Lessons on independent thinking from writer Susan Sontag

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Over at The Atlantic, writer Katie Roiphe asks: “What would the intellectual powerhouse think about our culture of groupthink and self-righteousness?” She begins:

If you are sitting around wondering what Susan Sontag would make of our current political moment, a new collection of her writing and interviews from the ’70s about feminism, On Women, offers tantalizing glimmers and hints. Imagining Sontag, with her flair for aphorisms, unloosed on Twitter is easy: “I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.” She would have thrived in the Twittersphere, though elements of its culture of groupthink and self-righteousness would have unsettled her.

In her introduction to On Women, the critic Merve Emre notes Sontag’s “refusal of easy answers or offended pieties.” Now that we are in the heyday of easy answers and offended pieties, Sontag’s stylish, idiosyncratic approach to the feminist debates and preoccupations of her era can be distilled pretty well into tangible guidance for ours. This is one of those moments when smart voices from other times can offer us clarity and fresh perspectives on our own. In the spirit of Sontag’s own numbered lists and notes (the most famous of which is “Against Interpretation”), here are some tips from On Women for independent-minded readers.

Here are seven tips:

  1. “Say what you mean. Be specific. Don’t be content with prepackaged jargon.”
  2.  “Look at the world honestly, even if doing so involves unearthing complex and disturbing dynamics. Avoid narratives with overly simplified villains and victims while still trying to illuminate how oppression actually works in daily life.”
  3.  “Don’t be boring. Sontag writes a colorful, slashing, attention-grabbing takedown of the institution of the family: “The modern ‘nuclear’ family is a psychological and moral disaster.”
  4. “Resist the urge to look at history, the world, or a cultural moment through a single, overarching, oversimplifying lens.”
  5. “Stop worrying so much about feelings. Sontag would not, for instance, have approved of the trigger-warning requirement that Cornell University’s student government attempted to pass in March, which would have forced professors to alert their classes to “traumatic content” of any sort. She would probably have argued that part of the thrill of intellectual exchange is being unsettled or uncomfortable or unmoored.”
  6. “Don’t overuse political language. By throwing around words like patriarchy or fascist or racist, we risk draining them of their power.”
  7. “Be independent”

Read Roiphe’s entire piece here. Great stuff.