The New Republic, February 17, 2011
The Washington Diarist: The New Thinking
Leon Wieseltier
One expects to discover, as one’s
experience of the years grows
great, that life is too short, but
it is disagreeable to discover that
life is also—I do not want to say
too long, because only a fool would
want the light to go out, but long
enough for one to suffer the
marginalization, and even the
disappearance, of values and causes
and of course people that one
loves. The world does not care
about anything forever. Its forward
movement will not be broken. The
relentlessness of time is a
condition of progress, but even
when it does not bring progress it
is relentless. Sometimes the
turnings can feel stupid, as when
there seems to be no good reason
for the falling away of things and
understandings whose worth was only
recently so proven. Time is not an
argument. One feels at home in
one’s universe when it concurs with
one’s sense of what is significant,
but the concurrence—be warned—is
fleeting, the world will revolve
again regardless of the merit of
one’s belief and way of life,
leaving one in a blue but perfectly
honorable isolation. Sooner or
later we are all minorities, except
of course the opportunists—they
have fancier names for themselves—
who move with the scene. “Do Truth
and Falsehood exist?” Cavafy
wondered anxiously in 1902. “Or is
it only the New and the Old that
exist—with Falsehood merely being
the old age of Truth?” I have
watched ideals and traditions that
I cherish—a certain sort of
liberalism; a certain sort of
philosophy; the speaking of Hebrew;
easel painting; the joyful making
of books; long sentences, and even
the sound of a voice, in personal
communications—fall into disrepute.
(We all have such a list.) But
there is dignity in the fugitive
existence that those customs now
lead: historical failure is not
evidence of error, not at all.
History rewards all kinds of
nonsense. One learns to live with
less external vindication; to find
others similarly unreconstructed;
to thrive a little out of step. And
of course to watch the gaudy parade
of new thinking.
We are living in an era of new
thinking. I hear that it is almost
unbearably exciting. You know the
drill. Times have changed. Nothing
is what it was. A revolution in
life calls for a revolution in
thought. The dustbin of history is
filling up. And so on. It is worth
observing, therefore, that new
circumstances do not always call
for new thinking. Sometimes the
explanatory power of a prior
concept survives into an altered
situation; or else all concepts are
merely expressions of their
moments. And some of the historical
thresholds that are supposed to
have retired the received ideas—a
new decade, a new century, a new
millennium, a new generation—are
meaningless chronological
distinctions. New thinking would do
better to seek a solid foundation
not on new times but on new
knowledge. The magnitude of
scientific and technological
discovery in our day certainly
overwhelms the mind, and rains
challenges upon what we have
hitherto believed. The emergence of
the controlling scientific metaphor
of our era—the network—is only the
most obvious sign of the upheaval
in perspective. We are wanton
paradigm-shifters. We should be
careful, however, to match our
answers to our questions. Non-
scientific questions do not have
scientific answers. Too much of our
new thinking consists in an
unwarranted scientism, as if the
solutions to time-honored
quandaries of morality and
metaphysics simply await the
attention of a few neuroscientists.
And some of our intellectual
freshness is just another round of
indulgence in the cute and the
counterintuitive, as in those
anniversaries encoded in the Google
logo: one day Cézanne’s birthday,
another day the birthday of
buckyball.
I have been reading a document of
the new thinking. It is called How
to Run the World and it is by the
“brilliant, eloquent, well-
connected, and charismatic” (so his
publisher says) Parag Khanna, who
sits at the New America Foundation,
a hive of the new thinking that
sometimes seems devoted to proving
that really the best Beatle was
Ringo. Khanna’s book is a parody of
the newness binge. Diplomacy is
over, it proclaims. “We just need
to load new operating software onto
our emerging global network.” That
software he calls “mega-diplomacy,”
which consists of “action-oriented
networks.” This is “Generation Y
geopolitics.” “Generation Y will
own mega-diplomacy,” not least
because “it subscribes to
postmaterial values such as
equality and ecology.” Mega-
diplomacy, which “forces us to cast
aside ideologies,” consists
essentially in non-governmental
individual and collective action
abetted by the Internet and other
technologies of linkage: best
practices plus social media. In
this way we will achieve “universal
liberation through exponentially
expanding and voluntary
interconnections.” For “mobile
phones and Internet are closing the
gap between activism and uprising,”
as Twitter did in Iran in 2009.
(Really, he says this.) And
“eventually, the Chinese
authorities may respect and even
follow Google’s unofficial motto:
‘Don’t Be Evil.’” (Really, he says
this, too.) As an historical actor,
the state is over. “Is statehood
itself the problem?” Maybe “hybrid
statehood” is the answer. No, the
answer is “networks of resilient
systems.” In any event, “everyone
has a role in running the world.”
And corporations, too, have a role
in the “diplomatic-industrial
complex.” For a tribune of the
people, Khanna has an unattractive
infatuation with elites.
“Celebrities possess one of the
core ingredients of diplomatic
success: prestige.” That is how
“Madonna has helped put Malawi on
the map.” “Madonna cites her
resilience and tirelessness as the
reasons why she remains at the top
of her game. Regular diplomats
should learn from her staying
power.” At the World Economic Forum
in Davos, too, “everyone at the
table is at the top of their game.”
And the Clinton Global Initiative
“produces the same aura of great
consequence.” Also, “the WEF also
embodies our postmodern age because
it allows people to maintain the
multiple identities they carry
today. Bill Gates has appeared at
Davos as Microsoft CEO and as head
of the Gates Foundation at the same
time.” You will have noticed that
the new thinking is not without
platitudes of its own: this dizzy
and self-adoring book is an
anthology of them. It is cool, but
it is not serious. Who, surveying
the dangers and the failures and
the horrors of our world, the
temptations of tribe and race and
church and empire, would give up
the old internationalism, and the
power of the democratically
regulated state, for this? Every
generation, I suppose, has a right
to get it wrong.
Leon Wieseltier is the literary
editor for The New Republic. This
article ran in the February 17,
2011, issue of the magazine.