I wrote about Jordan Peterson! The Point has a Substack!

huge day for public intellectuals, both fake and real

Hi, all. A lot going on today!

First of all, I wrote about Jordan Peterson’s new book. I loved it! Just kidding. It’s pseudo-intellectual dreck, and it’s deflatingly insistent on reducing religion to therapy. (I’m not religious, institutionally, but I feel I am religious, temperamentally; in either case, I have a lot of respect for religion, and I think it’s obscene to flatten God into the only kind of character that Peterson, a scold to the core, is capable of imagining: a reproachful dad .) Nonetheless, I did my best to be charitable to his many devoted fans, because it’s truly tragic that people genuinely searching for answers in the anti-intellectual wasteland of our broader culture are sucked in by his brand of flashy charlatanism instead: https://wapo.st/3ZGSfUT

Which brings me to a highly superior alternative for those in search of public intellectual engagement, the magazine I edit, The Point, which has started a Substack. Please subscribe! The first post is, of course, titled “What Is Substack For?,” and it consists of an extended exchange between me and

Sam Kahn

about the respective roles/merits of Substack and magazines. Please read it!!!!!! Or, better yet, since I’ve always been on the magazine side of this issue, SUBSCRIBE to the magazine!!!!

Finally, there is one further reason that I, personally, am a little wary of publishing longer and less bloggy stuff on Substack. I didn’t include it in the exchange because it’s not really a critique of the structural features of the platform—it’s more of an observation about my own warped psyche that might generalize. (I suspect it does, but I don’t know.)

I spend a lot of my writing life, which is to say my life, because it’s not like I have a non-writing life, juggling two conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, I write to be read, and the way that readers respond to my writing matters to me; indeed, getting the right sort of reader to respond in the right sort of way to my writing is the point of….well, my life. So I try to remain open to criticism. There is something deeply embarrassing about writers like [redacted], who insist that they haven’t achieved mainstream success because publishing is too woke to appreciate their genius when in fact it is obvious that they haven’t achieved mainstream success because their writing is blatantly terrible. Ignoring everything negative that anyone ever says about your writing—convincing yourself that any rejection you ever receive reflects poorly on the rejecter and has nothing whatsoever to do with you—is a recipe for failure and delusion.

On the other hand, it’s undeniable that a lot of people are stupid, tasteless, and wrong, and that taking their complaints to heart (or even wasting time becoming aware of their complaints) is a mistake. No matter how great you are at writing, someone out there is dumb enough to hate you. As of this post, there are 12,217 one-star review of Madame Bovary, a perfect novel, on Goodreads. Every last one of them is wrong. And sometimes, smart people hate you, but you still shouldn’t change what you’re doing. Schopenhauer was incredibly mean about Hegel; Elias Canetti hated T.S. Eliot; Nabokov once said that “Brecht, Faulkner, Camus” and “Mr. Pound, that total fake” “simply do not exist for me.” If Faulkner had gotten wind of Nabokov’s disdain, I think he should’ve carried on doing what he was doing unfazed.

On the other other hand (we’re at three hands now), Flaubert persisted in thinking that his Temptations of Saint Anthony was great even though all of friends tried to gently caution him that it might be a little over the top, and in this case, they were right and he was wrong (in my opinion). So how do you know when to listen to the haters and when to ignore them?

In short, you don’t. I think about the ending of W.S. Merwin’s poem about John Berryman all the time:

I had hardly begun to read

I asked how can you ever be sure

that what you write is really

any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure

you die without knowing

whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don't write

Well, there we have it. I’m not sure! I’ll never be sure! I write anyway! But my admittedly imperfect and provisional solution involves logging the fuck off as much as I can bring myself to do so. It also involves picking a few people whose taste I respect and trust, listening to them, and doing my best to ignore everybody else. At least, that's my solution in theory, because in practice, I read every single line of every single review of my book, including the ones on Goodreads. Do I need to know that someone on there thinks that I am like Susan Sontag, but that this is a bad thing, because Susan Sontag is a pretentious idiot? No. I was purer before I knew that someone felt this way. And yet there it is, this piece of information, emblazoned in my mind forever. I’ve spent at least fifteen minutes, and now another 30 seconds, being annoyed about it. I’ll probably recall it on my deathbed.

Being online all the time makes people, me among them, deranged. There are ways of being deranged that make a person a better writer (actually, most forms of derangement make people better writers), but the proverbial act of “reading the comments” is an exercise in mental illness that almost always makes a person’s writing and thinking worse. Yes, I’m generalizing, and yes, somewhere there exists an exceptional specimen who grows into a better artist and intellectual whenever he reads a nasty comment online. But there is a reason that “never read the comments” is an adage. Steeping yourself in an immediate barrage of responses to your writing tends to make you cautious and defensive; it tends to delude you into thinking that online phenomena are representative of reality writ large (the internet is the real world, but it is only one part of the real world); and it tends to make you reactionary, in the literal sense, insofar as your mind becomes crowded by online nemeses with whom you find yourself fighting on the page.

That isn’t to say I don’t like the culture of comment and exchange on Substack. I do, very much. In part, that’s because Substack is pretty collegial (that one guy excepted…..) In part, it’s because I have smart readers. But it’s also because what I post on Substack is bloggier and less finished than what I publish elsewhere, so I don’t really have to steel myself against hatred. If one of you thought this post was informal and unpolished, I would agree. That doesn’t mean I think my Substack is bad or that I intend to disrespect you by flooding your inboxes with worthless, thoughtless garbage¹; it does mean that my posts are forays, not attempts at masterpieces, and I’ve never told anyone otherwise. I’m usually actively asking my readers to mount objections (and I’ve learned a lot from the objections that you all mount). But when it comes to riskier and more ambitious writing, I need more distance from the responses to it to even be able to bring myself to do it at all.

Here is an example. In 2021, I wrote an essay called “Sanctimony Literature” for the literary journal Liberties. In it, I argued that a lot of recent fiction was straining to demonstrate its political virtue and was therefore riskless and bad. At the time, I was mentally ill; everyone was. It was the height of the pandemic, and we spent all our waking hours on Twitter, which had become vengeful and hateful and insane, and which was absolutely not an adequate substitute for touching grass or interacting with live human beings. The site was bad, worse than it had ever been (although not as bad as it is now), but also, I was bad. In isolation, I was becoming downright paranoid: I believed that Cancel Culture (tm) was coming for me, and that if anyone ever caught wind of my assessment of contemporary fiction, I would be ostracized and my career would be ruined. My assessment of that time has leavened a little, in part because I now see that I was losing my mind, in part because that essay was published and everyone was really fucking mean about it and I had a rough few days and then—I was totally fine and I moved on with my life. I no longer even know if I stand by everything I said in that essay—truth be told, I haven't re-read it since it came out—but I do know that I would never have been brave enough to publish it if I hadn’t logged off and insulated myself from the wave of nastiness that ensued.

It takes a lot of courage to expose the softest and squishiest parts of yourself to the world, knowing that someone, somewhere, will invariably hate and excoriate and attack them. That’s what being a writer is. I don’t know how I’d do it if I read all the responses to my writing all of the time.

1. I want to stress this point, because I think some people have interpreted my skepticism about Substack’s ability to replace magazines/newspapers as an admission that I don’t care about my readers. I do care about my readers! I don’t think that maintaining a blog—and being honest with you all that this is a blog—is disrespectful. My Substack posts aren’t my opus, yeah, but I aspire to write smart and entertaining blog posts, and I think that’s something, and it’s worthwhile.