[LST] Engaged or Detached? - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/30/opinion/brooks-engaged-or-detached.html?_r=0&pagewanted=print

Engaged or Detached?
By DAVID BROOKS
Let's say you are a young person beginning to write about politics and policy.
You probably have some idea of what you believe, but have you thought about
how you believe it? That is to say, have you thought about where you will sit on
the continuum that stretches from writers who are engaged to those who are
detached?
Writers who are at the classic engaged position believe that social change is
usually initiated by political parties. To have the most influence, the engaged
writer wants to channel his efforts through a party.
The engaged writer closely and intimately aligns with a team. In his writing, he
provides arguments for the party faithful and builds community by reminding
everyone of the errors and villainy of the opposing side. For the engaged
writer, the writing is often not about persuasion. (Realistically, how many times
does a piece of writing persuade someone to switch sides?) It's often about
mobilization. It's about energizing the people who already agree with you.
The engaged writer often criticizes his own party, but from a zone of trust
inside it, and he is usually advising the party to return to its core creed. The
engaged writer is willing to be repetitive because that's how you make yourself
an unavoidable pole in the debate. The goal is to have immediate political
influence, to provide party leaders with advice, strategy and policy
recommendations.
The detached writer also starts with a worldview. If you don't have a
philosophic worldview, your essays won't even rise to the status of being
wrong. They won't be anything.
But the detached writer wants to be a few steps away from the partisans. She is
progressive but not Democratic, conservative but not Republican. She fears the
team mentality will blinker her views. She wants to remain mentally
independent because she sees politics as a competition between partial truths,
and she wants the liberty to find the proper balance between them, issue by
issue.
The detached writer believes that writing is more like teaching than activism.
Her essays are generally not about winning short-term influence. (Realistically,
how many times can an outside writer shape the short-term strategies of the
insider politicians?) She would rather have an impact upstream, shaping
people's perceptions of underlying reality and hoping that she can provide a
context in which other people can think. She sometimes gets passionate about
her views, but she distrusts her passions. She takes notes with emotion, but
aims to write with a regulated sobriety.
There are trade-offs, no matter what spot on the continuum you ultimately
choose. The engaged writer enjoys a tight community and a powerful sense of
commitment. The detached writer enjoys more freedom and objectivity. The
engaged writer emphasizes loyalty, while the detached writer emphasizes
honesty. At his worst, the engaged writer slips into rabid extremism and
simple-minded brutalism. At her worst, the detached writer slips into a
sanguine, pox-on-all-your-houses complacency and an unearned sense of
superiority. The engaged writer might become predictable. The detached writer
might become irrelevant, ignored at both ends.
These days most writers land on the engaged side of the continuum. Look at
most think tanks. They used to look like detached quasi universities; now some
are more like rapid response teams for their partisan masters. If you ever want
to get a political appointment, you have to be engaged, working on political
campaigns and serving the team.
But I would still urge you to slide over toward the detached side of the scale.
First, there is the matter of mental hygiene. You may think you can become a
political partisan without becoming rigid and stale, and we all know people
who achieve this, but the risk is high.
Engaged writers gravitate toward topics where they can do the most damage to
the other side. These are topics where the battle lines are clearly drawn, not
topics where there is a great deal of uncertainty. Engaged writers develop a
talent for muzzle velocity, not curiosity. Just as in life, our manners end up
dictating our morals. So, in writing our prose, styles end up shaping our
mentalities. If you write in a way that suggests combative certitude, you may
gradually smother the inner chaos that will be the source of lifelong freshness
and creativity.
Also, detached writers have more realistic goals. Detached writers generally
understand that they are not going to succeed in telling people what to think. It
is enough to prod people to think — to provide an idea or piece information
that sets readers on a train of thought that takes them far in front of whatever
you put down.
The detached writer understands that, at the top level, politics is a bipolar
struggle for turf. But the real fun is down below, sparking conversations about
underlying concepts, underlying reality and the underlying frame of debate.

--
Saurav Datta

Twitter: SauravDatta29

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