‘Shut up!’: bad reviews and unfair critics are hurting the social sciences
A bad habit
Once I have finished
reading an interesting, moving, insightful or informative book, I often search
for conversations, reviews or commentary on the work. This happens almost
involuntarily, without my intending to do so, and is a bad habit that refuses
to die. Unfortunately for me, what I often find, especially if the book happens
to touch on a politically sensitive topic (or, actually, not even so, as you
will see shortly), is hypermodern intellectual nihilism of the kind that makes
you despair of the future of writing and thinking.
Unfair critics
In Act 2 of Samuel
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the
listless protagonists Vladimir and Estragon decide to kill time by hurling
insults at one another. The jokey tirade continues for a while with the two men
hurling the choicest abuses at each other until they reach climax with the
biggest insult they can muster: “critic!”
This article is
about recent encounters with frustratingly bad reviews of books and
unfair critics. It is also about what our approach to ideas portends for
culture.
I only recently embarked on
a voyage of the works of Jared Diamond, the acclaimed bio-geographer who wrote
the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs
and Steel (1997). Guns is a
magnum opus that meticulously reviews and re-charts the history of the world
with the aim of explaining the conditions and circumstances that led to some
societies developing farming, writing, technology, and political advancement
and expansion, while others maintained their hunter-gatherer lifestyles. Simply
put, it was an eye-opening and magnificent read. Then I read Collapse (2005) and The World Until Yesterday (2012). Now I’m waiting to continue onto The Third Chimpanzee (1992), an earlier
work.
As I said earlier, I have
the unfortunate habit of reading reviews and commentary, sometimes
simultaneously with the text. That’s what I did with The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional
Societies?. And, man, was I disappointed.
Diamond is not an
anthropologist but some anthropologists really seem to have it in for him. Wade
Davis’ review of The World Until Yesterday in the Guardian and James C Scott’s review in the London Review of Books are two prime
examples of this. This blog post by ‘Dennis Junk’ is an
excellent riposte to the two aforementioned reviews and I make similar
arguments here as I agree with him completely.
Davis tells us that
Diamonds’ charting of civilisation and implicit adoption of a “hierarchy of
progress” (not Diamond’s words) is bad practice; that these are, in fact,
outmoded concepts and scholars who engage in such scientific piddling as the
tracking of particular evolutionary models missed the memo that established
“radical” “cultural relativism” as the
“ethnographic orientation” in “modern anthropology”. Cultural relativism is, he
tells us, as radical as “Einstein’s theory of relativity in the field of
physics”. Understanding how a culture evolved in a scientific way (through
climatic, ecological and historic models) apparently replicates “19th
century thinking”. Instead, cultures must only be understood as “unique sets of
intellectual and spiritual choices” made by ancestors thousands of years ago,
requiring no outside explanation and no explanation whatsoever of how these
choices came to be made. This is the only way you can evade the charge of
colonialism (implied by “19th century thinking”).
Diamond must have to deal
with straw-man fallacies such as Davis’ a lot, which is why he’s had to
explicitly state the obvious: “My motive for investigating these geographic
differences in human societies is not to celebrate one type of society over
another but simply to understand what happened in history.” (p. 18)
James Scott’s review is a
long commentary (masquerading as a refutation of Diamond’s ideas) on how states
are violent and how tribal societies are not preserved relics of past
hunter-gatherer societies. He pulls Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) into the discussion to talk
about how scholars are minimising state violence and exaggerating the violence
of hunter-gatherer societies.
Firstly, Diamond explicitly
clarifies at the very start of the book what he means by the terms
“traditional” and “small-scale” societies (p. 6). Nowhere does he say that he
considers tribal societies replicas of past hunter-gatherer societies. In fact,
he clearly points out that all such societies have been “at least partly
modified by contact, and could alternatively be described as ‘transitional’
rather than ‘traditional’ societies”. Instead, his argument is that demographic
and ecological factors may help illuminate how pre-agrarian societies lived.
Secondly, he talks at length about cultivation in such traditional societies,
thereby giving the lie to his critics’ misleading use of the term
“hunter-gatherer”. Thirdly, Diamond discusses state-led violence at great
length (more so in other books). In this book, he compares traditional
societies to contemporary states, not early agrarian states (which is what
Scott goes on and on about in his review). Finally, Scott argues that
archaeological, historical and ecological evidence do not tell us anything
about the past, and concludes with this churlish anti-intellectual statement:
“We have virtually no
credible evidence about the world until yesterday and, until we do, the only defensible intellectual position is
to shut up.” (emphasis mine)
Incidentally, both Davis
and Scott find the ‘what we can learn from traditional societies’ part of
Diamond’s book unremarkable. Evidently nothing other than radical or
never-heard-before suggestions on this front would have satisfied them.
In addition to these two
reviews, we also have a review by activist Stephen Corry whose headline screams that “Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday is completely
wrong” and whose premise is that Diamond (and Pinker) are guilty of “pushing
the advancement of human rights for tribal peoples back decades”. Like Scott,
he gives the impression that Diamond sanitises state intervention in the lives
of tribal peoples by only speaking of
the state as a guarantor of law and order. And like Scott, he totally
disregards Diamonds’ analysis of state-led violence.
Other than some factual
misrepresentations, Scott also indulges in a whole lot of – “Are they
‘backward,’ from ‘yesterday’; are they more ‘savage,’ more violent, than we
are?” – all of which, including the use of single quotes, you will know is pure
tosh if you’ve read even one page of any of Diamond’s books. Diamond, who published his first book at 54
after years of study and who has spent more time with communities in New Guinea
than most of his critics would have spent outside their home societies in a
lifetime, is the complete opposite of what is suggested here – he has possibly
done more to teach us about the ingenuity of tribal societies’ (and of all
societies’) adaptations to their environments than anybody else.
Who’s killing the humanities now?
Selective (mis)reading and
ideological haranguing might indeed provide fodder for charged exchanges in
esoteric seminars and for damning commentary in click-bait outlets but the
unintended consequences of this particular approach to intellectual discourse,
taken to its logical conclusion, may well frighten its purveyors.
By promoting (faux)
outrage, rancour and belligerence as the go-to modes of critique in the world
of ideas, many academics and journalists are complicit in the deadening of the
humanities - not only the dumbing down of the humanities but its gradual
ossification and disintegration.
Reviews inveigh against
ideas that do not comport with their worldview. Critics distort and
misrepresent specific ideas within texts, and use straw-men arguments to
‘demolish’ the entire edifice that is the work in its totality. Presenting one
specific aspect of the whole as a ‘fatal’ or ‘fundamental’ flaw, the
overreaching critic often concludes (and sometimes even starts) his/her ‘devastating’
review by categorically ‘rejecting’ the author’s contribution. The author’s
stand on the subject is deemed irrecoverable and all conversations are declared
closed.
Instead of criticising
specific ‘flaws’ in the text and leaving it at that, and humbly accepting that
other methods, views and conclusions can
exist, the go-to option appears to be to ‘shut down’ the conversation.
One wonders how reviewers
who adopt this approach see it as being even remotely conducive to academic
growth and vitality?
The (very self-evident)
problem with this approach to criticism is it damages learning. It forecloses
the possibility of developing a body of knowledge that is inclusive rather than
fragmented; that is receptive to ideas rather than jealous and hostile in
guarding its territory.
When even the most
sophisticated, rigorous and popular thinkers in the field are approached with
such belligerence, one can only imagine the treatment that is routinely meted
out to ‘unpopular ones’.
Or, on the other hand,
perhaps it might be more accurate to say that people like Diamond and Pinker
are now being critiqued in invidious ways precisely because they are so
prominent and popular. After all, both are immensely engaging and thoughtful
writers, and Pinker has been very critical of the abstruse and
moribund style that is conventional academic writing’s defining characteristic.
The mode and register of
academic ‘journal paper’-type writing favours narrowly delimited claims and
never-ending caveats and endless hedging. Arguments are sapped of life and
vigour and presented in the most unobtrusive ways possible. It is best to say
as a little as possible with as much corroboration as you can muster.
But the kind of scholarship
that Diamond and Pinker represent (scholarship in its more traditional sense)
differs in fundamental ways from the conformist, cabalistic and formula-driven
scholarship that defines academia today. The former prioritises ‘big picture’
analysis over punditry. It does not shy away from making generalisations on the
basis of scientific criteria instead of dwelling endlessly on particularities.
More often than not, it is
marked by its lucidity and accessibility, expansiveness, seamlessness, and
above all, its desire to engage, move, provoke and convince. It is, at its
core, a very public kind of
scholarship, more invested in engaging a wide readership and expanding the
frontiers of knowledge than in fulfilling professional duties (by mass
producing formulaic papers) and conforming to whatever is de rigueur amongst
peers.
In academia, where styles,
conventions and professional duties have become so rigid, this older, more
traditional kind of scholarship is now often regarded with an unwarranted
reflexive hostility. Popular science works (especially those that overlap with
humanities disciplines such as history and anthropology) are the latest
casualty.
Veneration for formulaic
academic writing is so ingrained in scholars that any writing that transcends
it is viewed with suspicion or otherwise treated shabbily (such as in bad
reviews). Paradoxically, this even applies, retrospectively, to classic works
such as Guns, Germs and Steel. Davis’
review of The World Until Yesterday
in the Guardian, for instance,
evaluates the former text in the most dismissive and laughably dishonest manner
possible. (He concludes his summary of Guns
with this comment on its analysis: “No surprises there.” Oh, really? Hindsight
is wonderful thing!)
And, while most of what
I’ve said so far pertains to structural issues, it’s important to keep in mind
(and to attempt to untangle) the politics underpinning all of this. Although
admittedly confounding, understanding the politics of what is critiqued (and for what reasons) is, ultimately,
indispensable to evolving a relationship with both text and critique.
When a writer is attacked
for seeming to offend current dogma, and when such attacks are justified in the
name of upholding moral norms or correcting historical wrongs or injustices –
such wrongs being grossly unfairly attributed to the scholar – then we have a
form of moral/political persecution of scholars (in the form of scaremongering
amongst readers) that is as dishonest and almost as dangerous as that practiced
by, for example, religious fundamentalists
who make it their business to set limits on what constitutes ‘acceptable
scholarship’.
Unfortunately, the end
result is an intellectual world that is poorer, less informed and more
partisan.
And,
at the end of the day, when people of my generation barely read anyway, one
wonders what those in the business of educating others are attempting to
achieve by undermining what remains of scholarship?
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