Nick Gillespie Q&A in the October Issue of CEI's Monthly Planet

Nick Gillespie | November 16, 2004

CEI and Reason magazine have a long and happy relationship. Throughout the years, CEI analysts have contributed substantially to the libertarian publication’s pages. Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey is a CEI Adjunct Fellow. And Reason’s current ranks include three former CEI Warren Brookes journalism fellows: Bailey, Brian Doherty, and Jesse Walker. Now, to celebrate its 35th anniversary, the magazine has published the anthology, Choice: The Best of Reason, edited by the magazine’s editor, Nick Gillespie, who recently spoke with the Monthly Planet’s editors about the anthology and the changes in the world since he took over the magazine. This is a longer version of an interview in the October 2004 issue of Monthly Planet.

CEI: What inspired Reason to put together this collection? What criteria did you use for selecting the articles?

Nick Gillespie: We celebrated our 35^th anniversary last year—Reason’s first issue appeared in May 1968, the great month of student unrest throughout America and Europe. In December, we published our anniversary issue, as we had already started pulling articles together, and the opportunity to put together a collection and sell it to a publisher presented itself. Part of it was the desire to showcase what we had done in the past decade—particularly in the past five years since I’d been in charge—to show the ethos of the magazine and how it’s shifted, particularly in the post-Cold War era. Putting aside 9/11 just for a moment, the world changed with the end of the Cold War, as has libertarian politics and longstanding libertarian alliances with and attitudes toward conservatives, liberals, leftists, and rightists.

One of the criteria for inclusion is the question of how have stories in Reason reoriented things away from the traditional left-right political spectrum and dealt with issues in terms of choice vs. control, and that shift is more important in post-Cold War era. Historically, it has been said that libertarians have shacked up with the right wing, putting up with the more theocratic, socially repressive impulses because fighting communism was more important. It’s a different world, and we often find ourselves equally at loggerheads with both the Right and the Left over the question of choice vs. control.

CEI: How did you settle on TV comedian Drew Carey to write the introduction and disillusioned leftist columnist Christopher Hitchens to provide the foreword?

Gillespie: One of the “distinguishing characteristics”—to use a Clinton-era term—of Reason magazine is that we cut across the traditional political spectrum of right and left. As a result, we looked for people from various, unexpected places on the political spectrum to write the introduction.

Drew Carey, long a big fan and supporter of the magazine, was an obvious choice; and an interview that another writer and I had with him a few years ago appears in the collection.

Hitchens is a fascinating character. He understands that the political landscape has changed at least twice in the post-Cold War era. The first occurred with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the absolute, ironclad verdict of history against communism and centrally planned command-and-control economies. The second was the rise of Islamic terrorism or Islamism as a counterforce. He has also admired the magazine, and we thought it would be provocative if we had him talk about the magazine at the beginning of the collection.

CEI: In your article “All Culture, All the Time,” you note that, “we have been experiencing what can aptly be called a ‘culture boom’: a massive and prolonged increase in art, music, literature, video, and other forms of creative expression.” In addition to the increased cultural choices available to individuals, what effects do you believe this boom is likely to have on other aspects of life, such as work habits, living arrangements, and public policy?

Gillespie: In a “Simpsons” episode, Homer is chosen as a citizen astronaut and flies to outer space. One of the things the space mission does is conduct experiments on ants. The ants get loose, and one of them says in a word balloon, “terrible, terrible freedom.” In many ways, that is real outcome of the culture boom—terrible, terrible freedom.

For the first time in human history, masses of people can make a huge number of choices. We can choose what we look like—whether through fashion, plastic surgery, or other forms of body modification. We can choose who we live with and who we sleep with, because many of the social and legal prohibitions that barred many types of couplings a mere 20 years ago are now gone. We’re more mobile, and we have more money, and it’s more possible to live the type of life we want, wherever we want. We have this terrible, terrible freedom to pick and choose, to live however we want. That is an incredible liberating, illuminating, and fascinating development. But it’s also a terrifying one for those who are fixated on controlling or regulating other people’s lives—socially, politically, or economically. And it is a very bad time to be one who wants to be in charge of other people.

This explains why figures of authority have to have a very different relationship with those traditionally their subordinates—from priests, politicians, professors, even the stockbrokers. Fifty years ago, stockbrokers were gods—they could impart secret information to you if you were of the right class or had the right connections. Now you can know as much as or more than they do and execute a trade for $8.

This type of shift in power relations is ubiquitous—and it is exciting (though horrifying for some people). But it’s really an effect of this broader-based shift, which comes from technological advances, from economic advances, and in many ways from educational advances.

CEI: What about the charge that culture might become so fragmented that society comes to comprise groups of people who aren’t conversant with each other? This complaint is already current regarding cable news, which, some claim, allows people to tune in only to views that reinforce their own.

Gillespie: People always worry about the loss of a common culture. Even before cable news, you used to hear this charge in critiques about academia. You’d hear that academics were becoming too specialized—English professors, chemistry professors, and physics professors couldn’t talk to each other because they were so fragmented or specialized. For those who believe in a division of labor, such a development is one of the lynchpins of progress. I don’t worry about that too much.