We don’t have the Epstein files, but back in 2015 the contents of his little black book were published, and now New York Magazine has gone through his list of contacts and summarized them. Most of them are incidental encounters — Epstein was a pick-me boy who was straining to get the attention of establishment figures, and some of them were happy to get chummy with a rich guy. Unanswered, though, is how he got all his money; what’s clear and unsurprising is that a great many East Coast wealthy socialites were more than willing to overlook his conviction for child trafficking to go to his parties.
There’s a long section on Bill Clinton, for instance. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of the facts about the Bill Clinton/Jeffrey Epstein relationship exposed, and wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that he took advantage of Epstein’s underage “clients,” and that there’s a whole rotten mob of unscrupulous exploiters thriving in the upper crust. Take ’em all out.
One name on the list jumped out at me: John Brockman, agent for scientific “freethinkers.” Brockman was my agent! I contributed to some of his books! I guess I have a very thin, tenuous connection to one person on the Epstein list. (Don’t worry, I never was invited to any of Brockman’s Edge symposia, let alone got a ride on the Lolita Express. I was very bottom-of-the-barrel in the Brockman universe.) Nothing in NYMag about him was a surprise, but I’m relieved to say that the thread connecting me to that group was very thin.
What seems new, in flipping through the reams of society photos of perhaps the world’s most prolific sexual predator that have been circulating over the past few weeks, is not the powerful and the beautiful who surrounded Epstein, but the intellectuals — the Richard Dawkinses, the Daniel Dennetts, the Steven Pinkers. All men, of course. But the group selfies probably shouldn’t have been a surprise — documents of an age in which every millionaire doesn’t just fancy himself a philosopher-king but expects to be treated as such, and every public intellectual wants to be seen as a kind of celebrity.
Cultural shifts like these require visionaries, networkers, salespeople. Brockman is one. A Warhol Factory kid turned freelance philosopher of science turned literary agent to Dawkins and Dennett and Pinker (and many others), in the 1980s he formed a casual salon of like-minded scientists and futurists that came to be known as the Reality Club, a knock against the poststructuralism then dominant in the academy. In the 1990s, he rebranded it as the Edge Foundation, an organization whose central event was an annual online symposium devoted to a single, broad question. In 2000, it was “What is today’s most important underreported story?” In 2006, “What is your dangerous idea?”
Epstein was a regular contributor, and his plane — to judge from the photographs, at least — was an especially appealing way for other contributors to get to ted. They could also catch Epstein at Harvard, where so many of them taught and where he became so prolific a donor that one whole academic program seemed to be run like his private Renaissance ateliers. Epstein had long described himself as a “scientific philanthropist,” and in a press release put out by the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation announcing its “substantial backing” of Edge, he called it “the world’s smartest think tank.”
Many in Brockman’s Edge community are, or were, inarguably significant figures in the American intellectual Establishment: Freeman Dyson, Jared Diamond, Craig Venter, John Horgan, Paul Bloom (to name a random but representative sample). They are also among the gods and heroes of the Trump-era internet community of “freethinkers,” whom Eric Weinstein, the venture capitalist and regular Edge contributor, memorably called “the intellectual dark web.” The name suggests a self-glamorizing style of dangerous discourse, and as soon as the community was identified, it was criticized as revanchist, an effort to reopen areas of intellectual inquiry — about innate differences between the races, say, or the genders — now considered problematic, at a minimum. But to listen to the IDW warriors themselves — talking about the “war on free speech” as though their universities had sent assassins their way rather than tenured chairs — their crusade seems motivated just as much by a thin-skinned sense of their own world-historical significance. They were special people, deserving of special acclaim and, of course, special privileges.
Many contributions to Edge were plausibly the products of genuinely special minds. Epstein’s were not. In 2008, the year he went to jail for prostitution, the prompt was “What have you changed your mind about?” Epstein replied, “The question presupposes a well defined ‘you’ and an implied ability that is under ‘your’ control to change your ‘mind.’ The ‘you’ I now believe is distributed amongst others (family friends, in hierarchal structures), i.e. suicide bombers, believe their sacrifice is for the other parts of their ‘you.’ The question carries with it an intention that I believe is out of one’s control. My mind changed as a result of its interaction with its environment. Why? Because it is a part of it.”
“Jeffrey has the mind of a physicist,” the Harvard professor Martin Nowak has said, incredibly. But what he really did have was the life of a very rich person — unable to see any world he felt unqualified to enter and surrounded by too many people enamored with his money to ever hear the word no.
At least I can say that I spotted the bullshit of the IDW on day one.
