There are very, very few things that made more of a sad dent in my weekend than the news that Fareed Zakaria had possibly plagiarized a "New Yorker" article in his recent Gun Control column for TIME.
This is bad news. Such bad news.
Zakaria has occupied a cherished place in my mind for years, somewhere between "professional role model" and "ultimate celebrity crush." (The fact that I conflated those two things, even as a kid, says something about me, I realize.) As a journalism student, I stood in line for hours to get him to autograph my copy of "Future of Freedom," and the moment when he asked me where I was from and I - hit by true inspiration - replied, "Uh, Maryland" remains one of my fondest embarrassing memories. Ha.
I read his column in "Newsweek" religiously all through high school, and admired what I saw as his spirit of inquiry and intellectual fearlessness. This doesn't mean I always agreed with his stance on issues - as a student marching in Iraq War protests I notably didn't - but I liked that he looked at things in a way almost nobody else seemed to.
His reputation seemed unassailable. In a world where (too) many leaders seem to rise to the top by shoveling as much blame as possible onto the heads of those below them, Zakaria seemed like that rarest individual: a successful person who had risen on his merits, who owned his own faults and who earned the respect of those around him.
Needless to say, nobody is that perfect, and some of the views bouncing around Facebook over the weekend seemed tinged with more than the necessary smugness and schadenfreude. I'm going to steal someone else's idea here and point out that modern American society seems obsessed with the cult of youthful genius. We love to find these bright young things and then discard them when they show any sign that they might be capable of human weakness. That might explain some of the nastiness, not that it excuses the plagiarism.
It doesn't help that Zakaria's offense comes at a bad time for journalists, shortly after Jonah Lehrer's murky self-plagiarism and quote massaging "scandal."
I'm not trying to defend the indefensible. One of my favorite commentaries on the issue comes from Eric Garland, who points out that our society tends to trust authority blindly, being incapable of critical thinking. Ouch, but point.
At the same time, Garland confuses the issue because in the end, the blame for these particular lapses lies squarely with the individual authors. It's a bit of a morality tale, really, about two extremely bright and talented people who were brought down by their own hubris, their belief that they were untouchable.
Garland also raises a more interesting point: "They have gone a step too far, instead of stealing ideas from other people – which happens all the time, probably a positive thing in an active culture – to stealing verbatim paragraphs." [emphasis mine]
On to that bit about stealing ideas. Stealing ideas (and then evolving them) is really another name for the fundamental intellectual process by which society moves forward. It's awful, and often people get cheated, but from a base utilitarian perspective the occasional theft of a great idea may be inevitable, even positive.
Unfortunately, ideas are also worth a lot of money, particuarly for public intellectuals. This is where theft becomes a trickier notion. You're not just taking someone's idea and running with it, you're profiting from it. Suddenly the motive isn't intellectual expansion, it's money grubbing. Now it's not debate, it's tawdry everyday stealing. Ideas are worth something, which is why the notion of "intellectual property" evolved in the first place.
That said, I do think that what we consider "genius" is a more collective enterprise than any of us would like to admit or perhaps even recognize. Isaac Newton - one of my favorite geniuses of all time and another one of my weird celebrity crushes (what a sparkling adolescence I had, you can only imagine) famously said "If I have seen further, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants." Interestingly, Newton himself adapted that quote from an idea first raised five centuries earlier by another philosopher.
(Of course, Zakaria didn't steal an idea - that would have been a very different charge. Instead, he stole a particular arrangement of dates, nouns and adjectives - the paragraphs he lifted were basic and banal. At best it was arrogant, at worst, sloppy. If he was an inspiration to me earlier, he is all the more so now - in terms of what not to do.)
This is bad news. Such bad news.
Zakaria has occupied a cherished place in my mind for years, somewhere between "professional role model" and "ultimate celebrity crush." (The fact that I conflated those two things, even as a kid, says something about me, I realize.) As a journalism student, I stood in line for hours to get him to autograph my copy of "Future of Freedom," and the moment when he asked me where I was from and I - hit by true inspiration - replied, "Uh, Maryland" remains one of my fondest embarrassing memories. Ha.
I read his column in "Newsweek" religiously all through high school, and admired what I saw as his spirit of inquiry and intellectual fearlessness. This doesn't mean I always agreed with his stance on issues - as a student marching in Iraq War protests I notably didn't - but I liked that he looked at things in a way almost nobody else seemed to.
His reputation seemed unassailable. In a world where (too) many leaders seem to rise to the top by shoveling as much blame as possible onto the heads of those below them, Zakaria seemed like that rarest individual: a successful person who had risen on his merits, who owned his own faults and who earned the respect of those around him.
Needless to say, nobody is that perfect, and some of the views bouncing around Facebook over the weekend seemed tinged with more than the necessary smugness and schadenfreude. I'm going to steal someone else's idea here and point out that modern American society seems obsessed with the cult of youthful genius. We love to find these bright young things and then discard them when they show any sign that they might be capable of human weakness. That might explain some of the nastiness, not that it excuses the plagiarism.
It doesn't help that Zakaria's offense comes at a bad time for journalists, shortly after Jonah Lehrer's murky self-plagiarism and quote massaging "scandal."
I'm not trying to defend the indefensible. One of my favorite commentaries on the issue comes from Eric Garland, who points out that our society tends to trust authority blindly, being incapable of critical thinking. Ouch, but point.
At the same time, Garland confuses the issue because in the end, the blame for these particular lapses lies squarely with the individual authors. It's a bit of a morality tale, really, about two extremely bright and talented people who were brought down by their own hubris, their belief that they were untouchable.
Garland also raises a more interesting point: "They have gone a step too far, instead of stealing ideas from other people – which happens all the time, probably a positive thing in an active culture – to stealing verbatim paragraphs." [emphasis mine]
On to that bit about stealing ideas. Stealing ideas (and then evolving them) is really another name for the fundamental intellectual process by which society moves forward. It's awful, and often people get cheated, but from a base utilitarian perspective the occasional theft of a great idea may be inevitable, even positive.
Unfortunately, ideas are also worth a lot of money, particuarly for public intellectuals. This is where theft becomes a trickier notion. You're not just taking someone's idea and running with it, you're profiting from it. Suddenly the motive isn't intellectual expansion, it's money grubbing. Now it's not debate, it's tawdry everyday stealing. Ideas are worth something, which is why the notion of "intellectual property" evolved in the first place.
That said, I do think that what we consider "genius" is a more collective enterprise than any of us would like to admit or perhaps even recognize. Isaac Newton - one of my favorite geniuses of all time and another one of my weird celebrity crushes (what a sparkling adolescence I had, you can only imagine) famously said "If I have seen further, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants." Interestingly, Newton himself adapted that quote from an idea first raised five centuries earlier by another philosopher.
(Of course, Zakaria didn't steal an idea - that would have been a very different charge. Instead, he stole a particular arrangement of dates, nouns and adjectives - the paragraphs he lifted were basic and banal. At best it was arrogant, at worst, sloppy. If he was an inspiration to me earlier, he is all the more so now - in terms of what not to do.)
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