When a radically liberal friend back home heard that I had quit The Review and was to become a columnist for The Dartmouth, he asked: "Will you continue to spit out your fascist ideology, or will you begin to write intelligent pieces?"
There are two easy replies to this question: the pompous reply and the gutless reply. The first type of reply would be to deny that there is a palpable gap between my personal "ideology" and intelligent thinking; the second would be simply to request the questioner to decide through reading my future columns.
I am partial to the latter response, since I am not certain whether I have any finalized, unshakable opinions, and among my reasons for writing a column is to embark upon a quest for self-awareness, an attempt to discover what I believe. Yet this, I am afraid, will prove to be an entirely unsatisfactory explanation for the reader. To offer a better picture of what I intend to do with this space, let me, pardon the word, philosophize a little.
What Is a Column? The column, I have been told by people in the know, is an analysis of news events. According to this view, it is a mere extension of the news story, and the columnist is a prisoner of what is "relevant." Naturally, the culmination of this kind of thinking is that William Safire is considered the finest columnist in our time largely because he does his own "reporting."
Readers of this space will be disappointed with me if they identify the ideal column with the "Safiric" column, since I believe the latter represents a depreciation of the columnist's craft. To elaborate my meaning, I will briefly turn to the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville.
Democracy, according to Tocqueville, weakens all social institutions that have stunted intellectual growth: family, class, and religion. In theory, this condition should result in the full flowering of the human intellect, as each man is free to exercise his own reason. However, in practice, few men are both capable of and willing to think through life's deepest issues, and without other authority, most men will turn to the opinion of the majority.
Moreover, the majority, because it can only achieve shallow consensus, cannot contemplate things beyond its own time and locale. To use a Socratic metaphor, the democratic majority is permanently chained to its own cave. This double tyranny of the majority and the cave, Tocqueville said, will result in the enervation of the human intellect.
The column, I believe, is the best tool for combatting the above trend. It gives voice to the free play of solitary reason -- it need not be bound by everyday facts and concerns, and hence it can best counterpoise the loss of perspective in the democratic man by constantly reminding him of unfamiliar horizons and alternatives.
Who Is a Columnist? The columnist is an antidote to democratic conformism and myopia. He will first stand opposed to the majority and be a debunker of democratic truths. His motto is Kierkegaard's dictum, "The crowd is untruth," and he will be willing to say, as Nietzsche did, "I have the courage to stand by my faulty tastes."
The columnist must also direct the eyes of his readers away from the constricting vision of the timely and particular; rather, he must strive to be irrelevant to the here and now and thereby widen his readers' vision. He must ultimately be a philosopher masked as a newspaperman.
On Choosing a Title: Now, having a rather inflated opinion of what I was doing, I originally thought to name this column "Essay (not after Safire, but Montaigne)." However, to do so would have drawn unfavorable comparisons, and I desisted, rather settling with "Out of Step."
The title "Out of Step," while not having the belligerent undertones of, say, "On the Contrary! (Ibsen's last words which I rejected as being too strident for a column title)," still adequately describes my approach, for I intend to go out on a limb from time to time.
Of course, I do not necessarily hope to persuade you to my side; that task may be daunting even for a skilled sophist. All a writer can ultimately ask his reader is to consider his point of view. I hope you are in need of that other viewpoint.
