Leon Wieseltier: An Ambivalent Fondness

I've become ambivalently fond of the columns of Leon Wieseltier in the New Republic.   

Ambivalent because I don't always share his political convictions; for example, in his most recent column Wieseltier is unfairly dismissive of the Dalai Lama's recent efforts to make peace with China.  

Fond because Wieseltier is wryly amusing, lyrical, and urbane.  Lately he has considered subjects that I care about deeply, both personally and professionally.  That most recent column begins this way: "One of the most troublesome qualities of reason is that it is not always reasonable. The man of reason is committed to follow only where deliberation leads, but the reasonable man has other commitments. His rationality answers to more than itself."   Thus Wieseltier begins a discourse on a topic that I think of as the "tyranny of rationality."  He comes to different conclusions (hence my ambivalence):  Leon prefers sharp-edged reason, while I almost always favor the more mushy "reasonableness."  But nevertheless it is refreshing to read about a topic that I've cared about for a long time, which for most people is fairly abstract.

A few weeks earlier Leon proclaimed: "Once upon a time, before the panicked society-wide attempt to expel contingency from American life, existence was organized, or left sufficiently unorganized, for the refreshments of serendipity."  Here is the librarian's fear that the shelves of physical books--a form of organized serendipity--have no analogue in the online world.  Wieseltier goes on to decry the fading away of things as seemingly disparate as "second-hand bookstores, or large movie screens, or patience in journalism."  All of this heritage is being sucked dry as we log onto Google and let it do our thinking.

It is here that Leon goes overboard (although I confess to an embellishment of his point of view).  For one thing, Google and its descendants are here to stay; it is important to honor what we're losing in this process, as long as we don't become indulgently maudlin.  And anyway, the Web is an amazingly rich source of information that has no counterpart in the analog world. 

Yes, people can blinker themselves on the Web just as easily (maybe even more easily) than they can in the physical world.  But this is the fault of ourselves, not of our tools.  I love printed books very deeply, but ultimately care more about the power of words however they are transmitted.  And even though Wieseltier and I don't agree about everything, I value his words very highly.