A Steamless Critique For Electric Monks

High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse. From under its rough woven cowl the Monk gazed unblinkingly down into another valley, with which it was having a problem.

The day was hot, the sun stood in an empty hazy sky and beat down upon the gray rocks and the scrubby, parched grass. Nothing moved, not even the Monk. The horse's tail moved a little, swishing slightly to try and move a little air, but that was all. Otherwise, nothing moved.

The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random. It was even beginning to believe things they'd have difficulty believing in Salt Lake City. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Nor had it even heard of a quingigillion, which was roughly the number of miles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah.
- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Carl links to this essay by Bruno Latour, wherein Latour splutters in hysterical alarm at the fact that the great unwashed--conservative!!!--masses might have also learned to heft the obsidian hand-axes of the hermeneutics of suspicion. Since the guiding principle for him is obviously the need to be more clever and up-to-date than the Right, he seems to suggest that "we" must outmaneuver "them" by embracing facts again. Blatantly opportunistic as the move is, it does reveal certain things about theory that "we" have up till now carefully avoided facing.

I'll get there by way of Douglas Adams and his "Electric Monks." Dirk Gently is not Adams's best book (its sequel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, for one, is superior). But the Electric Monk is probably the most insightful science-fictional concept out of a whole career filled with such concepts. In the simplest terms, as Adams describes it, the Electric Monk is a device to which you assign the responsibility for your beliefs. Of course, if a physical version were to be invented, it would be immensely popular--but in the meantime, we've got plenty of surrogate Monks already. The best such surrogate is the media ecosystem. In the contemporary 24-hour full-spectrum news world, every Internet user inhabits a carefully filtered universe of discourse designed to reinforce the viewpoints she already holds and hide the ones which alarm her. (Some people stage occasional excursions outside this preserve, but this only confirms what they already thought.) Since this universe is precisely tuned--via RSS subscriptions, reading patterns, selective memory, and so forth--to coincide with the user's beliefs, "beliefs" become unnecessary. They are facts, as cold and hard as Karl Rove's heart, and all the angst and uncertainty of belief melts away when it confronts them. That's an Electric Monk. The scientific pseudo-controversy over global warming? Also an Electric Monk, of course. It is not I who believes that global warming is still unproven; it's the scientists who say so.

"Critique" is just another form of Electric Monk--but it is a topsy-turvy one: it enables us to reassign our responsibility for not believing in something. Oh dear, I'd love to sign up for your metanarrative, but it's just, you see, I've got this critique, and it's telling me I should be skeptical of it, so no can do. Science, you say? Well, if it were up to me, you know I would of course agree completely, no question about it, but the Strong Programme keeps getting on my back about it, and I can't very well tell it no, can I? Sorry, good luck, let me know how things work out! We end up with a convenient little world in which our labor-saving intellectual devices have successfully turned our beliefs into irresistible critical realities.

And now, of course, even the uninitiated have stumbled into the shrine. What we're faced with now is the same predicament that struck Adams's Monk: we've started believing things more or less at random. After all, if we've got an inexhaustible array of devices to believe for us, and an equally inexhaustible supply of ones to disbelieve, we can more or less configure them in any way we want. But is there even much to object to here? It is hard to think of the massive Electric Monk mainframe known in the '60s as "public opinion," and then of its myriad differentiated successors, without feeling a sense of progress. May a thousand flowers bloom.

In any case, Latour's solution is saved from total impracticability only by its vagueness. It's too late now: like the Gutenberg revolution, the Electric Monk revolution has taken the responsibility for belief away from the clergy forever--and from the laity, too. We've only really got two options. The first is to multiply our Electric Monks until we achieve collective transcendence as a species and end up floating idly in a nihilistic void, like Bazarov without his frogs. The second is to abandon Electric Monks completely, and hence to embrace an entirely different form of nihilism: systems of beliefs for which we would hold ourselves unswervingly responsible. We'd have to do without any appeals to extrasubjective epistemological claims--except to the extent that these can be reintegrated into the subject. (Here's my evidence; where's yours?) In the end, both solutions sound tolerable--and neither is quite as craven as Latour's.

The Dangling Conversation

In the meanwhile, at another festivity in honor of Priestley (for whose presence I am still grateful, since it helped to open doors for me), I met Mme Afinogenova, a Hungarian-American dancer, the widow of a playwright 'honorably' killed--in an air-raid on Moscow in 1941--who was evidently authorized, and perhaps instructed, to organize a salon for foreign visitors with cultural interests. At any rate, she invited me to it, and there I met a number of writers. The best known among them was the poet Ilya Sel'vinsky …'I know,' said Sel'vinsky, speaking loudly, with great rhetorical force, as if he were addressing a much larger audience, 'I know that we are called conformists in the west. We are. We conform because we find that whenever we deviate from the Party's directives it always turns out that the Party was right and we were wrong. It has always been so. It is not only that they say they know better: they do; they see further: their eyes are sharper, their horizons are wider, than ours.' The rest of the company looked uncomfortable: these words were plainly intended for the concealed microphones without which we could scarcely have met as we did. Under dictatorships public and private expressions of opinion may differ; but Sel'vinsky's outburst was, perhaps because of the insecurity of his own position, too clumsy and overdone: hence the embarrassed silence which followed. I realized none of this at the time, and argued that free discussion, even of political issues, was no danger to political institutions ... I had learnt my lesson. To argue about ideas while Stalin was still in power was to invite predictable answers from some, and to put those who remained silent in some jeopardy. I never saw Mme Afinogenova or any of her guests again.

- Isaiah Berlin, "Meetings with Russian Writers," from Personal Impressions

I do not quote this passage only because it happens to mention my great-grandparents (although that is one reason). The encounter is important, I think, because it mirrors another episode narrated a few pages later: Boris Pasternak's telephone conversation with Stalin after the imprisonment of Mandelstam. Stalin calls Pasternak; Pasternak does not believe he is really speaking to Stalin. Stalin calls back. Pasternak is overjoyed and decides that here, at last, is his opportunity to speak to the Great Leader about the Great Issues. Stalin only cares about whether he was present at the reading of Mandelstam's fatal epigram, but Pasternak gives vague and evasive answers to his questions. At last Stalin says, "If I were Mandelstam's friend I should have known better how to defend him," and hangs up. The great conversation never takes place.

Two conversations, each torn by a certain kind of chasm. On one side, there is the interlocutor who takes the whole thing in good faith, who believes that it is right and proper for the true and beautiful to be sincerely discussed; on the other, there is the strictly businesslike other party, for whom words can have only a utilitarian purpose. The archetypal ancestor of this conversation is the story of Hodja Nasreddin and the foreign scholar. It gets at the comic aspect quite well, although it ends before the tragicomic comes fully into view; if there were a continuation, it would no doubt have the foreign scholar questioning the purpose and value of scholarly talk itself.

Berlin does not question it, either in this essay or in the other entries in the volume. In general, he never appears to doubt that stringing together positive epithets and heart-warming examples of good-natured donnishness does not make for a compelling biographical style. Inevitably, in an apparent attempt to proselytize, he projects his own antipathy to abstraction and authoritarianism upon his voiceless subjects. (Half of the essays in Personal Impressions are elegies for dead Oxonians, all of whom come out looking more or less the same.) But this problem is fundamentally of a piece with his faux pas in Moscow: he assumes the command of the soapbox without considering his audience in the least. If he wants to discuss ideas, it is always on his own terms.

In a way, then, it is Stalin and Selvinsky who are the better conversationalists. By minimizing the idea-rich content of what is said, they focus on how and why it is said, how it is constrained by the confines of the situation. They must understand the other person--that Pasternak's insistence on Great Ideas is nothing but an ineffective distraction from the matter of Mandelstam; that Berlin's talk of democracy is nothing but an empty gesture with no genuine opposition. Berlin, in contrast, does not even need anyone to talk to. He could argue as sincerely with a wall. In the same way, Pasternak's fantasy of the Poet confronting the Tyrant in some alternate-universe version of the Hiero does not require the tyrant to be anything more than a cardboard projection of his own anxieties. (And the real tyrant would no doubt prove unsatisfying.)

This applies, in fact, to the entire book. The style in the Personal Impressions is sprinkled with the trappings of the Persuasive Essay, and the reader does have a constant feeling of being convinced of something. But, like Selvinsky, he is in no position to disagree. Both Berlin and his reader are hemmed in by the limits of genre: the éloge, praised in the introduction, permits no critical engagement or contradiction. It is the quintessential monologic text, as Bakhtin would put it--and that is almost certainly why the book is so tedious. To write something like this, or to blather about freedom as an Englishman in Stalinist Russia, requires a unique and toxic compound of vanity and naivety.

On Leaving New York

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was. When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was. Some time later there was a song in the jukeboxes on the Upper East Side that went “but where is the schoolgirl who used to be me,” and if it was late enough at night I used to wonder that. I know now that almost everyone wonders something like that, sooner or later and no matter what he or she is doing, but one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.

Of course it might have been some other city, had circumstances been different and the time been different and had I been different, might have been Paris or Chicago or even San Francisco, but because I am talking about myself I am talking here about New York. That first night I opened my window on the bus into town and watched for the skyline, but all I could see were the wastes of Queens and big signs that said MIDTOWN TUNNEL THIS LANE and then a flood of summer rain (even that seemed remarkable and exotic, for I had come out of the West where there was no summer rain), and for the next three days I sat wrapped in blankets in a hotel room air conditioned to 35 degrees and tried to get over a cold and a high fever. It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come—was anyone ever so young? I am here to tell you that someone was. All I could do during those years was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.
- Joan Didion, "Goodbye to All That"

What else could I have blockquoted? Maybe some old song about homosexuals and saxophones? Maybe a bit from a grumpy eighteenth-century merchant, who once complained that New York was "beyond doubt ... the worst School for Youth of any of his Majestys dominions, Ignorance, Vanity, Dress, & Dissipation, being the reigning Characteristicks of their insipid Lives"? I could, of course, but it would hardly be the same.

I first read Didion's essay during my first few months in the city, a glossy copy five-finger-discounted from a chain bookstore and subsequently given away (as it inevitably turns out) for good, to an acquaintance who grows more distant with every passing year. Like any kid in my position would have done, and probably has, I read "Goodbye To All That" with rapturous excitement; I nodded and smiled my way through her descriptions of peaches and five-a.m. headaches, thinking this, right here, is what it's supposed to feel like. And of course I read the end of the essay too, retaining only the vague premonition that eventually this, too, would happen to me.

And it has. I'll make all the necessary caveats--her eight years in New York were a much more respectable investment than my lousy four, and the collegiate aspect cheapens the thing considerably. Yet for all that I still sense what drove her back to L.A. Her essay, despite appearances, isn't really about growing out of New York or the myth of New York. It's about growing into it. The exhilarating peach-eating feeling she describes at the beginning is the sense that you live here too, that all the writers and celebrities who've trod on the same pavement can't erase your own cautious steps. And eventually you take that feeling and run with it; you build yourself your own private New York, criss-crossed by paths of memory and landmarked with the homes of friends. You inhabit it, and it belongs to you. Sure.

But then, not one day but over the course of many, you come to realize that you don't live in a city at all. It still takes you an hour and a half to get from one place to another, but your destinations are vanishingly few. Once in a while you try a new restaurant, a new walking route, a new bodega. Sometimes you go to parties with people you don't know, and find yourself hoping for the same old thing. You live, in short, in a village, with carefully handpicked people and rituals designed to protect you from the yawning, valve-closing chaos of Manhattan. Are you still a New Yorker? Your mental map overlaps the MTA's, maybe. But your imagined community looks more a scene from The Prisoner than Sex and the City.

It's begun to chafe for me, as it once did for her. I keep promising to myself that I'll make the most of The Opportunities Here, but it never works. Why go to this bar when I can go to that one, where I once went years ago? Isn't it easier to take every single person who visits you in the city to the same two restaurants? I'm lazy by nature, and the familiar always overpowers the new--okay, but even the new is predictable. Wherever I go, there I am. It's not that it's all bad. I like my village. As it turns out, though, you can't voyeuristically consume your own lifestyle like you could the lifestyles of Jerry Seinfeld and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sid Vicious and even, for god's sake, Joan Didion. So the lurking nebula of glamor and importance that envelops every nose picked in Union Square and every brief filed downtown just, I don't know, vanishes after a while. And what's left then?

Tomorrow, I'll be on the ten a.m. train to Boston. All this has been to say that I am not overjoyed to leave New York, but neither am I especially sad. In this day and age it won't be hard to stretch my little village-links out past Yonkers and Westchester--so whatever it is I'm losing, it's nothing I can't happily do without, at least for a spell. And since I'm going to graduate school, I can always look forward to yet more inevitable and somehow well-deserved departures. The places change; the people, I hope, remain.

Needful Things

The Puritan's great danger is that he imagines himself in possession of a rule telling him the unum necessarium, or one thing needful, and that he then remains satisfied with a very crude conception of what this rule really is and what it tells him, thinks he has now knowledge and henceforth needs only to act, and, in this dangerous state of assurance and self-satisfaction, proceeds to give full swing to a number of the instincts of his ordinary self. Some of the instincts of his ordinary self he has, by the help of his rule of life, conquered; but others which he has not conquered by this help he is so far from perceiving to need subjugation, and to be instincts of an inferior self, that he even fancies it to be his right and duty, in virtue of having conquered a limited part of himself, to give unchecked swing to the remainder. He is, I say, a victim of Hebraism, of the tendency to cultivate strictness of conscience rather than spontaneity of consciousness. And what he wants is a larger conception of human nature, showing him the number of other points at which his ature must come to its best, besides the points which he himself knows and thinks of. There is no unum necessarium, or one thing needful, which can free human nature from the obligation of trying to come to its best at all these points. The real unum necessarium for us is to come to our best at all points. Instead of our 'one thing needful,' justifying in us vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence,--our vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence, are really so many touchstones which try our one thing needful, and which prove that in the state, at any rate, in which we ourselves have it, it is not all we want. And as the force which encourages us to stand staunch and fast by the rule and ground we have is Hebraism, so the force which encourages us to go back upon this rule, and to try the very ground on which we appear to stand, is Hellenism,--a turn for giving our consciousness free play and enlarging its range. And what I say is, not that Hellenism is always for everybody more wanted than Hebraism, but that for Mr. Murphy at this particular moment, and for the great majority of us his fellow-countrymen, it is more wanted.
- Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy

There's a lot to hate about Culture and Anarchy, despite its firmly entreched place in the canon. It is a book that frequently verges on the tedious. At times its notions about culture and society are both laughably naive and maddeningly vague. Arnold is never so smug as when he is appealing to unexamined prejudices; even if we grant him all the benefit of the doubt that appertains to a man of his time, his complacent from-on-high evaluations of the Philistines and the Populace are still immensely frustrating. I've encountered few texts more irrelevant and pointless than the chapter on "Our Liberal Practitioners."

Even his fundamental vocabulary could be called, not unjustly, lazy. "Culture" as Arnold sees it exists in no identifiable relationship with any kind of actual human culture, past, present, or future. All passion, all contradiction--even all uncertainty--is erased from this emptily latitudinarian fetish, and the charges of tweedy academicism leveled against him by his polemical opponents do not appear at all unreasonable. "Machinery" is just as troubled a term. Sometimes it seems simply to denote anything Arnold happens to disagree with; other times it refers specifically to an overemphasis on rigor and materialism--or, conversely, on freedom and spirituality. Neither version is entirely satisfying.

Of course, I won't spend this whole post slagging on a dead man. There is in fact a certain useful and beautiful kernel to be extracted from Culture and Anarchy: the very "Hellenizing" idea that immediate goods like economic welfare can only be, at best, provisionally useful. The final object is always "sweetness and light"or "perfection." It is by substituting immediate goods for final ones that one becomes most definitively "mechanical." Using the leverage provided by this mindset, Arnold manages to produce an effective polemic without ever definitely committing himself to anything (apart from establishmentarianism).

It is in fact the very vagueness of his final goals that enables this to happen. "Sweetness and light" can't really have any specific content, because the phrase is just a rhetorical placeholder for a deferred end that never appears. Arnold is clearly best seen as much more of a thoroughgoing pragmatist than he lets on; the latently-Philistine certainties that fill his pages are just slip-ups, moments of weakness that prevent him from keeping a truly open mind. Eventually one expects him to make like a butterfly and exit his class-bound, self-satisfied cocoon.

Well, that's one interpretive possibility, anyway. On the other hand, I like pragmatism too much and see it where it is not. Am I not stripping Arnold of his most vital features by reducing him to an ersatz Rorty? Perhaps all that open-mindedness is just ideological camouflage for an even deeper tweediness. Or perhaps the pragmatic kernel suffices to establish the potential to escape even this. The regress might be infinite, unless we can successfully answer this question: what is the one thing needful for criticism? But then again--what harm does it do to us if we cannot answer it? And what harm might it do if we can?

Refuge

Rorty would not deny, I think, that our biological endowment predisposes us to the exercise of freedom and self-determination. But he struck a different balance than Chomsky between biology and culture, between drive and socialization. Human nature is stubborn, no doubt, but not immutable or unconquerable. Even if it requires tinkering with our genetic program, social control can ultimately, for good or evil, get "all the way down." Which is why he acknowledged that his was "an ungrounded hope."

Lasch, for all his severity, talked constantly about hope. What he meant by it remains tantalizingly obscure. He sometimes referred to it as "trust in life," or in "Being." Here is his fullest definition, from True and Only Heaven (pp. 80-1):

Hope does not demand a belief in progress. It demands a belief in justice: a conviction that the wicked will suffer, that wrongs will be made right, that the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity. Hope implies a deep-seated trust in life that appears absurd to those who lack it. It rests on condence not so much in the future as in the past. It derives from early memories -- no doubt distorted, overlaid with later memories, and thus not wholly reliable as a guide to any factual reconstruction of past events -- in which the experience of order and contentment was so intense that subsequent disillusionments cannot dislodge it. Such experience leaves as its residue the unshakable conviction, not that the past was better than the present, but that trust is never completely misplaced, even though it is never completely justifi ed either and therefore destined inevitably to disappointments.

I'm not sure I understand this, but I find it more illuminating than many things I do understand.

What keeps me going? I suppose it's simple gratitude toward a few (doubtless idealized) exemplars of moral beauty. I worship the ground John Stuart Mill and George Eliot walked on and dread above all things writing a sentence that would have displeased either of them.
- George Scialabba, "Response," in this PDF right here.

I admit readily to not having read Scialabba's book (and not really wanting to, either), although the question of what intellectuals are good for is obviously of great interest to me. There is, I think, only one answer that an intellectual may give to this question in good faith: "Nothing." The responses collected in this PDF are in the main flabby attempts at suggesting "Something, potentially, maybe," and are thus profoundly useless. I am not saying that an intellectual who says "Nothing" is more correct than an intellectual who does not. The "correctness" of any given response would be impossible to evaluate. The point is that a historical stage in which intellectuals are forced routinely to defend their own usefulness is one in which they have already stopped being taken seriously--and these epigones of epigones who gesture vaguely in the direction of some past or future intellectual ideal are an indication that even intellectuals have stopped taking intellectuals seriously.

An intellectual who answers "Nothing" helps to build an infrastructure for a post-intellectual world--one in which the perks and burdens of learning are allocated and interpreted differently. Since that world will come whether or not we want it to, this is largely a question of adjusting to whatever it might look like. An intellectual who answers "Something, vaguely, maybe" in effect pumps money into a failing corporation expecting his investment to be repaid based on nothing but its sentimental value. I doubt this is a move that any of the Crooked Timber reviewers made consciously; I suspect it is largely a matter of inability to let go. The way that ranting demagogasters like Alexander Cockburn are now held up as exemplars speaks volumes in itself.

There's a specific form that this inability to let go seems to take; it's most apparent in the above passage, but there are clear echoes throughout the PDF. What can be the meaning of a sentence like "I'm not sure I understand this, but I find it more illuminating than many things I do understand"? On its face, of course, it is absurd: one can hardly be illuminated (rather than, say, inspired) by something one doesn't understand. The only reading that makes any sense at all is that Scialabba is promoting the kind of mystical pseudo-enlightenment that has always been popular among lazy divines and tedious moralists (like C.S. Lewis in his worst moments). I am picking on him only because his phrasing is the most explicit; the reviewers conceal it better, but for the most part they are just as committed to keeping the most interesting bits unexamined.

I'm not really opposed to mystical pseudo-enlightenment, and I'm not sure that genuine enlightenment even exists. In this particular incarnation, though, its function is to provide some semblance of justification for intellectual laziness. Words like "hope," "democracy," and "justice" are treated here as ritual signifiers for things we all ought to believe and none of us ought to question. Thus the question becomes not "What are intellectuals good for?" but "How can an intellectual fit as comfortably as possible into the speaking-truth-to-power position of Chomsky or some alternate version of it?" "Internal critics," "external critics"--everyone's a critic.

If the word "intellectual" is to have any meaning at all, it must suppose that intellectuals at least make an honest effort to question these background assumptions. How much does a critic really accomplish, whether his audience is a crowd of elites or a mob? What is the real horizon of possibility for the realization of leftist political ideals? To what extent is the overriding emphasis on enabling praxis made in these essays really a helpful contribution to our idea of the intellectual? These questions are not being asked, and the reason for that is obvious. The vocabulary of leftism is not being used here to articulate a coherent vision of the intellectual in society. Rather, it's what remains after all the dross of culture-wars identity politics has been swept away and the abyss of uselessness yawns before every self-identified intellectual--a rhetorical refuge. And an intellectual who isn't willing to flex his hermeneutics-of-suspicion muscles there is really good for nothing.

Beards and Beckers II: The Highest Stage of Historiography

Both Bollinger and Haskell were attempting to stake out an epistemological "vital center"--a middle-of-the-road grounding for the historical venture. This was a not unworthy endeavor; one which they conducted with great subtlety, modesty, and circumspection; one which, in other circumstances, might have attracted considerable attention and support. But as of the 1980s, hardly anybody was listening. Sensibilities were too diverse to be gathered together under any ecumenical tent. As a broad community of discourse, as a community of scholars united by common aims, common standards, and common purposes, the discipline of history had ceased to exist. Convergence on anything, let alone a subject as highly charged as "the objectivity question," was out of the question. The profession was as described in the last verse of the Book of Judges.

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

How long "those days" will continue is anyone's guess. With the triumph of professionalized, scientific history at the turn of the century, historians were confident that problems of historical knowledge had been definitively resolved. Surveying the development of historical theory through the 1930s, Bulletin 54 of the Social Science Research Council announced that with the victory of relativism, American historiography had "come of age." In the early 1960s historians congratulated themselves on having successfully transcended relativism, and having established a mature and permanent equilibrium in a "practical" objectivity. The reader will understand my unwillingness to join the ranks of these failed prophets by predicting the indefinite continuation of present chaos (or some other outcome). In any case, as I have attempted to show, the evolution of historians' attitudes on the objectivity question has always been closely tied to changing social, political, cultural, and professional contexts.
- Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (1988)

As far as Novick is concerned, the age of substantive debate about the "objectivity question" is over. Individual historians might have opinions and proposals about the virtues of relativism and objectivism, but there is little hope that any of them might be able to win a significant fraction of the others over. While he might have been chary about making a prediction for the future, the trend Novick identified in the '80s has not ceased--sure, there was cultural history, Atlantic history, and the history of the book, but none of these approaches proved robust enough to erase the epistemological and methodological fragmentation of the profession. (Indeed, to the extent that cultural history acquired a position the others did not, it was by losing its sharp edges and becoming more pluralistic--so two works of cultural history might differ from one another more than a Progressive and a neoconsensus work would.)

So what we have, in effect, is an enforced relativism (as Novick essentially claims). Even if Joe the economic historian has definite commitments to historical objectivity and rigor--and even votes against hiring Jean the Derridean culturalist--he still generally has to inhabit a department in which "heterodoxy" is every bit as professionally ensconced as "orthodoxy." So little by little, a kind of historiographical Lockeanism becomes established and the use of the disciplinary power of the profession to resolve epistemological disagreements becomes impossible. Novick makes much of the case of David Abraham, who was railroaded and ostracized by an objectivist lynchmob; in 2009 such a situation would look very strange, to say the least.

For Novick, though, this pluralism seems to be explicable by the various new approaches being taken by historians. This is not a very satisfying explanation, since it basically begs the question. Why are so many new approaches being taken? Is interdisciplinarity merely a passing fad for historians, devoid of meaningful underlying causes? I don't think so. I think the explanation lies in a dynamic recently outlined by Mark Bauerlein in the Chronicle (hat tip to Dave Mazella): the economic nature of scholarly production. It is not at all naive, even for a relativist, to think of the body of history-to-be-written-about as a pool of raw material which is processed into monographs and tenure. (The reason it's even okay for a relativist is that the "raw materials" need only represent the "pool of history that people are interested in reading about," with no reference to the objectivity of that pool. Thus there is considerably more raw material in Tolkien's Middle-Earth than there is in the world of Robert Asprin. But that's a subject for another post.)

Up to a certain point in the postwar period, the central problem for historians was encircling and tapping the raw material in a complete and reasonably undistorted way. There was so much of it that scarcity did not enter into the picture. Thus a unified epistemological approach promised great reward for the coordination of efforts and the efficient exploitation of available resources. Today, due to the vast amount of research done since the '60s, scarcity is much more palpably present to us, and the unit price for truly new historical breakthroughs has risen dramatically. Epistemological fragmentation is the inevitable result. Compare oil extraction: for a long time the only way to get at oil reserves was There Will Be Blood-style drilling. Then seaborne oil platforms came into widespread use--and today, due to rising prices, it has become economical to get it from algae, oil sands, oil shale, and so on. There would not be nearly enough oil if all of it were still extracted by drilling. If all historians still followed Richard Hofstadter's lead, there would be no research professorships left outside of the Ivy League.

The Leninist theory of imperialism is the other point of comparison. Capitalism must inevitably find its home markets insufficient and therefore engage in market-creating ventures abroad; this produces a variety of new ideological justifications, e.g. the "white man's burden," that in the last analysis are merely superstructure. It is the same way with our profession, which has rapidly ascended to the stage of finance capitalism. (Given that fragmentation and not consolidation is the operative metaphor, the analogy is imperfect. But you get my drift.) Unless new technologies, more significant even than computer-based datamining, produce dramatic new bodies of primary sources--or unless the publish-or-perish system is uprooted in its entirety--the relativization of the profession will not stop. It's all we've got.

Also, this isn't entirely relevant, but I just wanted to reproduce this footnote from Novick's book:

The way in which substantive sessions were organized at meetings of the AHA was the best evidence that the ostensible purpose of the gathering was not taken seriously. Typically there would three tenuously connected papers, edited with a cleaver so as to be (almost) deliverable in the allotted time. The shredded remnants were read aloud as rapidly as the speakers' lips and tongues could move, while pretending not to notice the chairperson pointing at the clock. There followed one or two "prepared" comments cobbled together at the last moments because the paper had only just arrived. Then, if time allowed, there would be a couple of rambling and off-the-point remarks from the floor. The conclusion was often a plea to the audience (friends and family of the speakers, those on search committees sampling the merchandise, and a collection of incurable innocents in search of enlightenment) to exit the room as rapidly as possible because the hotel staff had to arrange it for a luncheon now overdue. If there is exaggeration in this description, it is slight; if there are exceptions, they are rare. (n. 8, p. 580)

Yup.