I would like to nominate “What ______ Don’t Say” for the most consistently unfunny meme of 2013. It’s significantly worse than the meme of six-square “What _____ think(s) I do” image macros, which I believe deserved the 2012 crown.
(Yes, I am a crotchety internet slang traditionalist. Each individual instance of “What _____ think(s) I do” is an “image macro,” only the general concept of “What _____ think(s) I do” macros counts as a “meme.”)
An expanded version of an earlier post, cross-posted from the Society for U.S. Intellectual History facebook group, where I posted it as a comment.
I’ve seen a lot of silly “digital humanities” work, but then I’ve seen a lot of silly analog humanities work too. People may not truly believe that quantitative methods are inherently inimical to the spirit of humanistic inquiry, but they tend to talk as if that’s true. We raise the specter of “scientism” all the time, but, I would argue, a language of “humanitism” may be developing.
That is, we develop a theory of what “numbers,” “science,” or, most often “computers” — all typically caricatured — cannot do. We then mock as “missing the point” any efforts to do those things with those tools. This saves us the effort of engaging with — let alone refuting — the truth claims of such efforts.
This isn’t new. Anxiety about the status and funding of the humanities relative to the sciences has long been an animating idea for those who have shaped the academic humanities in America. In the 1930s we got a whiff of it from the perennialist vs. pragmatist debates. It arrived full force in the post-war period. I’m not making the vulgar argument that increasingly frequent and ham-handed attempts to sell the humanities as in the national interest (“forming the good democratic citizen” etc.) were directly caused by the Bomb and later by Sputnik, but there’s some truth in that. This same anxiety was alive and well in the Culture Wars; see for instance the section of The Closing of the American Mind about the three disciplines. See also, for that matter, “Speaking for the Humanities.”
Of course, if anxiety about the sciences has inspired science-bashing, it has also inspired science-envy and humanistic scientism. This very same history may be partially to blame for the worst excesses of the digital humanities. Tim Lacy might have come across the newspaper clipping (from the sixties, if I recall correctly) in which Mortimer Adler and an IBM engineer had a rather superficial argument about whether computers could eventually become conscious. And yet even Adler, loather of scientism that he was, signed to a promotional scheme whereby the Syntopicon was digitized. People could then name a topic, and “The UNIVAC Computer will research the works of 74 authors below and print 4 authors’ quotations on a subject you select.” Note the anthropomorphizing language: the computer “will research.” In reality, the UNIVAC setup was nothing more than a computerized index, but it was dressed up as AI in order to sell Great Books.
What this intellectual history reminds us, I hope, is that anxious attempts to justify the humanities have tended to lead to visions of the humanities that most humanists today find misguided, vulgar, or point-missing. I am leery of how we talk about the digital humanities today because I fear that we are falling into the same trap. We historians should be particularly careful. History is at least in part an empirical discipline; there is nothing in principle wrong with numerical empiricism in history — even in intellectual history. We tend to get mad (or is it anxious?) when digital humanists substitute a mound of data for the implications of that data. Perhaps instead of complaining about the medium, we should show them what searching for the message actually looks like.
Cambridge jello-wrestling debate-induced realization: many students at Cambridge speak in a way that suggests a deeply libertarian understanding of speech, power, and coercion. Many of these same students are horrified by American unwillingness to introduce gun control or universal healthcare. A useful reminder that while it may be fun to talk about “first principles” and “political vernaculars,” our[1] political beliefs tend to be incompletely theorized.
[1] Yes, *our*.
Over at Leah’s blog, they’re chatting about “postmodernism.” Rant time:
-ism-ism is a problem both in the academic humanities and in the internet (blago-blag) humanities. Tossing around abstractions can make for bad intellectual history and worse philosophical criticism. By all means critique Derrida, Foucault, or Deleuze. Even talk about how they are related, or about how American literature professors lumped them together.
If you say something like “postmodernism leads to relativism,” though, it’s not clear what you actually mean. Are you using “postmodernism” as a technical philosophical term, where postmodernism equals “the belief that X, Y, and Z” for some X, Y, and Z, in the same way that, for instance, the term “consequentialism” can mean “the belief that the moral status of an action is determined by assessing the consequences of that action in some way”? Or are you using it to describe a class of theories or ideas that have a shared history and are associated with one another in our cultural memory, but need not necessarily share any single specific quality?
Statements such as “postmodernism leads to relativism” often arrive without clarification as to which of these two kinds of abstraction the author believes “postmodernism” to be. Moreover, they often arrive without any definition of the term at all. This makes it much easier to strawman postmodernists (or any -ists). Once you’ve put, say, Derrida in an -ism-ist box (“Derrida was a ‘postmodernist’”), you’ve spared yourself the trouble of actually engaging with what, if any, actual arguments he may have made that could distinguish him from other postmodernist thinkers. You can then just engage with what you take to be “postmodernist” arguments, whether or not Derrida himself did make them or would have endorsed them.
If you are going to argue with a diffuse movement rather than with a specific philosophical claim, do the legwork to explain why the movement deserves to be considered as a cultural and intellectual historical unit.
Rant over.
Postscript 1: Yes, this was a rant about attacks on postmodernism grounded in analytic philosophy. Yes, -ism-ism is an -ism. Must say something about irony or self-undermining.
Postscript 2: No, this doesn’t mean we can’t say things like “racism is bad.”
Postscript 3: This applies equally on the other side of the political aisle. Please talk more coherently about “neoconservatism” as well.
My three favorite forms of British – particularly English – self-congratulation, in ascending order: jokes with punch lines that amount to “the Welsh fuck sheep,” jokes with punch lines that amount to “the Americans are gun-toting Bible-thumpers,” and assertions that “non-Brits don’t understand British humour because it’s so subtle, understated, and ironic.”
“Loads of dumb people believe X! Allow me to parody the dumb arguments for X! Allow me to post a link to a dumb person arguing stupidly for X! Therefore not-X.”
As Nate Silver has argued, the structure of the NCAA tournament helps it produce Cinderella stories. The tournament is single-elimination, there are many matches, and basketball is a volatile game. Due to seeding, a low-seeded team that beats is first-round opponent then faces an easier road to the Sweet Sixteen than do teams with middling seeds.
What the tournament doesn’t tend to produce are Cinderella winners. Once a low-seeded Cinderella team reaches the later rounds on the strength of its first-round upset and subsequent smooth road, it will again have to beat the strongest teams in the tournament to remain in business.
When their favorite Cinderella loses, bandwagon fans switch happily pick one of the remaining big-name teams to support. The tournament lets us root for and believe in the little guy but at the same time ensures that one of the big guys almost always wins. Fans seem fairly content with this arrangement.
I’ve seen a lot of silly ‘digital humanities’ work, but then again I’ve seen a lot of silly analog humanities work too. People who truly believe that quantitative methods are inimical to the spirit of humanistic inquiry are only marginally better than those who whinge about the decline of the printed word and talk about how they don’t take English classes because ‘we murder to dissect’. They’ve confused the trappings for the heart, and they’ve drunk the Romantic kool-aid. Now everything is ‘Team Prosaic Enlightenment Rationalists’ versus ‘Team Sophisticated Irrationalist Romantics’. At their worst, they are to real humanities scholars as nature lovers are to ecologists, or as readers of xkcd who wear geeky t-shirts are to mathematicians.
This will probably be of most interest to self-described ‘virtue ethicists.’
Performing the right thing professedly for the right reasons but actually for the wrong reasons is the first step toward doing the right thing actually for the right reasons.
Off-the-top-of-my-head examples of this: making schoolchildren apologize when they don’t mean it, political correctness.
N.B. that ‘conservatives’ buy into some kinds of rote ethical training but not others, and ‘liberals’ likewise.
Hope Solo was Woman of the Match. Her final save was as beautiful as it was crucial. Solo dove at full stretch to deflect a wicked low strike by Mana Iwabuchi. Japan had had all the momentum in the match from Yuki Ogimi’s 63rd minute goal onward. Had Iwabuchi equalized, Japan might well have prevailed. The Iwabuchi save alone would have been enough to make Solo one of the heroes of the match, but Solo also stopped many other excellent Japanese chances, bailing out a US defense that I will charitably call “porous.”
That said, the USA win was a team effort. Solo was anything but in her efforts to win the gold. Offensive star Carli Lloyd earned the first of her two goals with excellent positioning and vision; she saw Alex Morgan’s eventual cross developing and came to get it. Her second goal was still more impressive. Japan committed all their [sic, see footnote] defensive forces to contain the dangerous Wambach and Morgan (who repeatedly found herself triple-teamed). Lloyd was left with a one-on-one match-up. She beat that defender and scorched a beautiful 20-meter curler just inside the left post. Two-nil USA. Lloyd and Solo were aided by the unselfish Morgan, whose brilliant chip cross engineered the first goal, and who created chances and drew defenders throughout the game with her speed and ball-handling. The US also might not have won without Wambach’s relentless, willful play. In the closing minutes, the USA defense went from merely porous to nonexistent, as Japan’s better conditioning augmented their existing advantage in pure speed and their strikers ran circles around the USA back line. The Americans might have conceded a goal or even two but for Wambach, who ranged back from her striker position to hit several crucial defensive headers. Wambach is known for scoring through the air; she possesses the most dextrous brow in the women’s game. In this final, she deflected crosses away from her own goal as ably as she normally sends them into opponents’ nets.
Canadians will (and do, the internet suggests) think that this US team effort included a contribution from the ref. The US undeniably benefited from a blown call. Japan got away with plenty of fouls (and stooped to uncharacteristic pushing and diving in the final minutes), but no uncalled Japanese violation was as flagrant as Tobin Heath’s handball in the box with the US up one-nil. Solo, clearly in the zone, might perhaps have saved the direct free kick that ought to have been awarded, but Japan more likely would have equalized, and a different match could have unfolded. That said, the other officiating in the match (not perfect, but hardly unequal) demonstrates that this was a mere blown call, not proof of a pro-USA reffing conspiracy. Such a conspiracy exists only in the imaginations of bitter Canadians.
Others have complained about America’s dirty play on defense. Please. This is football. The Japanese players frequently pushed off American defenders while cutting on set pieces. That is also football. If the refs called every push or shove in the box on a set piece, every single international corner kick would lead immediately to a free kick for one side or the other.
Rachel Buehler is too slow. When injury to Buehler in the closing minutes forced USA coach Pia Sundhage to sub Becky Sauerbrunn and her fresh legs for the defender, I exhaled with relief up in the stands. You may remember Buehler as the goat (in the sense of anti-MVP, not Greatest of All Time) of the USA’s loss to Japan in last summer’s World Cup final. She bungled a clearance attempt, giving Aya Miyama a clear shot on goal. In this excellent rematch, Buehler found herself repeatedly outrun by Japan’s fleet-footed forwards. People (and by “people,” I mean “Canadians”) complain about Buehler’s (sometimes uncalled) fouls. They’re right; she does foul too much, and it’s because she gets outrun too much. In Buehler’s defense, I should mention that she did tip away a goal-bound ball after Solo had committed herself early. Still, I agree with Brandi Chastain. Sorry, Hope.
In general, I would like to see a slightly faster and more competent back line from Pia’s ladies in future tournaments. Japan created many lovely and well-deserved chances, but their only actual goal arrived gift-wrapped compliments of the US defense, which once again bungled a clearance. This particular time, Christie Rampone was at fault, but she was hardly the only American defender to falter in the match. Solo bailed out the women in front of her several times.
Gripes about a defense that tested my cardiovascular health aside, hearty congratulations are due to both teams for a very well played match. Japan were swift, creative, and deadly. The US did not create quite so many chances, but capitalized beautiful when they did. Lloyd and her teammates thoroughly deserved both goals. As in the World Cup final, either team could have won the match. Last time, Japan pulled it out; this time, it was America’s day. I look forward to watching the two teams—undoubtedly the best two teams in the world (cue more Canadian griping)—meet again and produce more gripping football.
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[Footnote] I follow football convention by referring to the sport as “football” and the teams as plural—rather than singular—collectives. I recognize that this will seem weird to some speakers of American English. That said, given that I root unabashedly for the US Women’s National Team, I think my patriotism need not be questioned on grounds of language.
