The Moment of the Foxes

There's an epistemological and historiographical problem that I am trying to make sense of in relation to the Pragmatists -- and perhaps in relation to our relation to the Pragmatists -- and I am having trouble formulating my thoughts on the matter.  So I have decided to take my question, such as it is, to the blogosophere, and see if  our good readers here can offer some clarity -- or, maybe, some complexity.  Or both.

This weekend I am reading Twentieth-Century Multiplicity by Daniel Borus  and No Place of Grace by T.J. Jackson Lears.  Both are on my reading list, but only Borus is assigned for a class -- the last organized class, by the way, that I will take in my entire academic career.  Ever.  To plunder the Kuhnian castle: I am headed for a major paradigm shift.  First, though, I have to get through this semester.

What I'm wondering about is how to historically situate or understand a particular kind of interpretive move that historians make, though it is certainly not unique to historians.  What I have in mind is our fondness for typological or characterological binarisms -- the binarisms we can employ as shorthand to distinguish between two seemingly different ways that people extract or construct meaning from events. 

I'm thinking, for example, of how one can look at American thinkers at the end of the 19th century and divide them heuristically into "optimists" (John Dewey, William James on most days) and "pessimists" (Henry Adams).  This particular binary seems especially suited -- or, I guess, favored -- when discussing this period. Fragmentation, fracture, multiplicity, contingency, instability -- however we might characterize the cosmology of that era, we seem to find it useful to situate the thinkers of the time in terms of whether or not that they saw in their own time reason for hope or cause for despair. 

In fact, I would suggest that historians of this period themselves might be seen as tending to be either "pessimistic" or "optimistic."  In a footnote to his introduction, Borus writes, "Two diametrically different but superlative efforts to link culture to political economy are T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace...and James Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution" (15). Borus does not say what makes these inquiries "diametrically different," but I would surmise that much of their difference has to do with each historian's sympathy for a particular strain of thought emerging from the period.  I mean "sympathy" in a kind of Collingwoodian sense:  their effort to understand the thoughts of their subjects by re-thinking them and re-constituting them through their historical inquiry. Lears is recovering and legitimizing an elegiac lament for a lost past; Livingston is recovering and legitimizing an exuberant celebration of an open future.  And so in a way these monographs may come to re-instantiate the very sensibilities they explore.

Perhaps one might expect the historiography of this period to embrace binarism as a mode of inquiry or even divide along binaristic lines because the period itself was so marked.  Think, for example, of James's distinction between the "tough-minded" and the "tender-minded," where epistemology becomes a matter of two basic kinds of temperament.  What's interesting about James's bifurcation of "minds," and other similar distinctions, is the way that a binary can be used to point toward plurality.

A similar binaristic taxonomy of "mind" that paves the way for pluralism is Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction between hedgehogs and foxes.  Of course Berlin is writing after James, and in some senses perhaps in response to him -- I'll let the historians of philosophy weigh in here.  In any case, Berlin uses a binary to accentuate the value of plurality.  Indeed, Borus invokes Berlin's binaristic metaphor in the introduction to Twentieth-Century Multiplicity as a helpful way of distinguishing between two kinds of thinkers or two kinds of thought:  "The early twentieth century," Borus writes, "was the moment of the foxes, even if there were quite a few hedgehogs.  It is salutary to recall that Berlin saw the value of and need for both" (11). 

Borus situates the Berlinian fauna within the period he is studying -- but also, by implication, within his study of the period.  What he says about the thinkers of the time is easily applicable to historians' thinking about it:  "Where foxes remind us of the dangers of overgeneralization, hedgehogs remind us how helpful and at times necessary significant and meaningful generalizations are" (11).  That's not just intellectual history; that's historical method.

So here's the best I can do in framing my question:  to what extent is the epistemology of historical inquiry, especially inquiry about this particular period of epistemic turmoil, indebted to and taking place within the framework of the period itself?  

If we look at American intellectual and cultural history in this time frame and see optimists and pessimists, tough-minded and tender-minded, modernists and anti-modernists, foxes and hedgehogs, are we seeing the object of our inquiry -- the thinking of the time -- or are we seeing everything through it? 

Keeping the Faiths

Today, the entire academy, and especially those of us who are part of the American historical profession, owe a profound debt of thanks to several of our colleagues for a truly thankless task:  fighting the farcical, fraudulent, fatuous pseudo-historical pseudo-scholarship of David Barton.

In case you haven't heard, the Thomas Nelson publishing company has decided to stop the presses on Barton's infamous book The Jefferson Lies, and pull all copies from distribution.   Thomas Kidd, who broke the story yesterday at World Magazine, reports:

Casey Francis Harrell, Thomas Nelson’s director of corporate communications, told me the publishing house “was contacted by a number of people expressing concerns about [The Jefferson Lies].” The company began to evaluate the criticisms, Harrell said, and “in the course of our review learned that there were some historical details included in the book that were not adequately supported. Because of these deficiencies we decided that it was in the best interest of our readers to stop the publication and distribution.”

I don't know who in particular contacted the publisher.  But I do know that a number of historians and other scholars have done yeoman's work in demonstrating the evidentiary flimsiness and downright fabrications underlying many of Barton's claims.

John Fea, who blogs at The Way of Improvement Leads Home and who will be commenting on a panel at the fifth annual S-USIH conference this fall, has spent the past several months documenting and debunking Barton's distortions and outright lies. See especially his six-part series of blog posts analyzing Barton's historical argumentation.  Type "David Barton" into the search window at the top of Fea's blog, and you will get a sense of how much time this highly-regarded professional historian has spent doing battle against (really bad) popular "history."  In these posts you will also see that Fea frequently links to the work of other historians and scholars from a range of academic disciplines who have taken the time and care to refute Barton's propaganda -- scholars such as Stephen Prothero, Warren Throckmorton, Michael Coulter, Clay Jenkinson, Alan Pell Crawford.

Similarly, at the Religion in American History blog, historians Randall Stephens, Kelly Baker, Paul Harvey, Chris Beneke, and other contributors and commenters have situated Barton's work where it belongs:  not as history, but as a particular (and particularly virulent) strain of right-wing Christian nationalist propaganda. 

Barton's propaganda has never been aimed at swaying the judgment of the historical profession; though he has apparently been able to dupe the Texas board of education into accepting his propaganda as history, he is not writing anything that has a chance of passing muster with professional historians.  People who practice critical thinking skills for a living are not his target audience.  So professors at places like Messiah College, Grove City College, North Park University -- Christian institutions all -- might have been excused for doing what most of us do when we run across some of the laughable nonsense that sometimes passes for reliable history with popular audiences:  as academics and professionals, they could have simply ignored Barton.  Instead, they took the time and trouble to refute him -- drawing the predictably martyrological response from Barton that their criticism should be dismissed as the work of "academic elitists" who are attacking his "personal religious beliefs." 

Presumably, the group of Cincinnati pastors who recently called for a boycott of Thomas Nelson publishing over Barton's book are not part of the anti-Christian academic elite.  Bob Allen at the Associated Baptist Press reports that these evangelical pastors "were concerned that the book glosses over Jefferson’s heretical views about Jesus Christ and excuses him for owning slaves."  In other words, they fault not only Barton's historical argumentation but the moral judgment from which it proceeds and which it supports.  For them, Barton's work is not just bad history, but bad history in the service of bad theology. 

Indeed, I assume that Barton's work is "bad theology" in the view of the many Christian academics and scholars who have taken the time and trouble to expose the propagandist's falsifications and distortions.  In fact, I would surmise that their own pastoral and confessional concerns as scholars and teachers in faith-based institutions, their sense of responsibility to teach not only well but truly, might have spurred them to take on this particular vapid but vicious wolf. 

As a historian, I am not the least bit interested in promulgating good theology or bad theology or any theology at all.  I just want to write and teach good history.  What is interesting -- and not a little problematic for me -- about this case is the way in which good theology appealed for support to good history, and good history emerged at least in part from a commitment to good theology.

Why do I find this problematic?  Well, that has to do with a book review I have not yet written, and my reasons for not yet writing it.  I will explain my problem in another post.  For now, though, I would like to congratulate and thank these scholars and their colleagues for fighting the good fight and keeping the faith. I'm just not quite sure which faith or faiths they're keeping, and how they fit or ought to fit together.  But this I know:  if we are to judge a tree by its fruits, this latest small victory for good history tastes pretty sweet indeed.

Where Am I?

In the last paragraph of his essay on "The Present and Future of Intellectual History," Daniel Wickberg observes, "We have yet to have a really good history of American intellectual history, one that explains how we got where we are, how much our approaches are indebted to those of the past and the assumptions they made, and how much we have departed from them."  

What I find most interesting about this statement is not the claim it makes about the need for a history of the field, but the way that it frames an epistemic problem in spatial terms.  We need to understand where we are.  Our methodological and theoretical commitments are approaches, and they may retrace older routes to knowledge or depart from them.  

Similarly, in his reflection on the role this blog might play in the future of intellectual history, Ray Haberski writes, "This is a place where intellectual historians (emerging and emerged) offer a body of work to be discussed by graduate students and senior scholars without pretense that they serve as an official organ for the field" (emphasis mine).

I draw attention to this language not because it is jarring, but because it is utterly unremarkable. 

It is seems perfectly natural to conceptualize thinking and knowing in spatial terms.  Indeed, the sense of space is implicit in the idea of a "field" -- it is a conceptual territory with contested boundaries that allow us to define what is a proper subject of inquiry, and who is properly authorized to make such inquiries.  

This is the dual purpose of field exams in a PhD program -- mapping the terrain and vetting its custodians.  Professors may joke that there is an element of hazing involved in the process, but I'm afraid they're also telling the truth.  I'll find out for myself next year when I take my qualifying exams.  I am not looking forward to it.  

To "look forward" to the future is to conceive of the temporal in particularly linear directional terms.  Indeed, this way of thinking about time is the conceptual foundation for both whiggish history and its dour doppelgänger, the narrative of declension.  It is, I suppose, the conceptual foundation for the Western idea of history, period.  

And what is a "conceptual foundation," but a metaphor for knowledge-as-edifice?   Like the concept of a "field," the concept of knowledge as something that is "built" has proved a serviceable metaphor for understanding this scholarly enterprise in which professional historians are engaged.   In That Noble Dream, Peter Novick characterizes the beginnings of professional history in America as an era of "brick-making," an image borrowed from the public writing and private correspondence of J. Franklin Jameson, the founding editor of the American Historical Review.  Novick writes, 

This conception of the historian's task -- the patient manufacture of four-square factualist bricks to be fitted together in the ultimate objective history -- had enormous professional advantages.  It offered an almost tangible image of steady, cumulative progress.  Although creating a grand synthesis might require an architectonic vision, almost anyone, properly trained, could mold a brick: worthwhile employment in making a contribution to the edifice was thus guaranteed to those of the most modest endowments.*

The historian as a brick-maker tasked with converting the (presumed) raw material of the past into useable pieces of "objective" knowledge to be fitted together in a collective building enterprise has mostly been discarded, at least in theory.  Instead, thanks to Theory, we have a way of stepping back from this enterprise and thinking of historical knowledge (and any other kind, for that matter) less as a given structure than as a posited construct. 

Yet behind and beneath these two seemingly different ideas stands the same basic metaphor:  knowledge is something we build together.  

But where?

Peter Novick ends That Noble Dream with a chapter titled, "There was no king in Israel."  This phrase is lifted from the last verse of the biblical Book of Judges:  

In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.

This verse serves for Novick as a fitting epigraph for the discordant and chaotic practice of history in a post-consensus, post-objectivity era.  But quoting this verse from Judges is also a cunning, punning invocation of Carl Becker's 1931 AHA Presidential address, "Everyman His Own Historian."  Becker was talking about "Mr. Everyman," not "every man."  As the AHA website notes, Becker's call for a pragmatic, pluralistic (or, for some, relativistic) approach to history has been interpreted by some as a call for "greater modesty in interpretation" of the past.  Nevertheless, that call for modesty was anything but modest in its bold swipe at the foundations of the brick-making, brick-laying enterprise of professional history.  It must have sounded positively destructive to some.

Similarly, some read Novick's book as a narrative of declension, and perhaps Novick himself viewed the story he was telling in that light.  But the "present" moment Novick described in 1988 -- a moment of cacophonous dissensus -- was also a moment of disciplinary creativity.  Look at the Bancroft winners for the decade following the publication of Novick's masterpiece, and all the Bancroft winers since.**  This is the scholarship that came from or came of age amidst that age of fracture, that babel of voices.

Perhaps, then, I might be excused for imaginatively situating the field -- or, perhaps, the construction site -- of U.S. intellectual history not in the land of Canaan during the time of Judges, nor in the land of Egypt during the years of bondage, but on the broad plains of Mesopatamia in the mythic age between Noah and Abraham.    Though the gods have already come down once or twice to confound our speech, there is no guarantee that they will not come again.  And the more we sound alike, the more we speak the same language -- or believe that we do -- the more nervous we ought to be.  

So, between Daniel Wickberg and James Livingston and Daniel Rodgers and David Hollinger and Andrew Hartman and Bill Fine and Ray Haberski and David Sehat and Charles Capper -- not to mention, as David Hall wryly notes in his MIH essay, "the occasional woman"*** -- I think we're good...for now.

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*Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge UP, 1988), 56.

**Never mind Bellesiles.

***David D. Hall, "Backwards to the Future: The Cultural Turn and the Wisdom of Intellectual History," Modern Intellectual History, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2012), 176.

The Utopianism of the Digital Humanities

Alongside my blogmates, I attended my first THATCamp at last week's AHA meeting in Chicago. I learned a lot and enjoyed myself. I think we especially gained valuable feedback during the session that Ben proposed on E-publishing. That said, I came away somewhat skeptical of what I sensed was a utopianism among many of the digital humanists and historians at THATCamp. In one session that I attended--on the question, "What Are the Digital Humanities?" (still debated, not surprisingly, since the much older question, "What Are the Humanities?" has yet to be resolved either)--some of the participants made claims that digitalization has created a fundamental, even epistemological shift in how we think about history. I am underwhelmed.

I'm no Luddite or technophobe. I see the merits of the digital world for historians. Research can be made easier, or at least, more efficient. How historians deliver content is changing, obviously, evident in this blog post. But these are examples of how digitalization serves as an important new tool. It does not change the way we conceptualize the past. Or does it? I am genuinely curious about this question, so if you, dear reader, have answers, I would like you to share them.

There's another element of digitalization that worries me, beyond misconceptions of utopia. Some of the THATCamp participants have changed the types of work they have their students do. One professor told of having his students produce collaborative, digital media projects, like short digital films, in place of traditional essays. When it comes to teaching history and the humanities, the level of my distrust for technophiles rises. Call me crazy, but I think reading and writing remain essential, and I don't think digital filmmaking is a replacement in a humanities course, even though it is a valuable skill in and of itself. But what think you?