Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind

by Alan Jacobs

In a brilliant essay on the same branches of the online alt-right that Donna Zuckerberg covers, Brian Phillips quotes a compelling line by Emily Dickinson: “The unknown is the largest need of the intellect.” Phillips continues, “I happen to believe that this is true; but the kind of esotericism that thrives on the far right has never had the slightest interest in the unknown. It wants to be told the news it wants to hear.” But this is not a pitfall to which the right alone is subject. Any one of us who denies that we want our assumptions confirmed would be lying or self-deceived. The theater critic Terry Teachout talks about plays that flatter their audience, that reassure them that the beliefs they came into the playhouse with are the ones with which they should leave: he calls this the “theater of concurrence.” The concluding lines of Phillips’s essay make, I think, a fitting commentary on this chapter, because all of us, on some level, want the whole world to be for us a theater of concurrence: “The varieties of false knowledge in this world are infinite; one of the most dangerous is the knowledge that answers desire. Policies begin in dreams.”