In an age of fictionalized reality, we need literary criticism more than ever

Episode Summary 

If you’ve watched or listened to this podcast for a while, you probably know by now that Theory of Change is about stories—larger trends that happen and the narratives we tell ourselves about them.

We’re finite beings; we exist for a moment within a small slice of spacetime. To understand anything at all about externality, we have to simplify it. But sometimes simplification makes things more complicated and confusing.

The historical moment we’re sharing together is incredibly messy and confusing which is why I firmly believe that while the 20th century was the age of the economist, the 21st century is the domain of the philosopher—an era of interpretation.

That’s why I’m excited to bring you today’s discussion with Virginia Heffernan, a really fantastic writer and thinker whose work you may have seen in the New Republic, Wired, or at her Substack, “Magic and Loss.” Virginia has written a lot of great journalism over the years, but at heart, she’s a literary critic—a profession that I think is very well-suited to interpret our interesting times in which the division between text and sub-text is often impossible to delineate.

The video of this episode is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Related Content

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• How an oversharing Christian blogger inadvertently documented his own radicalization

• Why 90s Christian pulp fiction explains today’s Republican Party

• How Democrats got trapped in the fictional politics of “The West Wing”

• Jeffrey Epstein as the synechdoche of cruelty across political ideologies

• The Big Ten rises up against Trump

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

07:42 — The 21st century as the return of philosophy

10:54 — Oral versus written traditions

13:32 — The fragile nature of reason within society

19:33 — The end of purist capitalism and communism

20:35 — Universities as places of public goods versus privatized goods

26:34 — Jeffrey Epstein as a synecdoche of corrupt compromise

34:02 — QAnon as projected right-wing Christian fear about internal predation

41:45 — Lewis, Tolkien, and the rise of fictionalized group interpretations of reality

51:08 — Richard Rorty's continued relevance

58:19 — Opposition to cruelty as a guiding principle

01:04:53 — Understanding why people believe lies

01:08:10 — Conclusion

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Virginia Heffernan. Hey, Virginia. Welcome to Theory of Change.

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN: I’m so glad we’re doing this.

SHEFFIELD: Yes, me too. Absolutely. Well, so why don't we start with that the title of your Substack is called politics–or the subtitle of it, I should say, is called “Politics for English Majors.” What do you mean by that?

HEFFERNAN: Well, so title is the same as my book title from 2016 book, Magic and Loss, and I can tell you about that title if you are interested. But essentially comes from engineering. That's lossy. Lossy sound representation is representation that loses something obscure from the sound that we might not be able to perceive with our ears. But that can be quantified. And that's the loss.

And then the magic is sort of that term of art. From tech or a term of marketing from tech that, any te technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. It was a big Steve Jobs word. So the book was about, the internet was about those two sides of the internet, something obscurity lost for which we're grieving and something gained that almost tripped our minds into kind of superstitious thinking, into magical thinking.

And so that's the title of the book. That's the title of the of the, of, the Substack, which began a bit to be about tech 'cause that's what I had written about for so long. But I'm trained as a literary critic. I did a PhD at Harvard in, in, in English. And the topic of the dissertation was sort of finance and various novels about finance and in particular about inflation.

So. short, the [00:04:00] idea that to save money is to lose it American fiction at the turn of the 20th century. And that has all kinds of consequences for nostalgia and preciousness money and value. so all those things were propelling this Substack as I went into to write it.

And I really, but I had also very much since 2012, been writing about tech and politics since the digital election of 20 20 12, which I was, I wrote about Yahoo News. Just, pounding the pavement, going to the conventions, studying the Pinterest of, MIT, Romney's wife, like that kind of thing.

So I, and, I had my old podcast Trump cast had just been ca ended because we thought Trump's reign of terror was over right after Trump's, after Trump lost the 2020 election.

I looked forward to not writing about politics, to writing back about tech because I figured the ship of state had been righted with Biden as president and that politics would become boring again, and that I'd be able to write full time about AI, which I, was writing about for Wired at the time about AI and also some biotech with Ozempic and other drugs.

And I figured that would be that would be my future. But then Trump was reelected and so it stopped being tech and politics and wanted to be, or I felt it wanted to be ta politics again, but all of it. Including the book Magic and Loss all the way through has been influenced by training, and I can only call it that as a iterate critic.

I, don't say that to establish my authority as much as to say that's what I was soaking in for so long. My father was a literary critic. And it's, these things are hard to get out of once you have hermeneutic strategies and, methodologies, but also a [00:06:00] lot of politics seems to me. To come down to textual analysis.

So a very simple one is, originalism, right? Like, it's crazy to hear people talk, to talk, hear constitutional law. People talk about originalism or to hear religious folks talk about fundamentalism without using the tools of literary criticism. Originalism has, there's a lot of faith that you can read words the way they are originally either intended or laid down, or, and this is kind of the work of literary criticism, is to understand why there's nothing simple and transparent about language that's put on a page.

There's nothing that you can see through to either the intention of an author or to reality. And. Maybe you can, right? So that's another argument. But the fact that people have arguments about originalism absent the language of literary criticism and the methodology of literary criticism is just leaving a lot on the table.

It's leaving a lot of tools on the table and I've seen computer scientists and other people kind of in philosophers, swoop in on conversations in, public domains in other domains and say like, you know what? We have something to offer here. This is Aristotle, and psychologists coming in with physicists or and so on.

And that I'm an academic at heart. I like interdisciplinary studies, and I think it can be very useful to use some of the techniques of literary criticism, and I could give more examples of that to, understand kinds of facets of American politics.

The 21st century as the return of philosophy

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I definitely think that's right. And and, in a lot of ways the, politics of this moment, the, of the 21st century, I see it as the, this is the century of philosophy. The 20th century was the century of [00:08:00] economics. But we're, and, going back to philosophy as the, nexus of politics that is the historical reality of it.

And that even, like the term economics, that, that comes from oikonomia, which, is the Greek word. And, Aristotle was one that put that in. So this wasn't a discipline that arose on its own. It was created by philosophy, just like so many it created so many other things, including religion.

HEFFERNAN: I really, appreciate, and I do, I agree by the way, if with the implication that literary criticism or criticism is a subset of philosophy I, double majored in philosophy in English. My problem with philosophy and Aristotle as an example is just that I could read so little of it in the original.

I mean, certainly not ancient philosophers, but also French philosophers and so on. So what I like about the, that I think some people forget when they think that what I, we study in English departments is, literature, right? We are trying to focus on just literature in English or in the American language and paying close attention to the way the English language works.

So I have much, much less to say about than I do about what Whitman for obvious reasons. And I am not confident to. Even if I can get through a copy of Madam Bovary in French, not capable of reading it very deeply. Because my vocabulary's limited, because my understanding the grammar's limited because I haven't been soaking in it and I just am skeptical of the translations that I get when it comes to ancient texts.

I'm not sure, you just did like a lovely translation. We had to, do in the PhD program I was in, we had to have two ancient language, sorry, two ancient, two modern languages. And one of my ancient languages was old English. So [00:10:00] we can do those translations, but it's incredible how revelatory they are when you press on them and you wonder how much you might be missing.

So anyway, just emphasize that. Literary cri English literary criticism in English and American literate literature is a subset of philosophy, especially since it's got this incredible laser-like focus on the English, and particularly in my case, the American language.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And if we look at Socrates as

a philosopher, you know, he explicitly said, I don't want to write anything, because to write down something means to, lose the meaning of what I was saying and that it can be misinterpreted. Uh, that people will

say that I was trying to say something when I wasn't trying to say it. And and I, but if I'm talking to them. They can be completely clear as to what my intentions were. and,

Oral versus written traditions

SHEFFIELD: I

That's obviously

true.

HEFFERNAN: I mean, I love that

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

HEFFERNAN: I don't know if Walter NG's work but he was, I think, a, minister in one of the founders of, Media Studies, if you take the University of Toronto with Marshall McCluen at the, as the avatar of it, as the birthplace of media studies.

And he he contrasted the oral and written traditions in a somewhat similar way to say that, there's something that written language always ends with QED. It's like, I'm going to close the case. I'm not listening, I'm not, and I can do this as a, like, as a compulsive filibuster.

I can like shut out the other person so that I can make my point. But that is in dialogue, not what dialogue, what conversation with other people exist to do. And very few people are talking aloud in a room where most writers are just writing in a room and making meaning together as Socrates did in dialogue is a wonderful, is maybe the only way to [00:12:00] really extend extend your thinking on a matter.

I think David Graver and David Gro, who wrote the dawn of Everything together in that book, talk about how. Some, there's some neuroscience and I'm not going to get it right, but that says we can only hold a thought in our brain for a certain number of seconds.

SHEFFIELD: Working memory as it's called.

HEFFERNAN: Yeah, right. But in conversation, we could hold a thought forever. We could run, and you and I could probably go for hours here. And,

SHEFFIELD: We could, but we won't do that, guys, I promise.

HEFFERNAN: We'll spare you our mutual filibuster. But but anyway, so, so I think you, that's, I think that point about spoken language is absolutely right. I think that literary critics see themselves as in some kind of dialogue with another text.

And that's the way we get around the idea that we're just, writing in our own heads. There's something incredibly intimate about reading about close readings. Just

almost begin to imagine, the author has. An infinite number of choices about what next word to use.

And you're on a precipice in the spaces between words of what's going to happen next, and when you can start to make guesses about what it might be or sort of understand why that word was chosen. It's almost like riding the rails of someone's very nervous system, and that is, I think, a kind of intimacy that is like a Socratic dialogue.

The fragile nature of reason within society

SHEFFIELD: This is so relevant now because we're in this historical moment for humanity in which. There is a minority of people who do believe in the scientific method and what it means and apply it to their own lives, but we're the minority and we have always been the minority

and, yet, excuse me, and yet the that minority has [00:14:00] always operated as if it was the majority.

HEFFERNAN: Yes. Right.

SHEFFIELD: has a more functional and, a, an epistemic process in which can, layer upon itself, add, infinitum. It supposes that everyone else agrees with that, but in fact, the majority of people don't agree with it and probably have never really fully under understood

it.

HEFFERNAN: I mean, I'm not sure. So do you mean by scientific method,

SHEFFIELD: Well, I just mean the idea that, you know. That we can improve our understanding of reality by observing it and then creating hypotheses about how certain aspects of it function and then testing those hypotheses, like, and, then if they're not true, then we abandon those hypotheses. So it's, it is about continually falsifying our ideas and being open to the idea that nothing is always true.

Or

is indubitably true? As, as Carl Popper had, said very convincingly with regard to science, but that applies beyond science. Like the, that you have to keep an openness to revising your priors as people

Sometimes say,

HEFFERNAN: I,

I I just want, for listeners, it seems important to flag maybe where our opinions diverge and I mean, you can probably imagine that as someone who was sort of. Had was woken out of my own dogmatic slumbers by a philosopher. I started doing analytic philosophy when I was in college at the University of Virginia, and then the University of Virginia hired Richard Brody, a philosopher, but he refused to be in the philosophy department because he was had written his way out of philosophy and in particular analytic philosophy.

First, he had been enchanted by continental philosophers including darida, including some of the ones most loathed by analytic [00:16:00] philosophers, and then had. Started to think that he mostly wanted to, be a literary critic and a lit, and for various reasons. And so he started the Department of the Humanities.

And by that point I was exhausted by a JA and by sense data and little pennies that looked like an ellipse. And what we could do if there were actually data that floated before our eyes. I don't want to reduce analytic philosophy to just that, but there was some strange stuff going around that seemed to be taking me down a a path I didn't know.

And because I was much more drawn to poetry than science I, and for many, contingent reasons came to believe that poetry had greater explanatory power for me than scientific method. So I wouldn't want to say that it's the tools of literary criticism that interests me more than the tools of science.

SHEFFIELD: Sure. Yeah. But I'm just saying overall you understand that your personal beliefs are not the absolute truth.

HEFFERNAN: absolutely. I mean, I would, say

SHEFFIELD: yeah.

HEFFERNAN: more than science. So like, I, yeah, I mean, both of us in that way are absolutely Socratic. What I'm

Against is is an absolute conviction in my own, my own lack of wisdom that my own inability to perceive the world as it is.

And, also my enjoy. It's like, like we must imagine the ignorant person happy, or the person seeking meaning happy in the sense of that, that, that, quest for a way to describe the world such that it, crystallizes my sense of identity and then a way to describe the world such that it describes a possibilities or how to improve the world and reduce suffering in the world.

Those two different private public projects are a reason to seek some durable modes of expression. I mean, this is all quite, sort of, sounds [00:18:00] sort of boring or circum as opposed to scientific language, which sounds, much more direct, but I'm just a little bit afraid of, well, there are ways of, testing our delusions against reality or, falsifying beliefs or even settling on, absolutely true statements instead of useful and beautiful statements as

SHEFFIELD: Oh, well, yeah.

HEFFERNAN: Describe that.

SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah, except, I mean, popper explicitly said that the scientific uh, truth or actually just unf falsified beliefs, that's all they are. So, so that's, I, so I think we actually agree on it. We're just putting a different label.

HEFFERNAN: I

Do. And I think I, I really like learning that you sort of live in the flicker among these various disciplines the way that I do, because, we're probably

SHEFFIELD: we need more of that,

HEFFERNAN: of that. And

SHEFFIELD: I think.

HEFFERNAN: it was just a very exciting time to come of age as young philosophers.

There was just a lot to, at least it seemed exciting to me to have various philosophers kind of bringing us closer to scientific method and, also 'cause we, I wasn't an economist at the time, so we had a lot of space to ourselves. People were less, Bothered by people doing philosophy and criticism because economic economists were competing for these much more highly paid jobs and also paving a way for them to go into finance, which we was not a pathway open to English and philosophy majors.

The end of purist capitalism and communism

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and the other reason though, uh, just to go back to something I was, that I had said about, you know, that where this is the time of philosophy versus the time of economics is that, you know, the, end of the Cold War showed that Marxism was not. It was not a possible destination, it wasn't going to work. But then the intervening years since then have shown that pure capitalism doesn't work. [00:20:00] And that, and Peter Thiel, the, uber advocate of capitalism explicitly says in his view, capitalism is about the creation of monopoly.

And so it is not about competition. In fact, competition is bad. If you are a capitalist, you want to have no competition. And so in that sense, events have, made economics obsolete in that pure communism, pure capitalism. Nobody wants those and they don't function and you can't even get to them. In fact but even if you could, it would be destructive all around.

Universities as places of public goods versus privatized goods

HEFFERNAN: I, just published a piece in The New Republic about the Big 10 conference there, the Big 10 conference in the United States. I'm sure most people know this now. Comprises now includes 18 schools across 16 states. So there's nothing 10 about it, but incredibly powerful organization.

Writing about it and writing about its capacities to oppose Trump and and fight back against the against federal overreach and the federal government. I discovered that it was founded by. education reformer who also happens to be the inventor of the game of American football. And just to, I'll, speed past some of this history that was very interesting is that the president of Harvard, the notorious racist Charles Elliot was against football because he thought it was brutal, that there was deception in it and that it shouldn't be, and students shouldn't.

He was against intercollegiate football because students shouldn't be performing to entertain other people. That's not what education was and camp thought otherwise. He also ran a factory. He believed that, students should be taking orders and they should be, able to be part of a team, and then they should rise up until they can give orders themselves.

So it's very coach driven way of thinking about well, coach driven and, unified executive [00:22:00] sort of presence that orders us into what to do. We take orders and then we ultimately we give orders. Now it sounds like one is somewhat dehumanizing and the other isn't, but one thing the Big 10 understood is that nobody, just to put it quickly, I mean like the Elliot loved competition, right?

But William Camp's point is that nobody, that nobody likes competition. Everybody likes winning to your point, right? So it's not just that you want competition, you want a monopoly. And that's, I think that goes to your, idea that competition for its own sake, where not everyone is out for a monopoly makes no sense. Like there's no way that people in a gentlemanly way, even in the sort of Oxford system, are going to, throw the game of quidditch at the end in order to what? Right. It's, it, it's not the, they want a fair game, but they more than a fair game, they want to win.

and I think that was actually a very crucial insight of camps and now. The Big 10 while Harvard dithers around with prestige and, backroom compromise and all this other small stuff, the Big 10 is still devoted to building up the most nuclear reactors of any university conference in the world to beating Europe and quantum to winning at football, to making 1.4 billion in untaxed revenue a year.

And this thing is hiding in plain sight because it, it wants to win. It's not in the, it's not in the business of pretending to be pro capitalism. It's just trying to nail it's incredible scientific accomplishments and and, build up its resources. And in some ways I feel like it's the reason that you can have so many Marxists there is that there's no one arguing for capitalism.

There's just people, making things you know, that are better than other people's [00:24:00] things.

SHEFFIELD: Well, and it's also that they have a vision of public education for the

public, and as an integral part to the, states and localities in which they

exist, and that does not exist for the

Ivy League, by And, large.

HEFFERNAN: where the, where Harvard has little interaction with the governor of Massachusetts, although she's a Harvard alumna they, those schools are integral, to their state's economies, like the number four, number three employers in their states. And often they have former governors, or at least in two cases, former governors come and take over as presidents.

The governors are, they really like it if they went to Purdue or IU or, Ohio State. And the, they have 44 million fans, the big 10 schools altogether, like the, like these are schools that. People don't have contempt for, like they do for Harvard and Yale. They have an allegiance to, and that allegiance is more strong and immediate than their allegiance to maga, for instance.

No matter where they fall on the political spectrum. So, I think there's a lot going right at the Big 10. But the other thing I wanted to say is it's sort of outside that particular conversation about economics because they just are blissfully striving for, monopolies on, on, on things that people should be pursuing monopolies on.

I mean, they ultimately are open source, right? 'cause they're public. But on medical research, they collaborate. They do collaborate of course with China on medical research, on green tech, on nuclear power. Because because capitalism, Secondary get arriving at answers, and being the first to arrive at answers, so, I mean, you

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

HEFFERNAN: want science. You don't want science and progress without people out for monopolies. You want people who want to get there first.

SHEFFIELD: The other [00:26:00] thing also that I think is illustrative about the Big 10 versus the Ivy League is that it is the relationship to. And, you've talked about it a bit here, but you know, just like the relationship to capital that, these schools do have large public

funding and because they're so integral to

their states, it's a lot harder for the Republicans in their state to, to slash them and go after them.

HEFFERNAN: Indiana

SHEFFIELD: And they,

HEFFERNAN: Yeah. You've probably

SHEFFIELD: yes, unfortunately.

HEFFERNAN: have basically been obliterated there. But,

Jeffrey Epstein as a synecdoche of corrupt compromise

SHEFFIELD: yeah well, I was going to say, but the other thing that you know is different is that because the Ivys are mostly private they do, have to be going out and raising money a lot more. And one of the people who had very many connections to these schools was Jeffrey Epstein.

And Epstein has since gone on to become, kind of a, a, figure that as, we were talking about before the recording here, that, you, I, think I correctly identified him as somebody who. Can be the representation of the corrupt bargain that is at the heart of modern institutions in a way that is easy for people to grasp no matter their ideology or how much informed they are or not.

HEFFERNAN: So, well, I'll try to, I'll try to, I, as, I ended up in, in the, a circle of people called That was some people, I've been on podcasts to talk about it as a cult. But let's just say had some cult like qualities to it. But the worst thing about it was not that it was sponsored by Jeffrey Epstein.

I didn't know who Jeffrey Epstein was at the time, and honestly didn't even know the name of the person that gave most of the money for it, but we can talk about it in a second. But what this organization or a group did is, and end up, and this is what I hated most about, it, was produce so much so sophistry so you can lay at its feet.

Things like evolutionary psychology and certain kinds of neuroscience and certain kinds of [00:28:00] bad philosophy. And also in addition to intellectual fraudulence. And and a, lot of people missing the mark of the what's it called, the replicability crisis, right? Like whose studies couldn't be replicated.

They also were exerting great dominance over people who worked for them to the point of lots of sexual abuse. And so, that combination of things the headquartered at places like Harvard and MIT where Jeffrey Epstein, supposedly smart washed or whatev some version of smart, washed his money, plowing it into eugenics adjacent departments and faculty and having these people to his house and all that stuff.

PR produced office sophistry produced this kind of sexual abuse. And I can just name one after another. This isn't, I'm not, this isn't Q Anon right? This is like actually arrested, documented court documents. Same with Epstein, same thing that I was to some extent complicit in. And lots of people in the academy, in retail, in all these, Victoria's Secret, if you were interested in modeling in New York real estate, if you were in Hollywood where, Kevin Spacey and other celebrities were flew with and hung out with Epstein.

Then you that the arts, so Interlochen is another place like arts and acting school in, where he recruited. So these are so many domains that, Epstein touched if you were anywhere near them, you had a creeping feeling that somehow the person that you were, was being compromised, that you were sitting with.

Sitting, talking to a seemingly interesting person at a party, and then his girlfriend came up and she looked like she was 15. That happened, and you just didn't say anything about it. I, would tell myself everybody was getting a deal out of it. Or, and this is where I think conservatives I might've [00:30:00] listened to conservatives, my full throat of defense of Bill Clinton for having, getting a blowjob in the Oval Office was very like, oh, we're also, I call this sort of a swanky leftism.

Miran has three families and it's all the greatest thing in the world you can do to be, not be puritanical. Right. And American and Jeffrey Epstein was that too. I, he, not know that he was trafficking women. Obviously. I never even saw him at a party, but I, I saw Donald Trump and Melania, and we are accepting what like 30 year age difference is just.

It's just a kind of normal thing, right? It's like the thing we delore in Mormons was the thing that we thought was like really exciting and sophisticated and and really like camil foe with intellectuals and with with the rich. So those two things. My proximity to it. Then the distance of other people from it who must have thought seeing movies like Miramax movies that had, all kinds of like outlandish, abusive, cruel sexuality represented, had really weird codes of conduct that like, that, I'm not talking about Philadelphia, which is like a sentimental story that puts, puts Gay, sees the Humanity in gay people, but movies that, a lot of movies that Miramax came out with that were, had s and m dynamics, had dynamics of cruelty and that in the hinterlands or in the Heartland, you just didn't watch those movies and feel like there was something in it for you that was good, and then you were finding that your own. Shudder that you had toward those things was being vilified as like racism or bigotry, or corniness or puritanism provincialism. And I can imagine those two responses, my shuttering feeling, the uncanny response of, former Republicans or Republicans who turned to maga.[00:32:00]

They, two responses were a response to something that was rotten in the state of Denmark. And one thing we might, as people who like abstractions refer to that thing as is neoliberalism, right? Or you say econometrics. And a consolidation of the ruling class, the proliferation of billionaires and monopolization of capital.

That's how we might, in boring terms, explain what happened with Epstein. Then there is a much more exciting story that thrives in Q Anon, most of which is not true, but a fragment of which is freaking true, right? It's like, like Jeffrey Epstein at these crazy islands was like, it's a little like, we don't like to think that the Russian co like it's very immature or something to say, well, Russian collusion doesn't happen because, Putin comes up to Trump and is like, here's my, here's your tape of you having sex in the Ritz, or whatever it, nothing really happens like that.

But Epstein did happen like that. And it's one, it is one way, I think the fact that most of us let, most of us, at least on the left, thought the Epstein thing was put to rest, thought that it was like ground by the pussy or the rape of Eugene Carroll, and it was just another Teflon thing that would roll off Trump.

Moreover, I, until very recently thought, well, come on. He never, there's never been a real suggestion that he had sex with a teenager, with an underage person. But there is, and and so I. I feel in some ways that there's a, listening to Q Anon part of this, which is like you were, they were sensing that something was really, weird.

And, incest and they, what they call age discrepant relationships or the rape of kids is very common in lots of institutions from the Catholic Church to the Boy Scouts and so on. And they weren't

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

HEFFERNAN: They weren't wrong. We

SHEFFIELD: Yeah,

HEFFERNAN: a creepy feeling. And now we have a name for that creepy feeling.

And, Jeffrey Epstein is a much more vivid name [00:34:00] than neoliberalism.

QAnon as projected right-wing Christian fear about internal predation

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and uh, your point about the, that creepy sensation that a lot of, the Q anon people had I wrote recently a piece of just looking at the numbers that you know, right wing religious communities. Are disproportionately plagued by child abuse compared to, uh, other communities. And somebody went and, uh, did the stats on just like actual cases of people accused of child sexual abuse.

And what they found was that of politics. So she, went and gathered literally more than 10,000 cases be between a year

span. And what she found was that of politicians who had been accused of, that type of crime, that it was 67% of them were Republicans. And that 1.7, I think, or sorry, 2.2% or something like that were libertarians, which when you think

of how few elected libertarians there are in this country, that's astronomically overrepresented that party is.

And

so,

HEFFERNAN: is amazing.

SHEFFIELD: and.

HEFFERNAN: yeah, go ahead.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, and the same thing is true that when you just look at abuse studies that you know, these far right religious denominations, they, the leaders that operate them do not, they have unquestioned authority

HEFFERNAN: Right.

SHEFFIELD: people are not allowed to examine them. They don't provide accountability.

And they often, have completely they don't do background checks on people because they know the God. They feel that the Lord tells them they should hire this person. And so they do.

And

don't bother to check whether they have had convictions or whatnot. And so this is why, all of the biggest abuse scandals that have happened have been in the theologically conservative denominations.

HEFFERNAN: I mean, I think that we have to, [00:36:00] one of Trump's one of the. The biggest, you never has said to not call things Trump does missteps because he he's right on Surefooted, right? When he looks like he's stepping outside. But I think calling the, Jeffrey Epstein affair, and it's all of it.

The crimes a hoax akin to the Russia hoax, which also was not a hoax, but the Epstein hoax Epstein thing. A hoax is saying, well, it all didn't exist right? Like he's, bill Clinton denied knowing what Epstein was doing and denied being a part of it. Trump has not issued a denial. He didn't deny, he doesn't deny a lot of things.

He mostly just says it's all a hoax, right? Like that he never met EG and Carol. And so he usually, he doesn't mount a factual defense. He just says, this is all just didn't happen, or it's just not true. Like they, like, like Brett Kavanaugh did with, Christine Blasey Ford, and, parenthetically I would.

Love it. If we got, speaking of empiricism, just one person who said, yeah, I didn't really know much about sex. I'm Brett Kavanaugh. I was drunk, I don't know anything. And I tried to take off this woman's clothes and she had a swimsuit on and I was got over ahead of my skis and we've all done it and I'm so sorry to her and I'm so sorry I affected you.

And now here's my history of understanding the Constitution. And I'd like to be on the Supreme Court. I think most sane people would say, you know what? That thing sounds like it happened. the only thing that's making me crazy about you is that you just say it. Didn't, you just like obliterated it. You've just said it didn't happen.

And I do think because we know. Jeffrey Epstein was friends with Donald Trump, that there's photographic evidence, that there's witnesses, that there's, we know that they were very close. And because we know that Jeffrey Epstein committed a lot of crimes, and we, this is all just o nobody right or left disagrees with any of this.

I've never heard anyone [00:38:00] to say that it was a hoax. So to tell us that it's a hoax is to do, you know what Joe Rogan has said? What a, lot of people on the right have said is just to gaslight the shit out of us. And this is a time where we're not having it.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

HEFFERNAN: I think that's, I, think that is a really interesting.

Finally, at least there's one example, maybe fleeting of a time that, Trump told us to disbelieve the evidence of our eyes that, it was a hoax, like crop circles. Like I was thinking of things that was used before, right? Like world, of the world. That it was like something perpetuated to do by whatever, that this isn't an abstract issue like that.

This isn't a complex issue with the word hoax in it that makes you do triple cognitive epistemological back flips. To understand that what each photo is a CGI photo, like all the things you'd have to do to imagine it's a hoax. We just don't want to rev up to do that again. Right now.

SHEFFIELD: No.

HEFFERNAN: want to just be there and say, you know what?

Raping teenage girls is wrong. And I know it in my bones. It's wrong. The fact that it is common. in families we know it's common. We can't pretend that this is not a huge threat in human history. I mean, there's so many disturbing numbers on this, including the ones you just gave, but you probably saw that in England, God, I don't want to get this wrong, but there's some enormous number of people that are descendant from first degree incest father, whose grandmother and great-grandfather, whatever, had sex with each other.

And this is this is a phenomenon that we can't deny either because we want to keep our heads in the sand or because we're party to it. Like the Catholic church, like the Boy Scouts like Jeffrey Epstein, like, Mike Jeffries, [00:40:00] who used to run Abercrombie and Fitch. We can't they might say this doesn't exist because they want to call the whole thing a hoax.

And the rest of us who don't have those kind of relationships in our lives might want to say it doesn't exist because it doesn't exist for us. And it's too horrible to think that it does. But the truth is it's just incredibly common. And Jeffrey Epstein did it. And I don't know if I want to call it systemic, but I think the numbers are there.

The complicity is there and and it in some ways it's incredibly satisfying to finally have an example of cruelty. Then we can all agree is cruelty and that we can all oppose, I thought the murders in Newtown of, toddlers were an example of cruelty. That we should do everything we could to prevent from happening ever again.

Somehow the right did not think that. and they think that the, expansion of rights for trans people or even expansion of medical care for trans people represent some kind of cruelty. I don't see it as cruelty. So I was starting to despair that we could agree on an idea of what is something the strong, attacking the weak, causing deliberately causing suffering that we could agree that we collectively need to oppose, right?

We don't even need to agree on any moral principles. We just need to agree on what a cruel act is that we see. And it's just very, satisfying to see brief coalition between people on the left and people on the right that trump's participation in the sort of Epstein machine is beyond the pale.

Lewis, Tolkien, and the rise of fictionalized reality

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think so. And that's it. It also cuts across what, you know, the, these, cross ideological understandings have been become a lot more difficult [00:42:00] because. Society has, really transitioned into kind of fictionalized versions of itself that everybody's developed their own, version of it.

So like, you know, there's a famous, uh, evangelical book called, uh, this Present Darkness. And it's a novel about, uh, uh, a small town that is being being that demons are trying to gain possession of it through working with universities possessed universities and, a, small town pastor that fights against it, but, and it's a fictionalization, but, and i, bought a copy of it from a used bookstore, and it's fascinating that on the, on it was a 'cause I, like buying. Physical used copies of books because all you can see what previous readers thought about them. and the reader of this book had inscribed it as a gift to someone else. And it said something like, this book is fiction, but the idea is behind it are all real.

HEFFERNAN: Amazing. Wow.

SHEFFIELD: And like, and, but, and this, type of, a hermeneutic of reality,

HEFFERNAN: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: is what a lot of people have. and you know, I think everybody probably to some degree, we all have this, you know, going back to, the idea of interpretation as reality or not you know, like it's, it, but it became much more of a thing beginning with the popularization of, mass fiction. So like CS Lewis or Tolkin,

And the Matrix,

That everybody thinks in terms of, well, maybe not everybody, but like a lot of people really do see reality in these metaphoric terms.

And,

Peter Thiel to circle back with him,

He, names all of his companies after, Lord of the Rings

things like Palantir

HEFFERNAN: Yes.

SHEFFIELD: And that, guy Curtis Jarvin, the, reactionary blogger, he sees himself as a [00:44:00] dark elf and people who agree with him.

HEFFERNAN: yes. I mean, they are living in something that looks like middle earth or resident evil, 25 or, endless runner games. Like, like, like Elon Musk and I, you, I think you would know better than I do that, like Worlds of Demons, Satan, antichrist that have. Driven people in various panics at, in the past that there were so many in the madness of crowds, right?

Like that, that, all of those, almost all of those are driven by panics about forces, and mostly they're mapped onto Christian onto Christian iconography. Yeah. And Milton obviously like huge influence on American life was Milton and Milton Satan. So the, yeah, so one of the other ways that we started by talking about politics for English majors, the fact that these texts, and I'm so glad you mentioned this, present darkness.

I hadn't heard of that one. there are, the Scientology foundational Scientology books like Battlefield Earth. The, Turner Diaries is a work of fiction. Ayn Rand, who's always treated as a philosopher, is in fact an author of fiction. If you've read The Fountainhead, if you've read Atlas Shrugged, you've read a novel, right?

And a novel by, and you may have thought because it's very unlikely that you read it for the characters, the irony, the metaphors, even, the plot. You come away believing the ideas are real and you may come away believe like you're in scriber of that book, and you may come away from, came, come away believing that you read a work of philosophy or allegory.

And this is where the tools of literary criticism come in. And I'm just going to keep one thing succinct. People do not need to learn to fact check or understand facts. They need to learn to read fiction as fiction. Which is what literary critics teach you to do. So that's where the English major is useful.

There is a beautiful state of mind and some people interacting with AI understand [00:46:00] this of willingly suspending disbelief and getting into this kind of trance where you're living with characters. People know it much better now, from Bingeable Netflix series. What are you doing when you watch a really cool detective series on Netflix, or you watch the succession on HBO, you're watching Forged History.

You're watching people that kind of act like real people, but they speak in heightened language and things happen to them that don't happen to real people and anyone. a gift who grew up reading novels not allegories like the ones that we're talking about, but real novels with ironies and and fiction and characters that are aestheticized and created.

Know when you're in the presence of art and take it in, this wonderful way. I mean, I, a great Netflix series or a great or succession is, has this wonderful effect on the brain. I mean, the willing suspension of disbelief is like, that's, coleridge's term is a trance. It's you're not believing.

You're not believing what you read. That would be like reading Pizzagate and taking a gun and trying to find the people that are responsible for it. That's, you believe what you read. You read it like, oh, I am a thing happened in the world and I'm going to avenge people by taking out a gun. And again, parenthetically, there've always been people who mistakenly read like that.

The Stephen King novel Misery, right? the, there's a reader, the Kathy Bates character in the movie who believes that misery, the central character in a novel is real and she must redeem her. And so she takes the author the author prisoner shaped hostage. There were people who believed Dickens' characters were real, notoriously wept when Little Nell died.

And but re taking a novel as real means that you have not acquired the incredibly pleasurable capacity to get into the fiction trance and.

SHEFFIELD: Well, it is catharsis as Aristotle

called it.

HEFFERNAN: Yeah. Well say more about [00:48:00] that. You mean in the presence of, in his case, right? Theater and poetry.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I mean, it's still the same concept that it's, it is art. It is inhabiting a fictional moment as a heightened representation of reality that it's not just, it isn't a pale imitation. In fact, it is a exploration and zoomed in, a way that the actual, you can never get from observing real reality because you have to inhabit your own mind.

But with, literature, we get to inhabit the mind of multiple people in the same story.

HEFFERNAN: So that's where allegory comes in. And another feature of literary criticism is to help you understand genre. Allegory has a one-to-one correspondence between characters and places ideas in the world. And many of the books that the drive people are simple allegory of pilgrim's progress.

The kind of act allegory in English was on people's beds next to the Bible. And taking literally the idea that a character, called Every man was person who then faced things, certain temptations that were like the slough of despondent he had to get through. And this was true and Dante also, but that, that he had to face down with Vanity Fair is another example. And resist these temptations and make this way through the make his way, through the, thickets of, seductions. In order to be godly. An allegory like that and there's like a key at the bottom. I mean, these are the kind of things, by the way, the reading that's taught in by homeschooling that is, that misses irony and metaphor.

I'll just put it that simply. And so if I were going to teach anything, it would be to how to read fiction as fiction. What's great about reading as fiction, as opposed to fact checking, which I've also done for a living, is fact checking is incredibly tedious. It's pedantic, it's librarian.

Nobody likes to be [00:50:00] corrected. Reading fiction as fiction is an absolute delight, and it's a way to be like, oh, I see, I know when. I am drinking a glass of wine versus, drinking a, refreshing glass of water. And I don't mistake one for the other. I don't think that I should seek hydration, nourishment, whatever in that, in this glass of wine that I might seek in a green smoothie or whatever.

And that's true with fiction too, that it's not quite clear. It may give us catharsis, it may give us pleasure, it may give us better ways of understanding the world. It may give us, and this is what Rdy thought, better ways of understanding ourselves, because the metaphor, the idiosyncratic metaphoric, as he tediously said it existed in great literature.

There's nothing like it for crystallizing a person's sense of identity and what dies when they die. And what dies when we die. At least I found that to be true. a lot of things are included in, literature there. Of course I've certainly count television and, scraps of thinking on the internet and epigrams from philosophy and all those things.

Richard Rorty's continued relevance

SHEFFIELD: And just to go back to Rorty as we're coming up on the hour here in our recording that, I, he he wrote a book, his, final

book was called Achieving Our Country. And it was a really, good book in a lot of ways, and I wish. That more people had read it in the late nineties when it came out. Because he was trying to, it was, I mean, in many ways a prophetic warning to the left about you have to be able to speak in something other than abstractions. You have to understand that truth is something that is, felt and always in motion and that everyone has to be

included in it. And that their needs are also part of what truth is and answering

them and providing for them. And, that [00:52:00] was ignored by neoliberalism.

And but he also talked about trying to make sure of, avoiding two different types of dangers that movements that are trying to do some achieve social change.

You want to talk about those?

HEFFERNAN: Yeah, I I really would love to, I mean, is a, pressing interest of mine in the, in our, my podcast with Steven Metcalf called, I'll just plug it. What Rough Beast. Stephen and I both studied with Richard Bordy at the University of Virginia. That's how we met. And and, he, his kind of pragmatism, his version of pragmatism revelatory, I think to both of us.

And and one of the points that he makes on this essay he includes in achieving Our Country, an essay he wrote for dissent in the nineties called Movements and Campaigns. Which is very short and and succinct I think Gatz said something extremely important. Now, Verde was disliked on the right and the left time equally, but he.

that does not mean that he objected to the left more than the right. He thought that the pull, that the right, so let's just call it fascism, has on us, is tragic. The pull that some of the worst tendencies of the left has on us. He called a nuisance, which I think is a very good distinction when you hear complaints about ry, right?

It's about woke, right? It's like, someone, when Trump was first elected, someone on my Facebook page said, better nuclear winter than more letters in L-G-B-T-Q. Right? And it had really gotten so that the nuisance of left wing, speech codes or kind of efforts to be accommodating, or maybe they were, it was small bits of penry.

Were driving people into the hands of like extermination, fascism. That they'd rather die than, participate in this kind of nuisance ritual. And can't mistake the nuisances [00:54:00] from what's now called the woke or formerly politically correct. We can't mistake those for a tragedy and run from them into the hands of fascism.

It's just, it would just be, it's a, terrible category error to think of them as equally terrible. However, he does talk about. The problem with what he calls movements. So movements mostly revolutionary. And movements that are extremely focused on utopia and focused on a moment that never comes.

So the Kingdom of God or the apotheosis of the worker. Anything that you might have the thousand year Rike, anything you might have heard that's on a, extraordinarily long time timeline and far in the future? A moment that never comes and a moment that we can never fully realize, like there are no, as they would say in business there, there's, there are no deliverables.

There's no, what is A-K-P-A-A product indicator? No key progress indicator. I don't know. There's nothing you could put up on your deck for venture when you're, try to get venture capital and say, well, we've realized this, we've realized this, right? Campaigns and so movements as we were talking about earlier.

very quickly into two, terrible problems. One is infighting and purges. So like Stalin ish purges or Maoist struggle sessions to choose two, on the would be left. But also separation of rhinos from maga, right? Like rhinos or regular Republicans and MAGA republicans might vote alike on 80% of subjects.

But if you read, as I just did Christy No's book about politics, she's so far right that the people that are really in her sights are like Paul Ryan. and she would probably do well to align with Paul Ryan since most of their [00:56:00] politics are the same. But her hatred for him is very, like the hatred on the left for say, the people that qualed in the women's March which were kind of pro-Palestine and pro-Israel feminists, and, that thing came, fell apart because of this kind of infighting and, desire for purity tests and to purge people who didn't agree with you on everything.

Now, that is something that the left is often f faulted for because we come up with a lot of infighting because we're trying to have a big tent because a lot of people are included among, say Democrats, a lot of different people with different backgrounds. But that kind of infighting is definitely present on the right and it happens in primaries.

And the first fights that Trump picked were with, Jeb Bush. So the, the idea that they didn't even share a set of values because Trump had to be a movement. He had to be like a one man, I don't necessarily want to say cult leader, but cults also style themselves as movements that were moving toward the promised land.

Okay. The promised land almost always in the infighting, falls away. So you think of like David Ksh, right at Waco. He originally had some idea of a movement toward a kind of socialist, multiracial something world. But pretty soon. He was amassing guns and the federal government didn't like that he had guns and he had much younger girlfriends, and that was against the law of the land.

And then the whole thing became a late stage cult where it's just about fighting against either people on the inside who aren't sufficiently committed or people on the outside who are trying to get you for something. And you've lost sight of this utopia that you first drew people in with. So movements, they lose their utopias and they devolve into infighting.

But the last thing that happens is that they commit [00:58:00] cruelty. Because if what you're interested is in is the rapture, this is sort of your territory, but the rapture, the restoration of the kingdom of God on earth. If what you are interested in those things, that if those are the things that motivate you, then anything can be justified in their name.

Opposition to cruelty as a guiding principle

HEFFERNAN: And those things often turn out to be cruelty. So one thing Richard Ty says is, sum, bonum, any ultimate good can be cited to just by Nazis or by maoists to justify violence. So hope or even, I have trouble even with decency and kindness, even sort of the mild ones. But 'cause his argument was anything that you and I agree on at the philosophy table, that is like the ultimate good truth, right?

You can imagine a Nazi or a Maoist torturing someone saying, I'm doing this in the name of truth. So as Ardi says, the thing that we oppose, don't have an ultimate good as pragmatist, but we have an ultimate evil. And that ultimate evil is not the antichrist. It's not the orcs, it's not sour on, it's not something from fiction, it's cruelty.

It's. The infliction of suffering on people, on, on people. And the fear kind of cruelty. So let's take the ice arrests, engenders in people so we know cruelty when we see it. That's what I think is useful about Jeffrey Epstein. Why do we oppose cruelty? Why do we behave humanely? Because just because we don't derive it from some truth.

There are probably, there are probably efforts once you start with truth, you can derive a, you can derive cruel actions, so you have to oppose the action at the end of it. And that's how you get people to do things, to change the world. So I was in a seminar with him and someone said, well, we would never have gotten desegregation without Christianity because.

was a [01:00:00] Christian and because I have a dream cited Christian used Christian tropes and that people wouldn't have been moved to do it. And Richie, Richard Rdy said very memorably, I wish it weren't that way. Right? It's just like, I wish that you did not have to have some doctrine.

Then someone else raised their hand and said, I find as a feminist that the kind of thinking around the gaze of the other, which was the kind of feminist, french feminist theory that was soaking up our minds at the time, I find that thinking around the gaze of the other, around the male gaze to be incredibly motivating Dy said, what does it motivate you to do?

And she said, well really understand this and that. And he said, but how are you eliminating cruelty or promoting human flourishing? There are a shortage of, this is the nineties beds for female AIDS patients right now. is the kind of campaign that we could all be part of. And I, asked after the fires in Portland, Oregon, I asked a friend this was a couple years ago, like I had read something about someone opening his door from the inside and scalding his hand on the, his doorknob from the inside and getting blisters and burns.

And I said, how could I help someone like that? I just want to cool off his body and get him some neosporin. And she said, well, oppose climate disinformation. And I just thought, I think that ship has sailed, right? I don't want a movement about saving the earth right now. I really want to get this guy some bottles of water and some, Some Neosporin for his hand and some burn treatments and a bandage. And that kind of, those kind of campaigns are the kind of thing Rty Rorty really appreciated. And there's a wonderful list in movements and campaigns of the campaigns that he had thought were extremely successful. And you can name tons of them in this country, [01:02:00] including reducing emissions.

And a lot of the things, by the way that Trump is undoing. But campaigns that have made the world better public education and that you, and it's measurable, right? So you have a theory of change, but you can't have a theory of change without these indicators of progress, markers of progress toward your change.

And some of those markers are the ones realized by campaigns. The most recent one I participated in was the te Tesla take down where the idea was to stigmatize driving a Tesla. And gad fly ish. Nobody likes it. It's annoying. We were yelling at Tesla drivers outside dealerships that like, shame, And this country, sales went down and the stock price dropped. And ultimately Musk was so troubled by it that the Tesla takedowns were included in dangers to the stock and got people to downgrade the stock because, as an insurance question, the fact that its reputation was taking a hit from protesters explicitly was affecting the value of the company.

And he left the government in part to restore the Tesla stock price. So it was a very, effective. A campaign. And he was like, the, cruelty that was that we were opposing was his attack on U-S-A-I-D. He put it in the wood chipper and that put children in the wood chipper. So was something wonderful about that campaign, was it?

Yes, we can, did it have a charismatic leader standing up there and getting us to effect on him and love him and imagine that there's some magic future? It did not. What it had was us yelling at car drivers so that they would finally decide it was too much of a drag to drive a Tesla. They weren't as cool as he thought people were going to slap incel inside stickers on it.

And why not buy another kind of car? And and so that's an example of a campaign being successful. And I have a hard time thinking of a movement [01:04:00] that has ever been successful and have a very easy time of thinking of movements like the French Revolution or Maoism that turned quite cruel and bloody

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I, would say further that, the idea of countering this tragic hateful political philosophy of Trumpism, it has to be done in, this way of, preventing cruelty and in letting people know that they do have a

future, even if they have these, antiquated superstitious beliefs that, like,

and letting them know you, nobody's going to make you disbelieve those

things.

You can, if you want to believe these false beliefs, go ahead. we're not going to stop

you. You just can't impose them on everyone else, and you should be okay with that.

Understanding why people believe lies

HEFFERNAN: Yeah. There. The one, one last thing I'll say about literary criticism, which is obviously a passion, is that there was a, wonderful book by Janice Rodway called Reading the Romance from the eighties and. a lot in literary criticism, but the main thing it did for me was propose a reason that people believe lies and that they read compulsively.

And for romance readers in the eighties, the books really rewarded someone who reads like a detective. So because the story was a man behaving cruelly to you, this is also the plot of pride and Prejudice actually loves you more than anyone. So you're like writing away the current abuse and cruelty in your head all the time in this incredibly pleasurable way.

And, in pride and prejudice, Mr. Darcy is like, withholding and snobbish and terrible and imperious. But then it turns out that's the greatest love of all. And to make your life bearable while your husband is ignoring you, putting up a shield of a book. Sometimes these women were reading three, four books a day.

They were reading the way people read [01:06:00] the internet now, just compulsive, Tell yourself a story over and over again so you know, you're a single man, as they always say, living in your mother's basement, but reading these things, you are actually Luke Skywalker, or you're actually, Legolas or or a wonderful hero or you're on the video, games believing that because it's, and it ends up being, at least in the case of the romance readers, your heart breaks.

they're just as bruised. This was a group of people, women in the Midwest who identified as housewives and were reading these novels, you're just as bruised or, just as single or just as lonely as you ever were, but you've decided to devise a story in your head that, that tells it otherwise.

That says, that r