by Linda Hirshman

In a recent online volley over the behavior of new fathers, the youthful blogger Brian Reid ("Rebel Dad") struck what he thought would be a fatal blow at me: He published my age: "I've let the Prospect [where I had published the disputed opinion] know that if they'd like to know what young men are really thinking about work and family nowadays, I might be able to offer a slightly different perspective than a 62-year-old lawyer/philosopher." As it happens, despite my dwindling powers, I had managed to predict the Youthful Male's behavior perfectly in his particular case. But the geezer move has caused me to think about the larger issue, and this seems like the perfect place to open it for discussion. What do we intellectuals do, especially those of us in the judgmental trades like philosophy, as the gulf between us and our students, or, in my case, the distance from the readers in their fertile years, grows larger and larger? This is not a reprise of the "omigod, the students think John Kennedy came right after Lincoln" business. My students at Brandeis were smart and well-informed and rarely fell into that stereotyped behavior. But, for example, I always used examples from popular culture in my classroom. For a long time, Jeremy Irons, the "thinking woman's sex symbol," did very well in a thought experiment about risk and desire. Toward the end of my teaching career I found myself groping for names the students would recognize. I wonder whether this is symbolic of larger gaps, not just in matinee idols but in categories of understanding. I am not a relativist, so I do not believe that all capacity for human communication and dialogue is bounded by a fixed set of historical understandings. Thinkers like Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen have done wonderful work in trying to resurrect a core concept of human capacities that should transcend space and time. I used that concept heavily in my book, Get to Work, and a year of solid controversy has not shaken its validity. But transcendence can also be a trap. I wonder about old Jeremy. Maybe he reflects an Anglophilia typical of the American academy at its most hidebound. In these postcolonial times, no one would think of someone whose breakthrough role was as a character from Evelyn Waugh as an idol! Maybe I should have picked a man and a woman. Jennifer Baumgardner is doing terrifically with her book about the privileges and pitfalls of female bisexuality. I don't worry that I would have rejected the idea; I worry, would I have even thought of it? Thanks to the benevolence of TIAA CREF, I don't have to solve the classroom problem. By making it possible to draw teachers' pensions at 59-1/2, they enabled me to think I had dodged the question. But pace, Rebel Dad, the doctors tell me I have the blood work of a 30 year old. And what do we workers of the mind trades do, feeling hale even at 62? So, instead of taking up golf or some suitable geezer activity, here I sit, blogging and writing and book touring. Happily, as we have discussed in these pages, I am so old that the kind of liberalism I grew up on has come back into fashion, just as those very short dresses popped up again in Vogue. I think I'm not completely irrelevant, but who knows? NPR guru Garrison Keillor just published a "memoir" longing for the good old days when there were no openly gay people around. Anybody catches me doing that, pull my hyperlink, okay?