire adult life in these institutions, and in some deep sense, I love the university. It doesn’t always love me back, but I love the university, and so I’m going to keep fighting. Having said that, of course, liberal education existed before universities, and it will exist after universities, and it will exist because it addresses a fundamental human need. But it would be a crime if our universities just walked away from it entirely. So I hope that they won’t.

Attendee: Is what’s happening right now in education the continuation of something that’s been going on for the past century—e.g., specialization, and the move away from shared knowledge—or has something meaningfully changed in the past five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years?

Jennifer Frey: What I’m inclined to say is that in 2008, a certain kind of rot that had been there was finally exposed. During the Great Recession our universities were publicly defunded, and also just suffered from the general financial collapse, and what we saw in response to that was that universities needed to make decisions about what they really valued—and it was never the humanities. It has continued since then. Every budget decision really reflects a value judgment. So why is it that the humanities aren’t valued? I believe that’s because universities are no longer committed to liberal education in any meaningful sense, and until they recommit it will continue to be the case.

The people who have the most power in the university need to reflect more deeply on the ways they are responsible for the fact that no one studies classics anymore. You can’t say to someone, especially in a discipline that’s quite difficult such as classics, “Well, we’ve in no way communicated your value to anyone. We’ve in no way meaningfully supported you, and now you don’t have students, so we’re going to cut you off.” I think that is exactly the way that it looks. This is all part of a continuous trend, but a lot of chickens are coming home to roost now.

Attendee: I’m wondering if there could be very large benefits accrued to expanding liberal education to teach kids, you know, that are younger than undergrads. I have two kids that are college age and high school age. And when they hit high school, in civics class, they’re reading the Bill of Rights. But so much of the context gets lost. I’m thinking, this is a very radical thing; before you even talk about the Bill of Rights or how our government is structured, you have to ask, well, what is government?

Jennifer Frey: One of my side projects in life has been getting involved in the K-12 classical education space. I think a lot of the problems in higher ed are inherited from K-12. Depending on what sort of institution of higher education you’re in, you’ll see different aspects of that problem, but the status quo of K-12 education is not worth defending in any way, shape or form, and needs to be fundamentally reassessed. But until we manage that, we are dealing with the products of that system that we inherit. And this is why I like to go back to the claim that I was a very smart idiot when I entered university. I had been in gifted and talented classes since first grade, and I did all AP, yada yada yada—and I knew almost nothing interesting, honestly. Once I started to see how vast the space of what I didn’t know—and didn’t even know I should know—was, at first I was kind of horrified, but then I was like, “Oh my gosh. I really want to know all this stuff.” In high school I never had someone so much as pose any kind of philosophical question to me. It never happened. It’s just not the way we were taught.

Attendee: I’m a scientist, but with two daughters who are deeply involved in humanities. And just as you said, Jen, my whole life changed in university because of my exposure to a real liberal arts education. I’ve been a professor and my colleagues sometimes leave the sciences out of a discussion of liberal arts and of general education, which I find really sad, because it is a different way of knowing. So I’d love to know how you perceive the sciences and their role in general education.

Jennifer Frey: One of the joys of starting a new college and really working on curriculum was sitting down with professors, and the professors who were into it were really into it. A fair number of them were what I would call people in STEM. We would sit down once a week for an entire semester, and we would talk about what a liberal education in science would look like.

I was trying to grow this Honors College, and I was like, “Hey, we have this great books core, it’s amazing.” But I also felt that we needed to have honors classes, really, in every college, and those classes need to be liberal. I had the most amazing conversations with physicists, with biologists, with mathematicians, about how to do that. What we shared in common across disciplines was not just learning a technique, but the importance of asking fundamental questions about our chosen disciplines. The scientists had all reflected on these fundamental questions and really wanted to do that with students, but were never given an opportunity to. So, for example, in biology: What is life like? What actually is life? Which is a difficult question. Once you start thinking about it, it’s not so clear what life is. And then, similarly, in physics, physics shades into metaphysics really quickly. They were also very interested in studying the classical texts of their field. Biologists really wanted to study Darwin with their students and finding a way to integrate it into a biology class. So I don’t think there’s any one way to do it, but I think it’s about turning the class into a form of knowledge for its own sake, with deep, serious reflection on what the discipline is and more foundational questions.

Attendee: I’m the associate director of the humanities center at my university, and I am proud to say I’m a part of a department that still puts students first. We are struggling with big questions about the role of education. I completely agree that it is to help our students think and write and be able to make good choices in life after they finish a university education. But we are being squeezed constantly because of the low enrollments. And I’m wondering if you can offer any practical solutions about how to convince administrators, deans, the provost, of the value of humanities education. The people in administration seem to acknowledge that there is intrinsic value in the humanities, but when it comes to the curriculum and support for the humanities, it’s not there because our numbers are low. The initiatives that come from the administration are sort of just focused on training—from college to career. We are not a vocational school, and we try to remind them of that, but there are no substantive changes and no real support.

Jennifer Frey: That’s tough, and I’m very well aware of the problem that you’re talking about. If you think about the way that power is held and exercised in higher education right now, it’s very hierarchical and very top-down. Most of the power is held by deans, but even deans are limited by what their provost wants, and the provost is responding to a board and a president. I would recommend having a serious talk with your dean about enrollments and how to strategize as a department. I think general education is the best way for a department such as yours to get a real foothold, and deans are always impressed when a department actually is strategizing about this, because they have this idea that faculty are just in it for themselves and don’t ever think about the bigger picture. I definitely have seen departments thrive when they can really situate themselves such that they are serving the university, so even if they don’t have a lot of majors all their classes are filled regardless. However, when you’re relegated to being a service department, you’re still going to be second fiddle to the big research departments. So we also need, as faculty, to be pressuring administrators to think seriously about the fact that they’re not just middle managers, but we’re supposed to be educators. We need to push back against a completely elective system and think about the value of whatever it is that we’re offering.

Attendee: I work at a think tank here in Washington, D.C. Some of my work touches on the future of the humanities in higher ed, and I’m also broadly interested in the humanities, so I have an interest in their future. My question is, if I can glean anything from your story, Jen, it’s that it’s very difficult to convince consumers of the value of the humanities. And I’m wondering why. Will, at least initially, the suppression of some consumer preferences be necessary in order to advance our favored form of education?

Jennifer Frey: Yes, first of all, because if our model of education is based on consumer preference, we’re just not educating. But secondly, I actually don’t think it’s that hard to sell people on a liberal education. That’s not been my experience. So we have to ask ourselves: How are we doing recruitment, who is getting put in front of the consumer, and why is it them and not someone else? And how can we calibrate our pitch?

I have a very old-fashioned view, and I was very upfront about it, and I would also tell people, this kind of education is really hard. It’s not easy. But I would also tell them that everything was at stake in doing it—and that got their attention, because no one’s telling them that. What people are saying is, “Oh, you might study this. You might study that. Who knows, it’s up to you to figure it out.” I think what we need to expose is this idea that an eighteen-year-old really knows what they’re supposed to study. I didn’t. I actually didn’t even know that philosophy existed. It just so happened, by the grace of God, that I got put into a philosophy class because it fulfilled some requirement, and that’s how I ended up knowing that philosophy was even a thing that still happened. So I think consumers do respond when they learn what it actually is, but the trouble is, they’re not learning what it is, and so they’re not responding. Now, is everybody going to respond? Of course not, but again, in my experience, the majority of people do. We should create those conditions where people are sort of getting the full monty, as it were, for liberal learning.

Attendee: I recently graduated from Swarthmore College, a great liberal arts school, a little over a year ago, and I have just started a Ph.D. in philosophy at NYU. So I love liberal arts, loved my time at Swarthmore, and it very directly led me to the Ph.D. But I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit more about what a liberal education would look like that isn’t oriented toward academia. A ton of my friends are already in grad school just one year out of out of college, and I have some strong instincts about how the practical life is a very virtuous life, and I think it would be kind of a shame if a true liberal education only led us into the academy rather than toward other forms of flourishing. I’m just struggling to imagine: What does the class look like? What do you read? How does conversation go?

Jennifer Frey: I agree that philosophy should not be ordered just to get people into NYU. That should not be how philosophy functions, because very few people are going to need, or even want, a Ph.D. in philosophy. I want to resist the teaching of philosophy as a pre-professionalizing endeavor. It wasn’t that way when I was an undergrad. I had a completely amazing undergraduate education in that the philosophy classes were small and freewheeling and we had this department where it was amazingly comprehensive and also eclectic, and you could do hardcore logic, or you could do philosophy of literature. You could learn Hegel, you could learn Sellars and Quine. I mean, it just was all over the place, and that was wonderful for me. But very, very few of us went on to get a Ph.D. in philosophy.

The main difference is that if you’re training someone to be a scholar in a discipline, you’re training them to create scholarship. They have to know what the top journals are and what the practices are they have to learn to write for them. The fundamental thing they have to learn is how to narrow their thinking. But I think that should only be done in basically the third year of graduate school, at least for philosophy. What you want as an undergrad is broadness of thinking. In terms of what we were doing at Tulsa, it was reading a ton of great books—we did not do secondary literature. We did not have the professor lecturing or being an expert, the professor would just ask some questions. That was it. And the whole thing was a dialogue, and you never really knew where it was going to go. You would teach the same material to different classes, and it would go in wildly different places, because the point was for them to be able to initiate and carry on a very serious, sophisticated conversation about big ideas. And to give them the confidence and ability to keep having that conversation outside the classroom. That’s a very different sort of enterprise.

Attendee: I’m here from UNC Chapel Hill, where I teach in the history department, and then I also work with a lot of community colleges doing public-humanities work. And my question is about the cost of higher ed. I’m at a point where I don’t want to get people into my history class by telling them it will get them a job. I want to have conversations about how this will help them to live. But that’s a really hard conversation to have with someone who you know is going into extraordinary debt for this education, or for someone for whom a lot is actually riding on their earning potential on the other side of this. So I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that hard obstacle of what seems to be just the inescapably rising cost of higher ed.

Jennifer Frey: This is something that I have thought about a lot, because I had to work 32 hours a week as an undergrad and pay for my own college, and also went into debt. So this is something that I feel very deeply: I believe everyone needs a liberal education, and it does a disservice to those of us who have to pay our own way or go into debt to say, “Well, for you, education is merely vocational.” I want to double down on general education. General education is for everyone, regardless of what you go on to specialize in. Not to mention, paying for higher education is risky for everyone and a merely vocational approach doesn’t always work out. Just take the most recent example of computer-science majors. We told everyone for twelve years to major in computer science and they would be rich, but the job market has totally collapsed. Students from very good schools who majored in computer science are not getting jobs. So I think your best bet is to get a liberal education where you are not trained just to learn a very specific, narrow thing. Those skill sets are constantly changing. Those job markets are in flux. No matter what happens, you still have to be a person. I cannot solve the problem of the skyrocketing costs of higher education, but if you’re going to get a higher education, it might as well truly be higher.

Further reading from The Point’s archive…

• Jennifer Frey on the fate of philosophy in the contemporary university, for the issue 25 college symposium

• Megan Fritts on what AI university committees can actually do

• An Interintellect debate between Anastasia Berg and Hollis Robbins on AI in higher ed

To read “A Letter to Vania” click here, and to explore the rest of our issue subscribe now.

⁠Yousri Alghoul

Your story in our issue, “A Letter to Vania,” is at once fantastical and grimly realistic. What about this mix of real and surreal elements appealed to you as a way to depict suffering?

In most if not all of my stories, I try to write neither a news report nor a typical short story. Rather, I try to blend the traditional short story with surrealism. I am striving to create my own new school of storytelling. You can find many works like this one in my story collections, because I don’t like being overly direct with my intended readers—namely those in Western society, whom I know consume a lot of film and theater. I don’t only write for Palestinian readers, but also to people in the West. The West produced Hollywood and its films, and international theater, including Brecht and other playwrights.

⁠“A Letter to Vania” takes a near-epistolary form—it’s about a letter the narrator is attempting to write to Vania, a friend living abroad who seems to be quite distant from and in fact rather ignorant of life in Gaza. Although the story is quite short, the complexity of this friendship feels so rich because of the form: the story is directly addressed to her and yet the narrator doesn’t seem able to begin writing the letter itself, to actually communicate with Vania. Could you talk a bit about how the story’s form came together?

When I began writing this text, around seven years ago, I think, I had just read a sentence that my friend posted on Facebook. She said: “I will write a letter to so-and-so—I must.” Just that one sentence. I have numerous friends abroad, in Europe and in the United States and elsewhere. So I decided I would send my “letter” to my friend Vania, and I started the story with “I will write a letter to Vania—I must.” And then I simply wrote, letting my unconscious and subconscious guide me wherever they wanted. I didn’t know which direction I would be going in while writing. In this way, I didn’t focus as much on structure, composition, style, school of thought or methodology as I did on really being able to deliver the message. At the same time, I myself was still discovering what the contents of that message were! In the end, I believe I succeeded in delivering it. The relationship between the Palestinian and the Westerner is a relationship full of cultural differences, but despite that, I believe that in this case the Palestinian was able to deliver his message and make his voice heard.

⁠At a few different points in “A Letter to Vania” you make pop culture references, like the Incredible Hulk and Iron Man, that I found interestingly disorienting. I’m curious why you decided to include these kinds of references in the story.

As I said before, I don’t care about the type of story or the style, but rather about sending the message. When I sit down to write a story, my unconscious is always trying to project what it knows of pop culture, theater, films both Arab and international, short stories, etc. Not just in “A Letter to Vania,” but also in the other stories in my collection John F. Kennedy Sometimes Hallucinates, I try to turn my short stories into something fantastical. I try to “fantasticize” them—meaning to make something real out of fantasy and to make something fantastical out of reality.

Right now, for example, I’m trying to write about hunger and starvation. But honestly, I haven’t been able to find the time to write. So I’m just holding onto a few ideas. And when the war calms slightly, and I find a place where I can charge my laptop and phone—since we barely have any electricity, and I have to travel a long distance to various places to charge my devices—I want to write a new story collection that focuses on starvation. I won’t talk directly about starvation in terms of the policies of starvation that Israel has been pursuing, which is the reality we’re living—no. An idea for a story came to mind, and I wrote it down so that I wouldn’t forget it:

One day the world wakes up and discovers there is no food anywhere, not in the restaurants or in the grocery stories or anywhere else. So there's a mass outcry: Where did all the food go? Who took it? How did it run out? People go searching in the forests, in the fields, in the farms, and there’s no food anywhere. And at the end of the story, it turns out that all the food in the world is in Gaza, being enjoyed on its streets and on its rooftops. I want to send a message to the world: What if you were starved? What if you were slowly killed like this, not finding fruit or vegetables or anything else? That’s the kind of story I want to write.

You’ve been publishing regular accounts of living through the genocide in Gaza at the Institute for Palestine Studies’s blog for more than a year now. Why did you begin doing it? Has the project changed at all since you began?

Since the beginning of the genocide, it has not been the right time to write fictional stories. Rather, now is the time for writing the Palestinian narrative, which must not die. When the Occupation began its genocide against us, and we started being confronted with death more than once per day, I began to feel obligated to write, for posterity, a record of this miserable era in world history and in our nation’s history. For that reason, I started writing for newspapers and journals and institutes both Arab and international to say to the world: We are human beings. We dream of life and “We love life,” as Mahmoud Darwish says, “whenever we can find a way to it.” And, in another poem, “On this land there is something that makes life worth living.” But the Israelis are killing us and destroying us and infringing on our rights, killing children and starving infants. So, my recent writing has taken the form of realism and nonfictional stories. I have been writing what might be called testimonies, in order to tell the world that the Palestinians are still alive, documenting their history—and this dark era in the history of humanity—for the world.

⁠In an essay translated by Graham earlier this summer, “Writing on War’s Edge,” you explained why you are compelled to write: “Writing is an act of madness whose practitioners live in fantasy worlds, drowning in unreal dreams in lands where peace is unknown.” Typically people praise writing as the opposite: a way of making sense of the world. Why do you think writing is an “act of madness,” and why does that make it worth doing?

Who said an act of madness isn’t a positive thing, isn’t something worthy of praise? No one besides a crazy person, one who doesn’t believe in monotony or routine, can bring about new knowledge or progress. Those who start revolutions are mad, those who bring about renaissances are mad and those who invent are mad.

How can someone write, living under the bombs, when he should be fleeing for his life? How can someone write under a hail of bullets, with horror all around, sitting comfortably at his desk, or rather at a desk in a house that is not his own? I’m referring here to my friend’s house, where I lived for a while during the war after being displaced from my own house. I was writing, after my home was destroyed, while the bombs were falling all around us. So, yes, writing in these conditions is an act of madness. And madness is the most beautiful thing in this life.

Why did [twentieth-century Lebanese poet] Khalil Hawi die by suicide? Along with Ernest Hemingway and many other great authors? They were mad. Guy de Maupassant ended up in an asylum. Writing is the act of a madman in a time of weariness.

As the African proverb says: “History will keep continuing praising the hunter until the lions find themselves a writer—or rather a historian.” And so we write. When we write we are not only documenting history, but we are also creating history. We glorify the truth that we see as truth. And we heroize the character whom we see as a hero. We produce consciousness. We force the world to talk about the fact that so-and-so said such-and-such in certain circumstances, especially if that so-and-so is a person who is doing something different from the rest of his people. For my part, I am the only writer I know of who stayed in the north of the Strip [during the earlier stage of the war when all of northern Gaza was under evacuation orders and many fled south]. So yes, writing on war’s edge is an act of madness, but one that it is worthwhile, and even worth dying for.

Graham Liddell

Before going into academia you worked as a journalist. Why did you make the switch, and how did your time in journalism shape your academic and translation interests? How did you start translating literature?

After I graduated from college I spent a few years working in journalism, and for my first job, I lived in the West Bank city of Bethlehem and worked for the Palestinian news agency Ma’an. My apartment was located across from Azza camp, one of Bethlehem’s three refugee camps, and soon I found myself writing news pieces related to the Palestinian refugee experience. I became friends with a number of people from the camp, and even lived with a host family there for a time. Meanwhile, the 2014 Gaza war started, and Israeli military activity in the West Bank escalated. My host was arrested in the middle of the night and held incommunicado for several days before being released, without being given any reason for the ordeal. He suspected that it was because he had designed and printed t-shirts that featured messages of solidarity with Gaza.

It didn’t take me long to realize that the stories I wanted to tell about what I was seeing around me weren’t necessarily the stories that grabbed headlines. I wanted to write in much greater depth about individual people and their experiences, not about shocking events that would garner a massive number of clicks. As I was learning about the Palestinian refugee experience in quite an intimate way, news from the region was breaking about a mass exodus of refugees from Syria and other countries. I decided to go to grad school and focus my research on listening to, documenting and analyzing individual refugee stories from the so-called “European migrant crisis.” I also looked closely at the way refugees used narrative as a tool both to make sense of their own journeys and to gain access to new spaces along the way.

Translation played a major role in this graduate research; my dissertation includes both literary translations and translations of interviews I conducted with Arab refugees living in Greece, Germany and Malta. My main advisor at the University of Michigan was Anton Shammas, who is one of the few Palestinians to have ever written a novel in Hebrew. He has also translated a great deal of Palestinian literature into Hebrew, including the work of the late Emile Habiby, another Palestinian citizen of Israel. In Anton’s class, I had the opportunity to translate a short story by Habiby into English, and I fell in love with the process. I’ve been doing it ever since.

How were you introduced to Yousri Alghoul’s work, and how did you start working with him as his translator?

At some point, Anton forwarded me an Arabic-language review of Yousri’s 2021 novel Gallows of Darkness. The book tells the story of refugees from Gaza and Syria who find themselves on the same dinghy, crossing the Aegean Sea in the dead of night. I ended up writing in depth about the novel in my dissertation, and I also wrote a review of it in English for Banipal, a journal of Arabic literature in translation. A few years later, the poet Mosab Abu Toha came across my review and sent it to Yousri (both authors were born in Gaza’s Al-Shati Camp). Yousri posted about it on social media, and I got in touch with him shortly after that, sometime in 2022. I started translating two of his short stories at the time, but then I got busy finishing my dissertation, so I put that work on hold. When the current horrors started unfolding in Gaza at the end of the following year, I felt a great urgency to make Yousri’s work accessible to English-language readers; it seemed more crucial than ever. My first translation of one of his stories came out in the “Gaza! Gaza! Gaza!” issue of ArabLit Quarterly last spring. My other translations of his works have appeared in the Stinging Fly, Michigan Quarterly Review, World Literature Today and now The Point.

What do you most enjoy about translating his writing? What’s challenging?

Lately I’ve been working on an academic article in which I argue that Yousri’s stories resist categorization into existing genres. Much of his work certainly takes the form of speculative fiction (and, when he writes essays, speculative nonfiction), but any label more specific than that doesn’t fully capture it. So, as scholars are wont to do—whether or not it’s truly necessary—I decided to coin a term: rupturing realism. As in, not magical realism, but rupturing realism. A realism that ruptures the threshold between worlds that we tend to think of as inherently separate: between the present moment and the apocalypse, this life and the afterlife, the natural and the supernatural, the individual and the cosmic. Yousri’s stories also disrupt our understanding of what realism is—that is, our sense of what is or could be real. People in Gaza today are experiencing horrors that truly stretch the imagination, and in order to capture this daily unbelievability in his work, Yousri forces his readers to reassess reality. Despite the seriousness of the task, I have very much enjoyed my efforts to reproduce this innovative literary style in my English-language versions of his pieces.

As for what is most challenging, I have sometimes found it tricky to discuss Yousri’s works with publishers. Not too long ago I attended a conference in which the scholar and translator Huda Fakhreddine gave a talk titled “Poetry After Gaza.” In it, she argued that now is not the time for evaluating the quality of the literary work of Palestinian writers from Gaza, but rather the time simply to broadcast that work to the world. I tend to agree, and yet, when I talk with publishers, the conversation necessarily requires a consideration of sales. It’s felt difficult, on an ethical level, to focus on the question of the value of Yousri's work as a marketable commodity, as if it can be neatly separated from his value as a human being.

It is, to put it mildly, a tumultuous and difficult time to be collaborating with a writer from Gaza. How do you see your responsibility as an Arabic translator at this time, both in general and for Yousri? What is it like to collaborate with Yousri right now?

I’m uncomfortable seeing myself as someone who “gives Yousri a voice” or someone whose primary role is to advocate for him. I prefer instead to see the writer-translator relationship as one of partnership and, as you put it, collaboration. It is a collaboration in which we take a work of art and produce a new one for a new context, giving the original text an “afterlife,” as Walter Benjamin puts it. When the text to be translated concerns genocide, “afterlife” is a morbid concept. But perhaps that makes it all the more appropriate, especially given Yousri’s literary style and his interest in the otherworldly.

Collaborating with Yousri on these translation projects has been one of the most meaningful parts of my life these past two years. It is extremely disorienting to follow the daily news of the mass slaughter and destruction of people and places you care deeply about and be expected to keep going about your life as if nothing abnormal were happening. My relationship with Yousri keeps me grounded in the reality that the events in Gaza are happening to real, tangible, ordinary people—people who can’t be reduced to disembodied soundbites or dramatic political talking points.

Read Yousri Alghoul’s story “A Letter to Vania,” translated by Graham Liddell, here.

Further reading on The Point’s Substack…

• Anastasia Berg’s interview with Jacob Abolafia about his issue 35 review, “Violence and the Left.”

• Rachel Wiseman’s interview with our cover photographer, Jordan Conway.

• A preview of Alex Rollins Berg’s review of cinematic violence from issue 35.

• Our issue 35 sources.

To read Jacob’s essay in full click here, and to explore the rest of our issue subscribe now.

Anastasia Berg: The essay you published with us, “Violence and the Left,” takes a critical stance against a tendency on the left vis-à-vis violence. What is this tendency?

Jacob Abolafia: The piece is not a cri de coeur or plea for nonviolence. It’s really an analysis of a tendency on the left toward abstraction from politics. I wanted to ask: What does violence actually mean when these left intellectuals are talking about it? Are they talking about politics? Or are they talking about something else?

I was interested in what happens when you take certain left-wing theories and claim that they apply to politics, and in the piece I am trying to show the cracks that emerge when you talk about violence as something abstract, rather than thinking deeply about the cases at hand. What made me totally sure I had to write the piece was the left’s self-satisfaction that its political answers are so obvious and true that no self-criticism around the relationship of left-wing ideas to politics is necessary.

There’s a fear on the left that if we critique violence or the violence of certain actors, we’re being bad allies, or we’re not on the left anymore. I do not have a problem critiquing violence, and one of the things that was motivating me to write this essay is that, actually, I think a critique of violence is the most left-wing thing we could possibly do.

Walter Benjamin was sort of in the back of my mind while I was writing the piece. The critique of violence is part of left politics, precisely because it helps us think about the sort of system we want in the end. I think violence is not to be avoided at all costs, but its value is in its ability to get us the nonviolent equilibrium that we want.

AB: What are the left-wing ideas you’re thinking of—and how are they applied to the case of Israel-Palestine?

JA: The piece is, in a way, a review of Adam Kirsch’s book On Settler Colonialism, although it is operating on two levels. I’m sort of reviewing that book, but also reviewing the tendency on the left to say that that book is not serious.

Kirsch’s thesis is basically that “settler colonialism” is this academic monster that has swallowed up left politics—where everything gets viewed according to the paradigm of colonizer/colonized, indigenous/nonindigenous, and that the politics that emerges from that is zero-sum. And that if the main academic prism for viewing the social world is settler colonialism, then the only politics that can emerge from that—because the settler emerged out of nowhere and stole from the indigenous their rightful inheritance—is a sort of zero-sum politics where you give back to the indigenous what was taken from the colonists.

But in addition to this uncovering of settler colonialism as a central paradigm for left thinking, there’s the claim that the politics that emerges out of that is bad and harmful; it can lead to the endorsement of horrific violence but also, and maybe more commonly, encourages a framework and a rhetoric that precludes real political solutions.

AB: Your own acquaintance with this issue is not just theoretical—you’re not just a reviewer of the book, you’re not just a scholar, you’re not just familiar with the issues. How would you define yourself and your position vis-à-vis the situation in Palestine and Israel? Would you say you’re an activist, or something else?

JA: Scholar-activist, I guess. I once taught a course with someone who described themselves as a scholar-farmer. And if they could be a scholar-farmer, then I think I can be a scholar-activist.

I have been a nonviolent activist in Israel-Palestine for about ten years now. And I have always been principally committed to nonviolent activism. I've never theorized that commitment, actually—the commitment has been very embodied and practical. I just felt that the last thing that this place needed was more violence. Violence didn’t seem to be conducive to the political ends that I wanted. Now, as I also reveal in the piece, it turns out that nonviolence doesn’t work either. So I come at this discussion from the position of somebody who’s been deeply committed to nonviolence and understands that nonviolence has failed politically. But I don’t think that that excuses the turn to a violence without sufficient motivation.

There's a big question right now in the discourse: Well, when is violence sufficiently motivated? You know, for instance: Mahmoud Khalil, when he talks about October 7th, he says, I’m against all war crimes and all killing of civilians, but this was going to happen. And that’s one position: that violence is inevitable, and that you can’t condemn anti-colonial violence, because it’s inevitable by the very nature of the political constellation. And I don’t think that’s obviously true. I think it's a position that needs to be argued for, and sometimes the left takes it as obvious that violence is unavoidable in postcolonial situations, and there are certain watchwords that get used to adduce that fact. Left intellectuals will sometimes say: Of course it’s obvious that we need not be afraid of violence—Algeria. Look what happened in Algeria! Or Fanon—just say the word, and that’s all you need. The point of the piece is not to criticize someone like Mahmoud Khalil. I completely understand why he would say that, based on his position and personal experiences. Instead I’m trying to ask, from the left, why left intellectuals aren’t questioning those watchwords. What would happen if we were to question those watchwords?

The activist part of me is also questioning this because I’ve watched every single Palestinian community that I work with be affected. Some have been cleansed. Some have evaporated. They don’t exist anymore. I’ve watched my friends be murdered. If one side is nonviolent and the other side is violent, there’s a game-theoretical problem there.

So I’m not sure what my own political practice looks like, but I am sure that the voices I was hearing and am hearing in the Anglophone left don’t seem to be providing political answers that speak to me—as a scholar or as an activist. They don’t stand up to critical inquiry, and they don’t tell me what I should be doing. If my nonviolence isn’t working, what would? Invoking Fanon and Algeria—these are not helpful words anymore, and certainly not in this situation.

AB: You say quite confidently, “My nonviolence doesn’t work.” And I wonder what you mean by that. You could mean that the practice that you have been engaged in hasn’t yet brought peace on earth, but somebody could say, in a future that’s very hard to imagine right now, the movement could grow. Or is there something else you’re getting at when you say that nonviolence doesn’t work?

JA: Nonviolence can work, but just like violence, it needs to be a means to an end. And the principle behind the sort of nonviolence that I was involved in, which is usually called “protective presence,” is that the presence of activists will deter state violence and the violence of, in this case, settlers—non-state paramilitary violence. But the problem is this: when one’s presence doesn't protect from state-sponsored violence, suddenly the theory of change doesn’t exist. Either the activists themselves can be subject to sufficient violence to deter them or, simply, violence that happens when activists aren’t around goes unpunished. Short of all activists living with all Palestinians all the time, there will be times when there aren’t activists present. And if murder can be committed with impunity, even when an activist is present, let alone when they're not, then you just don’t have a theory of change anymore.

We remember the Turkish American activist Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, who was murdered in the West Bank a year ago. When an American can be murdered with impunity, a fortiori a Palestinian can be murdered with impunity. It shows that violence against Palestinians is so deeply acceptable to the state and the society that witnessing is no longer enough. Witnessing is ineffective.

AB: Going forward, will this change what you do, in your own activist practice?

JA: Absolutely. I guess the place where I’m at is looking for cases of effective action. One of the lessons of the piece is that if you want to look for inspiration you have to look at the cases that provide a politics that you’d actually want to endorse. Nonviolence is great in that way—India got a constitutional democracy. That’s what anybody who holds the values of the left should want. South Africa—you get an imperfect constitutional democracy, but still a constitutional democracy; great. India achieved those ends through a famously nonviolent campaign, though of course it was nonviolent in complicated ways. And South Africa used a mix of violence and nonviolence. Those are the places I would be looking to.

Regarding Israel-Palestine, I think the case of South Africa is much more appropriate than the case of India for a whole bunch of reasons. And if we take the South African case as an analogy, what are its differences from the paradigmatic settler-colonial cases that failed, like Algeria? And how do we operationalize it?

The left often has its favored cases, and then it justifies whatever happened on the ground against the canonized politics of settler colonialism. And I think we need to do exactly the opposite. That is, look at the politics on the ground first. Look for cases and do reflective comparison between them to figure out what sort of politics is going to get us the result we want. And the piece I wrote for the last issue is, in a sense, brush clearing—clearing ground to help people realize that we need to pick our cases according to the political reality we have, not according to the canon that we know and love.

AB: What do you think makes violence in the context of Israel-Palestine so misguided as a strategy right now?

JA: The overwhelming force that Israel is able to bring. And the fact that Israelis do not see themselves as having a metropole to return to. This is one of the big confusions between settler-colonial theory and the case of Israel-Palestine. It’s not that Israel-Palestine is not a case of settler colonialism. It is, in the dry academic sense. And I think a lot of left intellectuals love to sort of jump up and down and say, “Oh, but look at the Anglo-Palestine Colonial Bank or, you know, the Jewish Colonization Initiative. They called themselves colonizers!” As if that were some sort of “aha!” moment that gives you a helpful politics.

Violence is only going to lead Israelis to double down. That is what has happened. That’s what happened in the Nineties. That’s what has happened today. And there are some defenders of Hamas’s strategy of violence, who say, “Ah, but now you’re talking about the occupation!” as if that were some sort of success. I think a left position has to be that we don’t play three-dimensional chess with the future. We rather look to the 70, 80, 90,000 people who are dead and say, Well, no, that’s a political failure. That’s a failure of emancipation. This sort of goes back to Walter Benjamin. Those are lives that will not be lived. That’s not the left notion of emancipation.

AB: So if I’m hearing you correctly, what you’re saying is that violence has to be conceivably construed as a means to an end, and the conditions that don’t hold in this case are: one, that the idea of some kind of resettlement of Jews in an original home is a complete fantasy, and two, Israel has the power to meet any kind of violence with untold devastation.

JA: Yeah. I mean, as someone who lives there, I would say—and all the Palestinians I know, and people like Rashid Khalidi, or Edward Said in his time, would say this as well—this is going to be a negotiated, a partnered solution. And violence, by its very nature, is zero-sum. It's not negotiated. It's not partnered.

Of course, Israel is the agent levying the rapacious, unmeasured, irrational force of violence right now. But the answer to that, the answer to one zero-sum action can’t be another zero-sum action, if you want to reach the equilibrium condition, which I do, and everyone else I know who wants a just and democratic Middle East does.

Violence just doesn’t get us there, or at least not violence that doesn’t have a clear aim in mind. I don’t see the clear aim in mind in the leftist endorsements of violence that I analyze in my piece.

AB: Right, you don’t dismiss violence entirely as a possibility. This isn’t a piece about pacifism, despite what you now describe as your own nonviolent tendencies, even pre-theorized ones. You acknowledge that, both historically and in principle, violence can be wielded if it could bring about the right kind of ends. Do you have a sense of what the legitimate criteria should be for using violence? And I also wonder: Somebody might then say, Oh, okay, so really your disagreement with the left is just that you have a different set of criteria… Is there something deeper at stake in your disagreement about when it is okay to use violence?

JA: This returns us to the Kirsch book, in that I’m interested in an ambiguity about this on the left. Kirsch’s argument is that once you start thinking according to the settler-colonial paradigm, you will come out with a sort of politics where: settler equals bad, indigenous equals good. And he’s not only thinking about Israel-Palestine, he’s thinking about the U.S. as well—you know, a politics where the left is hopeless about the United States, about liberal democracy, because it’s corrupted, in an Edenic sense, by the original sin of settler colonialism. He never says the phrase “1619 Project,” but that’s clearly part of what he’s thinking about. That’s a polemical charge. But the interesting question is, are there moral categories motivating the left’s use of violence?

And there’s a sort of realism that’s motivating my thinking in this piece, which is: moral categories like that don’t belong in left politics. They should not be part of it. What we ought to be interested in is judging things from the aspect of the universal respect for human beings as equals. And there aren’t antecedent moral categories that should affect our thinking around that. I think some people on the left are guilty of what Kirsch is accusing them of—the utter collapse of settler colonialism as a paradigm of historical development and the normative categories of contemporary politics—but for others, I think, it's more subtle, where moralism starts creeping into a left politics and getting in the way of what I take to be the more fundamental guiding principles of equal respect for persons.

One of the most common questions I’ve gotten about this piece has been people asking me: Well, who are you talking about here? And I’m talking about the Anglophone left, which is a sort of broad and nebulous category. I don’t want to make sweeping pronouncements. And within the conversation that I want to have and the people I’m talking about, there’s a range of positions. Some of them are guilty exactly of what Kirsch accuses them of. Others are simply willing to moralize rather than think politically, and that’s what I’m trying to get away from.

AB: How did you come to see things in this way? You said earlier you always tended towards nonviolence but was violence ever attractive to you? Was there a romantic flurry where at some point you did want to charge at the tank… and then subsequently became disillusioned?

JA: For me, it’s quite the opposite. Of course I felt the attraction of violence: I read far too much Nietzsche as an undergraduate. I aestheticized violence in my own way. But that was before I was on the left.

I’m just going to parrot Benjamin all day here, but the aestheticization of politics and the glorification of violence that comes with that is the natural patrimony of the right. And I flirted with a sort of right critique of modernity, which I outgrew the first time that I saw fascism in the street. The key moment for me was someone chucking a bottle at my head during a demonstration in Israel. By that point, I was already drifting toward the left; I was in no way on the right. But that clarified things for me. That, you know, this is what political violence looks like, and I can’t beat it by throwing a bottle back at him. There’s just no theory of change. There’s no victory that way. The way I can win is by getting this fascist to be ostracized by society, and to get society to see that he is the problem.

That was in 2014. Eleven years later, it’s obvious that I have lost in every conceivable sense. In every society that I’m a part of, the person chucking the bottle is now deeply empowered, if not in power, across the world. But at no point in those eleven years has it seemed to me like, Well, if I had just mucked things up more violently, I could have stopped the rise of fascism. The rise of fascism needed to be stopped politically. It needed to be stopped mostly through electoral politics. My failures were all electoral failures. They weren’t a failure of not being violent enough.

AB: In your piece, you write a bit about what’s behind the left’s attraction to violence. Why do you think your fellow leftists aren’t finding your perspective more appealing?

JA: I’m going to return to this question of abstraction. I was on a campus in the U.S. on October 7th, and I saw an encampment go up immediately. And it was clear to me that for everyone at that encampment, the actual goings-on in Israel-Palestine were abstract. Had to be abstract. Nobody at that encampment had been to the places that I had been. And I don’t mean Israel-Palestine. I mean a village being ethnically cleansed in the West Bank, the Gaza border. And so that abstraction, that distance, is the most important ingredient.

Most Israelis don’t go to the West Bank, either. They’re able to hold the politics they do, the fascist and apartheidist politics they do, because they don’t have to look the people they’re doing it to in the eye. And one aspect of politics that I’ve shifted on is that I’m a great believer in integrationism. Elizabeth Anderson wrote a book on this a few years ago, The Imperative of Integration. I just see the difference between the politics that is possible when the problem is concrete, versus the politics that develops when it’s abstract—you know, a set of ideas or principles clashing with one another, or an imagined enemy to contend with. So that’s one issue, this abstraction.

The other is the feeling that, once we’ve figured out the principles of emancipatory politics, how could we not do everything in our power to make those principles come true? Since the French Revolution, there has been a tendency on the left to fall for that. The examples are too numerous and odious to recount, but I think there’s a deep temptation on the left to be so certain that we’ve figured out the principles of justice, and therefore we figured out the politics that will get us to justice. And that entails, of course, a romanticization of violence. Violence is beautiful. Anyone who’s watched a war movie knows that, anyone who’s put up a poster of Che Guevara in their dorm as well. You know, from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the deep tragedy of emancipatory thinking’s tendency towards violence, to the ease of romanticizing a distant and abstract political movement, I think all of that’s at play. There’s no easy answer.

AB: Your ambition for the piece, from the very start, as we were discussing the essay early on, was to offer a critique of the left that wasn’t just meant for people already critical of the left, to give them more ammunition. Your ambition was to appeal to people on the left who might find these sorts of arguments in favor of violence appealing, but not so appealing that they couldn’t read the essay and be disabused of this confusion. But if not this, then what?

Specifically, with regard to the situation in Israel-Palestine, do you think there’s anything people abroad—particularly in the U.S.—can be doing right now that would be meaningful? What actions would be effective and not just futile, or impotent, or confused? You mentioned the encampments earlier. Were there things you saw there where you thought, Yeah, this is what I wish all these college kids were doing or, this is what I wish people would be willing to put their energy and their time into. What would you say to people who are feeling lost, who want to do something, but they don’t know what to do?

JA: Bernie Sanders’s resolution on the floor of the Senate to take military funding away from Israel—that’s it. The hope that even centrist Democrats, people like Amy Klobuchar, would vote for that, that’s the most hopeful thing I can say.

If the case of South Africa suggests that that’s what you have to do to convince a population that enjoys privileges from its violent oppression of another part of the population, and that’s what you need to do to get that population to give up those privileges and decide it’s in their own best interest to make a real constitutional democracy—well, the parallels are there for everyone to see. Not all ways toward liberation are equal, but the tools of an emancipatory pressure campaign are there for the taking.

But I don’t want to suggest that I’m critical of the idea of the encampments—some of their practices, maybe. But they had the right idea. Often, they had the exact right ask. These institutions should be critically looking at what sort of pressure can be put on Israeli society, such that the average Israeli decides that it’s in his or her best interests not to treat the Palestinians the way they treat them. But the ask got buried in, like, Hamas apologetics, or “glory to the resistance.” And, you know, those two things actually don’t go together.

What I as someone on the left am asking myself, what I think anyone should be asking themselves is: What could make someone change their mind? Right now, Israelis are not asking themselves that question, and it’s clear that violence hasn’t made them ask themselves that question. In fact, if anything, it’s pushed them further from asking that question.

AB: Are you hopeful that, if such external pressures were levied, Israelis would change their minds and their approach? For one thing, there’s a question: Are they doing what they’re doing in Gaza and the West Bank because it is serving their best interests? And, secondly, they’re pretty stubborn, I hear.

JA: I think right now, Israelis don’t pay a cost for doing what they’re doing. Some people would say the cost they pay is the war, but from an internal Israeli perspective, the war is just something that’s always been going on. It’s not the consequence of a particular set of factors. And more violence isn’t going to convince Israelis to the contrary. So, I don’t know if it would work. I don’t know. But to me, it’s the great untried thing. It has not been tried. You know, the stock exchange over the course of the war in Israel has only gone up and up and up, and it’s hard to get people to see that something is wrong if they are not just morally closed off to it, but also it doesn’t really affect them.

Some of this is simply despair. I thought for many years that I could win politically through nonviolence and an internal political vision of Jewish-Arab cooperation, so the turn toward something like external pressure—or encouraging the left to double down on the lessons of external pressure—is born of my own personal failure and the failure of all other alternatives that I’ve seen, violent and nonviolent.

Read Jacob’s essay in full here.

Image: Protesters on the campus of Drexel University (source: Instagram / ADL)

Further reading on The Point’s Substack…

• Rachel Wiseman’s interview with our cover photographer, Jordan Conway.

• A preview of ’s review of cinematic violence from issue 35.

• Our issue 35 sources

• plus, more author interviews coming soon…

Subscribe now

Anna Gát: Today we’re talking about potentially automating the humanities: so, literary history, literature, poetry, philosophy, public philosophy, argumentation, rhetoric—what many humans think of as the core elements of the human intellect. We will challenge this from multiple angles. For instance, maybe at some point, doing data calculations by hand counted as core elements of the human intellect, and now that we have Excel spreadsheets we’re happy we don’t have to do it, most of us. Hollis, the floor is yours. So, tell us, you’re arguing on the side of a positive scenario where AI actually makes academic life better, more efficient, cheaper, more egalitarian and humans somehow smarter. What do you have in mind when you’re writing these very hopeful things?

Hollis Robbins: We probably have a lot of agreement about what AI can do and what it can’t do in terms of our human flourishing. But in order to make this more of a debate, I’ll just say what my proposal would be: within two years, I think AI will be delivering the general education curriculum for all public universities. And what I mean by general education is writing, critical thinking, some of the baseline classes that most state mandates have decided are a requirement for all college students in public universities around the country. This is delivering information that is already known, and it’s being delivered by a human professor in a classroom, usually an overworked grad student or an underpaid adjunct. I have spent the past seven years as dean at two different places, reading course evaluations, and it is not being done well. So when I say, what is it that AI can bring to higher education, let’s start by asking: Are we doing a good job right now, human-to-human, teaching writing, teaching literature, teaching math, teaching critical thinking, teaching intro to philosophy?

You know, I ran into a young woman when I had a flat tire. I had to bring my car into the garage, and there was a young woman at the counter, and when I asked her if she was a student at the University of Utah, she said, “Yes, but I’m taking a year off because I’m in debt.” And I asked her, “Where are you in your journey?” And she said, “Oh, I’ve just taken my general education.” I said, “Well, how do you feel about being $8,000 in debt for your general education?” She said, “It was a complete waste of time. It didn’t teach me anything that I didn’t know. I was expecting to go to university and have strong, good relationships with professors, to work with experts.” She’s going to be a neuroscientist. She wanted to take classes already that would get her toward her neuroscience degree, and the gen-ed curriculum was just this layer of information and box-checking. I think AI has to be part of a university education if states are going to mandate taking money for what is already known. AI would be much better at delivering this material. We can talk a little bit about why, but I’ll stop there, so we can at least start our conversation.

Anastasia Berg: My time is brief, but I’m happy to say my argument is very simple, and what I want to claim and convince you of is that any purported use or alleged benefit of the introduction of AI into university—that includes the possibility that it could somehow make general education more effective or cheaper—needs to be really carefully weighed against what I think is already the undeniable cost of AI use, especially by students. And I’m going to put it a little bit provocatively by saying that the main cost, for me, is that it is rendering our students subcognitive. I’m going to try and convince you of why that is the case.

Anna Gát: Sorry to interrupt. Subcognitive... does that mean dumb?

Anastasia Berg: It doesn’t mean smart… but it doesn’t mean just dumb. So let me say what exactly I mean. I want to really emphasize first that this argument is not going to turn on denying any and all possible uses of AI in academic settings. It’s not going to even turn on the idea that none of them can produce a marginally better result within STEM. This is my claim: I am skeptical about some of these purported uses and benefits and successes of AI—I don’t think they often actually hold up to scrutiny—but my argument is that whatever these benefits may be, they need to outweigh the very real cost, and they need to be doing so by a comfortable margin, because this cost, and this is the second key claim I want to make, it’s not what we often hear. It’s not academic integrity. It’s not pedagogical quality. It’s not some vague and bespoke and kind of sentimentally conceived humanistic value, important as all these might be, and they certainly are to me—I’m a philosophy professor. The cost of relying on AI is a degradation of the most basic, fundamental, non-artisanal, non-specialized cognitive capacities. Using AI to perform intellectual tasks is destroying our students, as thinkers and as humans, and it’s already happening now as we have the first generation of students who are having full years of their college education being completely infiltrated by AI.

I want us to be clear about what I mean when I say destroying our students’ capacity to think. I’m talking about the capacity to take in information. And I’m not just talking about complex information. I’m talking basic information. I’m talking about being able to understand what words mean. I’m talking about being able to understand what sentences mean individually and taken together. It’s about assessing the significance of that information, drawing conclusions from it, communicating our thoughts: how we convey our beliefs, also our worries and our questions—effectively, persuasively, but even just coherently—to others. That’s what I think is at stake right now.

I’m sure everyone who’s interested enough to come to this debate has seen the reports on the recent MIT Media Lab study that showed that the use of LLMs in the composition of essays degraded essay writing capacities. When researchers forced ChatGPT users, after prompting them multiple times to write essays with AI, to then write without AI, they performed worse than people who never used it, and they performed worse than their counterparts at all levels on neurolinguistic scoring. I think one of the most kind of shocking bits of reporting was that 83 percent of ChatGPT users couldn’t quote from the essays they wrote minutes earlier. And likewise, we have a study, which I actually think is just as interesting and as important, because it goes even more toward this question of the potential benefits of AI in things like gen ed: we have a study at the University of Pennsylvania about the effects of the use of AI math tutoring at the high school level. (We’re sort of artificially separating university from high school, but this is a somewhat artificial separation.) They found that unadulterated access to GPT-4 led students to perform significantly worse when access was taken away, and while the specialized GPT “tutor”—so, something with guardrails and teacher-manufactured prompts and answers—didn’t harm students, it didn’t help them either, and it did affect their sense of learning significantly. Namely, it seeded a lot of false confidence, so the students were certain they knew a lot more than the students who didn’t have access to that AI tutor, which, I think, from a pedagogical perspective, is a danger of its own.

This is hard empirical evidence that’s coming out. It’s beginning to establish that reliance on AI will not just harm capacities for some in-depth analysis or creativity or adaptability, as many have argued, is going to degrade the most basic capacity that it’s trying directly to enhance. And as significant as empirical studies might be, I want to end on the student testimonies, because these are the things that really have haunted me. We now have students who’ve used AI for so long in their studies that they can reflect on that experience. And I’m just going to share with you two quotes that I found personally heartbreaking. One student said to a Chronicle of Higher Education reporter, “I’ve become lazier. AI slowly causes my brain to lose the ability to think critically or understand every word.” And that’s really important, because thinking critically can sound like something very complicated, but they’re talking about understanding the meaning of every word that they’re reading and then using. And on the possibility of using AI to produce summaries, another student said, “Sometimes I don’t even understand what the text is trying to tell me.”

This is an assault on our very humanity, as a lot of people say. But the problem isn’t that AI poses a risk to some special value or some very kind of romantic way of looking at ourselves. The problem is that it is making students dumber, and it’s making them cruder, and even if it makes their life longer by improving the results of radiology analyses, it’s going to make them nastier and more brutish.

And if this is not enough, I want us to not forget what’s at stake here: this sense of humanity—our basic cognitive capacities—is the foundation of our most basic ethical and political convictions. Subcognitive beings do not require us to treat them with respect. More alarmingly, subcognitive beings aren’t fit for self-rule. People who don’t understand words and sentences and can’t read a short passage from the newspaper—I think we can credibly start questioning the thought that they should be allowed to make decisions about their own private lives, but they certainly shouldn’t be making decisions about our collective decisions and our shared experience. So they might not be fit for democracy, and that’s where I’ll end.

Hollis Robbins: Well, my first thought was: this actually goes back to 1635, around the time of the founding of Harvard. If you went to Harvard in the 1630s, ’40s, ’50s, actually right up until the turn of the eighteenth century, when your professor assigned a book, it meant you had to write it down. You actually had to write down Principia Mathematica, Liber Secundus, all the physics books, all the geography books, all the Latin books. After a little while, you know, as Harvard got a little more flush and they actually got books, the complaint was exactly the complaint that you just made: How do you mean the students are just going to have to read it? They’re not going to have to write down the whole book? They’re just going to sit and read it? How are they going to learn? How is that going to create a habit of mind? That complaint is a technological complaint, that students can get an education simply by taking it in, and not by actually writing it out by hand. You can go to Harvard Library and just see copies that the students made all of those years. I bring that up to say that we have had this conversation about a new technology.

The second one is that that study you referenced was deeply, deeply flawed. I think the study there was methodologically flawed and technologically flawed. It was unclear what was being measured. If you look at the study, the people who started doing some projects with AI, and then the other ones that didn’t use AI, the EEG could be measuring a million things, and it was not necessarily measuring the thing that the study said that it was measuring. And I think, you know, just as a matter of methodology and a matter of the experimental design, it was designed to meet everybody’s priors, and it did.

But back to this “subcognitive” question—I think that’s a good phrase. I come at this as a dean, as somebody who’s been making policy. I look at what happens in the classroom at many universities where I have been, and that interaction between faculty and students, or between students, is not always the healthiest or the best or the most productive relationship in terms of instilling habits of mind. And so when I think about what AI can do—I’ve spent more time on AI platforms than others—I think about the ways that it has elicited things from me that have never been elicited from me, in terms of thoughts and ideas. Somebody at a conference I went to said that working with a really good model of AI is like browsing the stacks in a really good library. Things will come to you. And again, I’m talking strictly about the pro models. I’m not disagreeing with you that there is a certain danger—you know, my entire life is reading, grappling with words and thoughts and ideas and concepts and all those things. It is really, really important, but it’s not happening now. It’s not happening now.

Anastasia Berg: So actually, this doesn’t start in 1635. The earliest—or one early—articulation of the fear about technology and the written word comes in about the fourth century BCE, with Plato’s Phaedrus.

Now let me say something about Harvard. When I was at Harvard, we had books. You said the worry with the books was that we would be “simply taking it in.” But actually, I didn’t simply “take” anything “in”—because I had to not just take in things, but to get things out. And those things were essays. And the environment, the circumstances in which I was having to submit said essays was one in which there was an institutional, public, zero tolerance for even the mildest transgression against standards of academic integrity. And that meant that in that environment, despite many incentives to not do my work, I was forced again and again and again to write my essays, even though I had real books that I didn’t copy by hand.

When we’re talking about what is happening right now in my classrooms, it is not that students are “simply taking it in,” but that when they are required to submit their own work, they’re submitting the work of something else. They’re not even “simply taking it in.” They don’t need to take anything in. The only thing they need to take in is the prompt for our assignments, during the second that it takes to copy-paste it into the LLM. So I find the comparisons, which we see everywhere, to books, to the calculator, to Wikipedia—and I’m so sorry, and you know, I’m so grateful to be here, and I respect you Hollis—but that is sophistry. It’s sophistry to compare the use of LLMs to these other technologies, not because the other technologies did not also come at cost. Again, I’m open: there are many potential benefits to the use of AI, maybe even in education. But we’ve never faced anything like what’s happening today before.

One thing that’s unique about AI is that not even the degraded source that was a Wikipedia article—nor a calculator, nor a book, nor a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article that our students think is an adequate resource—none of them will supply you with a ready-made, structured response to any question, including my request to reflect on their personal experience. Even with Wikipedia summaries, the students still had to, in order to do well, in order to say anything, they had to take it in. They had to analyze and then they had to bring themselves into the work.

Now, Hollis, you said something about the MIT study. You said the study is not perfect. But no matter what the flaws of the study are, isn’t it intuitive that by not performing a task, we will not get better at performing that task, and we will score worse? We will be performing that task worse than those people who have been performing the task again and again and again. So, I’m open to arguments about “specialized applications” of AI and those kinds of discussions, but the thought of attacking the MIT study that just said students who never write essays will not get better at writing essays, I find that surprising.

Hollis Robbins: Well, I didn’t bring it up, but I just said that I think it was flawed. But here’s a question, because you’re at Irvine. The first two years of the gen-ed program of students, before they get to you, or before they even get to your classes, they’re taking general education classes that you are not teaching, right?

Anastasia Berg: Oh, I do teach general education classes.

Hollis Robbins: Which ones? Which ones do you teach?

Anastasia Berg: The philosophy department at the University of California, Irvine teaches many humanities general-education classes. I teach Introduction to Contemporary Moral Problems. And I cannot be replaced by an AI.

Hollis Robbins: I’m just saying if you take this suite of gen-ed courses, you can take them at a community college. You can take them at the Cal State. The state has already said that they’re exactly the same. The state of California that pays your salary has already said this, that the faculty member who is teaching these classes does not matter for the transferability of these classes across institutions. Now, that is the baseline.

I know that we’re talking about two different things, because I agree with you. You are articulating the ideal, the platonic ideal of a classroom situation, of a student who really wants to grapple with texts and is being asked to write wonderful essays. That is not happening in public higher ed, at least. And so when I’m sitting here saying that AI could be having some engagements with students, I am saying that we’ve got states like Texas and others that are saying none of this matters, we just have to train you for the workforce, and states like California that says the faculty member does not even matter. That is the context in which I am saying, yes, AI has a role.

Anastasia Berg: So when we’re talking about general education in the humanities—unlike the possible applications of AI in math and STEM teaching more generally—I have not seen anything that an AI interacting with my students can do to replace the benefit that a student has from being forced by the structure of incentives at a university to grapple with texts of a certain length and complexity. My students, until the introduction of AI, were required in my classes to write two essays. Those essays were read and remarked upon by very thoughtful, wonderful graduate students of mine and by me. Those students came to my class and we would discuss the material in very close engagement with the text. I have not found anything that even remotely suggests that any of this work could be transferred to AI. One of the things that I am most surprised about is the kind of confidence that gen-ed in humanities can be performed by AI. I guess that’s just an invitation to say more about how you think that is going to happen.

Hollis Robbins: I want to hear from others, but let me just say, right now, when you are a student—

Anastasia Berg: But you’re debating me.

Hollis Robbins: No, no… You enter the system, and you have to take all these credits in critical thinking, right? Philosophy, also English, and you can pass it in all these ways. And in a large, forty-person class without TAs, with a faculty member who’s teaching five sections of this class, you’re not going to have the personalized feedback that you’re talking about. So when I’m talking about AI intervention, again, I’m just talking about in places where it’s currently being delivered, in a place where the student isn’t getting feedback.

Anastasia Berg: Let me say something about feedback, because here I think I have something to contribute. Part of my delinquent college career involved the fact that… I mean, I must have read the instructor comments on my papers—but I don’t remember any of them. And I don’t think that anything that any TA or professor wrote, with the exception of one—Helen Vendler, may she rest in peace—has ever made much of a difference to my capacity to grow intellectually. But somehow, at the end of that college career, I got into a grad program of my choice. So how did that happen? That happened not because of the personalized comments I got. It happened because I had to perform that task again and again and again. I was reading and writing, reading and writing, and in that context, I just ended up improving. Maybe, probably, the encouragement of a human being played a role—there was a tremendous element of my intellectual development that was what you, Hollis, would call the “human touch” component. So we agree on that. But I really want to talk about the repetition of the task of producing these assignments. You know, I have friends who studied in the kind of utopian Oxbridge tutorial system, where they’re getting that one-on-one contact. And even then, it is not the particular comments about how you mistook what Burke said here, or why, how that word was misplaced there, that made the big difference. It was really this necessity of reading and writing and reading and writing and reading and writing that then matures our students to a place where they can really be intellectual interlocutors to us.

Hollis Robbins: I’m 100 percent in agreement with you on that. I’m just saying when a state system does not have the money to have that kind of attention…

Anastasia Berg: But this doesn’t require any attention.

Hollis Robbins: And you were an exceptional student, right? We’ve got students who phone it in, who don’t want to be there, who don’t want to be in their classes, who are required to take these classes, who put their prompt in, and there’s no disciplinary structure to make somebody do something over and over again that they do not want to do. So it is easy for anybody to teach the exceptional student. The bored, harried, overworked, doesn’t-want-to-be-there student? Teaching that student is the challenge, and it’s certainly the challenge in a public institution. And when I was talking about the young woman that I saw when I was getting my tire changed, she didn’t want to take any of those classes. I didn’t ask her explicitly whether she had used AI—I kind of suspect she had, because she had better things to do with her time. So I mean, I’m dealing with the reality of the situation. And I get it. I totally agree with you that you did it because you were self-motivated. Many students aren’t.

Anastasia Berg: I want to separate two things. One is the structure of general education, and in many places it’s deeply flawed. So we can have a conversation about what an ideal gen-ed environment would look like, or what kind of content it would have. I am a firm believer, however, that we need to have general education.

What differentiates the American system if not that general education? What gives it the claim to the title of the liberal arts, as opposed to the specialized European-style education system where once you graduate high school, you don’t need to ever study anything—unless you’re quote-unquote internally motivated—other than what you’ve chosen to concentrate in? It could be vocational training, even for our best and brightest.

I want to separate that question from what you’re raising, Hollis, which is this idea that there is no way for us to administer gen-ed education at cost. Now, if we’re comparing the cost of gen-ed with firing all gen-ed educators and giving students ChatGPT, I don’t know if I can compete with that, especially because right now it’s all subsidized by the AI companies. But I can say the following—what my colleagues and I who teach gen-ed are struggling with as we design our classes is this: There are ways of having assessments that are not open to the use of AI. We all know them. They include in-class assignments. They include peer review. They include an emphasis on providing our students with opportunities to be tech-free. And my students—a lot of them are STEM students—are sometimes very reluctant to talk about contemporary moral problems. But, to be concrete, if we were spending a fraction of our resources— the time and money and personnel resources—to think together about how to protect our students from the absolutely degrading effects of their constant use of the technology, as opposed to sending them daily emails encouraging them to use the models that I and my students have access to—they’re paid-only and they’re subsidized by my university—I think we would be at least striking a middle ground between the pessimism of “we have nothing to offer these people except AI access” and some fantasy—one that I don’t accept—in which all public education could only be adequately done by an Oxbridge tutorial system.

Jen Frey: I’ve been an administrator for two years now. Prior to being at the University of Tulsa, I was at large state flagship schools, and in fact, went to a large state flagship school as an undergrad. So it’s a space that I understand exceedingly well from both sides. And I think the thing that really bothers me, in a deep existential way, is how the administrative class just likes to double down on failure. So it’s kind of like, Oh, we all know gen-ed’s a failure. Rather than fix that, which we could do—we could absolutely do it—let’s just hand them over to the robots. To me, that’s negligence and I am very bothered by it. General education, for most of our students today, is the only chance they have in anything remotely like a liberal education. And a liberal education isn’t worth a damn if it’s not actually a kind of formation, if it’s not forming habits of mind, habits of speech, habits of being. So I think the argument really has to come down to whether or not you think those habits need to be formed in a human context, or whether you think it could sort of be outsourced to increasingly non-human AI.

All of this is happening so much more quickly than higher education has any capacity to deal with, which is very terrifying. For me, the thing that we always have to be fighting for is this idea that, one, general education is actually extremely important, and not just a weird side thing that, for some reason, is there, and no one can figure out why. And two, we really have to take seriously what those practices in the classroom are that actually lead to the formation of these habits. You just don’t get habits without the activities. And I don’t really think that AI is a very good substitute for a dialectical partner.

And another pain point for me is that we tend to think of students as these isolated learning units—as if the classroom shouldn’t ideally be a space of community, where what we’re trying to do is have students learn from one another. At least that’s what I’m always trying to do. Maybe if I taught calculus, I would feel differently, although I’m not sure that I would. And so for me, part of the existential threat of AI is that we’re taking the communal element out of it. And I think that that pairs really well with this instrumentalization of general education, where it’s just something you have to do for some reason that nobody ever really explains. None of it makes sense. Students are like, “Why do I have to do this?” And it’s like, “Okay, you just have to jump through these hoops. Here’s a robot to help you.” To me, again, it’s doubling down on failure rather than looking at the problem square in the face, which is that general education at most of our universities is a joke and we need to fix it.

Hollis Robbins: Can I just jump in to say, I agree with everything you’re saying, except the fact that we have no baseline for the human teachers. I mean, there are no studies of who is an excellent instructor or not, and one of the things that one gets from being a dean is reading everybody’s course evaluations and seeing trends over time of who the great teachers are, which other ones aren’t, where teaching is happening, where habits of mind are being produced, and where they’re not. And again, if everybody was as awesome as you or as awesome as you, Anastasia, or as awesome as I am—I’ve won several teaching awards—then I wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation. But I know really well, and I’m not just complaining: it’s bad. But one of the ways to fix things is at least to have a baseline of what that engagement is. And I’m telling you that what I’ve seen is that a really good pro model is not as good as the best professor at all, but is a lot better than most.

Anastasia Berg: I take seriously what students have to say, because we have to take their motivation and engagement into account. However, I think we have to be careful about relying on student evaluations as we’re thinking about the quality of instruction. One of the things that’s come up recently and made the viral rounds was from a professor who tried to AI-proof an assignment and whose student responded by saying, “You’re interfering with my learning style.” Now, you know that’s not going to be a student who’s going to leave a good student evaluation. Does that suggest that that instructor is any worse?

To make it a little bit more concrete, we know that in general, and not just when it comes to the use of AI, in educational experiences, students often confuse entertainment and ease value for learning. So when we look at student evaluations, they will rank their own performance higher—having absorbed more material, being able to do more at the end of a course—if they had more fun, if a professor was more entertaining, and if it was easier for them. Evaluations of their own learning outcomes are often dissociated from reality, especially as students have become service consumers. So I don’t know, in some context, maybe a robot is better than the absolutely worst professor, but I want us to hold that information about student evaluation squarely in mind as we come to evaluate that.

We’re talking about education. Education is a very intricate and complicated and subtle thing, but there’s something about it that’s also incredibly simple. It’s giving students an opportunity to read a text they might otherwise not do. It is longer than what they might read by themselves. It is more complicated than what they would persevere with, and I want them to ask themselves questions, forcing themselves to attend to that text, to recognize the functions of the argument. I’m hearing professors already tell me their students can’t tell what’s an example and what’s a claim and what’s an objection. They’re just reading everything as a mass. And we work so hard to give them that opportunity. We do our pedagogy workshops, and I give them a lecture, and I give them homework. But what we’re talking about is this: make them read, make them think, and then make them communicate that to someone else. And I just have not seen how an LLM could replace the work of providing that opportunity, that incentive structure that makes somebody do something that is not fun and doesn’t feel good and is not entertaining in the moment, and whose benefit they may theoretically take in, but are not feeling, while they would prefer to do absolutely anything else—not because they’re TikTok addicts, although half of them are, but because they have so many pressures—vocational, financial, social—that they would rather attend to instead.

From the archive

Rory O’Connell, “Intelligent Life” (2023)

“What would it be to approach the question ‘Can machines think?’ in a different way? Forget about machines for a moment. Instead, just think about thinking.”

, “A Matter of Words” (2025)

“Keeping up with advances in AI technology is not the biggest challenge we face. To come up with a good AI policy for a university, a department or even a household, one first has to have an idea of which skills and formative experiences they are prepared to lose for the sake of AI use, and which ones they will fight to retain. And it’s here that we have discovered that consensus is most importantly lacking.”

Chad Wellmon, “Degrees of Anxiety” (2021)

“Four years ago, I thought I knew what a university was. I was leading a sweeping reform of the undergraduate general education program and it had not yet collapsed into acrimony. I was on the Arts and Science Budget and Planning Committee and Faculty Steering Committee, and I had read and written a lot about universities from Paris to Baltimore. But none of this prepared me for the other half of the university: college as lived by the three hundred undergraduate students in the residential institution I assumed leadership of in August 2017.”

“College Life” (2021)

No symposium about what college is for would be complete without the perspectives of those for whom the question is most immediate: college students…

The Editors, “The New Humanities” (2014)

“There might have been a time when the humanities offered a counterweight within the university to the sciences’ relentless optimism and obsession with ‘progress,’ but since at least the 1970s—perhaps not incidentally when the enrollment numbers began to decline—only the heretics have stood up for anything resembling tradition. Today’s humanities professors speak of nothing but ‘new research opportunities,’ nothing but ‘progress,’ nothing but the gross injustice of the ‘way things have always been done.’”

David Sessions

Finally, to turn this back to you: I think we share a certain idealism about intellectual life as the pursuit of truth for its own sake and a sense that it can be degraded if it is too narrowly constrained by political instrumentalism. In my perception, you have tended to argue that intellectual life is inherently elitist and, in some sense, incompatible with left political engagement. In “Tired of Winning,” you wrote: “The left intellectual typically advocates for a world that would not include many of the privileges or sensibilities (partly a product of the privileges) on which her status as an intellectual depends.” I agree that the highest levels of cultural production will always be the domain of a relatively small number of people. But I don’t see why a commitment to socialism cannot encompass a vision of democratizing “higher” forms of culture, resisting their elite rarification, and mobilizing the intellectual resources of the humanities against the domination of an idiotic business and tech culture. That sort of idealism certainly motivated me, and I think many other academic socialists, even if it looked on the surface like we were narrowly concerned with politics. I don’t quite understand why you see an irresolvable contradiction there.

In a way, the socialist moment was just the latest episode in a generational arc, which perhaps begins in the late 1990s, and includes the “theory” era, grad student unionization, n+1, Occupy, Jacobin and the Bernie movement, etc. You bring some of that together in your 2018 piece, and Marco Roth did even more in an interesting recent episode of Noah Kumin’s podcast. I had not known that the n+1 group had been close to the earlier Yale grad student union campaign, and had faced that same choice between intellectualism and activism we would continue to face later. One of the things Roth said that struck me was that n+1 embraced politics in part because it was oppositional to the generally anti-political culture of the early 2000s. A suffocatingly anti-political intellectual culture was still my perception even in the early Obama era, and the reason so many of us looked to n+1 as our guide to being an intellectual as late as the early 2010s. But there has apparently always been a tension in our generation—professors or union organizers? mandarins or activists? professionals or bohemians? alienation from the United States or engagement with it?—versions of which run back through the entire twentieth century. We have always basically wanted to be European-style mandarins, but had to reckon with the hostility of American culture. Do we resign ourselves to alienation from America, or try to change it? So I guess my questions for you would be: How do you see this? Is that the contradiction you’re highlighting? What are intellectuals supposed to do about American culture and politics? Was the socialist intellectual answer to that inherently misguided, or a reasonable—if perhaps rearguard or idealistic—attempt to address those questions? What do we do now that we’re being swallowed by a hyperpolitical digital culture?

Jon Baskin

I’ll start with a brief response to some of your comments in the previous post on wokeness and the millennial left, and then spend most of this final answer on these bigger questions that you ask here about the left-intellectual project and American culture.

You make two points in defense of the millennial left’s attitude toward wokeness in point #2 of your response: one is that there was more criticism of “trendy antiracism discourse” on the left in the late 2010s than I am acknowledging, and two that, to the extent that you did have an anti-anti-wokeness instinct in those years, it was “because anti-wokeness was so clearly a right-wing strategy.” For the first point, I admit that the writers you mention—Karp and Singh, and I’d add one of my favorites, Lauren Michele Jackson—wrote smart and critical pieces about that discourse from the left. I still think these sophisticated critiques were mostly drowned out in the public sphere by the anti-anti-wokeness blasts that would sweep through social media every time someone who didn’t have perfect leftist credentials, like Jonathan Chait or Mark Lilla, would write what looked to me like a perfectly reasonable article about how social justice politics were playing out on college campuses, in school districts, and in the Democratic Party. (It took until 2022 for there to be a real article about something everyone knew was happening years before that in the nonprofit world as well.) And this goes I think to your point about seeing anti-wokeness as a “right-wing strategy”—a corollary of which was that if people brought up the issue on the liberal-left they were probably playing into the hands of or acting as a gateway to the right. There certainly was a right-wing strategy to codify and amplify “wokeness.” But in my view the reason it was an effective strategy was that it picked up on something that a wide range of people were unhappy about in their own lives (whether they called it wokeness or not), and that neither institutional liberals nor the most conspicuous leftists seemed at all interested in addressing. I’m not suggesting socialist intellectuals should have spent all their time trashing social justice politics, which I grant included more serious channels of political energy around antiracism and related social movements up through 2020. And I also am not saying that woke ideas were the only or the most important problem most people were dealing with at the time. But one potential pitfall of seeing every social debate as a propaganda war (or “war of position”) is that it can make it seem like it’s all discourse all the way down, with no room for the judgments people will form independently of any propaganda at all, based on their firsthand experience. And intellectuals should have known first of all, from the experiences we were having in universities, how off-putting it would be to many people to be seen as, among the two available options, the side that always seemed to be defending this censorious, moralizing, and often crudely reductive style of communication and politics.

But as you note, I’ve already admitted that political strategy was not my main concern at the time. I was more concerned with the way that political positioning and propagandizing seemed to me so often to be getting confused with “thinking” in intellectual life. You mention above the tension your generation has felt between their activist and their intellectual sides, and to some extent it was the attempt to “square that circle,” as you describe it, that I think I was reacting to. Does that mean I think being an activist or “left-intellectual” is impossible or always inadvisable? Not exactly. But I do think it’s important to be clear about the different things this conjunction can mean. Obviously someone can be a genuine intellectual and a political activist or organizer at the same time. We are all citizens and political animals and thus inherently have political responsibilities whether or not those inform our intellectual work. (And they may inform our intellectual work in ways we aren’t fully conscious of.) But the conjunction left-intellectual as you articulate it above has usually meant not that one happens to be a leftist and also an intellectual, but that one’s intellectual activity is in some way consciously disciplined by one’s leftist commitments. And maybe this is flat-footed of me, but I do think that to be a genuine—i.e. truth-seeking—intellectual you have to be open to the possibility that you will reach conclusions sometimes that conflict with your preconceived political identity, sometimes fundamentally. And I believe every political intellectual—and especially political intellectuals who work alongside specific political movements, as millennial leftists did in the late 2010s—will at some point be faced with a choice as to which of the two sides of the conjunction to privilege.

I realize from what you said above that you were honest with yourself about the fact that, in your public communication, you were putting your ideas in service of your political project, even if that meant compromising a dispassionate quest for truth. I am sympathetic to the reasons you did this, and why others do it. But I can’t quite talk myself into thinking it is ever a good idea. For one thing, we have no shortage of political propagandists in American society, and I’ve never been given any convincing reason to believe that intellectuals will be better at this work than pollsters or consultants. (There are lots of reasons to think they are worse at it.) More to the point, whatever your private understanding of the choice you were making, you weren’t talking about that conflict publicly, and this is the kind of thing that I think can’t help but have a corrosive effect on the public’s trust in intellectuals, including in their political capacity, eventually. A magazine like Jacobin, which announces its political mission on the front page and grinds forward with it, is very up-front about what it’s doing. It may not have often been the kind of thing I wanted to read in the late 2010s, but I never felt it was deceiving anyone or corroding intellectual life. The situation was different for the group of magazines and academic institutions that claimed to be stewards of our intellectual life in some broader sense, and yet which nevertheless continuously seemed to be narrowing the scope of ideas they judged acceptable in accordance with the reigning wisdom of the current leftist movement. The intellectuals you describe in Russia who realized they had to follow the people even when they disagreed with them are examples to me of intellectuals who have made a clear choice to prioritize the political over the intellectual. I think the choice is defensible. But it’s pretty straightforward to me that if you pretend publicly it isn’t a choice at all—and that those who disagree with you don’t just have a different perspective but are “wrong” in some metaphysical or moral sense—then you are injecting some level of dishonesty into the intellectual conversation.

Before closing I want to address, however inadequately I can do it here, the broader questions you ask about the compatibility of socialist politics and intellectual life, and the future of American culture more generally. And I can start with a point of full agreement. We are both interested in, as you put it, “democratizing ‘higher’ forms of culture, resisting their elite rarification, and mobilizing the intellectual resources of the humanities” to enrich public culture. One of the central objectives of The Point has always been to model a maximally inclusive kind of public intellectual conversation, and I know this is an objective many socialists throughout history have also pursued. When I say that intellectual life is “inherently elitist,” all I mean is that I think geniuses and truly “great” works of art and philosophy exist, and that it is wrong and counterproductive to pretend that there is no hierarchy of value within the humanities. Occasionally, in the wake of postmodernism, people who call themselves socialists or leftists have argued such things, or have attempted to undermine the idea of greatness within the humanities, but I do not take this to be any kind of core socialist tenet. And to the extent that having a socialist approach to intellectual life just means advocating for conditions where the most people can participate in humanistic discussion and reflection, socialism and a more inclusive intellectual life are clearly complementary. What inspired the line that you quote from “Tired of Winning,” about the “contradiction” of socialists often advocating for a world that would not include their current cultural privileges and tastes, was more a sociological than a logical observation, which has been suggested at other points in this discussion. To sum it up I might say that, on social or cultural issues, the leftist intellectual spaces I observed in the late 2010s were not exactly models of tolerance or inclusivity, which made me doubt whether many of the millennial socialist intellectuals would actually be satisfied with the results of the kind of democratized culture they claimed to want. But that was meant as a contingent point about a specific scene, not a perennial one about socialists.

Was it, as you ask, “inherently misguided” for millennial socialist intellectuals to try and change “American culture and politics”? I don’t think it was inherently misguided to try and change American politics. And in fact, I think it’s important now, at a moment when the millennial left is coming in for a lot of criticism (including in this conversation), to acknowledge that it was by many measures, and against tough odds, an extremely successful movement—probably the most successful intellectual-political movement in my lifetime. And American politics do need to change! I think the attempt to change American culture was more questionable, and also was carried out in a clumsier way. Perhaps above all, it was the conflation of the political with the cultural and intellectual battles that, in my view, ended up adding a degree of unnecessary difficulty to the (already quite challenging) political project you were undertaking while at the same time producing what I’ve described as corrosive effects in our intellectual discourse. It’s not that I deny there are connections to be made between politics, culture, and intellectual life. But I don’t think the millennial left ever worked out in a convincing way how all its cultural interventions—say, into how we were supposed to talk about art, or gender, or what books should be on English syllabi—were meant to aid the political project, and this made the militancy with which they tended to comment on such matters all the more frustrating. I share your sense that the early 2000s were a time when culture was depoliticized to a fault. That was definitely part of what made the early n+1, which dared to bring some kind of left-of-liberal political perspective back to culture criticism, so exciting and influential. But by the late 2010s, we were in a very different moment. And I don’t think the drive to politicize everything ended up being any better for culture than the apolitical phase was.

I’m finding it hard to figure out how to end this—there seems like so much more we could explore. I don’t want to conclude though without responding to something that struck me in your last paragraph. That was the line about the desire of the socialist intellectuals to be treated as “European mandarins,” but instead having to contend with the “hostility” of American culture. It struck me because, although in one sense I know what you’re talking about, I’ve never actually felt that the majority of Americans are hostile to intellectuals. Or, maybe more precisely, I’ve never felt that they are hostile to thinking. I know this can sound incredibly naive, and of course there are tons of forces that obstruct vibrant intellectual life in America. There is also an ingrained thread of skepticism about people who inhabit the official role of “intellectual,” of the kind Hofstadter writes about. I’m not denying these things. Still, I’m ultimately sympathetic to Tocqueville’s observation that “America is one of the countries in the world where philosophy is least studied, and where the precepts of Descartes are best applied.” I think there are few places where people are more committed to living in relation to ideas—which of course doesn’t mean they always know where to find good ideas, or how to separate the simulacra of intellectual activity from the genuine thing. But that in itself describes, I think, a natural task for American intellectuals. And in service of this task I guess I see a third option beyond the two you offer of either resigning ourselves to alienation from America, or trying to change it. I think we can accept that we are American intellectuals and not European ones, and take part in the very American tradition of opting out, so to speak, from the structures that we feel are hostile to genuine intellectual life, including the “hyperpoliticized digital sphere.” This doesn’t have to mean going to live alone in the woods (as Thoreau never quite did anyway), or even going fully offline (although some people are doing this)—and it doesn’t mean having to disengage from political commentary, either, although it perhaps mandates caution about some forms of political-intellectual activity. What it means to me is being deliberate about the portion of the public intellectual discourse that we have some control over, and using it to the best of our ability to model a more depthful, adventurous, and pluralistic cultural conversation than what most Americans are exposed to in their day-to-day lives. One aspect of that might be showing what it looks like to have productive dialogues both with ourselves and with others, including those we disagree with—which is something I think our generation of intellectuals could have been better at doing than we all were in the late 2010s. Fortunately we’ve still got some time.

Read parts I and II of this dialogue.

Jon Baskin

This is helpful for understanding how the millennial left saw its project, including both the opportunities and the challenges that it was presented with in trying to build its coalition between downwardly mobile white collar workers (and grad students) and the “traditional working class.” I think it’s also a good setup for what I want to ask in this round about the second topic you focus on in your note: how the millennial left dealt with the rise of identitarianism or “wokeness.” You say that “just because you get into a PhD program at Harvard or freelance for a magazine doesn’t mean you don’t come from a rural town or aren’t still part of a community that includes your blue-collar or Trump-voting relatives,” and that it was in part your ability to connect with those relatives on the leftist economic message that made you optimistic that you could overcome the cultural divide between you and form a political coalition. But it’s exactly in a situation like this that I would imagine the raft of cultural attitudes that came to be known as wokeness would exacerbate the challenge of overcoming that cultural divide, regardless of the comity you could find on economic issues.

In your Substack note, you acknowledge that the left’s perceived embrace of wokeness made things harder for leftists because it associated them in people’s minds with “orthodoxy” or “the establishment.” In response you suggest that this was something of a false perception. For one thing, you say wokeness did not originate on the left, but rather that its “loudest champions in the public sphere were institutional liberal media types that were often anti-socialist or at least anti-Bernie, the Hillary and Kamala 1.0 acolytes in the press.” For another you note that the “actual” left had a “critique of neoliberal identity politics, woke capitalism, all those post-left bugbears, from the beginning.” You then add two caveats: 1) that the left did include some people who embraced woke rhetoric, and 2) that there was a strategic embrace of some of it in response to the left being accused of racism and sexism in the Bernie Bro era.

I agree that it’s far too simple to say that wokeness originated on or was ever the exclusive preserve of the left, but I think this way of putting it risks understating things in the other direction. Some of this has to do, I guess, with which ideas count as “woke”—a notoriously slippery question! I don’t know if you see the defund the police movement, or the prison abolition movement, or the push for open borders as woke—probably there are both “woke” and non-woke articulations of these ideas—but I would say that they all draw on left intellectual traditions and often found their most forceful advocates on the intellectual left in those years. And then there was also the fact that concepts like “intersectionality” and “white privilege,” even if they got taken up and vulgarized by institutional liberals, leveraged a vocabulary that came from academics who claimed to be on the left. So I think there was a lot that from the outside could look legitimately muddled about how far the left was implicated in this set of ideas.

In theory, this should have only raised the stakes for leftist intellectuals at that time to actually explain where they stood. This is where I suppose the second caveat comes in, and I can certainly see how the Bernie Bro smears created incentives to downplay objections to woke ideas, or just to avoid talking about them. But this doesn’t fully make sense of what I remember seeing at the time, which was not only that younger leftist intellectuals seemed reluctant to take definitive stands on identitarian ideas but also that, in many cases, they mounted vicious attacks against anyone who did try to start a discussion about them. In other words, the dominant approach from the left intelligentsia at that time seemed to be a fairly insistent anti-anti-wokeness.

It’s true that some left critiques of identity politics did eventually surface along the lines you reference, but I can’t have been the only one to notice how long it took for most leftists to even acknowledge publicly that How to Be an Antiracist did not in fact offer a fruitful way of thinking about racism in America, and that was low-hanging fruit. (Meanwhile, there was about one article per week attacking Thomas Chatterton Williams, whose book on transcending race had basically zero pickup in the wider culture.) Likewise I would have thought the erection of elaborate DEI bureaucracies, especially at universities, would have been met with withering criticism from a left that claimed to be suspicious of technocratic solutions to social problems, and yet, in the leftist magazines I read (with the occasional exception of Jacobin) there was for a long time almost complete silence on the matter, alongside a steady stream of attacks and innuendo directed toward those who did raise questions about them.

So I am curious to hear you expand on what you said in the note about the determining factors in how the millennial left approached this issue, perhaps accounting for the strength of what I’m calling the anti-anti-wokeness approach. Just to be clear, I am not saying that the millennial left should or could have disavowed everything that was ever called “woke.” There were plenty of serious and important discussions going on in those years about racism, misogyny, immigration, history, and so on—and I don’t mean to shovel them all, as some right-wingers do, into the same bucket. But there was also lots of stuff getting a lot of attention that was really dumb! And going back to that scene with you and your Trumpist relatives, I imagine it would have been helpful in forging the solidaristic economic coalition if the left you were representing had been able to credibly distance itself from the most extreme or incoherent ideas that came out of wokeism, as well as the moralizing and judgmental tone in which those ideas were often conveyed.

Before finishing up, though, I want to be clear about what my main stake in all this was. I had no idea, at the time, whether it was smart, stupid, or a total wash, strategically speaking, for leftist intellectuals to stay on side, so to speak, with the adherents of wokeness. What I had much stronger feelings about was my sense that, in the intellectual world, such strategic considerations were keeping us from being able to have a more honest and critical debate about a set of ideas that had suddenly become culturally central, including about what in them was serious vs. what was incoherent and silly. (This was part of the impetus behind “Tired of Winning.”) I suppose it could be considered part of my incorrigible liberalism that I had confidence such a conversation would be valuable regardless of its political impact, but looking back on this period, I still see it as a missed opportunity for intellectuals of all political stripes in our (broadly speaking) social world to have demonstrated how we could help people to better understand and evaluate a series of ideas that, to many of them, were new, confusing, and increasingly pervasive. (Speaking of the people “back home,” I remember going home myself to Chicago in 2021 or 2022 and finding out that my urban professional friends from my progressive high school were turning to Bari Weiss or Jordan Peterson for help understanding the new ideas they were encountering in their workplace or at their kid’s schools, and feeling like this signaled a real failure of the intellectual world that I considered myself a part of.)

So I also wonder what your perspective is on what made discussing those particular ideas so uniquely difficult, especially within left and liberal intellectual spaces in that period. You mentioned in your note that wokeness actually split both the left and liberalism, and that seems exactly right. I’d add that it contributed to the backlash against both the left and liberalism that we are living through the consequences of right now. But it’s still not totally clear to me what allowed those ideas to be so destructive within both ideological groups, and of course between them.

David Sessions

Rather than quote extensively, I’m going to summarize what I think are the argumentative points in your response and address them in turn:

1. “Wokeness” may have not come entirely from the left, but at the very least was mixed up in left ideas, spaces, or groups, to the point it was not inaccurate to associate wokeness and the left the way people broadly do today.

2. Leftists were hesitant to criticize wokeness even if they disagreed with it; their position can best be described as “anti-anti-wokeness.” This may have cut against their goal of a solidaristic economic project that involved people who were culturally turned off by wokeness and some of the extreme ideas associated with it.

3. The way this manifested in intellectual life was that everyone was so concerned with strategy that substantive debates about some of this stuff were limited or impossible.

The gist of my response will be that all three points are at least half true, or true in a certain sense, but that I’m not sure how things could have been significantly different, or that a different political outcome would have followed from different intellectual behavior.

Point 1. Let me just start by saying what wokeness is, to the extent it’s even possible to define it. For me it was always more of a style than a substance: a type of performative political posturing that embraces an extreme, reductionist type of standpoint epistemology. It is also a style of combat often known as “cancel culture.” I don’t think that style is congenitally related to left politics; it emerged from the red-in-tooth-and-claw battle for attention on digital platforms. But is indelibly associated with online social justice politics, so it would be ridiculous to say it has nothing to do with leftism. This style, learned on the internet, is also prominent in left organizing spaces of all kinds populated by people millennial-age and younger, though mercifully—mostly—not the particular ones I was involved in. All that to say, I can accept calling those behaviors “leftist” even if neo-fascists, Swifties, YouTubers who cover the drama in TikTok mansions, and others have long done versions of the same thing.

Now, I think it is much harder to say whether a policy idea is “woke,” and there it is important to remember that the concept was given its protean, all-purpose political battle sense by the right. In the period we’re discussing, wokeness had not quite gelled into what it is now. And even though people are already memory-holing this today, the progressive ideas and movements that are now associated with “wokeness” were not as obviously unpopular in the 2016-2020 period as they are now. The George Floyd protests in 2020 were a mass movement, and brought the largest domestic deployment of the military in U.S. history. The scale of the militarized state violence against Americans expressing their opinions was shocking to everyone. It was a vertiginous moment to live through, and lots of people went through their own kind of reckoning, even if something like “defund the police” was never broadly popular. That’s why books by people like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi flew off the shelves; the people buying them were liberals and normie Americans! Only after that did the right really start making “wokeness” a brand: the Clubhouse event where Christopher Rufo was rallying the right to a strategy of generating battle-concepts like “critical race theory” and “wokeness” was in 2021.

Point 2. I bring that up as a reminder that that earlier moment felt very different than things did by the 2024 election. Obviously 1) the woke style of social justice politics existed, and 2) so did fairly radical ideas like defunding the police, and those were reasonably associated with left academia and organizing. But I’m not sure all this formed a clear “woke” package that socialist intellectuals could have successfully spoken out against. The left does, after all, believe racism is a serious matter, and the fact that millions of Americans were paying attention to it was an exciting opportunity, the kind of political moment where you try to expand your imagination to encompass what is happening organically. As for myself, I would agree my instinct was to be “anti-anti-woke,” but that was because anti-wokeness was so clearly a right-wing strategy. Rufo et al were very explicit that they wanted to delegitimize any discussion of racism whatsoever, and connected it to the muzzling of teachers and destruction of unions. And the center-right liberals who would become the “anti-woke” media complex were not much better; people like Andrew Sullivan and Bari Weiss spoke as if even using the term “white supremacy” about the United States was an outrageous smear rather than the most banal of empirical facts. So I think it’s fairly obvious why some of us on the left felt that we were, for better or worse, on the same side as someone like Nikole Hannah-Jones, who I would call “woke” both in the sense that she embraces the racial-pessimist view of American politics and is a performative, censorious, bad-faith participant in online debate.

That said, I don’t think your characterization is quite accurate that the left were all circling the wagons around wokeness back then. Before the 2020 election there was surely a cautious desire to “stay together” in a loose strategic sense, but there was vigorous debate at the intellectual level. There was an extremely passionate and wide-ranging conflict about the 1619 Project. Socialist-adjacent publications like Jacobin, Dissent, and the New Republic were all at times critical of trendy antiracism discourse; I don’t think it’s true that Kendi long went unchallenged. (Among many others, I would point to Matt Karp and Nikhil Pal Singh.) The left very broadly and vociferously pushed back against the liberal attempt to pathologize Americans as congenitally, incurably racist. But we did to some extent have to respond to the conditions on the ground. That’s why I insisted in my original note that we not forget how broadly popular antiracism was, including among voters and in the establishment part of the Democratic Party and their donors (who the right took to calling “woke capital,” which the left also criticized). That was the challenge: antiracism was motivating people to action, and it’s something we also care about, even if there were versions of it that were theoretically weak or seemed strategically less effective.

Point 3. This gets to your final point, which I think is the real core of your concern, and the argument of your 2018 piece, which was a frustration with what you see as the predominance of strategic thinking over substantive debate. I’ll absolutely concede that it was a hothouse intellectual environment that could be hostile to people who weren’t seen as “on the team.” (My response to your piece at the time is a case in point about that “vibe,” even if I am reiterating a gentler version of its substance here.) I’ve tried to argue so far that that “strategy” dimension was both real—realer than I admitted in 2018—and was also not quite as corrosive to debate as you made it out to be. My guess is that you are less concerned that what left intellectuals did had X negative strategic consequences for their project, which cannot really be demonstrated, and more that what they did contravened your vision of what intellectuals are for. So maybe I’ll say more about how my own understanding of what intellectuals are for has shifted since then and turn back to some questions for you about that vision.

In the 2016-2020 period, I explicitly modeled myself on the “party intellectual” in the Communist sense, even though my own sensibilities have always been—like those of many party intellectuals of the past—instinctively liberal and oriented toward intellectual freedom rather than political instrumentalism. The history of the left is rich with people who tried to square that circle, to negotiate the competing roles of political prophecy and political science. Marxist theory had a sociological critique of intellectuals—one that came in vulgar, reductionist versions and more sophisticated versions—as potentially useful but also usually unreliable because of their bourgeois ideology of intellectual freedom (which usually happens to align with what the dominant interests in society want to hear). As I wrote in my “autocritique” of my intellectual practice in that period, I was trying an experiment, to be both as rational and objective as possible, but in the service of a political mission; I wanted ideas to be good and rigorous, yes, but I wanted to ally them with a mission we might call propagandistic.

And that certainly meant the “strategic” emphasis that you disliked back then, and that I am less beholden to now, even if I don’t think we can directly blame any particular failure on it. A party intellectual, in my understanding, was not their own, they were a vessel of the movement and tried to use their intellect to sharpen and steer it. They were an idealist who put their elite tools in the service of the less privileged, which was possible because of their own intermediary position between the elite and the people. I was thinking about socialist-adjacent European intellectuals in my dissertation, and also had in mind China Mieville’s October, which presented Lenin and the Bolsheviks not as top-down dictators, but intellectual-organizers who were dragged along by the demands of the people, and sometimes had to give up their own theory about what was ideal and meet the moment. The Socialist Revolutionary Party was in crucial moments bigger and to the Bolsheviks’ left, and wanted things Lenin’s party thought it wasn’t the right time for. But it became clear that the revolution was happening with or without them, and they had to compromise.

That’s how I saw some of the wokeness stuff, for a while: this is what the people are doing, and it would be pointless to tell them they’re wrong; instead we have to use it the best we can and educate them toward a higher version of it. That didn’t mean no arguments about it or no attempt to steer in a certain direction; I think we had many of those. I don’t think even now that being committed to a project and strategic about it is an illegitimate form of intellectual practice, especially when it is done thoughtfully; virtuous intellects always have to weigh aims that are in tension with each other and do the best they can in each unique case. You can’t just throw up liberal-humanist platitudes about intellectual freedom as if they answer every question, because they don’t—intellectuals are never really “free.” But it did perhaps mean a certain narrowness of vision and a somewhat myopic hostility to people who weren’t focused on that mission in a particular way.

My own shift since then has been mostly a personal one of accepting my vocation as a generalist public intellectual, not an activist or adviser to a movement. I’m aware that that follows a now-clichéd historical script of intellectual burnout with left political engagement. But I’ve tried not to present it as some road-to-Damascus conversion to a righteous liberal humanism. I respect people who do serious work with activist aims, and of course we still just as much need rigorous work on labor, economics, global governance, and all the things we focused on in the socialist moment. But personally I’m just not going to worry if what interests me is directly instrumentalizable by a movement; if I want to read Plato or write about literature, and that is not directly political, then so be it—it is valuable nonetheless. I would never have become a leftist in the first place without a Great Books education. How I would put it now is that my work is not apolitical or anti-political, but tries not to be hyperpolitical. But I can’t really blame anyone for being intensely politically focused during an intensely political, historic moment in American politics—or say that such a thing won’t happen again. Some of this is cyclical: certain ways of seeing things may be right but have diminishing returns as they calcify through repetition, and one needs a breath of fresh air.

Read the next and final part of this conversation here.

Jon Baskin

This exchange was inspired by a note you wrote responding to a post by and a podcast conversation between and . Both the post and the podcast were about parts of the late 2010s millennial left that had either broken off and moved to the right or, in the case of the “post-left,” had sought to distinguish themselves from the “professional-managerial class” within the left. You present your note as an attempt to work “toward a better sociology of the current intellectual configuration,” and it is written from the perspective of an insider, someone who was at the center of what critics call the “PMC left” or what you have called, in previous writing, the “new socialist activist-intelligentsia.” I’m most interested in two defenses or “clarifications” that you make from that perspective. One has to do with the way that the socialist intellectuals thought about their relationship with the “traditional working class,” and the other with how they related to identity politics (later “wokeness”).

Having been an editor at The Point during the late 2010s, these parts of the note hit on topics that I’ve long been curious about. The Point, I would say, had a kind of insider / outsider relationship with this neo-socialist intelligentsia, which was much more closely associated with magazines like n+1, Dissent, Jacobin, the post-Wieseltier New Republic, and the Nation. We knew people and published writers who were part of it, but as the 2010s wore on it became increasingly clear that our projects were quite different, and at times we became antagonists—at least within the small world (though it seemed to be growing, at that time) at the crossroads of academia and intellectual publishing. My goal in revisiting that moment in this conversation is partly to help advance your sociology of the present, though in addition I was hoping to get a clearer picture of the discussions and strategy of that neo-socialist left, much of which still seems relevant to our intellectual life today. You say in your note that it’s easier to “play a self-righteous blame game” than to admit that “we tried something and it failed,” which I agree with. And I am not writing this at all from the perspective of someone who thinks they knew what the right way forward would have been politically—for the left or for any of us—at that moment. At the same time, I’m wary of how quickly a narrative seems to be hardening—for instance it is assumed in this post-election piece by Gabe Winant—that the millennial left in those years was mostly a victim of forces outside of its control, and bears no responsibility whatsoever for the course that political life has taken in the time since. Of course there is a grain of truth to this analysis. But I think it risks obscuring the field of options that were available to left intellectuals at a moment when they / you had built a pretty strong activist movement, and where there might have been room to act or speak differently.

We’ll get to the role of identitarianism or wokeness later on, but I want to start with your response to the charge that the neo-socialist left was a fundamentally fraudulent or hypocritical project, on the grounds that it was led by elites who never truly cared about the plight of the working class. This is a central part of the “post-left” critique, as it is of many who ultimately drifted toward the new right. You respond in your note that, in fact, those at the center of the intellectual left at that time were “very aware of the issue of their education and perceived (if not actual) insider status,” and were engaged in a self-conscious experiment whose goal was to create a coalition between themselves and the “more traditional working class.” That’s mainly to say, they were not cynical or self-deluded about what they were trying to do, something that strikes me as both accurate and important to say. I always think “bad faith” is a poor and lazy frame for thinking about political movements (in part because every movement has its share of it), and it seems especially inapt for millennial socialism, which was notable in no small part for its extremely high—sometimes annoyingly high!—level of sincerity.

That said, I am interested to hear more about how you all, having acknowledged the challenge of bridging the gap between yourselves and a class of people with very different educations, work experiences, and (in most cases) class backgrounds, thought this experiment was supposed to work. Especially given that you espoused a heavily materialist view of political interest and struggle. In your note, you suggest a gap between the “perceived” and the “actual” status of the neo-socialist intellectuals, and I felt in that distinction the echo of an argument I remember being made often in those years. I first encountered it in a 2013 n+1 editorial about “the proletarianization of intellectuals,” which suggested that graduate students, assistant professors, and some magazine editors were, far from being part of an elite, on their way to becoming part of a downwardly mobile segment of the middle class (or PMC) and therefore increasingly in class alignment with the traditional working class—in other words, not really insiders at all. If you believed this, then it followed that writers for magazines like n+1 could be what you, quoting Gramsci in an article for the New Republic four years later, called “organic intellectuals,” who were licensed to speak for the broader working class by the fact that they were dealing with similar economic conditions.

Insofar as I understood it, I always found this argument dubious. For one thing, I knew enough about at least some of these grad students and magazine editors to know they were not living economically precarious lives, and certainly not lives that had anything in common with, say, Amazon warehouse workers. Secondly, and more importantly from my perspective, the argument seemed to elide the significant cultural differences between the intellectual left and the majority of the people this left often claimed to speak for—differences that, I believed at the time and believe even more strongly now, cannot simply be subsumed into some solidaristic economic project, even if such a project could be agreed upon. Unlike the post-left, I never attributed the weaknesses of this argument to bad faith; it seems to me rather to spring from a genuine attempt to address a perennial challenge for intellectuals on the left. From an intellectual perspective, though, the argument I described above always struck me as a species of wish fulfillment. It sure would be convenient if student debt and declining job prospects meant that a Yale graduate student was no longer an elite! Whereas if this was not really tenable, then something else was required, which was for the neo-socialist intellectuals to grapple honestly with their position as elites both within their political coalition and, culturally speaking, in society at large. In the years since, as you well know, the notion of the millennial left having been a fundamentally “elitist” or establishment project has hardened, which I don’t think is entirely fair. But I suspect that the refusal to forthrightly acknowledge that it was led by some kind of “elite”—even if it was not the same elite who worked at Goldman Sachs—contributed to a decline in its credibility, especially as this broader criticism became more common.

I’ll close here by asking first what you think of this paraphrase of what I took to be the strategy in those years, and if you had something like that in mind when you made the distinction, in your note, about the perceived vs. actual status of the neo-socialist intellectuals. I’m sure there are elements I’m missing, or conversations you had with each other that did not make it into public-facing magazine articles, and I’m curious about those. But whatever you judge the main strategy to have been for bridging the gap between the intellectuals and the working class, I’d like to hear more about where you think it was most (and least) successful, and what you think of it looking back now.

David Sessions

Your first question is about the education or, we might say, the cultural status of what I called the socialist “activist-intelligentsia” and their self-conscious project of forging a political coalition with the more traditional working class. I’ll elaborate a bit more on the thinking behind that, and then address your question of how to assess that in retrospect: Was there anything we could have done differently? Or, to state more precisely what I think is the core of your question: Did we ignore, or were we too optimistic about, the obstacle that our “elite” cultural status posed to our project?

You summarized a view we might call “the proletarianization of intellectuals” that suggests “graduate students, assistant professors, and some magazine editors were, far from being part of an elite, on their way to becoming part of a downwardly mobile segment of the middle class (or PMC) and therefore increasingly in class alignment with the traditional working class–in other words, not really insiders at all.” That is a basically accurate summary of our view of the material forces behind the moment we were acting in. It wasn’t just academia or “intellectuals”; there were indications that a significant swath of white-collar workers of all kinds were feeling squeezed and, as a result, were more open to political radicalism. I think that’s pretty clear in the past decade’s burst of white-collar unionization; unionization is difficult work that people don’t really bother with if they don’t have a material motivation. Student debt was probably a significant material factor: lots of people who should be comfortably middle-class based on their education and skills are not on its account.

You write that you found this argument “dubious,” that “at least some of these grad students and magazine editors […] were not living economically precarious lives, and certainly not lives that had anything in common with, say, Amazon warehouse workers.” There were certainly individuals for whom that’s true, but that’s not the whole picture. Not everyone on the socialist left was a writer or intellectual, and even the ones who were were not all at elite universities or had, say, parents who paid for their college or bought them an apartment. (The PhD students at my university who had those were not socialists and were, predictably, the hardest to convince to join the union!) Our PhD students made about $25,000 per year, sometimes with heavy teaching loads as instructors of record, not just teaching assistants. Some had families, and almost all did lots of outside gig work to make ends meet. By mid-PhD I had reached a point where I wasn’t economically precarious, but only because I had a partner with a regular job. We still both had student loans and credit card debt from the cost of living in expensive cities early in our careers (when we both had white-collar jobs).

Being a PhD student certainly isn’t the same as working at an Amazon warehouse, but when you’re organizing a union and interacting with other kinds of workers in that world—nurses, teachers, auto workers, custodial workers, etc.—you see that the core issues are basically the same. A lot of our work as organizers was getting PhD students to recognize the obvious: that, in fact, they were making less than someone who works full-time at Starbucks and white-collar prestige wasn’t paying their rent. To speak more specifically of the intellectuals within that cohort, its “organic intellectuals,” if you will, I think a lot of our optimism about crossing those cultural divides came from that concrete experience of political education and organizing. You see real people on the ground change their minds and embrace a different framing for their interests, so you know it is possible. You see that you can build collective power without everyone being exactly the same or participating for the same reasons. The institution—in this case, the union—creates common ground between people who are otherwise siloed in different occupational settings and have different cultures.

That optimism about creating solidarity came mostly from organizing our peers in academia, but it extended to other people that are too definitively assumed to be vastly culturally different from us. In your 2018 piece on these themes, you wrote that all left intellectuals have “emancipated themselves culturally” from the classes they claim to speak for. That’s true in a sense, but again is only part of the story. Just because you get into a PhD program at Harvard or freelance for a magazine doesn’t mean you don’t come from a rural town or aren’t still part of a community that includes your blue-collar or Trump-voting relatives. Personally, the fact that my Trumpist relatives instinctively agreed with so much of my socialist politics gave me hope that cultural divides were not insurmountable. People take potshots at Gabe Winant for being such an activist-intellectual when he went to Yale and had professor parents, but I’m not aware of many people in my academic socialist milieu who spent more time talking to workers outside our milieu. I hope he doesn’t mind me speaking in this familiar way, but I thought he could connect with people in trailer parks in New Hampshire in ways I couldn’t partly because he was a historian and knew everything about labor conflicts past and present—in other words, because of the “culture” that is supposed to put him on the other side of some unbridgeable chasm.

Now obviously none of that was enough to make our “solidaristic economic project” victorious in the past decade. I didn’t convince any of my Trumpist relatives to vote for Clinton or Biden, though I did convince the more centrist ones to vote for Bernie in the primaries. That was disappointing, but I don’t think anyone on the socialist left found it surprising. A lot of us realized that we were trying to rebuild institutional power bases in a couple of election cycles that had atrophied for half a century or more. (The revanchist right-wing project, whether plutocracy or social conservatism, took decades to come to its current fruition.) I still think a solidaristic economic project is theoretically possible, even if it is more difficult than we imagined. If the upshot of Gabe’s post-election analysis you cited is that the results of the past few years were mostly due to forces beyond the left’s control, I agree with him—though I am perhaps less convinced that the Democratic Party behaving differently would have changed the outcome, either. The results of the last few elections mostly confirmed the obvious: that the left was as politically weak as, in our most realistic moments, we feared.

If you’re looking for me to concede something about “what the left got wrong,” I’ll speak for myself: I had an overly economistic analysis of the class forces in play, say, the economic rapprochement of downwardly mobile white-collar workers with the “actual” working class. Maybe I also had a Marxist strategic faith that those two somehow inherently want to come together, like magnets sliding toward each other, as they align in economic sociology. That’s something Marxists have been predicting since the “new working class” debates of the 1960s-1970s, which figured centrally in my dissertation. (I heard at least one academic socialist say, “Maybe they were right, just not at the time.”) In my world, there were at least tentative indications that might be happening: all kinds of people with fairly high-paying white-collar jobs were doing side gigs to raise families and overcoming their skepticism of socialism in genuine desperation.

But I also wrote about sociologists who pioneered the study of white-collar workers, and the “cultural” differences between white- and blue-collar workers were attested as early as the 1950s; education, the setting in which one works and the perceptions of cultural status that are attached to it, are all real. “Perceived” class positions matter as much as “actual” ones. All across the Western world, education is now a divide that cuts awkwardly across classes as understood in a more traditional Marxist sociology; education strongly correlates with voting for left parties, even though lots of those voters are actually pretty centrist—say, wealthy suburbanites who are culturally progressive but also hate taxes or oppose Medicare for All. That creates some sticky issues or double binds—wokeism or a certain way of talking about identity that is now de rigueur in the white-collar world, or the EU in Europe—where educated people, including many educated socialists, are on the opposite cultural “side” from the traditional working classes. Ever since the decline of unions and Communist and socialist parties, left coalitions have had to triangulate between remnants of the working class and new white-collar strata; America has its particular structural difficulties with its two amalgam parties that are subservient to two different parts of capital. That creates difficult issues of both strategy and principle: socialists may not like neoliberal identity politics or the EU in its current form, but we need voters who do and, in principle, we are rightly hesitant to make concessions to racism and nationalism. But I don’t think the 2010s socialist left in the U.S. was blind to any of that; I think it was a serious attempt to navigate conditions that proved to be just as difficult as we had down on paper, even if for a moment it felt like maybe a miracle was happening.

Read the next part of this conversation here.

This is the second post in the Point’s Substack. Check out our introduction to learn more about how we intend to use this space.

Becca Rothfeld: In my first foray, I thought I’d start by restating the position I first articulated on my Substack, so as to allow readers of the magazine who aren’t on the site to catch up. Ultimately, I think we both agree that Substack is valuable. Where we disagree, maybe, is on the question of whether Substack is valuable in the same ways and for the same reasons that magazines and newspapers are valuable. My initial suspicion is that, most of the time, it is not.

As I see it, Substack is in many ways the heir to both pre-Trump Twitter (when it was populated by writers and intellectuals and was mercifully free of “thought leaders”) and the blogs of the early aughts (when they were anarchic and a little less smoothly professionalized than blogs tend to be today). In other words, Substack is a dynamic forum where writers congregate to air their unfiltered grievances, publish their weirdest prose and, crucially, participate in their favorite pastime: arguing.

Inevitably, then, a lot of the discourse on Substack is about the medium itself—its possibilities, its limitations, its role in the literary ecosystem. I am not exempt from déformation professionnelle, in this case a tendency toward neurotic self-examination, and in my initial posts, I ventured a qualified apologia for legacy media. (You might point out that this is a funny thing to do on Substack, and you would be right.)

In a way, it’s misleading to say that I defended legacy publications, because my view does not commit me to celebrating actually existing newspapers and magazines. Rather, what I mean to be defending is what I called the “institutional model”—one in which publications with fact-checkers, editors and some measure of material resources gather work from different writers in one place, support in-depth reporting and edit raw drafts. Plenty of independent literary publications conform to this model, many of them newcomers.

Writing on Substack is, by and large, produced under different conditions. (It bears noting that Substack is, after all, just a platform, and it hosts publications that conform more closely to the institutional model, such as the Free Press. For my purposes, however, these just count as falling on the institutional side of the dichotomy.) On the site, an “influencer model” tends to prevail. That is to say, on Substack and platforms like it, mavericks write their own newsletters without gatekeepers or guardrails.

To be sure, the influencer model has its benefits. It allows writers excluded from traditional venues to enter into the fray; it fosters editorial independence and independence of thought; and it permits established writers to publish more daring and adventurous work. The most interesting thing about it, at least to me, is that it enables us to watch writers shaping themselves into characters in real time. Some of my favorite works of literature—Eve Babitz’s sparkling writing about Los Angeles, Colette’s autofictional novels—succeed precisely because they involve such inspired performances of personality. If Babitz were writing online today, we’d probably say that her writing invites a kind of parasocial attachment. That’s an aesthetic merit.

But character creation is not without its risks. An environment that prizes displays of personality sometimes rewards careless exaggeration for the sake of the bit. (I’ve succumbed to these sorts of baser temptations myself, as you know.) And I think there are also structural features of the institutional model that allow it to foster a different and often deeper sort of writing. When it comes to reporting, money and material support are indispensable. It’s hard to imagine a lone wolf on Substack reporting effectively from a war zone, for instance. When it comes to the reading experience, it’s often more pleasant to read articles from different people that are all concentrated in one place. And I think editing almost always improves writing (I say this both as an editor and an editee).

Perhaps above all, I retain a sentimental attachment to the communal aspects of writing. I like talking ideas over with an editor. I like changing my mind in response to critiques. I like the almost sensual friction of encounters with another mind.

But of course, we’re in the process of changing each other’s minds right now—and this exchange began on Substack!

Sam Kahn: So I’ll pick up with where we agree and then move on from there. I’m glad you think Substack is valuable! And I can certainly concede the other side of the coin, that it’s very hard for individuals, on Substack or elsewhere, to replace an essentially group and institutional activity like a large news-gathering organization.

I would chip away there slightly that it’s a bit of an unfair fight that you’re proposing. Many of the legacy publications— the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc.—have been around for 150 years and to a great extent survive off that accrued authority (and the deep-pocketed individuals who have been willing to subsidize them). The Substack “publications” aren’t exactly imitating the older institutions. They believe that the distribution channel of the internet—and of a platform like Substack—allows them to be far more light-footed than their older competitors. They can have fact-checking, editing, original reporting and all of the good things, but they don’t need to be weighed down by office space or bureaucracy or the kinds of cash barriers that are distinctive to legacy media. There actually already is war reporting on Substack, and investigative reporting by experienced reporters, and there’s only going to be more as time goes by. You do slightly have to know where to look, though.

But the real point of contention here isn’t so much about reporting. It’s about underlying mindset. My argument is that you (and you’re certainly not alone in this) are vastly underestimating the potential of what Substack represents. You’ve written, “substack is a glorified blogging platform lol.” But I think you’re operating by analogy to recent models of discourse—to 2000s-era blogging or 2010s “influencing”—as opposed to thinking about what the form itself suggests. Substack is the blank page hooked up to the Internet. That’s the long and short of it, and if you think about that that’s unbelievably powerful—and also something that has never existed before. We didn’t have that in the long era of the printing press when the cost of producing and distributing books gave publishers tremendous oversight over what went out. We didn’t have that in the era of printed newspapers when the power of public discourse was consolidated in a newspaper office. We didn’t have that in the first round of social media, when discourse was severely constrained by character counts, etc. And we didn’t really have that in 2000s blogging when you needed a degree of technical savvy to set up a site—which tended to self-select the kinds of people who blog.

With Substack, the internet has reached a certain level of maturity where people can say whatever they want to say, at whatever length they want to say it, without requiring technical know-how, and with a decent chance that whatever they put out there will be read. To somebody who loves writing—as much as I know you do—I can’t imagine how that could be anything other than thrilling.

The place of dispute that we get to, then, is why a lot of the writing on the platform isn’t very good. And there a couple of major reasons for this. One is just that there are a lot of people on Substack who aren’t accomplished or professional writers—but this is of course the way it should be! It’s fun for me to read advice for chiefs of staff by other chiefs of staff, or memoirs by people who’ve had interesting lives and haven’t really written before—and never would have had their work picked up by traditional gatekeepers. What this does is it puts the onus on readers to be more wide-ranging and generous readers. You’re right of course that it’s not the same ease of use that you can get in a nicely laid-out newspaper, but what you lose there you gain in diversity of expression. Then, a lot of writers on Substack still have bad habits picked up from blogging or Twitter arguments, but to say this is a feature of the platform is a self-fulfilling loop. If people choose to publish only their “weirdest prose” on Substack—or stick to promotion for their more “serious” work—then, of course, the platform will have real limits. But, more and more, that’s just not the case. As the platform gains in popularity and credibility, more people—self included—are publishing their best work there, and are happy to trade the loss of an (often theoretical) paycheck for editorial freedom and the thriving community that you get in the comments. For me, the central question, then, isn’t about whether the platform is inherently better or worse. The platform is powerful enough that it’s whatever we make of it. The real question is what mindset we have.

This is the first of three exchanges; read the second and the third on The Point website.

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