I was reading something written  Ryan Holiday recently when a sentence stopped me short. He was discussing Thomas Jefferson, whose reputation has become increasingly controversial in recent years. Holiday’s conclusion was essentially: we used to admire Jefferson; now, not so much.

Really?

It was the “we” that caught me.

I like Ryan Holiday’s work. I’ve read several of his books and respect what he has done to make Stoic philosophy accessible and useful. But lately I’ve found myself increasingly irritated by something in the writing: a tendency toward moral high ground. In Right Thing, Right Now, particularly, activism sometimes seems to emerge as the preferred expression of virtue. It began to feel a little like being told where the good people were standing. Which is rather ironic, because one of the things I value about Stoicism is its insistence that we examine our own judgements.

Perhaps that was why his comment about Jefferson bothered me.

Both Things Can Be True

I loved Monticello when I visited. It’s difficult to spend time there without being fascinated by Jefferson’s mind. He seems to have tinkered with everything—architecture, agriculture, mechanical devices, gardens, books, food. The house feels almost like an extension of his brain.

And, of course, Monticello was also a plantation worked by enslaved people. That isn’t an inconvenient footnote to Jefferson’s story. Neither is Sally Hemings. Nor can we ignore the enormous contradiction between the man who wrote that all men are created equal and the man who owned other human beings.

But I’m not sure why understanding more about Jefferson should require us to think less of him. Surely the point is to understand more.

Jefferson could articulate ideas about human liberty that changed the world and fail spectacularly to live by them himself.

Both things can be true.

And suddenly I realized I was doing something similar with Holiday’s work. I can find a great deal of wisdom in his books and still find some of the moral positioning tiresome. I don’t have to turn a disagreement with one aspect of his writing into a judgement about the writer—particularly a man I don’t know.

That would be falling into precisely the trap I was objecting to.

Where We Naturally Stand

This reminded me of something Gordon and I have encountered repeatedly in our other life, working with people and organizations.

Much of that work begins with preferences: how someone naturally tends to think, communicate, make decisions or approach problems. The purpose isn’t to identify the right preference. It’s to understand where we naturally tend to stand—and therefore what we are likely to notice from there.

Someone who instinctively looks for structure might benefit from becoming more comfortable with ambiguity. Someone drawn to analysis could develop greater sensitivity to the people around them. Someone who values consensus may need to become more comfortable with conflict.

Understanding our preferences gives us a starting point. From there, we can expand our capacities. But there is another possibility.

There is no particular virtue in becoming capable of seeing everything ourselves when someone standing beside us can already see what we cannot. Sometimes the most effective way to expand our capabilities is simply to bring in someone who already has them. Rugged individualism has its limits.

Experience works much the same way. Direct experience can tell us things that observation from a distance cannot. But it remains one point of view, not the whole picture. The plural of anecdote, after all, is not data.

Experience may tell us where to look. Then we need to move around.

Moving Around the Subject

This idea has certainly wandered into Entertablement Abroad.

• The Continental Thread follows civilization through time.
• Hidden Frameworks looks underneath it.
• Fascinating People looks through individual lives.
• Places begins with the landscape, building or city where something actually happened.
• The Five Acts looks for recurring patterns of inheritance, building, crisis, reinvention and accumulation.

They aren’t competing explanations. They are different places from which to look.

Political thought reveals one Jefferson; Monticello another. The people enslaved there reveal another still. Architecture, agriculture, religious liberty and the early American republic each alter the view.

Moving around the subject doesn’t require us to abandon judgement. Quite the opposite. Judgement becomes more useful when it has more to work with.

Perhaps that was what bothered me about Holiday’s “we.” There is enormous comfort in knowing where the group stands. Perhaps that very comfort should make us a little wary. It is awfully easy to borrow a judgement when everyone around us seems to have reached it already.

But reflexive disagreement is no more independent than reflexive agreement. Rejecting the prevailing view simply because it is prevailing is still allowing the group to determine where we stand. And there is its own peculiar satisfaction in imagining ourselves among the brave few who resist the herd.

Nor does broad perspective require studied neutrality. Looking at a subject from several directions doesn’t mean giving every position equal weight, or suspending judgement indefinitely. Sometimes the evidence points strongly in one direction. Sometimes one argument is simply better than another.

The goal is not to stand nowhere. It is to know where we are standing—and why.

Feeling intellectually itchy is not a bad thing. It may simply mean there’s something worth scratching at. But the itch is an invitation to look again, not proof that our judgement is superior.

That’s harder than changing sides.

It means allowing Jefferson’s brilliance and his profound contradictions to remain in the same frame; finding Holiday’s work useful while disagreeing with some of its conclusions. Sometimes greater understanding simply means discovering that the subject is larger than the position from which we first encountered it.

No tidy verdict required.

Up in the Attic

Which, come to think of it, may be what the Attic is for.

There are plenty of orderly shelves downstairs in the Library. Up here, we can pull things out of boxes, turn them over, argue with them a little and see what connects with what. Some ideas will eventually find their proper shelf. Others may wander in, get put down somewhere and remain unpacked for quite a while. A few may turn out not to belong anywhere in particular.

That’s the pleasure of an attic. Not everything has to know what it’s doing here.