“The long fight simply to know.”

An exchange with Peter Kaufman

27 JULY—It is not often a writer comes along who brings the ballast of history to our contemporary predicaments. This requires a certain intellectual depth and a lot of shoulder in contact with the wheel. Peter Kaufman spent 10 years researching and writing his just-published The New Enlightenment and the Fight for Free Knowledge (Seven Stories). It shows. And can a book on our long, long struggle to establish and defend our simple “right to know” be any better timed—arriving as it does amid our information wars, the wars that rage for control of “the narrative”?

I welcomed Kaufman onto a Scrum webcast some days ago. Our exchange, offered here, is in two parts. Viewers will have to forgive us for this: Just as we were rounding the final bend in our discussion we had a power outage here in the wilds of Connecticut’s Northwest Corner. Kaufman and I picked up where we left off shortly after Comcast finished its repairs. 

Peter Kaufman, those who follow The Scrum’s fortunes very closely will know,  joined James Carden, Marshall Auerback, and me last year as we mourned the loss of Sherle Schwenninger and Steve Cohen, original member of our scrum (when it wasn’t capitalized or italicized). Kaufman wrote the best of the elegies we published (which are here), a piece full of insight and humanity that also managed to bring a certain affectionate lightness to an occasion that was otherwise. He does the same in The New Enlightenment. It is an altogether serious book that is also lively, absorbing, and, written with admirable grace, falls in the “good read” category. Kaufman gives us a superb history of the war we now wage—I especially liked the passages on the French encyclopédistes—Diderot et al. As Kaufman shows us in vivid detail, they, too, in gathering and publishing all the (Western) world’s knowledge then extant, were also fighting a war against the authorities of their time. Then as now the right to knowledge was at issue.  

We need this kind of insight better to understand what we are now called upon to do. 

No, Kaufman and I are not always on the same page by way of what goes on around us and what lies ahead—I do not share his sanguine view of mainstream media and the censorship question, for instance, and he does not share my profound objections as journalists turn themselves into mere clerks serving those in power. But neither did we (or do we) partake of the appalling practice abroad today whereby the only solution for someone with whom one disagrees is excommunication—all conversation canceled, no more cocktail hours. Ours (both) continue. 

— P.L.,

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