Live Updates: Elon Musk to Face Contentious Questions at OpenAI Trial
On his third day of testimony, Elon Musk will be cross-examined by lawyers from OpenAI and Microsoft. His answers on the stand grew testy on Wednesday.
Elon Musk will take the stand for his third day of testimony on Thursday, in a blockbuster trial that could help determine the future of companies racing to dominate artificial intelligence.
Mr. Musk has already spent two days laying out and defending his lawsuit against OpenAI, the A.I. start-up that he helped found and spent tens of millions of dollars funding. Mr. Musk has claimed that OpenAI abandoned its founding promise to remain a nonprofit and that his co-founders, including the company’s chief executive, Sam Altman, took advantage of his donations.
Mr. Musk has spent hours of testimony describing himself as someone who was protecting humanity from the dangers of A.I. He painted Mr. Altman and another OpenAI co-founder and defendant, Greg Brockman, as merely hungry for money.
On Wednesday afternoon, the cross-examination became contentious as OpenAI’s lead lawyer, William Savitt, called Mr. Musk’s trustworthiness into question. Mr. Savitt tried to show that Mr. Musk behaved no differently from the OpenAI co-founders he is suing, pushing for the A.I. start-up to adopt a for-profit model. And Mr. Savitt pointed to evidence that Mr. Musk filed the lawsuit after he founded his own A.I. lab, xAI, in 2023, which has lagged OpenAI.
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who is presiding over the case in federal court in Oakland, Calif., interrupted Mr. Savitt and Mr. Musk multiple times during the cross-examination on Wednesday.
“The classic answer to a yes-or-no question is not so simple,” Mr. Musk said. “For example, if you ask the question, ‘Will you stop beating your wife?’”
Judge Gonzalez Rogers cut him off, saying, “No, we’re not going to go there.”
The sniping is likely to continue on Thursday, when Mr. Musk faces further questioning by lawyers for OpenAI and Microsoft, which is also named in the lawsuit.
Mr. Musk is seeking more than $150 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest financial partner. He is also asking the court to remove Mr. Altman from the board and to stop the start-up’s recent shift to operate as a for-profit company.
The trial could reshape the global A.I. race. OpenAI is a leading A.I. company, and a win for Mr. Musk would also be a win for its competitors, including industry giants like Google as well as young companies like Anthropic and xAI, which has now been absorbed by Mr. Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX.
A loss for Mr. Musk would mean that OpenAI, which is now valued at about $730 billion, would be free to continue its commercial course just as it appears to be heading toward one of the biggest initial public offerings in history.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
Here’s what to know:
High-profile witnesses: Mr. Altman and several other key industry figures, including Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, and Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, are slated to testify later in the trial.
Trial logistics: The trial is expected to take about four weeks before a nine-person jury at the federal courthouse in Oakland. If the jury rules in Mr. Musk’s favor, Judge Gonzalez Rogers, who also oversaw a high-profile lawsuit against Apple over its control of the App Store, will decide on monetary damages and other remedies.
Musk’s social media: Judge Gonzalez Rogers on Tuesday called Mr. Musk, who assailed Mr. Altman on X before the trial, to the bench to discuss whether there should be a gag order preventing him from posting on social media about the trial. “How can we get things done without you making things worse outside the courtroom?” she asked. The judge asked him and Mr. Altman to start with a “clean slate” and “keep things to a minimum” on social media. They all agreed, and Mr. Musk has thus far mostly complied.
Meanwhile, he continues to bleed over the Mandelson affair, triggered by Epstein file details of the Labour grandee’s close relationship with the disgraced financier. The agency that vetted his appointment as envoy to Washington was also concerned about his lobbying firm’s Russian and Chinese clients. Mandelson had also resigned twice from the cabinet over probity matters.
Mandelson has been sacked, but the appointment is a bad meal that keeps repeating for Starmer. It has put his lack of judgement and curiosity, and a passive reliance on “process”, under the spotlight, and he has been found wanting.
Mandarins have told a parliamentary inquiry there was pressure from Downing Street to quickly shepherd Mandelson’s appointment through the bureaucracy so he could take up the role to coincide with Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Starmer, by contrast, told the House of Commons “there was no pressure whatsoever” – a discrepancy that Opposition Leader Kemi Badenoch moved to exploit by trying to refer Starmer to the privileges committee for misleading Parliament. The British media has dubbed it a “sleaze inquiry”, in that wonderfully tabloid way that made Fleet Street famous.
Just as Bill Clinton redefined “sexual relations” during his impeachment scandal, Starmer has opened the word “pressure” to interpretation.
What a civil servant might interpret as pressure from above to implement a decision, no matter what, could also be regarded as a minister’s expectation that their department be responsive and proactive.
As in Australia, the episode suggests the days of mandarins offering frank and fearless advice are well and truly over, and they are instead more intent on pleasing and appeasing their political masters.
On high alert that Tuesday’s (Wednesday AEST) vote could serve as a proxy vote of no confidence, Labour powerbrokers imposed what is known as a “three-line whip” to strongarm MPs to oppose Badenoch’s motion. The punishment for defying a three-line whip can be as harsh as expulsion from the party room.
The motion was easily defeated, but 68 MPs failed to vote with Labour, including 15 who crossed the floor to support Badenoch. Of the 53 who did not vote, some had personal reasons, but others abstained to protest against Starmer.
While the dissidents come from the hard left of the party and are known Starmer enemies, the large number of MPs who failed to fall into line will have the prime minister and his loyalists on edge.
In a party room of 403 MPs, just 80 are needed to nominate a rival candidate and force a leadership ballot. One reason Starmer has retained his job is that a consensus candidate has yet to emerge.
One civil servant who may have been a bit too frank is Christian Turner, Mandelson’s replacement as envoy.
A leaked recording obtained by the Financial Times of a Q&A Turner held with visiting British students in February has the ambassador saying it was “extraordinary” no one in the US had been held to account over their ties to Epstein, while Mandelson and “potentially the prime minister” had been dragged down by the scandal.
Turner told the students that Starmer was “on the ropes” and could be replaced after the May local elections.
In a backhanded compliment, Turner said Starmer was a “stubborn” person and unlikely to quit. We will soon find out how true that statement is.
Andrew Tillett is The Australian Financial Review’s correspondent for Europe, based in London. He was formerly foreign affairs and defence correspondent based in Canberra. Connect with Andrew on Facebook and Twitter. Email Andrew at andrew.tillett@afr.com
Editor: 10,818 words is a challenge to the reader! I recall reading Freud, Biologist of the Mind by Frank J. Sulloway in 1979, Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, Self Analysis by Karen Horney and Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis by Sigmund Freud. And later I read with great interest Frederick Crews essays publiched in the New York Review of Books. It takes time for Amia Srinivasan to arrive at a viable point in her essay, after this interjection exposes her ‘methodology’ as fellow traveler!
As Jake Romm wrote in Parapraxis, a magazine founded in 2022 dedicated to psychoanalysis and left politics, ‘temporalities and geography mix and collapse in the ruins of the crematoria and emerge, reformed, from the barrel of a gun in Gaza.’
Editor: Amia Srinivasan declares the fact that ‘the unconscious never left the scene’
In fact, the unconscious never left the scene. Psychoanalysis tells us that it is the unconscious that sets the scene. What has returned of late is not the unconscious itself, but the felt need, in some quarters, for the unconscious and its workings as a diagnostic tool, as an explanans for the explanandum of irrationalism that seems to be taking hold everywhere. No purely materialist or realist or folk psychological analysis seems to suffice. We need to go beyond talk of parties and platforms; of beliefs, values and identitarian affiliations; of class, jobs, wages and exploitation. We need to speak of phantasies and their repression, the libido and the death-drive, disavowal and displacement, trauma and its disfiguring aftermath. We need to speak of vulnerability: not just the sort that arises asymmetrically from poverty and racism and sexism; but the universal infantile vulnerability that haunts us all – including (and perhaps especially) the most powerful.
To what end? Despite more than a century of debate about the epistemic credentials of psychoanalysis, I take its explanatory power to be self-evident. You may not wish to commit yourself ontologically to some thing called the ‘unconscious’, and you may reasonably object to many of the details of the orthodox Freudian picture. (For example, the idea of penis envy, as Simone de Beauvoir complained, seems to assume precisely what’s to be explained.) But can we doubt that there is more, much more, to our individual and collective lives than that of which we are consciously aware? Do we doubt that each of us encounters reality not directly, but through the thicket of our individual psychic realities, with their stubborn frames and secret desires, the vast sediment of our past histories? That, to put it mundanely but not inaccurately, each of us brings with us a helluva lotta baggage?
The interesting question to my mind is not whether there is truth in psychoanalysis, but whether its truth will set us free. This might seem an odd question for a philosopher to ask. Philosophers tend to be preoccupied with questions of truth and knowledge – and in the specific case of psychoanalysis, whether it deserves the status, as Freud thought it did and Karl Popper thought it absolutely did not, of a science. But insofar as a philosopher, or anyone, is interested in politics – interested, that is, not just in describing the world but changing it – the real question is whether psychoanalysis can liberate us, not just from the violent divisions of our individual psyches, but from the violent divisions and resulting despair of our political moment.
Editor: Amia Srinivasan forgets that the asention of Freud was fraught with problems of his own making: Cocaine papers Hardcover – January 1, 1974 by Sigmund Freud (Author), Robert Byck (Editor), Anna Freud (Contributor) and the time it took to arrive at a realized conceptualization of what Psychoanalysis might be?
There is reason for doubt. Psychoanalysis was born out of a collective retreat from politics on the part of the Viennese intelligentsia. In the 1880s, Austrian liberal hegemony, with its confident ideology of Enlightenment reason and social progress, was threatened by the emergence of new mass parties that channelled various anti-liberal currents – Christian, antisemitic, socialist and nationalist. In 1895, the electorate in Vienna voted for Karl Lueger, a populist antisemite and reactionary Catholic, as mayor. Emperor Franz Joseph, disliking Lueger’s antisemitism, refused to ratify his election; Freud, a liberal and a Jew, smoked a cigar in celebration. But just two years later, in 1897, the emperor bowed to the popular will, and Lueger became mayor, bringing the liberal era to a close. Describing the dying days of 19th-century Austria, the historian Carl Schorske writes: ‘Anxiety, impotence, a heightened awareness of the brutality of social existence … these features assumed new centrality in a social climate where the creed of liberalism was being shattered by events.’
Psychoanalysis, then, was born of a moment not dissimilar to our own: a moment when the image of the human as a rational animal seemed fragile if not preposterous, and the progressive liberalism founded on that image was revealed to be dangerously naive. In turning inwards to the drama of the human psyche, Freud was part of an aestheticised culture of feeling and self-cultivation that resulted from political paralysis. In fin-de-siècle Vienna, what mattered was not objective reality but one’s affective response to it. Freud took this focus on inner feeling and instinct, synthesised it with the scientific rationalism of mid-century liberalism, and created in psychoanalysis a theory that at once offered a powerful reckoning with human irrationalism and a welcome refuge from its terrifying political manifestations.
As Schorske observes, Freud would put psychoanalysis to use in explaining away his own sense of political guilt. In his pivotal work of 1899, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud reports one of his own dreams – he calls it a ‘revolutionary phantasy’ – in which he confronts an aristocratic Austrian statesman only to frantically flee the scene. The dream Freud rediscovers the statesman at a train station, now transfigured into Freud’s blind and dying father, whom Freud must help to piss into a urinal. On display in the dream is Freud’s guilt at having abandoned his youthful ambition to enter politics – to confront and conquer the old, antisemitic world represented by the aristocrat with the secular, liberal values that his father venerated. But Freud reads the dream as merely the phantastic fulfilment of his wish to take revenge on an overbearing father; a father who had once suggested that the young Freud, as he immodestly urinated in front of his parents, would never amount to anything. On this reading, the dream loses its political specificity; it is simply an expression of the universal desire for patricide. The Oedipus complex, the centrepiece of Freud’s mature theory, thus promised to acquit an entire generation of politically disengaged sons from the accusations of their fathers.
Headline:Speaker has Keir Starmer snookered with privileges committee vote
Sub-Headline: Sir Lindsay Hoyle was in jovial mood, bantering about the baize action at the Crucible — then left the prime minister in need of a trick shot or two
Over recent weeks, the prime minister’s ever-more absurd refusal to answer questions put to him at prime minister’s questions has built to a rolling boil. The Speaker has received several highly abusive letters from members of the public blaming him for not making Starmer do better. Terse exchanges between the pair of them at the end of the sessions have become a regular occurrence. There’s not actually much the Speaker can do about it, but the public don’t necessarily know that. Though he can, of course, seek redress in more creative ways.
It was his duty as a “gatekeeper”, he said, to allow the House to decide. Specifically, it will decide on whether Starmer has been knowingly truthful at all times, to the House of Commons, especially in regard to a claim made at last week’s prime minister’s questions, that “no pressure existed whatsoever” on the Foreign Office to rush through Mandelson’s appointment as ambassador to the United States. Sir Olly Robbins, the sacked head of the FCDO, very much took a different view.
Team Starmer will now have to fight extremely hard to ensure the bucket doesn’t become airborne, but it can do nothing about the smell, which is already everywhere. Whatever the outcome, on Tuesday the Commons will debate whether or not Starmer has knowingly misled it — and while it does so, the foreign affairs select committee will hear from his sacked chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, and the former head of the Foreign Office, Sir Philip Barton, will tell them what he knew about Mandelson. All three will be brutal.
Even Boris Johnson, who also had a large majority, didn’t try to prevent his MPs from referring him to the privileges committee. Not merely because it would have been too outrageous but it would have asked too much of them and he knew that many of them simply wouldn’t have gone along with it. Starmer, we are told, is considering enforcing a three-line whip on his MPs to oppose the motion. For the many who have already had more than enough of him, that might push them past the point of no return.
Not that long ago, Starmer was considered a lucky politician. Even after Johnson’s various Covid outrages, by the autumn of 2022 he was miles ahead in the polls and widely considered unstoppable. Then along came partygate, and the rest was highly poisonous history to which Starmer was meant to be the antidote.
That he now finds himself in the same invidious position is almost more damaging to him than it was to Johnson. He has so much further to fall.
(Courts minister Sarah Sackman says drug dealers and career criminals are ‘laughing in the dock’ knowing cases can take years to come to trial. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian)
Criminals will be stopped from “gaming the system” by choosing trial by jury in order to increase the chances of proceedings collapsing, the courts minister has said, promising to enact radical changes to limit jury trials by the next election.
Drug dealers and career criminals were “laughing in the dock” knowing cases can take years to come to trial, Sarah Sackman said, while warning that inaction would be a road to “chaos and ruin”.
Ministers will legislate to remove the right to trial by jury for thousands of cases in one of the biggest and most controversial overhauls of the justice system in England and Wales in generations – promising the changes will significantly shrink the court backlog by 2029.
The Ministry of Justice is braced for a backlash from barristers and the judiciary as it presses ahead with the measures to tackle a backlog of nearly 80,000 cases, which will create a proposed new judge-only division of the crown court to hear some cases.
Sackman said the “stakes are incredibly high” as she prepared to announce early next month that vast numbers of cases will now be heard by judges and magistrates rather than juries, a response to recommendations in a review by Sir Brian Leveson.
Speaking at Wood Green crown court, Sackman said victims of severe sexual assault were routinely told it could take four years for their cases to come to court.
On the morning she spoke to the Guardian, the minister watched a bail hearing for a case involving severe sexual assault, one unlikely to come to a full trial until 2028. Some of the offences in the case, including strangulation, beating and nonconsensual sexual images, took place as far back as 2020.
“I can’t think of a greater responsibility in government than ensuring that our justice system works,” she said. “The sense of duty that I feel is enormous.”
Trial by jury: a democratic right we cannot afford to lose
December 8, 2025
Sian Darlington
The crisis in the criminal courts
England and Wales’ criminal justice system is in crisis. The backlog of unresolved Crown Court cases has reached over 78,000, a record high. To put this in perspective, the Crown Court typically processes between 100,000 and 120,000 cases annually, of which around 30/40% proceed to full trial.
In 2024, under 31,000 Crown Court trials were completed. In the period from April to June 2025, the average wait time from a defendant entering a guilty plea to case completion was 13 months. When factoring in the duration of investigations, it’s unsurprising that many cases take years to reach a conclusion. New cases continue to pile up. As the saying goes, justice delayed is justice denied.
Proposed reforms to jury trials
To address the backlog, Justice Secretary David Lammy has announced plans to limit the right to a trial by jury in England and Wales. Under these proposals, jury trials would be abolished for defendants facing custodial sentences of three years or less. Only those accused of serious offences such as rape, murder, or manslaughter, or cases that meet a specific “public-interest” test, would retain the right to a jury trial.
These recommendations stem from a review of criminal courts conducted by former judge Sir Brian Leveson in July, commissioned due to the significant backlog. The government claims that removing the jury aspect from trials could cut trial times by around 20%.
Historical and constitutional importance of jury trials
The proposed change has sparked controversy owing to historical and constitutional significance. The principle of trial by jury dates back to the Magna Carta of 1215, which declared that no free man could be punished except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. At the Old Bailey, a marble plaque commemorates Bushel’s case of 1670, in which a jury refused to convict two Quakers of unlawful assembly, despite judicial pressure and being locked up without food or water. This case helped establish the right of juries to reach verdicts according to their convictions and confirmed that jurors could not be punished for their decisions. In short, juries safeguard against arbitrary rule, ensure community participation and provide a check on the state’s power.
The risks of judge-only trials
Eliminating jury trials removes a core safeguard from the criminal justice system, presenting several dangers:
Loss of independent public judgment. Without a jury, all fact-finding is performed by a judge, increasing the risk of unchecked institutional bias and decisions that fail to reflect community standards. It is perhaps unsurprising that, historically, the abolition of jury trials has been a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.
Increased risk of wrongful conviction. Blackstone’s maxim, “better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent suffer,” underscores the importance of multiple perspectives and group deliberation in preventing individual mistakes. In judge-only trials, a single error or assumption could determine the outcome.
Reduced public confidence. Jury trials visibly demonstrate that justice is delivered by the people. Juries bring everyday reasoning and common sense into the process. Judges, relying on evidential and legal interpretation, may miss the human context and social realities of a situation.
Increased risk of discriminatory outcomes. Diverse juries help dilute individual bias. A single judge, whilst well-intentioned, may unconsciously reflect their own bias. Research suggests that limiting jury trials disproportionately impacts black, Asian, and minority ethnic people, both defendants and victims, where jury trials may be a glimmer of hope in a system where ethnic minorities are over-represented. Lammy’s own 2017 review of racial inequality in the justice system emphasised the importance of juries in making the system more legitimate particularly for minority groups: “Juries deliberate as a group through open discussion. This both deters and exposes prejudice or unintended bias: judgements must be justified to others”. The judiciary in England and Wales is neither sufficiently diverse nor representative. In 2025, while black, Asian, and minority ethnic people make up around 22% of the population, they make up only 11% of court judges.
In short, the implementation of judge only trials remove a key democratic safeguard against error, abuse and unfairness.
Underlying causes of the backlog
There is also doubt about whether the proposed reforms will achieve their intended goal of reducing waiting times. The backlog is not simply due to the suspension of trials during the Covid-19 pandemic or reduced operations due to social distancing. Rather, it is the result of years of chronic underfunding. Since 2010, the criminal justice system has faced deep budget cuts which have resulted in fewer judges, court staff, and legal aid practitioners, the closure or sale of court buildings, reduced sitting days, and less investment in digital systems. Meanwhile, the number of cases has risen, and technological advancements have made cases more complex and resource-intensive, leading to longer trials.
To put it simply, demand has gone up, capacity has gone down, and the system has no spare resilience.
Potential impact of the proposed changes
Because jury trials require more time, for selecting jurors, longer deliberations, and more procedural steps. Removing juries from certain cases may speed up proceedings. Theoretically, this could clear simpler or less resource-intensive cases more quickly. However, it is unlikely to be sufficient and may even prove counterproductive. The problems stretch far beyond the court system. Delays in pre-trial procedures, poor logistics (such as prisoner transport issues), the increased complexity of serious cases due to technological advances, and staff shortages across the entire system, police, prosecution, defence, and probation. Eliminating juries does not address these deeper structural problems. Transferring cases to judge-only trials could simply shift the bottleneck to lower and mid severity cases, rather than resolve it.
Lammy’s plans include a major increase in court capacity, with an additional 1,250 sitting days. However, increasing the number of sitting days is not in and of itself a solution. There are already shortages of judges and lawyers to staff the Crown Court, with a shrinking pool of criminal justice practitioners.
There is also a risk that increased conviction rates from judge-only trials could put further strain on the already overcrowded prison system, especially if the volume of convictions rises. Solutions must also address pressures on the prison system.
Criticism and alternative solutions
Legal bosies and politicians widely oppose the reforms. The Bar Council cautions that removing the right to a jury trial could exacerbate the crisis in the criminal justice system. According to Bar Council Chair Barbara Mills KC: “The current system is capable of working if sufficiently resourced. Funding for justice should be in line with the demands made of the system”.
Mark Evans, president of the Law Society of England and Wales, has described the proposals as an “extreme measure” that go “far beyond” Leveson’s recommendations, stating: “This is a fundamental change to how our criminal justice system operates and it goes too far”.
A survey of Criminal Bar Association members found that 88.5% oppose the creation of new “swift courts.” Opposition extends beyond legal professionals; Labour MP Karl Turner labelled the proposals “undemocratic” and misleading, and six Labour MPs, including former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, have signed a Commons motion against them.
A 2024 survey of 1,000 members of the public found that 75% believe the UK should retain jury trials. The majority considered jury trials to be fair (51%) and trustworthy (60%), and felt that more diverse juries are fairer (61%), with half believing juries should reflect the communities they serve.
Alternative solutions to ease the backlog have been suggested, such as diversion programmes for first-time, low-level offenders, who would, after admitting responsibility, avoid trial or prison and instead pay compensation, engage with victims, undergo rehabilitation, behaviour management, or training. Other recommendations include allowing judges to sit as many days as they are available, offering up to one third credit for early guilty pleas, extending District Judges’ sentencing powers to two years’ imprisonment, and greater use of cautions for low-level offences.
Conclusion
The right to a jury trial is not a luxury to be sacrificed for expediency. Dismantling it risks undermining the principles of justice, fairness and public confidence which are central to a democratic society. There is a crisis in our criminal courts that is real and that is urgent. The solution lies not in stripping away democracy, but in adequately funding a system that has been allowed to decay through years of neglect. The widespread opposition from those who work daily within the system should not be disregarded. While justice delayed is deeply troubling, it is far preferable to justice denied through a fundamentally weakened system. There are alternative measures available to address the backlog without sacrificing the constitutional safeguards that have protected British liberty for over eight hundred years.
Editor: Mr. Robert Colvile does not confront the fact British Political Dissidents, who await trial for Political Speech, against the Zionist Faschist States Genocide! Starmer is the front man for this exercise of jurisprudential chicanery. Colevile’s strategy is to muddy the waters just enough to make it worth his time, to chatter at lenkth, and ignight the animus of his auidence?
Rust Hills, the celebrated and storied fiction editor of Esquire, in that magazine’s last golden era as a publisher of great literary fiction, died in August 2008, at the age of 83.
Rust Hills edited, befriended and brought to American readers a generation’s worth of first-rate literary talent. Among the writers Rust Hills edited and encouraged were James Salter, Jim Harrison, Richard Ford, Bruce Jay Friedman, Annie Proulx, Raymond Carver, Thomas McGuane, Jayne Anne Phillips, Francisco Goldman, Robert Stone, Ann Beattie, and Tobias Wolff.
From the 1950’s well into the 1990’s, Rust Hills’ name, his wide literary appreciation, his?at times courtly, remarkably convivial, and decidedly mid-century public self?was not only a significant presence behind American’s understanding of what extraordinary fiction looked like; but he was, as well, a generous, loyal, fastidious (and occasionally infuriating) blue-pencil editor, who month-upon-month inspired young story-writers and novelists in the direction of their very best work.
Rust Hills was perhaps one of the last of a great breed of New York fiction editors who once enriched our reading and cultural life.
Join Will Blythe, Byron Dobell, Lee Eisenberg, Richard Ford, Beverly Lowry, Terry McDonell, and James Salter, as they pay tribute to Rust Hills.
photo of Rust Hills by Nancy Crampton
About Will Blythe
Will Blythe is the author of To Hate Like This is to be Happy Forever, and a former colleague of Rust Hills at Esquire.
About Byron Dobell
Byron Dobell was the managing editor of Esquire in the Sixties when Rust Hills was its fiction editor. He was also editorial director of New York magazine, managing editor of Life, and editor of American Heritage. He is now a portraitist.
About Lee Eisenberg
Lee Eisenberg is a former editor-in-chief of Esquire. His most recent book, The Number, a New York Times bestseller, was published in 2006.
About Richard Ford
Richard Ford is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Independence Day and the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in short fiction.
About Beverly Lowry
Beverly Lowry is the author of six novels and three nonfiction works, including Crossed Over. She teaches at George Mason University, and credits Rust Hills with her start in publishing.
About Terry McDonell
Terry McDonell worked with Rust Hills at Esquire, where he was editor in chief from 1990 to 1993. He is now Time Inc. Group Editor, overseeing Sports Illustrated and a number of other magazines and websites; and serves as president of the board of the Paris Review.
About James Salter
James Salter is a novelist (A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years) and short story writer (Dusk, Last Night) many of whose stories were published in Esquire when Rust Hills was literary editor. He won the PEN/Faulkner in 1989.
The reader of Bret Stephens latest what to name it?
University administrators sometimes ask how their institutions can best serve democracy. For decades, many believed that their role was to serve as instruments of social change. Diversity, equity and inclusion programs, especially in hiring and admissions, were one part of the tool kit. Politicized academic departments, often with the word “studies” attached to them, were another.
A new report from a committee of Yale professors takes a different view. The purpose of the university, it says quite simply, is “to preserve, create and share knowledge.” The method is academic excellence. To the extent that universities are supposed to serve democracy, it’s by becoming considerably more meritocratic.
Editor: Reader explore Mr. Stephens’ educational portfolio via Wikipedia
Bret Stephens was educated at the University of Chicago, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts (BA) with honors in 1995, and the London School of Economics, where he earned a Master of Science (MSc). He attended boarding school at the Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts.
Editor: Reader be sure to read McGeorge Bundy’ reviews of Buckley’s ‘God and Man at Yale’ from November 1951, as a kind of model that Stephens might have attempted to model his latest diatribe: except his political/intelectual ignorance got in his way!
The Attack on Yale
“God and Man at Yale, written by William F. Buckley, Jr., is a savage attack on that institution as a hotbed of ‘atheism’ and ‘collectivism.’ I find the book is dishonest in its use of facts, false in its theory, and a discredit to its author.”
Editor: M.F. Burnyeat supplies to the reader, of the political present, in the New York Review of Books of 1985, Stephens political precursors… that even such a fellow traveler as Francis Fukuyama has abandoned ship for ‘Liberalism’ ?
Editor: M.F. Burnyeat eviserats the Strasssian Cadre, from October 10, 1985Q
Glad as I am to have helped Professor Cropsey understand the book he edited, I beg to remind him that not everything written in code deserves the effort, be it large or small, of deciphering the author’s meaning. The intention of being profound is not the same as a profound intention.
Likewise, while the effort which has been devoted to translating Strauss into various languages is evident from the (incomplete) listing in the bibliography to Studies in Platonic Philosophy, this effort has not been rewarded by the emergence of a following, let alone a cult like that which Strauss and Straussian teachers have managed to create in the US. For example, Strauss in Italian has been received with sustained and often hostile criticism, which is documented by P. Taboni in Studi Urbinati 48 (1974), pp. 191–220, and G. Giorgini in Il Mulino 33 (1984), pp. 396–416. In fact, the hypothesis of “Mr. Strauss’s charisma” (a phrase to be appreciated by initiates who have read Strauss on Weber) seems to be amply confirmed by Professor Jaffa’s letter.
Let me then assure Professor Jaffa that, whatever the historical genesis of his belief in the meaningfulness of the great questions, there are lots of non-Straussians who dispute the fact-value dichotomy and who have never even been tempted by the historicist fallacy as he describes it. What has Jaffa been reading for the past forty years? He illustrates non-Straussian political philosophy by quoting one statement from a book published in 1922 and inventing for it a positivistic meaning which, in its context (p. 277), it does not have. He surely has had time to catch up with the 1942 reprint of Becker’s book, whose preface states that the brutalities of Nazism have enabled men once more to believe that “liberty, equality, fraternity” and “inalienable rights of men” are phrases that denote realities.
Becker was interested in the conditions which make certain beliefs possible (a worthwhile and important inquiry, which need not lead to relativism). He meant that in 1942 it had become possible to return to a faith that the nineteenth century had lost. In his humane, gentlemanly way he would perhaps have wondered at the intellectual environment and educational influences which enabled Jaffa in 1959 to write that the differences between Lincoln and Aristotle on the justice of slavery are more apparent than real, on this basis commending to his twentieth-century readers the proposition that in circumstances of economic scarcity it could be just to sanction the ownership of slaves (Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided, Doubleday, 1959, pp. 342–346). So much for Jaffa on natural right as “an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times.”
The manner in which Jaffa commends his proposition about slavery can be compared to the manner in which Strauss commends to his readers the proposition that the just citizen is one who helps his friends and harms his enemies: by exegetical pleading rather than by independent argument. We are not given reasons why we should believe these propositions true, only reasons why Lincoln/Aristotle/Xenophon’s Socrates should be thought to have believed them true. Disturbing recommendations with far-reaching political consequences are to be accepted on the strength of nothing more than a systematic misreading of “old books” (Jaffa’s understanding of Aristotle is abysmal). No wonder Jaffa appeals to the tablets of law brought down by Moses from Sinai. But no wonder also that my review, when considering the enormous influence of Strauss and his ideas in the US, should call attention to the presence of a Straussian on the National Security Council, which directs the work of the CIA and advises the President on his dealings with “enemies.”
The point, as I expressed it, was that “something more than an academic quarrel is taking place” when Strauss defends his eccentric views. His misreadings of old books are not merely influential. They could have consequences in the real world of politics. If I had been writing a critique of monetarism, showing it to be an ill-conceived theory derived by special pleading from data inadequately grasped, it would not, I submit, be McCarthyite to note the presence of a leading monetarist among the President’s economic advisers.
We need not debate “the precise sense” of the term McCarthyite (that rhetorical flourish merely reveals the imprecision of the writer’s sense). For Professor Bloom’s letter is itself a prime example of Straussian hermeneutics. The idea of a Straussian political conspiracy was hatched in Bloom’s mind; it appears nowhere in the text of my review. Nor did I argue, “Carnes Lord served in the National Security Council, therefore he lacks scholarly integrity.” (For the record, Lord’s published work shows him to be a better scholar in the field of ancient political philosophy than either Strauss or Bloom.) Would it be McCarthyite to add that Bloom’s systematic misreading of my text is designed to have practical consequences?
The saddest feature of Bloom’s response is his apparent inability to distinguish between criticism and persecution, irony and malice. Rather than give a reasoned reply either to my essay or to Charles R. Kesler’s calmly argued critique in the National Review, he immediately divides the world into friends and enemies of the Straussian truth. The same “paranoid logic” (to borrow Bloom’s precise phrase) is evident in Professor Cropsey’s letter. Never mind that my review was gentleness itself compared to the scorn and derision with which Strauss reviewed Collingwood, for example, or Eric Havelock. The Master must be sacrosanct; he is too serious a thinker for reasoned discussion, not to mention David Levine’s cartoon.
It is all so unlike Strauss’s hero (and mine) Plato, who believed that the essence of philosophy is to be found in argument and discussion infused with irony and playful levity, and who surrounded himself, in the Academy he created, with men who disagreed with his ideas and did their best to refute them. That is why I put quotation marks round the word “philosopher” as it occurs in Straussian writings. Cropsey may be indignant but Strauss’s conception of what a philosopher is stands so far from Plato’s that it would be misleading to appear to accept that they are talking about the same thing. For the same reason I am happy to acknowledge that I belong to the “conventional establishment” consisting of readers of Plato since the fourth century BC who have found in the expressed meanings of Plato’s dialogues the paradigm of great philosophy.
This brings me to the arguments of Professors Weinrib, Pangle, and Orwin—and all honor to them for replying with arguments, at least on questions of interpretation—about the role of the philosopher in Plato’s Republic.
Weinrib’s argument supposes that one can derive or discern a general principle or definition of justice from a single example of just action. This is a mistake; a mistake, moreover, of a type which Plato’s Socrates is constantly correcting (e.g., at the beginning of the Euthyphro). The philosophers’ undertaking to rule the ideal city does fall under the principle of helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies, but it also falls under thirty-one other principles, including Thrasymachus’s definition of justice as serving the interests of the stronger. Thus the nonphilosophical majority is the largest and so the strongest group in the city, and Socrates has already shown how their interests will be best looked after if they are governed by philosophers. By parity of reasoning Weinrib should conclude that Thrasymachus’s definition “remains decisive” despite being the main target of Socrates’ criticism both in Book I and in the remainder of the Republic.
The truth is that to discover what principle of justice motivates the philosophers to rule it is necessary to read Plato rather than Strauss. In the context we are considering Socrates does not simply say that it is just for the philosophers to undertake the tasks of government. He explains why it is just, as follows:
It’s not the concern of law that any one class in the city fare exceptionally well, but it contrives to bring this about in the entire city, harmonizing the citizens by persuasion and compulsion, making them share with one another the benefit which each person is able to bring to the community. And it produces such men in the city not in order to let them turn whichever way each wants, but in order that it may use them in binding the city together.
(Republic, 519e–520a; Bloom’s translation, with corrections)
This implies that the claim on the philosophers arises from the impartial justice of a set of social arrangements which requires everyone, without exception, to contribute what they are able to contribute to the good of everyone else. (If the philosophers are able to contribute more than other people; so be it: they will be the first to recognize that it is only just that they do so.) This principle of everyone doing what they are best suited to do to the benefit of everyone else is the principle established in Book IV of the Republic as constitutive of the justice of the ideal city. We have no alternative but to accept it as Plato’s answer to Weinrib’s question “Under what principle of justice is it just for the philosophers to rule?”
Besides, from Plato’s point of view Weinrib’s answer has the priorities the wrong way round. The citizens of the ideal city do not benefit each other because they are friends; rather, they are friends because they benefit each other (Republic 462a ff.)
So much for the question whether the philosophers can be induced to rule in the ideal city itself. Professors Pangle and Orwin are quite right that the passage under discussion presupposes the ideally just city already in existence. In a state which is not run for the benefit of all but only for the mutual advantage of some group of “friends,” there is no social justice to make claims on the philosopher to participate. Accordingly, I did not argue, as Pangle and Orwin imagine, that the passage shows that the ideal city can come into existence. I argued that, when correctly understood, the passage does not show, as Strauss imagined (The City and Man, p.124), that the ideal city cannot come into existence. I was rebutting Strauss’s contention that the ideal city is intrinsically impossible, because the philosophers could not be induced to rule. Pangle and Orwin appear to agree with me, against Strauss, that they could be induced to rule if the ideal city is already in existence. In which case we have to look elsewhere in the Republic to decide whether Plato means us to think that the ideal city could not come into being.
Socrates says emphatically at 499d that it is not impossible that somewhere, sometime, a divine inspiration should give those in power a passion for philosophy or that some necessity should constrain one or more philosophers to take charge of a city; perhaps it has already happened far away or in the distant past. As in the passage discussed above, Socrates insists that a philosopher will take part in politics only with reluctance and from necessity, i.e., because he sees compelling reasons to do so. The compelling argument will be different from the argument from social justice which constrains the philosophers who have been educated within the ideal city, but that difference provides no basis for impugning Socrates’ sincerity when he asserts here, as elsewhere, that it is possible for Utopia to get started. The ideal city will get started by one argument and continued by another: there is no logical absurdity in that, merely the difference between an argument about preserving justice and an argument about bringing it into being.
If Pangle and Orwin reply that the passage they quote implies that it would actually be unjust for philosophers who have not been educated in the ideal city to take part in the launching of Utopia, the answer is that the original Greek implies no such thing. There is a difference between the philosophers’ not having a duty to take part in politics and their having a duty not to take part. Bloom’s translation, used by Pangle and Orwin for the second sentence of their quotation, may suggest the latter, but the former would be more adequate to Plato’s Greek. This is not the place to discuss the nuances of a translation (where Bloom writes “has justice on its side,” Plato is not using his normal word for justice but a more archaic one, appropriate to the situation he is describing in which social justice does not yet exist), but the substance of the point I am making is confirmed at 496d, where Socrates gives as the reason why a philosopher will keep out of the present-day politics of actual cities the lack of “an ally with whose aid one could safely champion the cause of justice.” The consideration is conditional. It would lapse if an ally was found with enough power to help make justice real. (I wonder whether Weinrib believes that a Platonic philosopher would find many such allies in the present administration of the US.)
Weinrib, however, has a more general argument for supposing that Plato does not mean what Socrates explicitly says in the various passages we have now examined. He appeals to Plato’s Phaedrus and to the Seventh Letter as favoring Strauss’s approach to “the meaning” of a Platonic text rather than mine. Strauss had the same thought (The City and Man, pp. 52–54), though he wisely refrained from mentioning the Seventh Letter, which may be a forgery. But Strauss had to use Straussian hermeneutics on the Phaedrus to get that dialogue to justify using Straussian hermeneutics on other Platonic texts. An appeal to the Phaedrus does nothing to extricate the Straussian approach from the vicious circularity with which I charged it.
Platonic scholarship urgently needs a decent understanding of what the Phaedrus means to say about writing. But that understanding will require literary methods more sophisticated than any that Strauss purveyed. Nor can it be assumed in advance that the Phaedrus aims to tell us how to read the Republic. One of the many objectionable features of the Straussian approach is the blunderbuss way it treats all dialogues alike. In place of the scintillating variety which Plato’s artistry created, Strauss puts “the Platonic dialogue” and a uniform Maimonidean recipe for decoding its hidden meaning. And yet, if Professor Gordis is right, this whole saga of misreading began with a misreading of Maimonides.
In considering this, the last but certainly not the least important letter, we should distinguish two Straussian claims:
(1)The Guide of the Perplexed is an example of “esoteric literature,” whose message is “written between the lines.”
(2) The message between its lines is that philosophy and religion cannot be reconciled.
I did not endorse claim (2), but wrote of Strauss “having, as he thought, discovered” that Maimonides meant the opposite of what he said; Gordis truncates the relevant passage in my review, omitting “as he thought.” Nevertheless, Gordis’s confirmation of my skepticism about claim (2) is a sufficient answer to Pangle and Orwin’s complaint that I neglected Strauss’s treatment of “the theological-political problem.” There is a limit to the number of confusions one can tackle in a single review.
As regards claim (1), however, I plead guilty. I was impressed with the fact that Maimonides does—Gordis seems not to deny this—instruct the learned reader how to gather his meaning from hints, indications, and deliberate contradictions. For example, the seventh cause of contradiction is the following:
In speaking about very obscure matters it is necessary to conceal some parts and to disclose others. Sometimes in the case of certain dicta this necessity requires that the discussion proceed on the basis of a certain premise, whereas in another place necessity requires that the discussion proceed on the basis of another premise contradicting the first one. In such cases the vulgar must in no way be aware of the contradiction; the author accordingly uses some device to conceal it by all means.
(p. 18 in the Pines translation)
Two pages later Maimonides tells us that contradictions from this seventh cause are to be found in The Guide of the Perplexed. Strauss certainly has more to go on here than he has with Plato. But I should be only too happy to have a critic like Gordis take me through the Guide explaining in detail how and where Strauss has got it wrong.
Meanwhile, readers who have found much of this polemic distasteful can recover their good humor by reading a short story by Oscar Wilde entitled “The Sphinx Without a Secret.”
Editor: As impressive as Mr. Stephens academic record appears, he is by his own admission not just a Zionist Loyalist, but former editor of the Jerusalem Post! Yet the reader arrives at Stephens expression of teped doubt framed as: But is it enough? I have my doubts. A wan pathtic riff on Martin Luther? Its hard to be patient with Stephens as diagnotician of the problems at Yale, that blossoms into Sebastian Venable’s Garden!
Editor: The final paragraphs of Stephens diatribe: The as if here is that Stephens, a newspaper columnist and perenial scold, somehow posses in great quantity the wisdom of the ages, that has eluded the Educators of the political present? Stephens possesses what these Educators do not, hubris!
Either those programs must change or universities should look more broadly for intellectual talent. The road to wisdom cannot lie in the indentured servitude of graduate-school education, capped by an unread (and frequently unreadable) dissertation.
Finally, universities will struggle to reform and improve themselves if they can’t recover a sense of what a university is for. That’s not just a credentialing agency — their de facto current role — or even a knowledge factory, which is the Yale committee’s aspiration. It’s something altogether deeper: a place where the universe of knowledge connects; where sustained engagement across multiple disciplines, enlivened by a genuine contest of ideas, nurtures the capacity for mature independent thought; where the rigor of a difficult education, enforced by a realistic prospect of failure, puts sharp young minds on a path to originality and self-understanding.
I doubt that the Yale committee would have been convened, much less produced its excellent report, if the decline in public trust hadn’t been matched by the Supreme Court ruling effectively ending affirmative action in college admissions, and by the Trump administration’s blunderbuss assault on universities. The first helped dismantle a bureaucratic infrastructure that, in practice, undermined academic achievement in admissions and hiring; the second put the fear of God in university leaders who had been afraid to rattle a campus consensus.
It shouldn’t take blunt political pressure to get universities to reform and redeem themselves. Here’s hoping they can act before they are acted upon.
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