Bespoke platitudes for the middlebrow
I’m reading Jon Ronson’s Shaming book so I’m reminded of Jonah Lehrer. Steven Poole wrote about his return last year.
The most vilified writer of modern times is back, and people are lining up to give him another kicking. Jonah Lehrer’s 2012 book Imagine: How Creativity Works was pulled from shelves after it was demonstrated to contain fabricated quotes purportedly from Bob Dylan and WH Auden. He subsequently admitted to plagiarising the work of others in his blogposts, while critics noted apparent plagiarism and disregard for facts throughout his published work. The pop-neuroscience whiz-kid had, it appeared, simply stolen or made a lot of it up.
Well, we are living in an era of post-truth politics, so why not post-truth nonfiction? Four years on, and the disgraced author – after publicly apologising for at least some of the above – has managed to publish another volume, A Book About Love. Naturally, onlookers are suspicious. In a brilliantly disdainful review for the New York Times, Jennifer Senior calls the book a “nonfiction McMuffin” and “insolently unoriginal”.
I like “insolently unoriginal.” I’ll have to steal it.
But Lehrer has his defenders. Booksellers tell the Wall Street Journal that the guy deserves a second chance (especially, one imagines, if it helps them sell books). And the New York Times columnist David Brooks handles Lehrer with kid gloves, offering excuses for the writer’s earlier misdeeds: “Success fell on Lehrer early and all at once – and it ruined him,” because he had too much work to keep up with honestly. This might seem insufficient justification, given that plenty of other people enjoy sudden success and do not start stealing and lying.
Yes but David Brooks. David Brooks has had decades of unearned success for uttering unremarkable platitudes, so I suppose he’s motivated to excuse unearned success in others.
The deeper problem, however, is that it was clear to some of us that his books were egregious even before it turned out they contained plagiarism and fabrication. As I and the psychologist Christopher Chabris have noted, for example, Imagine drew unwarranted conclusions from partial scientific evidence in order to promote an “uplifting moral” that was nothing more than syrupy conventional wisdom.
Much like David Brooks, or Thomas Friedman. I hate that kind of thing, myself.
Publishers love books that tell clear, simple stories sprinkled with cutting-edge science. Newspapers and magazines, too, are hungry for such articles. This is now, Engber argues, “less a Jonah Lehrer problem than a science journalism problem”. Jennifer Senior, for her part, says that it was all along: the “vote to excommunicate” Lehrer back in 2012 was not just about his lying, but was “a referendum on a certain genre of canned, cocktail-party social science, one that traffics in bespoke platitudes for the middlebrow and rehearses the same studies without saying something new”. If so, however, the excommunication was surely unfair, given that other notable practitioners of this sort of thing have happily carried on.
Exactly, and they’re highly paid and all over the airwaves. Alain de Botton is another.
*wink*
I can’t think of a quality that is more important to me in a nonfiction writer than honesty. An honest but shitty writer at least isn’t going to waste much of my time — I’ll put his or her book down quickly and move on to someone else. But a dishonest writer is taking up my time and giving me bad information — I’m literally worse off than if I’d never read the book.
I don’t understand what “skill” Jonah Lehrer has that is so irreplaceable or special that it should override his demonstrated lack of honesty. I’m baffled that anyone would buy one of his books now, and that publishers think he’s worth publishing.
And as to all the talk about second chances: Jonah Lehrer can do plenty of things for a living. Some of them can even involve writing — he could write fiction (well, again, but this time labelled as such, ha ha), or marketing materials (where someone else has to review for accuracy and legality anyway), etc. Or yeah, he could be like millions of other Americans and sit in a cubicle and write memos to the Assistant VP of Corporate Such and Such, or god forbid even perform blue collar work. But somehow that’s treated as unthinkable.
If you get caught dealing drugs or some other serious but not necessarily violent crime, it’s understood that it may mess up your career for good. Some jobs and schools will simply be closed to you because of your criminal record, at least for a good long while.
It’s a fascinating bit of class privilege that once you get admitted to the elite club of Famous Writers, it’s taken for granted that nothing should deprive you of that status, and that by golly, it’s unAmerican not to give a “second chance” to such a fine fellow who just made a mistake!
Another example: I was astounded by how close another journalistic fabricator, Stephen Glass, came to being admitted to the California Bar. Even though he continued to conceal the scope of his lies right up until he was running into trouble on his bar application and needed to come clean, there was no shortage of big shot lawyers and others willing to testify as to his supposed moral character. A state bar court judge actually ruled in his favor, and the California Supreme Court had to intervene and unanimously overrule it. I mean, make whatever jokes you want about lawyers and ethics, but if you’re not going to exclude a guy who repeatedly misrepresented facts and has never fully repented for it, then why have a moral character requirement at all?
I noticed one memorable instance of that in his magazine work; I think it was shortly before he got caught plagiarizing. Lehrer was talking about the old ESP experiments, and he claimed that the results of those experiments were ambiguous enough to serve as illustrations for some claim he was making about science–that it sometimes gets things wrong and therefore Doesn’t Have All the Answers, or something. But as a lifelong skeptic (who actually took a parapsychology course in college), I knew that the experiments he referenced were unequivocally, unambiguously Bad Science. They couldn’t be used as illustrations for anything except ineptitude. But bygod Lehrer thought he had a good story, so he pressed some old experiments into service. He probably assumed nobody remembered what really went on.