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Black armbands, expertise, and fraud
It’s hard to keep people from believing what they want to believe. That can be especially true if the people are experts. After all, the views of experts define what is true, those views are “expert” on account of certain formal qualifications and procedures, and formalities can usually be manipulated to achieve any result one wants. The consequence is that if experts want something to be true they can, for purposes of public discussion, make it true, and it will stay true as long as they want it to be true. I’ve touched on the problem before in connection with architecture.
It also comes up in connection with history. In Australia, for example,
the dominant “black armband” school of historians isn’t about to give up
its campaign to prove Australian society illegitimate because of its
treatment of the aborigines just because Keith Windschuttle has shown
that they distort or fabricate their evidence. They have therefore lauched
a counterattack. “Malicious” and “cultural chauvinist,” says one,
“Replete with misconceptions, distortions, character assassinations”
says another. The big problem, according to the editor of a book of
essays attacking Windschuttle, is that “There is no room in his court
for historical imagination.” As another professor complains,
“Windschuttle aims to take the discipline of history back to some a
golden age when it was all about facts.” And that, apparently, would be
a catastrophe for scholarly understanding. After all, as one scholar
observed (quoted by Windschuttle in his article
in The New Criterion) “very little historical interpretation is
verifiable in any strict sense,” so historians arrive at the truth on
the basis of a “scholarly consensus.” The consensus, it appears, can now
be based on little more than the will to believe of the dominant group
of scholars. (For more on Windschuttle and the historians, see the very
useful site The Sydney
Line.)
Comments
“Windschuttle aims to take the discipline of history back to some golden age when it was all about facts.” The scandal of it! Posted by: Matt on June 23, 2003 9:02 PMThe slogan of the Left. Posted by: Paul Cella on June 23, 2003 9:08 PMWhat a great line. Says it all. Posted by: Bubba on June 23, 2003 11:30 PM“After all, the views of experts define what is true, those views are ‘expert’ on account of certain formal qualifications and procedures, and formalities can usually be manipulated to achieve any result one wants.” This reminds me of a meeting of Swiss academics I attended in New York a couple of years ago. Every time I challenged them on their plans, such as the “integration” of Switzerland’s newer immigrant populations (i.e. the ethnic proportional representation of every group in every area of life), they would with great assurance mention some “study,” which, they said, proved that their idea would work. I thought of saying to them, though I didn’t do so: “Switzerland has been an independent republic for about 700 years. Was Switzerland founded, and did it successfully survive and function through all those centuries, on the basis of ‘studies’ proferred by left-wing academics who know and care nothing about their actual society and how it works?” Posted by: Lawrence Auster on June 24, 2003 3:24 PMWindschuttle is doing for the aborigines what Derek Freeman did for the Samoans. Freeman discovered that Margaret Mead’s “scholarly” work on Samoan adolescents’ sexual freedom had nothing to do with the facts. But Mead wanted to believe the tall tales she heard from her “informants,” because they fitted her leftwing ideology. Yet most casual readers of anthropology still consider her work the last word on the subject and condemn Freeman. The modern version of the same opposition is happening now in Australia, where Windschuttle has punctured the myths of the Left concerning their victimization by the nasty Europeans. Only the names have changed; the substance is the same. Correction to my previous post: In the next-to-last sentence, where I said “concerning their victimization,” I should have said “concerning the aborigines’ victimization….” Posted by: frieda on June 25, 2003 7:34 AMor you are all racist, or white supremist idealist that couldt possibly see the wrongdoings of a monstrous people. ‘deaths of minorities? couldnt possibly be the white people’s fault!’ Posted by: frederick on March 23, 2004 9:57 AMor you are all racist, or white supremist idealist that couldt possibly see the wrongdoings of a monstrous people. ‘deaths of minorities? couldnt possibly be the white people’s fault!’ Posted by: frederick on March 23, 2004 9:57 AM |