I have been thinking lately about something the essayist Phil Christman wrote last year:
All those “writing in the age of Trump” essays aged like milk. I still don’t want to reread them even now that we’re in a Second Age of Trump! I want to read essays about how to slow down or ideally stop a militarized ICE when it tries to purge “illegals” (anyone brown) from my campus. Or I want to read essays about Sir Thomas Browne’s theory of the occult. I do not want to read essays about “Reading Sir Thomas Browne’s Theory of the Occult in an Age of Militarized ICE Purges.”
It is not easy to avoid the habit of relevance-mongering, of explaining to people that they ought to read this piece about some long-ago moment in history or some far-away place because—and by implication only because—it is a distant mirror that tells us something about us. The habit is compelling for several reasons.
For one thing, such comparisons can be genuinely illuminating. Some years ago Daniel Mendelsohn wrote an essay on the Aeneid in which he explored the ways that this magnificent poem, written near the beginning of a great empire, illuminates all of our imperial experiences since—and does so from the perspective of one who is a refugee, an exile:
Months later…it occurred to me that the difficulties we have with Aeneas and his epic cease to be difficulties once you think of him not as a hero but as a type we’re all too familiar with: a survivor, a person so fractured by the horrors of the past that he can hold himself together only by an unnatural effort of will, someone who has so little of his history left that the only thing that gets him through the present is a numbed sense of duty to a barely discernible future that can justify every kind of deprivation. It would be hard to think of a more modern figure.
This insight has the great advantage of being not immediately obvious—but then, once pointed out, clearly central to the poem itself as well as our experience of it. That is, Mendelsohn does not simply use the poem to illuminate our moment, but uses our moment to illuminate the poem. His essay generates a mutuality of understanding—it builds a bridge that encourages two-way traffic.
Too often our attempts to read the past as a story of us are more forced. Timothy Hampton, writing about the movie A Complete Unknown—a new picture, but one set sixty years ago—says, “The current crisis of American democracy, Trump’s genius at turning us against each other, the arrogance of a gilded class that sails above us in their private planes—all of these big themes hover around A Complete Unknown.” Do they, though? Do they really? If the movie had been released even one year ago, would anyone have read it that way?
When editors—especially editors at newspapers and other periodicals driven by current events—consider whether to run an essay or article, they often look for hooks. A hook connects the subject written about to subjects that already occupy readers’ attention. A hook says, “Read this because it’s related to something you’re already reading about, already interested in.” And often editors don’t have to press this kind of hooking on their writers. The writers are already doing it, because as they write they are also scrolling their social media feeds, reading newsletters, listening to podcasts, even (gasp) watching TV, and thereby keeping a small set of hot-button issues in the forefront of mind at all times. In a highly presentist and attention-colonizing media environment, writers are already primed, as students of thinking would say, to make connections to now and us.
But priming, while natural to us and often useful, is a major source of cognitive errors. It is overwhelmingly likely that that essay on “Reading Sir Thomas Browne’s Theory of the Occult in an Age of Militarized ICE Purges” will manifest some serious misunderstandings of Sir Thomas Browne’s theory of the occult. (Christman’s fictional example is an extreme and intentionally comical one—but it is not far from what I have actually seen. In the interests of charity I will avoid giving examples.)
Now, some people will reply that such misunderstandings are a small price to pay for an essay that, I dunno, raises our consciousness of ICE purges or something. But if that’s what you care about, why drag Sir Thomas Browne (or A Complete Unknown) into it? It would be better to write directly about the thing you really care about. Cut out the middleman. There is a very good reason why this doesn’t happen, though. If the expert on Sir Thomas Browne simply writes about ICE purges, then editors and readers will likely say, “What do you know about ICE? You’re a scholar of seventeenth-century English prose, for heaven’s sake.” To prevent this embarrassing observation, the would-be political commentator employs the fig-leaf of scholarly expertise. And this leads to superficiality of both scholarship and political activism.
It would be better—I do not say this often—to follow the example of Noam Chomsky: that is, to keep one’s professional expertise and one’s political analysis in separate compartments. Of course, Chomsky is perhaps not the easiest model to follow, since by the time he wrote his famous critique of the complicity of scholars in the Vietnam War, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” he had already completely transformed the discipline of linguistics. Still, I think compartmentalization is better than the production of work that is half-hearted in its attention to its ostensible subject and half-witted about politics, the latter being perhaps the most complicated thing that human beings do and therefore greatly vulnerable to well-intentioned but ill-informed commentators.
I have drifted here from a meditation on the use and misuse of the past into a general commentary about the relationship between one’s sphere of expertise and one’s politics. The former is indeed a subset of the latter, but it is a crucial one because—as I have argued elsewhere at some length—we cannot truly understand our own time and place without a serious understanding of other times and places. Strangely enough, the priming effect, as manifested in the search for politically relevant hooks, actively prevents that understanding: It equips us not to understand the otherness of the past but only to dress ourselves in historical costume. Whatever use the past has for us, we will not know it unless we undergo the discipline of putting its potential relevance aside. If the past does not speak to us in its own voice, we are only talking to ourselves.
I once knew a man who, in meeting people, would warmly ask them about themselves, their experiences, their joys and sorrows. After they had made brief replies, he would then tell them, at great length, about how their experiences reminded him of his own. I say unto you: Don’t be that guy.
