Public Repentance

"He put another parable before them, saying, 'The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field, but while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat and went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the master of the house came and said to him, 'Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?' He said to them, 'An enemy has done this.' So the servants said to him, 'Then do you want us to go and gather them?' But he said, 'No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them.'" - Gospel of Matthew 13:24-29

"Some indeed preach Christ from envy and rivalry, but others from good will. The latter do it out of love, knowing that I am put here for the defense of the gospel. The former proclaim Christ out of selfish ambition, not sincerely but thinking to afflict me in my imprisonment. What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice." - Philippians 1:15-18

I preface this final blog post for my internship with the Florida Historical Quarterly with biblical epigrams, because while the subject matter is not exclusively biblical, there is much in it explored by the Jesus of the gospels and the first generation of Christians. For a variety of reasons, many former (and to some now neo-) colonial powers, public repentance is very much in vogue. In November of 2017, the Georgia Historical Quarterly lamented its historical role in the myth of the Lost Cause after the Civil War; in March of 2018, the New York Times began a (still-ongoing) series "Overlooked," in which it is going all the way back to 1851 and providing obituaries for minorities and women the newspaper of record did not honor when they passed; and this month's issue of National Geographic was on race, and its opening letter from the editor is titled, "For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It." I would argue that all of this is good, yet in our advertising age of obsessive optics, self-conscious branding, and institutional public relations campaigns, many cannot shake a cynical suspicion that there is something besides nobility driving all of this. Just to illustrate the intensity of this phenomenon, consider that there is a sizable Wikipedia entry for all of the following topics:

Activism 2.0
Armchair revolutionary
Armchair warrior
Concern troll
Dog-whistle politics
Hypocrisy
Moral superiority (disambiguation)
Race Card
Self-licensing
Self-righteousness
Shy Tory Factor
Slacktivism
Social desirability bias
Social justice warrior
Tribalism
Virtue-signaling
Watching-Eye Effect

They all amount to a self-serving virtue-chauvinism tainted with artificiality or insincerity. They combine to make one wonder: how do you separate the weeds from the wheat? The corporation of true believers from the company listening to a top-notch PR firm? When it comes to beliefs, the testimony of (Matthew's) Jesus of Nazareth and Paul's letter to the church in Philippi is the same: you cannot with definitive certainty; if someone's behavior outs them unequivocally as a wolf in sheep's clothing, you do not need to charitably ignore the obvious, but if you are looking for a litmus test for sincerity, you will never find it.

The Lost Cause and scientific racism are being denounced; women and minorities are being remembered. Some doing the denouncing and the remembering may be doing so from altruism that is not pure, but in the spirit of the apostle Paul I say, "whether in pretense or in truth, may what is good be proclaimed, and in that I rejoice."

Where Lies the Greater Good?

"In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies." - Winston Churchill, November 30, 1943, Tehran Conference

"There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the Bill of Rights into a suicide pact." - Robert H. Jackson, 1949, Terminiello v. City of Chicago

"[Foreign diplomats] are not dealing in the civil society we live in under the Constitution. They are dealing in an anarchic environment internationally where different rules apply." - John Bolton, 2010

It has been a light week, mainly spent going far back into the archives of the Florida Historical Quarterly, so the three quotations above have been weighing on the back of my mind a good bit. In a nutshell, the ideas in them twist into a Gordian Knot: how do you reasonably recognize that your government may need to lie to the public to get back onto Nazi-occupied continental Europe, but not give them carte blanche to lie in the name of national security any time the truth might be political hazardous?

I do not expect ever to be governed by a group of people in whom I have complete trust--I suspect I will always be a human, governed by humans. However, I think it is vital that our political culture have a clear litmus test for evaluating whether or not dishonesty is warranted. Vaguely, I can identify a tripartite division:

1. Justified by American lives being at risk (D-Day)
2. Dubious and Dangerous, possible grounds for dismissal (James Clapper about the NSA collection of call records)
3. Malicious and Self-Serving (Joe McCarthy's "card-carrying communists" yarns)

The question that I still need to ruminate on is how to define the categories. It is sad to me that we do not yet have a robust vocabulary on this subject. After so many scandals involving rationalized dishonesty, we are long overdue.

The Great Scholarship Triad

When it comes to writing good history, there are three critical elements: a good idea, adequate evidence, and engaging writing. These are distinct, but interrelated. Over the past few weeks of copy-editing for the Quarterly I have encountered a rare bird, a piece of scholarship that can boast a great idea and ample evidence, but very rough writing. Discretion does not allow me to say whether or not the submission will ultimately be published, but I can say that I enjoyed the work of reviewing it because it had well-supported, illuminating ideas (again, I cannot discuss anything particular to the piece here in case it is printed). Bracketing desperation-induced apathy ("I have to turn something in tomorrow, whatever its quality"), everyone writes what he thinks are good ideas with plenty of evidence to accept them, clearly conveyed, yet their readers beg to differ. So I'm going to indulge in the fantasy that a few paragraphs' reflection on these elements can help me avoid false positives of good ideas, evidence, and writing in my scholarship.

A good idea is definitely the most difficult element to define precisely, but here's a go at it: you have to provide something new and valuable. A narrative survey of the major points of the American Revolution is certainly valuable, but such a narrative has been written thousands of times, and most new treatments are likely to be more milk and not the cream at the top. A purely-aesthetic assessment of the best and worst dressed at the Second Continental Congress would probably be new, but the audience who found it valuable would likely be small. One of the greatest errors in this area is the conflation of "interesting" and "valuable." Though not a silver bullet, the question, "Why should a person care about this" can help clarify between the two.

Adequate evidence inheres a lot, and in every case it is largely defined by the idea being explored or argued. The more ambitious the historian in his idea, the more evidence will have to be marshaled. I suspect that the pitfalls change the further into the academy a person goes, but at the undergraduate and graduate level it seems that writers are generally most vulnerable to underestimating the scope and depth of evidence necessary. If an exhaustive treatment is not possible, a good historian has to explain how a representative sample was obtained. As with so many things, a little bit of acknowledgment goes a long way. Another exasperatingly common mistake is the failure to recognize the evidence that is most difficult to square with the author's thesis. Often the difference between a strong scholarly work and a truly influential one is the consideration of different sets of evidence that support divergent conclusions. As a final quick note, the available evidence is a major factor in assessing the feasibility of an idea. A biography of the Calusa man who killed Juan Ponce de Leon in 1521 would be a great idea...except for the fact that no documentary evidence exists from which to write it.

Quality writing is powered by the twin pistons of clarity and artistry. Any avid student of history will read texts--often textbooks--that present the information with no ambiguity, but with so little artistry it feels like chewing on hardtack. Then there are the historical poets who write with so much purple prose that readers' eyes are rolling too often to be able to stay focused on the text and its ideas. This is perhaps the most element for the historian, because it is the most subjective. I believe that the old popular historian Will Durant to have achieved a fantastic combination of dry wit and honest assessment of where adequate evidence ends and speculation begins--many find Durant just dry.

As has been hinted at a bit, these three elements are integrally-connected. An extraordinary writer can supplant an old classic's summary treatment of the French Revolution, but for an ordinary writer the same idea is a bad one. Conversely, even an amazing writer will flounder with a poorly-chosen idea, e.g., the biography of Ponce de Leon's assassin. Some topics, such as the English Restoration, provide quality writing within the sources themselves. Curating some of the more gifted mid-17th century writers for evidence can kill two birds with one stone--back up claims with evidence and give the reader some entertaining 'juice,' so to speak. If your subject writes poorly, or communicates in clichés, as Adolf Eichmann apparently did, then you'll need to quote sparingly and season with wit, as did Hannah Arendt.

Reflecting personally, I am most prone to underestimate (often out of laziness) the amount of evidence that I need to cite to support my thesis. What are your strengths and weaknesses?