Cynthia L. Haven: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, but I wonder often whether the truly dangerous mimesis is some form of people attacking the superficially dangerous form of mimesis. I’m not at all a Trump supporter, but often, I see more Girardian behavior amongst the critics of Trump than the Trumpians themselves. In some ways, they seem more free-thinking to me, and in ways I object to. But if you want to see your real Twitter pile-on, praise Trump in some manner, even for something good he did, like Operation Warp Speed, one of the few things he did where I would say that was really wonderful. You get creamed much more for supporting Trump than attacking him. Where the dangerous mimesis really is embedded in the system, I’m never quite sure. I understand your point, and I agree with it. I would just like to see us value more thinking. I’d like to see us value literature again. I’d like to see us value poetry again. I think that this is a question about argument. People have tact, and they’ve talked about Nazis that used to listen to Haydn and stuff like that, but I do think that there’s a better chance of something good getting through if you’re reading Czesław Miłosz than if you are reading Twitter feeds. If we valued intelligent thinking, intelligent speaking in our public lives, I think we’d be less likely to get the kind of candidates that we’re getting. Now, you spent some number of years writing profiles of Stanford faculty. Without asking you to name names, but what’s your sense of the system overall? Is it producing and supporting those great thinkers?…

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