An Open Letter to Radicals

“The conservative’s concern over order implies knowledge about what actually happens when social order breaks down. The value of order is perhaps more evident to those who have not had order in their lives than it is to those who have lived with a superfluity of it. You do not have to explain to Tutsis in Rwanda the value of the police. And lest one think that this is merely the bullying creed of tyrants, large and small, both the Caesars and Gottis of the world—or too closely allied to the American right-wing code of law and order—we should recall that the most widely human of all poets thinks this, too. Again and again, Shakespeare, who had come of age in a time of violent civil and religious war, extolls the necessity of order; he hates tyranny, but what worries him is anarchy and strife.”—Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities (2019)

Dear Radicals: I think you vastly underestimate how much your society benefits from strong institutions and an old-growth democratic political culture that took a couple of centuries to create. Like all radicals, regardless of their politics, you’re ready and willing to clear-cut it all—because you’re sure that anything could be better than this, because you’re filled with faith in the future.

Perhaps you fancy yourself a gifted gardener with a flawless five-year plan for humanity? If so, bear in mind that most of the planned societies of the last century led to the Gulag not the Garden. Perhaps you’re a laissez-faire libertarian, with a flair for creative destruction, who wants to burn the forest down just to see what comes up of its own accord. If so, bear in mind that societies with weak institutions are notoriously unstable.

As Machiavelli rightly observes, the stability of a society with weak institutions is heavily reliant upon the virtue of its leadership. If its elite is virtuous, all is well; if they’re not, things fall apart with startling rapidity. By contrast, societies with strong institutions are remarkably robust. Although nothing human is foolproof, and nothing human last forever, societies with strong institutions can withstand the ravages of troubled times and evil men, and they can survive seasons when virtue runs dry and vice flourishes, because virtuous institutions are more reliable than virtuous individuals.

Your willingness to gleefully burn your country’s institutions to the ground worries me, as does your inability to learn from the recent past. Remember what happened when America invaded Iraq without an exit strategy? How did that work out for Americans? How did that work out for the people of Iraq? Are the monsters that slithered out of the chaos to fill the power vacuum not still with us? Are they not far worse than those they replaced? How could you possibly want to repeat this reckless experiment in your own backyard?

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Trashing journalists and the media has been a mainstay of Western intellectual life at least as far back as Nietzsche, who implored his readers to “live in ignorance of what seems most important to your age!” Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Aaron Haspel, thinkers I’ve profited from immensely, are similarly hard on the media. Taleb’s contempt for journalists is legendary. In The Bed of Procrustes (2016) he says that he takes “a ritual bath after any contact, or correspondence (even emails), with . . . journalists, and those in similarly depraved pursuits”—whilst Haspel quips in Everything (2015): “News is noise.” I was once quite partial to this view. But far less so lately.

If the citizenry buys into the idea that journalism is little more than propaganda, and journalists are little more than paid trolls, who benefits from this, if not paid trolls and bullshit artists like Sean Hannity, who can now afford to hide in plain sight, with get-out-of-jail-free cards in their wallets which read: “Everybody’s Doing It Why Can’t We?” Same is true of those who denigrate science: they’re usually doing so because serious science is a threat to their particular brand of bullshit.

There are those who maintain that media isn’t about truth, it’s about power. It’s a popular view these days. But I don’t buy it. Is media often about power? Absolutely. Too often? Probably. But there’s still a world of difference between The New York Times and the propaganda machines that masquerade as media outlets in totalitarian states like North Korea and the former Soviet Union. There’s still a world of difference between Peter Jennings and Alex Jones.

I read Adbusters religiously in my early twenties, and I was a bible-thumping Pentecostal in my teens, so I know full well why folks on the far left and the far right are in love with this false equivalency. They love it because it levels the playing field. After all, if news is nothing but propaganda, and it’s all just about power, then we can spew out our own bullshit with impunity, and we can do it with a clean conscience.

Removing a well-established institution like the media from your society is like getting a seemingly superfluous part of your body, like your appendix or your tonsils, surgically removed. We too often discover the usefulness of things like the tonsils after they’ve been irretrievably removed. So, before you entrust the body politic to the radical’s knife, it’s good to ask: Is this institution performing an important function? And, if it is, what’s going to perform it after it’s gone.