Week 5: The Great Debate, by Yuval Levin, Problems with Bad Writing

“The idea is cool, but this book is terrible.” Any serious reader has said that to themselves at some point during their reading career. That’s exactly the feeling you will get reading The Great Debate.

Think of a situation when you had to read a book for a college class. Some of you just hated all books from school, and that’s understandable, but others of you wanted to learn about some of the topics in your classes. You paid attention during lectures, and you even carved out some time to do that reading on the Battle of Gettysburg or the differences between Locke and Hobbes. Yet when you actually sat down to read, you could not get through more than three pages without becoming bleary-eyed and looking for the nearest Starbucks. Then you realize you do not just dislike the book, but you hate this entire class you thought you would love.

You probably felt bad about it and told yourself “don’t be a slacker, just power through it.” But once your friend texted you with “we’re going out tonight, you in?”, you were in, even if it was a Tuesday. Do not feel bad about abandoning a bad book to take part in some Dionysian revelry at your local bar or house party. This action was not your fault. You picked a class that should have been good. It was about the Civil War Era, or Microbiology, or whatever topic turned you on; it should have been fascinating. 

Don’t blame yourself. If the class is supposed to be interesting but ends up being boring, the teacher, not you, is doing something wrong. If the teacher is awesome, the topic should not matter. Your favorite topic will shine with a great teacher, but “20th Century European Intellectuals” or “History Workshop” with that same teacher will still inspire you. But if the topic is great and the professor is only mediocre, you are in for a painful semester.

The Great Debate is just like that bad class. The book covers two great scholars of the late 1700s, Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Burke was a classical conservative who believed government evolves over time to promote the good of a civil society. Paine was a classical liberal who thought government arises only as a contract to protect a citizen’s natural rights. The book tells the biography of both men and then lays out how the two first united to support the American Revolution but later diverged around the bloodier and more controversial French Revolution. Levin hashes out how each scholar viewed government, history, human nature, and human reasoning. He argues these two men not only defined political thought in their era but laid the groundwork for the current political divisions between left (Paine) and right (Burke) in the Western world.

The Burke-Paine debate should be a fascinating subject, but Levin’s writing in TGB comes as a great disappointment. According to his bio, Levin is a journalist by trade who edits National Affairs and contributes to conservative publications National Review and Weekly Standard. He writes more like an economics professor or a lazy college sophomore pulling an all-nighter. His sentences are bloated and filled with unnecessary adverbs. No view is “central” but is instead “utterly central”, and Burke never “disagreed“ but always “disagreed sharply.” Levin also overuses the negative voice throughout the book. One egregious example is on page 20, where he writes, “But (Burke) nowhere contends with the radical views of politics laid out in Common Sense, and it seems unlikely that Burke would have failed to react badly to those views had he encountered them.” Once your head stops spinning and you realize Levin is trying to say, “Burke would have disagree with Paine,” you have completely forgotten what he is writing about in the first place. 

Every writer (the author of this blog post included) has been guilty of these writing crimes at some point, but for a professional writer and editor they are inexcusable. The book takes an otherwise interesting subject and makes it very dry by using clunky sentences and lazy language. The subjects the book covers are not simple, but the more complex a topic, the more care the writer must take. If a writer is not exact with his words and his arguments, then the reader misses his main points, and his book loses its relevance. And, as George Orwell points out in his essay on political writing, “language can corrupt thought.” Levin’s vague language misleads the reader to think the philosophies of Burke and Paine were also vague, but it also keeps the reader from understanding what made Burke and Paine so important.

Don’t read The Great Debate. If you want to learn more about Edmund Burke or Thomas Paine, look them up online and find their original writings. The best of both writers is available on Project Gutenberg. For Paine start with Common Sense, and for Burke start with a collection of his political writings. Decide for yourself what these two men thought, and form your own opinions on the nature of government (those opinions are sure to be more clear than what Levin writes in TGB). Just don’t choose a bad teacher for a great subject.

Trust Me, I’m Lying, By Ryan Holiday: 11 Reasons I’m Doing This Blog

Author’s Note: This post has two parts. Part one is thoughtful and slightly depressing. Part two is less thoughtful and goofy. Read either one at your leisure.

Part One: The Main Reason

I don’t know anything. That is the main reason I am doing this blog.

My goal is to read one book per week for the next 52 weeks and write a blog about it. I think this one-year challenge is the best way to broaden the scope of my knowledge, share that knowledge with friends, and create a little friendly challenge for myself. Trust Me, I’m Lying, Ryan Holiday’s take on the twisted world of blogs, was the book that showed me I do not know as much as I think. Not knowing enough is a problem I really need to address.

In my freshman year of college, we were all required to take a course called “Western Traditions.” The class reviewed the great philosophers starting in ancient Greece moving through to the Renaissance period. The point was for us to understand early Western thought on a basic level before diving into whatever subjects we chose to study in more detail. Frankly, I remember very little about each of the so-called classics we studied, but I have always come back to one particular piece from that course, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. I am a visual learner, and I remember vividly my professor drawing out the setting of the beginning of the story on the blackboard in our classroom:

“And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or unenlightened:—Behold! human beings living in a underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.”

Plato explains what humans see as truth is not actually “Truth with a capital T” (as our professor would always say)--it’s just someone else’s projection of truth through an unreliable medium. The real truth, the one that is important to philosophers and intellectuals, is not readily visible and can only be found through extensive exploration.

This idea, that what we humans think is true might actually be false, blew me away. At the time I was a naive 18-year-old, and it never occurred to me that things I thought of as real could be fake. The thought was unsettling to say the least.

In the years following, I continued to take things in the world around me at face value more often than not. But occasionally I would come back to that story of The Cave. When I did, I would apply it more literally to the two media that define the view of “truth” in the modern world: television and the internet. Here were two examples of where notions of truth were not just being metaphorically screened in front of us, but were being physically screened for everyone to see. These channels for thought were so powerful and so prevalent that if the ideas they were espousing were actually false, it could be extremely harmful to any viewer’s freedom of thought.

Reading Trust Me, I’m Lying has brought this train of thought full circle for me. Holiday, who has served as a marketing advisor to public figures like Dov Charney and Tucker Max, explains how the economics of blogs make bloggers easy targets for manipulation. Most blogs rely exclusively on metrics like page-views and ad clicks to determine how much revenue they get from sponsors. More views and clicks equal more ads, so for-profit blogs will almost always choose content that will get a high number of views over content that is high quality. This often leads blogs to publish stories of questionable factuality. 

Holiday describes how he would often use phony names and email accounts to send bloggers fake news stories designed to gain more publicity for his clients. Bloggers are so starved for “click bait” content, he says, that they would usually accept his “tips” as fact and publish related stories without verifying any sources. Holiday says he would take advantage of this sloppy reporting by “trading up the chain”, feeding outrageous ideas to low-level blogs knowing the stories would, for the sake of clicks, eventually get picked up by more elite news agencies. Oftentimes these stories would show his clients in a negative light, but since guys like Charney and Max thrived on being reviled, this bad press was actually good press. These tactics are one of the reasons Holiday is the marketing superstar he is today.

While the first part of TMIL is all fun and games, Book Two, called “The Monster Attacks,” is much darker. Holiday shows how the moral ambiguity of these blogs (which include The Huffington Post, Gawker, Buzzfeed, Jezebel, and Business Insider among many others) will often (surprise!) do more harm than good. By the end of the book, Holiday becomes very cynical about major blogs, and even the internet as a whole, as a means of human communication.

I do not agree with Holiday that internet communication is a total waste of space. But I have realized anything passing for “daily news” on the internet could be utterly fabricated. As Holiday points out, this is a tough pill to swallow. Holiday writes, “Suppressing one’s instinct to interpret and speculate, until the totality of evidence arrives, is a skill that detectives and doctors train for years to develop. This is not something us regular humans are good at; in fact, we’re wired to do the opposite.” When we see a report on a celebrity scandal or hot-button political issue, our instinct is not to contemplate but to react. We will not take time to analyze what is truth and what is embellishment. Instead, we will laugh, cry, or kerfuffle, and we will accept what’s written as fact.

Of course, this blind acceptance is not a major problem if, as Holiday says, “they (the bloggers) hadn’t meant anything they wrote. It had all been a game.” I realized accepting the collective thought of the blogosphere as even remotely accurate could warp my entire perception of reality. That is why I have to do this blog. I need to turn off the spigot of modern media flow into my brain and turn on the spigots of literature and thoughtful commentary. Only then can I find the Truth with a capital “T” my professor always discussed.

Part Two: 10 Other Reasons

Okay, so Part One was a little heavy. If you have gotten this far (thanks Mom), I’ll try to reward you with a little humor and lightheartedness. So, here are ten other reasons I’m doing this blog:

1. I’ve always wanted to do a blog. Aside from wanting to be a professional golfer, a professional football player, and a professional baseball player, the main career dream I have in my young adult life is to be a writer. Maybe the best way to be a writer today is to start a blog. Big problem: before now, I had nothing interesting to write about. While the one-book-per-week idea is not earth shattering, it is the best I have for right now. How’s that for a sales pitch?
2. I want to improve my writing. I found my fire for writing while I was in college, and while I lost a little of it in my first couple of years after school, my most recent job has rekindled that fire into a roaring blaze. I have brainstormed a few different ways to improve, and I figured that writing articles for the whole world to see would be the best way to get better. Hopefully this is the worst post I ever write for this blog.
3. I want to read more. When I tell myself this, I always think of Brian Regan’s standup routine, where he says, “you never hear anybody bad-mouth reading.” Also, my parents often ask me, “what are you reading right now?” in a concerned, parental tone. Now I don’t have to answer that question; I can just tell them to read my blog.
4. Routine is key. I don’t have my bowel movements timed out or anything, but lately I have become more interested in routines. I knew I wanted to read more, but I knew I would not do it unless I had a schedule. That’s how I came up with the “one book per week” idea.
5. Stakes are a good thing. Nothing motivates me like a set of stakes, and no set of stakes motivates me like the possibility of total social embarrassment. And that’s what will happen if I fail to follow through on the promise of this blog. That’s why I turned the “one book per week” idea into a blog. Also, I need stakes if I am going to prioritize this blog, which has my full-time job, sports, food, family, and friends as competition for my time.
6. What are other people reading? It’s a good question for friendly conversation, but it is something that is rarely discussed any more. I want to know what other people are reading. What did you read that rocks? What did you read that sucks? What should I read next? Send me suggestions by commenting on this post or emailing me at lyonjournal@gmail.com, and I’ll add your book to my to-do list (probably). By the way, this question is one reason I will keep these blog posts reasonably clean: I want to hear what everybody is reading. That includes my 13-year-old cousin, who reads more than anybody I know (which is like 18 people, but still).
7. Tackling tough topics. This blog is where I can write honestly on topics I care about. Is time travel possible? Is going gluten free the way to be? Does high school poison you against reading? I will discuss these hard-hitting questions, and more, in future posts.
8. Becoming a Jack of All Trades. Tim Ferriss did an awesome podcast back in July about why being a "Jack of All Trades" is way cooler than being a specialized insect. Or, in the words of James Altucher: “winners focus, losers diversify.”
9. Connecting with New People. One of my big things since moving to Sarasota has been meeting new people (and meeting girls). I am hoping this blog will be a way for me to connect with even more new people (although very few of them are likely to be girls).
10. Filter the Flow of Info. I kind of already said this one, but I needed a 10th reason. Although this is technically an 11th reason. Either way, I want to cut my flow. I already refuse to have a TV, and I am thinking about cutting out my internet service. And I live in south Florida, away from the din of large cities. If I get a bunch of cats, I can be a 25-year-old male version of a cat lady who doesn’t have TV or internet. Pretty cool right?

I hope you enjoyed this post, and I hope enjoy following me on my journey of one book per week for the next year. Thanks! Later.