Hi, all. I wanted to write a brief addendum to my Yale Review piece, which was about writers who undermine their own attempts at public intellectualism by condescending to their readers. In that essay, I argued that public thinking is a matter of regarding “the public,” that dangerous but occasionally fruitful construct, as a made up of one’s equals. Maybe the public, or at least a given public, isn’t made up of one’s equals. But we have to act as if it is, because otherwise we’re doing something bankrupt. A writer who can’t think with her readers, who insists on thinking at them, isn’t a public intellectual but a would-be demagogue. This time around, I want to warn against a similar but distinct species of condescension: the sort that is so often displayed by academics hoping to make a public pivot.
Academics are increasingly interested in public writing, at least if the number of them emailing me about it or pitching the magazines I edit is any indication, and, in some respects, I’m thrilled. To the extent that academics are beginning to appreciate the value and difficulty of an enterprise that I know first hand is every bit as grueling as producing scholarship, albeit in a totally different way, I’m enormously glad. Academics in the humanities in particular are no doubt responding appropriately to the much-lamented “crisis” of their area. The collapse/crisis/catastrophe etc of the academic humanities is probably the product of a constellation of material obstacles (no public investment in the arts, no students in humanities departments, no jobs in the academic humanities), but the insularity of academic discourse certainly isn’t helping. So, if academics (especially in the humanities) really wanted to take public writing seriously, that would be a great thing.
But (and here is the time to stress that this is not a “subtweet” of anyone in particular, just a general observation that does not apply to many of the people who ask for my advice or whom I have the privilege of editing) I’m beginning to suspect that many academics want to write for a public audience not because they think it’s valuable but because they think it’s easy. They think that all they have to do is sit down and excrete a few hundred words; they think that because they know how to write journal articles (which, I’m sorry to say, are often unreadably ugly), they know how to write essays for magazines. Never mind that there are people whose entire job it is to write articles for magazines, people who train for decades! As one of my friends and colleagues, a fellow editor, put it, many of the academics who wake up one morning with an urge to write for magazines think of themselves as performing a kind of public service: they think writing for a public audience is a charitable act not unlike volunteering at a soup kitchen (which also isn’t easy), not the kind of thing they need to work at and prepare for, maybe for many years. They may not even read the best instances of the kind of writing they nominally want to produce, writers like William Gass or Guy Davenport. In fact, they may not even read any of the magazines they claim to want to write for! For all these reasons, many of them are stunned or offended when they get extremely heavy edits back. They’re used to sending an article off to a journal, getting some comments that have nothing to do with the style or the structure of the article, revising it to account for some additional objections, sending it back, and voila. Public writing is not like this in the least. You’re required not just to say something new and rigorous, but something beautiful. It’s not just hard; at its best, it’s the hardest thing in the world. A really good essay is a work of art. There is nothing harder to make than a work of art. Nothing!
I don’t mean to suggest that writing for academic journals is easy. Getting a paper published in an academic journal is hard. And writing a really great paper, producing a great piece of philosophy? Well, that’s just as hard as making a work of art. (I’m not convinced it isn’t just the same thing as making a work of art, at the end of the day.) The point is not that writing philosophy (or academic literary criticism, or whatever) is easy, but that writing essays at the highest level is just as hard. And to suggest that is it not—or to assume that, because you can write academic papers well, you can write essays for a public audience well—is simply disrespectful to the people who devote their lives to perfecting the latter art. It’s condescending!