In Defense Of History

Posted on March 28, 2022 by Luke Ford

Richard Evans writes in this 1999 book:

* Virtually all historians, for example, assumed that the nation-state was the primary object of historical study. The emerging historical profession was dominated by the view that the historian’s task lay principally in the study of the origins and development of states and in their relations with one another.

* The Prussian school of historians, led by such figures as J. G. Droysen, was happy to proclaim that “the German nation has outstripped all others” in its application of the critical method to historical sources, but it was just as critical as Trevelyan was of the notion that this was sufficient to constitute history in itself. “History,” declared Droysen, “is the only science enjoying the ambiguous fortune of being required to be at the same time an art.” He complained that because the German middle classes had for so long considered “the German method in history pedantic, exclusive, unenjoyable,” they all read Macaulay instead, or turned to the great French historian and statesman Thiers, so that “German historical judgment” and even “German political judgment” were “formed and guided . . . by the rhetorical superiority of other nations.” The German middle classes did indeed look to the examples of English liberalism and the principles of the French Revolution for much of the nineteenth century. The Prussian school of historians set themselves the task of demonstrating through a mixture of scientific method, historical intuition, and literary skill the superiority of Prussian values and their inevitable triumph in the unification of Germany in 1871. They could claim at least some credit for the drift of middle-class opinion in Germany from a liberal to a more authoritarian form of nationalism in the last three decades leading up to the First World War.

* Already before 1914, therefore, the ability of the scientific method to deliver a neutral and value-free history was under some doubt. Its credibility was even more severely shaken by the events of 1914–18 and their aftermath. Professional historians in every country rushed into print with elaborate defenses of the war aims of their own governments and denunciations of other Great Powers for having begun the conflict. Substantial collections of documents on the origins of the war were produced with all the usual scholarly paraphernalia and edited by reputable professionals, but on principles of selection that seemed manifestly biased to colleagues in other countries. The rigorous scientific training which they had undergone seemed to have had no effect at all in inculcating a properly neutral and “objective” attitude to the recent past, a view that was underlined as the 1920s progressed by the continuing violent controversies between extremely learned and scholarly historians about the origins of the war. 22 Moreover, among British, French, and American historians, the support for the war of the overwhelming majority of the “scientific” German colleagues whose work they so admired came as a further blow. 23 Many historians who had studied in Germany now rushed to denounce German scholarship as pedantic and antidemocratic. “The age of German footnotes,” as one of them declared in 1915, “is on the wane.” 24 And for G. M. Trevelyan, the defeat of the Germans also represented the defeat of “German ‘scientific history,’ ” a mirage which had “led the nation that looked to it for political prophesy and guidance” about as far astray as it was possible to go. 25
The war also revealed previous, apparently neutral scholarly histories of, for example, Germany or nineteenth-century Europe to have been deeply flawed in their interpretations. Events such as the Russian Revolution, the Treaty of Versailles, the triumph of modernism in art, music, and literature increased this sense of disorientation among historians. Reflective historians of the older generation realized that their faith in objectivity had accompanied their sense of living in an ordered and predictable world.

* The idea of the relativity of observer and fact was applied to history by a number of interwar philosophers…

* In making moral judgments on the past, historians have far more powerful rhetorical and stylistic weapons at their disposal than mere denunciation: sarcasm, irony, the juxtaposition of rhetoric and reality, the factual exposure of hypocrisy, self-interest, and greed, the uncommented recounting of courageous acts of rebellion and defiance, the description of terrible acts of hatred and violence. All this can be achieved without the direct application of the transient moral vocabulary of the society the historian is living in.

* Most historians have always believed the establishment of general laws to be alien to the enterprise in which they are engaged. This clearly differentiates them very sharply from natural scientists.

* Nor does history enable one to predict revolutions, however they are defined. Historians notoriously failed to predict, for example, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–91. 25 In any case, although Carr argued repeatedly that the historian’s role was to use an understanding of the past in order to gain control of the future, very few historians indeed have shared this concept of their function in the sense of using the past as the basis for concrete predictions. The fact is that while a chemist, for instance, knows in advance the result of mixing two elements in a crucible, the historian has no such advance knowledge of anything, nor is trying to gain such knowledge really central to the business in which historians are engaged.

* An instructive recent example has been that of the Yale historian Paul M. Kennedy, whose profoundly researched and carefully argued study of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers argued that there was a pattern in modern history according to which wealthy states created empires but eventually overstretched their resources and declined. Illustrated with wealth of historical detail, the book attracted attention not because of its learned demonstration of the reasons for the failure of the Habsburg Empire to achieve European domination in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but because of its conclusion that the United States would be unable to sustain its global hegemony far into the twenty-first century. At a time when U.S. President Ronald Reagan was about to ride off into the sunset, this gloomy prophecy struck a deep vein of anxiety in the American people. The book became a best seller overnight. Written in 1987, the book also made a point of arguing that the Soviet Union was not close to collapse, so that the situation situation seemed to many American readers to be ominous indeed. 26 Within a few years these prophecies had been confounded. The Soviet Union had indeed collapsed, not in the international war which Kennedy had argued was the invariable and inevitable trigger for such processes, but in a process of internal transformation and disintegration. The world hegemony of the United States seemed more assured than ever and in the economic boom of the 1990s showed few signs of suffering from the “imperial overstretch” which Kennedy had prophesied. In the first seven chapters of his book, in other words, Kennedy, writing as a historian, had produced some instructive and workable generalizations about the rise and fall of international superpowers and the relationship of economic and military strength. These chapters also incidentally demonstrated the continuing vitality and viability of “grand narrative” in history. Had Kennedy stopped here, his book would not have attracted the attention it did and would not have sold so many copies. But it would also have been better history. As soon as he turned his generalizations into laws and used them, in his final chapter, to prophesy the future, he ran into trouble. It is always a mistake for a historian to try to predict the future. Life, unlike science, is simply too full of surprises.

* Mommsen’s skepticism about the necessity of even a very modest degree of training in the making of a good historian was echoed a century later by the Oxford specialist in modern French history, Theodore Zeldin, who argued in 1976 that “the ideals or models that historians have set before their pupils have always been rapidly forgotten.”

I have no wish to urge anyone to write history in any particular way. I believe that the history you write is the expression of your individuality; I agree with Mommsen that one cannot teach people to write history; I believe that much more can be gained by encouraging young historians to develop their own personality, their own vision, their own eccentricities, than by setting them examples to follow. Original history is the reflection of an original mind, and there is no prescription which will produce that.

* As three American historians have recently pointed out in their reflections on the current state of the debate, “history is much more than a branch of letters to be judged only in terms of its literary merit.” …Few historians write competently; fewer still display any real mastery of the language in which they publish their work. Most history books are hopelessly unreadable. For this situation, the dominance in the past thirty years of social science models bears a lot of responsibility. Professional historians publish works that no sane person would attempt to read from beginning to end, works that are designed explicitly for reference rather than for reading. They usually lack the kind of literary ability that would make their work rival that of major poets or novelists. If they had it, no doubt most of them would be writing poems or novels. …The historians who can be read for literary pleasure are few indeed, and most of them, such as Gibbon, Michelet, Tocqueville, and Carlyle, wrote in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, which is no doubt why literary analysts have concentrated their attentions on this period rather than applying their techniques to historians of the twentieth, when the desire to be scientific has increasingly driven literary qualities out of their texts.

* “The techniques of deconstruction or discourse analysis,” declares Professor Arthur Marwick of Britain’s Open University, for example, “have little value compared with the sophisticated methods historians have been developing over the years.” 44 In view of his stout championing of the historians superior sophistication, it seems legitimate to ask how Marwick has deployed these “sophisticated methods” in his own work. Here is one sample, taken from Marwick’s discussion of the popular novels of Jeffrey Archer in his book Culture in Britain since 1945 : “I have read only one of these novels: I found my attention firmly held while reading, but, the book finished, I had only the feeling of deepest nullity: no perceptions broadened, nothing to think about, just nothing—the classic outcome of empty entertainment, the opposite pole from serious art.” 45 Does this kind of judgment really reflect the “sophisticated methods historians have been developing over the years”?

* History, in the end, may for the most part be seen as a science in the weak sense of the German term Wissenschaft, an organized body of knowledge acquired through research carried out according to generally agreed methods, presented in published reports, and subject to peer review. It is not a science in the strong sense that it can frame general laws or predict the future. But there are sciences, such as geology, which cannot predict the future either.

* The intellectual historian H. Stuart Hughes has leveled the charge that historians in the United States “seem to have forgotten—if they ever properly learned—the simple truth that what one may call progress in their endeavors comes not merely through the discovery of new materials but at least as much through a new reading of materials already available.” 27 Hughes of course has a strong vested interest in asserting this “simple truth,” since he has never discovered any new material himself in any of his publications but has devoted his entire career to going over old ground. His view is shared by William H. McNeill, of the University of Chicago, who used the occasion of his presidential address to the American Historical Association in 1986 to castigate his colleagues for practicing a “historiography that aspires to get closer and closer to the documents— all the documents and nothing but the documents”—because this meant “merely moving closer and closer to incoherence, chaos, and meaninglessness ,” 28 Coming from a historian whose lifelong specialism had been in the history of the whole world from the beginnings of humanity to the present, and whose acquaintance with original documents was correspondingly limited, this view was perhaps unsurprising, if somewhat tactlessly expressed.

* “Documents cannot be viewed as simple manifestations of a creator’s intentions; the social institutions and material practices which were involved in their production played a significant part in shaping what was said and how it was said.”

* “The whole modern method of historical research is founded on the distinction between original and derivative authorities. By original authorities we mean statements by eye witnesses, or documents and other material remains that are contemporary with the event they attest. By derivative authorities we mean historians and chroniclers who relate and discuss events which they have not witnessed, but which they have heard of or inferred directly or indirectly from original authorities.”

* follows a prominent vein in postmodernist thinking, in which the secondary rather than the primary becomes paramount; rather than study Shakespeare, it is often argued, we should study what critics have written about him, because one reading of Shakespeare is as good as another, and the text itself has no particular priority above interpretations of it, since all are forms of discourse, and it is wrong to “privilege” one discourse over another.

* Language and grammar are in fact not completely arbitrary signifiers, but have evolved through contact with the real world in an attempt to name real things. In a similar way, historical discourse or interpretation has also evolved through contact with the real historical world in an attempt to reconstruct it. …Language is not in the end purely self-reflective. Experience tells us that it mediates between human consciousness and the world it occupies…

* “The work of historians in analysing and unmasking forgeries … is a paradoxical and ironic way of reasserting the capacity of history to establish true knowledge. Thanks to its unique techniques, the discipline of history is skilled at recognizing fakes for what they are and, by that token, at denouncing forgers. It is by returning to its own deviations and perversions that history demonstrates that the discrete knowledge it produces is inscribed within the order of a confirmable, verifiable knowledge.”
In this sense, genuine historical documents do have an integrity of their own; they do indeed “speak for themselves.”

* THESE issues, and others besides, were made painfully concrete in the American historical profession in the 1980s by the so-called Abraham affair. When the young American historian David Abraham’s book The Collapse of the Weimar Republic was published by Princeton University Press in 1981, many reviewers (including myself) hailed it for its originality, while at the same time finding its structural Marxism rather too schematic. Indeed I thought that its central arguments were at such a high level of abstraction that they could not really be empirically validated at all and that the book was best regarded as a work of political science rather than history, conforming therefore to a set of rules and conventions that were not strictly historical. 29 Other, more specialist reviewers were critical in a very different way. In particular, the conservative and avowedly anti-Marxist American historian Henry Ashby Turner, who had himself worked on the same source material, went on record accusing Abraham of deliberately inventing and falsifying archival material in order to discredit German capitalism and blame it for the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Appalled at these allegations, Abraham went back to the archives to check his sources and replied to Turner, admitting some minor errors but rejecting the main charges leveled against him. 30
At this point another American specialist in the history of big business in the Weimar Republic, Gerald Feldman, entered the fray with a further string of accusations. Feldman had originally recommended the book for publication by Princeton University Press, despite numerous errors which he had said should be corrected. But he then discovered that one of his former graduate students, Ulrich Nocken, was checking over every reference and every quotation in Abraham’s book. Nocken reported that there were hundreds of egregious mistakes, including the printing of inaccurate paraphrases as if they were direct quotations from the documents, wrongly attributed letters and documents, mistranslations, misconstruals, inventions, and falsifications of the sources.This persuaded Feldman that he had been wrong to assume that because Abraham had been awarded a Ph.D., his scholarly integrity could be trusted. As if to atone for his earlier gullibility in passing the manuscript for publication, Feldman now unleashed a ferocious campaign of denunciation, in which a large number of specialists in modern German history, including myself, were sent circulars exposing the errors in Abraham’s work and declaring him unfit to be a member of the scholarly community. Abraham replied with a vigorous self-defense, lobbying the German history community on both sides of the Atlantic in his turn. But in the face of Feldman’s campaign, which included denunciatory letters and phone calls to universities considering Abraham for an assistant professorship, this was in the end to no avail. As a result of Feldman’s untiring hostility, Abraham was hounded out of the profession and went to law school, where he graduated with distinction and duly reentered university employment, this time as a lawyer rather than as a historian and therefore in a subject which is perhaps more comfortable with the manipulation and tendentious interpretation of evidence than history is.

* Lawrence Stone, for instance, said:
When you work in the archives you’re far from home, you’re bored, you’re in a hurry, you’re scribbling like crazy. You’re bound to make mistakes. I don’t believe any scholar in the Western world has impeccable footnotes. Archival research is a special case of the general messiness of life.” 42
But this, too, was a debatable point.
Stone should know about “the general messiness of life” in the archives. He was far from being an unimpeachable witness on this issue. When he was Abraham’s age, in 1951, his own work had been subjected to a series of devastating and merciless attacks by his Oxford colleagues Hugh Trevor-Roper and J. P. Cooper in the Economic History Review , which had shown a similar catalog of gross error to that discovered in Abraham’s work. Stone had published an article arguing that English aristocratic landowners in the early seventeenth century were extravagant, financially inept, and declining in economic power. The conclusion was that this hastened the “rise of the gentry,” which was regarded by left-wing historians like R. H. Tawney as one of the main causes of the English Civil War. Trevor-Roper, however, pointed out that Stone had confused different generations of aristocrats with the same title, got many, if not most, of his sums wrong, and altogether misunderstood the nature of landownership at the time. In arguing that aristocratic ownership of manors had declined, for instance, Stone took county samples without realizing that aristocrats owned land in many different counties, and would readily sell their holdings in one to build up their estates in another; moreover, manors differed substantially in size, a factor Stone ignored completely, so that his figures showing a decline in the number of manors held by aristocratic landowners in some cases concealed an actual growth in the acreage and quality of land they possessed overall.
Trevor-Roper’s critique was described variously as “terrifying,” “brutal,” and “one of the most vitriolic attacks ever made by one historian on another.” Stone himself was forced to admit that there were “very serious mistakes” in his article and confessed to his “unscholar-ly treatment” of much of the evidence. 43 When I was an undergraduate in Oxford, indeed, the dons, sniffy as ever about American universities, even Princeton, where Stone had gone to teach, were wont to sneer that he had been forced to seek employment in the United States because his position in Oxford had become untenable as a result of the controversy. Although he in fact subsequently went on to a highly successful career, publishing a series of major (though never less than controversial) works in the process, his mauling at the hands of Trevor-Roper clearly rankled even more than thirty years afterward, and his defense of Abraham, with whom he evidently had a certain fellow-feeling, has to be regarded with suspicion. More to the point, however, was the fact that Stone had recovered from this early débâcle and during his later career had exercised a major and undeniably significant influence on the study of early modern English history and, through his perceptive and readable review articles, the study of history in general. To deny Abraham the same chance of making amends, as Feldman ultimately did, was surely wrong.

* THE Abraham affair was taken up into the debate on postmodernism not least because it touched on the issue which was proving the crucial test of the claim that history was incapable of establishing any real facts about the past. Nazi Germany seemed to postmodernism’s critics to be the point at which an end to hyperrelativism was called for. Postmodernists realized this. In replying to critics, Hayden White pointed out (in a footnote to one of the essays in The Content of the Form) that the Jewish historian Lucy Dawidowicz had attacked all previous writers on Nazism for misrepresenting, neglecting, or trivializing the “Holocaust,” thereby implying that they, too, were writing more in literary than in factual terms and that the Third Reich was no different from any other historical subject in this respect. But Dawidowicz’s book The Holocaust and the Historians has rightly been generally viewed as distorted, exaggerated, overpolemical, and grossly inaccurate in its account of the subject. There is in fact a massive, carefully empirical literature on the Nazi extermination of the Jews. Clearly, to regard it as fictional, or unreal, or no nearer to historical reality than, say, the work of the “revisionists” who deny that Auschwitz ever happened at all is simply wrong. Here is an issue where evidence really counts, and can be used to establish the essential facts. Auschwitz was not a discourse. It trivializes mass murder to see it as a text. The gas chambers were not a piece of rhetoric. Auschwitz was indeed inherently a tragedy and cannot be seen as either a comedy or a farce. And if this is true of Auschwitz, then it must be true at least to some degree of other past happenings, events, institutions, people as well. What then are the implications of this for postmodernism?

* In a conference devoted to this subject, published in Probing the Limits of Representation , edited by Saul Friedländer, a number of postmodernists and their critics sought to address this problem. Hayden White in particular retreated from his earlier position in order to defend himself against the accusation that his hyperrelativism gave countenance to the “revisionist” enterprise of “Holocaust denial.” He conceded that the facts of the “Holocaust” closed off the possibility of using certain types of “emplotment” to describe it. But in making this concession, he implicitly acknowledged the primacy of past reality in shaping the way historians write about it, thus abandoning his central theoretical tenet. The past turned out not to be completely at the mercy of historical “narrativity” and “emplotment” after all.
White himself summed up his change of position by saying that in his early writings he was more concerned to point out the ways in which historians used literary methods in their work and, in so doing, inevitably imported a “fictive” element into it, because their written style did not simply report what they had found but actually constructed the subject of their writing. In his later work he came to draw a sharper distinction between fiction, on the one hand, and history, on the other. Rather than imagine the object first, then write about it in a manner that was therefore mainly subjective, history existed only in the action of writing, involving a kind of simultaneous production or identification of the author of the discourse and the referent or thing about which he or she was writing. White made this shift of position in response to the debate on postmodernism and “Holocaust denial,” and it seems to me to sum up more realistically than his earlier arguments the way in which historians actually go about their business. Historical imagination, he says, calls for the imagining of “both the real world from which one has launched one’s inquiry into the past and the world that comprises one’s object of interest.”

* The distinction between primary and secondary sources on the whole has survived the withering theoretical hail rained down upon it by the postmodernists. The past does speak through the sources and is recoverable through them. There is a qualitative difference between documents written in the past, by living people, for their own purposes, and interpretations advanced about the past by historians living at a later date.

* Long ago, Sir Herbert Butterfield pointed out in his little essay The Whig Interpretation of History that many of the greatest and most important developments in modern history were the unintended consequences of actions whose originators had had something entirely different in mind. The Protestant Reformation, for instance, and its Catholic counterpart in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe had intended to make people more godly, but the religious upheaval and conflict which followed eventually produced such widespread disillusion that the secular rationalism of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment was the result.

* Take E. H. Carr’s claim, for instance, that while millions of people have crossed the river Rubicon, the historian is interested only in Caesar’s crossing of the river because it affected the course of history.

* Hugh Trevor-Roper, too, writing as Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford in 1965, declared that Africa had no history, merely “the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.” 33 As late as the 1990s John Vincent was still writing off Asian history as an impossibility (“we do not understand Asia and will not need to”), 34 surely a rather unwise statement in an age when the global influence of the new Asian economies was already exerting a major impact on the advanced industrial economies of the West.

* The cosmopolitanism of the historical profession in Britain and America contrasts starkly with the insularity of the profession on the European continent…

* THE argument that each group in society creates its own history as a means of building its own identity has worrying implications. As the American historian Laura Lee Downs has noted,
The politics of identity, feminist and otherwise, rests on a disturbing epistemological ground, in which the group’s fragile unity, rooted in an emergent sense of identity as an oppressed other, is shielded from white male colonization by asserting the inaccessibility of one’s experience. Only those who share the group identity and have lived its experience, whether seen as biologically given or socially constructed, can know what it means to be black, a woman, blue-collar, or ethnic, in an America constructed as white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant.” 38
One might of course argue that it follows that none of these oppressed groups can possibly write the history of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males since they in turn have not shared the experience which makes the writing of such a history possible. The ultimate implication indeed is that no one can know anything beyond his or her own bodily identity. Experience is the sole arbiter of truth. There is no universal truth; there are only truths particular to specific groups of people.
Thus white male historians can write only about dead white males, and that, in the opinion of many postmodernists, is why the dominant perspective on the past purveyed by the historical profession has written so many other groups out of the story.

* Does postmodernism therefore give a license to anyone who wants to suppress, distort, or cover up the past? Where do you draw the line between all this and legitimate reinterpretation?
THESE issues, and some even more serious, were raised in 1987, when a young Belgian scholar discovered that one of the leading postmodernists, Paul de Man, a professor at Yale University who had been born and grew up in Belgium, emigrated to the United States after the war, and died in 1983, had written some 180 articles for a Nazicontrolled newspaper in Brussels during the German occupation from 1940 to 1942. Their focus was cultural, but they included encomiums of collaborationist writers in France and—most controversially of all—attacks on the Jewish contribution to European culture in the twentieth century, which de Man decried as mediocre and without great value. At a time when Jews were being rounded up in Belgium and deported to Auschwitz, de Man wrote an article arguing that if the Jews were deported to a Jewish colony outside Europe, European culture would suffer no great loss. After his emigration to the United States, de Man never mentioned this to any of his colleagues or pupils and indeed always denied any kind of collaborationist involvement in Belgium during the war. Like the Austrian president Kurt Waldheim, he had rewritten his own past without reference to the evidence. On this basis he built a successful career in American academia and became an extremely influential literary theorist, leading the “Yale school” of literary “deconstructionists” who argued for the irrelevance of authorial intentions and the multiple, indeed virtually infinite possibilities of textual interpretation. 19 The point of these revelations about his wartime writings was quickly grasped by deconstruction’s critics. Literary criticism, for de Man, seemed to be a way of denying his own past.

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One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway – and Its Aftermath

Posted on March 28, 2022 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2015 book:

* We want to be loved; failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. Our soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact.
Hjalmar Söderberg, Doktor Glas , 1905

* In October 1981, weekend respite care was approved for Anders twice a month. Anders was allocated to a newly married couple in their twenties. When Wenche [mother] brought the boy to them for the first time, they found her rather odd. The second time, they thought she was nuts. She asked if Anders could occasionally touch his weekend dad’s penis. It was important for the boy’s sexuality. He had no father figure in his life and Wenche wanted the young man to assume that role. Anders had no one to identify with in terms of his appearance, Wenche stressed, because ‘he only saw girls’ crotches’ and did not know how the male body worked.
The young couple were speechless. But they were too embarrassed to report what she had said.

* The month before, Wenche had gone to the foster-home section at the child welfare office. She was looking into the possibility of having both children fostered. She wanted them to ‘go to the devil’, she told the child welfare office.
Autumn arrived and life got even darker. In October, Wenche called in to the Frogner Medical Centre. ‘Mother seemed severely depressed,’ they noted. ‘Thinking of just walking out on the children and leaving them to society, to live her own life.’

* The neighbours called him ‘Meccano Boy’ because he was like something made out of a construction set, stiff and angular.

* The ants in the wall had a permanent path from the grass, across the tarmac, along the edge of the footpath, across a grating and up the steps. Anders would sit there waiting.
‘You’re going to die!’
‘Got you!’
He picked them up one by one and squashed them. Sometimes with his thumb, sometimes his index finger. ‘You and you and you and you!’ he decided, there on the steps, master of life and death.
The little girls found him disgusting. He was so intense, and he was cruel to animals. For a while he had some rats in a cage and would poke them with pens and pencils. Eva said she thought he was hurting them, but he took no notice. Anders caught bumblebees, dropped them in water and then brought them up to the surface in a sieve so he could watch them drown. Pet owners at Silkestrå made it clear to their children that Anders was not to come anywhere near their cats or dogs. Anders was often the only one not invited to come and stroke other children’s new puppies or kittens.

* In the fifteen years of Anders’s lifetime, the number of non-Western immigrants in Norway had risen almost fivefold. In Oslo, the change was even more marked. By about the mid-1990s, a third of those living in the eastern areas of Oslo city centre were from immigrant backgrounds. The largest group was the Pakistani community, who had come to Norway for work in the 1970s.

* He called himself metrosexual; he dressed up, wore make-up and used vitamin-enriched hair products. He had ordered Regaine from America, which promised to stop hair loss and trigger the follicles into new growth. He could still conceal his incipient bald patch with a good cut but his hairline was definitely receding. There was a great deal about his appearance that grieved him and he spent a long time in front of the mirror. Too long, thought his friends, who would laugh whenever he overdid the make-up. When he started wearing foundation, they teased him even more. It’s concealer, he objected. In summer he applied bronzing powder, and he kept a whole row of aftershaves in the bathroom.
His nose was new. An experienced surgeon had made a small incision, removed some bone and cartilage from below the bridge and sewn the skin tautly back in place. When the bandage was removed, his nose was just as he wanted it, as it ought to be: a straight profile, quite simply, an Aryan nose.

* Norway should learn from the US, where the key to success was: 1. You’re the best. 2. You can make all your dreams come true. 3. The only limits are those you set yourself.

* Anders had been exempted from military service because he was registered as his mother’s carer. After a serious herpes infection she had had a drain inserted in her head and she needed nursing for an extended period.

* It sounded familiar. He was behaving like a king, but he was only a toy.

* Anders’s posts on the forum grew more negative. ‘The sad thing about the political system in Norway is that it often isn’t the most competent who get political power, but those who are best at networking.’

* ‘Come out of the closet, Anders!’
Anders gave a strained laugh and pushed his friend away. Kristian refused to be shaken off, not wanting to drop the subject.
‘You’ve got to come out, we’re living in the twenty-first century, for God’s sake!’
Anders twisted free. ‘Ha,’ he said. ‘You’re talking to the wrong person.’
Kristian had always thought Anders was gay, but it was the first time he had dared bring it up. ‘There’s no doubt about it,’ said a mutual friend who had himself just come out. Kristian’s girlfriend thought the same. ‘Definitely gay,’ had always been her view of Anders. ‘He plainly isn’t interested in women. He just pretends,’ she said.
Anders’s friends also jeered at him for looking like a pansy. Anders and his make-up, Anders and his giggling, Anders and his affected voice. Anders who always had to do a few quick push-ups as a prelude to a night on the town, who never had a girlfriend but talked enthusiastically about prostitutes and the legalisation of brothels.

* When he sat down at the computer, what he liked best was to escape from reality.

* Anders avoided his friends. The computer screen attracted him more and more. He swiftly typed in the addresses of the computer games he was involved in and could play for hours. If anyone called round or telephoned, they often had to wait until he had finished the level he was playing.
He could not be bothered to work out any more, his diet was poor, he no longer made the effort to dress up and go out into town; he’d had enough of partying with friends in that damn cattle market, as he called the social scene.

* World of Warcraft is one of the most addictive games ever created, precisely because it is constructed on social lines. Players develop bonds with each other through their avatars, and the sense of solidarity can be strong. Every minute you spend away from the game means setting the others back slightly.
It allows you to enter a system that seems easy to grasp. If you can think strategically, success is achieved. You can measure your achievement in the minutest detail. Your goals are concrete. You get a virtual pat on the shoulder every time you log in, and your status is gradually enhanced as a result of time spent there. Everyone can succeed. Such is the online world.
Anders, who had wanted to be part of the power elite, was now one of the soldiers of World of Warcraft . From having been excited by the Freemasons’ stately props, he was now fascinated by computer-generated suits of armour. From having been obsessed with making money, he was now a collector of WoW gold. From having been concerned with his appearance, he now lurked in his room, grubby and unkempt.
Anders, once so keen to build networks, no longer needed anybody but himself.

* After two years in his room, in the summer of 2008, he suddenly felt like being sociable and rang his friends. Andersnordic logged off from the games; so did the other avatars he had created, like Conservatism and Conservative . All at once he was out and about, ordering the sweet drinks he preferred. ‘Ladies’ drinks,’ his friends teased. But he didn’t care. He had never liked beer.
Anders had changed. He had developed a one-track mind.
From always having countless irons in the fire, he had turned into someone engrossed in just one thing. Having launched so many business ideas, he was now monothematic.
‘He’s in a tunnel,’ said Magnus. Hoping he would soon see the light at the other end.
That summer, Anders delivered long lectures on the Islamisation of Europe.
‘The Muslims are waging demographic war,’ he said. ‘We’re living in dhimmitude and being conned by al-Taqiyya .’
‘Eh?’ said his friends.
‘The Muslims will take power in Europe because they have so many bloody children,’ Anders explained. ‘They pretend to be subordinating themselves, but they’ll soon be in the majority. Look at the statistics…’
The words poured out of him.
‘The Labour Party has ruined our country. It’s feminised the state and made it into a matriarchy,’ he told his mates. ‘And more than anything, it’s made it a place where it’s impossible to get rich. The Labour Party’s let the Muslims occupy…’
He started repeating himself. They generally let him go on for a while before they asked him to change the subject. His friends glossed over his peculiarities, the strange behaviour and extreme topics of conversation, because it was good that he was at least getting out. It surely wouldn’t be long before he was back to his old self.
When his friends finally told him to shut up, he generally stopped talking. He could not cope with the transition from didactic monologuing to ordinary chatting. He could only talk about what his friends called his ‘gloomy outlook on the world’.

* In the evening he relaxed with the vampire series True Blood or an episode of Dexter , the show about a serial killer. It annoyed him that all these series he watched were so keen to promote multiculturalism…

* To judge by the way the Oslo police was behaving, little indicated that Norway had just been the target of an act of terror, with an acute risk of secondary attacks. When other districts offered support, their offers were largely declined, even though many potential targets around Oslo remained unsecured. The Parliament requested reinforcements as there were no armed officers outside the main building. You will have to make do with your own guards, the head of the Oslo operational centre informed them. Just close off some of your buildings, the head of security at the Parliament was told. The Labour Party offices at Youngstorget asked for police guards; the House of the People asked for police guards. Their requests were turned down, with the advice to evacuate their premises.
Norway owns a single police helicopter. And in July, the helicopter service was on holiday. As a consequence of new savings measures, there was no emergency crew cover at the height of the summer. The first pilot nonetheless reported for duty right after hearing about the bomb on the news. He was told he was not needed.
Yet the emergency response unit requested use of the helicopter twice in the hour that followed. The squad was informed that the helicopter was unavailable, even though it was on the tarmac, fully operational and ready to fly. Nor did the police take any steps to mobilise military helicopters or make use of civilian helicopter companies.
After the bomb in Oslo, no immediate nationwide alert was sent out. A nationwide alert is issued to communicate information considered important to all the police districts in the country. When such an alert goes out, all police stations follow a standard procedure. In Asker and Bærum, this would have involved setting up a police roadblock on the E16 at Sollihøgda, towards which Anders Behring Breivik was currently heading…
The information provided by witnesses was not read out over any general communication wavelength, nor was it passed on to the media so that alerts could go out on radio and television. The Public Roads Authority in Oslo, which has a comprehensive network of cameras, was not alerted either. Despite the fact that the government quarter – Norway’s most important seat of power – had been blown to smithereens by a bomb, the terror-response plan was not implemented.

* ‘If there really is a person shooting, then somebody’s got to talk to him,’ said one of them. ‘We’ve got to ask him to stop,’ said the other.
As AUF members they had grown up in a culture of words. The debate must be won. It is the strength of your argument that gives you power. The young people on Utøya this Friday were used to being heard.

* He stressed that they were not Nazis, and that they supported Israel. They were not racists, but they wanted political Islam out of Europe. It could be called a conservative revolution. ‘But I’ve written a fifteen-hundred-page manifesto on this, I can’t explain it all now,’ he said.

Posted in Norway | Comments Off on One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway – and Its Aftermath

Russia’s Fight To The Death In Ukraine (3-27-22)

Posted on March 27, 2022 by Luke Ford

00:00 Russia’s war to the death, https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1507819604105592832
15:00 Biden says Putin ‘cannot remain in power’ in sweeping speech on Russian invasion of Ukraine, https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/26/biden-says-putin-cannot-remain-in-power-in-sweeping-speech-on-russian-invasion-of-ukraine.html
30:40 That’s What Xi (Jinping) Said, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alR-hlz7ueU
38:00 What a Single Metric Tells Us About the Pandemic, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/03/covid-excess-mortality.html
47:00 My new over-arching theory of life — what gives you energy? https://www.amazon.com/Before-Laughter-Life-Changing-Jimmy-Carr/dp/B09HG18CYW
50:00 NLP – the pseudoscience, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming
54:00 Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena”, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/63389/roosevelts-man-arena
1:01:30 Elliott Blatt joins
1:02:00 Slack destroys productivity
1:29:00 Normies are a foreign land
1:30:30 How Mushrooms Will Change The World, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9RceZhnSwE
1:35:30 Prepping
1:40:00 Elliott’s rescuing fetish
1:50:00 She Was a Candidate to Lead Levi’s. Then She Started Tweeting., https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/business/levis-jen-sey.html
1:53:00 What’s ‘Context Collapse’? Understanding it Can Mean a More Fulfilling Online Life, https://www.rewire.org/context-collapse-online/
1:58:00 Finlandization
2:01:00 Class Action Park, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_Action_Park
2:06:00 What is a woman?
2:16:30 Elon Musk giving ‘serious thought’ to starting new social media platform for free speech, https://www.rebelnews.com/elon_musk_giving_serious_thought_to_starting_new_social_media_platform_for_free_speech
2:25:20 Will Iran Get the Bomb? with John Mearsheimer, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71hOYfE8sSI
Fourth vaccine reduces COVID-19 deaths by 78% – study, https://www.jpost.com/health-and-wellness/coronavirus/article-702441
The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998), https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=142930, Review: https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=142919
The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=142926

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Loving Putin Is The New Holocaust Denial (3-21-22)

Posted on March 21, 2022 by Luke Ford

00:00 Holocaust denial has long been the most socially deviant opinion you could offer
01:00 Dooovid joins the show
03:00 When you moralize the news, the IQ of the conversation goes down
05:00 The dominant narrative about the war in Ukraine
11:00 Kevin Michael Grace had a trip and fall and black eye and black eye patch
29:00 Why is Israel neutral on the Ukraine war?
30:50 Will Israeli PM negotiate the surrender of Ukraine?
34:00 Israeli treading softly with regard to Russian-Jewish-Israeli oligarchs
39:00 Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, Venerated Talmudic Scholar, Dies at 94, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/obituaries/rabbi-chaim-kanievsky-dea.html
40:00 Dooovid compares to Chaim Kanievsky to Adam Green, https://canarymission.org/individual/Adam_Green
47:00 Dooovid doesn’t feel lonely
50:30 There’s nothing Dooovid looks forward to getting back to socially
52:30 Dooovid has many homosexual friends
54:00 Dooovid says it is easier to meet people on the internet
1:08:10 Putin’s Popularity | Douglas Murray, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY3AciVyuIY
1:16:10 Peter Zeihan on Putin’s threats nuclear war
1:19:00 What’s hot on my yikyak right now
1:20:00 Peter Zeihan on The Battle for Ukraine & Prospects for World War III, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmtwYizIfxc
1:29:50 Peter Zeihan says he’s an Atlanticist, a globalist
1:31:20 Is Biden a populist?
1:32:30 Why is the war in Ukraine important to the world?
1:36:00 What was Putin’s initial plan?
1:40:00 Four ways China is making life difficult for Russia, https://egyptindependent.com/4-ways-china-is-quietly-making-life-harder-for-russia/
1:42:20 How to deal with difficult dictators and supervisors and coworkers, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnZX3UAuY-w

Posted in Holocaust, Russia, Ukraine | Comments Off on Loving Putin Is The New Holocaust Denial (3-21-22)

The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998)

Posted on March 21, 2022 by Luke Ford

Here are some excerpts from this book sociologist Randall Collins:

* The long-term tendency of an active intellectual community is to raise the level of abstraction and reflexivity.

* Individuals who participate in IRs [interaction rituals] are filled with emotional energy, in proportion to the intensity of the interaction. Durkheim called this energy “moral force,” the flow of enthusiasm that allows individuals in the throes of ritual participation to carry out heroic acts of fervor or self-sacrifice. I would
emphasize another result of group-generated emotional energy: it charges up individuals like an electric battery, giving them a corresponding degree of enthusiasm toward ritually created symbolic goals when they are out of the
presence of the group. Much of what we consider individual personality consists of the extent to which persons carry the energy of intense IRs; at the high end, such persons are charismatic; a little less intensely, they are forceful leaders and the stars of sociability; modest charges of emotional energy make passive individuals; and those whose IR participation is meager and unsuccessful are withdrawn and depressed. Emotional energy (abbreviated EE) flows from situations when individuals participate in IRs to situations when they are alone. Encounters have an emotional aftermath; it is by this route that persons can pursue their interior lives and their individual trajectories, and yet be shaped by the nodes of social interaction. EE ebbs away after a period of time; to renew it, individuals are drawn back into ritual participation to recharge themselves.

* The distinctive IRs of intellectuals are those occasions on which intellectuals come together for the sake of their serious talk: not to socialize, nor to be practical. Intellectuals set themselves apart from other networks of social life in the act of turning toward one another. The discussion, the lecture, the argument, sometimes the demonstration or the examination of evidence: these are the concrete activities from which the sacred object “truth” arises.

* Intellectuals tend to feel that an idea has not fully entered into their reality until it is in the system of cross-referenced books and journals which constitutes the products of the intellectual community.

* Intellectual life hinges on face-to-face situations because interaction rituals can take place only on this level. Intellectual sacred objects can be created and sustained only if there are ceremonial gatherings to worship them. This is what lectures, conferences, discussions, and debates do: they gather the intellectual community, focus members’ attention on a common object uniquely their own, and build up distinctive emotions around those objects. But what is it that distinguishes such gatherings of intellectuals from any other kind of IR? One difference is in the structure of attention. The key intellectual event is a lecture or a formal debate, a period of time when one individual holds the floor to deliver a sustained argument on a particular topic. This is different from the give-and-take of sociable conversations, which typically cannot reach any complex or abstract level because the focus shifts too often. Intellectuals giving their attention for half an hour or more to one viewpoint, developed as a unified stream of discourse, are thereby elevating the topic into a larger, more encompassing sacred object than the little fragmentary tokens of ordinary sociable ties.

* The intellectual IR consists not in giving orders or practical information but in expounding a worldview, a claim for understanding taken as an end in itself. The audience is in the stance of pure listeners, not subordinates nor participants in the moral community of faith which is invoked by religious ritual. Intellectual
discourse focuses implicitly on its autonomy from external concerns and its reflexive awareness of itself.

* An intellectual IR is generally a situational embodiment of the texts which are the long-term life of the discipline. Lectures and texts are chained together: this is what makes the distinctiveness of the intellectual community, what sets it off from any other kind of social activity.

* Without face-to-face rituals, writings and ideas would never be charged up with emotional energy; they would be Durkheimian emblems of a dead religion, whose worshippers never came to the ceremonies. Texts do not merely transcend the immediate particulars of the here-and-now and push toward abstraction and generality. To be oriented toward the writings of intellectuals is to be conscious of the community itself, stretching both backwards and forwards in time. Intellectual events in the present—lectures, debates, discussions—take place against an explicit backdrop of past texts, whether building upon them or critiquing them. Intellectuals are peculiarly conscious of their predecessors. And their own productions are directed toward unseen audiences. Even when they lecture to an immediate group, perhaps of personal students, disciples, or colleagues, the message is implicitly part of an ongoing chain, which will be further repeated, discussed, or augmented in the future.

* The focus is on a peculiar kind of speech act: the carrying out of a situation-transcending dialogue, linking past and future texts. A deep-seated consciousness of this common activity is what links intellectuals together as a ritual community.

* emotional energy (EE) [is] the kind of strength that comes from participating successfully in an interaction ritual. It is a continuum, ranging from a high end of confidence, enthusiasm, good self-feelings; through a middle range of lesser emotional intensity; on down to a low end of depression, lack of initiative, and negative self-feelings. Emotional energy is long-term, to be distinguished from the transient, dramatically disruptive outbursts (fear, joy, anger, etc.) which are more conventionally what we mean by “emotions.”5 Emotional energy is the most important kind of emotion for its effects on IR chains. It fluctuates depending on recent social experience: intense ritual participation elevates emotional energy, rejection from ritual membership lowers it; dominating
a group situation raises emotional energy, being dominated lowers it; membership rituals within a high-ranking group give high amounts of emotional energy, membership rituals within a low-ranking group give modest
emotional energy.

* Individuals are motivated to participate in rituals of highest solidarity, gravitating toward those encounters in which their repertoire of symbols and their level of emotions mesh with those of other persons so as to generate high degrees of solidarity, and away from those encounters in which they are subordinated or excluded. If the network is stratified, one attempts if possible to dominate one’s ritual interactions; lacking the resources to do this, one attempts if possible to evade rituals in which one is subordinated.

* Consider now the trajectory of an individual’s career across the intellectual milieu as an IR chain. The intellectual world is a massive conversation, circulating cultural capital in intermittent face-to-face rituals as well as in writing. What makes one an intellectual is one’s attraction to this conversation: to participate in the talk of its “hot center,” where the ideas have the greatest sacredness, and if possible to attach one’s own identity to such ideas so that one’s ideas are circulated widely through the conversation, and one’s personal
reputation with it. The conversation of intellectuals is competitive, an implicit shouldering aside and grasping of one another to get as much into the focus of attention as possible. How does one succeed in this struggle for ritual centrality? One can make two kinds of claims: “My ideas are new” and “My ideas are important.”

* Successful ideas must be important, and importance is always in relation to the ongoing conversations of the intellectual community.

* Intellectual creativity comes from combining elements from previous products of the field. The references found in a paper are a rough indication of the cultural capital it draws upon. Derek Price (1975: 125) has calculated from citation patterns that in contemporary natural science, it takes on the average 12 “parent papers” to give birth to one “offspring paper.” Turning the structure the other way, we can say that the most eminent intellectuals are those whose papers end up being cited the most; their ideas are “parents” to the greatest number of “offspring.” Their ideas make it possible for other people to make their own statements.

* We know from Derek Price’s studies that the most eminent intellectuals—in this case, scientists of the mid-1900s whose work receives the most citations—are the most prolific publishers; and they are the individuals who stay in the field the longest, while others drop out. This evidence suggests that eminence is largely a matter of having access to a large amount of CC, and turning it over with the greatest rapidity, recombining it into new ideas and discoveries. This would make creativity a matter of sheer activity, of emotional energy in using cultural capital. The psychologist Dean Keith Simonton (1984, 1988) has shown that creative persons in a variety of fields produce large amounts of work, only portions of which receive recognition. Their formula for success seems to be to range widely and try out new combinations of ideas, some of which become selected for recognition by the intellectual community.

* The emotional energy specific to creative intellectual fields is not the same as the confidence and aggressiveness of persons in other arenas of social life. It is not the same as the emotional energy of the successful politician or the financial entrepreneur, of the sociability star or the sexual hotshot.

* If intellectual life is constructed by rituals in which speakers become centers of attention, and in which ideas and texts symbolize the continuity of an intellectual community across time, we can expect that individuals’ intellectual EE will be driven upward or downward by their type of contact with these situations and sacred objects. The crucial variable is how closely one is drawn into participation in these symbolic activities. The speaker at the seminar increases his or her emotional energy if the audience is responsive; so do the listeners, if they have the personal cultural capital, and the trajectory of their own intellectual projects, that makes their ideas mesh well with the line being expounded. In the opposite direction, the inability to carry off the lecture for that audience, or the inability to follow it, perhaps even the sense of having one’s ideas excluded, depresses one’s EE. One’s personal level of EE is like a reservoir filled up or drained by the amount of experience one has with such favorable or unfavorable situations, and by the balance between the two.

* Since possessing high emotional energy is one of the things that enables a person to attract attention in a ritual interaction, and which affects creativity in general, there is a tendency for persons who are already well started in EE to become even more “energy-rich” over time. A high level of energy reaches a plateau or goes into a reversal if one’s career trajectory takes one into levels of competition for attention in which one becomes overmatched. This occurs when someone who has become famous within a particular research specialty is propelled into a larger arena, perhaps interdisciplinary or in the eye of the wider public, where one may not have the resources to match up with the existing competition. The effect of starting with low levels of EE is likely to
be even more emphatically cumulative. Just as success breeds the ingredients of success, failure breeds intellectual failure. Depression, writer’s block, the shifting of one’s attention away from intellectual projects and back onto the everyday world: these are typical pathways by which would-be intellectuals fail to make a mark and drop out of the field. The majority of the intellectual field at any time consists of persons who are in this transient position. The core experiences of intellectuals are their immediate interactions with other intellectuals. EE is also affected by vicarious experience of the intellectual community.

* Imagine a large number of people spread out across an open plain—something like a landscape by Salvador Dalí or Giorgio de Chirico. Each one is shouting, “Listen to me!” This is the intellectual attention space. Why would
anyone listen to anyone else? What strategy will get the most listeners? Two ways will work. A person can pick a quarrel with someone else, contradicting what the other is saying. That will gain an audience of at least one; and if the argument is loud enough, it might attract a crowd. Now, suppose everyone is tempted to try it. Some arguments start first, or have a larger appeal because they contradict the positions held by several people; and if other persons happen to be on the same side of the argument, they gather around and provide support. There are first-mover advantages and bandwagon effects. The tribe of attention seekers, once scattered across the plain, is changed into a few knots of argument. The law of small numbers says that the number of these successful knots
is always about three to six. The attention space is limited; once a few arguments have partitioned the crowds, attention is withdrawn from those who would start yet another knot of argument. Much of the pathos of intellectual
life is in the timing of when one advances one’s own argument.

The other way these intellectual attention seekers can get someone to listen is to find a topic someone else is talking about and agree with it, adding something which extends the argument. Not “No, you’re wrong because . . .”
but “Yes, and furthermore . . .” This transforms the relationship into teacher and favorite student. The plain full of dispersed egotists becomes clumped another way, into lineages of master-pupil chains.

* The motivation to make oneself a sacred object is an energizing force of intellectual careers. One of the reasons why there tends to be a chain from one highly creative intellectual to another is that the younger
person draws energy from the older as just such a symbolic hero. It is not merely a matter of transmitting cultural capital from one generation to the next, since we are dealing here with creative departures rather than loyal discipleship. The protégé’s consciousness is filled by the image of what it is to be an intellectual hero, by an ideal to emulate, even while one challenges the content of the master’s ideas.

* A thoroughgoing omni-skepticism is a deep trouble, the counterpart to the regulative ideal, the most central sacred object of intellectual life, the ideal of absolute truth.14 That is why skepticism is repeatedly revived, even though hardly anyone is ever convinced by it.

* Over the long term, the major intellectual driving force is the dynamics of organizationally sustained debate. Factions which keep their identities during many generations of argument become locked into a long dance step with one another; increasingly impervious to outside influences and turned inward upon their mutually constituted argumentative identities, they drive the collective conscience of the intellectual attention space repeatedly to new heights of abstract self-reflection.

* All persons move toward those IRs in which they get the largest payoff in emotional energy, and away from those which are an energy drain.

* Each person is trying to get the best intellectual status membership he or she can, not only directly but vicariously. Everyone is attracted to thinking high-status ideas as well as associating with high-status persons. The problem is that negotiating alliances is a mutual process. One side, looking up the status ladder, might wish to make an alliance, while the other side, looking down, is less eager; the successful intellectual may welcome followers but is unlikely to give them much recognition in return.

* Each intellectual faces a strategic choice. One can go all out, try to be king of the mountain, which means trying to be alone or nearly alone at the center of one of the major intellectual positions. Or one might cut one’s losses and aim for a more modest position: as loyal follower… Initially most intellectuals aim unrealistically high, and are driven down emotionally by the structure.

* Thinking is driven by the emotional loadings of symbols charged up by the dynamics of the markets for social membership. One’s emotional energy at any given moment selects the symbols which give one an optimal sense of group membership. Thinking is a fantasy play of membership inside one’s own mind. It is a maneuvering for the best symbolic payoff one can get, using energies derived from recent social interactions and anticipations of future encounters.

* The most notable philosophers are not organizational isolates but members of chains of teachers and students who are themselves known philosophers, and/or of circles of significant contemporary intellectuals.

* The crucial feature of creativity is to identify an unsolved problem, and to convince one’s peers of the importance of solving it. It is typical for intellectuals to create problems at the very moment they solve them.

* The structure of intellectual life is governed by a principle: the number of active schools of thought which reproduce themselves for more than one or two generations in an argumentative community is on the order of three to six.

* As the raw size of intellectual production goes up, the reward to the average individual goes down—at least the pure intellectual rewards of being recognized for one’s ideas and of seeing their impact on others. The pessimism and self-doubt of the intellectual community under these circumstances is not surprising.

* Secularization means removing control of intellectual production from the authority of the church. That authority had been backed up by the coercive power of the state… The exhaustion of politicized church conflict led to secularization, the gradual neutralization and downgrading of the role of the church in the state, and the loss of church control over the means of intellectual production.

* abstract philosophy was usually produced by professional teachers, monks and priests, in organizational structures turned inward and away from the ordinary world. In contrast, writers’ networks are more closely connected to, even embedded in, the status order of society, and their cultural content is much closer to lay concerns of class-appropriate entertainment, topical morality and politics… With the shift to a writers’ marketplace comes more room to maneuver, but the power of the audience results in a division between writers oriented toward the mass market and an inwardly oriented elite of writers pursuing their own standards of technical perfection. The latter group sets up a possible rapprochement with academic carriers of culture, but the meeting is laden with tension.

* In Germany the intellectual world became academicized before anywhere else…

* Religious tracts had always been the biggest seller since the inception of print media.

* Sartre was the first philosopher in history to be heavily publicized by the popular mass media…

* Dostoyevsky’s own explicit doctrines, no doubt sincerely held but serving also to make his materials palatable to government censorship, extol a religious doctrine of passive suffering; but it is his villains who drive the drama and provide the atmosphere of impassioned philosophy that would appeal internationally to intellectuals. What made Dostoyevsky a literary success was that he combined this material with the style of the mass market novel, often taking the form of a murder mystery or police thriller. Dostoyevsky exploited the intellectual’s self-examination made successful by Turgenev, purged of its polite drawing room qualities and transposed into the melodrama of popular fiction.

* Economically, the highbrow segment rarely has been able to support itself on returns from the market. It arises where writers turn inward upon their professional connections within the network of peers; the audience which alone is given legitimacy to set standards of judgment are other elite writers.

* highbrow writers survive by patronage, sometimes the self-patronage of wealthy inheritors (Flaubert and Proust), reinforcing the self-image of the artist as the true aristocrat. Some highbrow writers hold alternative jobs (Baudelaire as journalist-critic, T. S. Eliot as bank clerk), the despising of which usually figures into the theme of artistic alienation from the ordinary commercial world which fails to support their art. Another common external niche is an academic job, which bruises the writer’s self-esteem because its bureaucratic routine contrasts with the freedom and creative exaltation which the writers’ market holds out as its ultimate reward. Most common of all is economic failure.12 This gives rise to the image of the artist starving in a garret, melodramatically ending as a youthful suicide rather than be forced back into the mundane world. In fact, most highbrow writers (perhaps middlebrow writers as well) spend only a youthful episode in writing, like Rimbaud from 17 to 19, before economic realities force them back into a conventional career.

* The best chances of success for highbrow writers exist where many aspiring and part-time writers are concentrated in a community. Sheer size is the crucial variable in making a critical mass which can support at least a few technically oriented esoteric writers on the proceeds of their works… This concentrated mass of intellectual aspirants, together with failures who had not yet given up their highbrow identities and their network contacts with the culture production business, made up a local market supporting viable careers for a few pure intellectual creators, whose lives became emblems for the rest. Such was the market structure in which the Sartre circle forged a brief episode of high-level creativity merging philosophy and literature.

* When intellectual life came alive in medieval Christendom, proofs of God became a standard turf for tests of philosophical skill, not primarily for converting unbelievers but for precedence in the intellectual community. It was a pure intellectual game; there was no premium on accepting proofs, and rejection of inadequacies of rival argument was taken as a mark of superiority.

* Deep Troubles: Free Will and Determinism, Substance and Plurality. A deep trouble is a doctrine containing a self-propagating difficulty. Alternative paths open out, each of which contains further puzzles. Exploration of such conundrums becomes a chief dynamic on the medium to higher reaches of the philosophical abstraction-reflexivity sequence. Intellectual life gets its energy from oppositions. It thrives on deep troubles because these provide guaranteed topics for debate. Once a deep trouble is discovered, it tends to be recycled through successive levels of abstraction. The recognition of deep troubles enables us to reformulate with greater precision a basic principle of intellectual creativity: oppositions divide the attention space under the law of small numbers, not merely along the lines of greatest importance to the participants, but along the lines of the available deep troubles. Monotheism is fruitful for advance along the abstraction-reflexivity sequence because it is a major source of deep troubles. One of the simplest of these is the issue of free will. The question of free will arises only at a level of abstraction capable of generating contradictions within a pair of opposing
concepts.

* The drive of the mathematical networks into higher abstraction and reflexivity is what gives the distinct edge to the philosophy of the modern West.

* The intellectual situation since about 1700 in this respect is historically unique. An anti-mathematical stance of this sort would have been inconceivable to most Greek, Islamic, and medieval Christian philosophers,29 for whom
mathematics would have been not seen as a bringdown to mundane calculation but as the essence of the transcendental, even mystical hierarchy. Mathematics was the ally of religion and faith. It was only after the great reversal of alliances, at the time of the secularization of the intellectual world in the late 1600s, that an anti-science and anti-mathematical front appeared. Moreover, this front consisted not merely of religious reactionaries, but of a secular opposition to the main line of philosophical development.

* The individual thinker, closeted in privacy, thinks something which is significant for the network only because his or her inner conversation is part of the larger conversation and contributes to its problems. If a brain flickers and brightens with statements which are true, this happens only because that brain is pulsing in connection with the past and anticipated future of a social network. Truth arises in social networks; it could not possibly arise anywhere else.

Posted in Academia, Philosophy, Sociology | Comments Off on The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (1998)