Bis später

Harvard is after Henry, and that's not new,

"I'll see you later" cried the crippled soul

one destination behind.

Soul upon soul, in the high Andes, blue

but blind for turns. And this is where the mind

stops. Death is a box.

- John Berryman

Paid by the Word

For St. Augustine’s pure liar it is, on the contrary, a reason in favor of making it. For the bullshitter it is in itself neither a reason in favor nor a reason against. Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’'s normal habit of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost. Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. 

One who is concerned to report or to conceal the facts assumes that there are indeed facts that are in some way both determinate and knowable. His interest in telling the truth or in lying presupposes that there is a difference between getting things wrong and getting them right, and that it is at least occasionally possible to tell the difference. Someone who ceases to believe in the possibility of identifying certain statements as true and others as false can have only two alternatives. The first is to desist both from efforts to tell the truth and from efforts to deceive. This would mean refraining from making any assertion whatever about the facts. The second alternative is to continue making assertions that purport to describe the way things are but that cannot be anything except bullshit.
- Harry Frankfurt, On Bullshit

So I've just finished my first semester of teaching. It isn't much at all, as far as experience is concerned: I only had 11 students. But when I set this brief episode against two decades in which I was always on the other side of the classroom, the difference is surprisingly stark. Suddenly, I'm remembering moments in which I thought I was being an ideal student as having been in reality an embarrassing nuisance for the professor. The empathy that I so rarely felt for my classmates is now beginning belatedly to appear. If I were shown this point of view, Christmas Carol-style, when I was in high school, I am not sure it would have changed much except making me somewhat more tolerable to teach and learn next to. Ah well.

When I was a student, I had a finely worked-out hierarchy of paper-writing tricks--mainly ones designed to make the paper seem longer than it actually was. At the bottom were the especially stupid ones, never to be resorted to: cheap plagiarism, widening the margin, increasing the font size. (Why do the others think they're getting away with it?) Then came more subtle ones: invisibly increasing the size of each period, expanding the heading, using a slightly different font. I never used these except in moments of extreme duress. Around the summit, an even more refined and well-worn toolbox: making the paper longer by writing more characters. A "representation" used instead of an "image" could, in the right cases, net you a whole new line break, and several could make your seven pages look more like a respectable seven and a half. An extra adjective could do the same. Finally, the apex and cornerstone of my strategy was writing whole sentences to beef up points already made, conclusions already reached. At times I could work up hundreds of words of bullshit that fit so organically into my writing that I no longer remembered which sentences were which. My writing style, as you've probably observed, has become a permanent and unrecoverable casualty of these staple tactics.

Now, looking back on the final papers I've graded, what strikes me the most is how little the length, especially the page count, really matters. An already weak paper may have seemed especially weak because it wasn't long enough, but obvious attempts to lengthen a too-short weak paper--and they were all obvious, no matter where on my beloved pyramid they were--were an even bigger black mark. In fact, the most important thing I noticed and remembered about all the essays I graded was whether they had a real argument or not, and if so, how thoroughly they pursued it. Why did none of us students ever apply as much diligence and creativity to composing arguments as we did trying to satisfy an almost wholly imaginary word count god?

The best explanation I can come up with, though it may seem too cynical by half, is that for students producing papers is primarily an exercise in bullshit. I don't disagree with Harry Frankfurt, but he should have noted that in the collegiate context--where most of us are drilled most thoroughly in producing bullshit--its most salient feature is that it is measured by volume. When students talk and think about papers, they do it in terms of page count, because the content usually means so little to them. If a sweaty, panting New Historicist arrives and tells them that their reading of The Merchant of Venice is totally off-base in the play's context of reception, they will shrug their shoulders and pretend he does not exist. In most papers nothing is at stake, which is one reason plagiarism is so common.

I found it especially excruciating when teachers or professors responded to this kind of thinking by saying the paper "should be as long as it needs to be," as if the image of flowers in Shakespeare were a topic divinely ordained by some universal constant not to take up any more or less than ten double-spaced pages of twelve-point Times New Roman. The instinct was noble, the response fallacious. An assignment does not become meaningful and bullshit does not cease to be bullshit just because the volume requirement is obfuscated. My (mental) response to this was an angry (unspoken) accusation: "You and I both know that this is an elaborate game. I produce volume for you and you give me an A, I do a rote close-reading and you get to pretend I am learning to think critically. Why not cut the crap?"

I'm not sure I disagree with my jaded pimply teenage self even now. But what I have realized, as a beginning teacher, is that while I may recognize that something like this is right and possibly more right than the platitudes we are forced to absorb in our graduate "teaching practicum," that doesn't get me very far. I am not only not allowed to teach, assign, or grade on the assumption that the whole exercise is an elaborate piece of meta-bullshit, I can't even use that kind of thinking as an escape route. For one thing, I'd inevitably be letting down the students who do think they're doing something worthwhile, though it's hard for me to reliably tell how many of them there are. (One danger of being a cynic is that it encourages large-scale projection.) For another, I don't think I could stand to be in a classroom if I were as thoroughly convinced of the pointlessness of the exercise as I sometimes think I am, even with the justification that I'm getting paid. Moreover, as long as I'm not totally despicable I should see it as some kind of goal to transcend the bullshit, to create meaningful learning even in the context of a meaningless game.

But how? Is there a magical assignment that will overcome the will-to-bullshit of the whole system of mass education? I thought in terms of volume even when I was writing good papers for classes I passionately adored. Is hitting a page count just one of those creatively-constricting elements of writing, like the syllable count in haiku? I don't think so. This, like so many other things, is calibrated mainly for the convenience of the instructor. (Just how much of class design is based on this is another thing I've just begun learning.) There's nothing inherently good about a 10-12 page paper except that it takes a decent amount of work on the student's part and is relatively easy for the instructor to grade. What if I threw open the gates completely, letting them write one-page blurbs or three-hundred-page novels as they like? That won't work--the educational equity issues alone make my head hurt.

Bullshit is a problem I've never been able to solve. The only halfway-acceptable alternative is having students contribute to projects that will eventually, somehow, be useful to someone--like a wiki or an online exhibit. But students often hate those. And, however grudgingly, I do admit that I would be nowhere today if it wasn't for the bullshit I've been producing for the last two decades. Is this just something I have to live with?  

Yet Another '90s Fad

Today, friends and foes of globalization debate 'its' effects. Both assume the reality of such a process, which can either be praised or lamented, encouraged or combated. Are we asking the best questions about issues of contemporary importance when we debate globalization? Instead of assuming the centrality of a powerful juggernaut, might we do better to define more precisely what it is we are debating, to assess the resources which institutions in different locations within patterns of interaction possess, to look towards traditions of transcontinental mobilization with considerable time-depth? 

Globalization is clearly a significant 'native's category' for anyone studying contemporary politics. Anyone wishing to know why particular ideological and discursive patterns appear in today's conjuncture needs to examine how it is used. But is it also a useful analytical category? My argument here is that it is not. Scholars who use it analytically risk being trapped in the very discursive structures they wish to analyze. Most important in the term's current popularity in academic circles is how much it reveals about the poverty of contemporary social science faced with processes that are large-scale, but not universal, and with the fact of crucial linkages that cut across state borders and lines of cultural difference but which nonetheless are based on specific mechanisms within certain boundaries. That global should be contrasted with local, even if the point is to analyze their mutual constitution, only underscores the inadequacy of current analytical tools to analyze anything in between.
- Frederick Cooper, "What is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian's Perspective," African Affairs 100 (2001), 189-213.

Globalization and various species of "international turn" have been on a lot of people's minds for decades now--and this has not abated in the ten years since Fred Cooper's article appeared. It seems almost impossible to write about any kind of phenomenon, historical or contemporary, without taking into account its international context. At the very least, scholars and commentators who confine their work to a single country or locality are increasingly doing so as a conscious and deliberate choice rather than as a default--and if they do not, audiences are increasingly starting to call them on it. A decade ago, with Japan moribund and China still very much a developing country, it was possible for politicians to talk about the American economy in ways that were largely isolated from the outside world. ("Jobs going abroad" and the accompanying rhetoric are not necessarily a complete counterexample, since the conversation could often be framed in terms that turned it into an internal problem with external dimensions rather than as a fundamentally international issue.) Today, a politician who discusses the economy without mentioning Europe (for instance) would be regarded as a tyro. This kind of shift has only become more apparent since the heyday of globalization discussions in the 1990s. 

In academia (and even long-form journalism or, as we see with Teju Cole's Open City, fiction), the result has been a surge of works whose claims can be summarized as "This phenomenon has international consequences or roots that must be understood." We are now seeing that there are very few things in the world of which that is not true, which guarantees such works a readership and fanbase. That's not to be dismissive: often, depending on the nature of the subject, a claim like that is really a revelation. (Cole's book, if read devotedly or doggedly enough, can tell you much about what traditional literary fiction chooses to compartmentalize or ignore.)  In history and associated disciplines, though, making an argument like this leaves room for serious confusion. This is because "X has international consequences or roots" is really two claims: "We do not do enough to learn about or take into account the international roots and consequences of X" and "The international roots and consequences of X are important." In many cases, the two may coincide: the French Revolution had international roots and consequences that have been neglected and yet are highly important. In other cases, they do not: I don't think the international roots of, say, early computing are as important as they've sometimes been made out to be, even if they are very interesting and we don't know enough about them. 

All this seems like small potatoes at first glance, but it's striking to consider the effect the relentlessness of these kinds of conversations has on history and any discipline that deals with historical questions. Everyone roundly condemns histories that focus on unilinear upward progress, yet what we've been learning recently is that everything is international, the significance of the international grows greater over time, and, as a result, the world is always getting more globalized and interconnected. Like paint colors eventually mixing into brown, the sophisticated elegance of these histories produces a remarkably bland picture when seen as a whole. In fact, some kind of triumph-of-globalization story is likely to be the only take-away lesson learned by somebody foolhardily attempting to summarize the recent work. (C.A. Bayly's Birth of the Modern World, the best attempt to do that so far, is either impossibly confusing or bland in just this way, depending on how you look at it.)

So how do we work against this effect? I don't just mean my traditional "we as historians" first person plural here. I think this is something that concerns anyone who finds herself caught up in internationalized writing. The first step, it seems to me, ought to be an effort to focus on the failure of international connections or roots. When faced with nationalistic or local-particularist movements or ideas, writers used to the international narrative often treat them with a kind of studied condescension, as if people who followed them were ipso facto ignorant about how immersed they really are in the world. Sometimes this argument looks like "because nineteenth-century nationalism or twentieth-century fascism was an international movement, it was inherently self-contradictory." Sometimes it's more blunt: "But what about the Angles/Saxons/Pilgrims, why aren't you considering them dangerously foreign?" In the most sophisticated version, it's rather more nuanced, though the whiff of condescension certainly remains: "The problems in this situation resulted from a mix of international and local factors, and the poor benighted locals chose to defend their native culture from encroaching modernity by scapegoating foreign influence." (This kind of line is commonly encountered, for instance, in accounts of the Boxer Rebellion.)

Left-leaning writers tend to be more sympathetic to appeals to concepts like "cultural appropriation," even though there is precious little that separates this kind of talk from the essentializing identity-discourse of nationalists and fascists. What interests me here, though, is that moves against cultural appropriation form part of a chain of resistances to globalization (especially cultural or intellectual globalization) stretching back hundreds of years. This makes it possible to see a whole web of cases in which international links have not been constantly and unilinearly growing and spreading. Not all of these are simple fascism, nationalism, nativism, or localism. Sometimes it is by sheer accident that global connections decline. The Jesuits in China in the sixteenth and seventeenth century were at the forefront of European science and brought cutting-edge research to the Chinese court. (Matteo Ricci studied under Clavius, who played a leading role in developing the Gregorian calendar.) By the eighteenth century, they were fringe marginals who barely had any contact with metropolitan Europe at all. Thus China went from being enthusiastically "Westernizing" under the Kangxi emperor to being viewed as hopelessly arrogant and set in its ways when the English arrived less than a hundred years later.

We lack a language for talking about these issues except as the reverse of the globalization medal. But I think there is every indication that as the clichés of globalization recede, we will arrive at some better idea of how the failures or gaps in internationalization narratives can be exploited to make sense both of the past and the present. It is becoming utterly obvious that we are not facing a Star Trek-style future in which national boundaries are erased and political units are planetary in scale. How did this happen? Or, rather, how did so many smart people come to believe that this was inevitable? How does the agreeable simplicity of the international story confuse and betray insufficiently critical observers? These are questions people are beginning to answer, and I'm hoping academics will not be the ones to do it. Despite what many people believe, academics follow broader cultural trends far more often than the reverse, and when such a thing happens it is impossible to convince people that they are not being utterly faithful to the facts. 

I think we'll end up arriving at the middle of the twenty-first century more confused than we were at the beginning. Social complexity will continue to grow, probably, which will mean many more people will find themselves affected by obscure developments in faraway places than were before. But "globalization" and "integration" will not be enough to explain these trends. We'll see that clearly enough. After all, we'll still be living in a fragmented, national world that has continually made gestures toward Star Trek but has never quite arrived there. I might eat my words eventually--but I really don't think so.

Claudius the Historian

And what thoughts or memories, would you guess, were passing through my mind on this extraordinary occasion? Was I thinking of the Sibyl's prophecy, of the omen of the wolf-cub, of Pollio's advice, or of Briseis' dream? Of my grandfather and liberty? Of my father and liberty? Of my three Imperial predecessors, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, their lives and deaths? Of the great danger I was still in from the conspirators, and from the Senate, and from the Guards battalions at the Camp? Of Messalina and our unborn child? Of my grandmother Livia and my promise to deify her if ever I became Emperor? Of Postumus and Germanicus? Of Agrippina and Nero? Of Camilla? No, you would never guess what was passing through my mind. But I shall be frank and tell you what it was, though the confession is a shameful one. I was thinking, So, I'm Emperor, am I? What nonsense! But at least I'll be able to make people read my books now. Public recitals to large audiences. And good books too, thirty-five years' hard work in them. It won't be unfair. Pollio used to get attentive audiences by giving expensive dinners. He was a very sound historian, and the last of Romans. My History of Carthage is full of amusing anecdotes. I'm sure they'll enjoy it.

That was what I was thinking. I was thinking too, what opportunities I should have, as Emperor, for consulting the secret archives and finding out just what happened on this occasion or on that. How many twisted stories still remained to be straightened out. What a miraculous fate for a historian! And as you will have seen, I took full advantage of my opportunities. Even the mature historian's privilege of setting forth conversations of which he knows only the gist is one that I have availed myself of hardly at all.
- Robert Graves, I, Claudius

Historians in fiction are usually a pretty predictable bunch. Sometimes they've unearthed some dark secret and are committed to risking their lives and fortunes for the sake of getting it out (most historians I know, including myself, wouldn't know a dark secret if it jumped out of the file and bit them on the ass, and even fewer would sacrifice anything more than copying fees for it). More often, fictional historians are dour pedants who bury themselves in dusty books at the expense of the real world; in the more nuanced/psychological version, they deliberately choose the dead past as a refuge from the unsatisfactory present. While convenient, these images aren't especially reflective of historians in real life. Portrayals of academics typically exaggerate the professional side of their lives, perhaps because most often they are the work either of grad students who have no other side of their lives or of undergraduates who know professors only as "that guy who teaches HIST 1115." (If anything, philosophers have it worse, while natural scientists tend to get more well-rounded characters. Take that, "liberal arts"!)  

For me, and probably not just for me, being hopelessly unworldly is actually something of a romantic dream. One of these days I won't have to go to department stores or drop off dry cleaning or have awkward first dates, I'll just lock myself up with my Loeb Classical Library and that's the last this cruel world will see of me! This is linked, in my head, with a fantasy of detachment. It's true that being "objective" is no longer considered a viable possibility for historians, even if the more recondite among us still consider it a worthwhile ideal. But no matter how politically-engaged (and hence avowedly unobjective) a historian gets, detachment as an ideal never quite disappears. This is a rather different kind of detachment from the one we are normally encouraged to pursue. It's not about remaining unswayed by partisanship or treating historical subjects with fairness and dignity.

No, our kind of detachment is more of an abiding sense of professional superiority over effectively anyone who has opinions about things. This comes at least in part from the fact that it is now very difficult, if not impossible, to publish a book about (say) abolitionists that strides confidently to a conclusion that the abolitionists were stand-up dudes and were right about stuff. Even an audience composed entirely of leftists would jeer at this kind of presentation. No, we've moved on from the '60s, and all our books have to show how the agents were trapped by cultural structure n and achieved icky unintended consequences x, y, z. It's hard not to feel superior to everyone if you watch the news knowing firmly that fifteen years on someone's gonna publish an article about how the heroic freedom fighters on the screen were really the apostles of some fresh hell. You're not detached because of some conscious choice; you're detached because irony is your most important professional habit.

I, Claudius, in its tragicomic final third, is a beautiful illustration of the stupidity of this way of viewing the world. Graves surely had more than a casual acquaintance with historians and their occupational illnesses--or, at any rate, knew enough about the classical historians to discern the similarities. Graves's Claudius imagines himself as a classic unworldly recluse, engaging with the court around him only to the extent that he needs materials for his history-writing. In practice, of course, this is far from being the case: the narrative makes it plain that he is in fact far from obscure, and although his physical defects marginalize him, he is still on the minds of many of the people who are carrying on their intrigues. In the final third of the novel, with the last years of Tiberius and the reign of Caligula, this narrative pushes towards its absurd denouement. Rome is falling apart, and while Claudius constantly makes outraged noises, it is obvious that he is relishing the opportunity to ironize over the unenviable careers of people foolish enough to have played a part in the world of politics and rank. This conceit breaks down when Caligula makes Claudius a court jester. As he struggles to save his own skin, Claudius turns into the most obsequious of courtiers. He is, it turns out, no more dignified and aloof than anyone else at court. Meanwhile, Caligula's reign only heightens his tendency to ironize. What is supposed to be a popular tragedy is described as a sequence of comic interludes in which Caligula doesn't even come off that badly. Crazy? Sure, but what a clever guy!

So it is with us. Ironic detachment helps us, modern historians, deal with the unpleasantness of living in a ridiculous world, but when it's needed most it becomes more and more of a figleaf. I won't belabor the point: it's not hard to see how academics these days are structurally servile, whether your starting point is Marx or Nietzsche or someone else. To a certain extent, the narrowing of horizons that comes from being able to see yourself from history's point of view is adaptive. If you're mostly helpless to do anything about student loan delinquency rates or bloodthirsty state legislatures, you may as well sigh and be the jester for a bit. What the gesture doesn't carry with it--as in Claudius's case--is the luxury of distance. I don't know if it's only my generation of graduate students that seems ready on command to adopt the melancholy-ironic pose and then to relinquish it, but it's a good time to develop that kind of skill, as long as you're not entertaining too many illusions. But then someone has to end up writing those histories.

Fatal Flaws

Unattractive in his political life, Maximilian was equally unattractive in his personal characteristics. Fate had unkindly bestowed upon him a singularly unimpressive presence; he was lanky, lean and small with mouse-colored hair and a pasty complexion, his speech and features much affected by adenoids. His manners were polished and his conversation blunt and well-informed, but the shrill pitch of his voice startled those who were not prepared for it. In honor of his wife, a princess of Lorraine, he affected the French fashion, whose elegant elaborations can hardly have concealed the shortcomings of nature.

Abler and more politically effective than John George, Maximilian had not that dogged honesty which was the saving grace of the Elector of Saxony. Cautious to a fault, he would never commit himself and thereby raised delusive hopes in all who courted him. Like John George he was sincere in striving for the common good of Germany, but unlike John George he had a clear sense of policy and an accurate judgment. His excuse was the less when, like John George, he allowed his individual advantages to take precedence. In this respect both the Elector of Saxony and the Duke of Bavaria failed their country, but Maximilian always with the more shameless egoism. Never was man more anxious that others should sacrifice their gains for the general good; never did man stand more jealously, more fatally by his own.
- C. V. Wedgwood, The Thirty Years War (1938)

C. V. Wedgwood does not believe in the so-called "Great Man" theory of history. If anything, her vision is the opposite: what shapes history is the weakness of people in power, their inability to prevent their flaws from coming to the surface and annihilating anything that might have been achieved by the better angels of their nature. That is what gives her work its fine--and baffling--literary quality. How can a book that's mostly about moving troops from someplace and putting them somewhere else, in which descriptions of looting and rapine maintain a static consistency from chapter to chapter and whose biographical fragments amount to a kind of elaborate twisting of the knife, be so wonderfully captivating, magical, and irresistible to read? I say this as someone who has not found the energy to read for pleasure in months (which is why I haven't been blogging) and who bought the book fully expecting to let it mature on the shelf like a fine wine. Somehow this did not happen.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is, any notion Wedgwood might have of historical causality is not really reducible to the categories in which we're accustomed to thinking. Disbelief in "great-manism" has been universal among bien pensants for about a hundred fifty years now, which is truly astonishing, considering how many times every other foundation of our thought has been overturned since then. We all nod our bored heads along with Tolstoy when he inveighs against Napoleonocentrism. What do we think causes historical events to happen? Well, that does change: sometimes we call it "social forces," sometimes "culture," sometimes something already fully circular like "patterns" or "trajectories." As Carlyle's influence has waned further and further, the people who think about this kind of thing have gradually come to believe that any theory that places individual human beings front and center in the historical process (not just in a positive or transformational kind of way) is actually subsumable under great-manism.

That's a funny paradox. I'm not sure if this is a malady specific to historians, but we're somehow always being encouraged to "leave room for agency," an admonition that is current only as long as that agency involves otherwise powerless brown people. People who are not oppressed cannot have agency. Actually, no, maybe that's too post-'60s revisionist. What I mean to say is: in the contemporary view, people have agency, and that agency is important, as long as nobody is actually accomplishing anything. It would be absurd if someone got up at the AHA and demanded that Duke Maximilian of Bavaria be assigned his due measure of agency. I think it would be short-sighted to blame this kind of thing solely on the '60s hangover that continues to dominate in The Profession. No doubt that's part of it, but mostly it's symptomatic of a near-universal unwillingness among historians to discuss causality in any kind of serious way because no one actually has clear and defensible views on the matter. (I've talked about this kind of thing lots of times before.)

It's a bit like Jackson Pollock. There must be people out there who think Jackson Pollock is a good artist for excellent reasons. I suspect, however, that there are more people like me: people who secretly have no idea why anyone thinks Jackson Pollock is a good artist but, for social and cultural-capital kinds of reasons, don't want to discuss their qualms with anyone. (What does it say about me that I only felt the weight lift once I read this piece?)

What is particularly odd is that the bien-pensant position is, in its bastardized current form, obviously absurd. Everyone agrees that people who wield power can, usually, do lots of different stuff with it; everyone agrees that individual biographies can be decisive when those individuals become entangled in social movements (for instance); everyone operates in their daily lives under the assumption that personality is an important part of how people react to events and do things. But put those pieces together and all of a sudden you need to mount defensive rearguard actions and use words like "social forces" (what are they?), "structure" (where is it?), and "contingency" (as if the historical role of individuals were not the ultimate source of contingency).

In Wedgwood's hands, all these hifalutin methodological questions fall away. I don't know how contemporary early modern Germanists think about her work; three quarters of a century is usually enough time for the pendulum of revisionism to swing around two or three times. Judged on its own terms, however, the history she tells is utterly convincing. The weaknesses of statesmen reinforce and direct the flow of a process that has its own dynamic. Without, say, the selfishness of Maximilian or the arrogance of Wallenstein the war would have been allowed to exhaust itself, but the tragic flaws of otherwise reasonably normal and competent people ensured that it could not come to an end. In contrast with Wedgwood, any more "structural" or economic explanation in the Marxist style looks utterly ad hoc, and anything more contemporary far too causally flabby. (One of the effects of the decline of interest in causality among historians has been a dramatic rise in histories that largely ignore causality in favor of relatively static internal accounts of various phenomena. Whether or not this is a good thing is a subject for a different post.)

I have to confess a large part of my sympathy for Wedgwood's approach comes from the fact that I love her style, although strictly speaking this is of course totally irrelevant. Is it that her account of the war actually is more convincing, or is she just more successful at making it look that way? I'm not sure. When I start thinking about how, exactly, style and content can be so cleanly separated my head starts to hurt, which isn't quite the same thing as being willing to assert that the two are one and the same. On some level, isn't a successfully-told story one that also proposes an internally consistent and propulsive narrative, even if we're talking about fiction? But this stacks the deck against approaches that lend themselves less easily to narrative...

At any rate, one of the reasons I feel so enthusiastic about the current resurgence of good, well-researched academic narrative history is that it promises to recreate some of Wedgwood's charm. As narrative, it must inevitably deal with both character and causes, and pry into the links between the two. As history, it ought to feel a sense of responsibility not only to the sources but also to the state of the field, meaning it cannot simply impose a character-centered framework on material that it assumes to be its own. If we're to start revising the bien-pensant view, we ought not to do it without thinking deeply about how it can be replaced.

Ugly Swans

You are in a classroom listening to someone self-important, dignified, and ponderous (but dull), wearing a tweed jacket (white shirt, polka-dot tie), pontificating for two hours on the theories of history. You are too paralyzed by boredom to understand what on earth he is talking about, but you hear the names of big guns: Hegel, Fichte, Marx, Proudhon, Plato, Herodotus, Ibn Khaldoun, Toynbee, Spengler, Michelet, Carr, Bloch, Fukuyama, Schmukuyama, Trukuyama. He seems deep and knowledgeable, making sure that no attention lapse will make you forget that his approach is "post-Marxist," "postdialectical," or post-something, whatever that means. Then you realize that a large part of what he is saying reposes on a simple optical illusion! But this will not make a difference: he is so invested in it that if you questioned his method he would react by throwing even more names at you.

It is so easy to avoid looking at the cemetery while concocting historical theories. But this is not just a problem with history. It is a problem with the way we construct samples and gather evidence in every domain. We shall call this distortion a bias, i.e., the difference between what you see and what is there. By bias I mean a systematic error consistently showing a more positive, or negative, effect from the phenomenon, like a scale that unfailingly shows you a few pounds heavier or lighter than your true weight, or a video camera that adds a few sizes to your waistline. This bias has been rediscovered here and there throughout the past century across disciplines, often to be rapidly forgotten (like Cicero's insight). As drowned worshippers do not write histories of their experiences (it is better to be alive for that), so it is with the losers in history, whether people or ideas. Remarkably, historians and other scholars in the humanities who need to understand silent evidence the most do not seem to have a name for it (and I looked hard). As for journalists, fuhgedaboudit! They are industrial producers of the distortion.
- Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan (2008)

I wish there were some less snotty way of saying this, but The Black Swan is remarkably erudite and provocative for an airport bestseller. Taleb is a Europeanized intellectual writing for somewhat pretentious Amherst-educated Wall Street traders, and it shows: there's a lot of chrome in the form of references to Umberto Eco and assorted Respectable Humanistic Thinkers You May Have Heard Of. Yet there is a great deal of genuine learning, too, and Taleb seems utterly sincere in his admiration of Sextus Empiricus, a thinker who receives more time in the spotlight here than he has for probably three hundred years. There is none of that stereotyped pop-non-fiction air of authority that comes from ventriloquizing a cherry-picked study or a dubious expert.

There is still, however, an air of authority that permeates the whole book: Taleb's claim to superior insight based on being both very well-read and a former successful Wall Street trader. This is not a modest book. Taleb includes chunks of very thinly-disguised autobiography and plenty of anecdotes in which he is invariably the smartest guy in the room. No doubt they were at least partially motivated by the need to cater to that particular school of business-think that assumes that people who don't self-advertise have nothing to say. Most of them are not wholly implausible, either, even accounting for the distortions introduced by selective memory and the lack of the other side of the story. Above all, they help you identify with the guy--after all, don't we all know plenty of academic stuffed shirts?

The problem with this is that Taleb is telling you that everyone else is wrong, that their fields are based on flawed premises, that almost all forms of recognition based on successful predictions are misguided and delusional. I like to think of myself as a Pyrrhonian. I get off on reading things like that. But even I recognize that dismissing whole areas of inquiry based on the say-so (or even the admittedly plausible argumentation) of a self-interested guru is dangerous. I don't think Taleb even has the insight into economics he thinks he has, much less philosophy or history. The Black Swan is great for pseuds--or, to put it more nicely, snotty autodidacts--because it indulges their tendency to reduce their workload by giving themselves an intellectual escape clause. (I only recognized this tendency in myself fairly recently, and it's been quite a revelation.)

Passages like the one I've quoted above give me the most pause. Does Taleb not realize that the scenario he is depicting is, on its own terms, absurd? The history professor who is teaching you about this posse of dead historical theorists cannot possibly be making the point that history moves in a stable and predictable pattern, because all of these Big Names are mutually exclusive. It would be like arguing that a single currency is a good thing and we should therefore adopt twelve of them. And this is leaving aside the more minor absurdities, such as the idea that someone who describes himself as "post-dialectical" would be throwing Toynbee and Spengler in your face rather than, I dunno, Badiou or something. (Not to mention that historical determinism of any sort is laughably out of fashion these days.)

Actually, I think Taleb has a point in this passage, he just doesn't really know what it is. Part of the problem associated with this moment in the life of The Profession is that no one who is on the cutting edge is really thinking all that hard about causality as an epistemological or methodological problem for historians. This is because picking away too hard at causality will reveal the necessity of taking one of two positions: either causality is some specific thing, which you then have to commit to like some mustachioed bell-bottom-wearing old social historian, or it's just a vague intuitive sense we have of stuff that happens in some sort of order, which doesn't really leave much room for reflection. (I prefer the second view because I am utterly bewildered by the concept of causality itself, but that may be fodder for another post.) Taleb's critique, if it were actually specific and well-motivated rather than hectoring and unfocused, would be an excellent way of opening up this discussion.

It's too bad. The Black Swan is the clearest and freshest defense of a thoughtful, humane skepticism that I've encountered in a long time. If it weren't so overstructured, so self-aggrandizing, and so packed with pretensions to universality, it wouldn't make for a bad Enchiridion as far as these things go. But who needs one, really? All you have to do is imitate a pig on a ship.

(When the Natalie Portman movie came out last winter, I was thinking it was an adaptation of this book. Boy was I surprised fifteen minutes in when I realized no funky randomness would be forthcoming. Frankly, I would have preferred the adaptation.)

One More from the Archives

I met with the Jesuits [who are already known to you]; they are quite industrious and ready to perform whatever is required of them to the best of their ability. One of them seems to me very efficient. As far as I know [the one who?] meant something to you died recently; news from China always came to them making a large circle around Europe; not knowing why they were summoned here, they do not have any letters concerning China with them, nor do they have any names to whom they might write, and therefore they wish to be released to Polotsk, where they can examine their papers at their leisure.
There does not seem to be any inconvenience, to my knowledge, of releasing them to Polotsk, provided we determine in advance how we are to use them.

If they are to travel to Kiakhta, then they can, after gathering their papers, go there from Polotsk. In which case, Petr Bogdanovich Passek should be ordered to recommend them himself to the acting Governor-General in Irkutsk, or even better, to give them an order from his own office in Irkutsk so they can go straight from Polotsk to [Pil'?].

This I believe [should be done] in case it turns out to be absolutely necessary to send them to Kiakhta, from which they would be able to respond with friendly letters to their colleagues in Peking ...           

... 1st. They should talk at length about the patronage their order benefits from in Russia due to the magnanimity of Her Imperial Majesty, making a greeting here to the Chinese [Jesuits], that for all the persecutions [their order has suffered] in other places in Europe, they at least have the solace of living in serenity and flourishing in the two greatest empires, i.e. the Russian and Chinese, that this patronage gives their order a means of pursuing and seeking pleasure and solace in their love for the sciences.

... They might add in this letter of theirs something about their Order, of its present condition, and also something of the sciences, whatever they themselves find appropriate, and it does not seem ill-advised to expand this portion, so that the matter concerning the English would not appear to be the principal subject of the letter, but contrariwise would appear to mention it in passing.

If the Chinese Jesuits send a response to this letter of [the Polotsk Jesuits], and in it put forth the possibility of their colleagues' traveling to Peking, the latter should be given orders in writing that their residence in Peking should have as its principal object creating obstacles to the arrival of an English embassy.

In such a case, that is, if our Jesuits are allowed the opportunity to travel to Peking, they should be dispatched from Kiakhta with various presents, including furs of various kinds, items of fashionable clothing, and rarities, as well as astronomical instruments...
- A. R. Vorontsov to A. A. Bezborodko, June 3, 17[80s-early -'90s?]

I consider this letter to be the greatest find of my entire summer, although my enthusiasm has been tempered a bit now that I have looked more closely at it (while I was translating for this post) and determined that it could almost certainly not date from 1778, as the archival file says (this is where I curse my poor notetaking skills for not having recorded any other numbers on the document). Unfortunately, it's only in draft form, and it's barely legible besides  In any event, let's discuss the document, which in itself is almost as captivating as a Patrick O'Brian novel. Analysis here is premature and almost superfluous.

A. R. Vorontsov, who was most likely President of the College of Commerce at the time the letter was written, is writing to A. A. Bezborodko, who was either the empress's personal secretary or the Grand Chancellor of the Empire (most likely the former). These are the very senior levels of the state hierarchy, and Vorontsov in particular is a representative of an especially wealthy and influential noble clan. Vorontsov has interviewed a group of Jesuits from Polotsk, one of the territories acquired by Russia during the Partitions of Poland.

The significance of these Jesuits (as well as other Jesuits in formerly Polish lands) is that they are the only Jesuits technically remaining on Earth at this time, and certainly the only Jesuits possessed of an institutional support structure and a novitiate. This is because the Jesuit order was officially disbanded by the Pope in 1773. In a strange historical twist, the Orthodox Empress Catherine, who happened to acquire Belarussian lands the year before, saw here a great opportunity to win a powerful, educated, and culturally-influential body of clergymen to her side. She forbade the bull dissolving the order from being promulgated anywhere in the Russian empire, and when the local archbishop was given extraordinary authority by the Pope in an attempt to push through the dissolution regardless, she forced him to let the Jesuits open a novitiate (to train new members) instead. Thus the Russian Empire has become the sole official patron and protector of the Jesuit Order, whose members had been, before 1773, officially forbidden from setting foot on Russian soil. (In his 1719 expulsion decree, Peter the Great had laconically observed that "they engage in correspondence during church services").

Vorontsov has a grand project in mind. He aims to ship these Jesuits all the way across the Russian Empire, to the tiny but bustling town of Kiakhta, near Lake Baikal, which serves as (effectively) the only authorized site of direct Russo-Chinese trade. There, these Jesuits are to compose a letter in Latin to their colleagues in China, ostensibly of their own accord, in an attempt to convince them that helping Russia is in their best interests--in large part because Russia is in a position to support their scientific work. Vorontsov's letter delineates precisely, in point-by-point fashion, what this letter is to contain; the goal is to convince both the Jesuits and, especially, the Chinese, that no Russian government authority and certainly no central government authority had anything to do with the missive. (The letter is also to broach the possibility of a visit or residence in Beijing, which would give the Russians a whole new set of levers.)

The aim of this Russo-Chinese Jesuit alliance is to manipulate the situation at the court of the Chinese emperor Qianlong in order to prevent a planned English embassy from being received; this ties in with a persistent (and, it turns out, correct) Russian anxiety that the English are the only power capable of stealing away their Chinese trade. The embassy would eventually materialize as the Macartney Embassy in 1792-4, which concluded with the famous Chinese announcement that they had no need for European goods, leading directly to the Opium Wars in the next century. Of course, the Chinese had failed to mention that they had been buying Russian goods in large quantities--sufficient to despoil Siberia of a large portion of its fur-bearing mammals--for a hundred years. So, for the time being at least, the Russians ended up the geopolitical winners.

More important to me, however, is how Vorontsov is telling the Jesuits to write. He is telling them to include astronomical and scientific details, but for reasons that are explicitly and utterly instrumental: they are just filler intended to conceal the real geopolitical and commercial purpose of the contact. I'm not as widely read as I should be, but I have never come across any historical document that is quite so brazenly frank about using scientific discourse for narrowly political ends. Vorontsov literally doesn't care what the "substantive" portion of the letter says, as long as it looks more important than the mention of the English.

The question this raises for me is: if I were to come across this supposed letter--I have no idea whether it ever ended up being written, although I have some suspicions--would I even be able to tell? As historians, we are trained to be suspicious of excessive suspicion; we tend to regard it as the mark of amateur conspiracy theorists, a kind of fetishization of the primary source that treats it as if it were normally capable of being a totally transparent and objective reflection of the underlying reality. And it's hard to argue with that, at least for me. But it does mean that we almost always assume our sources to have been written in good faith: a political pamphlet, even a mendacious or a satirical one, is almost always treated at least as the result of an attempt to write a political pamphlet.

I would undoubtedly treat a letter filled with astronomical minutiae as the result of an attempt to communicate astronomical results; after all, I have plenty of similar Jesuit letters already transcribed. Does this mean that any of them could actually have been about something entirely different? Given Vorontsov's direct proof of such a communicative practice, shouldn't I be feeling more insecure about my sources? What does it say about my epistemological assumptions that I don't?