If You Can’t Accurately Quote Someone, Why Should I Believe Anything You Write?

Example #234234234 of intellectual rot in left-of-center spaces

For a while, I’ve been concerned about what feels like creeping intellectual rot in left-of-center circles. This rot is by no means ubiquitous, and there are plenty of liberal and leftist writers whose work I still respect, enjoy, and learn from. But in many cases, arguments are published that fail to clear extremely basic, very low bars — the equivalent of pulling a muscle during warm-ups before getting to the actual exercise itself. It’s very common for writers in this space to fail to accurately sum up the views of their opponents, to misstate basic facts of a given case, to quote in deeply disingenuous ways, and to make arguments that simply don’t hold water in a freshmen composition, A-implies-B sense. In many cases, rhetorical Calvinball is replacing sound thinking.

A couple days ago Literary Hub, a well-regarded lefty arts publication that often publishes political takes, ran an article by Peter Coviello, the former chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin College and currently a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. Coviello’s article is about how, after former Bowdoin African Studies major Zohran Mamdani hit the spotlight, Coviello started getting inquiries from journalists asking what he remembered about him. (Coviello writes that he’s not sure he ever had Mamdani as a student, but might have.)

This part stuck out at me:

Beneath its humdrum requests, every email said more or less the same thing: Can you explain how reading certain things can turn a person into a socialist—and, possibly, a terrorist-sympathizing antisemite? It’s a storied gambit of the right at its most grimly predictable. “People read Foucault,” the redoubtable David Brooks once wrote, in an actual column that I’ve all but committed to memory, “and develop an alienated view of the world.” God, did I love this. An “alienated view of the world”! Not by, like, trying to pay rent or having an insurance claim denied—no, no, it was probably the Foucault you read in 2003. Anyway, it was clearly time to get the elaborate machinery of manufactured bewilderment and sour indignation up and running again. [emphasis in the original]

I rolled my eyes a little at the idea that “every” journalist who reached out to Coviello was trying to get him to talk shit about Mamdani, but whatever; maybe that’s what happened. It was the David Brooks quote that struck me as suspicious. I simply didn’t think Brooks would make such a silly, oversimplified argument.

So I clicked the link to check the context of the quote. The column in question, written amid the heat of the summer of 2020, is about a pessimistic strain in lefty thought, particularly among black intellectuals:

Many conservatives and moderates say these ideas come from campus culture. People read Foucault and develop an alienated view of the world. The blunt facts, however, suggest that, overstated or not, these writers are responding to something real in the world, something real in the world both of the less educated and of the highly educated. People are responding to the failure of the mainstream, moderate, progressive formula for how to create a more equal pluralist America.

So Brooks is arguing against the notion that “People read Foucault and develop an alienated view of the world.” He’s presenting this as a view he disagrees with.

Coviello is an accomplished academic with many articles and books under his belt, and by his own account was so struck by the Brooks column that he has “all but committed [it] to memory.” The fact that he failed to understand Brooks’ argument about Foucault on the most basic level is astonishing. Either Coviello has a real reading comprehension problem — one that would pose genuine challenges to his ability to write about anything — or he’s a transparently disingenuous writer and thinker. I’m not sure which is worse. And of course the whole thing is layered in smug sanctimony. “God, did I love this,” he said.

Something like this can only be published if no one involved cares much about the truth. Maybe LitHub is overstretched, resources-wise (that’s the most sympathetic interpretation possible), but all it would have taken to see how silly an error this is is to actually read one paragraph of the column Covielli is quoting?

I come across stuff like this over and over and over. I don’t want to fall victim to Gell-Mann amnesia. What are the odds that Coviello is this bad at the basic task of correctly interpreting a column, but is good at making more sophisticated, less easily checkable arguments? Why even bother with writers and editors of such low caliber? Life is too short.

This is an error and LitHub‘s editors should correct it. I’ll be shocked if they do.

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Questions? Comments? Obvious errors and misquotations in this very newsletter? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on X at @jessesingal. Image via ChatGPT.