Schwartz on Schwartz

INTERVIEW WITH SAM SCHWARTZ
by Sam Schwartz

Q. Is this a blog?

A. No, it’s an interview. An exchange of views between me and myself.

Q. What’s the secret to a happy life?

A: Aristotle was close. Everything in moderation, even excess.

Q. What’s the secret to good writing?

A. In ascending order of difficulty: 1. Pay attention. 2. Be honest.
3. Put in the time. 4. Stop caring about how you come off. 5. Don’t
let the bastards tell you how or what to write.

Q. Why is Starbucks such a big success?

A. Why did crack kick cocaine’s ass in the 90s? Coffee is a highly
addictive, mind altering drug! Starbucks brews the strongest coffee.

Q. Why do big companies make such bad decisions?

A. Clean air and natural light critical to proper brain function.
Don’t believe me? Catch the next flight to Chicago O’Hare. Call me as
soon as you get off the plane. Tall buildings are like planes. They
have wonderful views but their ventilation systems are inadequate.
Their lights are fluorescent. They are well-lit tombs of the mind.
Most of the world’s worst decisions are made in rooms located on the
uppermost floors of these tall buildings.

Q. What’s the solution to the Israeli / Palestinian conflict?

A. People need to stop thinking of land as being “holy.” Nothing is
holy in an objective sense except, perhaps, other people. If God is
good, God is way too smart to promise land to anybody. So claims to
land on the basis of prehistoric God-promises are just stories.
Stories are great but not worth killing other people over. That’s not
a solution, really, more of a restatement of the problem.

Q. What about the Holocaust?

A. Terrible, but irrelevant. Two wrongs etc. Also: You shouldn’t have
to be Jewish to say this sort of thing in public.

Q. What’s the difference between fiction and nonfiction?

A. Nonfiction is what happened. Fiction is what must have happened.

Q. Come again?

A. Nonfiction is fiction that can pass rigorous factchecking. Fiction
is nonfiction after the names have been changed.

Q. What’s “the eclipse”?

A. The eclipse is that set of facts which can be known, but not
proven. The object of journalism (and science) is to shrink this set
of facts. First you get a hunch or a hypothesis, then you go about
trying to prove it to a certain standard. Hearsay from a “reliable
source” constitutes the fuzzy edge of the eclipse. The reliability of
the source determines the relative lightness or darkness of the fuzz.
Follow?

Q. What’s “the Omega”?

A. The Omega is the total set of publicly known facts. The Omega isn’t
written down anywhere, but Wikipedia is a pretty good approximation.
(I stole this one from Joel Mokyr, the economist.)

Q. What’s “the noumena”?

A. The noumena is that which can be neither known, nor proven. The
black hole at the heart of the eclipse. Ignorance is what happens when
people mistake the eclipse for the noumena. When people give up on
inquiry, give up on trying to peel away the outermost layers of the
eclipse.

Q. Is there a difference between science and journalism?

A. Yes. Good science is about using standardized cases to prove new,
interesting rules. Good journalism is about using standardized rules
to get at the heart of interesting cases. But journalism is about
stories and people, two things that are too complicated for science to
ever understand.

Q. Given the general situation, are there any reasons to be optimistic?

A. For sure. The Internet is mostly a waste of time right now because
the only people who have it are wealthy airheads talking about
products, celebrities, and themselves. You need heterogeneity to have
a good conversation. Once the whole world gets in on the Internet and
everybody starts talking you’ll see some kind of new grassroots global
consensus-making machine emerge. The universal cosmopolitan impulse
runs deeper than anyone realizes, and the Internet is rapidly evolving
a very efficient vehicle for its expression. Loneliness will trump
nationalism; sameness, having found its proper medium, will win out
over difference. Connection will run wider and deeper than ever. In
other words: War will be a much tougher sale when our daughters have
secret MySpace crushes on cute Iranian shepherd boys, who are
listening to old Biggie Smalls compilations and uploading their own
irresistably nihilistic Islamo-fascist raps. I like that example.
Ultimately the real war is fought between power, which is about lies,
and art, which is about truth. The truth isn’t up there. The truth is
down here.