Happy St. Andrew's Day!

Back in March, I mused about rituals surrounding St. Patrick's Day and wondered why there's nothing similar for, say, St. Andrew's Day.

Well, it turns out there is. Tonight, in honor of St. Andrew, Christ's College is serving haggis as its main course. Me, I'll be having the vegetarian haggis, which might actually sound more disgusting than the real thing.

If only I had some plaid to wear...

Best duet ever

I'm sure I've blogged about this before, but I can't find it, so here it goes again...

"Ain't No Mountain High Enough" by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell is, far and away, the best duet ever. Their voices wrap around each other so tightly that you believe every word of it.

The best moment of the song: 1:40 in, when Tammi's line is "My live is alive" and Marvin throws in a falsetto "Woo!" just for the hell of it. Pop music doesn't get any closer to perfection than that.

Can ESPN not afford fact-checkers?

What's with baseball writers having a tenuous grasp on history? First, Peter Gammons, now Phil Rogers.

Over at ESPN, Rogers has a column on why the Washington Nationals (formerly the Montreal Expos) will succeed. Here's one of his reasons.

While the Expos have had a losing record in six of their last eight seasons, they are capable of contending soon in a division that has been ruled by the Atlanta Braves since another George Bush was in the White House.

What division would this be? The Nationals and Braves are both in the National League East. Baseball realigned its divisions in 1994, though, and it was only then that the Braves joined the NL East. Before then, they were part of the NL West (don't ask).

That other George Bush, in case you've forgotten, was president from 1989 to 1993.

Rogers's claim is that the Braves have dominated the NL East since the term of George H.W. Bush. He's wrong. The Braves have dominated the NL East since they joined it in 1994, but Bush wasn't president then. Even in '93, Bush's time in office didn't overlap with the baseball season. So Rogers is off by two seasons.

Yes, I'm being pedantic as all hell. But is it so hard to get the facts right, especially when they're easily available? Again, why doesn't ESPN have competent fact-checkers?

Rogers also argues that the second Bush administration will also benefit the nascent Nationals. I'm not quite sure I follow this argument. This bit in particular I can't make heads or tails of:

While a John Kerry team elected on populist appeal might have wanted to keep the new baseball franchise at arms length, Bush will do his best to attend as many games as possible, inviting old pals like Nolan Ryan and Roger Clemens to attend games.

Huh? Why would John Kerry have distanced himself from the Nationals? Didn't Kerry display more interest in baseball this fall? And what does populism have to do with any of this? I'm confused.

Two-time divorcé defends marriage

Jesus Christ. How much longer do we have to listen to assholes who have displayed no respect for the bonds of matrimony rail against gay marriage?

Phil Burress, a former pornography addict, is a leader in the movement against the "gay agenda", helping to get the measure banning same-sex unions on the ballot in Ohio.

Burress is on his third marriage. His second divorce took place after his religious conversion and return to what he sees as a moral life. Apparently divorce fits in just fine with his morality, which he's now using to denigrate Americans who want equal rights.

This is complete bullshit. The hypocrisy of the anti-gay movement knows no bounds.

Someone else who doesn't know history: Peter Gammons

Peter Gammons has a better grasp on the inner workings of baseball, and particularly the free agent market, than just about anyone else. But that doesn't mean he knows much history...

From his latest column:

How great is this: The producers of "West Wing" are getting several items of interest from the Eastern League champion New Hampshire Fisher Cats for upcoming episodes. Josiah Bartlet (Martin Sheen) is, of course, from a small town in New Hampshire. The only thing wrong is that in the last 40 years, the only states to have produced presidents are Georgia, Arkansas, Texas and California.

Let's review the presidents of the last 40 years.

1963-1969: Lyndon Johnson, of Texas.
1969-1974: Richard Nixon, of California.
1974-1977: Gerald Ford, of Michigan.
1977-1981: Jimmy Carter, of Georgia.
1981-1989: Ronald Reagan, of Illinois/California.
1989-1993: George H.W. Bush, of Massachusetts/Connecticut/Texas.
1993-2001: Bill Clinton, of Arkansas.
2001- : George W. Bush, of Texas.

In the case of Reagan and Bush, it's not easy to pin down which state to affiliate them with. Reagan grew up in Illinois but gained prominence in California. The elder Bush was born in Massachusetts and attended boarding school there, but his father was senator from CT and Bush entered politics in Texas.

In any case, it's absolutely false to claim that only Georgia, Arkansas, Texas and California have produced presidents in the past 40 years. Depending on how you count, Michigan, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Connecticut all have claims on presidential products.

This stuff is easy to check. Gammons needs to be more careful, and he also needs a decent editor.

The progress of history

All historians worth their salt know that history is not a story of progress. For one thing, history has no clear endpoint (or, if it does, we have no way of knowing what it is). And even if we did know "where" history has been going and will continue to go, any careful study of the past reveals that the course of history does not move in a single direction. If, say, Hegel was right and "The History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom," we can easily point to instances where there was a movement away from freedom, not towards it. Even Macaulay, the quintessential Whig historian, saw history as a "chequered narrative" of "disasters mingled with triumphs, and great national crimes and follies far more humiliating than any disaster." Put simply, there is no simple correlation between the passage of time and progress or improvement.

Leaving aside "history as it happened" for a bit, let's look at "history as it is written." In the historiography class I'm taking, we're currently presentations on important or interesting historians, examining their lives, historical thought, writings, and the like. After each presentation, the professor tells us whether that particular historian's work is still worth reading, whether they've been superseded. The vast majority of the time, it seems, scholarly history has a lifespan of about 50 years. New evidence emerges, new interpretations convince, new models explain more and older histories do little more than sit on bookshelves.

In the realm of historiography, then, there does seem to be steady progress towards a better understanding of the past. It's important to note that this progress is not founded simply on the accumulation of more written history; all those old history books that haven't been opened in decades are not major contributors to our improved knowledge of history. Instead, it seems as if the new is just better than the old.

You might be sensing my wariness regarding this conclusion. The biggest question is simple: how do we know that the history of the early 21st century is better than the history of, say, the late 19th? Our conclusions are based on our own judgments, and we've got plenty of reasons to believe we're doing a better job than our predecessors (otherwise, why are we doing this at all?). Still, since a great deal of history is written with the explicit purpose of improving upon the failings of earlier historians (be they evidentiary, interpretive, or ideological) and historians are intelligent and responsible (we have to assume so, at least), it's entirely reasonable to conclude that we know more about, say, the American Revolution, than George Bancroft or Charles Beard. This isn't to say that history written in 2004 is necessarily better than history written a century ago, just that, as a matter of fact, it is better.

We're faced with a contradiction. History is not a story of progress, yet written history seems to be getting better all the time. I'm not trying to be slippery here and conflate history as it happened and history and history as we record it; they're very different things. Rather, the contradiction arises from the writing of history itself being a historical act; if there's no steady progress in history, it seems to follow that no subset of history can be uniformly progressive either.

There are two ways of dealing with this.

First, we take the admonition that history is not a tale of progress as a general rule, not an iron-clad dictum without exceptions. Computers, after all, are getting faster and faster all the time. That's progress, isn't it? So even though human society as a whole isn't inexorably progressing, certain aspects of human existence do seem to be steadily improving. It could be argued that the writing of history is one such case. The production of written history is sufficiently cut off from "natural" human existence to be exempt from the "law of non-progress." Historians have more control over written history than, say doctors have over the spread of disease, so the history they produce builds and improves upon older historical writing.

Second, that history has steadily improved does not entail that it had to be that way. This was hinted at above. It's easy to imagine instances where future historians will almost necessarily write worse history than their predecessors. Suppose the Public Record Office burnt down, and all its documents were lost. Historians of the future would have a hell of a time writing books on British history as firmly grounded in evidence as those written today. Or suppose some poison is realized throughout the world's universities that makes all scholars stupid. There are countless scenarios in which the history books of the future will be crap compared to what's being written today.

In this view, which I find far more convincing than the first extrication, the progress in history has been contingent on the convergence of a number of factors; to name just a few: the availability of sources, an existing base of historical scholarship, and responsible, hard-working historians. Take away any of these and the historical knowledge we have today would be considerably less.

The story of written history has largely been a story of progress, but it didn't need to turn out that way.

Returning to "history as it happened," there's a strong parallel. In many respects, the past 100 years have seen considerable improvements in the lives of many (most?) people. To look at but one crude index: life expectancy at birth in the United States rose almost 30 years from 1900 to 2000. But it didn't have to be that way. It's possible to look at particular factors that led to longer lives for Americans. Take away those factors and Americans wouldn't have lived so long.

It turns out, then, that "history as it happened" and "history as it's recorded" resemble each other in this respect. The passage of time has seen progress in both, not due to any general philosophical rule, but because of particular historical factors. Progress is a contingent process, but it does happen.

Stray thoughts on history and media

Last week Helen Weinstein gave a talk on history in the media, "It may be history, but is it true?" or something along those lines. In addition to outlining the varieties of TV and radio history, she advised the audience (almost all historians) on how to go about getting their scholarly work to a larger audience.

What struck me most was just how much history programming there is on British television and radio. While there are certainly outlets for history on U.S. television, you almost never see "straight" history on network TV; it's virtually always relegated to PBS, A&E, or the History Channel. In contrast, there are 8+ hours of history programming on the BBC in the next week, and that's ignoring the various satellite channels. And if Weinstein's right, that number is on the rise.

Now it's certainly the case that I could find more than 8 hours of history programming on U.S. TV in the next week. But it'd be on A&E or the History Channel; I'd be surprised if there's been 8 hours of history on ABC, CBS, and NBC in the past two months. I can't be sure about this, but it seems as if history has a far more prominent position in the media in the U.K. compared to the U.S.

Hell, there are famous TV historians here. So famous, in fact, that an impression show, Dead Ringers, (rather hilariously) spoofed Simon Schama and David Starkey. There just aren't any U.S. historians famous enough to make fun of. While there are some scholars that I recognize from their appearance on lots of documentaries, I couldn't tell you any of their names.

The fame of Schama and Starkey is based on the existence of a genre that doesn't really exist in the U.S.: the presenter-led documentary. When historians appear in documentaries in the U.S., they're talking heads who are there to provide specific information. The narrator of most documentaries is just that, a narrator who never appears onscreen and lacks any special knowledge of the topic.

I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from all this. It looks as if British historians have greater opportunities to present their work to the public. Does that mean Brits care more about history than Americans? Does that mean Brits know more history than Americans?

A few days ago Ralph Luker provided a link to History News Service, "an informal syndicate of professional historians who seek to improve the public's understanding of current events by setting these events in their historical contexts." HNS works exclusively with the print media; U.S. historians would be well-served by the existence of parallel organizations for radio and television. Anyone know if such organizations exist?

Silly Brits, "keen" is for bobby-soxers

It occurs to me that the rather dry series of tips for grad school (here, here, and here) should be supplemented by something a bit more light-hearted. So here begins Differences Between the UK and the US. I'll try to avoid the obvious (Hey! They drive on the other side of the road!) for the smaller details.

1) They talk funny. Okay, so that's obvious and expected. But here's two quick examples of how they talk funny that I didn't expect:
- They use "keen." A lot. I don't think I've ever heard Americans use "keen" except when parodying the '50s or in the expression "peachy keen," which nobody says seriously anyways.
- "Fancy dress." Before I came, I had no clue what this meant. Formal wear? Nope. You wear fancy dress for Halloween. And Emma Sprints.

2) Grocery store inventory. They don't have graham crackers here. I had plans to make a cheesecake last weekend and panicked for a bit when I couldn't find anything that even looked like it had the same texture as graham crackers. What would I use for the crust?! As it turns out, digestive biscuits work just fine. The lesson here is that, even if you can't find exactly what you're looking for, you can probably find something suitable.

No chocolate chips, though? Unacceptable.

More to come...

Weekend update

I had hoped to post some pictures from Emma Sprints, a rather jokey race where boats get a head start for having good costumes. Our crew opted for a Hogwarts theme, with yours truly as Harry Potter. Sadly, the batteries on the one camera on hand died, so no pictures. So you'll just have to imagine eight people in gowns, scarves, and wizardy hats trying to row. A not terribly surprising conclusion: gowns and rowing don't go together terribly well...

Final (?) thoughts on The Da Vinci Hoax, relativism, revisionism, history, and truth*

Last week I wrote a critique of The Da Vinci Hoax, by Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel. That critique prompted responses from both Olson and Miesel. Those replies have caused me to reevaluate my opinion of Olson and Miesel. I originally believed that their grasp on how history was rather naive and unsophisticated. It's now clear that they both have a firm grasp on the various problems historians face. However, I stand by my critique of The Da Vinci Hoax as a misreading of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code.

First, I'd like to reiterate once again that, on the whole, The Da Vinci Hoax serves an important purpose: debunking the rather absurd claims that Dan Brown makes throughout his books. It seems as if people are attracted to Brown's writing due to his superficial erudtion, so it's good to see him knocked down when it comes to his facts. It is my sincere hope that everyone who read The Da Vinci Code and took it seriously would go out and buy a copy of Olson and Miesel's work.

It was not and is not my intention, then, to "demonstrate that [Olson and Miesel] failed to demolish Brown's claims," as Miesel initially believed.

Instead, my purpose was to illustrate that Olson and Miesel misread and misinterpreted Brown's work and rather broadly painted him with charges of relativism and revisionism, charges that are, respectively, unfounded and intellectually lazy.

Relativism
First, regarding Brown's supposed postmodernism and relativism, Olson and Miesel have made the following statements:

This [statement by Dan Brown] may strike some as thoughtful commentary, but it is simple sophistry, based on a mixture of popularized post-modernism and deconstructionism. (DVH, p. 27).

The offending statement by Brown, as far as I can tell, is this question: "How historically accurate is history itself?" I fail to see how asking this question is in any way "postmodern." To be sure, postmodernism is a notoriously difficult concept to define precisely, but is it really postmodern to question the accuracy of written history? Historians long before the late 20th century were questioning the accuracy of, say, Herodotus. Was Macaulay a postmodernist?

One of the great dangers of a popular, entertaining work such as The Da Vinci Code is that it reinforces the relativistic attitudes that are already prevalent in Western culture and offers additional reasons for readers to embrace such attitudes. [...] This idea [of relativism] is evident in remarks made by the character Robert Langdon, who talks about "faith" as being built upon "fabrication" and beliefs that cannot be proven in any way (DVH, p. 37).

Here Olson and Miesel accuse Brown (through Langdon) of propagating a relativist view of religion. Two points are made to support this claim: 1) Langdon views all tenets of faith as ultimately unsupportable by fact, 2) Langdon views religious faith as based on lies. The first is so self-evidently true (matters of faith are, by definition, unprovable) that I'm not sure why it's included as evidence in support of Langdon's supposed relativism. As to the second point, I'm not sure whether Langdon's expressing his opinion of Christianity or religion in general (it's not clear from the context in DVH and I don't have a copy of DVC nearby to check). Let's assume that Langdon's claiming that all religions are based on lies and are, therefore, equally valid. This is a relativist perspective; in fact, it's the only example of genuine relativism that Olson and Miesel cite.

It's crucial to note, however, that Langdon seems to have changed his mind by the end of the novel. At its heart, DVC is a detective story. Sure, there are bits of romance thrown in, but the central action of the novel is concerned with discovering the nature and location of the Holy Grail. And, by gum, by the end, Robert Langdon has found the answer. This last bit bears repeating: Robert Langdon has found the answer. In order for the plot to work, there needs to be a definite answer. That answer (I doubt I'm spoiling this for anyone) is that Mary Magdalene is the Holy Grail, and "true" Christianity recognizes the sacred feminine, a belief Langdon enthusiastically embraces as he falls to his knees at the end of the book (assuming I'm recalling the ending correctly).

Put as simply as possible, The Da Vinci Code is deeply anti-relativist in its basic assumption that the Truth is out there. The protagonist, Robert Langdon, makes one potentially relativist statement in the whole of the novel (at least as substantiated by Olson and Miesel). And it is this relativism that Olson and Miesel so thoroughly decry as a dangerous element of Brown's work.

Dan Brown's work is deeply flawed. The problems with it, however, are almost entirely factual. As Miesel herself writes, "the kinds of errors that Dan Brown makes require no lofty analyses of 'discourse.'" I'm in complete agreement with her on this point. Brown is easily debunked purely on the facts he presents. Why Olson and Miesel bring up relativism at all remains a mystery.

Revisionism
On the question of revisionism, Olson and Miesel are entirely correct. Dan Brown's version of the past is revisionist and explicitly challenges long-held beliefs.

But (and I cannot emphasize this enough) there is absolutely nothing wrong with revisionism in of itself. All good history is revisionist, for it improves our understanding of the past. "Non-revisionist" history, quite frankly, would be boring as all hell, merely repeating the same conclusions that have already been reached.

Calling someone a revisionist is a lazy and almost meaningless attack. Anyone who suggests an analysis or interpretation that in any way differs from the current consensus is a revisionist. To be sure, some historians write more extreme versions of revisionist history. But this is not a bad thing. Only when revisionist views are based on shoddy research and interpretation are they bad, just as "traditional" views are disproved in light of new evidence and more enlightening analyses.

The Da Vinci Code is a bad book. The Da Vinci Code is revisionist. That both these statements are true does not entail that they are in any way related. In fact, there are plenty of explanations for DVC's wretchedness that do not mention its revisionism, namely its factual inaccuracies, its formulaic plot, and its painful prose. Here, again, Olson and Miesel are tilting at windmills: the problem with DVC is not its revisionism but its inability to present the facts.

[I wrote up another few paragraphs, but Blogger ate them and I'm too tired to type them up again. I might retype them tomorrow.]

*You didn't actually believe me, did you? I've got plenty more to say about history. But this could prove the end of my posts on The Da Vinci Hoax, depending on whether Olson or Miesel have further responses, which I would gladly welcome.

Further comments from the authors of The Da Vinci Hoax

In addition to the comments from Carl E. Olson I've already posted, I also received two replies from The Da Vinci Hoax's other author, Sandra Miesel. They follow.

From this morning:

I was indeed a history major, specializing in the religious and social history of the Middle Ages. MA, University of Illinois; abd Indiana University. My old professor, the distinguished Reformation scholar Gerald Strauss, who taught me historiography, could assure you that I am aware of the impossibility of fully recovering the past. But the kinds of errors that Dan Brown makes require no lofty analyses of "discourse." He inverts and invents on matters over which there's not the least disagreement. (ie, who arrested the Templars; the significance of Templar architecture) He attempts to exalt silly, worthless sources at the expense of consensus academic authorities. And no, not all history is "written by the winners." Such revisionism and relativism were our targets. You have not demonstrated that we failed to demolish Brown's claims.

And from this evening:

We appear to be more or less on the same page. I was just annoyed to bereferred to as an amateur. I've used my historical education as a professional writer for more than 30 years--Google me and see.

As Carl said, Brown would like to have it both ways: undercutting the historical consensus while telling people to trust wingnut books by occultists. I had to slog through those and still feel grumpy about it. None of this would matter except that a fair number of people are taking TDVC as Truth. The sales of said wingnut books have soared and Brown's misinformation is sinking deep into popular culture.

But glad to have a response from a knowledgable reader. Thank you for posting about DA VINCI HOAX.

Further thoughts on this tomorrow. I'm rather flattered that Olson and Miesel have seen fit to respond to me, and their responses have helped me sharpen my understanding of their work and that of Dan Brown.

More on The Da Vinci Hoax

As a result of my recent post on The Da Vinci Hoax, I've heard from both authors, Sandra Miesel and Carl E. Olson. In the interest of fairness and promoting further discussion, I'm posting the substance of Olson's judicious, open-minded reply below.

Okay, a few random, but hopefully coherent, thoughts. You wrote:

> That said, I stand by my critiques of _The Da Vinci Hoax_. Most importantly,
> I think that you're misreading Brown when you claim that "He openly questions
> whether we can even know the truth about the past." Brown clearly thinks we
> can know the truth about the past, it's just that his version of that truth is
> wacky that no reasonable person could ever accept his version of events.

I'm actually open to the possibility that I misread Brown, at least to some
extent, on the issue of "can we really know history?" But I think there is
another, more irritating problem here, which is Brown's inability to make
his position clear. Or, to put it another way, I am convinced that he has
mastered the art of having it both ways, mostly by being ambiguous and
spouting cliches, usually empty of any substantial thought or meaning.

I'm not convinced that Brown does think we can know the truth about the
past, nor am I sure that he could articulate, as you have, the difference
between interpreting recorded history and figuring out what actually did
happen. There is, it seems to me, a very fine line to be walked here, and I
don't think Dan Brown is much for fine lines. I am firmly convinced that one
reason his novel has done so well is that he relies on a relativistic notion
of truth, while also claiming to have The Truth. Again, having it both ways.

You write:

> While reading your book, I found myself nodding and smiling most of the time.
> But when you started criticizing postmodernism, I got rather confused. As you
> suggest, "But the kinds of errors that Dan Brown makes requireno lofty
> analyses of 'discourse.'" If Brown's errors are simply factual ones, I see no
> need to raise the spectre of relativism and postmodernism.

There is really only one passage about postmodernism and I purposely
described what I was referring to as "a mixture of popularized
post-modernism and deconstructionism" (p. 27). I then have a footnote with
definitions of those two terms. If I were to rewrite that section I would
spend more time making a distinction between Brown's crude use of ideas
taken from postmodernism and the far more nuanced and academic forms of
post-modernism that exist.

While I think postmodernism (to the degree it can be carefully defined) is
seriously problematic and ultimately very flawed, I also don't think Brown
knows postmodernism from a hole in the ground. I think that he has dabbled
in superficial, pop forms of various philosophies and worldviews and has
then filtered them through his own simplistic manner of expression, which is
quite crude and often laughable (and very lucrative, sadly).

In other words, Brown does make (as Sandra indicates and you well know) a
myriad of factual errors. This is quite serious in its own right, of course,
but here are other problems, namely his coy, slitherly remarks about history
and it being "written by the winners" and so forth. This attitude, however
poorly expressed by Brown, owes quite a bit to postmodern and
deconstructionist thought, as I attempted to explain in our book.

In your original post, you wrote:

>They view The Da Vinci Code as a systematic effort on the part of Brown to
discredit traditional Christianity (and Catholicism in particular) and
replace it with a relativistic belief in the "sacred feminine." But it seems
to me that Dan Brown is simply not smart enough to be as insidious as Olson
and Meisel suggest he is.<

I think you misread us a bit on this, although I'm open to a rebuttal.
First, I don't think TDVCode is systematic in the least; I don't think Brown
is capable of a systematic effort. I think he has tossed a great deal of
silliness (much of it quite dangerous) together and has thrown it against
the cultural wall--and quite a bit of it has stuck. Therein lies the problem
and a major reason we wrote our book. I do agree that Brown is not smart
enough to produce a systematic effort, but (and it's a HUGE "but") that
doesn't mean his distortions and errors won't have a tremendous impact, no
matter how incoherent, illogical, and erroneous they are. Which is, I
suppose, the "genius" of TDVCode: it makes sense to people who are looking
for a particular mythology. And that is what I think many TDVCode fans
want‹not a systematic, structured, and scholarly attack on Christianity, but
an entertaining, emotional, and highly subjective work that gives lip
service to "fact' and "truth" without taking those things seriously.

Finally (and I really must go to bed!), you wrote, in your original post:

>Olson and Meisel's own vision of history is awfully outdated; no historian that
I know of shares their opinion. Criticizing Brown, they write that "He
openly questions whether we can even know the truth about the past" (27).
Well, yes. Any historian who doesn't question the limitations of historical
knowledge isn't being terribly responsible. We can't know *the* truth about
the past, and to think otherwise is to display a remarkable lack of
knowledge about just how history is produced.<

Here is the fine line I mentioned above and I wonder if perhaps you step
over it in writing this particular paragraph. Both Sandra and I understand
the difference between the historical record and how history has sometimes
been written; I'll also acknowledge that we don't make that entirely evident
in our book, and so you make a valid and helpful point. But we can, I am
convinced, know truth about the past, even while we might revise our
understanding of particular events, people, etc. I have a serious problem
with the statement, "We can't know THE truth about the past," since it begs
a number of serious questions: Is that a true statement? Can we know the
truth about the present? Can we know the truth about truth? Can we know
TRUTH, period?

Take your example of Trevelyan and the French Revolution. I happily concur
that historians can revise and update their understanding of certain events,
personalities, causes, effects, etc. But Trevelyan did believe that the
French Revolution happened, didn't he? And he would likely agree that this
event occurred and that person existed, etc. However, if Brown were writing
about the French Revolution, I suspect he would happily say it didn't happen
if that would serve his needs, whether they were "artistic" or otherwise.

I don't think that Brown really takes history seriously at all; in reacting
against his irresponsible and insulting approach, I may have overreacted a
bit in the other direction. But I think it's unfair to say that our view of
history is "awfully outdated," when our view is simply that there are many
historical facts that we can and do know, and that these need to be taken
seriously and address soberly. And we also know that there are many things
that we do not know about the past and many judgments that historians will
disagree about to one degree or another.

I'll post my response to Olson tomorrow.

More Milton nonsense

How many times are we going to have to go through this? Eric Milton is not an elite pitcher, or even a particularly good one for that matter. He's a mediocre starter who shines every so often.

Yet, according to Ken Mandel, in an article on the Phillies website:

Milton is attractive to the Phillies because of his ability to not be fazed by the cozy dimensions of Citizens Bank Park. Sure, he gave up an NL-high 43 home runs, but his ERA of 4.87 was respectable considering his home setting.

Look. I don't care whether or not Milton gets "fazed" by the hitter-friendly Citizens Bank Park. I care about how many runs he gives up. Good pitchers don't give up a lot of runs. Period. Giving up 43 home runs in a season is awful. An ERA of 4.87 is not respectable, I don't care where you're pitching.*

Incidentally, Eric Milton's ERA+, a statistic which takes into account park factors, is 92; 100 is the league average. In other words, Eric Milton was a below average pitcher in 2004.

Quite simply, there's no reason why the Phillies, or any team for that matter, should be expressing all that much interest in Milton. As a 3 or 4 starter, sure. But as one of the most coveted free agent pitchers of this offseason? You can have him, Steinbrenner.

*Incidentally, Citizens Bank Park isn't nearly as hitter-friendly as people seem to think. According to ESPN's Park Factor chart, CBP is only the 12th most hitter-friendly park. It's closer to the average than it is to the top. People seem to get that impression because there's so many home runs hit there. And when it comes to HRs, CBP is the fifth most hitter-friendly stadium. Which makes it an even worse place for HR-prone Eric Milton to pitch.

Jim Thome and Charlie Manuel, separated at birth?

Is it just me, or is Charlie Manuel, the Phillies new manager, just an older version of Jim Thome, the Phillies slugger-first baseman?

First, the visual evidence. On the left is Charlie Manuel, on the right is Jim Thome:

 

Add about 25 years to Thome and you get Manuel, right?

Manuel spent several years coaching and managing the Cleveland Indians before coming to the Phillies as, first, special assistant to GM Ed Wade and now as manager. Jim Thome played his entire career for the Cleveland Indians until 2003, when he came over to the Phillies as a free agent.

Then there's this description of Charlie Manuel by Inquirer columnist Bob Ford: "beneath the uncomplicated, countrified exterior of Charlie Manuel is an uncomplicated, countrified interior. What you see is what you get, and while the river is gentle and soothing, it ain't that deep." Replace "Charlie Manuel" with "Jim Thome" and that description rings just as true.

So I ask you... were Charlie Manuel and Jim Thome separated at birth? And, er, 25 years?

Dan Brown's not alone in his ignorance of history

First, for some more delightful takedowns of Dan Brown's atrocious prose, see posts by Geoffrey Pullum here, here, and here.

And now onto a Dan Brown topic I have some thoughts on.

My parents, knowing my distaste for Dan Brown in general and The Da Vinci Code, sent me a copy of The Da Vinci Hoax by Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel a few weeks ago. On the whole, I enjoyed the book, and I think it serves an important purpose, demonstrating just how wrong Dan Brown is about his factual claims.* Put simply, Brown is wrong more often than he's right, and Olson and Miesel, rather patiently, lay out Brown's errors and suggests where they likely came from.

That I admire and appreciate The Da Vinci Hoax as a whole, I do think they get a number of things wrong. It's certainly not as bad as The Da Vinci Code, and their errors are more debatable than Brown's.

On the whole, I think Olson and Miesel give Brown far too much credit. They view The Da Vinci Code as a systematic effort on the part of Brown to discredit traditional Christianity (and Catholicism in particular) and replace it with a relativistic belief in the "sacred feminine." But it seems to me that Dan Brown is simply not smart enough to be as insidious as Olson and Miesel suggest he is. The problem with Dan Brown is not that he's anti-Catholic (though he may very well be); the problem with Dan Brown is that he just doesn't know enough to say anything informed or intelligent about religion at all.

Olson and Miesel go off the deep end when they start railing against the relativism and postmodernism of Dan Brown's writing. Again, I simply do not believe that Brown is smart enough to be either a principled relativist or postmodernist. Brown is not concerned with questioning the nature of knowledge or morality. He firmly believes that the Truth is out there. It's just that he's challenging the accepted version of the truth. Put simply, Brown believes in a definitive answer regarding the nature of Jesus and Christianity, a position that relativists and postmodernists would never support.

Olson and Miesel's own vision of history is awfully outdated; no historian that I know of shares their opinion. Criticizing Brown, they write that "He openly questions whether we can even know the truth about the past" (27). Well, yes. Any historian who doesn't question the limitations of historical knowledge isn't being terribly responsible. We can't know *the* truth about the past, and to think otherwise is to display a remarkable lack of knowledge about just how history is produced.

This belief is based, as far as I can tell, on Olson and Miesel's conflation of history as it happened and history as the record of what happened. These are two very different things, and historians have been distinguishing them for a long, long time. Yet they claim that Brown's comment "'How historically accurate is history itself?' is nonsensensical since it rests on the premise that 'accuracy' is in the eyes of the beholder and therefore cannot ever be objectively gauged" (28). In this case, Olson and Miesel are simply wrong. It's perfectly sensible to examine whether history (as it is written) is historically (as it happened) accurate. Indeed, evaluating and improving upon older conceptions of history is exactly what historians do.

(Can I say how bizarre it feels to be defending Dan Brown's position on historical thought?)

Just today I gave a presentation on George M. Trevelyan, about as traditional an historian as you could find in the first half of the 20th century. Before I began my research, I expected to find that Trevelyan had rather quaint views on writing history, believing in Truth, Progress, and all that. What I found, however, was that Trevelyan's historical thought was really quite nuanced and self-critical. In "History and the Reader," for instance, he declared the following:

It is still too early to form a final judgment on the French Revolution, and opinion about it (my opinion certainly) is constantly oscillating. On such great and complex issues there can never be a final ‘verdict of history.’

G.M. Trevelyan, the last Whig historian, fully recognized the speculative nature of history and its ever-changing conclusions. Reading his work, I couldn't help but think, "I don't even know why I bother with thinking about the writing of history. Everyone's already reached the same conclusions as me, a long while ago. Hell, if Trevelyan, the least novel historian you can think of, thought of history in the same way as me, there's really not much chance of me coming up with something new, is there?"

But then I go and read books like The Da Vinci Hoax, which show just how unsophisticated non-historians, even well-educated ones, can be when it comes to what history is. I've written about the gap between historians and laymen when it comes to historical thought (PDF) and mused about possible solutions, but I'm still astonished when I come across ideas like that of Olson and Miesel.

Listen, everyone. I don't mean to sound elitist, but historians know more about the past than non-historians. That's just how it is. If you're going to make proclamations about what history is and how accurate it is, please go out and read historians' takes on these issues. Read Trevelyan, even... he put a lot of effort into writing well (writing each paragraph at least four times before it was ready to be typed, and he's tremendously readable). The history found in books is not necessarily right, it's just the best guess of the writer. History should be reexamined and challenged. That's the only way our understanding of the past improves.

*Lest anyone say, "Oh, come off it. It's just fiction," I'd remind you that Brown starts his books with a page headed "FACT" and makes a great to-do about the years of research that go into each book. If Brown is going to highlight the supposedly factual nature of his work, he's opening himself up to criticisms on just that front.

[UPDATE - 16 Nov 2004: Sandra Miesel e-mailed me to let me now that I'd consistently misspelled her last name. It's been fixed now.]

Some pasts are more lost than others

Just in case you didn't believe me when I said the past is lost, go read How women disappear from history on Philobiblon. Natalie Bennett provides a concrete example of the phenomenon that I described in rather abstract and evidence-free terms. This sort of thing (the "forgetting" of apparently important bits of information) happens far more than most people realize.

Now, you could argue that when it comes to the important stuff, like politics, we've got loads of information from well-preserved sources. There's no chance, after all, of us forgetting who the first president of the United States was, is there. And you'd be right. But you'd also be privileging political history as the "important stuff." To be sure, understanding the history of politics is crucial to creating any comprehensive outline of the past, but it's hardly the only thing that matters. There's a whole lot more to the past than elections, cabinets, and bills.

Certain types of history, then, are particularly susceptible to the problems outlined in my previous essay. While I'm sure there are plenty of sources political historians wish they had, their source material is typically a whole lot more obvious than that of social or cultural historians. Governments produce lots of paperwork. Not all of it gets preserved, but a whole lot of it does, providing plenty of fodder for later political historians.

The preservation of sources is not as haphazard as my earlier essay may have suggested. People choose to preserve those documents they find most interesting or valuable. The very selection of documents and sources to be preserved and archives, then, reflects the values of the time, values that do not always match the interests of later scholars.

Now this doesn't mean that Bennett's right, that the female founders of the charitable organization in question were forgotten because they were women. It's possible that charitable organizations as a whole didn't keep good records on their founding. And it's also plausible that the records for this particular organization just got lost somehow, whereas the majority of such female-led organizations did maintain these records. It's just impossible to know without further research.

Still, it's important for historians to remember that many of the sources they use are there for a reason, and many of the sources they don't use (simply because they no longer exist) aren't around for a reason, too.

PSA: Do not use TERI

In the course of the past few months, I've probably spent upwards of 40 hours dealing The Education Resources Institute (TERI) trying to expedite the processing of one of the loans I'm taking out to finance my graduate study. Numerous problems arose along the way. It would, quite literally, take pages for me to outline all of TERI's mistakes, so you'll just have to trust me on it. All that time spent has led me to the following conclusion: if at all possible, avoid doing business with TERI for any student loan.

Truth be told, there is little positive I can say about my dealings with TERI. Their customer service representatives proved tremendously unhelpful, insisting either that the processing was fine, or that there was nothing that TERI could do to smooth the process. When TERI did take action, it was often delayed or resulted in an error on their part. They have proved incapable of following even the most explicit directions I have provided them.

Because of TERI's mishandling of my loan, I did not receive the funds until almost a month after the expected date. And this only took place after extensive communication all through October to ensure that the check would (finally) be sent to the right address.

So I urge you, in no uncertain terms, to avoid all dealings with TERI. And I also encourage you to pass on this advice to anyone else financing study through student loans.

I'm pissed. And you should be, too.

Go read Tim Burke. I've been rather pissed off today, and Tim's post explains my anger far better than I could.

Here's a choice quotation: "51% of the voters now share with their President—their President, not mine, not mine: I am not his loyal subject, though I may be ruled by him—his most abominable trait, the inability to recognize and correct mistakes."

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Like Tim, I'm completely dumbfounded at Bush's complete refusal to recognize his own mistakes. Look, I realize that the debate question was a loaded one, but Bush refused to give a single example of any lapse in judgment.

Hell, I can name you five mistakes I've made today without even thinking about it. What, you don't believe me?What kind of schmuck is so full of himself that he refuses to see any of his flaws? And what has the American public come to that he gets away with this shit?

I don't know where to go here. I don't share Tim's pessimism... more than anything else I'm still just in shock. There's really nothing else to say.

Another grad school tip

#6: Set deadlines for yourself.

Chances are, you're not going to have to be turning in a paper every week, or even every other week. In the case of the program I'm in, we don't turn in any work until the end of January. It'd be awfully easy just to sit back and think, "Awesome. I don't have any work for a couple months, so I do the reading I'm interested in now and catch up with the rest when I need to. I have all of winter vacation to write these essays, so everything's fine."

Everything will not, I can assure you, be fine if you take that attitude. Good papers take time, between the research, the analysis, the writing, and all the rest. If you try to shove it all in at the very end, you're going to sacrifice something, whether it's insufficient knowledge of your sources, a complete lack of style, or something else altogether.

The solution is staying on top of your work. This sounds obvious and it is. But you really should go beyond just telling yourself, "I need to stay on top of this." Because you won't have a good way of judging whether you're actually accomplishing what you can and should.

So break up big projects into little tasks and give those little tasks semi-firm deadlines. Don't kill yourself if you finish taking notes on a book a day later than you planned, but remember that those days add up.

Make lists. That way you can cross things off and feel as if you've gotten something done.

Who knows? You might feel inspired one day and get ahead of your schedule. But it's only when you have that schedule that you get that good feeling.

(Yes, in case you're wondering, some of these tips are more reminders to myself than anything else. But they're just as useful for others, so on the blog they go!)

Election question

I'm really in no mood to write about the result. Or the apparent result, since there's still counting going on.

But I am wondering about something. In 2000, around 105 million Americans voted in the presidential election. This year, there's been tons of reports that voter turnout has been much much higher. Yet it looks as though only 111 million people voted this time around. To be sure, that's an increase, but it doesn't seem to reflect the long lines at polls that were widely reported.

I'm genuinely curious about this; all I know about the election has come through phone calls with my family, the BBC, and the internet, so I'm wondering whether all the reports of massive voter turnout were a bit exaggerated. If not, what's with the numbers?

Huh?

Can someone please explain to me why Eric Milton is being considered part of "the top of the free-agent crop"?

I mean, really. He had an ERA of 4.75 this past season (which is actually slightly better than his career ERA), he consistently got himself into trouble with walks, and he gave up a ton of home runs. Now, the home runs can partially be attributed to his pitching in Citizens Bank Park, but 43? Come on.

The only thing Milton has to his credit this past season was a sparkling 14-6 record. It helps, of course, when you get the best run support on the team. Besides, don't people know that pitchers' wins and losses don't matter?

Einstein?

I've noticed that someone from Einstein has been dropping by every so often by searching for "danny loss". Presumably, this is someone that knows me, so I probably know them, too. So I'm curious. If you want, feel free to drop me a line...