There are two kinds of intellectual engagement: “gifts,” which shape our understanding of the world, and “antidotes,” which challenge it. We should cultivate both to avoid intellectual complacency.
I like to use this metaphor: some books, essays, theories, works of art are gifts, while others are antidotes. Gifts are our intellectual assets, the foundations of our way of making sense of the world. Antidotes are the opposite: they question, prod, and challenge our beliefs.
There is a famous Latin saying, often attributed to Thomas Aquinas, that goes, “Cave hominem unius libri,” or “Beware the man of one book.” It is usually interpreted to mean that someone who has read only one book—who has learned only one doctrine or one point of view—is unreliable and perhaps even dangerous. My metaphor of gifts and antidotes is somewhat similar but extends to those who have read dozens of books or theories without cultivating the relevant antidotes. The problem isn’t reading one book or one hundred; the problem is reading only books confirming what you already believe.
Cultivating antidotes is not a sign of intellectual timidity or hesitation. If the gifts are good, they should be defended and practiced vigorously. Cultivating antidotes means testing and strengthening the gifts, pruning the weaker ones and keeping the others. It means remembering your own fallibility, not becoming too attached to your beliefs, always choosing the idea that convinces you, rather than the one you’re loyal or simply used to.
Ideas that grow in contact with their antidotes grow strong and free. Even the best of us can become intellectually lazy, clinging to an argument or theory simply out of long familiarity. Antidotes are a cure for intellectual complacency.
The habit of using antidotes also vaccinates us against ideological vanity. We’ve all experienced that moment in an argument when we realize we’re wrong, but pride stops us from admitting it. Some people remain stuck in that place for their entire lives. How can they renounce arguments and theories they’ve defended for years, without feeling defeated or humiliated, even when they’ve realized their theories are flawed?
But if, over the years, they had engaged with the right antidotes, and shared them with their interlocutors, their pride wouldn’t be so deeply hurt. After all, they’ve already proven themselves to be critically alert and curious—not men and women of one book—or only gifts—but connoisseurs of antidotes.
True pride lies in being someone who reconsiders, tests, trains, and restructures their ideas about the world. Cultivating that intellectual vanity is the key: to take proud in the method—knowing how to change your mind and play with antidotes—rather than in any particular theory or conviction.
The story of gifts and antidotes is not at all a story of irony or detachment. Those who constantly balance between seriousness and facetiousness, always witty and never fully committing because they fear appearing naïve or unsophisticated, are not the thinkers I have in mind. They have no gifts to prod with their antidotes. The ideal thinkers I defend take ideas quite seriously and are not afraid to admit they emotional investment in their beliefs—unlike the witty jokesters, who are terrified of defending an argument that is anything but a critique, preferably a sarcastic one.
To be a fan of antidotes, you must first be a passionate seeker of gifts. If you only know antidotes, you’re no better than someone who only knows gifts. The unyielding preacher of gifts and the brilliant dandy of antidotes are both self-satisfied readers of “one book.”
Cultivating antidotes doesn’t mean simply juxtaposing contradictions to savor the contrast or stir up doubt. You need to believe in the antidote a little—enough so that the inoculation against lazy certainties takes effect.
This is why the best reading recommendations combine gifts and antidotes, and the best teachers give us both. Perhaps even when arranging our bookshelves, we should place our gifts close to their antidotes.
Some of you may already have your list of antidotes, while others may not. But we should at least try to draft one, scribbling notes to return to, cross out, and revise. If you’re not ready for a courageous list of antidotes, make a mental note to examine the matter in the near future—it’s a deeply personal exercise.
There’s a passage by Roger Scruton, written in 1982, that is a remarkable antidote to my own rationalist spirit. Defending “prejudice” after Edmund Burke, Scruton writes that “our most necessary beliefs may be both unjustified and unjustifiable from our own perspective,” and that if we try to justify them rationally, we weaken them “for the very reason that they are justified by ourselves.” In other words, beliefs are weaker if justified by our own fragile reasoning; they are stronger and more necessary when rooted in tradition, social life, and ingrained instincts. Beliefs are truly justified when they find their justification in something greater than ourselves. Like prejudices, for example.
What a mistaken theory! But an excellent antidote, which I cultivate with affection. Like Bartleby’s radical and destructive refusal; or Job’s empirically puzzling tolerance; Farinata’s arrogance; John Gray’s pessimism of progress; Eliot’s Ash Wednesday; Verga’s Sicilian fatalism; Agent Cooper’s investigative methods; Kierkegaard’s defense of Abraham; Ishmael’s wandering, knocking off hats; the repressed love of Newland Archer and Clive Durham; Terrence Malick’s hermetic mysticism; and so many other flawed, erroneous, even harmful theories that I don’t have the space to list. Wrong ideas and beloved antidotes.
Beware of those who aren’t passionate about their ideas. And beware of those who, while telling you about their passion, cannot offer a proper antidote, one for which they have some true affection.