Author: Ophelia Benson

There are a lot of bizarre remarks in this piece in the LRB.

Within the limits he sets himself, Sharpe’s book is admirable…He takes pride in bringing to his task the skills of a professional historian, determined to ‘get history right’. He sets out to expose the stories told about Turpin since his death as factually incorrect…Sharpe is uncomfortable with myths.

Um…why should Sharpe not be ‘uncomfortable’ with myths? (That sentence is a good example of why ‘comfortable’ is one of the first words that was defined in the Fashionable Dictionary – the original one, the one on B&W. ‘Comfortable’ is such a weasel word. What’s comfort got to do with anything? It’s not about bums on seats, or even about elevated heart rate and sweaty palms. It’s about critical thinking, epistemology, rational inquiry. Thinking that myths are out of place in ‘professional’ history is not a giveaway of pathetic nerdy insecurities, it’s simply a reasonable idea of what history is supposed to be: to wit, evidence-based and logically sound.) Why should he not be ‘determined’ to ‘get history right’? What should he be determined to do, get it wrong?

What interests Sharpe about this story (which he has read in the much abbreviated fifth edition) is that it is false: what should have interested him is that Ainsworth’s readers (and the book was an enormous bestseller) thought it was true.

I beg your pardon? Why is that what should have interested him? If that’s not the book he’s writing, then why should it interest him? It may well be a highly interesting question, why Ainsworth’s readers thought the Black Bess story (that Turpin rode a horse 200 miles in 12 hours) was true, but it’s not the only possible subject. David Wootton does go on to say some interesting things on this question, but it doesn’t follow that Sharpe ought to have written them instead of what he did write.

This doesn’t occur to Sharpe. His idea of the historian as someone who gets at the facts means that he can give a fine account of the activities of Turpin and the Essex gang, but it makes him quite unfitted to be a reader of Rookwood.

Um…so? So on earth what? You read Rookwood if you want to, but that doesn’t mean everyone has to. And what is with this absurd scorn for the idea of ‘ the historian as someone who gets at the facts’? Well we know what’s with it. Alas.

Sharpe could have been provoked by his subject into reinventing the idea of what history is: instead, his conclusion, ‘Dick Turpin and the Meaning of History’, retreats to the old cliché that the business of the historian is to deal in facts…The language of fact and fiction, critical and uncritical thinking, is useful if one wants to address the question of whether Turpin was a thug. But it hardly helps one address the question of why Rookwood appealed to the imagination of its readers.

The old cliché – it’s a shame, isn’t it, the way historians will go on thinking that they ought to deal in facts rather than myths. Unless, of course, they are in fact doing histories of myth, which some historians do. But they don’t all do that, and why should they? (And if they do, one hopes they do it with some reference to facts somewhere along the way, lest they tell us about Navajo myths that actually belonged to the Chinese, and Egyptian myths that in fact originated with the people of Tierra del Fuego.) And some historians inquire into the history of literary taste; but, again, not all of them. If the question of why Rookwood appealed to the imagination of its readers was not Sharpe’s subject, it’s not clear why he should have addressed it.

Guess what David Wootton is writing about. It made me snort with laughter when I saw it. Can you guess? I’ll tell you. ‘He is writing a history of the body from Hippocrates to Foucault.’ Attaboy! No chance of any old clichés there! That’s some fresh untilled cliché-free ground, all right. I think I’ll review it when it comes out, and keep asking why he didn’t write a history of underwear from Nefertiti to Adorno instead.

I heard a classic example of the journalistic habit of translation that I have pointed out a few times in the past, earlier today on the BBC World Service. It was a discussion of creationism and the pressure to get it taught in US schools, between Peter Atkins and creationist Donald DeYoung. At one point DeYoung (or else the journalist) mentioned ‘design’ and Atkins said ‘There is no design in nature.’ DeYoung didn’t hear, and Atkins repeated with great distinctness and emphasis, ‘There. is. no. design. in. nature.’ DeYoung, a physicist, disagreed and talked about the weight of the proton: if it had been just a tiny amount heavier, etc (the anthropic principle, in short). The journalist cut that off, as being too far afield, and said ‘You [meaning Atkins] say there is no order in nature – ‘ ‘That’s not what he said,’ I shouted at the radio. ‘That’s not what I said,’ Atkins said without shouting (well he was nearby). ‘I said there is no design in nature.’ ‘Same thing,’ said the journalist. ‘It’s not the same thing!!’ I shouted even louder. ‘It’s not the same thing,’ said Atkins.

I mean. Come on. The guy thinks order and design are the same thing?! And all [I mean many – not all – I haven’t checked them all, have I!] journalists, apparently, think ‘no evidence that’ is the same thing as ‘proof that not,’ and so they use the two interchangeably with gay abandon. It’s an outrage.

Really. Journalists ought to be licensed, or something. And they ought to learn some basic vocabulary and concepts before they get that license. I mean that literally – well except of course that if they did, Julian would run out of Bad Moves. As it is the supply seems to be infinite.

The ‘Academic Bill of Rights’ issue seems to be warming up. Unfortunately. Because the idea seems as full of holes as a colander. It seemed leaky when I wrote an In Focus on the subject a year and a half ago (it doesn’t seem that long, but it was), and it seems leaky now. The difficulties seem so obvious…I mentioned some –

Who would decide the law was being violated? What would the criteria be? What would constitute evidence? Would the testimony of students be sufficient? If so, what of the possibility that for instance a student who’d received a C, or one who’d been bored, or one who simply disagreed with a teacher would file charges? If student testimony would not be sufficient, would administrative staff sit in on classes? Would they go undercover? Might that lead to an underage hence underexperienced and underqualified administration?…And what about all the issues that don’t divide along a neat left-right axis? What about points of view that aren’t really particularly political at all but that the legislature doesn’t happen to agree with? So perhaps we begin to see the advantage of dealing with such issues by means of discussion, debate, argument, books and articles and websites, rather than handcuffs and subpoenas.

And Brian Leiter mentions similar ones –

The problem is that it is plainly within the purview of academic freedom for instructors to determine what counts as “serious scholarly opinion” and what counts as “human knowledge.” The only way, then, that this provision can have any bite is if it authorizes others (who exactly? the Ohio legislature?) to override the instructor’s academic freedom in setting the curriculum…suppose the student’s political, ideological, or religious beliefs with respect to the subject matter of the course are false, i.e., contradicted by “serious scholarly opinion” and “human knowledge” as assessed by the instructor? Does the creationist get a free pass for her ignorance in evolutionary biology simply because she has a “religious belief” that conflicts with the scientific content of the course? Is the NeoNazi entitled not to be graded down when he writes a paper for his Anthropology or Biology class defending his “ideological belief” that “the Jewish race is biologically inferior”?

Just so. Question after question. But that hasn’t stopped the Ohio legislature, as Leiter usefully points out. Coming soon to a university near you: teaching entirely taken over by political hacks, lobbyists, bribers and bribe-takers, and religious zealots who have the ear of the political hacks. Spiffy. That will certainly improve things.

Any of you read the TLS? An informant told me via email that ‘apparently’ there is a review of the Fashionable Dictionary in the latest one, but that it doesn’t seem to be available online. I asked a few questions, such as who wrote it, but the informant didn’t answer, so I’m thinking it was probably a joke. I love jokes. So – if any of you do read the TLS – is there a review of the DFN in there? Silly of me to be so curious, I know, but – well it’s probably an American thing.

This articles intersects with a couple of issues we’ve been talking about lately. (Well, I say ‘we’ – I’ve been talking about them. I know that. It’s just me, going jaw, jaw, jaw. I realize that. But I think of it as a discussion anyway – I think ‘we’re’ talking about them. Because…because of a lot of things. Comments, and emails I get, and that tiny little high-pitched voice that no one else hears, and – what meds? I’m fine, cut it out, get your hands off me – )

Sorry. Where was I. A couple of issues. The one about various tensions between cherished goals and ideas, and the one about special treatment of religion.

In the bitter controversy that followed, the Christian Legal Society sued Ohio State, charging that the university’s nondiscrimination policy violated the group’s First Amendment right to freedom of religion by forcing it to accept unwanted members. This past fall, without ever going to court, the group won a complete victory when Ohio State changed its policy to exempt student groups formed to promote “sincerely held religious beliefs.”…Requiring a Christian-student association to admit non-Christians or gay people, “would be like requiring a vegetarian group to admit meat eaters,” asserts Jordan Lorence, a senior lawyer at the Alliance Defense Fund, which is based in Scottsdale, Ariz. “It would be like forcing the College Democrats to accept Republicans.”…Emotionally charged conflicts like the one at Ohio State have forced colleges to choose which of two basic principles is more important: freedom of religion, guaranteed by the First Amendment, or equal protection under the law, as established by the 14th Amendment. “There are times when constitutional rights come into conflict with one another,” says Jeffrey Gamso, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio.

Aren’t there just. And such times force one to think hard about which rights, goals, values, ideas are more important (or valuable or basic or non-negotiable or central or various other terms indicating which is less possible to give up) and which are less so. And often such thinking gets one nowhere but at a stalemate, an ‘I don’t know.’ And I don’t know. Because groups are discriminatory, aren’t they. If you have a book group, you discriminate against people who never read. If you have a cooking group, you discriminate against people who eat out of tins and foil bags. If you have a runners’ group, you discriminate against people who prefer to amble or sit or lie flat. And so on. But you don’t really want to see the same principle extended to the Anti-Semites’ group, or the Misogynists’ Club, or the Homophobia Alliance. So you seem to want to judge groups on the merits of their principles of discrimination – and what a can of worms that would be to get into! What a lot of time and trouble that would be. As all these college adminstrators and litigators remark in the article.

Critics of the change are particularly concerned that the settlement exempts only religious student groups from nondiscrimination rules, which may represent an unconstitutional favoring of religious groups over nonreligious ones, says Ruth Colker, a professor of constitutional law at Ohio State. She predicts that the decision could lead to future lawsuits if nonreligious groups are denied recognition because they practice some form of discrimination.

Well, exactly. Here we are again. Why do ‘sincerely held religious beliefs’ get special consideration when other kinds of sincerely held beliefs don’t? There seem to be a lot of reasons – habit; religion is consoling; religion is taken to be central to people’s identity; religious people are willing to sue; and no doubt more. But none of them really seems like a knock-down argument or reason, does it. Which is why people aren’t always pleased when sincerely held religious beliefs get special treatment that sincerely held secular beliefs don’t.