Andrew Sullivan on Braving New Intellectual Journeys | Conversations with Tyler

Introduction but it is worth noting he has a new book that just came out called Out on a Limb: Selected Writing 1989-2021. I would say if you would like one single all-purpose introduction to Andrew Sullivan, this is the book. Andrew, welcome.

Now, since I've nominated you as the most influential public intellectual of our generation, I would like to start with some questions about the Andrew Sullivan production function. Okey doke. So let's go back in time. At some point you learn you are HIV/AIDS positive. How did that possible risk of premature death affect your productivity over the longer run, because you have done an enormous amount as is shown in the book?

So if we fast forward to today, let's say you were to learn that you had only four years to live. What would you do differently?

You kind of learn why not become more devout now, right?

God is a good question, Tyler. I think I've been struck over the last few years specifically at how many journalists, especially or public intellectuals, are very much members of their own class and are extremely concerned, perhaps more than ever, what their own peers think about them. So they are actually very vulnerable to social pressure. I think that means you don't want to take risks. If you want to have a good career in intellectual journalism, you don't want to alienate your peers. Increasingly your peers are all taken from a pretty narrow socio-economic base. I think I am lucky to some extent to have a life that's really not socializing with all those peers. My friends are a very eclectic bunch of people, and almost none of them are in journalism or in public intellectual life at all.

What accounts for that? What variable in you or in them has led that to be the equilibrium?

So your non-gay friends you think are in some ways more conformist than your gay friends?

It's just not something I ever wanted to do. I'll tell you this: I'm also just not that big a socializing person. I tend to have friends that are very individual, one-on-one. I tend to hang out with small groups of people. I don't have parties, I don't go to parties. I'm just not a clubable person. I've never easily fit in to any institution that I belong to.

We are more candid with each other, I think. We're certainly more candid about affairs of the heart. There's a... category they're not at all. I'm talking more about my straight peers within my profession rather than my regular non-gay friends in real life. So taking a hetero person such as myself, if I want more of this element at the margin that you have with your gay friends, what's the needed input to produce that?

You mentioned before mushrooms. How do you think that self-medication, whether it be mushrooms, marijuana, testosterone, something else, influences the actual content of your ideas?

Maybe that judgment you became too attached to because you were too proud to let go of it. Taking a moment to take your pride out of it and take your ego out of it gives you some possibility after hours of reassessing your work. Also the thing that happened with blogging is that because you were constantly writing, you had to constantly account for changes in mood, in argument, and in your opinions. Because it charts you day by day, hour by hour, that was another thing that got me to shift my opinions. The testosterone I think does give you a certain amount of energy, and I have to be careful because it's every two weeks, only one cc, it's not a massive amount. But the next two days I have to be careful I don't get too aggressive. So I have to be aware of that too. But we are a function of everything. I could just as well say that eating as I used to sugar and cookies all morning as I wrote gave me this kind of wiry focus. But we're all a mix of chemicals.

I literally have a little book called Ideas, which is ideas I've had when I'm high. I write them down, and then I make sure I look at them totally sober. I would say about three quarters of them are terrible. But I'm just a curious person, I love thinking about stuff. I think my mind can go down a rabbit hole. This was part of the problem with me for a long time. I had terrible insomnia until I found cannabis in my late 30s. Some of us have brains or minds that just won't stop, and it can be an ordeal. So it's not for lack of... I'm not going to not think while I'm on weed. Even when I'm on MDMA, I find for example on mushrooms, it's all theology for me. It's all about God, it's all about the relationship between the Trinity, the possibility of the Incarnation. These things are what I become obsessed with when I'm really on mushrooms or MDMA or the hallucinogens. Yes, it becomes all about God. The more you can look at a topic from different angles, perhaps the more you'll understand it. But I think the main thing is ego. The ego bias: we don't want to be wrong. Certainly if we've taken a position, it's really hard for us to accept that we screwed up.

It was kind of a shock. When I was in elementary school, there's an exam you could sit for back in those days called the 11 plus, which was an IQ test essentially. I was just a kid in elementary school about to graduate and go to high school. I was told I was very smart. I wasn't really aware of it until then. Then I got sent to this super magnet school, which was wonderful, for people from all backgrounds who were over a certain level. It was like Stuyvesant, a kind of magnet school. Within the first month they graded everyone on all the topics and put the list of 1 to 30 in the class on the wall. I was number one, which was another huge shock to me. So that's how I found out. I wasn't really aware I was that bright, but the system found me. This is why I'm a pretty passionate defender of SATs and IQ tests in general, to find kids who otherwise would be missed.

Pretty much the same. We were a little wilder to be honest. We were a little brattier and a little more interested in just comedy. We published a little ramshackle magazine that poked fun at the tops, at the Etonians. We both sort of thought of ourselves as grammar school boys. We weren't part of the elite, but we got in because of our brains. So we were a little contemptuous of one of our peers, for example Boris Johnson, who was also there at the same time. This is what happens in England, it's a very small elite in a way. I also went to high school with him. You have to understand Boris Johnson's administration that the rest of us would not. He's a charmer and a liar, and hilarious. On purpose hilarious, yes. He was an Etonian who showed up a lot of the Etonians. Unlike the other Etonians who came to Oxford and decided to downplay it, wear regular clothes, alter their accent, Boris came and said, 'Instead of fighting it, I'm going to just turn into a caricature of an upper-class twit.' You know, like a Monty Python sketch. He was very ambitious. He wanted to be president of the debating society. I was elected president in my second year, and he had a hard time. But I was very much on his side because I just thought he was a talent. I found him funny, and I could forgive him for anything really. I think that's why, having known that side of Boris and not being intimately aware as my peers in England were of all his shenanigans, all his lies, all the corners cut, all the betrayals he committed, I didn't see any of that and experience it. When I went back to England and talked to all my peers about him, they were so full of bitterness that they had begun to forget his basic charm and that power. I saw that at Oxford.

Reading things to see if I would include it in the book, I basically predicted that I can't see Scotland being part of the UK past another 20 years. That was about 20 years ago. But don't they want to leave and keep the pound and the queen and everything else? Yeah, just to say buzz off to the English. Yes. Where can they go really? If you look at language, every time they've come up to this decision it looks like they're going to pass it, and they always pull back. Because in fact the arguments for Scottish independence are incredibly weak. First of all, the EU would not recognize it. The EU is not going to have Scotland as an independent state because they'd have to deal with Catalonia and other elements in Europe, which the Spanish would veto. So I don't think they will. But maybe I don't know. I do think that Northern Ireland has been effectively turned into non-UK by the trade barrier in the Irish Sea which Boris negotiated. So I think Northern Ireland has definitely taken a step away from being fully in the union the way Scotland and Wales are.

Sorry, that's a ferry boat blasting. Don't worry, we've had trains across our episodes. Yeah. It's a good question. So I think that's what I would say to that. But the Muslim immigration to Britain seems to have gone acceptably well, right?

Why is there so much residual British hatred of Margaret Thatcher?

What do you think are the main disadvantages women face in politics, and are any of those reflected in views on Thatcher?

Name a place, an idea, you tell me if you think it's overrated or underrated. Awesome, yes. I'm ready. Go ahead. Elton John: overrated or underrated?

David Bowie: overrated or underrated?

Charles Dickens: overrated or underrated?

What's your favorite book by him?

Underrated. Why?

Another gay icon to me, who I think is... A lot of people saw that movie Bohemian Rhapsody, but the songs that man wrote, we still sing them, we still hear them, they're still part of our culture. Another incredibly original gay man. For a gay man to conquer rock and roll with no real posturing about it... A lot of the stuff that we celebrate, the first person did it before under much harder circumstances and didn't sit around asking to get a gold medal for it. He came from a very conservative background, and yet he lived his life. All those football fans and... I just love the possibility of cultural mixture and energy that comes from that.

Airplane! Why? I watch it every year because it's just so funny and stupid. As a tonic, if you're weighed down by the world, especially if you're weighed down by wokeness or the kind of incredibly censorious attitude that we have, it's just so great to sit down and watch that every now and again and see what they got away with. The sight gags, I'm a big fan of sight gags and slapstick. So Airplane! I'm not saying it's the greatest movie of all time or anything, I'm just saying it's particularly fun.

Who's the most interesting and underrated feminist thinker?

Now you often have described yourself as an Oakeshottian, right? Michael Oakeshott. How would you approach political issues where it seems you have to choose something ideological and there's not an obvious way to do experimentation? So take, say, the Mexican-American War from the 1840s. How do you think about that? Are you glad it happened? Was it a big mistake? Is the Oakeshottian framework adequate to handle that?

At the state level, do we have Oakeshottian legislators today in America?

It could be the most. I think the experience of having had an opportunity to avoid a catastrophe and then walking right into it is potentially much more emotionally and psychologically traumatizing than just having something happen to you that you had no warning for and couldn't have prepared for, but which knocked you out. The way New Yorkers were traumatized by 9/11 or indeed the first wave of COVID. I see that too. My worry is that the Delta variant means it's also going to mean a lot of death in the next month or two, much more death than might otherwise be the case. We'll have to wait and see how that affects this understanding. In general, as you know, I'm in favor of getting on with life and getting back to normal as quickly as possible. I say that as someone who's particularly vulnerable to COVID. But I've looked at the risks, got my vaccination, and I'm going to live my life with some reasonable precautions. So I kind of appreciate where they're coming from, but I seriously don't understand why you wouldn't take a prudential measure to save your own life when it's available to you for free. It doesn't quite... the system having to subject themselves to it for the first time on the basis of a potential illness. We'll see, won't we? My hope is, and it might be the case, the Delta is going to blow itself out quite quickly as it seems to be happening in Britain right now. So they may not. But I do think there's a chance that they're going to suffer terribly, and suffer on top of that the sense that they could have avoided it, which makes you doubly traumatized.

The culture war has been propelling us now since the 1960s really. That was the sort of thesis of the Obama support: that he could get us past this. He's the first non-Boomer or post-Boomer to really be able to slice through pragmatically this deep right-left, somewhere-nowhere, heartland-coasts divide. With Obama, I look at it and I've really tried in my conscience to see: did he really inflame racial relations or the culture war in ways? I honestly don't think he did. I think he tried quite hard not to, which is in stark contrast of course to the current administration's embrace of critical race theory and the diversity, equity, inclusion agenda across the government and elsewhere. Whereas Obama was really very hostile to those things and resisted those things. But I'm sobered up by the fact that I never fully understood how Obama was as unpopular as he was in many parts of the country. I honestly can see some aspects of his personality could rub people the wrong way, but his core decency always seemed to me quite self-evident. I have to conceive that simply that Americans... I always believed Americans would be willing to elect a black president. I underestimated how willing they would be to be governed by one. So some deep racial stuff I had not fully understood.

Why has wokeness done so well, at least along our coasts, in passing a kind of market test in many of our most productive companies? Now some of it is governmental support, but...

I would go to Rome, which I've never fully really discovered. I never really spent that much time in. I would probably go to Rio. I don't understand South America very well, and there's something about that city that really compels me. And I would go to Ireland, because it's also an island where most of my family comes from, and I've never really spent time in the west of Ireland. I'd like to get in touch with my ancestral roots by glowering at the grim Atlantic Ocean and the steady rain and the bleak sky, and get in touch with their grit and their resilience. That's where I'd like to go. Those places. How's that, Andrew Sullivan? Thank you very much. And again, Andrew's new book, the definitive statement of Andrew Sullivan, it is called Out on a Limb: Selected Writing 1989-2021. Tyler, you lived up to your reputation. Those are fantastic questions delivered with merciless speed and energy. I'm so grateful. Thank you. I'm afraid I didn't do as well as I hoped to, but nonetheless thank you for having me. Great dialogue. Thank you.