Eminent Americans

The Psychedelic I

I had the good fortune to be joined on this episode by the redoubtable Sheila Heti, award-winning novelist, avant-garde memoirist, incisive essayist, and all-around Canadian woman of letters. I asked Sheila to come on the show after I read “Good Medicine,” her recent essay in Granta, which is the report of her experience taking a series of guided psychedelic trips. It is also, though she didn’t set out with this in mind, a kind of midlife crisis essay, reflecting on where she’s been, where she’s going, what’s left for her, and so on.One thing that really struck me about the essay is that it really is, in the most basic way, a report on her experience. It’s here’s what she did, here’s what she felt, here’s who she met, here’s what came up psychologically during her trips, here’s what she felt like in its aftermath. And when a piece of writing feels so plain but so effortlessly holds your interest and propels you through the length of it, you know, if you’re somebody who’s tried your hand at writing yourself, that you’re in the hands of someone who has an exquisite command of language, and also that it’s who doesn’t need to prove it to you with every sentence she writes or every essay or story or novel. So I just appreciated that. I appreciated the craft of it. It also just vibed for me because a lot of the issues that she ends up confronting during the course of her trips are ones that I face, too. We also had some great conversation about other topics of interest to both of us, including clothing and fashion, class, money, success, and our mutual affection for the late, great essayist and critic Dave Hickey, who was a benevolent, generous, cantankerous spirit in both of our lives. So I really enjoyed this conversation, which was the official first episode of the second phase of an anticipated eight-phase journey of this podcast. As of this episode, Eminent Americans is produced in collaboration with the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis, and is distributed through its publication, Arc Magazine . You can find all of Arc's podcasts and much more online at arcmag.org. This won't change much about what I'm doing here. You'll now get some dulcet-toned promos for Arc and its flagship podcast. The occasional guest on my podcast will be someone who's written something recently for the magazine, or otherwise has something interesting or compelling to say about a topic the magazine has covered. Otherwise, though, we'll keep on keeping on Eminent Americans style. Peace. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

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The David Sessions Session

2w ago01:36:51Tap to summarize

My guest on the show today is returning guest and all-around friend of the pod David Sessions, a Boston-based freelance writer and the co-host, along with Blake Smith, of the relatively new Off Christopher Street Podcast and and Substack newsletter, about the history and present of gay male life and culture in America. David, Blake and I have recorded a crossover episode of Eminent Americans that focuses on their new endeavor, which should be out in the next month or two or three, but on this episode David and I are talking pornography, its ubiquity, the effect it may or may not have on our culture and kids, and related issues around technology, moral panic, and modern life. A few key differences between the two of us structure the discussion. One is our ages. David is 40. I’m now 50, and though it’s not a huge difference from one angle, it represents a fundamentally different generational growing up experience when it comes the internet, social media, and smart phones, none of which I basically had growing up, all of which David got relatively early on.Another is kids. I have three of them. David doesn’t have any. And a third is our backgrounds. I’m from a liberal secular Jewish home in the northeast where sex was discussed pretty openly, and porn wasn’t permitted but wasn’t really stigmatized either. David grew up in what he describes as a deeply conservative, Christian-nationalist home. He went to a Christian college, married a good Christian woman, and then came out as gay in his mid-thirties.One consequence of that background, for David, is that he’s unusually attuned to some of the ways that mainstream discourse around issues like porn, smart phones, the internet, and social media has been influenced by savvy right wing Christian groups, who recognized pretty early on that if they wanted to move the mainstream they would have to find rhetorical frames that weren’t aversive to establishment media. So instead of sin and god and traditional values they talk about public health harms, addiction, exploitation, objectification of women, etc.So David comes to these debates with an awareness of how they’ve often been covertly shaped by religious groups and motives. He also has the experience, as a gay man, of living a pretty flourishing social life that is enabled in all sorts of positive ways by the technologies that a concerned parent like me can easily fall into perceiving as purely pernicious.And one last thing I want to bring up, which I think is important as context for this conversation, is that so many of the discussions around the effects of tech on kids lack a real perspective on how it plays out differently depending on the socioeconomic class of the kids in question. Who is really speaking for, or from, the kids who aren’t living with the kind of social and cultural capital that David and I both, albeit in very different ways, had growing up. Two parent homes, relatively intact communities, financially secure, high parental investment, and so on. David and I, and my kids, and his kids if he has them, have been or will be raised with psychological protective factor layered on top of psychological protective factor. What about the kids who don’t have all that? Are we condescending to their parents in imagining that their kids are just at the mercy of the evil tech gods, that they’re not able to sufficiently protect and nurture them. Or, alternatively, are we just basically ignoring them when we have these discussions, as elites, as though their kids are just like our kids, having basically the same experiences. I don’t know, and David doesn’t either, and – and this is maybe the worst part – who would I even turn to to help me answer it? So that’s in the background of this conversation too.Two quick housekeeping notes. The first is a thanks to Joshua Howard for manfully editing this episode, as he has the last few. The second is that this the last episode of what I will retrospectively refer to as the scrappy, underground, indie era of this podcast. Starting in a week or two, I’ll be launching a partnership with Arc Magazine, which is published out of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. I’ll say more about that when we officially launch, but one thing I’ll say now is that Arc’s touch on the content and vibe of the show will be very very light. Occasionally I’ll have on a guest who is doing something for the magazine, there will be brief promos for other Arc content, and I hope to do some fun experiments that I didn’t have the bandwidth to do when it was just me and producer Robert. For the most part, though, I’m going to go about my business as I’ve done for the last few years. I’ll have on whoever I want. We’ll talk about whatever I want. And I’ll swear whenever I fucking want.Peace. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

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Who Killed the American Man?

3w ago01:31:46Tap to summarize

My guest on the show today, our special Fourth of July sesquicentennial episode, is Jacob Siegel. He's a writer and editor at Tablet Magazine, an Iraq and Afghanistan vet, co-host of the Manifesto! podcast, and author of the new book, The Information State, which we don’t discuss on the episode.Our topic, instead, is the “The Disappearing American Man,” the first installment of a column that Jacob is now writing for Tablet. To give you a sense of the essay, which is slightly to the left or maybe to the right or just below or above the typical crisis of masculinity polemic, here’s a particularly pungent passage from it:What I see in many prominent and representative American men today is a dribbling sludge of bitterness. A peacocking display of impotence, debility, worminess, insincerity, lack of competence, lack of confidence, lack of élan, pettiness, selfishness, scheming, and self-pity. Not all men, as the saying goes, but enough to pass a civilizational tipping point. The young men standing up at town hall meetings are almost pompous in their bitterness. The anonymous posters online have turned cattiness and petty sadism into a group erotic ritual. The politicians are embittered, the podcasters are embittered, even the popular comedians are embittered. Probably the comedians are the most bitter of all.Much of this bitterness seems to stem from an ambient feeling of betrayal. Today’s American man knows that he has been wronged. By globalist elites and international pedophile rings or else by his own toxic masculinity. By immigrants or perhaps by his innate racism. By “woke capital”; diversity, equity, and inclusion; greedy billionaires; and unappreciative modern women. And by the Jews, of course. Always by the Jews. So that's just a taste. It's a pretty intense, hard-charging essay. I would say there's more or less two overlapping arguments in the essay. One is about this bitterness as it's expressed in the more venomous, less inhibited regions of the right, which Siegel traces to the effects of the failed wars after 9/11, the thesis being something like: when the globe-bestriding American military colossus can't beat a bunch of goat herders, it powerfully undermines the projective identity that so many men, and particularly men on the right, have had with American military power. Its power is our power, is how they felt, and so then when its power is undermined so thoroughly, it strikes right at the core of people's identity, their sense of themselves as men. And what some people did with that searing sense of impotence was to turn it not just against the left, which is traditional right-wing move, but against the American soldier himself, and then behind him against what the American soldier traditionally has represented, which is American power, American might, American manliness. Attached to that is a historical narrative, a quite conspiratorial one, that the long period that most of us think of as a kind of golden age of American power and manliness, from the end of WW II to the end of the Cold War, was in fact a long, deep con perpetrated by the globalists on the real American men, who were its innocent victims. All that time that we thought we were powerful, by virtue of our affiliation and identification with American power, we were in fact being manipulated and betrayed. (Jacob and I wouldn’t say “we,” of course, since as Jews we were perpetrators of the con, not its victims.)So that's argument one, and the other argument, which I think is downstream of that one, is that an effect of all that — the loss of the wars, the cultural and political reaction to it — is that the cultural ideal of the American man has become exhausted. That figure who stood a certain way, held a cigarette a certain way, often looked on the world with a certain cool disdain, has died or at least has gone conspicuously silent. An archetype that was capacious enough over the decades to manifest in figures as diverse as manly Hemingway, the dandy Gatsby, the stoic Marlboro Man, swaggering Muhammad Ali, and the alienated Kurt Cobain seems no longer to be producing new manifestations of itself. The world spirit has abandoned him/us. Then braiding through these two arguments is Jacob’s own story of being in the wars. He did 15 months in Iraq, and then after some years in which he rather failed to figure out life as a civilian, he signed up again and went to Afghanistan. And it was in that space, he writes, that he was able to reassemble himself in a way that could eventually go on to do some flourishing in the aftermath. The piece opens with a road trip he takes with a bunch of enlisted guys from his unit, men over whom he had command. They semi-licitly liberated a van from the motor pool, and they went to see families of two soldiers who'd been killed by an IED in their last month over there. He talks about being the only officer in this tight group of enlisted men, some of whom had some real suspicion of him. He writes about his sense of guilt and dislocation during the interregnum between his two stints. He and I talk about that. We go into his theory of how the right talked itself into treating World War II as the original sin of American betrayal, how that recasts the Greatest Generation as a bunch of cucks, how a guy like Tucker Carlson, who was such a cheerleader for the Iraq War, has re-imagined himself into a state of metaphysical victimhood and purity, and how the big story of the betrayal of the American man has a weird double-sidedness to it— the true American man is pure, because he’s not responsible for the nation’s sins, but he also has no agency. He’s a dupe, a cuck.And so on. We get deep in the shit, in other words. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Hope you do too. Peace. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

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The Notorious R.O.D.

Jun 2301:43:12Tap to summarize

Damon Linker is back on the pod to talk about another former guest, the notorious R.O.D., Ray Oliver Dreher Jr. — i.e. Rod Dreher, one of the more fascinating, tragic, and infuriating writers of the Christian right over the last few decades.Linker and Dreher first met back when Linker, who is now a man of the solid center-left, was a conservative and an editor at the Catholic conservative magazine First Things. They bonded over their shared horror at the Catholic priest abuse scandal, a lot of details of which were unfolding at the time, and also over their shared frustration with various figures on the Catholic right, including some important people at First Things, who seemed to be in some kind of denial about the severity of the scandal, or if not in denial about the severity of it then intent on shifting as much blame as possible away from the Catholic Church and onto other folks or forces.The two remained friends over the next decade and a half, even as both of them went through various evolutions and migrations. Linker migrated towards the left, although not too far to the left, and Dreher went through a series of shifts, or perhaps repetitions, ever in search of some kind of structure or vessel or institution to contain or pacify his various aspirations, contradictions, and demons.A few years ago they broke, as Dreher has broken with many former friends and comrades over the decades, over what Linker would characterize as Dreher’s extremism, though they’ve been in touch a bit more recently in the aftermath of Dreher’s public denunciations of the right’s tolerance of anti-Semites within its ranks.In a recent essay, Linker writes of Dreher:I’ve written enough posts about Rod Dreher down through the years that I could almost dedicate a stand-alone section of this newsletter to him. (That’s an exaggeration, but not by much. Here is the most recent post, from just a few months ago, in which he plays an important part.) When I write something on him, my most engaged readers usually respond in comments that they used to admire Dreher and read him fruitfully but that at some point he became a reactionary and racist crank they could no longer abide. I’ve had periods when I’ve felt like that. But I keep coming back to him, even as he’s drifted further and further away from the (perhaps idiosyncratic) skeptical and pessimistic liberalism I affirm in my work.One reason why I keep coming back to Rod is that I know him personally, we developed a friendship nearly a quarter century ago, and I don’t believe in dropping friends for political reasons. There are limits to that, of course. (A friend who began telling me Adolf Hitler made a lot of good points in Mein Kampf would no longer get invited over to dinner.) But I try as best I can to exemplify the ancient virtue of liberality in my dealings with people. That means demonstrating generosity and openness to difference.But it wouldn’t be entirely honest to suggest I remain drawn to Rod purely out of a principled commitment to tolerate a longstanding friend who holds views with which I sharply disagree. The truth is that I feel like I “get” him on a deep, spiritual level.I don’t feel like I get Dreher on a spiritual level, but I do feel like I perceive him insightfully, from the outside, on a psychological level, and though my perceptions and Linker’s don’t perfectly align, they end up proving (as you’ll appreciate it you listen to our conversation) quite complementary.For both of us, Dreher is such a compellingly open wound of a person. He’s endlessly vulnerable, incredibly affable in one-on-one interactions (as I learned when I did my interview with him), reliably hysterical and apocalyptic when he’s dealing with the broad sweep of things, and also very principled in his idiosyncratic way, unable to gloss over the sins of his own side, in the name of unity, when they conflict with deeply held values of his. This all is, in other words, primo Eminent Americans content, and it was a pleasure to have Linker back on for it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

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Non-Producer Character (NPC)

Apr 2101:26:33Tap to summarize

My guest on the show today is audio producer Robert Scaramuccia, my longtime collaborator on the podcast. Robert is leaving me, as of the end of this episode, so that he can get a healthy work/life balance in place in advance of starting an MFA writing program in the fall. We talk about the things you’d expect — our experience of working together, his thoughts on Eminent Americans, his plans for the future — but we also, fortuitously, focus a fair amount on a topic that I’ve thought about addressing on the show, in the past, but have never pursued because I couldn’t see a obvious way in. It turns out that Robert is wholly fascinated with video games. Pretty much exclusively, to this point, his engagement has been as a player of them. But his hopes, going into the MFA program, is to write about them seriously, and perhaps also to produce podcasts on them. He’s really effing serious about video games. They’re important to his identity, and intellectually and aesthetically fascinating to him. They even, as we get into, played a role in him dealing with some of the emotions around the long sickness and then death of his mother when he was in college. I’ve never been a serious gamer, but some of it I get. it was part of the mix with my friends when I was growing up, now has a significant presence in the social lives of my 10 and 15 year old sons, and is just this huge thing, obviously, in the social and emotional world of boys and young men and increasingly not so young men. It also seems to me a topic that hasn’t received nearly the degree of serious literary and journalistic attention that it clearly deserves. It gets a lot of ink, in a certain sense, but so much of it is quite shallow, and so little of it seems to even begin to grasp the profound role that games and the ecosystems around them have played, and are playing, in the social and psychological lives of the people who play them.Really enjoyed the conversation. Hope you do too. Apologies in advance as the pace of release slows down for a bit. Still working on finding a new producer, and have some good leads, but for a little while at least I’ll be on my own, and so I will not be as productive. Not going away, though! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

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The Reservation Broadcasting System

Apr 201:20:57Tap to summarize

My guest on the show today is the inimitable Sherman Alexie, poet, novelist, Substacker, and occasional screenwriter.I would be surprised if you don’t already know who Alexi ise, given that he’s been an award winning and best-selling writer for decades now and is almsot certainly the best known Native American writer of our time.I asked him on, naturally, to talk about genre television. I’d noticed over the past few years that whenever I posted something to Substack about whatever random genre TV I happened to watching at the moment, Alexie would often pop in to respond. It became clear that we shared an earnest love of TV as emotional comfort food, and I wanted to talk to him about that. It naturally spins off into all sorts of other issues about childhood, reservation culture, literature and other forms of media, and politics.It is, in other words, an immensely fun conversation. Hope you enjoy.Peace This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

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I Get Schooled on Marx

Mar 2601:25:33Tap to summarize

My guests on today’s episode are historians Andrew Hartman and James Livingston. Andrew is a professor of history at Illinois State University and the author, most recently, of Karl Marx in America. Jim is professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University and the author, most recently, of No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea. I asked Andrew and Jim on the show to talk to me about Karl Marx and his continued influence on the American left. Really, if I’m being honest, I asked them on to help me solve a problem that I’ve been feeling increasingly compelled to solve, which is that I have a very strong intuition that Marxism is a profound drag on the capacity of the American left to achieve what I would like it to achieve, which is to exert meaningful power in opposition to big money in all its forms, but I am embarrassingly vague on the why or how Marx continues to exert such pull. The bosses have so, so much power in America, and I fear it’s slowly killing us, and we desperately to find a way to rebalance the scales. But precisely the kinds of people and groups to whom we’ve looked, historically, to organize fundamental resistance to the evils of big money are the ones who seem least capable of talking and acting in ways that might get the job done. And I blame Marxism for some, though certainly not all, of that incapacity. So I have all these very strong feelings, but I don’t know how to talk to the people I might hope to persuade in a language that might be persuasive to them. I could tell a story about the various sins of various Marxist movements of the last century that might be persuasive to some people — and in fact have told versions of that story — but I don’t think that that story would be persuasive to contemporary Marxist-influenced intellectuals. They know all that history, have already baked it into their perspective. What I’d need to do is talk theory to them, and I don’t really grasp the theory. And maybe even more than not understanding the theory, I don’t understand, viscerally, why people continue to be so drawn to it. I don’t grok the lived experience of being a 21st century American leftist who feels compelled to draw on Marxist concepts and language to think and talk through the problems we face. I can’t mirror those neurons. And it kind of drives me nuts. So this episode is a very selfish effort to help reduce the level of my vexedness, and I appreciate Jim and Andrew for their indulgence of me and for their uncompensated labor in bringing some clarity to my confusion.If you’re interested in learning more about Andrew’s new book, by the way, the American Prestige podcast is producing a six-part series, Marx Prestige, where Andrew and Daniel Bessner work their way through the history covered in the book. I’m looking forward to it.Peace. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

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Crime Story

Mar 1901:36:10Tap to summarize

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.comThis converstion with Greg Berman, former longtime CEO of the Center for Justice Innovation and author of the Small Sanities Substack, is both like and unlike a lot of previous conversations I’ve had in the anti-woke liberal space. It’s like it…

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Deconstructing the Broligarchy

Mar 501:49:11Tap to summarize

My guest today is friend of the pod Blake Smith We talk mostly about Blake’s recent essay for Colossus magazine, “The Education of the Broligarchy,” which is about what we can learn about the tech elite from what’s become known as the Silicon Valley Canon, a widely shared list of books that all aspiring tech overlords should read. .Unrelated to that, I want to share an exchange I had on Substack notes with Vladislav Davidzon, an Eastern European Jewish writer now based in the US. It began when I posted this note. I don’t really get the logic of Trump’s decision to invade. Even if it goes amazingly well, even if a mature liberal democracy magically coalesces in the aftermath, there’s no real constituency for that in the U.S. No one will care in nine months much less two years and nine months.His response: “You really are this clueless??”What’s amusing to me in retrospect is that I genuinely didn’t know which way he was going to go with this, given the dizzying array of theories about the motives for this war and the fact that you can’t even predict, in this case, what someone will say from knowing which side of things they’re on. Is it oil? Israel? Epstein? Dementia? Was it the frictionlessness of the operation in Venezuela?I’d already seen all of these theories, and more, all of them always offered with utter confidence, and I didn’t know which one Davidzon would proffer. The answer was none of them. He sent to me a piece on Tablet by Park MacDougald that was an (utterly deranged, from my perspective) argument that the attack was a carefully calibrated action that followed organically from the very well thought through theory that Trump hold of US foreign policy in the middle east, “an overdue correction to decades of a flawed U.S. Iran policy instigated by Barack Obama that transformed the globe into a more dangerous and more unstable place than it has to be.”I said in response that this seemed deranged to me, given what we know about Trump’s psyche, and Davidzon’s response was this:You seem to be deeply integrated into a fanatical worldview - so it seems like a waste of time to engage with that- Trump derangement syndrome is as real as much as he skillfully and sardonically ratchets it up to make the people maddened by him froth at the mouth and attack him - however - Trump - whatever his other failures may be - is a radically perceptive and intuitive about power relations. He has brutal and unsentimental and predatory and often correct judgments of power relations. He is a savage bruiser and that approach is very well matched to the way that things operate in the Middle East.I recount all this not to try to dunk on Davidzon, but to reflect on the fact that 23 years ago I supported the war in Iraq.I was 26 at the time, and wasn’t publishing, so I had the good fortune not be to responsible, even in the tiniest measure, for pushing us towards that terrible mistake. But my reasoned conclusion was that on balance it was a good idea. And I say “reasoned conclusion” earnestly, because even though it was a dumb thing to believe, I really did think it through in a fairly rational way. Doing something to upset the cruel status quo over, I concluded, was better than just tolerating or propping it up, as we’d seemed to cynically be doing for so long. Even rolling the dice had to be better than leaving Hussein in power, right? Right.Every war is its own thing, and I genuinely hope that somehow this war makes things better for the Iranian people, and the world, somehow. Maybe Davidzon sees things more clearly than I do. I doubt it in this case, but it’s always possible.My point is that I continue to be amazed at how radically differently people who are smart and not overtly crazy can view the same set of facts.I find it fantastical that anyone could look at Donald Trump at this point and see what MacDougald and Davidzon see, which is someone capable of acting strategically in any way, even a brute intuitive way. Davidzon finds it “fanatical” that I view Trump this way, as a captive of his own broken psyche; this is evidence of my Trump Derangement Syndrome.There isn’t a set of algorithms we can run this kind of dispute through in order to resolve who is right and who is wrong. What we can do, I think, is continue to put our ideas and premises and prejudices in genuine conversation with other people who see the world differently than we do. My experience has been that if this process is undertaken earnestly and openly, it tends to move one toward greater self-knowledge and wisdom. Which doesn’t, to be clear, miraculously enable one to arrive at the right answer on thorny questions. But just the fact that there’s a thing we can do, a process we can engage in, that will reliably move us toward greater self-knowledge and wisdom is pretty damned miraculous in its own right.In that spirit, hope you enjoy this conversation with Blake. Peace. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

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Jonathan Lear, Local Exemplar

Feb 2601:25:08Tap to summarize

My guest on the show today is Jonny Thakkar. Jonny is an Assistant Professor in Political Science at Swarthmore College and one of the founding editors of The Point. He’s the author of various articles, most recently “Beyond Equality” in the newest issue of the Point, and the 2018 book Plato as Critical Theorist.I asked Jonny on to talk about his late friend and mentor the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, who was his advisor at the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought and, as you’ll hear in our discussion, his occasional advisor on matters of the heart.He wrote about Lear, after his death, along with a collection of other remembrances from friends and colleagues of Lear’s:His own career path was so individual as to be impossible to emulate. Institutionally speaking, he had completed two undergraduate degrees, one in history and the other in philosophy, followed by two graduate degrees, the first a Ph.D. on Aristotle’s logic under the supervision of Saul Kripke—a prodigy in contemporary logic and metaphysics who was only eight years older than Jonathan, had no expertise in Aristotle and only ever supervised one other dissertation—and the second a professional qualification in psychoanalysis that licensed him to treat patients clinically. His philosophical interlocutors were many and various, among them Plato, Aristotle, Kierkegaard, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Williams, J. M. Coetzee and Marilynne Robinson, but he was no dilettante. He wanted to understand what it meant to be human, and he simply followed that question wherever it took him. Without end, I should add: he took up the study of ancient Hebrew in his mid-seventies because he had become so puzzled by the treatment of the prophet Balaam that he wanted to make sure he wasn’t missing anything in translation!That ethos of constant self-development was central to what you might call Jonathan’s philosophy of life. Some people use the term “perpetual student” pejoratively; for Jonathan, being open to learning from the world was the key to human flourishing. As he told matriculating undergraduates in a 2009 address, “the aim of education is to teach us how to be students.” In the preface to Open Minded, he wrote that achieving tenure at Cambridge in his twenties freed him from professional pressures to such an extent that he was forced to confront the meaning of his own existence. “I realized that before I died, I wanted to be in intimate touch with some of the world’s greatest thinkers, with some of the deepest thoughts which humans have encountered. I wanted to think thoughts—and also to write something which mattered to me.”We talk about Lear’s work, but also about what it means to be, or be influenced by, what Lear called a “local exemplar,” which is someone who has a profound influence on the people around him or her. An exemplar could be a real mentor in the classic sense, as Lear was for Jonny and other students of his, or a writer who affects other people just through text, which is how he functioned in my life. It could also be someone who just said or did something once or a few times that stays with us, imprints itself on us, and changes us in ways that unfold over time.So we talk about how Lear played that role in our lives, but also about the ways in which Thakkar may be playing the role of local exemplar, as a teacher, in the lives of his students, and more generally what it is about someone, or something, that makes it capable of influencing us in these ways.One reason we ended up in this space, I think, is that I’ve been wrestling a lot, lately, with the question of how writing does or doesn’t influence people, because I’m writing a book, on relationships and therapy, that edges into the territory of self-help, and I’ve become moderately obsessed with not replicating the mistake that so many self-help books make on this front, which is thinking that in order to help people, the thing to do is give them straightforward advice on how to do or be better.This always seems to me like a fundamental misunderstanding of how texts change people, and in some ways an odd one to make in particular for the therapists and psychologists who write so many of these books. If anyone should understand that the human psyche is tricky and that real change tends be a product of close relationships and communal structures playing out over time, rather than advice distilled to words, it should be therapists.Texts do change people’s lives, but it’s indirect. They’re poetic. They’re narrative. They’re allusive and elusive. They’re not precision tools to achieve a predictable outcome in readers.Lear understood this. I asked him once if the style of his essays was deliberately looping and associative because he was trying to emulate something about the rhythms of psychoanalytic practice, and his response was surprise. I just try to write clearly, he said, and the more I think the more I believe him. I think there was something so integrated in the way he did all these things – teach, write, practice psychoanalysis – that his version of writing clearly became this thing that I perceived as indirect, and that it is because of this, in some sense, that his writing has the capacity to affect people in a way that most self-help literature doesn’t.I didn’t know Lear well, as a person, but he had, and continues to have, a big influence on me. That’s even more the case for Jonny, as you’ll hear. I don’t think he’s for everyone, but if he might be for you, I really encourage you to pick up one of his books or find one of his essays online. I’ll drop in some links to a few of below. He was a remarkable person.Hope you enjoy. Peace.Jonathan Lear articles:* “Aims of Education”* “Inside and Outside the Republic”* “A Case for Irony”* “Wisdom Won from Illness” [this is actually the whole text of one of his books]* “Transience and hope: A return to Freud in a time of pandemic”* “Jumping from the Couch: An Essay on Phantasy and Emotional Structure”* “Can the virtuous person exist in the modern world?” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

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