But telling the truth is remarkably important. Imagine you consider going to work with someone, but they show signs of difficult behaviour. You will ask one or two people in private if your impression is correct. Is this person always like this? Do they get worse?

How ought these people to respond? Telling the truth is a moral good, and essential for true inquiry. But no-one wants (or says they want) to be a gossip. You may not consider this to be a paradigmatic case of gossip, but it is spreading unflattering information about a person behind their back:—Gossip often borders on a warning.

Johnson defined a gossip as, “One who runs about tattling like women at a lying-in.” A lying-in is the period of confinement during childbirth. So the gossip here is about paternity. He does not specify whether the information passed along is true or speculative, or whether it exists, like so much of what we think we know about each other, in between.

The OED defines the noun as “one who delights in idle talk; a newsmonger, a tattler.” A newsmonger and a tattler are not always so different as they appear. The scandal of gossip is often not that it is invented, but that is it true. It is a double scandal: once as it relates to the subject (they did what?), and once as it relates to the tattler (she told you that?).

In responding to the person asking to know if their new colleague is a bully, we are not running about tattling:—we are giving vent to our impressions without the chance to avoid judgement, ours or our interlocutors. The example is apt because it is a case of virtuous gossip: people should be warned before they work with bullies, even though, were they to hear of the warning, the bully might say, were you gossiping about me?

A lot of the gossip that I am told is not salacious, merely interesting. We all find great interest in the workings of other people. Well-intentioned and truthful gossip can be harmless, admiring, or a warning. If women were unable to gossip about men, they would all surely feel much less safe. If children were unable to gossip about grown-ups, they would find themselves more confused in their relationships with authority.

A far higher rate of women than men (according to survey data I can no longer find) report that before they consider accepting a job, they find someone they know (or someone who knows someone they know) inside the organisation. There are certain reassurances that can only provided in this way, which is a form of gossip. The news is passed on privately. Other people are implicated, judged, perhaps condemned.

Companies know this. “You brand is what they say about you when you leave the room” is a common marketing adage.

When gossip helps us find out the truths that we cannot discover more publicly it becomes a virtue. Talking about other people is another form of learning about other people. Done well, gossip is knowledge. Knowledge is essential to an ethical and intellectual life.

As Phyllis Rose wrote in Parallel Lives, “gossip may be the beginning of moral inquiry, the low end of the platonic ladder which leads to self-understanding.”

Summer Sale! Get 15% off id you subscribe before 12th June!

15% off Summer Sale

Everyone now has access to the GPTs I made for free. One gives advice on reading great literature (based on this blog). One you can ask all about Second Act. One gives you writing advice. And one gives life advice from Samuel Johnson. Try them out and let me know what you think!

My Western Canon salon series with Interintellect starts on 6th June. First, Shakespeare’s Inadequate Kings, but then Emma, and on to Goethe, Turgenev, Wilde.

My thanks to all of you who are reading Second Act and telling me how much you are enjoying it. It makes a good Father’s Day present… Amazon US. | Amazon UK.

Autonomy, partnerships, failure, mimesis.

Before today’s essay, I want to draw your attention to a series of essays I published with Entrepreneur First, a talent investor in London and San Francisco. Some of this is among my best work, certainly the fourth essay, which is my Emersonian response to the cult of Girard.

How do entrepreneurs succeed? Why do some people make breakthroughs? Do founders need the right idea or the right partner? How can you avoid the mimetic trap of being like everyone else? I tried to answer these in a series of pieces written for Entrepreneur First.

1. Are you trading your ambition for security? Too often, talented individuals settle for the normalcy of law, finance, or consulting — jobs that stifle innovative potential. Eric Yuan, Zoom founder, had to leave his corporate job to make his idea real.

2. Great ideas often emerge from the push and pull of productive partnerships. Look at the cautionary tale of Maurice Wilkins, the scientist who missed out on partnering with the right people – and lost the race to discover DNA’s double helix structure.

3. The ability to learn from failure is essential to success, as demonstrated by Katalin Kariko, the Nobel Prize winner. New research suggests that the start-up lore—fail fast, iterate, and learn from failure —is correct.

4. This all relies on a strong will. Being a mindless non-conformist is just as bad as copying other people. The example of Larry Page guides us to a solution: nurture your imagination to cultivate anti-mimesis.

On Civilization

Who now will speak on behalf of civilisation? We debate nothing more intensely than our societal values and but not enough about the question of civilisation and how to preserve and progress it. Elon Musk is perhaps the most impressive person alive, and instead of discussing his ambition to colonise Mars we spend our time bickering about the Twitter algorithm and the enshittification of everything. Perhaps the problem wasn’t the algorithm; perhaps the problem was the users.

We take so much for granted! “We are but too apt,” as Burke said, “to consider things in the state in which we find them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have been produced and possibly may be upheld.” We live in an age of miracles: free of so many of the diseases, pests, ignorances, and wants of the past. There is much that could and should be improved: but to summon the spirit to make those improvements, we have to feel the tremendous luck by which we arrived here. We have to feel also the great efforts of the past and recognise them in the heroes of today.

Civilisation is not fragile. It cannot be smashed in a second like a vase. But it is susceptible to leaks, rust, entropy. Societies can wither like unwatered vines. Just as our transport infrastructure will either improve and get worse, and just as that is, in turn, connected to the general prosperity of the nation, of our ability to pay for the upkeep, to innovate for the future, and to make the system productive, so are the thousand other conveniences that we use each day part of a nexus of susceptible parts, each of which needs to be admired to be sustained. And that is all reliant on people, on ideas, on what we choose to elevate into our highest regard. We have to want it; it will not simply arrive like the rain.

Today, though, the philistine supremacy is real. Taylor Swift is on the syllabus at Harvard! There is no vision of greatness here, no grand sense of the past that is part of the sustaining effort of building the future. We are privileged to be able to sit around and compare Swift to Wordsworth (heinous an activity though that may be); but her lyrics are nothing as to the astonishment of his. My God, I tremble at the thought that we are beginning to equate the two.

We trade these things off slowly, one by one, like an aristocrat still grand enough to sell parcels of land to fund his London lavishness. No one transaction ruins the family. But the world does not wait on our pleasures. The past recedes, the past recedes and fades. We choose between the weak nostalgia of admiring the pop culture of yesteryear or keeping in our sights the idea of a great society, one that can stand with Athens, Rome, Florence.

In his fifth review of Grote’s History of Greece J.S. Mill said this about Plato:

He judged them from the superior elevation of a great moral and social reformer: from that height he looked down contemptuously enough, not on them alone, but on statesmen, orators, artists—on the whole practical life of the period, and all its institutions, popular, oligarchical, or despotic; demanding a reconstitution of society from its foundations, and a complete renovation of the human mind.

Who do we have so looking down upon us now?

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Never call a true piece of gold a counterfeit: Thou art essentially mad without seeming so. Henry IV, part I

Derivative is often used as an artistic insult. Reviewers and critics wanting to describe why a work is lacking will say derivative, as if to mean it is a mere copy, and not a very good one. They are wrong. All art is derivative, it is produced in great chains and webs of influence. Everything derives from something. What they mean (and it is not merely ironic, but telling of their critical attention) is imitative. Samuel Johnson knew this, of course, and perhaps more critics should be made to read one Rambler essay every day over breakfast.

All imitations are inferior. No-one values mock Tudor houses, reproduction furniture, or cover bands as highly as the originals. You might think they are good, you might even prefer them, but that is not the same as judging from a position of knowledge that these things are aesthetically better. My Jimmy Stewart impression is pretty good, sometimes it gets a laugh. I wouldn’t recommend you spend time watching me rather than Jimmy, though. (This is why the new Ripley is not good; it’s pure imitation, top to bottom, and too slow at that.)

Many people do say they think that “lesser” works are better. They like imitation furniture that is new and clean and fits with the style of their room. Fine. But to go beyond preference to taste, we must know how each work compares to each other. Spend several years reading Wordsworth and Shakespeare and then you’ll read the imitators very differently. Trapse the galleries and museums and you’ll start to see your mock ornaments in another light. To imitate is to diminish.

This is a good thing. A life is optimized for easy pleasures will receive nothing greater. Just think how quickly some people decide what they like and stick to it. A long life with so little to fill it! Many believe aesthetic judgement is subjective. People should enjoy what they want. Snobbishness is unkind. If I like it, it’s good. And so on. All true, all true. The best wine is often the cheapest. But knowledge is real. Truth is real. Some art survives; most doesn’t. How frequently it is the imitators who are winnowed out!

We have to ask why some works survive. Why Homer, Chaucer, Milton; why Vermeer, Michelangelo, Rembrandt? Neo-Kantians will forever believe that great art represents something great about themselves: reading makes you empathetic, appreciating great art brings out deep human values in you, and so on. This is so much contemptible, egoistic, pseudo-philosophical nonsense! Great art survives because of itself! Not because of some Bloomsburyite sect of self-satisfied, secular priests of highbrow taste and fine feeling. The very idea is a gross affront to the concept of art and beauty.

We have not preserved cave paintings, monk chantings, cathedrals, and tapestries because of some vague, post—eighteenth century, upper-middle-class preoccupation with being thought to be an aesthete or a cultured person. The art is the font of seriousness, not the art appreciator. The neo-Kantians are self-promoting liars, snobs, and hypocrites. They have not really seen the art they praise at all. We must enter into art as we enter into a church, in awe at the seriousness not of ourselves but of the work.

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

The argument that Taylor Swift is as a good a lyricist as the Romantic poets hasn’t yet been made by anyone with a serious knowledge of those writers. The idea that her lyrics will be taken without her music, her performances, and read in poetry books four hundred years hence—which is where most of the great Elizabethan lyrics come from—is laughable. We say these things to defend ourselves, to promote our own taste, not as a way of seriously discussing art.

Knowledge in the arts is so often shrugged off by those who want everyone’s taste to be considered equally valuable. But your taste is not a reflection of your moral character. Not at all. Just look at how morally awful so many great artists are, not to mention the critics. We are talking about knowing a body of work the way a scientist knows a body of knowledge. In her 1991 MIT lecture, Camille Paglia described the way a feminist scholar had critiqued fashion photography, seeing symbols of domination and abuse in the poses and clothes. It was ignorance of the history of art, Paglia said, that left this well-intentioned scholar unable to see that high fashion photography from 1940-1990 was an important chapter in the history of art. We can only see what we know. Ignorance can have very clear vision.

In our quest to call the imitation good we repress all this, repress even our own instincts. We know quality when we see it. It always tells. It rings like crystal and gleams like a bird’s eye. Children respond very differently to great poetry than they do to the dross so often pushed off onto them by children’s authors. Yes, it’s fun. Yes, that’s a good thing. No, they don’t pause and go quiet when you read it to them. They don’t ask you, quietly, about it a few days later. They don’t agree to memorise it. Few play classical music to children anymore. The days of Fantasia and Looney Toons are long gone. The philistine supremacy is real. But try them with Bach, Vaughan William, John Adams. They listen. They hum. They dance. Show them the great door at Canterbury Cathedral and they are enthralled. They do not have the critical capacity or the deep knowledge to tell you why, but they do at least listen to their instincts. Great art catches them like the smell of fresh bread or the first light of the day. What the eye finds beautiful, says Nietzsche, the hand wants to draw.

This is what you must do. Follow your instinctive ability to see and to feel greatness. Be confused. Immerse yourself in what makes no sense, but which you are sure has some large value. Once you put any personal feelings and judgements aside about whether a piece of art is snobbish or accessible or what you like and simply experience it, you will have a very different view of art. And you will start to see imitations for what they are. Not derived from greatness, but small, weak copies. Life should not be optimised for what you currently enjoy. That runs out fast. Instead, you should be working, slowly, to discover more of what is great. To find something of which you can say with satisfaction—how derivative!

I’m covering Shakespeare, Austen, Goethe, Turgenev, Wilde. The first salon is June 6: Shakespeare’s Inadequate Kings.

Also, if you aren’t sick of listening to me on podcasts, I did a short interview with Brian L. Frye, which was a lot of fun.

On Hope

every period of life is obliged to borrow its happiness from the time to come
Samuel Johnson, Rambler 203

We are happiest when hopeful, perhaps only then. Hope is the belief that the blur of our lives will be resolved on some far out horizon—something else awaits.

There is no such thing as permanent satisfaction. Appetites renew, work falls undone, life accrues in rust and dust. New bread must be baked every day. A creature evolved to have far more intelligence than it needs for mere survival needs more to do with its surplus endowment of understanding than to elaborate more appetites. More complex, nuanced, individuistic pleasures are insufficient. Our work is never done and enjoyments are never enough. We must have hope.

Told that anyone was happy, or thought themselves so, Samuel Johnson would cry out, “It’s all cant, the dog knows he is miserable all the time.” He also said, with more consideration, that we find consolation in the idea of the future. Recalling the harmless frolick, honest festivity, lucky accidents, defeated opposition, and dangers encountered in youth brings pleasure to middle age. But, the people we shared youth with are older too, or dying, or dead. The older we get, the more that chimes at midnight are recalled with a sense of shortening time. Joy is the defiance of time, the hope of futurity.

A sudden loss upsets us not just for the absence of a loved person, animal, or object, but because it ends all hope of that particular future thus narrowing our own future hopes. Grief is the feeling that nothing more can be anticipated. To be accommodated without taking over the house of our mind, an old grief must live harmoniously with new hopes.

The static state is so unfavourable because it needs maintenance but has no embellishments of hope. Political despair grows like a weed, requiring the sweat of survival without any renewal. Hope is not optimism. Hope, as Vaclav Havel said, is a state of mind; optimism is a state of the world. “Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit… It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Writing about towns whose “principal supporting business now is rage” the poet Richard Hugo advised “Say no to yourself”.

The car that brought you here still runs.   
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it’s mined, is silver   
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.

Hope does not arrive like the morning dew or the evening stars. It must be found. It must be worked on. As Seamus Heaney wrote in his elegy for Robert Lowell, the way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life. Even Johnson admitted, “there is yet happiness in reserve, and that hope which we can be sure will not deceive us, is the chief blessing of mankind.”

It is up to us to make sense of ourselves, to live and work in a way that is neither optimistic nor naive—but is hopeful.

Specificity is different. Samuel Johnson defined specific as, “that which makes a thing of the species of which it is.” Being specific means distinguishing the essential qualities. You might accurately describe a beetle, for example, as a small black insect, without ever specifying the essential features that make it a beetle. When you specify a programme of work—something you will do or make for someone else—you must imagine, ahead of time, what it will be. You might describe it or draw it or hum it or act it out, but you will have to give more than a list of details: a good specification gives you the essence of the request.

So many stories people tell you about their lives are boring because they are accurate, but not specific. Massing up details about the when and the where, about the weather and what one person had said to another, is just a laundry list of other people’s trivia unless the incident has some particular quality which make it a specific story, one you haven’t quite heard before. Otherwise it’s just a variation on “child was infuriating” or “colleague was irritating” or “man slipped on banana”—relating accurately what sort of loafers the man wore doesn’t improve the story. It drags it out.

In a company I once worked in, there was an old story about a Christmas party where, during a game when a member of staff has to say what they would do if they swapped lives with the Chairman for one day (they get the boat and the holiday home).

In this case, the otherwise unprepossessing person revealed themselves to be much more waspish (and drunk) than realised when their opening remark was, with his hand pointing at the people he referred to: “I’d fire those two c—s for a start.” This was but the prelude, and at the end of his monologue, on his way out, he nodded at the chairman and said, “you’re welcome.” More accurate details would add little to the story. You have the essence. Good writing is more than a catalogue.

The proper combination of the specific and the accurate is what makes sitcoms like The Office successful. There is a lot of accuracy involved in things like the layout of the office and the background noises, but it is the specific situations that make it work, those instances which make the show “a thing of the species of which it is.”

You see this is advertising too: so many concepts involve too many details to bring the clever idea off at a high level of production values. But they spend much less time specifying what it is they are selling. There’s a web services advert right now with a futuristic older woman dressed in a purple outfit, and lots of dry ice and gadgets and accompanying hoopla. It is far too accurate, like a busy children’s game full of unnecessary detail. They don’t specify their product carefully enough and I never remember what they are advertising.

One way to practise this, is to follow the writing exercise prescribed by Ezra Pound in The ABC of Reading. The task is to describe something, like a tree, without naming the tree. Because you cannot say “oak” or “lime” or “ash” you are forced to carefully specify the tree, to notice those details that make the tree an example of the species of which it is. The best characters in literature work like this too. Think of Levin, in Anna Karenina, proposing by writing in chalk on the table. There is accuracy to the way Levin is portrayed, but it is moments like that proposal that truly specify him as a character. Exactness about Levin could go on and on and on—his measurements and details of his teeth—but this one specificity tells us who he is. That is an example, as the OED has it, of his special determining quality.

That could be a good writing motto. Find the special determining quality.

Whoever first thought up the idea of selling the news of battles and sieges so he could advertise powder puffs was, as Samuel Johnson put it, a man of great sagacity. Johnson was an early theorist of advertising, proclaiming that “In an advertisement it is allowed to every man to speak well of himself” and “Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement.” These are still the two main principles of advertising, however much the creatives in modern agencies pretend everything has changed.

So often, modern adverts speak well of a company, but do not make a promise. Boasting with a promise is enticing; boasting alone is dull.

Johnson worried that advertisers “play too wantonly with our passions”—certainly the best advertising is faithful and true. You can put any label on any product, but common sense is capable of discernment. Few are deceived when they see a food truck with WORLD’S BEST CHICKEN written across the top. And yet, there is a whole school of advertising, used in some of the world’s best companies, that does little more than this.

Thus much of what looks like advertising, isn’t. We are inured for good reason.

Unless it contains some useful information, an advert is mere posturing, unlikely to be remembered the instant it has passed by. What makes an advert work, as David Ogilvy said, is the headline and the personality. Effective advertising works like the opening of a good novel. It should leverage a subtle surprise. It works first through mood, then through specifics.

There have been many great copywriters, whose names are sadly unknown to the public now. Many of them deserve greater fame as writers. Raymond Rubicam wrote the great Steinway advert “Instrument of the Immortals” which should still be studied as great copywriting. It is as sharp and focussed as the best internet writing today.

Many advertising professionals think there was a creative revolution the 1960s, which made advertising into an exciting, creative medium which finally broke free of the “rules” which had kept it stale for so long. “Our job is to resist the usual” might have been their motto, only it was said by Rubicam in the 1920s. The creative revolution was a time of new ideas, a new sense of the musicality of advertising, but it was a development of what came before.

The father of modern advertising was not a figure from the 1960s creative revolution. It was David Ogilvy, a titan of the 1950s, who blended Rubicam’s image-based advertising with the research-intense salesman techniques of Claude Hopkins, a copywriter so proficient in his art he made millions writing adverts in the early twentieth century. All good advertising still blends those two traditions today. All brands are images, but the image must be based on a deep understanding of what is being advertised.

In advertising today, predictable, cliched creativity often dominates, but genius is the art of taking pains, as Hopkins said. To break out of the rut of boredom, modern advertising must take more pains.

Comedians are a hybrid artist, some of them merely performers of jokes, others writers of wit,—most are a combination. When we watch a programme by Larry David or Tina Fey it often has the quality of their authorship, and the quality of their performance. Mean Girls could only have been written by Fey; 30 Rock has her imprint as author and performer. When Larry David says “Pretty good,” the humour is performative. When he tells a dinner companion he wants to elevate small talk to medium talk (when challenged about his intense conversation style), he is being witty. Witty comedians say things we recognise as true but which we wouldn’t usually say: few of us outright say we are bored by our interlocutor’s small talk. Jokes, however, tend to reflect things we all think and say, or at least frequently hear said.

This is why some people can be exceptionally funny in the pub but do not become comedians. Having an aptitude for remembering and reciting jokes, is not the same as a talent for the creation of wit. Performance is rarely enough to ensure success. The world has never lacked performers of aptitude. Wit, though, is rare. Few have Fey’s or David’s talent for turning rhetorical forms to hilarious advantage.

In a society dominated by a philistine attitude, such as we now live in, performing jokes is a lot of what we ask of our comedians. We too often demand not the newness of wit, but merely the best version of familiar jokes. True laughter is the child of daring observation, such as when Larry David said “It’s nice to be affectionate to something German. You so rarely get the chance.” Wit may not be comfortable or acceptable, which is why is offers the release of humour, the sense that we are stepping into a parallel reality, the creation of the author, as opposed to the familiarity of the joke, which is domestic and comforting. Jokes console; wit confronts.

Robin Williams was full of the exuberance of wit and transported his audiences to a fictional realm where his jokes were the reality. To watch him was to step aside from conventional life for awhile. Philistine culture lacks this otherness, because it relies on the performance of jokes that reinforce the humour we are used to, rather than discombobulating us all with the surreal, phantasmagoric sense that all aspects of life, however unexpected, might be subject to the comedian’s wit. He was a true original.

Humour is among the hardest of the arts. As Samuel Johnson observed, all other jobs have an end, but “the hapless wit has his labour always to begin, the call for novelty is never satisfied.” And thus witty comedians too often give into the temptation to tell jokes, to descend from wild, original creation to the performance of anonymous jibes.