Recently, I read Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman’s Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? (University of California Press, 2000). They counter the falsehoods of Holocaust deniers.
(I’ve written at least one, two, three other posts about conspiracy theories.)
I picked up Denying History because I’d read some comments by Michael Shermer on an entirely different topic and I disagreed with him strongly on that other topic, and I wanted to learn more about what else has interested him over his career. So, although you should not understand me as endorsing anything in particular that Shermer has recently said on any of a number of topics, nevertheless I do want to point out a helpful framework within this 22-year-old book Denying History.
Historical objectivity
The 19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke explained this approach.
History is outside our minds; we discover the past and discern its causal structure; we can know the past; we can become objective; we should describe what really happened.
The hardest part of this approach is denying how we are influenced by our own standpoints. How can we pretend to be objective, when it’s obvious that we have biases?
Historical relativism
In the early 20th century, thinkers like Friedrich Meinecke, Benedetto Croce, Carl Becker, and Charles A. Beard took a more relativist approach.
History is inside our minds; we construct the past and assign it causal structure; we can know the past only through what’s documented; we’re always biased; we should present our own interpretation.
The hardest part of this approach is maintaining that nothing can be known. If that’s the case, then why attempt to present history at all?
Historical science
The authors believe that this approach, having evolved from and beyond the former two approaches, is the correct one:
History is both outside and inside our minds; the past has a causal structure, which we discover objectively and describe subjectively; our knowledge is bounded by the data available to us; we should examine our biases; our interpretations are provisional.
They note that James Kloppenberg (American Historical Review, 1989) has called it “pragmatic hermeneutics.”
I like the simplicity of the breakdown between objectivity and relativism and the presentation of a third approach that bridges them. I also like that they’re talking specifically about writing history.
I don’t necessarily agree, though, that the third approach is correct. The discussion is too short to persuade me (Chapter 2, pp. 19–35). From my own lifetime of thought, for my own reasons, I tend to come down more strongly on the relativist side. But I think it may be a fine place for someone to start exploring the question, and there’s room for discussion here.
Previously published July 7, 2022 to the Episyllogism blog. This article is no longer on that blog, so now it is here.
"The Hebrew word 'lidrosh' means both 'to interpret' and 'to demand,' suggesting that by interpreting a text, we stake a claim to it, and ultimately assert that the text’s meaning is not nearly as fixed as we may have thought—and the world around us not nearly as static as we’ve been taught to believe." Shabbat Reading List, Jewish Currents, July 19, 2024
Adding this:
"As I tried to write my book [How to Be an Antiracist], I struggled over what it means to be an intellectual. Or to be more precise: I struggled because what I wanted to write and the way in which I wanted to write it diverged from traditional notions of what it means to be an intellectual.
The intellectual has been traditionally framed as measured, objective, ideologically neutral, and apolitical, superior to ordinary people who allow emotion, subjectivity, ideology, and their own lived experiences to cloud their reason. Group inequality has traditionally been reasoned to stem from group hierarchy. Those who advance anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-classist, and anti-homophobic ideas have historically been framed as anti-intellectual.
The traditional construct of the intellectual has produced and reinforced bigoted ideas of group hierarchy—the most anti-intellectual constructs existing. But this framing is crumbling, leading to the crisis of the intellectual."
— Ibram X. Kendi, "The Crisis of the Intellectuals," The Atlantic, March 23, 2023
After the George Floyd protests in the summer of 2020, U.S. intellectuals saw their work as "more in line with that of medical researchers seeking a cure to a disease ravaging their community than with philosophers theorizing on a social disease for theory’s sake from a safe remove. We need the model these new intellectuals pursued to save humanity from the existential threats that humans have created, including climate change, global pandemics, bigotry, and war."
Kendi continues:
"Forty-six years later, when intellectuals of all races produce work on matters primarily affecting white people, the assumed subject of intellectual pursuits, these thinkers are seldom accused of engaging in identity politics. Their work isn’t considered dangerous. These thinkers are not framed as divisive and political. Instead, they are praised for example, for exposing the opioid crisis in white America, praised for pushing back against blaming the addicted for their addictions, praised for enriching their work with lived experiences, praised for uncovering the corporations behind the crisis, praised for advocating research-based policy solutions, praised for seeking truth based on evidence, praised for being intellectuals. As they all should be. But when anti-racist intellectuals expose the crisis of racism, push back against efforts to problematize people of color in the face of racial inequities, enrich our essays with lived experiences, point to racist power and policies as the problem, and advocate for research-based anti-racist policy solutions, the reactions couldn’t be more different. We are told that 'truth seeking' and 'activism' don’t mix."
Adding this:
"...the possibility that we do, after all, have some say over the patterns we choose to perceive. That we needn't simply receive signs and wonders, or 'Q drops' and Trump tweets, that we needn't only acquiesce to verdicts as truth or to reports of carbon dioxide parts per million as foreshadowing. That we might instead collaborate with the data; that is, interpret. This is what I want to believe that the preachers, even addled by their own filtered revelation, mean when they say to us, discern."
— Jeff Sharlet. The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War. W. W. Norton & Co., 2023. p. 243.
And this:
"The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality, the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity. In the midst of an abstract discussion it is vexing to hear a man say: "You think thus and so because you are a woman"; but I know that my only defense is to reply: "I think thus and so because it is true," thereby removing my subjective self from the argument. It would be out of the question to reply: "And you think the contrary because you are a man," for it is understood that the fact of being a man is no peculiarity....There is an absolute human type, the masculine. Woman has ovaries, a uterus; these peculiarities imprison her in her subjectivity, circumscribe her within the limits of her own nature. It is often said that she thinks with her glands. Man superbly ignores the fact that his anatomy also includes glands, such as the testicles, and that they secrete hormones. He thinks of his body as a direct and normal connection with the world, which he believes he apprehends objectively, whereas he regards the body of woman as a hindrance, a prison, weighed down by everything peculiar to it."
Simone De Beauvoir. The Second Sex. (1949) Quoted in Susan Bordo. Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997. p. 192.
And this:
"Thomas Kuhn, who wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, argued that scientists, like all of us, have prejudices and biases. Individual scientists have an established set of beliefs, they believe in certain theories, and they devote their professional lives to proving those views right."
— Brian Klaas. Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. Scribner, 2024.
Jude Ellison S. Doyle on objectivity:
"...a point that comes up often in left-leaning media criticism: Many large traditional news outlets have no immune system that allows them to screen out bad-faith actors. Marginalized identities tend to be framed as one side of a “debate,” and both sides of the “debate” are given equal time in the name of “objectivity.” This isn’t evidence of deep-down conservatism so much as it is evidence of a certain view of journalism, in which the world consists entirely of knowable facts, and the job of a journalist is to find and print those facts, without regard to personal feeling. Opinions cannot be evaluated in any objective way (right or wrong, useful or harmful) because they are not facts — it can only be a fact that someone has an opinion, and if an opinion is widespread enough or controversial enough to be newsworthy, you give it a hearing and let readers decide whether they agree.
This is an outdated worldview. I don’t think most journalists my age or younger actually believe it."
— Jude Ellison S. Doyle, "Richard Hanania and the Reasonable White Guy Voice," Medium, August 16, 2023.
Doyle links to info about standpoint theory, and says: "A truth is a fact within its proper context. That’s the standard to which most good journalists aspire."
In 1964, Lewis Coser wrote: “What Georg Simmel said about the stranger applies with peculiar force to the eunuch: ‘He is not radically committed to the unique ingredients and peculiar tendencies of the group, and, therefore, approaches them with the specific attitude of ‘objectivity’…whereas the relation to more organically connected persons is based on the commonness of specific differences…’" In other words, there's something special about outsider status that may make you a little more objective, at least in your attitude if not in your access to relevant facts, because you have fewer prejudices and loyalties related to the people you're observing. However, Coser continued, speaking specifically about court eunuchs: "The very detachment of the eunuch-stranger from all group involvements makes for his ‘objectivity’ vis-à-vis all subjects, and conversely for his nearness to the ruler,” which makes for “an ideal instrument of the ruler’s subjectivity.” (Coser, p. 882) In this model, you have the subjectivity of whomever you're close to (in this case, the sultan), and objectivity toward whomever you're separated from (in this case, the population at large).
("The Political Functions of Eunuchism." Lewis A. Coser. American Sociological Review, Vol. 29, No. 6 (Dec., 1964), pp. 880-885 (6 pages) https://doi.org/10.2307/2090872 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2090872 Quotation from p. 882. He cites The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt H. Wolff, The Free Press, 1950, pp. 404–405.)
But it should be obvious — and Coser may be pointing this out sideways, since he puts scare quotes around objectivity but not subjectivity — that sharing the sultan's opinion and agenda, especially when by necessity due to your precarious position as a court functionary whose job is to carry out the sultan's wishes, hardly makes you objective. In other words: Working for the sultan may or may not encourage you to sympathize with him and thus to approximate his "subjectivity." Regardless, sympathizing with one person hardly makes you an "objective" arbiter toward a third person. That's a logical fallacy. The conclusion just doesn't follow from the premise. If I'm drawn into the perspective of the wealthiest family, I'm not thereby more objective about the condition of poor people.
People whose bodies are understood to qualify them as being close to other bodies are ultimately perceived as more personal and therefore less objective:
“Being in bodily attendance on the feminine household within the palace, the eunuchs exploited this position near the person of the ruler and his family. Their basis of operation was attendance on persons, while the bureaucratic official based his power upon his position in an impersonal system. They thrived on nearness, where bureaucrats cultivated distance.” (Coser 1964, also p. 882)
This may be generalized, I suppose, to anyone whose body is focused on by others. Others are constantly reminding themselves that the person has a body. They claim that the embodied person is less objective. This is part of modern transphobia.
Brian Klaas in The Garden of Forking Paths (May 14, 2024):
"As my Atlantic colleague Adam Serwer wrote:
Fox News lies to its viewers. Its most prominent personalities, among the most influential in the industry, tell their viewers things they know not to be true. This is not accusation, allegation, or supposition. Today, we know it to be fact.
There is no equivalent of the Dominion lawsuit for MSNBC, or CNN, or any other “mainstream” news outlet that the Fox viewership loves to hate. In fact, Fox News previously defended itself successfully from a defamation lawsuit by suggesting that most viewers understood that they weren’t actually giving viewers the facts, because it was clear that Tucker Carlson is “not ‘stating actual facts’ about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’”
This strategy of subjectivity obliterating objectivity serves a crucial purpose: it creates a permissive structure for impunity. Accountability requires a shared sense of objective reality, because without objectivity, every “fact” becomes a he said/she said battle in subjectivity."
That is: When you have a cable network that sort of pretends to be news by outwardly insisting everything it says is true but is speaking out of both sides of its mouth by maintaining (if you ask them under oath) that most of its viewers know that the hosts are just running their mouths with BS, then no one on that "news" network can be held accountable for any damage their words cause.
