[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercus center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at marcus.org for a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links visit conversations withth tyler.com hello everyone and welcome back to
conversations with Tyler I'm very happy today to be chatting with Cynthia Haven she is listed as a visiting scholar at Stanford but I think of her as an independent scholar in the very best sense of that term quite recently she has published the definitive biography of Renee Gerard that is called evolution of desire a biography of cheslav Milos
she has written extensively on Joseph Brodsky and is published in just about every other Outlet you might imagine Cynthia welcome thank you it's wonderful to be here if if I think of three of your main interests Gerard broadsky from then the Soviet Union Milos they're all individuals in Exile why are you fascinated with the theme of Exile
that's an interesting question I've never thought about it that way I am interested them they were three people I happened to know but that's endogenous right you got to know people who were exiled self-exiled well Renee was not self-exiled he came here after the war because it was it was a place where he where he could get a job he was
recruited by the Americans that were going abroad and looking for bright young men to come and refill the colleges after the war and teach the gis on the GI bill but why does exile interest you so much and what kind of Exile do you live what are you exiled from I'm not sure it does interest me so much I I don't think that was what
attracted me to them I guess we're all Exiles in in a way I feel like one is there some kind of Eastern European liberalism they have in common so there's a theme of Christianity running through Milos and Gerard they're all from from what you might consider leis broadsky and Milos failed Societies in a certain way is there some new vision of
liberalism running throughout the works of the three their politics and their thinking was not quite that easy to characterize Renee considered himself I I think they all lose certainly mios considered himself a liberal in Poland but the terms changed so quickly with you know the rise of stalinism with what was happening in Europe that suddenly
the terms keep shifting and it's kind of hard to place any of them politically Renee has been called a conservative but he was pretty Mainline Democratic these are terms that we've put a great deal of meaning on I'm not sure that they're that fixed as we think they are Mainline Democratic was a kind of conservative in his time right conservative in the
literal sense five years ago I suppose well maybe 15 20 years ago but none of them were really Political Animals aren't they all quite political in some way so Gerard is writing about sacrifice and King ship and he's obsessed with the Bible and Shakespeare those are all highly political themes it's people today who are political that seem most
interested in Gerard right I'm not very political myself and I adored the man if we take Milos is there a way in which we can think of him as expressing a more liberal side of dovi is there such a liberal side of dovi a call for Universal love I think that's uh Beyond politics but he was obsessed with the intellectual
Corruption of the intellectuals in France post World War II right when so many French intellectuals were stalinist he writes his Masterwork of social science the captive mind about how conformist everyone is and that they're unwilling to think independently right he was writing about the totalitarianism and the pressures that were brought on
people by that system but these are people living in France that he's criticizing right not people living in the Soviet Union it's both yes it was purely mimic yes I mean it was a pretty universally stalinist atmosphere and the only person that befriended him was Kimu there were a few others the people in Cultura but they were polish igra themselves so
there's a lot of Conformity I don't think Conformity is left or right or liberal or conservative it's just human nature are he and Gerard thinking through what are the broader systemic implications of so much mimesis whether or not it's a particular political Vision again I don't think it's political I don't think they were they
were thinking in those terms well let's say I asked you to compare Gerard's vision of human beings and how they copy each other and Milo's Vision how are those two visions different I don't think they were I think that they they had a great deal in common in that regard but they expressed it in a different way they used a different language for one thing one was
a poet but Milos also wrote about human beings right and he wrote A Memoir he wrote a novel there's plenty of vision of how Human Society operates is mimus more Universal in Gerard than Milos I would think so was a central point of his whole work for in asure Ard but we're looking at human phenomenon and they're pretty much everywhere how
did Milos react to the Berkeley Free Speech movement he was sympathetic with the students but as he commented they complain because they have too much it was uh very different from the environment that he had just left where students had very few rights and very few freedoms so he also thought the famous incident of course is when he was
going through the campus and he was surrounded by protesters and how did he react to that with his best slav accent he waved his Cane and said be gone spoiled Children of the Bazi did he think they actually favored Free Speech I'm sure he did yes he once wrote and I quote the man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the
experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are do you agree yes would Gerard agree I think he would yes but wasn't he more of an objectivist in the sense of viewing Christianity as an objective vantage point for evaluating cultures polities he was viewing the scapegoat mechanism as a thing that United all
these societies but he's a systemic French thinker in a way MOS is seems to me much more relativist yes I would agree why did Milos translate parts of the Bible I think because he wanted to make it more part of himself remember he was going through an enormous amount of suffering at that point in his life too with his wife dying with his son going mad to what
extent do you think his theory of intellectuals in post-war France explains American intellectuals today that they're just highly conformist I think it pretty much explains to me yes I think there's a great deal of conformity in our culture as well we academics some of us have tenure what are we so afraid of in particular like
how does the calculus operate one wishes for esteem one wishes to get approval from one's peers that can be as powerful as the fear of losing a job but in a lot of Realms you get that esteem by innovating or by deviating from established opinion right so if you're a musician you're expected to do something at least a bit different and why is
Academia why does have more conformist standards for acceptance well one is allowed to make the great breakthrough book or whatever as long as it's breakthrough within certain confines within certain limits that's an interesting point what is the what is the point at which it becomes something unacceptable outrageous rather than just
Innovative and who decides that how does that get decided why do you think no tenured academic wrote a comparable biography of Gerard who in a way is not such a controversial figure year right uh he's becoming more and more mainstream but it's taken a long while for that to happen he was in Academia but not of Academia in a lot of ways
basically the head of the Michigan State University press's series on Renee approached me and asked me to think of an idea for writing about Renee and I noted that there had never been anything weaving together the life and the work so the only reason that it happened is because I did it I think that it was the cor conformist thing nobody wanted to
stick their heads out and people wanted to hold him at a distance I think what do you think of the current Silicon Valley infatuation with Gerard I think it's very mimetic come true a lot of that is Peter Teal's influence it's kind of a mixed bag it's interesting that people always want to ask me about Peter teal as the leader of
this kind of mimetic wave but I think he's got a lot more to say about a lot more things that are going to be of long-standing interest we've already had some good analyses of his effect on Silicon Valley but his effect on human behavior his call for Universal forgiveness his call for being more independent not being mimetic and all once desires I think
that those are his enduring messages that are more important than the world of technology what did Gerard think of social media he saw an early form of them right he was not tremendously interested of course he used a computer he was on the internet he was always on his own wavelength he was an amazing man to know an amazing man to talk to
sure how did PR influence Renee Gerard oh I think that was one of his first major literary interests finding that book as he was leaving for America he found that in a bookstore it was very influential and leading him to see how social groups work in the snobbery of Social Circles and the way that they can lure you and repel you at the same time
do you think Gerard's thesis of mimetic Desire is empirically falsifiable or does it suffer from the weaknesses of a lot of content nental philosophy that it's a big idea thrown out there and then selectively withdrawn when it doesn't fit the facts I think it's it's not a prediction it's not a way that you can predict something I think that
there's too many variables in almost any equation to make it foolproof in that sense one of the things that always interested me about Renee was the way he could pull up factors that you didn't see in a situation the thing that you weren't looking at what did he think of Buddhism because Buddhism at least on the surface is an attempt to escape the
cycle of mimetic desire he wrote a book about some of the Eastern religions called sacrifice that was mostly focusing on Hinduism I think when you people ask that question well what about Buddhism what about Confucianism but like we use these labels of religions there's millions of individuals within them and whatever the religion says
there are medic behaviors human behavior doesn't suspend itself because of the label of a religion that you're going under he did say and he did feel that Christianity and Jud Judaism and beginning with Judaism were the first religions to focus in such a concentrated way on the way people competition strife and the the reasons
for conflict and the pressures to scapegoat if you had to to characterize or conceptualize Gerard's Talent as a thinker how would you express that he wasn't a details person right but what was his great talent intuition the way he saw these patterns and saw patterns that no one else did of competition rivalry violence his big religious
intuition was the New Testament is moving us from the kingdom of violence to the kingdom of God and what that meant to make that transition is it true that Gerard had no mentors yep that's quite unusual how do you think that shaped his career and thought well that's what I meant when I said that he was in Academia but not really of Academia he climbed no ladder
he had no mentors within Academia he wound up in Academia really pretty much by accident do you think of him as one of your mentors or are you like Gerard with no mentors oh no I've had many mentors I've written about mine who's your main Mentor I don't think there's a main one I think that there's three of them that
I've written about and I'm sure that there are others that I will write about and who are those three Renee Joseph broadsky and ches Mos so the three people you've written the most about yes I mean they're endless all three of them are endless you can spend forever in their Works in an article you wrote you once quoted Renee Gerard quote joining
the mob is the thing people don't realize they feel the unity but don't interpret it as joining the mob do you agree with that so people who join say Twitter mobs on the internet they're oblivious to the fact that they're part of a mob they think they're speaking up for the right they think that what they're saying is true but do they also
think they're part of a mob or do they have false conscious ious I don't know about false consciousness the momentum of a feeling can drive one into a mob without one being aware that that is exactly what you're doing it's a very subliminal thing what is your best Gerard story okay I'll tell one you asked about Peter teal I was asked to fact check
that uh Peter teal had wanted an answer to a question about Rene's Theory and drove up immediately to Rene's house to get the answer that he needed and someone asked me to fact check that and I got the answer I thought Renee was not a guru he did not live on a top of a mountain and of course that didn't happen so I had to uh let down the
person who had asked the question so it hadn't happened it hadn't happened Renee did not run an open house he had a surprisingly conventional private life was madly in love with the one woman he was married to for 50 years 60 years here's a story for you Martha and Renee had a marriage that was so harmonious they never apparently never
gave each other presents on birthdays or whatever they did that and their children had to call and tell them that their 60th wedding anniversary had just happened because it went by without them noticing 60 wow now there's a an anecdote it's in your biography evolution of Desire that Gerard claimed he had witnessed a lynching and that
influenced his thought but if one traces the chronology of that claim it's not obviously true and if we fact check that claim can it be verified or was he just making that up was he a fabulous of some sort no no that was a writer's trick a writer's trick meaning he made it up no I was the writer I was interviewing Jean Maria Goron in Paris and who was at one
time you know Renee said many people were his best friends Jean Marie Michelle gon was one of the people that he often said that about and he claimed that Renee had told him that he had witnessed a lynching this is one of those moments and one of the most powerful moments I've ever had in an interview and the floor kind of opens up
when someone says something like that and I thought wait a minute how can that be true but it was my job to check it out and see whether it could be true but more than that it was an opportunity for me to explore what lynching meant in the US and abroad and talk about that I was surprised in my research to find out how recently lynchings had happened I had
thought of them as something from a much earlier decade in the 20th century having ended it gave me a chance to think about it it gave me a chance to talk about it and later in the interviewing process with f Michelle I said to him Goran that's an Armenian name were your family involved with that and his face fell he had lost a number
of his extended family in that genocide and that is why he grew up in Beirut not F farther east and what I concluded in that chapter was that je Michelle gon having been a second generation Holocaust Survivor that had impressed them and that what seemed outrageous to us the idea that Renee had seen a lynching was not so outrageous to him
because it had actually happened and then not too distant memory so I told the story that way I told that chapter that way it was a way of going back and revisiting that past and revisiting the impression that I had on the man standing in front of me so no he hadn't seen a lynching you don't go and watch a lynching you're either one of the people
throwing the stones or you're the lynchy it has that kind of Attraction it's not like some something that you can watch from far away how good was Gerard as a Critic of Shakespeare I think he was fascinated by Shakespeare it was a A Love Affair of sorts that was his kind of marriage to the English language it's the only book he wrote in English I
think he had a great deal to say I think that that's one of the most interesting Explorations that he had in his book theater of Envy is very critical to his Corpus and I think he's an excellent critic so you don't think one is just getting Gerard one is getting some reasonably accurate understanding of Shakespeare well yes but I think that
there are other ways of seeing Shakespeare besides Rene's Rene had a lot of interesting things to say but I don't think he's the only person that said interesting things on that or any other subject why is there more mimetic desire in the comedies oh I think it allowed Shakespeare to play around a lot more there's a lot of meic influences in
the other plays as well Julia Caesar is an excellent one for the mimic desire that leads to a basically a lynching I think the comedies give you a chance to play with it and I think that that's a large part of their Delight what do you think was Gerard's greatest flaw as a thinker I think that he had an unfortunate tendency to say
always or never if you quizzed him more thoroughly he'd say he would say well no not always or whatever but I think that that has sometimes been tackled on by people is a flaw do you think mosia as a thinker has a future in the way that Gerard has turned out to be really extremely influential and popular he's a poet and I think that that's a problem
of poetry is well it's it's not taught the way it was or the humanities have G have somewhat gone by the wayside not for people who love poetry but it's not taught I would like to see ches mios taught in schools as an American that's the premise of my book I think he had an enormous amount but he was not a systematic thinker as a poet he was not
are trying to create a system but he had an enormous amount to say to us today did it make sense for Curtis yarvin to have written a whole long blog post tribute to Milos have you read that where oh it's just online somewhere he's sometimes considered you know the father of thought of Ni reaction yarvin he's very controversial I'd like to read that
I don't think I've read that and he was really quite intrigued by captive mind that he saw as a diagnosis of the intelligencia today yarvin has a kind of cult following he's very influential it's not my thing I'm very much more in the tradition of Classical liberalism but nonetheless here was someone giving Milo a huge push and I haven't seen it
lead to anything but Milos is not just a poet right I very few people read polish who are not polish but plenty of people I know have read captive mind that is his only book that has been continuously impr print and a bestseller since it was published in 1953 it's an amazing book and yes it's an amazing book to us today
it has a lot to say to us about what you're talking about and a lot else about the Conformity about the pressures to what he call the myy Bing pill you've read captive mind yes he wrote Consciousness does not help them to shed their Bonds on the contrary it forges them yes but what has gone wrong in Freedom since we have a relatively free
society that a work from someone who grew up under communism and then wrote about stalinists in postwar France that that work could still be relevant to day what have we done wrong well then we get back to Renee don't we it's imitation it's a desire to conform it's a desire to rise get a better job get tenure whatever it is that still pressures
people Mi did not grow up under communism that didn't come about until the fall of Warsaw and its destruction human nature Remains the Same it's just a shame that it's getting more pathological forms but why do we copy the bad things rather than the good things what's the missing part of the theory the bad things are attractive to us
we're followers why is Putin still got support in Russia after what he's doing I mean why are the Trump supporters but say if I read Freud or I I read Reich there's some account of why people might crave the bad crave the bad as a bad not thinking that it's a good bad they're just compulsively drawn to some things that are bad they may even feel good to
people in the moment but there's an account of craving the bad in those thinkers also in Paro there's an account of craving the bad for Milo what's the account of craving the bad or for Gerard for muos I don't think he did crave the bad ever no he didn't but he portrays other people as craving the bad I don't
think he talks about that so much as people and captive mind as people trying to get along and live within the system and the way they pathologically divide themselves into two people so that they can avoid the martyrdom that happened to so many of their peers what did he find of such great interest in Simone vile his favorite phrase of hers was
distances the soul of beauty that was a big part of his Nobel speech getting the right distance from someone she was a profoundly religious thinker he was quoting her all the time does she make sense to you as a thinker or is it aphorisms aphorisms are a powerful way to learn but does it cohere right so schopenhauer and N More or Less their
aphorisms cohere into a particular worldview to hers cohere she was an odd and extreme thinker I think many of them do I don't see see her as a systematic thinker in that sense why does Milos assign such an important role to Nature in his understanding of America and was that just a California thing what if we had sent him to Rhode Island well we did
more or less I mean he's he spent a time in Washington DC New York City but his first calling was to be a naturalist that was his first attraction as a child so he studied nature from a child the American wilderness puzzled and somewhat confused him as he put it 10 different kinds of Oaks and instead of three like you'd have in Poland will Joseph
broadsky fall into a memory Hall do people still care yes but you can't read him in Russian right or most people can't poetry itself is much less popular unless you count something like rap music as a form of poetry but that won't help Brodsky the essays are are quite fine but they don't seem culturally Central I mean what about Brodsky will
last in America or in Russia in America and then in Russia in Russia he will never die he is one of the great Poets of the 20th century in America I think a lot of it depends on the future translations the word play in his poems the inventiveness is such that it makes it very difficult to squash it into the English language and there's been attempts there's been
controversy there's been issues with the estate and everything else I hope that we someday get a good complete volume of Joseph Brodsky in English that is as magical as the original Russian what do you think of the claim that he was first or maybe only Russian poet to have mastered the English metaphysical tradition like John Dunn I think
mastered is a big word grappled with I think he grappled with it it's hard for us in English to see how well that works in the butterfly is a masterpiece and as you know I wrote the conversations with George Klein and that was a masterpiece translation give us more Masterpiece translations and we'll we'll have a better judgment why
was broadsky so terrible on the Ukraine issue so his poem on Ukraine you can find a version of it online you can hear it in the original Russian on YouTube he sounds as bad as Putin right why where did he go wrong it's not just that poem he got into a fight with Derek Walcott at a famous conference when he was belittling the smaller nations of the
world there's a sort of national imperialism of Russia that is not just Putin goes all the way down I think that poem about the Ukraine is indeed very unfortunate it's not going to serve his legacy well it doesn't serve Common Sense well how do you model the mistake he made what was the problem in his broader worldview he was a Russian
imperialist I mean he got into the fight with Derek walcot was on the importance of his own nation and it's a strong streak in the Russian culture he simply never gave it up even after he came here what's bread in the bone will out in the flesh yes he never gave it up not entirely I think it became a smaller portion of his psyche if we think of
your own career so you're at age 17 a reporter and now you're writing books about Continental philosophy how did that happen and was that bread in your bone so to speak yes very much so I began at 17 as a reporter actually at 16 it teaches you a lot of things it teaches you to perform on Deadline it teaches you not to object to your work
getting edited which is a problem with a lot of authors it teach teaches you to be flexible teaches you how to ask questions teaches you how to do interviews lots of good skills there and when and how did the turn to philosophy come I don't know there was a turn to philosophy literature was part of me too I was reading lame as Roba is a little
girl I'm not interested in philosophy per se I was interested in Rene Girard I think I can promise I would not write about another philosopher it's a huge field of study but you're interested in philosophical poets and writers correct I'm interested in thinking yes we're talking about thinking I'm interested in people who ask big
questions and all those people ask big questions why such a strong interest in interviews which I share with you obviously doing a podcast but where does that come from in you nosiness as a young woman it gave me a chance to meet interesting people lots of people like to be interviewed so it was a chance to ask a lot of questions
and learn a lot of things what is your philosophy of what is missing in most other people's interviews I don't know that it's a philosophy but you must think you're adding something right I'm interested in big questions I think a lot of people aren't a lot of interviewers aren't it's not an era for big questions is it 2022 I'm not sure really maybe the questions
are either too big or too small and not enough in between that's an interesting point of view but there's plenty of ideology in the world and in this country doesn't have to be a good thing but ideology is different than big questions I think sure the kinds of questions M asked about questions of being what do you think is the best
question he asked the best question he asked he was fascinated beginning in the 1970s with the loss of what he called second space with the loss of the religious dimension in human thinking with the loss of any notion beyond the little here and the little now he explored that and beginning with a fragmentary science fiction experiment
called second space second space was the title of his last the last volume that was published you know with his supervision he was very restless about that I think it is a powerful thing to explore do you like stanislav LM yes I'm intrigued yes that's literary but also philosophical yes I can't claim great great familiarity with him I'm not a fan
of Science Fiction in general but I am a fan of of me how did you become a good reader starting young I was reading George Bernard Shaw and uh Victor Hugo when I was in elementary school because you had to or because you wanted to because I wanted to because you wanted to the stuff that they were giving us was dra I like the
good stuff has Shaw held up well at all I look at it periodically but it never interests me I love Hugo that's interesting it's kind of hard he was so solidly of an era his plays aren't performed much and they haven't been for a long time I like the wit I like the sharpness I think the last you know yes we could use a Revival what did you learn when you
worked for Vogue oh you've seen the movie The Devil Wears Prada yes I quite like that movie it was very much the same way in London where I was working for vog and kast the same kind of ladders I was under Bill rather than her American counterpart that was the first job I could get in London so I was very glad to have it but they didn't make me into
a fashion plate horribly hopeless un fashion but you wrote for them no it was more like The Devil Wears Prada I did edit an article by the sister of the Princess of Wales or the Princess of Wales to be that was my highlight there was editing an article by Sarah Spencer what's your favorite long train ride oh jeez cat muda deli how long does
that take oh gosh it was so many years ago can't recall how' you end up in Kat Mandu flu airplane why Kat Mandu well actually I was working with vogue's travel editor and he had just come back from katmundu and was telling me how beautiful it was and I was also seeing a man who was a concert pianist who was about to give a
concert in kundo so this was a twofer so I could do both and pack it all up and leave for India and Nepal I turned the pages at the concert what did you think of Kev and Odessa when you visited there oh I loved them what years were these that was uh 20 years ago maybe desa's charming and Kiev is just absolutely beautiful I love the lava caves those tombs that they
have underneath Kiev I very much hope that it survives all of this and that Odessa is restored to uh Ukraine mova mova too is mdova fun or just interesting everywhere is interesting I love traveling I love traveling I visited a Pushkin house in mova I believe puskin had houses everywhere in the Russian Empire he had places that he
stayed and they're all memorialized in the Eastern Europe so how does traveling fit into your conception of yourself I don't know that it does I just want to see everything before I die wow that is a conception of yourself right for me it's took kind of ultimate unit of account like I value money but I value money because it can
get me places I agree it drives me nuts I won't even be able to re I've never been to Greece I don't love Greece I'm certainly glad I went but it was uglier than I was expecting and seeing Greek ancient Greek civilization in turkey and Sicily was in some ways more rewarding than seeing it in Greece the museum in
Athens was amazing but I was a bit let down overall I have to say just too much concrete somehow what's your favorite country I love Latin America I've lived in Germany New Zealand been to Mexico I think 31 times my wife is from Soviet Union so there there's so many places I could pick you know my favorite country is the next one perhaps and what will
that be it will be Ireland in June ah Colombia in July and Northern India and August I have never been to Ireland either Greece and Ireland it will be I think my fourth Irish trip but I've never been to southern Ireland so I'm going to see Cork and limmerick which are huge gaps in my knowledge base but I will be there doesn't it bother you that
you could die without having seen everything I have this strange ambition to actually see every significant City in the new world which is not everything by any means but I don't really have a strong ambition to see all of Africa it would interest me but it just seems not feasible for a number of reasons but if I keep Health I'll feel within 5 years
I'll have been able to see the significant cities of the new world that will make me happy and I'll write a book about it the process of doing it and what I thought the major questions were and what I learned that sounds like fun so that's partly why I'm going to Colombia Northern Brazil is a big gap in my knowledge you know the little
countries the guanas and Surinam those are gaps Venezuela is a problem if anything stops me it'll be danger in Venezuela so there's another version of it where I get everywhere but Venezuela what do you want to do before you die besides see all these countries see everywhere in Europe minus Russia minus Russia it's just not feasible anymore to
include Russia so what I love to go to sov of course but I'm not optimistic about that country so if I can I will I've only been a few times I've never been to Lithuania or Malta or Montenegro obviously southern Ireland Northern Poland I've never been to Eastern Slovakia I've never been to and Italy I've never been to Britany and France
there these huge gaps but it does seem that they're manageable right it's not like someone saying oh I've never been to Austria and they're starting from scratch yes can I go back and tell a brodsky's story about his imperialism tell us the story I was on Facebook and for some reason I posted something about broadsky I can't even remember what the topic was it was when
he was asked what he thought was the best way to see Moscow he said from the cockpit of a B52 everyone just attacked me for posting this and you know how horrible it was that someone should say this a few days later there was the attack on Ukraine the thread went silent it suddenly seemed not such a vicious idea is it had
when he posted it I hope that things change I hope that Russia changes I have another book coming out in Russia how much interest in Russia is there in Gerard I hear quite a bit is that true in Gerard in Gerard really you get readers in Russia who write you emails somewhere here I had the uh Russian edition of evolution of desire it was a
top seller in Moscow so there's quite a bit of Interest then oh you said Rene's interest in Russia no Russia's interest in Rene yes there is and that's why I was anxious to see it come out in Russia and how do you think Russians read him differently I haven't spoken to them but I think that what they're going through has got resonances again this is not
most of Russia we're talking about the lensia who are buying the books in Russia not the people in the provinces I hope it gets through I want to go back to Moscow and most of all Petersburg MH how do you think Russians read Milos the captive mind it must have gotten in the Russian addition now again I think the problem is the Russians I know my
Russian friends they know all of this stuff but how do you get through to the others how do you get through to the ones that are you know still casting their votes for Putin does the Russian intelligence you know I'm never quite convinced they seem to know and not know and the ones even who move to the United States and face no censorship a lot of
them are still protin especially if they're not Jewish the ones I know are ashamed they're ashamed of the war but before the war they were often protin or at least anti- anti-putin right well no there's there's a liberal class in Russia and those those are the ones that are publishing my books I mean maruia stanova is a good friend of M mine she's one of the
leading writers in Russia my publisher for the broadsky book has a lot of Russians on its death they know what the truth is don't you ever wonder how Russian propaganda works so during the pandemic Putin works very hard to convince people the vaccine is great and people are really not sold on that notion there's a low rate of vaccine
uptake in Russia right people worry about batch problems correctly it turns out they're skeptical about the vaccine to begin with even though in Theory actually vaccine is probably not so bad so the prop again it doesn't work and then there's this much more horrible message being sold to people not take the vaccine but the war in Ukraine is a
good thing it's a police action whatever account of it you wish to give and so many Russians buy that yet you can't talk them into the vaccine I mean what are we supposed to think about that isn't there some abdication of intellectual responsibility at some level in a society like that like they are capable of resisting messages from
Putin I have no answers for that I mean Maria closed her online newspaper Colta a few days after this began after her whole staff signed an editorial saying no war was on the the front page so if the good guys can't publish who's going to be disseminating information but there's plenty of rumor right there's plenty of sources of sis
do even under the Soviet Union there are plenty of official claims that during the Soviet Union people simply didn't believe but now today the war is okay is for the most part the winning message in Russia I think it's hard to tell from this distance well it's maybe it's that under the cover imperialism coming to the four again just like Brodsky was
Keen about stomping on Ukraine well let's keep in mind that Brodsky didn't have a lot of military power or political power it's one thing to mouth off from a sort of pre-existing imperialist streak for Russia it's another thing to you know attack and kill Ukraine Ians is there an active Sami St in Russia right now people using vpns or or different ways
of accessing the internet there seem to be at least a few million people doing that okay I was thinking olden days with passing out leaflets and things but you're right you're right of course there's VPN let's hope it gets through what do you think are the forms of propaganda that we Americans are falling for right now so you believe in mimus
you like the thought of Gerard Milos what is it you know Russia is screwing Russian citizens are screwing up the war in Ukraine what's our failing as American citizens well you're on Twitter yes I'm on Twitter but what do you think is the failing well I mean it's mimesis it's this tendency for people to just join into to meet two momentums it
happens very fast in the US I think because so many of us are on the social media it's our willingness to believe I think our value system has become so produced by commercial forces it's hard to find serious forms of thinking maybe not for you but you know for people in much of America I might be killed for saying this but when your models are
people like Trump you know what are you going to get in the way of depth what are you going to get in the way of they keep saying if you want those kinds of people to go away we have to change the value system in America well one of the things that creates the value system is the humanities in the place where the
humanities and reading our suffering decline then the other models are going to come up and spring and be forceful we listen to crappy commercials we listen to crappy memes it's going to be without changing how we think by changing what we admire what we're willing to imitate the worst will rise to the four does that make any sense yes but I wonder often whether the
truly dangerous mimesis is some form of people attacking the sort of superficially dangerous form of mimesis so I'm not at all a trump supporter but often I see more girardian Behavior amongst the critics of trump than the trumpian themselves in some ways they seem more freeth thinking to me and in ways I object to but if you want to see
a real Twitter pile on you know praise Trump in some manner even for something good he did like operation warp speed one of the few things he did where I would say well that was really wonderful you get creamed much more supporting Trump than attacking him so where the dangerous mimus really is embedded in the system I'm never quite sure I
understand your point and I agree with it I would just like us to see us value more more thinking I'd like to see us value literature again I'd like to see us value poetry again I think that this is a questionable argument and people have tacked it they've talked about Nazis that used to listen to Heiden and stuff like that but I do think that
there's a better chance of something good getting through if you're reading chess W mios than if you're reading Twitter feeds if we valued intelligent thinking intelligent speaking in our public lives I think we' be less likely to get the kind of candidates that we're getting you spent some number of years writing profiles of Stanford faculty
without asking uname names but what's your sense of the system overall like is it producing and supporting those great thinkers kind of when I was doing that for the Stanford I wanted to focus on those people that I thought were the last of their kinds well you know I kind of thought of them as Living Legends so I wrote profiles of people like Robert
Conquest you know him a great scholar of course a great scholar who was the first to really uncover the extent of stal ISM and the murders and the in the crimes of under stalinism he was also a poet I wrote about Joseph Fran the noted biographer of dooi five volume series that was my excuse for getting to know Renee Gerard as I profiled him and Carl
vber the dramatist who was a student of I'm blanking come on the great dramatist in Germany helped man Berto bre B he was a student he was a student of Bal bre but if we're so mimetic why aren't we producing those people because we don't value them they're famous names they've probably earned some of them a fair
amount of income oh I don't think you get rich by being a no not rich but within Academia they've done relatively well right Joseph Frank I still know who he is I'm just some old Economist well they all died within a few years of my getting to know them that is the problem of dealing with the old Giants is the old Giants tend to disappear I ask the
same questions you're asking who replaces them I mean who's asking the big questions do you ever wish you were ins sconed an academic life with tenure like really wish it I know at times you might think oh it would be nice but truly in the button- pushing sense wish it I'm the first in my family to have any University degree at all so the idea
of becoming a faculty member never crossed my mind until I found myself working within Academia so sure I fantasize it sure I think it'd be wonderful to be able to have a salary and to be a able to not live as a freelance writer on the other hand I couldn't have done the things that I did there is an enormous pressure towards
Conformity with an Academia would I have been able to write the first biography of Renee Gerard if I had been I don't think it'd be something that necessarily would have been encouraged was in an academic atmosphere was something I could do because I was an outsider to some extent I've had a wonderful life doing this I've been able to sit there
and explore the greatest Minds that I've known in my lifetime and the greatest people Renee was not just a wonderful and seminal thinker he was a genuinely decent and generous human being the one of the best that I've known tesso of me was was a hell of a lot of fun to interview I was lucky cuz I happened to be the last person to get into interview
before he went back to Poland so those were opportunities that I had to take advantage of while they were still there and and I waited our last question what will you be doing next oh that's a secret I'll tell you offline okay in any case we all wish you luck with that and very good chatting with you Cynthia El Haven
and everyone she has numerous books most recently biographies of Renee Gerard called evolution of desire and also a book on the life of cheslav Milos in California and I should add the penguin modern Classics Anthology for vene Gerard which I'm editing will be out next year Cynthia thank you very much thank you thanks for listening to
conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts Spotify or your favorite podcast app if you like this podcast please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review this helps other listeners find the show on Twitter I'm @ Tyler Cowan and the show is @ Cowan convos until next time please keep listening and [Music] learning