Daily Blague

Somewhere in his book, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton, 2004), Richard Wolin observes that criticism is intended to strengthen and improve its object; it is the opposite of hostility. Setting aside the many hatchet jobs that have passed for "criticism" over the years, I quite eagerly agreed with this distinction, and then watched the implications build up. The real object of criticism, dear reader, is you. It is to suggest good ideas and helpful ways of looking at the world that I write. It is to bolster important distinctions that are often overlooked in the everyday rush. My opinion of a given work, as such, is of little importance to me. Sometimes it is the frank attempt to persuade others that motivates me. At others, I want to call attention to recalcitrant uncertainties, bounding them with cordons if necessary but not pretending to clear them up. In the intellectual life, nothing is quite as important as the ability to suspend the rush to judgment, to hold contrarieties in the mind.

Another implication is that it's going to take me a while to build a readership. Although I haven't been blogging for a year yet, even in simulation mode, I've discovered that the Blogosphere is a contentious place. I'm not speaking of flame wars or insults. The contention is milder than that. But it is contention: argument that's more competitive than persuasive. There is also a great deal of outrage, or at least the verbal expression of it. We are perhaps living in an age of outrage, but that only makes it more vital to avoid gratuitous manifestations. The real object of my outrage, if I were to indulge it, would not be the Bush Administration or the Congress or the Media, all of whom, in my view, are derelict at their very best and usually much worse, but the voters and television viewers without whose support these institutions would be very, very different. I don't believe in blocs; I believe in individuals. We must change the fabric of the nation one person at a time. Such a project is bound to be hindered by tones of outrage.

And perhaps few readers will be comfortable with the idea that I'm talking about them. Not personally or individually, to be sure. But when I remark that, for example, Americans are going to have to reduce their consumption of petroleum in all its forms, what I'm not doing is suggesting that you wait anxiously for the government to take charge of the problem. Without a catastrophe, no "leader" is going to touch this matter unless and until voters begin to pull their heads out of the sand and demand policies - with luck, on the most local of levels possible.

And if I suggest that you read Bob Herbert's column in last Monday's Times, it's because I'd like you consider his last sentence as carefully as you can.