“And, relatedly, one also begins to wonder if there are certain ways of phrasing the key points that have already been formulated, capture them perfectly, and, thus, cannot really be improved upon.”
In a forthcoming review of Rob Henderson’s recent book Troubled, I invoked a passage from C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. It reads: “Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that. As Dr. Johnson said, ‘People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.’ The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see…” I discussed this passage because I believed Henderson deserved credit for putting forward—both in his memoir and in his social media posts (how most people have to come to learn of his work)—self-help advice that tends to honor time-tested principles. Instead of resorting to parroting the latest gimmick or fad, Henderson—like Jordan Peterson and Naval Ravikant—frequently shares and reshares the basics: eat healthy, don’t drink to excess, exercise each day even when you don’t feel like it, and, perhaps most importantly, don’t waste your time. (1) We know this already, at least most of us do. But how often do we forget the basics, the key points, amid the endless barrage of tweets, never-ending news articles about far-away things outside of our control, and the daily tasks that populate so much of our lives: oil changes, running out of stamps, maintaining relationships, going to work?
Just as there may only be so many essential truths about what is conducive to having a contented and productive life—with more information beyond the basics tending to confuse rather than refine one’s approach—one wonders if a similar phenomenon takes place in the world of ideas. Most immediately, certain truths or realities are fundamental and already tend to be known to most of us (presented to us long ago either by attentive parents or contained within the basic teachings of many philosophies or religions, or even in vaunted aphorisms). (2) And, relatedly, one also begins to wonder if there are certain ways of phrasing the key points that have already been formulated, capture them perfectly, and, thus, cannot really be improved upon.
During the early pandemic months, with social events cancelled, I found myself with more time to read than normal. Just a few months prior, in June of 2019, George F. Will had published what we might come to call his magnum opus The Conservative Sensibility, an incredibly thorough summary of his political philosophy in his late 70s, a more libertarian worldview quite removed from the one he championed decades before in works such as his 1983 book Statecraft as Soulcraft. After finishing The Conservative Sensibility, I turned my attention to some of Will’s other works, including his 1995 essay anthology The Leveling Wind: Politics, the Culture, and Other News. Reading the essays within, most of which were once Washington Post columns, one after the other, I was struck by how phrases and examples first explored in these essays (and others) were replicated just about exactly in his later book, decades later. Although initially eyebrow-raising, perhaps, upon further reflection, it can be understood as such: the replicated lines or points indeed bear repeating. A reader might need to be reminded that “the most important four words in politics are: up to a point”; that so many American political figures are rhetorically Jeffersonians but, in practice, Hamiltonians; that far too much power is concentrated in Washington D.C. and its surrounding counties; and that Will believes America is a creedal nation. (3) And as much as at first blush, one might be tempted to accuse an author of being unimaginative in recycling previous work or, worse yet, of self-plagiarism of the sort Fareed Zakaria has been accused (a different matter), I choose to see it that sometimes one already found the best words or examples, and they ought to be emphasized rather than modified for variety’s sake. (4)
Joseph Epstein—in the postscript to his 2024 autobiography Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life: Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life—explicitly admits to doing the same: “Some while ago I wrote that I did not plan to write an autobiography and chose instead to spend some of the details of my life in nickels and dimes in various of my published essays. Now in the autobiography I have written, a large number of these details reappear in recycled form.”
As those readers who have read many of Epstein’s works will quickly notice, he often brings up many of the same anecdotes, jokes, and, of course, people. More than once, he muses about his friend, the novelist Saul Bellow: “had he been allowed to sit for two hours in the lap of the Queen of England, [he] would, when told by the Queen that she must now attend to her official duties, though she much enjoyed their visit, freshly emerge from the Queen’s lap with two observations: first, that the Queen had no understanding whatsoever of the condition of the modern artist, and, second, that she was an anti-Semite.” Maybe there was no better way to sum up Bellow’s personality. And furthermore, Epstein seems to believe that readers should be reacquainted regularly with the phenomenon of the aphorism, the greatness of Joseph Conrad (Epstein’s favorite novelist), and perhaps it is worth reiterating time and again the brilliance of Max Beerbohm, as Epstein often does, typically followed by a related point: no matter one’s literary renown or genius, with just a handful of exceptions, he will be forgotten within a couple decades of his death. (5)
Now, Will and Epstein (who certainly have read one another, have attended a baseball game together, and at least one very much admires the other) have published millions of words each over the course of their respective careers, and most phrases are not repeated, but some key ones certainly are, and perhaps this is done for a compelling reason: because they are either fundamental or cannot be expressed more poignantly.
It is perhaps similar to what President Ronald Reagan meant in his 1989 farewell address when he described having “spoken of the shining city all my political life” or even when President Abraham Lincoln reflected that, “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.”
I think, for instance, of a line from Aristophanes: “You get too much at last of everything: of sunsets, of cabbages, of love.” It would be difficult to say that better. The same is true for Chapter Three of the Book of Ecclesiastes—or, of course, the final lines of The Great Gatsby. How could one put it more perfectly? And, as a corollary, perhaps a given reader’s time would be better spent reading an anthology of sorts of some of these best passages from literature than chasing the constant, endless “overproduction of truth.” (And, in many cases, such is anything but truth.)
Even among many of the most expressive and memorable book titles, say, “As I Lay Dying,” “Brave New World,” “The Sound and the Fury,” or “The Sun Also Rises,” the wording is borrowed from Homer, Shakespeare, or the Bible (specifically Ecclesiastes).
What blessings there are for those “not too proud to learn from the great minds of the past.” And one also begins to realize that—in his own life—as time goes on, he may come to appreciate a given idea or phrase more on that third occasion when he hears it than on the first or second.
I will not go so far as a friend of mine does when suggesting that the ancients had already solved all of the essential questions of humanity, and we have just led ourselves astray—in the time since—by either trying to perfect upon those answers or ignoring them. As one philosophy professor told me when I was a freshman at Duke University, and I cockily made a similar argument to him, “Philosophers of the past used to concern themselves with questions we now consider science, and those philosophers could not have been more incorrect when it came to understanding fire and the like.” (To paraphrase George Santayana, men truly concerned with truth become scientists rather than philosophers.) So we’ve made some progress (and, to be clear, I do believe philosophers today still grapple with important, unresolved questions). But that is not to detract from the thrust of this assertion: that humanity has already successfully discovered quite a great deal. It is why we still quote Shakespeare and Milton. It is also why Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 book After Virtue has resonated so, because, in many cases, as the decades and centuries have gone by, despite the endless production of books, articles, and tweets, we would have been better off had we said nothing more and just returned to what was already discovered.
Arthur Schopenhauer might prefer we put down most books altogether and, as unnaturally as it might come to many of us, try to think for ourselves. In doing so, we might realize that the questions we ask ourselves in adolescence are often the same ones we find ourselves still wondering at the end of our lives. Sometimes the answers are there, to discover, as Schopenhauer would want, for ourselves. Other times, they are surely found in the words of others, often expressed perfectly a time or two or, as Jack Kerouac, once wrote, “One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”.
Erich J. Prince is the editor-in-chief of Merion West.
Endnotes
- Related to this idea of self-help and already knowing the path to a better way of living, Jordan Peterson has remarked: “Can you imagine yourself in 10 years if instead of avoiding the things you know you should do, you actually did them every single day?”
- Jesus Christ answers the question “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” with “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Abraham Lincoln once explained his never formally joining a church with reference to this passage, suggesting that if any church committed itself completely to Matthew 22:36-40, he would join it without hesitation: “When any church will inscribe over its altar as the sole qualification for membership the Savior’s condensed statement of the substance of both Law and Gospel: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind, and love thy neighbor as thyself,’ that church I will join with all my heart and all my soul.”) I also think of the simple wisdom contained in the Zen monk Linji Yixuan’s proclamation: “Just be ordinary.”
- I think, similarly, that some of the most effective arguments against collectivism are rather evident. As compelling as the thought experiment contained in, say, Leonard Read’s 1958 essay “I Pencil” is, what could be more powerful an argument against communism than the clear difference in average lifespan between those in East Germany vs. West Germany, or the darkness—seen from space at night—of only one half of the Korean Peninsula. And then, of course, the Killing Fields. Simply reminding would-be students of economics or history of these simple facts seems preferable to endless studies of advanced macroeconomics or bromides about the failures of “neoliberalism.” Sometimes, the truth is plain to see.
- It is crucial in the course of this discussion to draw a distinction between what I am describing and the idea of self-plagiarism, the sort CNN host Fareed Zakaria engaged in when delivering a 2012 commencement speech at Harvard University, having borrowed it just about entirely from one given at Duke University two weeks before. This is about laziness and reeks of dishonesty, perhaps born of taking on too many commitments. Now surely a given academic or public intellectual might give talks at various events or conferences emphasizing the same theme or even using the same examples, but this is distinct from passing off an already extant text as new and original.
- What’s more, nuanced thinkers rarely make history. That is reserved typically (and unfortunately) for the great systems-thinkers and spinners of grand narratives.
