Voices of Freedom - Interview with Roger Kimball

Episode Date: September 26, 2024

Interview with Roger Kimball Words matter. The right words can advance new ideas, enrich our lives and alter the course of history. Yet in today’s technologically driven world, language is often diluted as people think less about word choice and more about quick responses. This has also contributed to a decline in culture. Shorter attention spans and the lure of the screen have made people less inclined to appreciate or understand the works of the great artists, writers and thinkers. It has also contributed to an erosion of the values of the Western tradition and the principles of America’s founding.  Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom has dedicated his life’s work to preserving culture and contributing to the world of ideas. Roger Kimball, publisher of Encounter Books, shares his thoughts on the power of words and provides an update on a new initiative dedicated to honoring and preserving the traditions of the West and of America.  Topics Discussed on this Episode: ·         Kimball’s path toward the publishing industry and Encounter Books ·         The intriguing history of Encounter Books ·         The power of words ·         The impact of technology on culture ·         The New Criterion’s role in upholding the Western tradition ·         Encounter’s Golden Thread Initiative ·         The future of high culture

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, President and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. Since the dawn of modern technology, many have lamented the decay or even the decline of culture. It's easy to understand why. Each generation seems a little less inclined than the last to attend the theater,

listen to classical masterpieces, or absorb the work of intellectual giants. Some authors and scholars are even now warning that the Western tradition faces an existential threat. Joining us on this episode of Voices of Freedom is one of the country's leading cultural commentators and critics. Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and president and publisher of Encounter Books. He writes regular columns for American Greatness, and the Spectator World is frequent contributor to many other publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, and the London Telegraph. Roger lectures widely and is the author of numerous books. He, of course, is also a 2019 Bradley Prize winner.

Roger, welcome. It is wonderful to have you. It's great to be here, Rick. Great to chat with you. Roger, let's start with a little bit more about you. You could have chosen to focus solely on writing. That might have been easier. But instead, you went into a very, very challenging world of publishing. And even that's probably an understatement.

Why did you decide to take that path? And what led you specifically to Encounter Books? Innocence? No, I don't know. Naivete? Well, you know, Rick, I did begin, I thought I was going to be an academic first, and then it was made clear to me that it probably wasn't a good perch for me in contemporary academia. So I did. I branched out and became a freelance writer and did various other things. But from the beginning, I really wanted to see how I could help shape the conversation as well as contribute to it. And in order to do that, I think, it was important to understand the importance of cultural institutions,

than which there is none more second, I think, than the world of publishing, both in the magazine front and the book publishing front. The literary critic Lionel Trillian, many years ago, talked about the bloody crossroads where culture and politics meet. And in many ways, that's our neighborhood. We're not, neither the New Criterion nor Encounter Books is political in the usual sense of that word. But we do understand the way in which the politicization of culture has undermined both culture and politics.

And from the very beginning, before I was involved with the New Criterion, it was dedicated, at least in part, to pushing back on that, to insisting that cultural norms have their own legitimacy and they couldn't be subjected to categories like racial redrafts and so on. It's the same with book publishing, really. It's no secret, I think, that the publishing industry in this country, actually throughout the Western world, is largely a wholly owned subsidiary of the left. There are little oases here and there. joined as the publisher, but it really has been effort to push back against this politicization. And that's really, that's a major part of what we've tried to do. We've tried to become an important institution in that task. And curiously, over the last decade or so especially, many of the conservative

publishers that grew up in the aftermath of Alan Bloom's surprising success with the closing of the American mine, many publishers said, well, gee, we got to get on this gravy train. Well, they've fallen to the wayside and Encounter Books has become one of the last serious publishers, conservative nonfiction. Really, the number is tiny. And I think we've become, if you look at the kind of intellectual food chain of American publishing, I believe it's fair to say that we occupy a niche right at the very top. Many, many authors who in years past would not have given us a thought have reached out to us because they can't get published elsewhere or they can't get published effectively elsewhere. One of the curiosities about publishing is it's a little bit like having a child in the sense that producing the object is the easy part. It's bringing it up, getting it out into the world. That's the difficult and expensive part. And Encounter, I think, we have a very dedicated team. It's certainly not due to me, but we lavish a lot of attention on our books

in every aspect of it. I think you'll see, your readers will see how beautiful they are, but also how effectively we market them. So that's been very gratifying to me because that is exactly the kind of institutional presence that I like to foster. So both the New Criterion, which now has a larger subscription base than ever before in its history, both in its print issue and in its online presence, which I think is also unusual for serious magazines these days, which are dropping like flies, and Encounter Books, which is more successful now than it's ever been, this institutional presence, I think, has been absolutely essential. Totally agree. As you know, the Bradley Foundation has supported Encounter since its inception, but that's right. I'm not sure I know the story. Were you recruited to this job?

Well, you know, I was. Actually, my history with Encounter, it's odd, because before Encounter Books, there was Encounter Magazine, which was an English magazine. It was started after World War II. It was one of a suite of magazines that were liberal, but anti-communist. And Encounter was always the flagship, but there was Quadrant in Australia, which is one of the few that still remains, Brueve in France, Monarch in Germany. Those have all gone by the wayside. But Encounter was still going in the late East, early United States. And after I published my first book, Tenured Radicals, which was about the universities and their corruption, I was asked if I would like to become the editor. And I said, sure, I'd like to do that. And I went over, I met with a then-editor, Mel Lasky, and his publisher, a guy called Tony Robinson, the actor. And we had everything sort of worked out. The Encounter was not doing well financially, and the Bradley Foundation actually

was going to help them out and pay their debts and put them on a firm footing if they could get some English money as well. Well, they couldn't. So it closed. Bradley took over the name and whatever assets they had. And a few years later, they opened Encounter Books in San Francisco under the leadership of Peter Collier, my late friend. And Peter, I think, did a great job. He had the foresight to engage me to write a book called The Long March, How the 1960s Changed America, or words to that effect, and a few other books as well. But one of the interesting sidelights of this is that if we go back to 1967, when a less politically mature Peter Collier was the editor of Ramparts magazine. He published a story in Ramparts revealing what many people who were concerned about this sort of thing already knew. But anyway, he revealed that the CIA provided the bulk of the funding for the Congress of Cultural Freedom, which was the entity that started Encounter and started Quadrant, started all these anti-communist magazines after the war. People were very unhappy. You know, Susan Sontag and all these other left-wing writers said, we'll never write for Encounter again., and he was appointed the founding publisher. And then when he decided to retire, he asked if I would like to take it over.

So I did, and I moved it to New York. And that's a little bit of history that not everybody knows, but now everybody will know. That's great. Roger, one of the very first observations upon reading your work or speaking with you or listening to you is that you have an affinity for words. So just for fun and to give our listeners an example, here's a line from your Bradley Prize speech. The union of fragility and intolerance has given us that curious and malevolent hybrid, the crybaby, a delicate yet venomous species that thrives only in pampered environments.

Talk to us about the power of language and why word choice matters so much. Yeah, well, that's well put, what you just said. Very well. I think I'm the person who coined the term crybully, actually. I did so in an article for the Wall Street Journal, commenting on an event at Yale University when there was a big controversy over whether certain Halloween costumes were going to be allowed. Wasn't it cultural appropriation that people were wearing sombreros who were not Mexican and so on? And it was preposterous, but there was Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE, happened to be there. And we had the Buckley Institute, of which I'm the chairman, we had a conference on academic freedom right when this was happening. And Greg was part of this. And he came and he had just videotaped this young student who was screaming at the person who was the head of her college, Sullivan College.

They used to call them masters, but now they've retired that word because in their ignorance, they think that it has something to do with slavery, which it doesn't. But it was really quite extraordinary. And so I wrote a long piece for the Wall Street Journal about this, and I realized that these tampered, overprivileged, self-entitled students who are maybe the luckiest people, not only now, but in history. Here they are at one of the greatest liberal arts institutions in the world. And here they are complaining about that they are not being protected from being offended by somebody wearing a sombrero. It was, you know, preposterous. So I refer to them as tribal. But the more general point, the more general point about language,

well, it can be illustrated by something that the Austrian critic Karl Krauss said. In the late 1930s, Japanese were bombing Shanghai, and somebody said to Krauss, who was famous for his care about language, said, well, how can you worry about PAMAs when the Japanese are bombing Shanghai? And Krauss said, well, if all the PAMAs were in their place, Shanghai would not now be burning. Now, perhaps that's an overstatement. I'm willing to acknowledge that might be a slight overstatement. but if it errs, it errs in the right direction. And the more general point, I think, is this. You know, Aristotle says that rhetoric is the art of persuasion, it's not only about convincing people of what you want

to convince them of, it also has an ethical dimension. And that is something I think we need to pay attention to. I've often observed that the left now, and for many years, has exercised a virtual monopoly on the rhetoric of virtue. Why is that? Why is it that they are considered the nice guys, beginning with the word liberal, of course? I mean, is there anything more illiberal now than liberal? I mean, they want to censor your speech. They want to tell you, you know, what kind of car to drive. They want to tell you regulate your of car to drive. They want to tell you to regulate your life down to the smallest detail.

And yet somehow in the court of public opinion, partly because our media is so irresponsible, they are endowed with this halo of virtue. And it seems to me that one of the biggest tasks for, let's not even call it conservatism, let's call it common sense, let's call it a concern for recuperating our civilization. One of the biggest tasks is to chip away at that monopoly and use the power of rhetoric, the power of words to show a mistake, and that is. Now, this has a long history. It goes back to the French Revolution and before. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was always going on about virtue and how virtuous he was and so on. And that word, that rhetoric was something taken over by the architects of the terror,

by Robespierre, for example, who was always going on and on about virtue and its emanation terror. Virtue and its emanation terror. For him, the index of the virtue of the French society was the rapidity with which the guillotine was separating the heads of the people he didn't like from their bodies. There's this profound strain of utopianism behind this thinking that I think it's incumbent upon people who really care about the real world to stand against, to stand as fort as Bill Buckley might have put it, and say, stop. Obviously, we're in a digital age now where, I mean, it really does seem that the motivation is to just produce as many words as you can as quickly as you can. Yeah. That must have hurt the precise use of language. Would you agree? Yes. I think that, you know, with a phenomenon like Twitter,

for example, although that's somewhat in a sort of state of limbo now with Elon Musk's taking it over and expanding its capabilities. But I think Twitter or the sort of glossolalia that comes out of the mouths of some of our politicians, and not only those who are senile, is quite extraordinary. So it's a kind of use of what George Orwell called newspeak in 1984. The use of language not to describe reality, not to express genuine emotion, but to put forward a political program. And in order really to do that, it requires incredible censorship. The language in 1984, the whole idea of Newspeak is to deracinate it completely from history. They have squads of people there crossing out words that are no longer considered to be good. They have people,

squads of people, rewriting the past. The kind of grim joke that in the communist society, the future is known perfectly. It's only the past that's up for grabs. Well, that's what George Orwell saw. What really worries me is that many of the people who run our lives now, both in politics and in the media, they seem to regard 1984 not as a dystopian admonition about bad things, but as a user manual, how to do it, a how-to manual. And I think that, again, pushing back against that, understanding that our past actually is full of things that are incredibly compelling, incredibly uplifting, opposite to the, I mean, the past is not all roses and unicorns, but the fundamental allegiance has to be to the truth. And when you look around right now, today, and we discover that Google has altered its search algorithm. So if you type in attempted assassination of TR, you get Truman, you don't get Trump. Now, that's not innocent.

That is a deliberate perversion of what they're supposed to be about. And there are many other examples of that, of course, as well. But I think it's like every technology. The digital age, it provides lots of opportunities. It's very powerful, but it does tend to encourage a kind of superficiality. And I've always felt that it's better to read one book really deeply than 100 books superficially. The digital age is basically an attack on that kind of attention.

C.S. Eliot someplace in the Four Quartets says that we had the experience but missed the meaning. And I think there's a lot about our culture now that encourages that kind of superficiality, that kind of lack of attention, that lack of care. Yes. In our remaining time, let's talk a little bit about new criterion, and then we can focus a little bit, drill down a little bit on encounter, a couple things there. Let's start with new criterion. I mean, there really are some intense cultural battles being waged, right? Not just in our country, but across the Western world. Without question, one side seeks to undermine, not destroy, the Western cultural and intellectual tradition. How does New Criterion fit into that? What's its role in that?

Well, ever since it was started back in 1982, a long time ago now, the new criterion, I think, has had two tasks. One is to function as a kind of cultural pathologist, to call attention to the emperor's new clothes. Even back there in the early 1980s, it was clear that what we subsequently came to call political correctness, and later wokeness was already beginning to kind of eat away like a corrosive acid at the canons of not only education, but many aspects of our society. on the scene, at first people were astonished because Thai culture was supposed to be the province of the left. What were these upstart conservatives doing? And in fact, many of our enemies, I think, actually increased our reach because they attributed to us far more influence than we actually exerted at the beginning anyway. And so that's one thing, this kind of cultural pathology, calling attention to the emperor's new clothes,

going to meetings of the Modern Language Association and just quoting them, all these ridiculous things that they were saying. As my friend, the late Roger Scruton said, the deconstructionists are telling you not to take them seriously. So don't. That's very good advice, you know. But the second thing that the new criterion is about is battling cultural amnesia. You know, Plutarch or Aristotle or Dante or Shakespeare. These are not people from the dim, distant, primordial past.

In many ways, there are contemporaries. Why? Because they created the world that created us. And, you know, Alan Bloom once made, I think, a profound comment. Really, to be educated is to understand the alternative answers to the important questions of life. How should I live my life? What is the good? That sort of thing. And that's what the tradition opens up before us. I mean, the answer that St. Augustine gave, it's very different from the answer that Nietzsche, for example, gave. But

it's a good thing to know them all so that then you can make a reasoned decision about what is the good. Terrific. Talk to us about the Golden Thread Initiative. This is the big thing that Encounter is doing now and for the next, who knows how long, several years. We published, when I first came to Encounter, the thing I wanted to do was provide effective competition for Howard Zinn's anti-American book, People's History of the United States.

It's an anti-American diatribe. But it was incredibly successful. It sold millions of copies. Every teacher loves it because it presents America in a very bad light. Well, I wanted to provide a kind of counter to that. For many years, I was trying to try this person and that person. I finally found the right person with Bill McClay, Wilford McClay. Wonderful. I mean, he did a fantastic job. Land of Hope, Invitation to the Great American Story. I mean,

it doesn't present America as without blemishes, like any other country in the history of the world. It's done things that are wrong. But it is basically a success story. And that is what Bill tells. And it's had great success. Then we decided we would capitalize on that

and expand it a little bit. So now we are going to be publishing a two-volume history of the West called The Golden Thread, A New History of the Western Tradition or something like that, and by two people, Alan Gelso of Princeton and James Hankins of Harvard. And this initiative is not just going to be books. It's going to be, and it's not just these books. We're going to have a whole suite of books. And it's, we are developing curricular material. We are partnering with various entities. One prominent one is Hillsdale College and their Barney School Network. We're working very avidly to get it adopted by various schools, including public schools. We'll have symposia, and it's going to be terrific. What we are trying to do is change the conversation. It's like we've somehow gotten onto the bridge of a huge battleship that's going

in the wrong direction, and we're trying to change that direction. And the response that we've gotten to it so far has been extraordinary, like nothing else that had encountered since I've been there. It's been extraordinary. Let's go back to Land of Hope for just a second. Bill McClain didn't even want to write that book, did he? No, I had to test him. How did you persuade him? I can be persistent, you know.

Bill and I go way back. And, you know, I think I made him feel guilty for not doing it because I said, Bill, you're the only person who can do this. And he gradually acceded to the truth of that proposition. And he did, I have to say, he did a beautiful job. I mean, it really is an incredible book. Were you surprised that it sold as well as it did? Frankly, no. Really?

Well, because I knew how good it was. Not only is it good in the story it tells, Bill's a very good writer, very compelling narrative historian, but it's a beautiful book. The Nation only that it's, you know, sensual or whatever, but it's all these institutions have been hollowed out from within. So we still have elections. We still have Congress. We still have all these institutions, but their vital principle has been taken away. And it's part of what we're trying to do is to rekindle that vital principle. And I think Land of Hope, you know, was a pretty good preliminary shot over that. Last question, and I like to do our Voices of Freedom series episodes on an upbeat note.

So what gives you encouragement that the legacy of the great thinkers, the great artists, the great writers that have shaped Western civilization will survive? Well, one thing is the response I see to initiatives like the Golden Thread. As I say, it's been extraordinary. We've never experienced anything like it. That's a good indicator, for sure. And it's, you know, I think that if you step back a little bit, you know, remove yourself slightly from the static of the contemporary commentary, then you will see that there's actually a great hunger for permanent things, what Russell Kirk called permanent things. And this is not ideological. Russell Kirk once said that he was conservative because he was liberal.

It sounds paradoxical. It's not. What he meant was, you know, he was for things like colorblind justice. He was for things like advancement according to merit, traditional liberal principles. They're principles that I certainly believe in. And they're the principle, some of the principles that this country was founded on, individual liberty. But we're living in a world now where all of these things are under attack. And yet the great majority of people, they may not be able to articulate it quite, but they have a sense that something fundamental is at stake. And that sense, that hunger is,

I think, something that is profound and something that can be catered to. And it's like a little ember that can be encouraged to burst forth. And that gives me great hope. And that's why I think that at the end of the day, I'm a partisan of Johnny Mercer. I want to accentuate the positive. Absolutely. I mean, it feels like dark days, but there are some little kernels of hope out there. Yes, and one should be attentive to both. Don't discount the darkness. Don't discount the things that are attacking the things that we hold dear. But also, do not despair.

Despair is found sin, I think. Roger Kimball, thanks so much for spending some time with us today. We truly do appreciate it. Rick, that's great. I really enjoyed our conversation. And thanks for making a difference in these difficult times. You truly are. Well, we do what we can. We're all appreciative. And of course, you are too. Thank you. truly are. And we'll do what we can. We're all appreciative. And of course, you are too. Thank

you. And as always, thanks to all of you for joining us on this episode of Voices of Freedom. Join us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom and America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Graber, and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast. Thank you.