Andrew Sullivan on the classics, independent thinking, and the dangers of social media

Executive overview

A shared civilizational inheritance — the classical texts of Greece and Rome — once gave Western culture a common language for debate, persuasion, and moral reckoning. Without it, separate epistemologies harden into warring tribes incapable of conversation. Sullivan argues the classics survive not because of who wrote them but because they are simply better — and human minds, bored by ideology, will find their way back.

The loss of a common culture is not an aesthetic problem; it is a political one — it makes liberal democracy fragile.

Why the classics still matter

• The classics provided perspective before anything else: a sense of how long humans have existed and how slowly human nature changes.
• A shared canon lets speakers assume touchstones — Lincoln's biblical allusions landed because even ignorant farmers knew the texts.
• The diversity within the classics is wider than critics acknowledge: Epictetus (Turkey), Seneca (Spain), Augustine (North Africa).
• The test for inclusion was the test of time, not race — and that test is ruthless.
• Reading them slowly, in their original languages, trained a different kind of mind: patient, deep, capable of nuance.
• Contemporary critical theory has turned the humanities into a subcategory of power analysis, making transcendence impossible — and so the sciences have filled the vacuum.

The cult of contemporaneity

• Assuming the newest is always best ignores that cognitively modern humans have existed for 150,000 years.
• Plagues, often assumed to be ancient, are actually a relatively recent phenomenon — humans existed in smaller, more dispersed groups before that.
• The obsessive pursuit of change has accelerated into what Sullivan calls "liquid modernity" — which is why Marcus Aurelius feels so necessary right now.
• Without a common civilizational inheritance, individuals must construct meaning entirely alone; most lack the time or resources to do so, making escapism rational.

Making arguments within the tradition

• MLK's "I Have a Dream" worked because he used the founders' own words against them — classical persuasion, not rejection.
• Frederick Douglass preceded MLK in this: deep understanding of classical ideals helped realize them rather than discard them.
• Sullivan's own argument for gay rights went through Aquinas's natural law — showing the internal contradictions rather than dismissing the framework.
• John Locke argued for toleration on Christian grounds; things are made new through reinterpretation of the old.
• Persuasion requires engaging the texts your opponents have embraced, not yelling from outside their framework.

Independent thinking and audience capture

• Being contrarian is not the same as thinking independently — contrarianism just inverts consensus; it can be as wrong as conformity.
• The "neocon slide": thinkers who move away from one tribe often can't stop and keep drifting, rewarded by a new audience for escalating.
• Social media creates a feedback loop — only certain kinds of arguments go viral, almost never the nuanced or empathetic ones.
• Dependency on virality has driven culture toward performative tribalism: flags, slogans, and in-group signals replace argument.
• Publishing the best counter-arguments each week (as Sullivan does in The Weekly Dish) is a deliberate self-correcting mechanism.
• Financial independence from institutions creates a buffer — you don't need virality when you already have a direct audience.

The internet as cognitive environment

• Platforms are consciously designed as addictive products; recognizing this is the first step toward limiting their damage.
• Twitter demands 240-character responses to breaking events — a fundamentally different cognitive mode from the deep, slow reading the classics require.
• The old muscles atrophy: the ability to hold a complex argument, master a language, and sit patiently with ideas.
• Sullivan's essay on internet addiction identifies the problem as inseparable from work addiction — the screen is both the distraction and the workplace.
• The solution is strict regimen or abstention; the mind will otherwise be colonized.

Identity, individualism, and the soul

• Strong identity is a form of cognitive constraint — the clearer your tribal identity, the less freely you can think.
• The gay rights movement was never about encouraging people to be gay; it was about encouraging people to be themselves.
• Sullivan's core position is individualist: the individual soul is the baseline unit, and enlarging space for different kinds of souls does not require dismantling civilization.
• Gradual, least-disruptive change — Burke's conservatism — is not "no change" but nudging change to be constructive within the civilization we have inherited.
• Western liberal democracy is historically rare and deeply fragile; Socrates was executed for free thinking; Jesus was executed for denying power is greater than truth.

The enduring case for the classics

• Shakespeare remains compelling because the psyches, misjudgments, and consequences in his work are recognizably ours — there is no time limit on human nature.
• Ellison's Invisible Man addresses race, riots, and police shootings — and does so as great literature, not ideology.
• Ideology bores; the human mind eventually seeks what is actually better; the great texts have survived dark ages before.
• The Irish monks copying manuscripts through the chaos of the early medieval period preserved this inheritance at enormous cost — it is not guaranteed.
• Eliot's line: "We shall not cease from exploration / and the end of all our exploring / will be to arrive where we started / and know the place for the first time." That is what a life of learning in the classics produces.