There is an internet/social media controversy about the new book, The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe. The book itself is fine. I have a copy though I haven’t read it. It’s basically a revision of the idea of the Dark Ages.
The content of the book isn’t what I’m going to post about. Rather, there’s a social media controversy that I want to make a quick comment on as it relates to “academic culture” in the US. If you want details, Jesse Singal is going to do a podcast on the topic, and you can check out the hashtag #brightAgesSoWhite to get a sense.
Here’s the summary.
- The Bright Ages gets assigned to be reviewed by a white woke academic (WWA) to a woman of color woke academic (WoCWA).
- The review is really really negative. If you look for it online, you can make your own judgment, but I think it is very unfair to the authors. Basically, WoCWA was out to engage in a “hit.”
- There is a dispute between the WWA and WoCWA about edits and the former basically rejects the review. The latter is very angry.
- Next, accusations of racism etc. fly, and initially the WWA engages in what are now called “white woman tears” in social justice parlance. WWA was being attacked pretty harshly online, so her response was surely sincere, but her attackers responded that her recourse to tears hurt people who were marginalized (nonwhites). The issue here is who/whom. WWA deploying tears against a nonmarginalized person (white male) would have been a winning move.
- Part of the issue goes to connections between WWA and the authors of The Bright Ages (they are friendly), as well as between a positive reviewer and the authors. Accusations of nepotism and racism fly.
- Eventually, WWA apologizes. She gets attacked for apologizing not vociferously enough, or fast enough. She deactivates her Twitter account.
- Other people start to get attacked. People who defended WWA position, or pushed back on WoCWA. The authors of The Bright Ages get attacked as well as privileged white men. Screenshots are made of people who “liked” tweets that WWA or others made defending themselves for later reference to assemble a dossier of “very bad people”.
- The authors of The Bright Ages are very woke. In fact, I’m 99% sure David Perry, one of the coauthors, has joined in on one of the periodic online academic-twitter pile-ons on me at some point. The other author doesn’t believe in cancel culture, and is a very smug woke white man.
There are many more details, but that’s the main sketch. The whole incident was brought to my attention by a friend in academia who was at one point criticized as a possible white supremacist (or sympathetic) by WWA for a minor intellectual disagreement (he’s a white male). The point is that WWA and the coauthors of The Bright Ages are very excited and happy to deploy identitarian arguments against people they disagree with, so it’s hard to feel very sad about what’s happening to them now. They are being consumed by the Sandworms that they normally ride.
If you look through #brightAgesSoWhite you see many people acting horribly and being bullies. If you know some history you know that this isn’t surprising, and these people think they are being righteous. The targets of the bullying themselves actually are self-righteous bullies from what I can tell, so lots of bad apples here.
Some of the criticisms of academic culture and the way the review process worked aren’t totally offbase. Academics in most disciplines are incestuous and engage in a lot of back-scratching. Academia is an archipelago of “communities” with various social norms, and despite all the talk about “equity and inclusion” the dominant players are still upper-middle-class white people who often have a family connection to the institution (academics are more likely to spawn other academics than almost any other field). Weirdly (or not), many white academics I’m privately friendly with have told me of instances of casual anti-Asian prejudice and racism from “woke” white people, assuming that my friend (nonwoke) would agree.
The loudest promoters of DEI in performance are probably white academics from these connected backgrounds who live in white college towns and are totally personally unacquainted with “diversity” and “inclusion.” Look at the racial breakdown of the Census Tract that WWA lives in, for example. That doesn’t look like America. Some of the angriest attacks on me on Twitter get triggered when I point out this hypocrisy since there’s an “honor among thieves” code where people don’t point these things out too much lest comfy sinecures get disturbed.
What to think about the controversy and The Bright Ages? I am old-fashioned. What is true? What is right? What is illuminating our understanding of the past in all its complexity? The identity and feelings of academics are secondary because humans are secondary to the knowledge they engage with and produce. We will always miss the mark, and we will always be hypocrites, and never really live up to the standards that the quest for truth demands of us, but we should keep trying.
But this quest is no longer in the sights of many academics online. Rather, they are focused on feelings, identity and politics. When you make academia more about social justice than the truth, this is what you get. I am pessimistic about American academia being able to reverse gears on this, because when a young nonwhite woman sees a white woman advancing in her career by savaging a white male academic on identitarian grounds, why shouldn’t the nonwhite woman do unto the white woman what she’d have done unto her? The shared ethos for truth is gone, and all is now power. It’s sad.
I myself have defended people who are white males who were attacked unfairly, who later on denounced me because it was the expedient thing to do. People are weak individually, so I am not surprised. But in the aggregate, there’s a rot in the institution. Do these people know it? I don’t really know. I think most are not that self-aware.
Addendum: some of my “best” informants are white people who are not American or are from working to lower class backgrounds. They often see the hypocrisies because they are outside of the charmed pedigree networks of the genuinely privileged white people despite their race. The paradox of academia is that it mouths egalitarianism, but practices a hierarchical system with a prestige caste system of institutions and pedigreed-networks.
John Boyd (aka Genghis John) once opined that what mattered in war were “People first, ideas second, and hardware third,” but that the Pentagon ran exactly the reverse.
I know what you meant, Mr. Khan, but humans are NOT secondary to “the knowledge they engage with and produce.” At the end of the day, all the knowledge means little if the people who “engage with and produce” it do not have virtue and wisdom. No matter how knowledge-productive scholars are, if they ultimately lack virtue and wisdom, their knowledge will be distorted, corrupted, and subverted.
And that’s one of the broader critiques of the American “meritocracy” I have these days. For our society to be restored and function better, we need more people who’d rather be good than right. Alas, our society today is overrun with those who just must, must be “righter” (or lefter, I guess) than others.
We have too many people who want to be winners and not enough who want to be honorable warriors.
The author of the review posted it on Medium. It’s the worst kind of insufferably useless review – “Why aren’t you talking about this thing I think is important instead?”
As for Bright Ages, I haven’t read it either, although it is good to see some pushback on the “Dark Ages” idea. The High Middle Ages (1000-1300) were a genuine time of technological, economic, and philosophical advancement in Europe, and it’s always been mistake to act like they were part of some dead zone of stagnation between the fall of the western Roman Empire and the Italian Renaissance. This is when a lot of universities in Europe got founded.
I think part of why this is happening with super-progressive medieval researchers is because the field has a decent-sized conservative fandom, and that makes them feel insecure – like they’re going to be hit with racist accusations by association. They ought to just shrug and say “I don’t support such and such political thing, but you can’t control who reads and appreciates your work”.
Can’t say I’m sad about seeing the WWA deleting her account, honestly. My biggest memory of her is way back when she got thin-skinned and shitty with Patrick Wyman, and passive-aggressively tried to accuse him of being misogynistic when he got angry with her.
My earlier comment ended up in moderation. In hindsight, I think it would be better if deleted – I think I misidentified who the WWA was, and it was too long anyways. But basically in short
1. The review got posted on Medium, and I agree that it’s pretty bad. It’s kind of the worst sort of review, criticizing the author for not talking about what they think is important.
2. I’m wondering if the progressive folks in medieval history are getting insecure because a lot of conservatives like medieval history. Like they’re getting worried that they’ll be accused of racism essentially by association (even if it’s involuntary association – you can’t control who reads your stuff).
3. Not super sad to see Bond go. I just remember her being nasty to Patrick Wyman years back over something related to the fall of Rome, and then implying he was misogynistic when he got angry with her.
Not even the medieval latins(what the byzantines called catholics/western christians) believed their era was some sort of ideal time. One of the mains goals of catholics(the only type of christian around in romance and germanic speaking lands at the time) was to reconquer and reunite christendom. The warlike mentality is what drove medieval “western” technological innovations. It was always to recover lost roman(aka christian) territories from Islam but to go beyond as well. Many white supremacists/nationalists get rid of that factor(memory of rome, pre christian and christian) and make it seem like these medieval people wanted to be or were isolated from the rest of afro-eurasia just hanging out in europe inventing cool techology and maintaining their racial purity. On the contrary, latin catholics wanted to conquer afro-eurasia(the whole world really) and create a “res publica christiana”.
The medieval, latin, western european world was not like the anti roman(anti catholic) and proto nationalist world that arose in protestant countries like 19th century britain, germany or the U.S. If you want to get an idea of what medieval and early modern latin catholics(the architects of “europe”) wanted to create just look to latin america, a product of catholic europeans. Anyway, the right and the left in the Anglosphere countries really don’t understand this period.
Burn it all down!
Ok, I’m exaggerating a bit, but the higher Ed system is broken and needs reform.
1. It’s too expensive
2. It produces too many elites who have few real skills and are settled with debt.
3. Corollary to above, even in the hard sciences, too many grad students have to spend a great deal of their life in indentured servitude with little employment potential.
4. It has begun to specialize in “Studies” whose main object seems to be institutional self-destruction.
The main issue is that there is no feedback loop to the institution wrt the fate of the students. The institutions and their administrators need “skin in the game”.
“The Bright Ages gets assigned to be reviewed by a white woke academic (WWA) to a woman of color woke academic (WoCWA).”
I cannot parse that sentence.
Walter Sobchak: An equivalent version of that sentence is
A white woke academic (WWA) assigns The Bright Ages to a woman of color woke academic (WoCWA) to be reviewed.
Is that better? The WWA is a journal editor (or some such) and needs a review of the book in her journal. She asks the WoCWA to write the review.
@Marcel: Merci bien
“If you look through #brightAgesSoWhite you see many people acting horribly and being bullies. If you know some history you know that this isn’t surprising, and these people think they are being righteous.”
This is the abiding appeal of Puritanism. Remember that Puritanism was championed in England by academics though its natural home was in the rising bourgeoisie.
The Chinese have a derogatory term for the academic class, 臭老九 chòulǎojiǔ stinking old nine[th] [category]. The term got a lot of use during Mao Zedong’s era but the it’s much older than that.
@Jim: In the US, the puritian response goes further back as well:
“The Yankee reform impulse gets some issues right, some wrong” by Michael Barone | April 20, 2022 | https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/the-yankee-reform-impulse-gets-some-issues-right-some-wrong
“Many 19th-century culture war issues were fought over reforms challenging traditional behaviors championed by New England Yankees as they spread westward … Yankee culture, with its Puritan roots, was principled and prescriptive, moralistic and intolerant. … movements demand[ed] the abolition of slavery, equal rights for women, prohibition of alcohol, and an end to capital punishment.
“Some of the reforms were thus successful, but only up to a point or only after many years. Others were cast aside (Prohibition) or never achieved universal acceptance (no president has opposed capital punishment). …
“The Yankee reform impulse, applying moral logic to existing practice, is one important part of the American heritage. At its best, it has produced liberating results that have enabled the nation to live up to its promise. But its combination of Puritan moralism and Puritan intolerance sometimes runs up against basic human character, causing unintended damage. The arc of history, it turns out, doesn’t bend in just one direction.”
The American Conservative had a harsh review of the book:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-bright-ages/
Twinkie’s cliche ‘wisdom’ is always very entertaining. But at the end of the day it bothers me a little bit that he is biologically a fellow East Asian. Modern warfare is all about hardware(which in this definition includes software not attached to biological beings). Ukranians are doing OK because the West supplies the hardware. Pentagon is not the brightest of the kind but they are not fools.
Werner Heisenberg was pessimistic about the War from the outset. The Axis was no match of the Allies in terms of industrial production, he noted. Japanese thought that their high and very very “special”(or so they thought) spirit can overcome the material advantage of the Americans. Germans thought their Aryan moral superiority will overcome the apparent inferiority in manpower and material. This mode of thinking is the most recurring recipe for failure in modern times.
The human factor still figures in war. It was bigger in the past – like when 7 Jurchen cavalrymen routed 100000 Chinese – maybe somewhat made up but no doubt a great disaster. But that factor is getting smaller. In a not too distant future, wars will be fought between machines. We are not there yet but are getting closer.
This is pure ignorance. Ukrainians did well defending the Kiev region, because their morale and cohesion turned out to be quite (unexpectedly*) high and because they seemed to have good training (no matter how many NLAWs or Javelins you have, if you don’t have good ambush tactics and brave men willing to attack armored vehicles as isolated hunter-killer infantry teams, you are going to run out of people to operate those ATGMs pretty soon).
*Even the Pentagon expected Kiev to fall within days. All the fancy hardware arriving in Ukraine is after the apparently higher human factors (morale, cohesion, training) of the Ukrainians saved their capital. When you show that you are willing to fight and die well for your country, you amazingly find allies willing to supply you with all kinds of expensive stuff all the sudden.
For that matter, the early Russian tactical acumen in fighting out of ambushes seemed to be quite poor (no infantry dismounting their IFVs, establishing fire superiority, and then maneuvering to eliminate the hunter-killer teams and instead all vehicles just trying to boogie out of the kill zone while a lone tank blasting out cannon fire on the approximate site of the original ambushers). But later videos show the Russian infantry actually dismounting and doing just that (or even Russian infantry ambushing Ukrainian AFVs). Again, not surprising since war is a mutually-learning and -imitating activity.
That never happened and you are an idiot if you give credence to that (that’s like 300 Spartans standing off a million Persians – it’s ancient propaganda, not real history).
Why? You mean nothing to me.
You should stop getting your ideas on war from video games.
@Twinkie
You are so phony. You don’t even know who Jurchen were and when that event happened(Jurchen were not even an ancient people). No one disputes that it happened and I noted that it is ‘somewhat made up'(exaggerated).
The bottom line is, I am smarter than you or any of your fellow Harvard phonies except perhaps some former IMO members or Putnam Fellows. You certainly are not one of them.
It’s so confusing for an old, tired brain these days. We are all supposed to be racists and yet calls for racial solidarity get battered like, well, ping-pong balls.
closing thread since i don’t want it to be a food fight. work on the personal attacks ‘east asian man.’