Our new winter issue features a forum on the left and the good life, including a contribution by Marco Roth on the “whiny Nietzsche paradox” and the special (and difficult!) relationship left intellectual spaces have to the life of the mind. Today we’re publishing the essay in full on Substack. Click here to check out the rest of the new issue.

There’s a brief classroom scene in Kenneth Lonergan’s film Margaret (filmed in 2005, unreleased until 2011) that perfectly crystallizes a wounded adolescent masculine intelligence of a kind that has become increasingly prominent even among adult men in contemporary American cultural and political life, discontented by liberal arts pedagogy, and—by way of an emotive, illogical leap—with liberalism itself. A bunch of Upper West Side prep-school kids are asked by their well-meaning if rather uninspiring English teacher to gloss the Earl of Gloucester’s lines from King Lear, “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.” At first we’re treated to a range of fairly realistic, almost banal responses: there’s a girl who prefers not to say anything at all when called upon. The audience knows it’s because the lines resonate too deeply with her, and, like Cordelia, nothing is the most truthful thing she can say. Then there’s the good boy who suddenly discovers character and subjectivity: “It’s not Shakespeare saying it, it’s Gloucester. Maybe another character would have a different point of view.”1

The teacher is all set to reward this insight, allowing him to reinforce the lessons of the easygoing pluralism that we recognize to be the implicit pedagogical aim of too many high school English class discussions. (Poor literature, almost never taught for itself, always as a means to something else.) But Lonergan then takes the scene to another level by writing in that one galaxy-brained teenager who had probably just dropped acid for the first time the preceding week. He seizes on his classmate’s idea of different subjective realities and overworks it: not only do “the gods” treat humans the way boys treat flies, he suggests, but from the standpoint of consciousness, a god’s consciousness to a human is like a boy’s consciousness to a fly, and therefore we can’t know why the gods do anything. This is essentially the end of the Book of Job rendered in the self-satisfied idioms of someone a couple years away from discovering effective altruism, a future master-of-the-universe type. In Lonergan’s screenplay, this is made explicit. The kid continues, “He’s saying there’s a higher purpose we cannot see. He’s just saying that what seems like them killing us for sport could just be because our consciousness isn’t developed enough to see what the higher wisdom of their killing us is.” The filmed version adds a note of hostile grievance: “If you say they kill us for their sport … then how can we be so arrogant as to think they would even bother to kill us for their sport?”

Here is the theater of an intelligence suddenly in love with itself—“in apprehension how like a god.” In this situation a good teacher could ask the boy to connect his observation to the play as a whole, opening up a potential conversation about the social purpose of tragedy or beginning to inculcate an awareness of irony, i.e. what happens when characters in a play become aware that they are essentially characters in a play. Alternatively, the teacher could move in the direction of philosophy, reminding the student that that this teenage attempt to inhabit the standpoint of the divine is nonetheless a statement made by just another flawed human being.

Instead, in the film, the teacher gets flustered. The kid’s idea is not assimilable to the humanistic “takeaways” the guy has been hired to impart to these young minds. So he tries to sow doubt, insisting, “I don’t think that’s what Shakespeare meant,” and invoking “scholarly opinion” without citing any specific scholarship. The kid is too smart, too high on his own supply, and his mood too combative to be satisfied with this mere ghost of expertise. He shoots back: “What are you saying? A thousand Frenchmen can’t be wrong?”

Eventually, the exasperated teacher chooses to utter the fateful words that turn the premise of this entire exercise in nonhierarchical, pluralistic liberal arts education to dust. “No, David, you’re wrong. That’s not what Shakespeare meant!” he raises his voice. “I would really like to move on.” The camera shows us disdain, bafflement, turning to hurt, curdling to anger, on the kid’s face. What did he do wrong? We can well imagine how this kid might nurture a grudge for life against the dumb liberal arts teacher and the guy’s fake experts who shut him down. He would now be old enough to be among the more senior operatives at DOGE, or leading the charge for viewpoint diversity on college campuses, or representing the Marxist-accelerationist wing of the DSA.

Teachers—like cops, border guards and that day’s consulting psychiatrist at the ER—perform crucial jobs at the tense frontier where illiberal impulses and wishes are in daily confrontation with liberalism’s “rules-based order” for maximizing individual expression and liberty within the ever-shifting limits of other individuals’ expressions and liberties. A society turns out to be really only as good as its most liminal gatekeepers, and the teacher who fails the test of the principles he’s supposed to uphold as well as transmit reveals the fragile foundation of the whole open-society endeavor.

The machine was always full of illiberal ghosts, the irritable gestures of a weak authority tired of allowing itself to be questioned. And this was true of America’s most prestigious and rigorously “liberal” institutions, like the composite prep school of Lonergan’s film, which retained many non- or anti-liberal aspects throughout the comparatively brief epoch of American liberalism’s social, cultural and political ascendancy (a period that, most charitably, spans from the publication of Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination in 1950 until Al Qaeda took down the Twin Towers). Handling testosterone-fueled, would-be-nonconformist boys at the end of history was only one of the many challenges for an already fraying post-9/11 liberalism, but it turned out to be a particularly salient one for the ability of liberal institutions to continue providing the promised end of one type of good life.

The failure point had been reached well before the spot of time depicted in Lonergan’s film. Liberal values, at least in education, were already more of a vague idea than something actively practiced. The audience implicitly understands that the teacher had only a fifty-minute period to get through that day’s allotted reading of King Lear. The clock was ticking, and—in addition to the soft pluralism—he was also responsible for maximizing student SAT scores, thereby boosting admission rates to fancy colleges, a cog in the wanton flywheel of class reproduction. Time to move on.

Or not just yet. The contradictions on display in Lonergan’s short dialogue are not all on the teacher’s side. The kid isn’t just trying to make a valid—if digressive—point about hierarchies of consciousness. He wants two different things at once: the same validation the teacher bestowed on his classmate—be it smile, gold star, whatever cookie of affirmation or stamp of approval from authority; and yet he also wants to triumph over that authority. He’s not just seeking to be recognized as part of a community of meaning-makers and fellow minds, his comment is meant to end conversation. The recognition he seeks is a recognition of his superiority.

The scene offers a succinct version of what I like to think of as the “whiny Nietzsche” paradox that afflicts many young men (and not only men) of high intelligence at some point in their emotional and intellectual development. It’s not enough for them to be smart, they must be smarter. And it’s not only enough to be smarter, they need an authority to ratify their superiority. This need for external approval gives the lie to their claim for superiority. The boy does not seek recognition from the fly. In an ideal world, this yearning for recognized superiority would only be a type of chrysalis stage that gives way to mutual acknowledgment between peers, without the need for the single overarching authority figure to bestow rewards, or punishments. Because we don’t live in that world, what we’ve got instead is a number of adult whiny Nietzsches strutting and fretting upon the American stage: Curtis Yarvin, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Costin Alamariu (aka Bronze Age Pervert), whose claims to intellectual superiority or godlike insight into immutable truths about human nature ought to have been actively contested and refuted at a moment when it might have made a difference to their own thinking and to an impoverished culture that now lives only to take sides with or against them.

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Although the relationship might not be immediately apparent, I thought about this scene in connection with The Point’s forum about the left and the good life for a number of reasons. If we believe, along with Aristotle and Hannah Arendt, that the good life is one that contains or indeed chiefly is defined by contemplation, conversation, the free cultivation of the intellect for no ulterior purpose apart from the pleasure or happiness we derive from such thoughtfulness as an end in itself, we also have to attend to the creation and care of spaces that permit the full and free exercise of what Arendt glorified as “the life of the mind.” The whole point of this intellectual idea of the good life is that it is precisely apolitical, or pre-political. Not only is it beyond good and bad, it is beyond left and right, or rather it is before left and right. So, at first glance, what the left has to do with this kind of good life is precisely nothing. Only a space free from politics allows us then to enter politics, ideally on our own terms. But, as Arendt acknowledges, freedom of thought itself requires conditions of political freedom. Curiously and counterintuitively, she goes on to remark in her discussion of the life of the mind that “it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.”

What this has to do with “the left,” more than “the right,” is connected to our assumption that the left, at least such as it once existed in the United States of America, retains commitments to enlarging the space of freedom or providing for the greatest liberty of the greatest number, whereas the right narrows the liberty of others to protect the freedoms of the few. In this way, although the good life is both pre- and post-political, the guardianship of the nonpolitical space that offers the positive freedom to think has historically most often been entrusted to those on the left of the U.S. political spectrum. The foundations not just of the modern university but of the cultural practices of discussion, conversation and open-minded debate in this sense do indeed have an inherent liberal bias, and that’s a good thing.

The problem comes when that inherent liberal bias turns into something more than that, which is a constant temptation, since the things we think in our pre-political phase will inevitably, at least if we are serious about thinking them, as opposed to merely playing games with ideas, lead us in a political direction. Eventually we may find ourselves in a position where we are required to sideline the political convictions we have arrived at through thinking for the sake of keeping open the nonpolitical space for thought—and, depending on the times in which we live, or any number of ulterior considerations, we may not feel that this is a good trade, either for us personally or for the “movement” that our political convictions have brought us into alignment with. It is here that the posture of Lonergan’s put-upon English teacher, which has so often been taken up by the American left in the past fifteen years, even in its more moderate institutional guise, can become so hard to resist.

I experienced the difficulty of maintaining an open-ended space for “the life of the mind” firsthand, from inside the workings of n+1, the “little magazine” I helped bring into being in 2004. One part of the founding impetus, and the part with which I most strongly identified, was to enlarge or create a space of intellectual and artistic freedom within that mysterious trinity of “literature, culture and politics.” At times we placed this desire under the anarchic banner of “saying the unsayable,” aiming to function as a type of voice of the unconscious of American intellectual life—both as id and sometimes as superego. When we started out there seemed to be too much responsible and self-interested ego all around us: that could take the form of Peter Beinart’s carefully calibrated arguments for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, or the expensively tousled stylings of twee literary culture operating out of West Coast magazines like McSweeney’s and in the workshops of the MFA pipeline. We looked upon these as cultural and intellectual interventions that were written for the sake of approval from “acceptable” institutional voices and authorities, and which would never dare risk their incomprehension.

While suspicious of broad conformity and approval-seeking at the expense of grappling with complicated truths in the work of others, we nonetheless tried to be sensitive to this tendency in ourselves. Built into our attitude of permanent dissatisfaction was a project of autocritique, or at least an openness not only to disagreement and discussion but an active attempt to promote and host unfolding and uncomfortable conversations, whether through long letters to the editor, dissents to our own critiques published in our pages—as happened when James Wood approached us to respond in essay form to our criticisms—forums and public events with people who thought or believed differently from us, and so on.

At the same time, there were enough unresolved tensions in the founding editors’ sensibilities and commitments that we couldn’t avoid our own mid-2000s version of the whiny-Nietzsche problem, especially as the magazine gained subscribers and cultural influence. Did we in fact want the recognition and approval of the authorities we were challenging, did we want to supplant them, or did we want to evolve our own model of a working, growing cultural institution that operated differently and so avoided the pitfalls of groupthink and closed-mindedness we’d sensed in our precursors? Cynics would and did suggest that the first of these was always the primary motivation and that the evolution of the magazine over the twenty years since its founding bears that out. But it wasn’t so straightforward or predetermined at the time.

As editors but also as writers, we often found ourselves in the tricky position of occupying both sides of Lonergan’s unfortunate student-teacher encounter. Contrarians ourselves, we still struggled to handle any would-be whiny Nietzsches who came into contact with us. Most of all, the contradictions they inhabited—between wanting our approval and wanting to prove to us how dumb or backward or insensitive we were ourselves—made working with them difficult and time-consuming. And publishing pieces that we might not wholly endorse on grounds of widening the conversation or sparking dialogue tended to cost us subscribers who didn’t appreciate the challenge. And not only subscribers: one of my great shocks in talking with many of our most enthusiastic interns and writers was that they’d been attracted first to the magazine not because of its openness but because of the correctness of our opinions. “You were right about the Iraq War!” is something I heard from almost every young up-and-comer.

Something else happened in the course of my time at the magazine: beginning with Occupy Wall Street, in 2011, an actual American left protest movement broke out, of a kind that had not existed when we started the magazine. This put our commitment to remain open to uncomfortable confrontations under even more pressure. Throughout the left-liberal intellectual sphere, it was recommended that in the name of action—or at least of activism—conversations on a whole range of issues needed to be shut down, or wrapped up. The magazine’s editors and staff wholeheartedly joined encampments and demonstrations; we saw our friends beaten and arrested or were beaten and arrested ourselves. In our hearts, minds and bodies we felt ourselves to be less free. And under such conditions, as Arendt had warned, we chose to emphasize action and therefore “right action” over “thought” or the kind of “conversation” that suspended judgment of right and wrong.

Our foundational triad of politics, literature and culture turned out to be a hierarchy with political identity at the top. It didn’t necessarily have to turn out that way. A few years later, the novelist and essayist Amit Chaudhuri proposed a project that he named “Literary Activism,” i.e. activism on behalf of literature and literary approaches to life. The irony built into the phrase highlights the difficulty but also a life-affirming joy in the task. Alternatively, we might have mounted a more robust defense of freedom of thought, independent of party or politics or the sensitivities of donors and subscribers. Instead we became irritable, impatient and ultimately hostile toward those who continued to question our commitments and beliefs. They had not spent a night in the Tombs, nor had they labored with little sleep and no immediate reward to produce gazettes and pamphlets to give a platform to activists and advocates and everyday people who made up the movement. And so something that began as a contrarian operation inside the left-liberal literary and cultural spheres that formed our intellectual life lost the necessary patience to engage with and host potential skeptics within the frame of our own pages. This happened in the way people go broke, at first gradually then suddenly.

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Lonergan’s scene highlights the difficulty of maintaining open-ended intellectual spaces even under what ought to be close-to-ideal conditions. With one misstep, one slip off balance, the invitation to think becomes instead a theater of gesture, a drama of recognition and vengeance playing out in a space that appears to be free but reveals itself to be cryptically or tacitly authoritarian. This tacit authoritarianism does not have to arise from any obvious “ideology”—no assumptions about race, class and gender are at play in the confrontation—but rather from psychology. Or we could say that both teacher and student in the scene are caught between psycho-ideological scripts, the boy not knowing if he wants approval from authority or wants to supplant it, the teacher not knowing how to command respect without slipping into dogmatism. The teenage boy is not yet a troll, not yet an intellectual terrorist or right-wing influencer. It is only in the drama of failed recognition that he may become one. How much harder is it to deal with this type of intelligence, this type of challenging person, the gadfly who thinks he can see like a god, when we become convinced that conditions are intolerable and we inhabit a permanent state of emergency?

I’m not writing about my old magazine here to settle scores, or only to catalogue a disappointment. I understand n+1’s fate to be representative of a host of leftward cultural and intellectual institutions that unintentionally yet also willingly surrendered guardianship of the life of the mind. That this surrender happened at the same time that we also tried to open ourselves up to newer voices and newer perspectives is a tragic irony worthy of King Lear. But one result is that American society has drifted farther than ever from a truly independent good life in which our thoughts may be unsanctioned and also unsanctified, while remaining always contestable and always in conversation with other all-too-human humans.

Further reading on education and intellectual life from issue 36…

• Annie Abrams on Dewey, Plato, and what’s good for students.

• Daniel Walden on the left case for great books.

• Ege Yumusak on where politics takes place.