How to Think About Politics
Reflections on my political education—and on an especially important teacher
If you subscribed to this Substack because you want to understand the antiliberal right, you really need to read Mark Lilla’s latest essay, titled “The Tower and the Sewer,” in the New York Review of Books. (It’s currently behind a paywall at the NYRB, but you can find a PDF of it at Lilla’s website.) A wide-ranging review covering several recent books by Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, and Adrian Vermeule, the essay is a tour de force that places these writers in broad historical context, situates them in the contemporary American right, and combines generosity toward the psychological and spiritual struggles that animate their thinking with nuanced (and occasionally severe) criticism of it.
Those who know me well will not be surprised by this strong plug. Lilla is my teacher and friend stretching back more than three decades. So take my praise with several grains of salt if you wish. On the other hand, if you’re here reading my posts and consider them worth your time, there’s a good chance you’ll find Lilla’s work valuable, too. Beyond the quotable plaudits I’ve offered above, I’m going to devote this post to explaining why.
Two Levels of Education
The more I reflect with distance on my intellectual autobiography, the more I can see that my education in political ideas has taken place on two levels.
The first level is about objective facts: Who was Plato? What (and how) did he write? What were his political and philosophical views? What have scholars made of these views down through the centuries and millennia? Now repeat for Thucydides, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, and so forth, on down through the medieval, early modern, and modern thinkers of Western civilization.
This is education as prep for a comprehensive doctoral examination. I was extremely good at it. My mind has all sorts of defects, but I excel at grasping the Big Picture—of ideas and how they interact with each other, and then telling fairly accurate and elegant stories about how it all fits together.
But there’s another side to education in political ideas, one that was a much bigger challenge for me. That is the subjective side—the side that involves one’s individual reception of and response to ideas. What is my personal stance toward what I’ve read? How will it change me and the way I think and act in the world?
Some students are the equivalent of color blind or tone deaf when it comes to this subjective dimension of education. They can learn or memorize anything, but their souls remain unstirred by it all. I’m the opposite. When I was young, it seemed like everything I read was an invitation to take a leap or fall down blinded on the road to Damascus.
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