Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation

Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation Shiromani Kant / Unsplash Wander into any bookstore (I dare you.) The non-fiction table will be all but dominated by the usual suspects: Malcolm Gladwell's latest exploration of how some counterintuitive thing is actually the opposite of what you'd expect, a David Brooks meditation on character and virtue, something by Michael Lewis about how one weird guy in an office somewhere figured out a thing that nobody else noticed. And you might find yourself thinking: these are the same books. Spiritually, structurally, thematically identical to the books these same men were writing in 2008. In 2003. In some cases, in 1997. The Gladwell formula, if you haven't encountered it, goes something like this: take a subject that seems simple, complicate it with research that seems to undermine common sense, then resolve the tension with a tidy insight that flatters the reader's intelligence while confirming something they sort of already believed. The ten thousand hours rule. The tipping point. The power of snap judgments, except actually you should think more carefully, except actually your gut is right. It's intellectual comfort food, and there's nothing inherently wrong with comfort food, but we've been eating the same meal for two decades now and the chef keeps insisting he's serving something new. This isn't about Malcolm Gladwell specifically, though he'll appear as a recurring character. It’s a broader problem. Our collective intellectual culture seems to have calcified around a cohort of thinkers who achieved prominence roughly ten+ years ago and have been coasting ever since. These are the arena rock bands of ideas: acts who had one or two genuine hits, who now tour the same material endlessly, who perform to audiences of business travelers and conference attendees who want to hear the classics one more time. And we seem to have no punk rock waiting in the wings to tear them down. No new movement of rough, vital, angry thinkers ready to call bullshit on the whole enterprise. Our intellectual underground, such as it is, consists of Substack, a platform funded by some of the most establishment venture capital imaginable, and podcasts that run for three hours and manage to say less than a single well-constructed paragraph. I'm not claiming these people have never had good ideas, or that their early work wasn't valuable. Gladwell's "Outliers" was genuinely interesting when it came out. Michael Lewis's "The Big Short" was excellent journalism. David Brooks wrote some thoughtful columns in his day. The problem is that success in the modern “ideas industry,” such as it is, creates a set of incentives that almost guarantee calcification. Once you've written your airport bestseller, once you've established your brand, once you've secured your sinecure at the New York Times or the speaking circuit or whatever institutional perch you've landed on, the pressure is almost entirely toward repetition. Your audience expects the thing they know you for. Your publisher wants more of what sold last time. The conference organizers...

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