It hardly seems possible that I have been reading Anthony Lewis for thirty-two years. In fact, I haven’t been. I stopped reading him regularly about twenty years ago. True, doing my morning penance with the New York Times, I would glance at his column to see what had set off today’s snit, and sometimes I would even read the column, merely to confirm that, once you knew the occasion for his unhappiness, you knew what he would say without reading the column. But here is the final column, “Hail and Farewell,” and I felt I owed the man a last read. “As I look back at those turbulent decades,” he writes, “I see a time of challenge to a basic tenet of modern society: faith in reason.” Tony Lewis, we are given to understand, has been, over all these years, the champion of faith in reason.
Now the challenge to his faith, he says, comes from religious “fundamentalism” not only of the Muslim variety but also in the form of “fundamentalist Christians, believing that the Bible’s story of creation is the literal truth.” Drop the Muslim reference, and the column might almost have been written in the 1920s at the height of the modernist-fundamentalist controversy. In terms of ideas, not much has happened in Tony Lewis’ world. He seems quite unaware of postmodernism’s perspectivisms, historicisms, and anti-foundationalisms that are today’s chief intellectual challengers to his understanding of reason. Those whom Lewis calls fundamentalists even question “the scientific method that has made contemporary civilization possible.” Richard Rorty, call your office.
Lewis then shifts to the American Founders, who, he says, “put their faith not in men but in law, the law of the Constitution.” So it is not men who had faith in reason but “law and the Constitution [that] have kept America whole and free.” Except, of course, for the Sedition Act of 1798, the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, and the “fear of communism [that] brought the abuses of McCarthyism.” Tony Lewis, let it be said, never suffered from the fear of communism. For him, the Great Terror has always been the threat of American fascism, against which he postured himself and his corporate employer, the Times , as brave dissidents in the fight for intellectual freedom. He concludes his farewell with this: “In the end I believe that faith in reason will prevail. But it will not happen automatically. Freedom under law is hard work,” and so forth. Well, you can see why, over all those years, one felt no qualms about skipping the column.
In the following Sunday’s issue there was an extended interview with Lewis on what he had learned during his thirty-two years of explaining the world to the readers of the Times . The gist of it is that way back then he had thought that, after the Holocaust, people had learned that evil was a very bad thing, but very bad things are still happening, and it has shaken his faith that history is the story of human progress. With such hard-earned wisdom, and a little more attentiveness to ideas that have appeared on the scene since his discovery of the dangers of those who “question Darwin,” it seems that Tony Lewis might at long last be prepared to write a column for a paper so influential as the Times . Yet Lewis is not sure. His, we are given to understand, is the mode of honest and therefore tentative inquiry. He says in the interview, “Certainty is the enemy of decency and humanity in people who are sure they are right, like Osama bin Laden and John Ashcroft.” Presumably he is not sure that he is right about the exactness of the moral equivalence between the terrorist murderer and the attorney general.
Security Blanket
The Times is distinctive, although not necessarily in the way its editors may think. The editorials and op-ed page of the Times are monothematically left-liberal. Among its columnists, there is not one centrist or conservative. Yes, William Safire is sometimes called a conservative, but he is a self-described libertarian. On the social and moral questions that most importantly define our politics, the voices of the Times are univocally on the left. The Washington Post , by way of contrast, is editorially much less strident, and has regular columnists such as George F. Will, Michael Kelly, and Charles Krauthammer. This makes the opinion pages of the Post considerably more interesting. It is a liberal paper that knows it must engage opposing arguments. The Times , on the other hand, is a smug and self-contained world, run by people who seem truly to believe that not only do they publish all the news fit to print but also all the views fit to print, and that what they publish defines what is fit.
“In the end I believe that faith in reason will prevail,” writes Tony Lewis in his farewell column. As with the paper of which he was quintessentially part, almost never in all those years was there a hint of intellectual curiosity about whether there might be a difference”or even an at least theoretical distinction”between his habits of opinion and the conclusions mandated by reason. To a reflexively left-liberal readership, Mr. Lewis provided a regular checklist of what reasonable people thought. For them, it must have made his column a comfort, a kind of intellectual security blanket, during what he calls those turbulent decades. For others of us, it was a good enough reason for skipping his part of the daily penance that is reading the Times.
