Couldn’t agree more. Subject classification by algorithm feeds into general dumbing down which then erodes the culture’s epistemic foundation and hence, the everyday niceties of democratic accountability that keep us kinda honest. It’s a helluva harder to rebuild or even to maintain the foundation than it is to tear it apart. We’re all getting a ringside seat to that. The very least we can do is witness and speak out. This librarian appreciates your work, Dan.
At some visceral level, I remain agog at how seriously Yarvin is taken. Maybe it comes from my having heard of him long ago, before he hit the big time. My image of him is thus fixed as being some obscure guy with tedious blog bloviations.
I would naively have suggested it would be nice to have a site explaining basically "He Doesn't Know What He's Talking About". But nowadays I'm cynical so as to believe that it wouldn't do any good, he'd just say it's The Cathedral unable to cope with his truth.
Another REAL historian I admire is Timothy Snyder, the former Yale history professor who has now decamped to the University of Toronto. His book, On Tyranny, is instructive for the current moment in US politics.
Dan. Thank you. I love reading your cogent content and all-too-relevant pieces. And I applaud your efforts to counter the fire hose of mid- and disinformation that we face every day.
Thanks, Eileen. And let me take the opportunity to apologize to readers for writing so little of late. I've been travelling like crazy. But that will be over in a couple of weeks and I have lots of writing planned. Thanks for your patience.
If we could mobilize it and figure out how a regime of punishments might work, I'd stump for adding "Historical Malpractice" to the Criminal Code and volunteer to work in the prosecutor's office. Then, we could transplant it to the ICC and arrest some of these clowns when they travel to give 'lectures' in member states. Imagine the modern-day equivalent of the Irving trial on its own reality TV channel, with an endless supply of cranks, crooks, and grifters in the docket. I'd subscribe.
But we'd first have to figure out how doctorates in history would be indicted, many of which - despite their 'professional' imprimatur - are ideological opinions masquerading as explorations of the past. One of my old profs, J.T. Saywell, groused once at a faculty-student mixer, primed by adult libations, that MA students were curious enough, but that doctoral students wanted to select the evidence to buttress their own preconceived notions, regardless of 'what actually happened'. Such poseurs' higher degrees were vanity projects, he lamented, wherein prejudices went to be confirmed, not challenged. Supervisors who should have known better and directed more, in fact welcomed the adulation of feckless imitation, and so were comfortable in theses supplanting hypotheses in altogether too many programs. So long as the right oxen were gored and the right cliques joined, rubbish prospered. Much of the writing on Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb rests in this primeval sludge (to cite one of the more famous examples), as - yet more shockingly - does shelves' worth of contextual nonsense on how enslavement wasn't really the cause of the American Civil War. 'Canadian national history' was a proud course of study, until (shamefully) it wasn't. One could go on.
While 'professional' history has some of its own freight to carry, nevertheless the point made by Dan is a William Tell-like piercing of permeable pulp by pointy object traveling at speed. At its finest, history, understood as a discipline, is the honest, transparent search for the evidence of ourselves. We don't know its revelations until, with an open mind, we've been trained in how to do the work, we then do it and then try to derive informed conclusions from it. It springs from the simplest thing: the search for what actually happened. But it transposes onto two more complex things, each of which gives history both relevance and unparalleled power. First, history means sharing the past to better understand the present and steer us into the future. It is always with us and never over. But second, its power to inform, convince, and inspire also invites deliberate manipulation. We do have weapons against such toxins (education, journalism, parenting, literature), but our body politic is weak and our antibodies degraded. This is the origin and sustaining force of MAGA's assault on knowledge in all its inconvenient forms: it outs them. And this, history as much as science, economics as much as climatology, cannot be allowed.
So painfully true that a PhD is no guarantee of intellectual honesty greater than that of a Curtis Yarvin. All too often, when I listen to magnificently degreed historians talk, I am reminded of Clausewitz: It's politics by other means.
I like to ask two simple questions that I think get to the heart of intellectual honesty, whether of the historian, the scientist, the journalist, the police officer, the whoever: Do I trust that this person looks for evidence supporting the contrary position? If so, and this person finds such evidence, am I confident he or she will give it due regard -- and share it?
In making those judgements, I often lean on Phil Tetlock's heuristic for spotting foxes (as opposed to hedgehogs): How often do they say "however" or "on the other hand" or some other verbal indication of shifting cognitive gears and switching perspectives and weighing contradictions? Reality is complicated and messy and seldom sticks to the sort of straight line beloved of propagandists.
Couldn’t agree more. Subject classification by algorithm feeds into general dumbing down which then erodes the culture’s epistemic foundation and hence, the everyday niceties of democratic accountability that keep us kinda honest. It’s a helluva harder to rebuild or even to maintain the foundation than it is to tear it apart. We’re all getting a ringside seat to that. The very least we can do is witness and speak out. This librarian appreciates your work, Dan.
At some visceral level, I remain agog at how seriously Yarvin is taken. Maybe it comes from my having heard of him long ago, before he hit the big time. My image of him is thus fixed as being some obscure guy with tedious blog bloviations.
I would naively have suggested it would be nice to have a site explaining basically "He Doesn't Know What He's Talking About". But nowadays I'm cynical so as to believe that it wouldn't do any good, he'd just say it's The Cathedral unable to cope with his truth.
Another REAL historian I admire is Timothy Snyder, the former Yale history professor who has now decamped to the University of Toronto. His book, On Tyranny, is instructive for the current moment in US politics.
Dan. Thank you. I love reading your cogent content and all-too-relevant pieces. And I applaud your efforts to counter the fire hose of mid- and disinformation that we face every day.
Thanks, Eileen. And let me take the opportunity to apologize to readers for writing so little of late. I've been travelling like crazy. But that will be over in a couple of weeks and I have lots of writing planned. Thanks for your patience.
No need for an apology. I respect the fact that a) this is not the only thing you do and b) thoughtful analysis requires time.
I had never heard of these writers, so thanks for the heads up.
If we could mobilize it and figure out how a regime of punishments might work, I'd stump for adding "Historical Malpractice" to the Criminal Code and volunteer to work in the prosecutor's office. Then, we could transplant it to the ICC and arrest some of these clowns when they travel to give 'lectures' in member states. Imagine the modern-day equivalent of the Irving trial on its own reality TV channel, with an endless supply of cranks, crooks, and grifters in the docket. I'd subscribe.
But we'd first have to figure out how doctorates in history would be indicted, many of which - despite their 'professional' imprimatur - are ideological opinions masquerading as explorations of the past. One of my old profs, J.T. Saywell, groused once at a faculty-student mixer, primed by adult libations, that MA students were curious enough, but that doctoral students wanted to select the evidence to buttress their own preconceived notions, regardless of 'what actually happened'. Such poseurs' higher degrees were vanity projects, he lamented, wherein prejudices went to be confirmed, not challenged. Supervisors who should have known better and directed more, in fact welcomed the adulation of feckless imitation, and so were comfortable in theses supplanting hypotheses in altogether too many programs. So long as the right oxen were gored and the right cliques joined, rubbish prospered. Much of the writing on Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb rests in this primeval sludge (to cite one of the more famous examples), as - yet more shockingly - does shelves' worth of contextual nonsense on how enslavement wasn't really the cause of the American Civil War. 'Canadian national history' was a proud course of study, until (shamefully) it wasn't. One could go on.
While 'professional' history has some of its own freight to carry, nevertheless the point made by Dan is a William Tell-like piercing of permeable pulp by pointy object traveling at speed. At its finest, history, understood as a discipline, is the honest, transparent search for the evidence of ourselves. We don't know its revelations until, with an open mind, we've been trained in how to do the work, we then do it and then try to derive informed conclusions from it. It springs from the simplest thing: the search for what actually happened. But it transposes onto two more complex things, each of which gives history both relevance and unparalleled power. First, history means sharing the past to better understand the present and steer us into the future. It is always with us and never over. But second, its power to inform, convince, and inspire also invites deliberate manipulation. We do have weapons against such toxins (education, journalism, parenting, literature), but our body politic is weak and our antibodies degraded. This is the origin and sustaining force of MAGA's assault on knowledge in all its inconvenient forms: it outs them. And this, history as much as science, economics as much as climatology, cannot be allowed.
So painfully true that a PhD is no guarantee of intellectual honesty greater than that of a Curtis Yarvin. All too often, when I listen to magnificently degreed historians talk, I am reminded of Clausewitz: It's politics by other means.
I like to ask two simple questions that I think get to the heart of intellectual honesty, whether of the historian, the scientist, the journalist, the police officer, the whoever: Do I trust that this person looks for evidence supporting the contrary position? If so, and this person finds such evidence, am I confident he or she will give it due regard -- and share it?
In making those judgements, I often lean on Phil Tetlock's heuristic for spotting foxes (as opposed to hedgehogs): How often do they say "however" or "on the other hand" or some other verbal indication of shifting cognitive gears and switching perspectives and weighing contradictions? Reality is complicated and messy and seldom sticks to the sort of straight line beloved of propagandists.
I almost never say (or write) "however" or "on the other hand". That said, I do say "That said..." quite a lot. ;-)