Fareed Zakaria: preference

Transcript context

…What put you off academia? And this was for the better, in my view. I think two things. One, I could see that political science was moving away from the political science that I loved, which was a broad discipline rooted in the social sciences but also rooted in the humanities, which was rigorous, structural, historical comparisons. Looking at different countries, trying to understand why there were differences. It was moving much more toward a huge emphasis on things like rational choice, on game theory There was an economist envy. Just as economists have math envy, political scientists have economist envy. It was moving in that direction. Whether it was the right direction or not, it was not something I felt like I would thrive in. The second piece of it was actually very much related to Huntington. Sam Huntington was quite an extraordinary character, probably the most important social scientist in the second half of the 20th century. Huge contributions to several fields of political science. He lived next to me. Me, obviously in a tiny graduate student apartment, but he in a townhouse on Beacon Hill. I would sometimes talk to him. We’d have coffee in the mornings. He had a routine, which is, he’d get up about 6:00 a.m. He’d go down to the basement of his townhouse, and at 6:30, he would start writing or working on whatever his next big research project was. He’d do that, uninterrupted, for three hours at least, sometimes four. Then, at about 9:30, 10:00, he would take the subway to Harvard. His point was, you got to start the day by doing the important work of academia, which is producing knowledge. All the rest of it — teaching, committee meetings, all that — you can do later. He was so disciplined about that, that every five years or so, he put out another major piece of work, another major book. I looked at that, and I said to myself, I do not have the self-discipline to perform at that level. I need to go into something that has deadlines, that has structure, that has more feedback because, as you know well, Tyler, there’s a very lonely aspect to being an academic. There’s a lot of fun, and there’s lots of interesting things, but a lot of it is just sitting by yourself. In the new Leonard Bernstein movie, there’s a point at which Bradley Cooper says — I’m guessing this comes out of a Bernstein interview, where he was asked what’s the difference between being a conductor and a composer — he says, “Well, being a performer, you have a constant relationship with the outside world. You have a grand outer life, a life directed outward. But as a composer, as a creator, you only have a grand internal life.” It’s all within you, and you have to be able to generate ideas from that lonely space. I’ve always found that hard. For me, writing books is the hardest thing I do. I feel like I have to do it because I feel as though everything else is trivia — the television, column, everything else. I think it’s important, but it’s relatively — in my conception, in my hierarchy, it’s trivia. ave to do it because I feel as though everything else is trivia — the television, column, everything else. I think it’s important, but it’s relatively — in my conception, in my hierarchy, it’s trivia. The most important thing you can do is to try and write books that make a difference, that put new ideas into the world, but it’s the hardest thing for me.…

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