1) This is a thread that is also a brief guide for how to respond to people who are attacking or disrespecting work in ‘the humanities.’ The motto is: stop defending, and learn how to take back control of the conversation.
2) Most people who are dismissive of humanistic work and subjects are coming from a position of strong ideological motivation couple with profound ignorance.
3) Our biggest mistake in this situation is to skip a crucial step and go straight into explaining and justifying ourselves. Of course, when we do this, an ignorant person can always reduce a complex thing to a bromide or commonplace. For example...
4) You could spend paragraphs explaining archival research skills, but someone who has no concept of that and an ideological axe to grind against you can easily reduce that to ‘so you read books and take notes, anyone can do that, without the expense of a professor.’
5) We spend way too much time defending ourselves and self-justifying and explaining, and it’s useless if the people we’re explaining to already assume they’re smarter, and there’s no such thing as expertise in our fields, only opinions weighted by authority, not merit or facts.
6) With sad predictability they will call us ‘elitist’ for asserting an expertise they think is mythical and impossible; a software engineer will shamelessly challenge you on something you have a PhD in because he believes expertise is mere authority in your field.
7) For this reason, you can’t effectively explain concepts to someone who is ignorant but doesn’t know they’re ignorant. They can’t simply be told they’re ignorant. They need to *experience* ignorance before they can grasp your explanation.
8) The missing step is, therefore: make them *experience* ignorance.
Here’s how to do that:
Here’s how to do that:
9) Anytime someone criticizes ‘the humanities,’ ask them to define ‘the humanities.’ Push them to explain the lines of demarcation between knowledge branches and the epistemological assumptions behind those lines.
10) Ask then to formulate a research question suitable for an upper-level undergraduate course in your field, then ask them how they’d go about answering it. Ask them to describe a research task or method particular to your field.
11) If they say ‘I don’t like what I see coming out of the humanities these days, too ideological, blah blah blah,’ ask them which journals they read or peer-reviewed articles they’ve read lately. Ask them where they stand on a methodological issue or dispute in your field.
12) If they get frustrated & accuse you of changing the subject, explain that you’re simply trying to ascertain their basic factual understanding of what they’re taking about before entertaining their criticism. What, you don’t care about facts? How can you comment w/o the facts?
13) In short, stop being on the defensive and go on the attack by taking back control of the conversation about your expertise. Push your interlocutor to defend and justify why *they* have any business making judgments about your field.
14) Maria Edgeworth wrote a brilliant satirical essay ‘On the Noble Science of Self-Justification’ (1795), about how women are constantly forced to explain themselves, and how they could turn this back around on their husbands. Similar concept here: digital.library.upenn.edu/women/edgewort…
15) When your interlocutor’s starting point is ignorance and contempt, self-justification is self-defeating. Don’t forget the crucial step: make them *experience* their ignorance. Take control of the conversation. You’re the expert. /end
@v21 FYI
