Disrupted

My friend Johan sent me a copy of Leon Wieseltier’s essay which appeared in the 7 January 2015 New York Times Book Review titled “Among the Disrupted”.  Yesterday morning, I finally got around to opening the attachment.  A ten minute read, it said at the top.  Half-an-hour later I was tempted to fire up the word processor and write an essay of my own.  No, don’t do it, I thought.  Not yet.  Slow down.  Think first, write later.  What’s the hurry?  Why the rush to blog?  I don’t work in a “silent sweatshop” where “words cannot wait for thoughts.”  If I’m going to give my best response to Wieseltier’s essay, then I shouldn’t give my first response.  In the writing life, there is no extra credit for being a first responder.

While I’m sure I’ve seen Leon Wieseltier’s name before — I’ve probably even read some of his work in the past — I’ll admit that his is not a name I carry around in my head, so I had to Google him just to see who it was that I was agreeing with.  Immediately, I discovered that Wieseltier is the former literary editor of The New Republic, a periodical I haven’t thought about in more than ten years.  The “news” was that Wieseltier had recently resigned the editorship he’d held for thirtyish years over “managerial disagreements.”  I suppose I could dig a little deeper and find out what the story is, but I am more interested in the content of Wieseltier’s recent essay, than his recent career moves (though perhaps there is some connection between the two).  Scanning the list of “hits” I saw a link to an article in the New York Observer, a periodical that I used to read regularly, from the 1990s up until about 2005.  It was in the pages of the Observer that I learned about the launch of n+1, which has become my “go-to” journal covering the literary and intellectual scene.  What did the Observer have to say about Wieseltier’s essay?

The piece in the New York Observer is by Matthew Kassel (who?) and bears the provocative title “What was Leon Wieseltier thinking?”.  Kassel describes Wieseltier’s essay as a “seemingly incomprehensible rant against technology.”  Kassel suggests that Wieseltier’s essay is just “the point of view of a bookish old man feeling threatened by the prospect of technological change.”  Scratching my head, I wondered if Kassel and I had read the same essay.

Reading Kassel’s short article I couldn’t help but recall Wieseltier’s words about “journalistic institutions” transformed into “silent sweatshops.”  Perhaps Kassel was writing under a deadline and he just didn’t have time for thought to catch up with his words.  (The poor boy.)

What is valuable about Kassel’s piece is that it reports Mark Grief’s reaction to Wieseltier’s essay — a reaction more nuanced than Kassel’s.  (Mark Grief of a founding and contributing editor at n+1.  Grief’s recently published book, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973, is briefly mentioned by Wieseltier in his essay.  And I believe that Wieseltier’s reaction to Grief might be worth deeper consideration.  Perhaps I’ll return to this later, in a future post.)  But more importantly, Kassel’s chirping cynicism shook me out of my quiet confidence.  Had I read Wieseltier’s essay carefully enough?  Did I miss something?  Had I imposed my own peculiar reading on a flawed text?  Kassel found Wieseltier’s essay “seemingly incomprehensible.”  How was it possible then, that it seem so comprehensible to me?  An image of a naked emperor came to mind.

If I’d been led down the primrose path by Wieseltier, I certainly wanted to find out how he’d managed the trick.  Time to roll up the sleeves and dig back into the essay.  Get the hands dirty.  Read it again, I said to myself.  Look for the flaws, the inherent incoherence, the wooly thinking.

I’ve spent the whole morning going through Wieseltier’s essay again and reading the various (first) responses I could find online.  (See for example the “Letters” section of the New York Times.)  What I’ve discovered is that it doesn’t seem like anyone has actually read Wieseltier’s essay.  They might have looked at the words, but have then really read them?  To read with a view to understand?  Reading these responses leaves me with the impression that the essay was just an excuse for the first-responder to say whatever they felt like saying whether it had any relevance to Wieseltier’s thesis or not.  The critics appear to have willingly reached for the wrong end of the stick.  Even the people who supported Wieseltier’s words appeared to defend him because his thesis resonated with a pet view of their own.  The exchanges I saw on Twitter were truly incomprehensible.  But perhaps that is because I too am a bookish old man who feels threatened by the prospect of technological change.

Alright.  What have I (we?) learned from this rereading and the wider reading of the first-responders?  I’ve said nothing about the content of Wieseltier’s essay.  If we are going to dig more deeply, then we must engage in a little, old fashioned commentary.  Are you up for that?