The moderate-minded writer: Finding my voice as an intellectual in a climate of extremes
Why essential intellectual habits of moderation, pragmatism, and skepticism can only be cultivated by way of deep reading and contemplation.
I spend most of my time studying, writing, and teaching about intractable debates over science, technology, and the environment. It is, at times, a depressing experience. Climate change, for example, is a grave threat and one of the world’s most divisive issues.
Over the years, I have learned that strong discipline is required to avoid the easiest, most comfortable narratives and to reconcile in my writing competing visions of the “good society.”
Only a quiet mind can remain intellectually humble, recognizing the limits to knowledge and the wisdom in drawing on multiple perspectives.
Therefore, several years ago, I decided to dramatically minimize my social media use and screen time. I also shifted most of my reading back to print and dedicated portions of each day to introspection and contemplation.
The vast complexity of our problems requires us to constantly update our assumptions and beliefs, a goal best reached not through full-throated advocacy but via contemplative engagement with diverse voices and ideas.
Instead of quickly choosing between clashing perspectives, a better approach is to wrestle with their tensions and uncertainties and recognize what each offers that is of value. It is, therefore, essential for academics, intellectuals, and journalists to model forms of moderation, pragmatism, and skepticism that can only be cultivated through deep reading and contemplation.
This is my story on how I arrived at this realization — and how I strive to apply these habits of mind and virtues to my research, teaching, writing, and intellectual life.
The outrage machine
It is impossible to resist the siren song of political tribalism if, like the average American, you spend several hours a day on your smartphone swiping, scrolling, skimming, liking, hearting, retweeting, forwarding, and responding to other people's thoughts.
Artificial intelligence-driven platforms serve a constant stream of news and commentary that reflect our existing biases and beliefs rather than news and analysis that might challenge them.
Because they kidnap our attention, the most inflammatory, most outrageous, and most catastrophic headlines are rewarded by social media algorithms, ensuring that they travel the furthest.1
When a major event occurs, or a policy proposal is announced, your first thought in today's news feed culture is not your original idea but, almost inevitably, a headline or commenter appealing to your worse biases.2
Playing to the rawest elements of human nature, today’s social media-driven outrage machine has greatly damaged intellectual life, destroying our ability to think independently and discuss productively across lines of difference.
On no other topic is this clearer than climate change.
In tracking how our media system tends to distort debate, scholars have primarily studied national TV news and cable news networks. With their focus on breaking political events, personality clashes, and election races, these outlets continue to give little airtime to climate change.3
When TV news does report on climate change, portrayals tend to exaggerate the threats without providing information about what audiences might be able to do to protect against them, a style of fear-mongering that can result in feelings of powerlessness or forms of denial.4
Researchers have also documented that just as troubling are portrayals at Fox News and online outlets such as Breitbart News, which routinely deny the reality of human-caused climate change and castigate climate scientists in the process. Scholars, however, have tended to overlook the strategies of climate advocates that harm society’s ability to reach an agreement on effective climate policy actions.5
In pursuit of this “good fight,” the resulting weaponized metaphors, memes, and headlines hack readers’ brains, training their focus on conservatives and the evil doers of the fossil fuel industry as the end times loom.
Instead, some academics have joined with advocates in preaching that climate activists need to be more like their long-standing conservative opponents: more ruthless, more cunning, more aggressive, and more committed to the most audacious and ambitious policies regardless of their flaws.6
In the quest for climate progress, the goal is not to broker cross-alliances between the center-right, center-left, and left-wing, drawing on the best ideas those factions can offer but building progressive power.
By doing so, the vast complexity of climate politics is reduced to a Manichean storyline about a battle between the forces of “good and light” and “evil and darkness.”
Yet even as climate activists and allied journalists view conservatives and the fossil fuel industry as extreme, they seldom apply the same label to those on their side.
To protect preferred narratives, a leading strategy by some activists, academics, and journalists has been to discredit experts who question worst-case scenario narratives or policies like the Green New Deal by labeling them “deniers,” “delayers,” “contrarians,” “confusionists,” “lukewarmers,” “inactivists,” and “non-solutionists.”7
These attacks are not so much about the specifics of climate science or policy as they are about controlling who has the authority to speak on the subject.
Such labeling comports well with the political mood of the day. It breeds incivility and cultivates a discourse culture in which protecting one’s identity, group, and preferred storyline takes priority over constructive consideration of knowledge and evidence. Yet the more we become angry and catastrophize about the future, the less likely we are to find common ground for practical actions or even recognize our mistakes.8
We used to be human
It is not just the outrage culture of social media that is killing the moderate mind. The process of online immersion itself disrupts the most basic habits needed to engage in intellectual life.
“As our window onto the world, and onto ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it — and eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and society,” wrote Nicholas Carr in 2011’s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.9
He argued that replacing printed books and articles with screen-based text, images, and video marked the transition between two dramatically different modes of thinking.
When printed books and articles were at the center of human culture — the linear medium cultivated habits of mind related to concentration and disciplined thought.
“As supple as it is subtle,” the book has been “the imaginative mind of the Enlightenment, the inventive mind of the Industrial Revolution, even the subversive mind of Modernism,” wrote Carr.
In contrast, the Internet incentivized reliance on skimming, multitasking, superficial thinking, and short-term memory. Over time, as the mental circuits devoted to constant online multitasking strengthen, the circuits used for reading and concentration erode.
The altered brain consequently finds it more challenging to concentrate and read deeply — as numerous studies in subsequent years have shown.10
Consider the example of Andrew Sullivan, as he described in a 2016 New York magazine cover story “I Used to be a Human Being.” After completing his doctorate at Harvard, Sullivan spent the first part of his career as a long-form journalist and editor at The New Republic. To author a 3,000-5,000 magazine article or to get an issue of the magazine to press required Sullivan to spend his days engaged in immersive reading, writing, editing, and revision.11
But the pattern of his life and thoughts dramatically changed in 2000 when he launched his blog, The Dish. For the next fifteen years, success as a blogger required that he constantly keep up with the latest trending topic and hot take — and publish multiple posts a day, seven days a week.
But his experience took a severe toll on his psyche, relationships, and health. He could no longer read books, his mind and fingers “twitched for a keyboard,” and he suffered from chronic respiratory infections. Even though Sullivan spent every day alone at a computer, he felt like he was in a “constant cacophonous crowd of words and images, sounds and ideas, emotions and tirades – a wind tunnel of deafening, deadening noise.”
In 2015, Sullivan quit his blog and embarked on a months-long recovery that began with a silent meditation retreat. He then returned to long-form journalism as a columnist at New York magazine.
In retrospect, Sullivan realized he had been a “very early adopter of what might now be called living-in-the-web.” Yet now, as he warned readers in his cover story, the rapid diffusion of social media apps via smartphones had turned the insanity that was once unique to him into the cultural norm. “The once-unimaginable pace of the professional blogger was now the default for everyone,” he wrote.
The purposively engineered addictiveness of social media apps lulls users into the belief that there are no downsides despite the many negative consequences. The smartphone had banished “the very spaces where we can gain a footing in our minds and souls that is not captive to constant pressures or desires or duties,” Sullivan warned.
[Today,
writes a weekly long-form essay at his Substack and hosts a weekly podcast conversation with journalists, intellectuals, and authors.]
In 2020, in the updated introduction to the tenth-anniversary edition of The Shallows, Carr argued that digital technologies, driven by smartphones, were making people even more distracted and less focused. “It’s common today, even more so than ten years ago, to think of knowledge as something that surrounds us, something we swim through to consume, like sea creatures in plankton-filled waters,” he wrote.
Researchers, for example, find that college students today have far less experience than past generations with the deep reading of challenging books beyond what might be required in a course. As a result, those who avoid reading for its own sake may lack basic skills related to analytical reasoning, perspective-taking, and persuasion.
As a professor, I find this worrying for multiple reasons. Without the ability to read deeply, reason analytically, or argue effectively, generations of college students risk missing out on the essential skills needed to sustain a liberal democracy.
In 2019, realizing that the cost of us zipping around online is an increase in sectarian polarization and a loss in our depth of thinking, I began experimenting with different techniques for minimizing my time online.
I started by writing out a very long password in a notebook so that when logging on to Twitter or Facebook, I had to do so with a specific intention and purpose. On the latter platform, I also pared down my list of "friends" from more than 800 to just sixty-five, half of whom were relatives.
But even when we try to use social media minimally and mindfully, we run up against an impossible task, as the Silicon Valley start-up investor Roger McNamee writes. Tech companies have recruited some of the world's brightest minds to create an unbeatable chess game in which we battle artificial intelligence and algorithms with almost perfect information about us — machine learning tools that aim to keep us addicted to distraction.12
So, realizing the battle we all are losing, after a few months, I permanently deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts after a few months.
Shifting my reading back to print has enabled me to be alone with my thoughts, wrestle with uncertainties and complexities, and scrutinize my assumptions and beliefs.
At the time, I was reading the Roman stoic Seneca, who, around 50 CE, as a busy senator and advisor to emperors, still reserved time for the life of the mind as a prolific philosopher and essayist, influencing countless subsequent generations of intellectuals and writers.
“No activity,” wrote Seneca, “can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied since the mind, when distracted, absorbs nothing deeply but reflects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it.”13
Today, I begin my mornings by spending several hours of solitude in my office with no digital screen in sight. Shifting my reading back to print has enabled me to be alone with my thoughts, wrestling with uncertainties and complexities, scrutinizing my assumptions and beliefs.
As I read a book or article, I write in the margins and underline the sentences, pausing to fill notebooks with related observations. During breaks, taking a walk or practicing yoga, I sort out the complexities of something I might be writing — as I quiet the mind, easing the anxieties that afflict every writer.
We have forgotten that writing is not typing. There is a creative link between the intellect and the pen that I have rediscovered by writing the first draft of an article (including this one) by hand. I can only free my mind to write honestly and clearly by committing to solitude and contemplation.
For an excellent review, see Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Antisocial media: How Facebook disconnects us and undermines democracy. Oxford University Press, 2018.
See Deresiewicz, William. "Solitude and Leadership: If you want others to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts." The American Scholar 79, no. 2 (2010): 20-31 for a spell-binding articulation of this theme.
For a comprehensive review of this literature see Feldman, Lauren. "Effects of TV and Cable News Viewing on Climate Change Opinion, Knowledge, and Behavior." Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. 22 Nov. 2016.
See Hart, P. Sol, and Lauren Feldman. "Threat without efficacy? Climate change on US network news." Science Communication 36.3 (2014): 325-351 and O'Neill, Saffron, and Sophie Nicholson-Cole. "Fear won't do it” promoting positive engagement with climate change through visual and iconic representations." Science communication 30, no. 3 (2009): 355-379.
See Benkler, Y., Faris, R., & Roberts, H. (2018). Network propaganda: Manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in American politics. Oxford University Press.
For discussion see Hulme, Mike. "The Manichean Mann." Issues in Science and Technology 37, no. 3 (2021): 88-90.
Kloor, Keith. “The Science Police.” Issues in Science and Technology 33, no. 4 (Summer 2017)
For discussion see Howarth, Candice C., and Amelia G. Sharman. "Labeling opinions in the climate debate: A critical review." Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 6, no. 2 (2015): 239-254.
Carr, Nicholas. The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. WW Norton & Company, 2020.
An excellent overview of this research and a convincing argument on behalf of deep reading as contemplation is Wolf, Maryanne. Reader, come home: The reading brain in a digital world. New York, NY: Harper, 2018.
Sullivan, Andrew. "I used to be a human being." New York Magazine 19 (2016).
McNamee, Roger. Zucked: Waking up to the Facebook catastrophe. Penguin Books, 2020.
Campbell, R. (Ed.). (2004). Letters from a Stoic. Penguin UK.
Thoughtful, well-written--how reach a wide audience, which is warranted and probably necessary, with the messages contained in this essay?