Talking about a mediocre piece of writing can be fun. I have attended many an academic seminar about a bad draft — some of them not involving my own papers! — in which the conversation about the paper was stimulating. People in the room might agree the paper itself was bad, but we can also debate our way to what the best version of that paper could be.
The same is true with popular culture. Let’s face it: The zombie genre has a lot of dreck in it, but that did not stop me from enjoyment while writing of “Theories of International Politics and Zombies.” I liked it so much that the Apocalypse Edition is coming out soon. Similarly, I think my favorite episodes of “Space the Nation” are when Ana Marie Cox and I go into detail about why we disliked a particular science fiction book or film.
It is in this spirit that I read Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley’s since-deleted tweets from last month. Stanley tweeted, “People are like, ‘he regards himself as self-important.’…. I would regard myself as an abject failure if people are still not reading my philosophical work in 200 years. I have zero intention of being just another Ivy League professor whose work lasts as long as they are alive.”
Stanley’s Twitter feed is a haphazard mix of provocation and sarcasm. To be perfectly honest, I have no idea just how much sincerity he attached to those tweets. The ensuing social media mockery of his pretensions, however, did not care about such particulars.
So far, not a great discussion. This was disappointing, because most writers think about their legacy a lot more than they let on. This is true whether one is speaking of academic writing or more popular forms of discourse. Either way, a writer’s worth is almost entirely a function of how others perceive the work. It is difficult enough to write any words and have them break through. Aiming for an enduring audience seems like long odds.
This is particularly true when writing as a social scientist. I am writing about a world that is constantly changing. My small bailiwick of economic sanctions is constantly evolving. Even covering laws that we believe to be true might only stay that way for a few decades. A few years ago, Thomas Oatley warned that “the knowledge about human social systems that we generate as scholars has a limited shelf life.” And I agreed, writing that “if the social system we are studying is constantly changing, it is impossible to generate regular laws that endure for any length of time. The entropy of each complex system ineluctably leads to the breakdown of any empirical observation of any generality.”
But over at Gawker, essayist B.D. McClay took Stanley’s tweets and went somewhere interesting with them:
Stanley strikes me as a man who thinks he has exhausted his own context. (Whether he has or not is not something I could know.) From academic work he’s splashed out to popular writing, which has its own rewards and its own disappointments. Something strange but true is that for all their similarities, the worlds of academic and public writing mostly have contempt for each other. Trying to win at both games is quite possible, but it means, also, feeling judged.
This is not supposed to be armchair psychoanalysis: I just mean that Stanley’s ambition has nowhere to go. If you want to be Kant or Wittgenstein, no amount of willing can get you there. You need something else. What makes the wish not to be “just another Ivy League professor” a tragicomical statement is that institutions like the Ivies are not meant to make or house Kants or Wittgensteins, let alone Platos, anymore than the Iowa Writers’ Workshop aims to make Tolstoys. They are meant to make survivors — of the careerist type. You can climb all the way to the top of your profession only to find you’re simply standing around and that this was all you were ever trained to do. Some people will be great anyway. But the system is not meant for them.
McClay’s essay is worth reading in its entirety. My one quibble is the subsequent claim: “Non-fiction writing, in its popular and scholarly varieties, is largely parasitic on the real thing — the real thing being art. Art wrestles with problems of obscurity and immortality; art testifies to the transcendent horizon. Little essays, no matter how clever, fade as soon as they are born; big books, even before.” This is nonsense. Neither Thucydides nor Sun Tzu were fiction writers, and each one managed to hang around for a spell.
I have few delusions about my value as a writer; I am highly unlikely to produce anything that lasts as long as Thucydides or Machiavelli. If I have some optimism about my legacy, however, it is that even writing that fades too soon from the public sphere can be resuscitated by subsequent generations. Kautilya’s “Arthashastra” is now considered an important tract on international relations and strategy. While written two millennia ago, it was lost until Rudrapatna Shamashastri discovered the manuscript in 1905. It is possible for a work to not be read by anyone a century from now, but be read by many a millennia later.
My work will probably fade from view as society continues to change. But I hereby apologize in advance to the poor 31st-century scholar who excavates a copy of “Theories of International Politics and Zombies.” Some things are meant to die — even the undead …
