Pluralities of the Sensible

Exiles of the Chatting Classes of New York

I don’t know the work of most of the individuals who have signed the Letter on Justice and Open Discourse, but there are several I do know and respect. {Amis, Brooks, Christakis, Early, Filkins, Haidt, Jones, Marsalis, McWhorter, Painter, Pinker}. There are also several I simply recognize but have really never heard anything from that impressed me positively, they are about equal in number. So it’s an odd bandwagon. Nevertheless bread it is baking smells like it’s coming from an old factory. There are no tech names in there I recognized. There are no Right names in there I might recognize although you might consider Brooks, and Rushdie and Amis are the only ones I recognize who are not American. Yes, that old building is burning and these are the pleas of those on their knees. None of them seem to have the need to curse.

Eric Weinstein said of this:

Oh, I’ll take a crack at it. A) Heads of Newsrooms/Liberal magazines hired young hip kids to get clicks. B) Those kids terrorized everyone else outside of the media liberals who hired them & held immunity no one else had. C) Those kids are now turning on those who hired them.

Ouch. But yeah.

I can remember when I first started reading Harper’s in the late 80s. It was a good magazine for those who liked to read good English. It’s editor in chief Lewis Lapham dazzled me at first, but over time I came to realize like everyone else outside of New York City, that special flavor of egocentricity of the genteel. Harper’s served its purpose. At the time I was a young writer not yet dedicated to that special level of hell called online writing - quite fine if you can manage to live the life of Diogenes, which wasn’t much of a stretch for me and many of the things artistry meant to me then. These days, having lived in the distributed dungeons and parapets of the interwebz, it is the monolith of New York publishing that seems quaint, ancient, regally gilded and just as easily wrongheaded as it ever could be. It was a barrel of monkeys reading the Observer as I did in ‘91 and ‘92, and I realized how small and arcane that society was. All the concepts and devourers of such that could fit into the 92nd Street Y. It has been a long time since I last visited the City. I wonder if I would find it small the next time around. Underwhelmingly small, like the Russian Tea Room. Like the Village Vanguard, given the size of their legends yet overcrowded with audiences of the hungry.

I get the feeling that so much of New York has now been reduced in rather the same way its society, were it ever so refined and ethical, has been subsumed by the new billions and its die hards and remainers bilked by the conceptual equivalent of Bernie Madoff. I wonder how much New York blames itself for its nurturing of The Donald, and his predecessor Leona Helmsley. They have stumbled. When indeed is the last time I looked to New York for something ineffable and great? I think New York City, despite all of the wonders it generates by dint of its physical characteristics with some mathematical certainty, still remains in my mind defined by the dynasty of Sumner Redstone. Or maybe it’s Howard Stern, I can’t decide. If you can make it there, you can stay there, build a castle and stay made until the day you realize you’ve painted yourself into a corner that is irrelevant to the world. You cannot be NYC without being self-important, bold and shameless. If you fail to make it there the myth of New York lives on, until it has to deal with the indifference of nature.

New York thus is a force of personality not too far off from a cult. If America has been poorly served by the missteps, manipulations and malefactions of its president, one might think its greatest city’s exceptionalism would make it more immune than not. That is not what I’m seeing. What I’m seeing is its inability to connect and comport with anywhere it cannot direct, and a failure to save itself from the worst of it all: an inexplicable attraction to AOC and her Squad, an inability to fight off deadly disease, hurricane waters, or the Bridgegate controversy that killed the career of one of the last fiscal conservatives with a national name. What I feel is a lack of sympathy. I’m a bit ashamed of that, but not as ashamed as New York should be.

New York may be our last vertical city. Out here in the flat distribution of Southern California, we navigate well enough through our independent pathways towards ever changing destinations without the benefit or disadvantages of subways and high rises. We still can only sell pizza by the slice in our shopping malls. We are not centralized and thus not so vulnerable to the mistakes of the few, the genteel, the castle kings who make it here. When you live this way, with no Lincoln Center, no Grand Central, no Central Park, you learn to swivel your head a bit more. You soon learn that there’s more genius in the world than anyone can wrangle. You manage to live without a great newspaper, without an august and established magazine, without a mighty assembled collection of vetted superstars whose signatures might reverberate three paragraphs throughout the known civilized world. Here, it’s just another blog post that may or may not be interesting next month.

When we, we meaning some of us distributed in the Intellectual Dark Web, whose existence was related to a NYC appropriate audience by one of the signers, had our moment of terror at Evergreen State U, we saw a hint of what was to come. It might have been just another blog post, but out in the wide steppe-like flatlands, we understand that castles don’t keep out contagion, or as economist Mark Blyth says “The Hamptons and other low lying beaches are very difficult territories to defend.”

I wonder how we must all sound, trying as we do to crank out pluralities of the sensible. Is this perhaps as it has always been?

This week sees the voluntary defenestration of Bari Weiss and Andrew Sullivan from various towers in NYC. Where they may land is up to speculation right now, but I think, and actually hope that the pattern that emerges will be reminiscent of the trajectory of Jordan B Peterson, who ultimately found more money speaking directly to the people than through the increasingly tight shackles of his academic masters. I would like to see them land back into some reborn analog of the original Blogosphere. And I suspect that some version of the Persuasion community here in Substack will be a partial model, as will Quillette.

For my small part, I am working on localism and strong links for city-chapters of the IDW. So I am farming them out in the Reddit fields and Discord wilds. Truth and honesty are ever illusive, but discovery is always its own reward.