Reinvent Thyself!

Daniel Boorstin wrote in The Discoverers (1983): "The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge." And, the illusion of knowledge deludes us to this day. Start again! Live the dream! To hell with the naysayers! If this is (fair & balanced) whistling past the graveyard, so be it.

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The Avenging Amateur
By Kurt Andersen

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The financial crisis came about because we got complacent, depending on all-knowing financial experts — mortgage lenders, Wall Street sharpers, the Federal Reserve — to run our system expertly. But then the experts did the same thing, imagining that they had laid off all their risks on other experts. Until finally the last expert down the line turned out to be just another greater fool, and the system crashed.

We still need experts. But we can no longer abdicate judgment to them or to the system they've cobbled together. This country, after all, was created by passionately engaged amateurs. The American spirit really is the amateur spirit. The great mass of European settlers were amateur explorers, and their grandchildren and great-grandchildren who created the U.S. were amateur politicians. "I see democracy," the late historian Daniel Boorstin wrote, as "government by amateurs, as a way of confessing the limits of our knowledge." In the early 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville approvingly noted the absence of "public careers" in America — that is, the scarcity of professional politicians.

Back then, amateur was an entirely positive adjective. An amateur pursuit meant something that one pursued — a field of study, an artistic enterprise, a craft — not unseriously, but out of love rather than merely to earn a living.

Amateurs do the things they want to do in the ways they want to do them. They don't worry too much about breaking rules and aren't paralyzed by a fear of imperfection or even failure. Active citizenship is all about tapping into one's amateur spirit. "But hold on," you say. "I will never understand credit-default swaps or know how to determine the correct leverage ratio for banks." Me neither, and I don't want to depend on an amateur physician telling me how to manage my health. But we can trust our reality-based hunches about fishy-looking procedures and unsustainable projects and demand that the supposed experts explain their supposed expertise in ways we do understand The American character is two-sided to an extreme and paradoxical degree. On the one hand, we are sober and practical and commonsensical, but on the other hand, we are wild and crazy speculators. The full-blown amateur spirit derives from this same paradox. Even as we indulge our native chutzpah — Live the dream! To hell with the naysayers! — as a practical matter, it also requires a profound humility, since the amateur must throw himself into situations where he's uncertain and even ignorant, and therefore obliged to figure out new ways of seeing problems and fresh ways of solving them. At this particular American inflection point, after the crash and before the rebuild, frankly admitting that we aren't absolutely certain how to proceed is liberating, and crucial. I like paradoxes, which is why, even though I'm not particularly religious, Zen Buddhism has always appealed to me. Take the paradoxical state that Buddhists seek to achieve, what they call sho-shin, or "beginner's mind." The 20th century Japanese Zen master Shunryu Suzuki, who spent the last dozen years of his life in America, famously wrote that "in the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few." Which sounds to me very much like the core of Boorstin's amateur spirit. "The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance," Boorstin wrote, "but the illusion of knowledge."

This isn't just airy-fairy philosophy: it's real, and it works. A decade after Steve Jobs co-founded Apple, he was purged by his own board, but after the sense of betrayal passed, and he went on to build Pixar and oversee Apple's glorious renewal, he realized his personal reset had been a blessing in disguise. "The heaviness of being successful," Jobs has said of his firing, "was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." I happen to know what Jobs means: my sacking as editor of New York magazine 13 years ago freed me to reinvent myself as a novelist and public-radio host. Getting fired was traumatic. Finding my way since has been thrilling and immensely gratifying. May America and Americans have such good luck figuring out how to climb out of the holes we find ourselves in now. Ω

[Kurt Andersen graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, where he was an editor of the Lampoon. He received an honorary doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005, and in 2003, New York magazine named him one of the 100 People Who Changed New York. Andersen is the author of several books, the latest of which is Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America (2009).]

Copyright © 2009 Time, Inc.

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