Andrew Sullivan: recommendation

Transcript context

…Now you’ve taken quite a few intellectual risks in your career. If you look at our intellectuals and public intellectuals as a whole, what do you think is the most fundamental reason why they lack courage? These are good questions, Tyler. I think I’ve been struck over the last few years, specifically, at how many journalists, especially, or public intellectuals are very much members of their own class and are extremely concerned, perhaps more than ever, what their own peers think about them — and so are actually very, very vulnerable to social pressure. I think that means you don’t want to take risks if you want to have a good career in intellectual journalism. You don’t want to alienate your peers, and increasingly your peers are all taken from a pretty narrow socioeconomic base, who hold very similar opinions — and that’s become truer over the last 20 years. The career and psychological and social costs of going “out on a limb” are quite considerable. I think I am lucky, to some extent, to have a life that’s really not socializing with all those peers. My friends are a very eclectic bunch of people and almost none of them — a few of them are, but a lot of them are not — in journalism or in public intellectual life at all. What accounts for that? What variable in you, in them, has led that to be the equilibrium?…

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