2016
Hate Speech and Fresh Air
Hate speech is like mold: Its enemies are bright light and fresh air.
– Howard Gillman, “Bigots at the Gate: Universities Shouldn’t Duck the Fight against White Nationalism," Los Angeles Times, December 20, 2016.
Academic Prose
“Science Articles: A Guide”
(the ratio of subject matter complexity to prose complexity) by SMBC Comics
WordPress Email
My apologies if you tried to contact me earlier via WordPress's email form. Your message never reached my inbox.
Preparing to Fight the Last War? Maybe Not
Prussian War Academy ca, 1900 via Wikimedia Commons.
I've been taking some time to think more about a slow-moving article on Wilhelm Groener I've been working on. It has received a big boost recently from the GHI's new focus on the history of knowledge.
A truism holds that generals prepare to fight the last war, not the next one. Unable to peer into the future, they make do with the lessons of the past. Fair enough, perhaps, but this common-sense wisdom presupposes that military leaders will necessarily understand the salient features of the last war without preconceptions about war and officering affecting their discernment. In other words, the truism fails to account for the effects of prior training, experience, and acculturation in the production of knowledge about war. Instead, it implicitly assumes the existence of universal soldierdom, as if officering and soldiering—but for technology—were not culturally and historically contingent.
Wilhelm Groener (1867–1939) offers a case in point. A general staff officer in the German army who rose to prominence quickly in the First World War, Groener became an important spokesman in the interwar period for the so-called Schlieffen school, offering an interpretation of the war seemingly at odds with what actually happened. Instead of deriving new lessons from the stalemate, as his contemporary Erich Ludendorff did in a nightmarish vision of politics serving war instead of vice versa, Groener doubled down on the knowledge he had internalized in peacetime Wilhelmine Germany. Issuing from neither a military outsider nor an original thinker and steeped in antebellum military thoughtways and culture, Groener’s interpretation of the First World War can be analyzed in relation to his prewar training and wartime experiences to show the inner logic of the professional military knowledge and culture in which he was steeped.
Grafenwöhr 1983
A younger historian on Facebook called this picture a “Nice primary source of the late Cold War!” I don’t know what that makes me, the guy in front, but I decided to share here too.
'American Tragedy'
. . . A friend called me full of sadness, full of anxiety about conflict, about war. Why not leave the country? But despair is no answer. To combat authoritarianism, to call out lies, to struggle honorably and fiercely in the name of American ideals—that is what is left to do. That is all there is to do.
– David Remnick, “An American Tragedy,” The New Yorker, November 9, 2016.
Values
American national leaders gain their legitimacy by competing in compliance with not merely the outward forms but the clear values of our Constitution—equal dignity, religious freedom and tolerance, open deliberation, and the rule of law. These values don’t bind Donald Trump; norms of decency do not apply; he shrugs off the very burden of fact itself.
– Garrett Epps, “Donald Trump has broken the Constitution,” The Atlantic, November 9, 2016.
Tonight’s Lecture
Automation
I was standing near the driver in my bus yesterday, waiting for the light to change so I could get off. When the light turned green, but the car in front of us didn’t move, the driver beeped his horn. I said, “People need to get off their phones,” which earned a laugh from the driver. Then he added something I hadn't recognized about the situation: “Uber drivers are the worst. I thought taxi drivers were bad . . .” I almost quipped something about how automation will soon take care of that, but then thought better of it. Will we lose our bus drivers too?
Today there was this piece on NPR, “As Automation Eliminates Jobs, Tech Entrepreneurs Join Basic Income Movement,” which asks,
When we talk about the economy, we spend a lot of time talking about jobs—how to create more of them and how to replace the ones being lost. But what if we're entering an automated future where there won't be enough jobs for the people who need them?
This is an interesting, if not entirely new question, but also something of a gut punch when I think of all the ordinary human interactions I have in a day. On the other hand, it's possible that the Silicon Valley crowd is informed by more than a little hubris and so can't imagine all the areas of life that cannot—or should not—be automated.
'The American Face of Fascism'
It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s.
– Adam Gopnik, “Being Honest about Trump,” The New Yorker, July 14, 2016
‘Black Man Driving’
A woman I met way back when my son and her daughter were still in kindergarten or the first grade has written a piece that drives home the unfortunate contradictions in what passes for a national conversation in these United States. It's not preachy or partisan, just personal, the kind of thing that can make you think, even if you don't happen to know the man in question.
My husband of twenty-seven years is a police officer. He’s a decent man, a kind man, the kind of police officer you’d want if you were in trouble. He’s also a black man. A black man who I worry about more when he is out of uniform than when he is wearing one.
Read the whole piece: Black Man Driving.
A Few Notes on the History of Knowledge
Experts <—> Public
In most of today’s university disciplines, professional training serves to distance an individual from the public, to refine them into an ‘expert’ whose speech and writing are marked by incomprehensible formulae and keywords. But history-telling came out of an age before the era of experts, and its form is inherently democratic.
– Jo Guldi and David Armitage, The History Manifesto (2014; Cambridge UP, 2015), 56.
Rates of Change
Technology, institutions, mentalities and practices change at different rates. Technology, especially in the age of what has been called ‘the institutionalization of innovation’, changes rapidly. Society and its institutions change more slowly, a result of what has been called institutional ‘inertia’. Last to change are mentalities and practices, illustrating the presence of the past in the world of today.
– Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge II: From the Encyclopaedia to Wikipedia (Polity, 2012), Kindle ed., chap. 9, “Chronologies of Knowledge."
Commonplacing
Some years ago, I used a Tumblr blog as a kind of commonplace book. That fell by the wayside, but lately I’ve felt the need to have a place to save quotes again. Rather than use a separate venue, however, I’ll just collect them here under the commonplacing category.
I don’t intend to take extensive notes this way, but rather to grab things that I think can stand on their own. That’s the plan for now anyway.
Georgetown University’s Massive Slave Sale
This New York Times story sure hits close to home: “272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?" As a human being and as an alumnus, I find this startling. As a historian, I can’t think of a better way to make history relevant to students in the present.