Alan Jacobs

”It’s Not Your Fault You’re a Jerk on Twitter,” writes Katherine Cross for WIRED. That said, you are a jerk on Twitter.* As Jaron Lanier said a while back, Twitter is “worse than cigarettes, in that cigarettes don’t degrade you. They kill you, but you’re still you.”

• Of course I don’t mean you, dear reader, I mean … all those other people.

Kant clung to his university, submitted himself to its regulations, retained the appearance of religious belief, endured to live among colleagues and students: so it is natural that his example has produced above all university professors and professorial philosophy. Schopenhauer had little patience with the scholarly castes, separated himself from them, strove to be independent of state and society – this is his example, the model he provides. 

— Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator.” It is interesting to think of other examples of this distinction — and especially other major thinkers who share this inability to function within standard institutional structures. In a long essay about Kierkegaard in the New Yorker in 1968, Auden wrote, 

Like Pascal, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, Kierkegaard is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality (they speak in a voice one has never heard before) and by the sharpness of their insights (they say things which no one before them has said, and which, henceforward, no reader will ever forget). But with successive readings one's doubts grow, one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all the others, and one's first enthusiasm may all too easily turn into an equally exaggerated aversion. 

(Auden wrote this essay specifically to ensure that his own earlier fascination with Kierkegaard did not pivot to “an equally exaggerated aversion.”) Such thinkers don’t fit in universities because they can’t or won’t obey the codes of the academy. Almost all successful academics are code fetishists, for good reasons (e.g. the maintaining of professional and disciplinary standards) and bad (turf management and the performing of power). Truly original thinkers will either shun environments so code-dominated or will be driven out of them. 

But: not only original thinkers. One can be not original at all but rather unoriginal in the wrong ways, usually in outdated ways, and be equally in violation of the codes. Exhibit A: Jordan Peterson, who was comfortable enough (if neither productive nor influential) in the academy until he started vocally resisting recently developed guidelines of academic life in favor of defending some ideas that he thought had been unjustly forgotten. 

From Edwin Muir’s Autobiography:

During these years I began to grow aware of the people round me as individuals. At the Bu [the farm on the tiny isle of Wyre where they had lived when Muir was small] my family had been a stationary, indivisible pattern; now my brothers and sister hardened into separate shapes, and without my knowing division entered the world. The breaking up of our family, the departure of one member after another, strengthened this feeling greatly, for with my eldest brother Jimmie working in Kirkwall I could now think of him as separate from us, yet when he came out to see us at Garth he was obviously a member of the family still. This paradox of unity and separateness troubled my mind a great deal, for Jimmie in Kirkwall lived a life of his own, quite unlike our life; yet when he cam to see us he was still the brother I had known and worshipped as a child. Soon after our shift to Garth he went still farther away, to Glasgow, and after that we saw him only once a year, during his summer holidays. Then Willie, my second oldest brother, grew discontented in turn, and my, father, knowing he was unhappy, allowed him to enter a lawyer’s office in Kirkwall. The process continued; it was as if a fermentation had set up in our family which no power could stop. My third brother, Johnnie, and my sister Elizabeth had a harder struggle to get away, for they were urgently needed on the farm; but my father had to give in, though he could not understand. Elizabeth went to Edinburgh, and Johnnie to Kirkwall. At its heart the family held together; there was no inward break, no enmity: it was as if something quite impersonal were scattering us to all the quarters of the compass. If Garth had been a better farm, or if it had been twenty instead of three miles from a town, all this might not have happened, and some of us might have had a happier life; for to be a farmer in Orkney now is a pleasant lot: Orkney is probably the most prosperous, well-run, and happy community in Britain. But Garth was a thankless farm, Kirkwall was near, Edinburgh and Glasgow, from Kirkwall, seemed merely the next stepping-stone, and no power on earth could have kept us from taking that road. When my father had to give up farming he too, after a year’s hesitation, and against Jimmie’s strong advice, decided to go to Glasgow and take the rest of us with him: a terrible mistake.

I keep vacillating about whether or not to record the books I read here; it’s interesting in a way but also feels performative. (Plus, I’ve never formally trackled my reading so why start now?) But … I’m going to resume. Several books coming now, to catch up.