Sunday, February 21, 2010

Sullivan Against Wieseltier

1. Wieseltier: http://www.tnr.com/article/something-much-darker

2. Sullivan: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/02/the-latest-from-leon.html

3. Wieseltier: http://www.tnr.com/article/the-trouble-south-park?page=1

4. Sullivan: http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/04/wieseltier-resp.html

rziegler:

One commenter designated this as an example of LW's intellect (in reference to AS):
"he is merely explaining belief in terms of temperament, and mood, and identity, all of which have no bearing upon the substance of any discussion. Compose yourself, man, and think."


The idea that Sullivan's writings amount to no more than opinions and beliefs is in itself a dishonest assessment. Most of AS's ideas are well-reasoned. That he is over the top from time to time does not nullify his perspicuity the rest of the time.

LW knows this, but cannot cop to it because of personal animosity and because he disagrees with AS on the subject of Israel. What kind of "intellectual" tries to prove his point with such false statements?

Me:

Rziegler, you say:

...The idea that Sullivan's writings amount to no more than opinions and beliefs is in itself a dishonest assessment. Most of AS's ideas are well-reasoned. That he is over the top from time to time does not nullify his perspicuity the rest of the time. LW knows this, but cannot cop to it because of personal animosity and because he disagrees with AS on the subject of Israel. What kind of "intellectual" tries to prove his point with such false statements?

…. The idea that Sullivan's writings amount to no more than opinions and beliefs is in itself a dishonest assessment....

Please show me where in his pieces Wiesletier has argued this. Where, too, does he say that what he takes issue with in Sullivan—the kinds of statements and writings he cites that he takes such exception to—“nullifies”—your verb—everything else Sullivan has written.

What evidence do you have that personal animosity motivated Wiesletier to write these pieces?
I think you misconceive Wieseltier’s argument against Sullivan—which has to do with his deep problems with the kind of writings he has pointed to, as I noted-- and then castigate Wieseltier on the basis of that very misconception as well as ascribing disingenuous and intellectually dishonest motives to him that you cannot possibly substantiate.


rziegler:

basman, just look at the of LW's first paragraph. It is a pathetic attempt to reduce AS's writing to irrelevance:

"why should his blog be read as anything more than a psychological document, as a record of his shifts and his seasons?"

Why indeed? AS has a spectacular ability to lay out the pros and cons, to promote dialectical discourse. LW spends his time finding fault with some of AS's excesses and errors, but steadfastly refuses to engage the larger body of AS's good works, in particular his books and topical pieces that appear in periodicals like the Atlantic and the Times of London.

Want more?

In his earlier piece, LW complains that AS presents "feelings as ideas" (once again an ad hominem attempt to trivalize Sullivan's work). This after defending Krauthammer's positions because they are based on a "deep and sometimes frantic concern for Israeli security". Well. Emotions play a part in formulating in everyone's viewpoints. LW seems to think that emotions any accompanying reasoned arguments and therefore he refuses to engage the point at hand.

Sad.

It appears to me that LW is in a corner - he believes his position on Israel to be under siege, so he looks to counterattack. He focuses on Andrew Sullivan. Why? There are many other writers he could criticize. Perhaps he believes that AS is more vulnerable to criticism because Sullivan IS more volatile. Unfortunately LW personalizes and trivalizes his criticism (for example, by calling Sullivan "an athlete of regret"). It is small wonder that LW has labored for years within the TNR cocoon reaching a small audience. (Just to be clear, I've been a huge, if qualified, fan of TNR since the 70's. OMG!)

Meanwhile, The Daily Dish is read by millions. Could it be because Sullivan is both honest about his feelings and convincing with his facts? Maybe Sullivan has learned something that Wieseltier has not.

Me:

Rziegler, thanks for responding. But Wieseltier’s first paragraph doesn’t support your proposition that he has in his post tried to nullify everything Sullivan has written. Sullivan has written books, essays, done journalism, serious academic work including a Harvard doctorate on Oakeshott. Sullivan himself makes a sharp distinction between his blogging and his other writing in trying to rebut Wieseltier on his (Sullivan’s) blog.

Sullivan presents his blogging as emotional, in the moment writing and tries to excuse what Wieseltier complains about by recourse to his temperament , genes and the immediate nature of blogging. You may find those rationales convincing in explaining away the excrement of his worst outbursts and obsessions—and I include his sickening obsession with Sarah Palin, for whom I have no brief—which excrement Sullivan actually cops to by trying to rationalize it. But all of this is miles away from the idea you attempted to advance about a wholesale impugning of everything Sullivan wrote.

In that explaining away, Sullivan gives some foundation for Wieseltier’s admittedly provocative (maybe rhetorical) question about seeing Sullivan’s blog as the psychological documenting of his moods, shifts and larger changes. But that provocative question goes to a fair criticism of Sullivan’s incarnation over the last decade as a public intellectual. He is remarkable for his wild swings of enthusiasms and detestations—Ron Paul, Israel, or immediate post 9/11 are three examples that come immediately to mind. That wild inconstancy is sufficient to impugn any sense of his intellectual steadiness and to constitute him as a person who cannot control putting his considerable intellectual and analytical gifts to the service of his raging passions at any particular time

(Typically, I always remember when in his exchanges with Sam Harris, which were interesting for a while, finally Sullivan in the face of arguments he could not surmount and positions he could no longer defend became insulting and petty with Harris.)

Your argument that Wieseltier is to be faulted for not recognizing the good work Sullivan has done makes further evident your misreading. If I were to complain about Trilling’s fiction, if I were to complain about it in the most condemnatory terms, if his literary criticism was not my concern in that condemnation, should I be criticized for not being concerned with what does not concern me. That’s what your argument here amounts to.

To repeat: Wieseltier is concerned with specific things Sullivan has wildly written are akin to being anti Semitic and which he diagnoses further to be of a piece with weaknesses Sullivan suffers in needing to give mental vent to whatever strikes him. Sullivan’s rebuttal based, as noted, on temperament, his identity-Irish Catholic-- and the nature of blogging leads Wieseltier to reject those excuses for intellectual failure and to offer the prosaic advice of in effect “take a deep breath and think.”

I don’t know how you can complain about Wieseltier saying that Sullivan presents ideas as feelings when that is a central defence Sullivan himself makes in rationalizing his outbursts and what marks his intellectual failures.

Following on that, you distort, in good faith I’m sure, Wieseltier’s comments on Krauthammer. He notes what animates Krauthammer’s concerns, not to defend his arguments—“Moreover, Krauthammer argues for his views; the premises of his analysis are coldly clear, and may be engaged analytically, and when necessary refuted”—some of which he agrees with and some of which he disagrees with—but rather to defend his motives: “Whatever the merits of his views, I do not see that his motives are despicable.” This he does because Sullivan does not deal substantively with Krauthammer’s arguments. Rather he trades in Krauthammer’s motives and in doing so repudiates what it means to be an intellectual:

“...But the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing–that celebrates and believes in government torture, endorses the pulverization of Gazans with glee, and wants to attack Iran–is something else. Something much darker...”

And this repudiation—this ascription of evil motives: “something darker”—is compounded by Sullivan’s assertion of a Jewish essentialism for which Wieseltier properly and devastatingly takes him apart.

The issue here is not the role emotions play in argument—and you are not to think you have any greater insight into the relation between emotion and argument than Wiesletier. The issue is discreditably allowing passion free range over the intellect and to assert those passions under the pretence of ideas intellect Sullivan has the intellectual gifts to present his unconstrained passions as ostensible argument.

Ironically, you end your post mimicking Sullivan. You say Wieseltier is in a corner because he wants to defend Israel and thinks his position under siege, This is an assertion of motives, not contention with ideas. You are in no position to know whether Wieseltier feels in a corner.

You are in no position to know whether Wieseltier feels under siege in his defence of Israel. And you are in no position to know why he has in his first piece focused on Sullivan. It all in the end really doesn’t matter, does it?

What matters is the case that he’s made. You misread it, try vainly to present an analysis based on that misreading and wind up, ironically, replicating in your post a very ground of Wieseltier’s criticism .

rziegler:

Basman, thanks for the thoughtful reply. I will respond as best I can. You wrote:

“Sullivan presents his blogging as emotional, in the moment writing and tries to excuse what Wieseltier complains about by recourse to his temperament, genes and the immediate nature of blogging.”

Sorry, this is grossly oversimplified. Wieseltier makes unsubstantiated and grotesque claims about Sullivan in his original essay, for example, in one paragraph: “…Sullivan … belongs to the herd…who proclaim in all seriousness, without in any way being haunted by the history of such an idea, that Jews control Washington,” and “…the explanation that Sullivan adopts for almost everything that he does not like about America’s foreign policy, and America’s wars, and America’s role in the world–that it is all the result of the clandestine and cunningly organized power of a single and small ethnic group–has a provenance that should disgust all thinking people.”

I read Sullivan’s blog regularly. These sweeping and extreme statements are profound distortions of Sullivan’s views, and they are not substantiated. In fact, from my own reading, I see no evidence for these conclusions in anything Sullivan has written. Basman, show us!
Wieseltier goes on by saying, “His [Sullivan’s] assumption, in his outburst about ‘the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing,’ that every thought that a Jew thinks is a Jewish thought is an anti-Semitic assumption.” This is a smear, a direct accusation of anti-Semitism, but it is an empty argument, a cipher. Sullivan does not dislike the Goldfarb-Krauthammer positions because they are singularly Jewish. (He never says for example that “only a Jew could take such a position” or "this is a typically Jewish position".) He dislikes them because he thinks they are wrong-headed, no matter who thinks them.


Wieseltier, with similar bouts of broken logic, spends the rest of his essay attempting to demonstrate Sullivan’s “venomous hostility toward Israel and Jews.” The technique apparently is to present one or more of Sullivan’s writings, argue against it, and then pivot to one of several conclusions about Sulivan’s temperament, referring to anti-Semitism, bitterness, indecency, “moronic” insensitivity, and, naturally, derangement. Not an especially intellectual approach - rather clumsy, or to use Wieseltier’s language, “repugnant”.

You wrote: “Sullivan does not deal substantively with Krauthammer’s arguments.” Maybe not in that particular blog post, but anyone who reads the Dish regularly knows that Sullivan carefully backs up his opinions about Krauthammer’s ideas, Israel, and other topics with thoughtful reasoning. You may disagree with his choices of evidence and his conclusions, but the reasoning is there.

You wrote: “That wild inconstancy is sufficient to impugn any sense of his intellectual steadiness…” This is another sweeping statement that can’t be backed up. Does occasional inconstancy nullify all his carefully reasoned positions? Exactly how often is Sullivan inconstant? Some say, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. In my view, Sullivan is very predictable. In most areas, his positions have not changed. A flip-flop here and there does not make him wildly inconstant.

On the other foot, is Wieseltier constant? In this case, I would say that Wieseltier has written a wild and incoherent diatribe filled with unsubstantiated claims, in his words, an “outburst”. Not the emotional steadiness I would expect from an “intellectual.”

You wrote: “He [Sullivan] trades in Krauthammer’s motives and in doing so repudiates what it means to be an intellectual.” This echoes Wieseltier’s statement, “Sullivan is hunting for motives”. But motives and ideas are not mutually exclusive; in fact one is a subset of the other. (I’ll leave that to you to puzzle through.) In any event, it is up to Wieseltier to justify his claim, and then explain exactly how that might discredit Sullivan’s positions. Wieseltier does not make the case.
You wrote: “


The issue is discreditably allowing passion free range over the intellect and to assert those passions under the pretence of ideas.” Once again, a sweeping statement, one that you do not, cannot substantiate. This is one reader who likes reason AND passion. Sullivan is a crusader, a visionary, and he is influential because he marries the two. An idea may have merit if it is soundly conceived and argued. But leaders rely on passion in the delivery in order to magnify the impact of their ideas.

I will sign off this thread, but certainly will read any response you volunteer.

My respects.

Me:

rziegler thanks too for yours and I'll leave it there with you. No doubt we'll have something else to quarrel about in due course. Save to say that I would have thought Wieseltier gave pretty good examples of what he was talking about.

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