← Old School with Shilo Brooks
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- [00:00]
Shiloh Brooks
I'm Shiloh Brooks. I'm a professor and CEO and I believe reading good books makes us better men. Today I'm sitting down with Fareed Zakaria. Fareed is a renowned journalist, political commentator and best selling author. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1925. Change Fareed's life. Today I'm asking him why. This is old school. Fareed Zakaria, welcome to old school.
- [00:38]
Fareed Zakaria
Thank you so much for having me.
- [00:39]
Shiloh Brooks
It's a pleasure to have you. One of the reasons is you've written a lot of books yourself and this is a podcast about books. And you've got really wide ranging intellectual interests, which I appreciate. Can you talk a little bit about how you got to CNN with such a wide variety of intellectual interests and how those have shaped you?
- [00:59]
Fareed Zakaria
It's partly because I'm a kind of jack of all trades. You know, I'm not. I've never been very good at specializing and siloing myself. And I discovered as I was, you know, working as a journalist, that it actually helped me to be able to range as widely as my intellectual curiosity. And so, you know, I was at Yale, I studied history and I studied a lot of American and European history because I came from India and I wanted to deeply immersed myself in the history of the West. When I got my PhD at Harvard, I did international relations, but I studied a lot of political philosophy. In fact, I taught the required course in those days, which was essentially a course in political philosophy. Locke, Bain, Federalists, Anti Federalists, that kind of thing. And then a lot of court cases. It was a great course. It was sort of the theory of America, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Calhoun, who's very important to American democratic theory and then the application of that theory. So we do a whole bunch of court cases to see how, you know, how did you take those ideas and apply them. Of course, unfortunately that course is no longer because it was all dead white men, which I don't think should have disqualified it. But so now you have a kind of optional, you know, much worse, in my opinion, smorgasbord of things you can do. Then when I started to write more and more, you know, journalistic stuff, I just found that I was interested in social history, I was interested in cultural history. And so I just would, you know, kind of went where it went. I still have a core of things that I care deeply about, which are around international affairs. But you know, in the last book I spent the first 300 pages on the Dutch Revolution, the glorious Revolution. Because I was trying to understand the rise of populism and I just went where my curiosity took me.
- [03:02]
Shiloh Brooks
Well, let me ask you this, because you have written a book on liberal education. You are a really articulate expositor of the value of liberal education today. Old school really does try to capture the essence of what a liberal education, an old school liberal education is. So I wonder if you might give an account of what that is and why it's valuable today.
- [03:23]
Fareed Zakaria
So the first thing people need to understand about a liberal education is it is not an education that excludes the sciences. Yeah, A liberal education really means not a trade education. That is not an education designed to a very specific profession. It's a broad, wide ranging education in art, sciences, humanities, social sciences, whatever. And the idea behind it is to really to help train your mind to think, and train your mind to think broadly and widely and not to worry too much about how to become an accountant. That that's not the stage at which you should be doing, that you can specialize later. And I think the great value to that kind of education is in today's world, particularly when computers can do so much of the very basic analytic work that so many professions require, from coding to accounting. What is left for us is that broader sense of synthesis, creativity, curiosity. And a liberal education makes you think in that way very deeply. The contrast I always think about is a conversation I had with the then Singapore Minister of Education and I was asking him, how come Singapore, which does fantastically at all these tests, you know, all the PISA tests, and they basically are number one or number two in everything, and America does pretty badly. And I said, yet we seem to produce so many, you know, inventors, entrepreneurs, composers, and I don't see so many of those in Singapore. And he said, you know, you raise a very important point. We, our education system teaches people how to take tests.
- [05:14]
Shiloh Brooks
Right.
- [05:15]
Fareed Zakaria
Your education teaches people how to think.
- [05:17]
Shiloh Brooks
Right.
- [05:18]
Fareed Zakaria
And that may be more important in the long run.
- [05:20]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, yeah, I agree with you. At its best, our education system teaches people, you know, how to think. Occasionally it teaches them what to think and then it's not doing its, its proper job, I suspect.
- [05:31]
Fareed Zakaria
But it's almost antithetical to a liberal education to be told what to think.
- [05:35]
Shiloh Brooks
That's right.
- [05:35]
Fareed Zakaria
I mean, think about Socrates. And, you know, the whole idea was always contestation. You know, every idea has to be viewed as only as good as it can, as in this latest contestation.
- [05:51]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah. You have chosen for your book on old school, the Great Gatsby. This is a kind of testament to the power of your argument for liberal education. After all, you said you studied international relations. And yet when I asked you to choose a book, you choose what's arguably the greatest, or at least top five, let's say, so we don't have to offend anyone. Top 5 Greatest American Novels ever. I've been waiting for somebody to choose F. Scott Fitzgerald. The reason is that people often ask me, you do this podcast on books that change people's lives. What's the book that changed your life? Well, that's a Fitzgerald novel. It's called this side of Paradise. It was written when he was very young, at 23, around at Princeton. Gatsby a few years later. Can you tell us, when did you find this novel? Where were you? How did it strike you?
- [06:38]
Fareed Zakaria
Absolutely, you asked the right question. Because growing up in India, I went to a very good private school in Bombay, in now Mumbai, where, you know, we got a. I got a very good education, including in. In English literature. But it was India. And so my education in English literature was almost entirely in English literature, by which I mean British literature.
- [07:05]
Shiloh Brooks
We.
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Fareed Zakaria
And we particularly grappled with the great British authors who dealt with India, Kipling, EM Forster, people like that. But there was a very strong, you know, sort of Chaucer, Shakespeare, you know, evil in war. When we did modern stuff, it was Auden, but we had really not read much American stuff. So I come to Yale on a scholarship and had never really encountered that much American literature. And so I set about. I didn't take a course in it, just saying to myself, you know, I've gotta. I've gotta read the greats in American literature. And I actually started with another Fitzgerald book, which was the Beautiful and the Damned. Yeah, which I just loved. I thought it was so fascinating and dark and tragic and yet at the same time, the sort of glittering life of New York. Then I read Gatsby a few years later. Still, I think I was at Yale. To me, it was sort of partly that it made sense of America, it made sense of Yale, it made sense of my immigrant experience in a very profound way, I have to say. Most of Fitzgerald I had that feeling about, but Gatsby in particular, and partly, I think Gatsby is one of the most beautifully written novels. And it was striking to me because I had always thought of, again, British literature as being more finely wrought and that American literature was more like Hemingway, you know, these terse, short, direct sentences that conveyed a great deal, but not lyrical. And yet Fitzgerald, particularly in Gatsby, is Lyrical.
- [08:49]
Shiloh Brooks
Absolutely. And I want to talk more about Fitzgerald's unique style, but take me back. You're at Yale. Have you been, how long have you been in America when you find this?
- [08:58]
Fareed Zakaria
You know, I got to Yale at 18 and so I'd maybe been in America two years.
- [09:05]
Shiloh Brooks
So Gatsby is a real. And you said it made sense of America for you. It's a real cultural sense making instrument for you in a way.
- [09:13]
Fareed Zakaria
Absolutely.
- [09:13]
Shiloh Brooks
That's interesting. And I think the novel will strike you differently than it does maybe than it does a native born American. And I'm trying to think how that would be. In other words, you're using it to make sense of something that you're just acclimating to. Whereas when we read it, it almost feels like it's part of our blood and DNA in a certain way. It's like it's sometimes difficult. You know, you hold it up and you see yourself in the mirror of Gatsby when you're an American. But you were looking at it to try to make sense of America. That's a very interesting perspective.
- [09:42]
Fareed Zakaria
So many years later, when I was at Harvard, my PhD advisor was a guy named Sam Huntington. And Huntington wrote a book in the, I think it was the late 1970s, during the turmoil of the 70s, you know, stagflation, Watergate, everyone thinking America, you know, the protests, race riots. And he wrote this book called American Politics the Promise of Disharmony. And the last line of that book is just brilliant. And it says, america's critics say that America is a lie. They are wrong. It is not a lie. It is a disappointment. But it can only be a disappointment because it is a hope.
- [10:21]
Shiloh Brooks
Right?
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Fareed Zakaria
That is Gatsby.
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Shiloh Brooks
That's Gatsby.
- [10:23]
Fareed Zakaria
Gatsby is about, you know, when Lionel Trilling rescues Gatsby, we can get into this. But Gatsby had gone out of print. And then in 1945, Lionel trailing, writes an introduction to a new edition of Gatsby. And he says it is the quintessential American novel because it is the story of the American dream of promise, but of unfulfilled promise or something like that. And that idea of a country that is defined by this dream, which is no other country in the world, but also a country that inevitably will always fall short of that dream. That to me is so powerfully presented in Gatsby.
- [11:06]
Shiloh Brooks
Give us a summary of Gatsby for people who have never read it. And I would say this is probably one of the more widely read American novels. It was at least for A long time. I assume it still is, although, I don't know, assigned in most American high schools as sort of, you know, it is.
- [11:20]
Fareed Zakaria
I have three kids. I can tell you they've all read Gatsby.
- [11:23]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, yeah. But for somebody out there who's never read it, before we get too deep into it, can you just summarize for them what this book is about in its essence?
- [11:32]
Fareed Zakaria
Sure. It's set in the Jazz Age, I think in 22 or 23. This is, you know, America at its heyday in, you know, and it's New York and Long Island. This is glittering America in the. In the Roaring twenties. This guy, the narrator, Nick, moves from the Midwest, I think Minnesota comes to Long island, rents a house right next to the mansion of a very rich man. And there in West Egg, which is the nouveau riche part of Long island, across the water, they can see in East Egg, the house of Daisy and Tom Buchanan, who are old money New Yorkers. It turns out that the mansion next to Nick's is occupied by this enormously rich guy, Jay Gatsby, who it turns out, has a huge unrequited crush on Daisy Buchanan, Nick's cousin. And the origin story of that crush is that before Jay Gatsby was Jay Gatsby, he was, I think Jay Gatz or something he had. Was called something else. He fought in war.
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Shiloh Brooks
Jimmy Gatz.
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Fareed Zakaria
Jimmy Gatz. He was a farm boy from Nebraska, fought in the war before he went to the war. Had a huge crush on Daisy. Maybe they were in love and has come back to try to recover. To recover that love and is trying to show Daisy that he is, you know, he is worthy of her love and has become enormously rich and throws incredible parties at his mansion. What ends up happening is they have a. It doesn't work out. Jay Gatsby has had this enormous. Has had this dream of reuniting with Daisy. He puts enormous amount of energy. He devotes himself almost his whole life to that dream. And the whole thing turns to ashes.
- [13:41]
Shiloh Brooks
So we've got this narrator, Nick Carraway. That's the point of view from which the novel is written. He's sort of an ordinary guy. And we should talk about Nick. I mean, in a way, Nick is the character with whom we most immediately sympathize. He's like us, he. He's a sort of middle class guy who lives in a rich neighborhood and is just trying to make it. Whether he's trustworthy or untrustworthy, we can't, you know, we should say. But he Lives next door to Gatsby. So what I want to do is focus in on Gatsby. Gatsby is an extraordinary character. And then we can get to Nick and then we can talk about Tom and Daisy. So Gatsby, as you said, seems to come from nowhere and nothing and make it in the world in a way that's really mysterious. People. There are rumors about exactly what his profession is. It comes to sight maybe that he fraudulently sells bonds and other things.
- [14:32]
Fareed Zakaria
Bootlegger in the past.
- [14:33]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, bootlegger and these kinds of things. That the money that he makes is new money. It's been made very quickly, perhaps by fraudulent means. And he's in love with this woman, Daisy, who's an old money woman whose family goes back generations. So the novel is as much about America, what people call the American dream, as it is about old and new money. You know, Gatsby, he's got this beautiful house. He hosts all these parties. There are all these rumors about him. It seems like everybody wants to be near him. By the end of the novel when he dies, Nick can't get anybody to come to his funeral. So he goes from being the most popular guy in the world to a guy who nobody will even come to his funeral. I can't tell if Fitzgerald wants me, especially young man Shiloh, to see Gatsby and think that's it. Like this is the guy I want to be. Because there's something to Gatsby where you think, man, he's rich, he's good looking, he's got on. He kind of wears the new money, garish clothes, he's got on a hot pink suit. So part of me thinks Fitzgerald's trying to get me to dream of being Gatsby. And I remember reading it and thinking that. But then there's this part of the novel where you think, well, Gatsby dies and nobody comes to his funeral. He's kind of sad in his giant house all alone. So I just wonder if we might reflect on a minute the character of Gatsby and what. How exactly should we understand him and respond to him?
- [15:56]
Fareed Zakaria
So I think the fundamental aspect of Gatsby that is very important and it's one of the reasons I think I found it so important is reinvention.
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Shiloh Brooks
Yeah.
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Fareed Zakaria
You know, the story. And it is at the heart of the American story and the, and. And the American dream of for every. Every immigrant will understand this. Because. And that's why I think it's not so surprising that I found the, the novel so resonant. Every Immigrant is engaging in an act of reinvention when they come to this country, right, because you were in some place and you necessarily had a different life in milieu. And then you come here and there is an act of reinvention. But that's actually also very much part of the American story because people moved so much. And so Gatsby's story of this poor kid from nowhere, Nebraska, coming to New York is not that unusual. Most of the stories of the great New Yorkers that you hear about, you'll notice that they were almost always born in some other part of the country and had had this deep aspiration to come to New York, to make it in New York. And Gatsby represents that. And he represents almost in a very profound way, a complete reinvention. He changes his name, he, you know, tries to present himself as something he isn't. But I think that idea of reinvention is very American. You can't reinvent yourself in the old country. In Britain, everybody knows who you are, everybody knows where your family is, Every knows what village you come from, you know, so it is only in America that you have this possibility for complete reinvention. And Gatsby embodies that. And then, of course, there is the reality that in that reinvention, he gets so enamored of that and he becomes so devoted to it that it becomes almost all surface and the parties and the glamour. And I think. And that's why the funeral, which you rightly raised, is so important. Because what Fitzgerald is doing is he's closing the book by telling you. The way he shows you that it was all facade is by saying nobody actually knew him. So when it came time to go to his funeral, people realized I didn't actually know the guy. I just went to his parties. I loved the music, the glamour, the champagne, but I didn't know him.
- [18:28]
Shiloh Brooks
I. I like what you say about reinvention. I wonder if you would permit me this term, self making. This is a. A classic American. You know, you see this? I teach this essay by Frederick Douglass called Self Made Men. Gatsby is self made, but it's a bizarre kind of self making. I think he's from an even more remote place than Nebraska. I think he's from North Dakota.
- [18:48]
Fareed Zakaria
Oh, is it okay?
- [18:49]
Shiloh Brooks
I think he's from. Which is even more. I mean, who's from, you know, And I love why, I think North Dakota.
- [18:54]
Fareed Zakaria
Because when I came to New York, the person who struck me as the pillar of the New York establishment, I worked at Foreign Affairs My first job at the Council on Foreign Relations. The chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations was Peter G. Peterson, who had been the CEO of Bell and Howell, then I think the CEO of Lehman Brothers, then founded Blackstone. In the middle was Secretary of Commerce. It turns out that he's a Greek American who grew up in Nebraska. And as he was growing up, he said to me once, his whole life he wanted to get to New York. And I asked him, of all the things that all your successes in life, what was most meaningful to you? He said, most meaningful to me by far was that I succeeded David Rockefeller as Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations. Isn't that. That's such an American story. I'm in self made reinvention.
- [19:47]
Shiloh Brooks
Well, see, that's what I mean. And I sympathize with this too. I mean, I'm from nowhere in Texas, the middle of the plains, in the middle of nowhere. And I'm sitting with you in New York. And so when I read Gatsby and I'd be interested to get your perspective on this as an immigrant, I thought, okay, yes, this is kind of a critique of this guy. Like, I get it. But at the same time, something about him, it was noble to me. Even with the hot pink suits and nobody coming to the funeral.
- [20:11]
Fareed Zakaria
I feel exactly as you do.
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Shiloh Brooks
I don't know if Fitzgerald was trying to, you know.
- [20:14]
Fareed Zakaria
I feel exactly as you do. That was a. I mean, the thing about Gatsby is he's such a complicated character because he's so attractive on the outside. Look, he's been played by Robert Redford. I know dicaprio and dicaprio. These are attractive people. You want to be them. And yet there was a hollowness, yet there was a moral, there was a beauty and yet a kind of decay, a decadent element.
- [20:44]
Shiloh Brooks
That's right. And you know, there's that. That scene or that line where Nick, after everything has gone to pot and you know, Gatsby has, as you've pointed out in your summary, been wrapped up in this thing where this girl Daisy, who he was in love with five years ago, ends up in a car with him and they end up running over a woman and all this stuff and the whole thing is chaotic. Where Nick Carraway, the narrator, who we'll talk about next, turns to Gatsby and says, you're better than all of them. You're better than everybody, than all these people. It's almost like Nick falls in love with Gatsby being like you and me being well acquainted with the fact that this guy's a fraud. There's not a lot of substance there. He's probably a criminal. He's kind of lovesick about Daisy in a way that's really bizarre for a grown man. I mean, she's married with a kid, right? And he's built this whole house on the coast to stare at her mansion across the river, which is weird. And it's. But Nick, like you and me, despite all this weirdness, turns to him and says, hey, you're better than all of them. You're better than. And I wonder about that. What is it about Gatsby that by God, despite all this, he's still better than all of them? You know what I mean?
- [21:52]
Fareed Zakaria
Absolutely. And it's. It's the fact that he had that passion that he had that, you know, there was something, I think Nick saw in that which was noble. I. I just wanted to read you a passage. I took down a few passages because I wanted to convey just the beauty of the prosecutor. So this is obviously Nick. There must have been moments, even that afternoon, when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams. Not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion. It had gone beyond her, beyond everything. He had thrown himself into it with a creative passion, adding to it all the time, decking it out with every bright feather that drifted his way. No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store in his ghostly heart. And that, you know, it's just that phrase, the ghostly heart. But it gets at that. You know, he had this mad passion which in its own way was mad, but was also admirable. Just because, you know, he. He felt so deeply.
- [22:55]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah.
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Fareed Zakaria
And it's.
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Shiloh Brooks
It's true. And I wonder if that doesn't resonate, especially today with young people, young men in particular, because, you know, people talk about there's a kind of listless young man and no pat. And he said Gatsby has. Has a heart. He has. And he makes himself around this thing. I mean, it's this extraordinary story of self making. I wonder if we might contrast him fruitfully with Nick. So I wonder if we might discuss Nick and his relationship to Gatsby and his just sort of role as a narrator in general.
- [23:22]
Fareed Zakaria
It's a very odd device, you know, because Nick is in some ways the moral center of the novel. He is neither condemnatory nor does he worship Gatsby. He's watching him. So it's sort of. I think what Fitzgerald is telling us is that's how we should approach it. We should approach it without a great deal of moral, immediate moral condemnation or falling in love with Gatsby. And Nick is able to maintain that equipoise through the novel remarkably well. You know, you feel like there are points at which you feel like, oh, he's really sympathetic. And then there are points at which he seems stern and morally condemnatory of what's going on. But he kind of goes back and forth. And I think that's the genius of the Nick character, is that he allows you to hold a certain kind of. You know, they say about Fitzgerald that he said that if you can hold two contradictory ideas in your head, that's genius. Whether or not he said it, I feel like Nick plays that role.
- [24:28]
Shiloh Brooks
I will say this about Nick. Nick seems to say in the novel that he is objective. But, I mean, or at least he gives this kind of. I'm just a storyteller. There's that kind of mood about him. On the other hand, I did say just a moment ago that Nick condemns everybody and says, you're better than all of them. That's a moral judgment. So I do think Nick has certain moral inclinations. The other thing about Nick that kind of bothered me is, is that Nick is aware of all of the affairs and present for the affairs. So his best friend is this woman, Daisy, and her husband, Tom. Tom is engaged in a number of affairs where he cheats on Daisy with this woman, Myrtle Wilson. And Nick is both a friend of Daisy, but will go along with Tom for the trysts with Myrtle. You see what I mean? And so it seems to me that, yes, Nick can be called the moral center of the novel. But on the other hand, he's also complicit in some of the degrading, more sort of morally vulgar behavior that Tom is engaged in.
- [25:28]
Fareed Zakaria
But that's part of being at, you know, he's watching everything.
- [25:32]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah.
- [25:32]
Fareed Zakaria
And in a sense, that's why perhaps he can say to Gatsby at that point, you're better than the rest of them. Cause he's seen what, you know, Tom and Daisy are to society, you know, the most admirable people. Cause it's old money, you know, they live in the grand house, they have the pedigree. And he knows that it's. That's hollow. So he knows Gatsby has a hollowness. He knows they have a hollowness. So maybe he's the realest in. In that. In that whole story. But I. But I. And I tend to think. I agree with you that if anything, there's a There's a sneaking admiration for Gatsby as. As a man of, you know, of ambition and a man of. Who has. There's nothing ironic about Gatsby, you know, again to speak about how American a character is. He's earnest, he's passionate, he's ambitious, he's self made. These are all adjectives you would use for an American. Right. He doesn't have any of that kind of old money class irony. Wants to show that he's never trying to do anything. He's not trying to do anything too hard. No, that's. And maybe Nick at the end of the day again, this is the beauty of the novel. You almost want him to admire that more. And I think he does admire that more. But he says things in the other direction as well. And so you kind of don't quite know.
- [26:57]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah. I wonder if it's this about Nick that. And this would be true of Americans more generally that success. Gatsby's success in this case. But that success in America can serve as at least a partial refutation of a man's vices. Or by that I mean, yes, he's got X and Y and Z that are wrong with him but he made himself and he's successful and he's rich. And so there's this kind of American tendency in business and politics to sort of overlook the vices of a person if they are somehow successful. And that seems somehow American to me.
- [27:32]
Fareed Zakaria
Oh, it's hugely American. I think it's to a large extent. It's the only country in which if you become rich people assume you are also wise. That is not that. Right. I mean think about how when we the world we're in today, everyone thinks that, you know, some tech billionaire is not just a billionaire and didn't just get lucky or is not skilled at that one, making that one app. But is a prophet of the future, is a moralist, can deliver lectures on almost any subject and people will listen with rapt attention. And that's a very American. But again the beauty of Gatsby is you see that and he airs that in a way. But the heart of the novel is the degree to which that wealth does not buy Gatsby happiness. And it doesn't even get him his dream.
- [28:25]
Shiloh Brooks
Right.
- [28:26]
Fareed Zakaria
So there's a sense in which you see all the glamour of being wealthy and Gatsby has lots of it. And for those who've seen the movie that's on fine display. But the central message is actually that, you know, that there isn't that much to it that there is a kind of hollowness at the core of all that money.
- [28:47]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah. I mean, it's interesting you mention that because the two characters who I think most lust after the aristocratic, you know, American aristocratic way of life are, interestingly, Gatsby, who comes from nothing and is trying to become a world of the Tom Buchanans and the daisies. And then this woman, Myrtle Wilson, who is the wife of a man who, like, runs a gas station, something like that, and she is cheating on her husband, who is the car mechanic with Tom Buchanan, who is Nick's best friend. And so what ends up happening to her is she's the woman who's run over by a car, right? Gatsby ends up, as you pointed out, getting shot in a swimming pool. And so the two characters who both start from the low, Gatsby and Myrtle, and who are both in love with going up to the top, both end up dead. And then what we have remaining alive is the old money Tom Buchanan, who is a bad man. I mean, he's mean to his wife, he's cheating on his wife, he's ugly, he's racist. I mean, all these things are going on with Tom. He stays alive and comes out looking great. Daisy stays alive, old money, beauty. This woman who we haven't mentioned, Jordan Baker, who's a golfer who Nick falls in love with. And she's kind of old money, at least kind of a successful, beautiful woman. And then Nick himself. My point here is just this, that the characters who strive most for the top end up in the most tragic circumstances in the Great Gatsby.
- [30:13]
Fareed Zakaria
Yeah. And maybe there's a message there, but it's worth noting that the most unattractive character in Gatsby is Tom Buchanan, the old money, sign of wealth, living in the right part of town in the right kind of house. He is the person who clearly is portrayed as the person who you would admire the least. But there's again, an element of realism. And this is why I say it's the American dream. And then the American reality, the realism is he ends up fine, and he and Daisy end up fine. And Fitzgerald has that great line where he says they were careless people, Tom and Daisy, and they smash things up and then they retreat to their vast carelessness and let others clean up their mess. I think that's just one of the most powerful ideas and evocations of realism in life. You know, that is what happens to the rich. They retreat to their vast carelessness and somebody else cleans up the mess. I have used that line to sometimes describe American foreign policy. You know, we go into Vietnam and then we decide, oh, this is, you know, we're done.
- [31:28]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, we're out of here.
- [31:29]
Fareed Zakaria
And we. And we leave and South Vietnam falls and, you know, but we've, we've forgotten about it. In fact, Kissinger very famously in one of the secret tapes, tells, tells Nixon, look, we just need two years. We need a decent interval. Once we're out, Americans will not remember the name of a single South Vietnamese town or village that they've been obsessing over for 10 years. And of course, he turns out to be 100% right. Once we leave, we couldn't give a damn.
- [31:59]
Shiloh Brooks
The word of the day is a phrase. Jazz Age. The Great Gatsby takes place in the Jazz Age, also known as the roaring twenties. So Fitzgerald wrote this novel in 1925. This was a time in America when the music genre jazz had really come into its fullest flowering. It originates in New Orleans. It's a multiracial music consisting of creole sounds and blues sounds. It's a time of prohibition in the United States when there feels like, especially on young people, that there are a lot of restrictions. At the same time, in speakeasies around the country, people are consuming alcohol illegally, women are dancing, talking about sex openly. They're called flappers, the women who do this. It's a period of great transgression and excess. And so when you see Gatsby's parties and you see people drinking to excess, laughter rising up to the sky, gaudy dresses and surroundings, this is the excess and decadence, in a certain way, of the Jazz Age. The Jazz Age is also an age of moral transgression. One of the things you see in the Great Gatsby is these lavish parties. But at these lavish parties, people are cheating on their spouses. In the book itself, Tom is engaged in an affair. Daisy is engaged in an affair. Nick Carraway lets these affairs kind of go on. And so there's this transgressive spirit which is a kind of exhale From World War I, the post war calling into question of traditional values for something new and more youthful on the horizon. At St. John's College, every student reads Homer, Aristotle, Euclid and Einstein. I went there and it's where I was taught to question, listen and revise my thinking. St. John's College offers students the quintessential liberal education. Ancient in spirit, radical in practice. If you or someone you know is up for joining their undergraduate or graduate community of learning, visit St. John's College the original old school at SJC. Edu. That's SJC. Edu. What about love in the Great Gatsby? I was really struck by the fact that love just as a thing, you know, you can go read Romeo and Juliet or you can go read a great love novel and you come away from it sometimes impassioned and hopeful about love. In the Great Gatsby, I don't know that love comes off looking very good. In other words, Gatsby wants to. Is in love with Daisy. And then by the end he's dead and she ends up with her husband. But he's not a very good husband. Jordan and Nick don't get together. I wonder what Fitzgerald thinks about love. He himself, people should know, famously had a kind of fraught marriage with his wife, Zelda Fitzgerald, who had a lot of mental illness. She was a woman of tremendous talent herself, had written a novel some people say he lifted from her diaries and these sorts of things for his story. I think I don't make as much of that. In a marriage, you're one being. And so Scott is Zelda and Zelda is Scott. People should go read their love letters to each other. There's a beautiful volume called Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda, which shows just the richness of this romance of these two young, talented literary lights. But I'm trying to think about what the Great Gatsby's supposed to teach me about love because I don't walk away. When I was an unmarried man at the time I first read it thinking, boy, let's go get married and this is gonna be, you know. And I don't walk away thinking, I wanna go date someone. I mean, I just. It sort of leaves a bad taste in your mouth on love. I don't know if you have thoughts on that.
- [35:48]
Fareed Zakaria
The Great Gatsby is not a love story. Yeah, it is not about love. I think you're exactly right. The Gatsby is fundamentally about obsession, about longing, about the American dream, about self invention, about. About. About reinvention, about, you know, ideas and ideals and reality. It's not really about love. I think you're exactly right. Like, there's no point in the. In the novel where you feel, you know, like Anna Karenina is about love. The Great Gatsby is just not about love.
- [36:20]
Shiloh Brooks
You know what's weird though, is that when you read it, I mean, I almost want to say the Great Gatsby is a romance, but it's not a romance about love. It's a romance with America. You see What I mean, it's almost like the love is the erotic direction. Is this sort of self made man ideal.
- [36:36]
Fareed Zakaria
There's an obsession about that. Exactly. To a certain extent, the one that is more like that is this side of paradise, the one that you liked. It's funny. As you know, this side of paradise does very well and establishes Fitzgerald as an important writer. The Great Gatsby fails both in literary terms and commercially. I remember it sold like 20, 30,000 copies that year, and that was it. And then goes out of print. And then to tell you how the role of government, always, always the government always comes in. In World War II, the United States army issues a series of books to the troops and, you know, prints hundreds of thousands of them. And one of them is the Great Gatsby. And suddenly it finds a mass audience. And then the returning GIs, in a sense bring it to the colleges, which then start to teach it. And it's at that point then I think in 45, there is a new edition that comes out buoyed by all this GI interest, by the fact that American servicemen have read it. And Lionel Trilling reinterprets the novel and says, this is a novel about America and the American dream, and that is what establishes its canonical place in American literature.
- [37:57]
Shiloh Brooks
And I want to tell folks, look, Fitzgerald was 28 when he wrote Gatsby, 23 when he wrote Paradise. So I mean, this is a guy who's 28 years old who's produced an American classic. And I think, you know, a lot of times we talk about, you know, folks in their 20s, they should go, I don't know, be tech billionaires or something like that. But this was a man who was, you know, singularly devoted to the craft of writing, such that by 28, he had produced a novel that ranks among those of, you know, the Hemingway and the Melvilles and these sorts of things.
- [38:31]
Narrator/Announcer
This episode is brought to you by Netflix from the creator of Homeland. Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys star in the new Netflix series the Beast in Me as ruthless rivals whose shared darkness will set them on a collision course with fatal consequences. The Beast in Me is a riveting psychological cat and mouse story about guilt, justice, and doubt. You will not want to miss this. The Beast in Me is now playing only on Netflix.
- [39:01]
Shiloh Brooks
So let me. Let me ask you for a passage. I know you shared one with us.
- [39:05]
Fareed Zakaria
Earlier, so let's do the most famous passage, because it's a slightly longer one, but it really gets at just the beauty of the writing. This is, of course, the last Three paragraphs of Gatsby. Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy moving glow of a ferryboat across the sound. And as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away. Until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors eyes. A fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees. The trees that had made way for Gatsby's house had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams. For a transitory, enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent. Compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired. Face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate for his. To his capacity for wonder. And as I sat there brooding on the old unknown world I thought of Gatsby's wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy's dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn. And his dream must have seemed so close that he knew that he could hardly grasp to fail it. He did not know that it was already behind him. Somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city where the dark fields of the Republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light. The orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter. Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch our arms out farther. And one fine morning. So we beat on, boats against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past. Now think about it. That's a 28 year old writing that. It's not just the beauty of the prose but the thought, you know, to be taught. I mean it's just. It encapsulates so much. And that final line to me. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. I mean think about the world we're in today. You know, make America great again. Born back. Like you try to move forward but you are born back ceaselessly into the past. And that dynamic between forward movement and return is so much a theme of American history.
- [41:33]
Shiloh Brooks
I mean the beauty of the prose, I mean it's just breathtaking. I mean, you know, guys, 28 years old.
- [41:38]
Fareed Zakaria
It's poetry. It's. I mean it's. It's. There's. There's very few passages of poetry that I think are. That are as evocative as that.
- [41:46]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, I mean it's just. It's just syrupy I mean, Fitzgerald just. It's just extraordinary. And you find this. I mean, you know, Fitzgerald was. Was famous for his short stories, and he would sort of use those short stories as an incubator for this book. And my understanding is that he went over draft after draft after draft of this book, and his editor, Maxwell Perkins, he wrote, there are these famous letters between the two of them. And Fitzgerald says, look, basically he says, I'm giving birth to something amazing. I don't know what it is. It's going to be huge. And, you know, he just. He goes over it again and again and again. And you can. There are some published books of the early drafts of Gatsby, which are called Trimalchio. And you can go and see what Fitzgerald cut. And a lot of his brilliance is certainly, as you say, in the writing itself, but a lot of his brilliance is in what was left behind and what Maxwell Perkins left behind in the meeting of an editor and a writer to produce this beautiful artifact. And Fitzgerald not being so wedded to his beautiful prose that he was unwilling to let Perkus say, trash this part.
- [42:45]
Fareed Zakaria
Absolutely. It's AN Extraordinary. You're 100% right. And Perkins, that collaboration is probably the greatest writer editor collaboration, certainly in modern history that I know of. Most extensive in Tender Is the Night, where Perkins essentially reorders the book almost entirely. He changes the sequence of the chapters of the three big sections. But in this one, enormously influential. And here's the interesting thing, Fitzgerald knew it. So even when the novel fails in those letters back and forth between Fitzgerald and Perkins, he writes to Perkins, his editor, and says, look, I know that this novel has failed, but it is my best writing.
- [43:30]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, he knew it at the time. So let me ask you this. I mean, you are now, you've probably read the Great Gatsby several times in your life. You read it at Yale. It was, for you, as an immigrant, a kind of image of the kind of success that might lie on the horizon in America. You have achieved an extraordinary level of success. How has the meaning, if it has, of the Great Gatsby changed from that undergraduate at Yale for you now? It meant something to you then versus Fareed Zakaria today on tv in America every day, a voice with books out talking to people. I mean, how is it. How has that book changed as you've aged? Have you learned more from it? And has Gats become to look different?
- [44:10]
Fareed Zakaria
That's a great question. I think for me, there was more of a sense of. Of revelation when I read it when I was Young. Because these were things that, as a young person, I didn't know and I hadn't really fully experienced. You know, you're exactly right. A success or, you know, the glamour of the glamorous world that it describes. And at this point in my life, I think it, you know, it kind of has sharpened that idea that money doesn't bring you happiness, that fame doesn't bring you happiness, that you can be hollow inside no matter what the outside looks like. But I don't think it's produced a kind of different meaning. You know, I have read it, reread it recently, maybe in the last five or seven years. And I was struck, actually, by how these things that, you know, I. I was alerted to. I was. I was introduced to in the novel when I was 20 years old have turned out to be only deep, more. More deeply and, you know, profoundly resonant today. You know, part of it is that it's not a novel. Like, I don't know, like, you know, one of these great Russian novels with 16 different themes. There is a kind of focus in it, you know, which is. It is about this one thing, this one big thing. And it really leaves you thinking about that. And that central message hasn't changed, I would say.
- [45:45]
Shiloh Brooks
I think that that's right. That there's something enduring about the message that's evident even to a young person. One of the things, like, it's not.
- [45:52]
Fareed Zakaria
You know, people talk about it as the great American novel. I don't know, at one level it is because this theme is so American. But when I think of that phrase, when people mean it, you know, to mean something, that it encompasses the vastness of America. I actually always think of Steinbeck's east of Ebe.
- [46:07]
Shiloh Brooks
Oh, sure.
- [46:07]
Fareed Zakaria
You know, with the great story of moving from the east to the West. Many subplots, many sub themes. That's much more kind of like a book, I imagine. I've only read it once. So that if you read it two or three times, you'd be like, oh, I have completely forgot about this element to it, Gatsby. If you didn't get the central element, you weren't paying attention.
- [46:29]
Shiloh Brooks
You know, this novel is 100 years old. There were a lot of essays that came out. It was published in 1925. And I remember January, February, March of this year, there were a lot of essays coming out marking the 100th anniversary of the Great Gatsby. And everybody had a take. From the New York Times to every online publication everywhere. I'm curious what you think about the way this novel resonates 100 years later, because the novel really, at the time, would have acquainted somebody from Fitzgerald's Midwest who read it with the superficiality of cosmopolitan life. You know, wealth and cosmopolitan life. And I think in 100 years later, that superficiality has only been amplified because it's everywhere on the Internet and social media in ways that Fitzgerald could have never imagined. You know, money, beauty, power. And these sorts of things are worshiped as gods almost more ardently than they were, if you can believe it. Even in the Jazz Age. You know, you go read Moby Dick, and I love Moby Dick, but there's a whole lot of, like, arcane language about tying knots, you know, and these.
- [47:36]
Fareed Zakaria
Sorts of things and wailing, my God.
- [47:37]
Shiloh Brooks
Yeah, it's not immediately accessible. It's beautiful. And this is not to degrade Moby Dick. It's the best American novel, arguably. But Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby is perennially accessible. Why is that?
- [47:51]
Fareed Zakaria
Because I think Fitzgerald was writing about what I think is the central dilemma of modern life, which is. Walter Lippmann wrote a book called A Preface to Morals about the same time. Actually, it was in the 20s. I don't remember the exact year. And Lippman's point was that we have entered a world in which we have lost the sense of certainty that came from faith in God, observance of traditions, reliance on community, of the, you know, the kind of traditional pillars of what constituted the kind of meaning of life, and that we are now living in a world of doubt. And in that world of doubt, everything is a world. I think he quotes Aristophanes or somebody. A world is king, he says. And what the Great Gatsby is about life in that condition where, you know, having been unmoored from those certainties of the past, and probably most particularly that overarching ordering of that faith gave. People are. You know, people are trying to construct their own meaning for life. And so is it wealth? Is it fame? Is it glamour? Is it, you know, self invention? And I think that problem is, as it's fascinating, it's a hundred years, but we are still grappling with that same problem, which is we created, you know, liberalism, ushered in a new world in which human beings had all this autonomy and all this freedom. And look, I think it's an amazing accomplishment, but it is true. It leaves a kind of hollowness inside. It leaves a hole in the heart, and we're still trying to fill that.
- [49:40]
Shiloh Brooks
I think the Great Gatsby, when read properly by a Young person can serve as immunization to some of the temptations of decadent liberalism of the kind you describe. I know for me, as I've achieved more success in my life, there are moments when I'm at a party where it feels almost like Gatsby, like. Or I'm at a hotel. And I could have never, back in Texas, imagined that I'd be standing in this hotel with these people. And it kind of blows my mind. And I'm thinking, you know. But then you think of the Great Gatsby. And what ends up happening is that you're immunized to temptations that otherwise you might see striding the atmosphere as this is it in America. I've made it. And everyone's got on their nice. And that guy's on social media. I've seen that person on tv. I think back in the back of my head to the Great Gatsby, and I think about Fitzgerald warning me the substance here is thin. And in that way, I've carried the book with me as a kind of, you know, an immunization to some of the temptations that have come with success.
- [50:42]
Fareed Zakaria
And that's the thing great literature can always do, I think, is to. Is to make you aware of, you know, the full range of human emotion, the full range of the human experience. And as a result, I think it always has that feeling of grounding you and asking, you know, making you ask the question, what is real? And absolutely, it doesn't. You know, Gatsby doesn't. And. And of course, no novel can answer the question. You can't fill that hole. So what is, you know, where does true meaning come, you know, come from? I mean, you're, I think, a political philosopher by training, so. You remember MacIntyre's book After Virtue? Oh, yeah, right. And it's a similar kind of question, which. Which Lipman was asking, which is where. And. And, you know, so the. The ability to live in this world of individualism and autonomy and freedom and somehow to celebrate it but recognize it isn't everything and it doesn't give you true meaning. That's the challenge of modernity. Because we're not gonna go back to the old way. The very fact that we have the choice means it's not the old way was an imposed one, was precisely the denial of choice that made it. Made everyone believe and adhere and conform. But we have to live in the world of doubt and uncertainty and individual anxiety. And that, you know, that, in a sense, is what some of this literature, particularly Gatsby Helps you get through lightning round.
- [52:21]
Shiloh Brooks
Do you have time for a few lightning round questions? All right, so I'm curious. You mentioned that you read the Great Gatsby in college and you'd come over as an immigrant. So I'm curious, as an immigrant, what was your favorite course that you took in college?
- [52:35]
Fareed Zakaria
Oh, gosh, there were so many I loved. I mean, for me, college was a completely transforming experience. Some of the great history classes I took at Yale, probably the one that stays more vividly in my head, was I took a history of the Soviet Union which was taught by not an academic, but a former East German Communist Party bigwig named Wolfgang Leonhard, who then went on to write books. He was a kind of communist intellectual who had, who had seen the light. And he, he told the story of communism and the rise and fall of communism within a way that it was first of all incredibly dramatic. They were done at the Yale law School auditorium. 600 people, pin drop, silence. We were all sitting at the edge of our seats and, you know, he would do it. I still remember he did run on the show Trials and it was just mesmerizing. And you know, you just like, for a kid, you know, who had come from India to just. There's something so electric about it. And also the idea that he had been a participant in that world and he was now, he was a witness. He had witnessed this history and he was telling it that. So that probably is the one I remember.
- [53:53]
Shiloh Brooks
Credibility. He was a witness. Yeah. Is there a book that you read recently or even in your life that really made you change your mind?
- [54:00]
Fareed Zakaria
You know, the Lippman's A Preface to Morals. I read Ronald Steele wrote this wonderful biography of Walter Lippmann called Walter Lippmann and the American Century. And it's this extraordinary. Lippmann was the most influential American journalist ever without any question. I mean, he basically helped Woodrow Wilson write the 14 points when he was in his 20s and then went on to have a 50 year long career. It was the most widely syndicated, most widely read of any kind of political columnist. But he also wrote great books. And this book, Preface to Morals, made me understand, you know, much more. I was a, you know, I was somebody who was more than happy to just celebrate the break from the past, the advance of liberalism. And you know, I mean, liberalism, small, I do liberty, individual rights, autonomy. And Lippman made me realize, no, you know, you lost something very, very big and important, which was that certainty, that faith, that sense of tradition, that sense of community. And that is something you know, to be, to be reckoned with. And it's a very, it's a big loss. You're talking about thousands of years of history, you know, because I came from India where when I hear the word community still I want to reach for an oxygen mask. Because I saw those communities, they were narrow, they were hierarchical, they were stultifying. They didn't allow people to think, to be themselves, to live the lives they wanted to. But. But when coming to America and reading somebody like Lippman made me realize, no, but there's also something you lose when that happens.
- [55:45]
Shiloh Brooks
Is there a foreign policy myth that people keep returning to over and over again that you would love to just see disappear? If you were a magic, you had a magic wand that would go away?
- [55:55]
Fareed Zakaria
Not really, because they exist for a reason. I mean, the great American dilemma is we either, you know, the founding DNA of America is the world is evil, particularly in our minds, Europe, you know, the machinations of the European great powers. So we have oscillated between believing that we should therefore isolate ourselves from that world and have nothing to do with it. And you still see strains of that, you know, today, like, you know, these guys are crazy. We're just going to stay, we're going to do our own thing or we want to go in and transform the world and make it good. Yeah, right. So it's the engaging with an imperfect world that has always been the hardest thing for Americans. So we want to go to Iraq and we want to make Iraq a liberal democracy, just. And it's going to become just like Kansas. Or we say, get the hell out of here. These people are crazy. They just want to kill each other. You know, these thousand year disputes, who the hell understands them? We have one or the other reaction. It's very difficult to hold that middle ground.
- [56:56]
Shiloh Brooks
Is there something wrong with journalism today or something that you see in journalism today that you think is problematic?
- [57:04]
Fareed Zakaria
No, I mean, I'll be honest with you. I think the thing I see that's problematic is more the consumers of journalism than the producers of journalism. I think I really do think we're entering a world in which the image has become a far more important than the word. And that worries me a lot. I think that, you know, it shortens your time horizon. It privileges sensation and emotion over reason and deliberation. And I never thought too much about it because I thought, you know, in the world of TV and movies, print competed and, and added a lot to the world. And so you could imagine people watching a movie but also reading a long essay or a book in this world of short video, you know, which Instagram and TikTok and all this represent, it's become absolutely clear that it has become a substitute for the written word and it's a substitute for thought and it's a substitute for engage. Everything can be, can be, can be boiled down to a 90 second TikTok, you know, something like that. I mean, I give you an example of Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk, you know, extraordinarily admirable, would go and have these three hour sessions at college campuses where he would debate people. But what most people don't know is he had a four person camera crew or something like that who was with him at those things. They would then tape those things and then edit and release four 60 second encounters that had taken place. And that's what people, you know, not the 2,000 people in campus, but the 20 million people who watched, watched the three 60 second episodes. And I think you lose something when a three hour encounter that is of deep engagement becomes three 45 second clips provocatively titled Charlie Kirk owned the Libs, you know, and that's in a sense a metaphor for what has happened. And I'd like us to get back to the two hour conversation rather than the 20 minute at the 22nd TikTok.
- [59:25]
Shiloh Brooks
Well, Fareed Zakaria, thank you for coming on to Old School and sharing F. Scott Fitzgerald's great novel with us.
- [59:31]
Fareed Zakaria
It's a huge pleasure and you know the novel so well. I should have been interviewing you, but I'll take this as it came.
- [59:37]
Shiloh Brooks
I appreciate it.