Consider two writers and thinkers who are in the news at the moment, one because he’s just died and the other because he has a new book out. The New York Times said of Hugh Trevor-Roper that:

His approach to history was essentially belletrist – based not so much on original research as on wide reading and an ability to bring to bear insights derived from other disciplines on his subjects. He sought to appeal to a wide cultivated audience. In his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor, he defended this approach, saying modern history would have “dried up and perished long ago” without the contribution of economists, sociologists, philosophers, art historians and even anthropologists and psychologists.

Surely his approach is indeed defensible. Research is essential too, of course, but the house of history presumably has many mansions, or at least, room for both specialists and generalists, original researchers and synthesizers, depth and breadth. It’s not as if the borders around history are all that sharp anyway, or as if economics or sociology or philosophy seem exactly irrelevant. And if the goal of inquiry is better understanding, surely the way things tie together rather than fall apart is one of the subjects we want to understand.

Richard Sennett is another who draws on many disciplines, as this review of his new book in the Guardian says:

But he doesn’t really write academic sociology, and is often criticised for it, from within academia and outside it…His material is an elegant mix of interview, anecdote and wide, deep book-research. His key terms have to do with common personal predicaments, understood as socio-historic formations: love and power, dignity and humiliation, impersonality and self-absorption, self-worth and self-blame.

Trevor-Roper drew on sociology to write history and Sennett draws on history to write sociology, and both produce a rich thick brew for the general reader.

A recent Start the Week on Radio 4 discussed not one but two issues that we’ve been talking about here on Butterflies and Wheels. Nancy Cartwright, a philosopher of science, here asserts the trendy notion that the discoveries of science are a product of negotiation and agreement among scientists, and that the idea of universality (of science as well as of any other kind of knowledge) is one we should all be very suspicious of. Fortunately, there is also a working scientist on the premises, who disputes her views. Also present is Germaine Greer, who voices one of my favourite exasperations, with the fashion for gossippy biographies of poets and writers that give short shrift to the mental life of such people in order to concentrate on the really important business of what they got up to in bed. Greer gives a fine old rant about the fact that poets only get biographies written about them because of their poetry so why ignore the poetry in favor of the sex life eh? Just exactly what I always wonder! Her particular focus is Byron, and her outrage that the annual biography of him sells like mad while no one reads the wonderful ‘Don Juan’. I couldn’t possibly agree more.

Oh honestly. Does nonsense never go away? Well I shouldn’t complain, it certainly keeps us busy and entertained here at B and W. But it would be nice to think humans could pay attention once in awhile. Take
this article about Freud in Time magazine, for instance.

At the same time, post-Freudian psychotherapists are figuring out that the old master still has something to offer the science of mental health: an understanding of the human mind and its many malfunctions that’s richer, fuller and more exciting than anything invented since.

Really? Well I suppose it depends how you define ‘richer’ or ‘more exciting’. It would be rich and exciting to be told our brains were full of gremlins and talking spiders and extra-terrestrial visitors and reincarnations of Cleopatra, too, but it wouldn’t be true. If the science of mental health is actually a science, does it really want the evidence-free speculations and faubulations of Freud to help its work?

One of Freud’s key insights was to divide the mind into the conscious and the unconscious: he showed us that beneath the surface banality of everyday thoughts and gestures lurk subterranean caverns of forbidden longings that reach all the way back to our earliest childhood memories.

Oh honestly. That old chestnut. Has no one on the editorial desk ever heard of Nietzsche? Schelling? The Romantics? Freud expanded on other people’s work, he was not the originator of insight into the unconscious. ‘But the goal of psychoanalysis is deeper understanding!’ the defenders cry. Good idea! Deeper understanding always a good thing! Start building your library now.

A few days ago I took issue with a column John Sutherland wrote in the Guardian about the wonderful benefits of US university athletic programmes. Here is a delightful little story about some of the drawbacks of the US approach. College basketball fans harass and make death threats against an English teacher who has the unmitigated temerity to criticise a coach. Clearly, the basketball coach is important and the pesky teacher is just a thing that causes trouble. Could such an attitude possibly be harmful to actual, you know, education?

Sorry, but I do think this is pretty funny. It’s the bit about cognitive skills classes.

The cognitive courses all prisoners have to attend – usually Enhanced Thinking Skills – were deemed effective when they first started, but recent studies have shown that prisoners can emerge from these even more likely to reoffend than they were without them…Or it could be that they imbibe the skills without accepting the moral message, so they just come out with an enhanced ability to think crimes through and avoid mistakes like leaving their dog at the scene of the crime or ordering a pizza with a thieved credit card (both real occasions of burglar ineptitude in the past fortnight; the beauty of the prison system is that the people who most need some time in burglar university are by definition the people who end up there).

Oops! Enhanced Thinking Skills for Inept Burglars, this way please! Have pencils and notebooks ready, sit up straight, pay attention, sharpen those wits. Think twice before taking Spot along on your burglaries, and if you do, remember to take her away again. Use stolen credit cards only for major purchases, because it’s silly to get nicked just for a pizza. Don’t tell your victims your name, and don’t ask them to write you a check, and if you do, don’t cash it. Tomorrow: Dos and Don’ts of Getaway Vehicles.

I sort of hate to agree with The National Review about anything, but then it’s not my fault: if the left will insist on being so silly all the time, they have only themselves to blame. Anyway this is a very funny piece about Jacques Derrida and his inexplicable hold over the minds of far too many literary critics and other “theorists”.

Indeed, the critical point to be borne in mind with regards to Derrida…is that he is not now, nor has he ever been, a philosopher in any recognizable sense of the word, nor even a trafficker in significant ideas; he is rather a intellectual con artist, a polysyllabic grifter who has duped roughly half the humanities professors in the United States…into believing that postmodernism has an underlying theoretical rationale.

This is something I have been wondering about for years. What is it about literary critics that makes them so easy to fool? What is up with them, that they can be buffaloed into thinking someone is a profound and original thinker in a field not their own when all the other thinkers in that field could have told them he’s just a popularizer with a dash of vaudeville? Literary critics used to be such decent, modest, hard-working people, quietly reading their books and pondering ambiguity and metaphor, a nice harmless activity and, when done well, quite interesting and stimulating to youthful minds. But that’s all in the past, now they do Theory, and they are very keen for you to know that they do Theory and how important it is and how omniscient it makes them. Chaos theory, quantum gravity, paradigm shifts, de-centering the discourse of the hegemonizer, valorizing the signifier of Otherness, none of it is too much for them.

The fact that Derrida’s influence is least felt in the very discipline he claims to practice testifies to the ascendancy of dilettantism in the humanities.

Oh dear. It’s true. One has met a few such dilettantes in one’s time, and one has read or skimmed a great many of their books. They are out there, neglecting the metaphors and ambiguities for the sake of a bogus High Theory about every subject except the one they actually wrote their dissertations on. They are the snappiest dressers though.

This is a very peculiar comment in the Guardian. John Sutherland recommends that Blair and Labour imitate the American way of getting more racial minorities into higher education: via athletics. Why? He never really says. He does say he thinks it’s a good idea and that it’s been a great success in the States, but he doesn’t say why he thinks it’s a good idea, or in what sense it’s been a success. He does say that the athletics programmes created open doors through which not only black athletes, but also non-athletic blacks, could enter, but then he fails to explain what he means. He says the figures speak for themselves, but they don’t, at least not clearly enough so that I can understand them. What connection is there between the number of non-athletic blacks and the presence of athletic blacks? Do the athletes make the non-athletes feel safer, or less isolated? Do they have some unspecified effect on the admissions office? Sutherland doesn’t say.

He also says, oddly, that college athletes are held to high standards academically. He says they are required to maintain a B average, but fails to mention the well-known phenomenon of grade inflation, which makes a B a pretty low grade, frankly. Not to mention the pressure on teachers not to mark athletes down. He says athletes have to get 820 on the SATs…but doesn’t add that that is a very low score indeed. The fact is, there are plenty of people, black as well as white, who are not so charmed with athletics as the path to university for blacks. There is the implicit insult, for one thing, and there is also the implicit devaluing of academics as the logical criterion for an academic institution. There are the periodic scandals about corruption or flouting of the rules, there is the diversion of everyone’s attention from pesky old books to ball games, there is the amount of money spent on athletic programmes while teachers are fired and library hours are reduced. It’s not such a raging success as Sutherland says.

We all know history is written by the victors. It’s also worth remembering that it’s written by a lot of other unreliable witnesses besides. By participants, loyalists, traitors, friends, enemies, people with various kinds of axe to grind, people who were paying only selective attention (and who ever pays anything else?). Which is not to say that it’s all a fairy tale, that no history is more accurate than any other so there’s no need to be careful with the evidence or the conclusions we draw from it. It’s only to point out how tricky it all is. This story in the Guardian is a good example. Tony Blair and the people around him are quite sure they have influenced George Bush to enlist the U.N. in the conflict with Iraq. They talk of a crucial meeting between Bush and Blair at Camp David in September last year. But then the Guardian story points out that other people don’t seem to see it quite that way. Bob Woodward seldom mentions Blair in his book Bush at War. There, it is at a dinner with Colin Powell in August that Bush becomes persuaded of the merits of the UN. Perhaps Woodward has it right and the Blair people are deluding themselves. But then again…

But the fact that Mr Powell plays such a heroic, single-handed role may have something to do with the fact that Mr Woodward depended greatly on the secretary’s version of events for his book. Mr Blair was not interviewed.

Ah. Woodward doesn’t have a god’s-eye view either, does he. The account he gives does depend on which people he talks to. Naturally. And we’re all the heroes of our own stories, aren’t we. No doubt if Woodward talked to Powell’s cook and Blair’s driver, they would play a more central role than anyone suspects. A conversation in the car, mind-altering spices in the paella. It all adds up.

Speaking of Fresh Air…there was an interesting display of Pathetically Reduced Expectations on that show a few days ago. The political ‘commentator’ David Frum was on to talk about the year he spent as a speechwriter in the Bush White House. He has an unctuous, soft, childishly enthusiastic voice, and he kept getting in a flutter of excitment and admiration at things that were not worth getting in a flutter about. It was all too depressingly reminiscent of what we used to hear about the Reagan White House, when people would tell anecdotes that proved the President was actually conscious and awake as if they proved how brilliant and perspicacious he was. One example in particular struck me by its naive glee. Frum assured us that the President pays close attention to what his speechwriters actually write, and he has (oh boy!) a big marking pen with which he scribbles in the margins (gosh, really?). In one speech someone wrote ‘I saw it with my own eyes,’ and our dazzlingly clever Chief Executive wrote next to that: ‘duh’. Wow! Is that impressive or what?

Frum also confirmed something I’ve long suspected, which is that the words ‘mother’ and ‘father’ have been outlawed in the American language. It is, as I thought, official. The boss of the speechwriters has a lot of rules for what can and cannot be said, and among those rules is one that outlaws the word ‘parents’. It has to be ‘moms’ and ‘dads’. Because…what? The word ‘parent’ is too long? Too high-falutin’? Too elitist? No, I know, don’t bother to explain. It’s not cozy enough, not cloying enough, not sentimental and intrusive and folksy enough. Duh.

I do like to see a good roundhouse attack like this one in The New Republic, on that contemporary American plague, the Sport Utility Vehicle. I only wish there were more of them (and that they did any good). There was an auto industry reporter on Fresh Air a few days ago, and it was a pathetic series of missed opportunities as Terri Gross let the guy rhapsodize about the wonders of the SUV without bothering to point out the obvious drawbacks. For instance he sang a little aria to the joy of being so high up off the road and able to look over the other traffic. Well yes, and SUV drivers are so high up that they are also able to look over pedestrians, look over them so completely that they often don’t see them at all. I wonder how many times I’ve been walking innocently down the sidewalk and been nearly flattened by someone hurtling out of a parking lot in a giant SUV without noticing any pesky pedestrians.

But I hadn’t realized I was being impious in thinking this way. The New Republic article says Washington Post auto industry reporter Warren Brown ‘deliriously proclaimed that the Hummer is what Jesus would drive. Its size and its profligacy are justified, Brown said, because “if you are a missionary like some of my friends,” you could use a Hummer “to bring loads of food and medical supplies” to the poor.’ Of course! That’s what all those people high up over the walkers and talking on their cell phones are doing–shlepping food and meds to the poor! I knew that! ‘In the beginning was the Durango, and the Durango was with God, and…’

This is an interesting and uncomfortable story. The American Association of University Professors is about to publish a study which shows that Affirmative Action policies at US colleges and universities have failed to close the gap between whites on the one hand and blacks and Hispanics on the other.

The article will highlight admissions policies that give special consideration to the children of alumni and donors to colleges; prepaid-tuition plans, which benefit only those parents who can afford to save money for college; and the current movement among many public colleges to tighten admissions standards and end remedial programs, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Surely that sentence skates rapidly over the difficult issues inherent in the subject. Surely there are two very separate problems that the article plans to highlight. Special consideration for alumni would indeed seem to give an advantage – an arguably unfair and arbitrary advantage – to people whose parents went to universities in the past, which will naturally be white people. But what of this movement to tighten admissions standards? Is that unfair and arbitrary in the same sense? Is it unfair and arbitrary at all? Is it inherent in the education process? Perhaps the study addresses these issues. Perhaps it is simply impartially listing the causes of the gap. But a newspaper story’s grouping all such factors in one sentence, without reference to the differences among them, could create a false impression.

Oh good, another piece of Imaginative History, or The Case of the Peekaboo Evidence. Not unlike the Clonaid festivities last week, when the ‘Raelians’ announced the birth of the first cloned baby, but when invited to provide DNA evidence to support such a surprising claim, came over all bashful. There is a good deal of sly wit in Natalie Danford’s Salon piece about retired Admiral Gavin Menzies’ claim that the Chinese sailed to America seventy years before Columbus. It was a shrewd move, for example, to rent the lecture hall of the Royal Geographical Society as the place to announce his ‘discovery’. And publicity does do the trick: there has been so much attention that Menzies’ American publishers have advanced the date of publication by five months. Danford talks to three experts in the field who are unimpressed or plain skeptical of Menzies’ claim, and she wonders why a serious publisher like Morrow ‘didn’t question these unorthodox research methods or the veracity of the statements Menzies has built on them’. The executive editor Danford spoke to resorted to speculation on motives rather than answering the question.

Wachtel theorized that skeptics are threatened by Menzies’ attack on the status quo: “People don’t like the basis of their fundamental knowledge to be challenged, and we all know that in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.”

Ah. That explains it then. Because people don’t like their knowledge challenged, therefore bizarre claims based on shaky or no evidence are true. Interesting argument.

But of course we like this kind of thing. Think The Education of Little Tree. Think of the ‘Chief Seattle’ speech, that was actually written by a Hollywood hack. Think of Black Athena, and The Goddess, and The Gentle Tasaday. Think of Tacitus’ wildly romanticised version of the Germans, people he’d never laid eyes on and knew nothing about, but used to vent his hatred of ‘decadent’ Rome. No doubt the Chinese arrival in America in 1421 will soon be on the curriculum of many a school.

Is it a possibility that music can impact on culture in such a way so as to affect people’s behaviour? Apparently not, at least not if the music is rap, the behaviour violent, and you agree with Viv Craske, editor of Mixmag and would be sociologist. To suggest such a thing is “racist, out of touch and bigoted”. But Mr Craske is a little confused. On the one hand, he claims that “if gun crime is up 55%, it can’t be down to music in any part” (he didn’t elaborate on whether it might be down to music in some part if gun crime is up say 54%). But, on the other hand, he doesn’t accept that guns are fashion accessories for everyone (so that’s cleared that one up then) “but rather for the kind of person who is brought up in a culture who believes that’s the right thing to do.” Right, Mr Craske, but obviously a culture which cannot have been influenced by music in even the smallest way…

Anyway, in Mr Craske’s view, all this is stuff and nonsense, because if music were powerful enough to contribute to gun violence, then it would be used by governments. And there we all were thinking that governments have been using music for millennia…

Well, those silly Victorians, you know, of course they thought about sex every instant of their lives just as we do, but they wouldn’t admit it, the nasty hypocritical creatures, but we’ll fix them, we’ll just make a lot of movies and tv shows based on 19th century novels and if the sex isn’t there we’ll just damn well insert it! So to speak. There is an excellent article on this subject in the Boston Globe today. In it Abby Wolf reports, among other things, that child sexual abuse was featured in a tv drama based on Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, a feature that is entirely absent from the novel. This is one reason not to see movie or tv ‘adaptations’ of novels and expecially of novels that were written more than about five minutes ago. They just can’t get it right. All those Elizabeth Rs and Shakespeare & Lady Violas and Queen Margots having gleeful free-spirited fearless consequence-free sex on ten minutes’ acquaintance or less (Margot grabs the first man she sees on the street and they copulate against the nearest wall, implausible behavior for a 16th century princess, I would have thought, even a French one). We just can’t believe that they really were more inhibited than we are, and for good reason. We also can’t believe that they just weren’t as interested as we are, because we take it for granted that we’ve got it right and they had it wrong. But as Wolf says, ‘That we see sex wherever we see Victorians may say less about them than it does about us and the way we see things now.’

Another, more minor point from the MLA convention.

“The famous line about the M.L.A. is that you’ve never seen a convention where people drink so much and fuck so little,” said Michael Bérubé, an English professor from Penn State University.

Really. That’s so interesting, because I had always heard that was philosophers.

I always knew I didn’t want to be an academic, and a story like this reminds me why. Oh God. The jostling, the ogling, the sucking up, the trend-sniffing, the star-chasing, the pretension. I’d rather be a prison warden, a chicken plucker, a bus driver.

And that’s especially true of the MLA. There’s something about…what used to be called literary criticism, but is now called, in a move that to my mind reeks of pretension and seriosity-envy, ‘literary theory’, that makes me want to grab a shovel and cover myself in mud. Which is odd enough, because I’ve always been a literary type. But then again maybe that’s why: after all literature, unlike other academic fields, has always been a ‘popular’ or general or non-technical subject. The mystification and guild protectiveness and fencing-off aspect of academic literary study is bound to raise the hackles of people who think that at a pinch we can read Shakespeare and Keats on our own.

And that thought may have something to do with the main subject of the article: the scarcity of jobs and opportunities to publish for literary academics. The sad truth is that it’s hard to care very much. How many books and articles about literature do we need? How much research can literary ‘theorists’ do, what sort of discoveries can they make? It’s odd that the article never mentions this aspect of the subject, for all the time it spends on cutbacks and job interviews. But perhaps it’s not odd after all, when the people in the field are so divided (or is it opportunistic?) about whether they speak to Everyone or only to Specialized Professionals. Witness these two comments from Stephen Greenblatt:

“We need to remind ourselves and gesture toward the fact that this is not an esoteric private club,” said Mr. Greenblatt. “It’s as big as the people riding on the subways with their noses in books, or at home watching television shows. Our culture is saturated with the making and consuming of stories.”

“It would be great to sell a lot of books,” said Mr. Greenblatt, “but you don’t say to a physicist or a chemist, ‘Write for a larger audience!’ Any serious profession produces specialized work that is obviously not going to sell tens of thousands or hundreds or thousands, but a very small number of copies.”

Well which is it? Whichever one is needed for the argument at hand, probably. (Not to mention the fact that surely literature is about more than ‘stories’, which one would think Greenblatt of all people would know.) But it’s that tell-tale ‘physicist or chemist’ that gives the game away. Oh dear oh dear. Sad but true: lit crit, even literary theory, is not physics or chemistry. It is a mistake to compare them. Now, where is my shovel…

There is an interesting comment on the letters page of the New York Times Science section.

The conversation with David Sloan Wilson quotes him as saying, “I tell people I’m an atheist, but a nice atheist” (“The Origins of Religion, From a Distinctly Darwinian View”). The idea that atheists, secular humanists, agnostics and other free thinkers are not “nice” or, as is often more bluntly put, “cannot be moral without a belief in God” is highly offensive to the millions of Americans who are nonbelievers.

I entirely agree with the basic thought, but I would have phrased it a little differently. (Plus, in Wilson’s defense, I think he is reacting to the prejudices of other people, not expressing his own.) For one thing, why specify Americans? But that is a minor point, and probably just a habit picked up from political rhetoric. But more to the point, I think offensive is the wrong word here. Even though the implication is offensive, the point is surely that it’s inaccurate and a non sequitur. There are good reasons for de-linking religion and ethics, and good reasons for saying the link is not necessary. John Stuart Mill is incisive on the subject in his Autobiography, for example, describing his father’s contempt for the bribe-taking view of morality religion purveys: be good and you’ll go to heaven, be bad and you won’t. I think such issues are both more interesting and more useful than crying “offense”.

Here is a review of what sounds like a very strange book by a ‘New Democrat’ (i.e. a Democrat so conservative he might as well be a Republican) and adviser to Clinton named William Galston. He wraps himself in the cloak of Isaiah Berlin, the reviewer Stephen Macedo wittily remarks, in an effort to make a case for ‘value pluralism’; but it sounds more like Balkanization and desecularization. Particularly bizarre and indeed alarming is the fact that he condemns the U.S. Supreme Court for striking down the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was written so broadly as to give religious groups the ability to challenge any law that imposed an ‘undue burden’.

The review is particulary sharp with the all-too fashionable idea that the US is too secular and not accomodating enough to religion.

Galston and others who support RFRA evidently believe that liberals have not been sufficiently respectful and accommodating toward religious groups and other kinds of cultural communities…As a general proposition, this claim seems to me astonishing. America is an extraordinarily religious country by any plausible measure. Politicians fall over one another in affirming their religious faith and courting religious voters.

Indeed they do, until one begins to think that atheists are the only truly insufficiently respected group in the country. Perhaps I’ll write a book.

This is an essay that talks (among other things) about the convergence of two subjects (if not more) that keep coming up here: the fashion for biographies of intellectuals–poets, philosophers, historians, scientists–that dwell lovingly on prurient personal details and skip lightly over the ideas and thought and books that are why the people are interesting to begin with; and the dominance of identity politics over every other kind.

The fixation on biography, particularly when it is mixed with interpretive suspicion, suggests a retreat from philosophy’s aspiration to truth; we wallow in the particular and revel in salacious detail, whether it be Wittgenstein’s homosexuality, A. J. Ayer’s promiscuity, Foucault’s “sadomasochistic” experimentations in the gay subculture, Dewey’s sexual shyness, or Hannah Arendt’s affair with Martin Heidegger. The ease with which moral judgments are passed on the lives and passions of others and the titillation derived from cutting intellectual giants down to size are indicative of our own culture. Citizens in a republic of voyeurs, we are intent on microscopic moralism, incapable of appreciating more gracefully the contradictions, tensions, and ragged edges of all lives and unwilling to take ideas seriously, as something more than bandages for personal wounds.

Just so. There is a very interesting passage where Benhabib questions the way Richard Wolin takes his subjects to task for being ‘assimilated’ Jews, for not being ‘authentic’ Jews, and says that his analysis suggests a disturbingly fixed idea of ‘authentic’ Jewish life. Indeed. It is after all possible to be Jewish, or a woman or a Muslim or gay or Nicaraguan or what you will, and still not be consumingly interested in the fact. It is possible, in fact, to be intensely interested in other things, in a wider world than one’s own race or gender or religion, to be fascinated with stars or rocks or molluscs or maps or Louis XIV or Keats or topology, instead of being interested in one’s own parochial roots. It is a terrible claustrophobic oppressive stifling ghettoization that the identity-enforcers want to thrust on everyone, a narrow Balkanized world they want us all to live in, brandishing our ‘identities’ at each other and boring each other to death.

Here is a very silly essay from Slate. Note the rhetoric, for one thing, the talk of atheists ‘trumpeting’ their beliefs, and the truculent demand for an explanation, as if atheism required more explanation than theism does. Note the failure to define what is meant by ‘God’. Note the default assumption that belief is normal and that it’s unbelief that requires justification. Note the circularity of the argument that non-believers have some ‘splaining to do because Garry Wills doesn’t agree with them. And note the resort to the often-cited ‘cosmic deists’ such as Paul Davies. Holt doesn’t trouble to point out that Davies is very much in a minority among physicists in drawing deist conclusions from his work. And then there is the even more obligatory mention of quantum something (theory, here, but almost any abstract noun will do). A nice little exercise in mass market PoMo for the holidays, how festive.