TROUBLE IS HIS BUSINESS:

The strange thing, for me, is that people whose sunk costs are not nearly as great as those of Marian Keech's followers will often exhibit precisely the same tenacity in the face of evidence that questions, or might reasonably cause them to question, their preferred narrative.

I suspect, but do not know, that the informational triage required by our hypersaturated media ecosystem--by the overcrowding of what Matt Crawford has called the "informational commons"--makes us more resistant to changing our minds than our ancestors were. (Despite the popular conception of those who have gone before us as narrow, rigid, stubborn.) In their superb book Intellectual Virtues, Robert Roberts and Jay Wood describe the virtue of intellectual firmness, which lies between the opposed vices of rigidity and flaccidity. I can't imagine a better question for me to ask myself in our strange moment than this: How, in this moment, may I achieve genuine intellectual firmness? 

After some reflection on that question, I have decided to adopt a new hero: Ross Macdonald's fictional detective, Lew Archer. My shelter-in-place reading has shifted from tales of horror to the Library of America's three-volume collection of Macdonald's Archer novels, and reading so many of these novels in sequence has me noting certain themes. (One, unrelated to this essay, is that Archer gets knocked on the head a lot, usually by pistols, sometimes by blackjacks. How he doesn't develop CTE is beyond me.) The chief of these themes is this: At some point in each novel, Archer has acquired sufficient evidence to have a clear, sometimes an utterly compelling, sense of who has committed the crime or crimes he is investigating--and then he doesn't stop looking. That's the key. No matter how compelling the narrative he has developed, no matter how neatly the ducks are lining up in their row, he continues to investigate. And then, detective novels being what they are, at some point he acquires new evidence that sends the ducks scattering. That is to say, Archer holds his narrative firmly but not rigidly; he has the perseverance to acquire new information and the humility and honesty to alter his understanding of events in light of the new information he has acquired. 

Lew Archer, I say, should be the hero of our time. I plead with you: Be like Archer. 

The reason Archer couldn't stop with the killer is because he had to try to comprehend the familial and social milieu that had produced the killing.  in so doing, MacDonald offered a devastating--even apocalyptic--critique of the post-war era.  One of the very best reasons to read him today is to recall how awful the 60s and 70s were and how much better America is today. In that sense, Archer is very much a hero of his time, not ours.
Posted by Orrin Judd at April 24, 2020 7:11 AM

Tweet   @brothersjudd