Sam Schulman
Instructor, Yale; asst prof, BU; Asst Prof., MIT, then magazine publisher, media entrepreneur, investment banker, journalist writing primarily for Weekly Standard. Located near Charlottesville, Virginia.
Supervisors: Jonathan Wordsworth, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom
Supervisors: Jonathan Wordsworth, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom
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Censorship was once so simple. Kings, emperors, hierarchs, dictators stifled free expression to protect their authority. They decided what ideas were dangerous; organized a network of schoolteachers, priests, and informers to sniff out expressions of these ideas; then hired policemen, judges, and civil servants to punish the speakers. The censors didn’t want to make us good or persuade us of anything in particular: Obedience would suffice. As we began, more or less, to govern ourselves, the first thing we did was rid ourselves of the informers, demote the priests and schoolteachers, and find other work for the cops.
What we're doing these days is something quite new: The people themselves seek to rehire the censors, restore the (social) network of snitches, and redeploy the police—to govern our own speech. The aim is not to ensure the stability of a regime but to save us from being unkind to one another and encourage moral excellence. The notion that vigilantly watching what we say makes us better people is a crazy one. But it has an even crazier corollary: the widely shared conviction that what people say aloud is a reliable gauge of their private thoughts. Consider the case of the student journalist and the terrorist.
August 2004 Commentary piece, "How the Feminists Saved Marriage."
Censorship was once so simple. Kings, emperors, hierarchs, dictators stifled free expression to protect their authority. They decided what ideas were dangerous; organized a network of schoolteachers, priests, and informers to sniff out expressions of these ideas; then hired policemen, judges, and civil servants to punish the speakers. The censors didn’t want to make us good or persuade us of anything in particular: Obedience would suffice. As we began, more or less, to govern ourselves, the first thing we did was rid ourselves of the informers, demote the priests and schoolteachers, and find other work for the cops.
What we're doing these days is something quite new: The people themselves seek to rehire the censors, restore the (social) network of snitches, and redeploy the police—to govern our own speech. The aim is not to ensure the stability of a regime but to save us from being unkind to one another and encourage moral excellence. The notion that vigilantly watching what we say makes us better people is a crazy one. But it has an even crazier corollary: the widely shared conviction that what people say aloud is a reliable gauge of their private thoughts. Consider the case of the student journalist and the terrorist.
August 2004 Commentary piece, "How the Feminists Saved Marriage."
stunningly good, and stuns as much for what it does not say as what it does. Earlier Kissinger biographers have tried to
comprehend him, not quite in order to forgive his crimes but to share with others—usually Adolf Hitler—the blame for
them. Hitler stung Kissinger at a tender age into his amoral realism, and caused him to lure us into a foreign policy that
history has proved was unnecessary. Walter Isaacson’s 1992 biography ends with the triumph of the West in the Cold
War in spite of realpolitik. Kissinger’s machinations came to naught because the Cold War was more like a TED
conference than a lifeanddeath
struggle: Victory came to us because our values “eventually proved more attractive.”
Niall Ferguson is 15 years younger than the midcentury baby boomers like Isaacson, Christopher Hitchens, and me,
whose fathers were Kissinger’s contemporaries. Facing not an effortless Cold War victory but a victory squandered,
Ferguson is free of the presupposition that both he and his reader are Kissinger’s moral superiors. Instead, using
Kissinger’s thought and early career as his vantage point, Ferguson writes a marvelously capacious and dramatic
history of American foreign policy during the Cold War’s first generation.
only for global explanations but for blame. To our arsenal of defenses against future terrorist attacks, today’s crop of professional atheists urge us to add a mistrust of religion in general, in whatever guise. Thus, according to books by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Daniel C. Dennett (Breaking the Spell:
Religion as a Natural Phenomenon), and Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation), responsibility for an event like 9/11 ought not to be assigned solely or at all to the small group of radical Islamists who perpetrated the attacks, much less to Islam as a whole, but rather ought to be shared among all religions, including the very moderate kinds of religion that exist in the United States and Europe. Christopher Hitchens’s new book, God Is Not Great, is the most recent and in many ways the most engaging of these exercises, displaying a range of reference and a degree of energy, wit, and learning that the others conspicuously lack. Correspondingly, however, its flaws go much deeper.
after the book was completed but months before its publication, her daughter Quintana Dunne also died. Thanks to the
publicity surrounding the release of The Year of Magical Thinking, no reader can be unaware of this fact; but, for the duration of the book, Didion herself seems not to be. Her authorial decision to remain, as it were, ignorant of her daughter’s death creates a curious sense of disorientation—and also, inevitably, greater
sympathy for an author who, the reader knows, is soon to become doubly bereaved.
This effect, one begins to suspect, is a calculated one. Joan Didion’s best writing has always been dependent on the presence of her own self, observing what she describes, observing herself describing it. When she is not present—as in her fiction and in her political writing (where she tries to understand the world
without mediation through her personality)—she falls radically short. The Year of Magical Thinking is one of her best pieces of writing, but it partakes of some of the same deep flaws that beset her abundant worst.