Thread by @torstenkathke

People have commented on the obvious argumentative straw man that lurks behind this whole article. I‘m interested in something specific.

It’s this paragraph. Let’s take a closer look.

https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/1157475372096806917

The universal "he" is obviously something many writers today eschew because it’s not really universal. Stephens knows this, that’s why he’s using it.

His brand is to be conservative and a bit of an old, and he probably still takes Strunk & White as prescriptivist gospel. Fine.

Sentence: "Before an idea can be evaluated on its intrinsic merits, it must first be considered in light of its political ramifications."

The rhetorical move here is to pretend there was ever a time when this wasn’t true. In the history if ideas, ideas have never floated freely.

The "intrinsic" merits of an idea have always been subject to who came up with it, who spread it, and who found it useful.

What’s changed is that these people today are increasingly not the people Stephens would like them to be, who see things his way.

"Before a speaker can be invited to campus for the potential interest of what he might have to say, he must first pass the test of inoffensiveness."

Inoffensiveness doesn’t exist outside society. If a certain speaker isn’t invited anymore, those who have a say may have changed.

That’s something one may bemoan, especially if one is a conservative opinion columnist.

But it’s intellectually disingenuous to say that who was and wasn’t invited to speak was ever free of considerations of offensiveness. "Polite society" does police its borders in any age.

"Before a student can think and talk for himself, he must first announce and represent his purported identity."

I’m honestly not sure what linguistic work "purported" is doing here. It seems to obscure rather than help.

But, oh yes, "identity." Shall we open this can of worms?

"Identity politics" has become a popular phrase.

As used today, it often refers to minorities who read too much postmodern theory, and then decided they should do something about oppression based on their identity.

So "identity" is a thing that conservatives like to criticize.

So I suppose Stephens here means that you need to claim which identity you’re thinking for and then you get to think? Or come out as an identity and then you will be heard only as representing that identity?

Either way, identity is bad. It detracts from the big mainstream "us."

Which is why Arthur Schlesinger, jr. didn’t care for it in his "Disuniting of America."

For him, the overemphasis of identity tears up the fabric of society. Civil rights should be won by trying to incorporate ever more people into the blessings of mainstream liberal society.

So, a bit glibly, the argument is that the left engages in identity politics and therefore ruins national unity and pretty much makes society as a whole unmanageable.

But "identity" as an idea has seen criticism from those who would profit from identity politics as well.

In the words of Kimberlé Crenshaw: "The problem with identity politics is not that it fails to transcend differences, as some critics charge, but rather the opposite—that it frequently conflates or ignores intragroup differences." (jstor.org/stable/1229039…)

So those leftists who are supposedly super interested in defining their thinking according to an identity they then represent are pretty likely to question "identity" as a concept.

(And yes, there’s much much more here, but we have a paragraph to get through).

"Before a historical figure can be judged by the standards of his time, he must first be judged by the standards of our time."

The accusation here is that academia engages in pretty cheap presentism: X is bad today, so we judge historical figures who did X on that basis.

Let’s think about this. When does this come up?

A hint is in the article: John C. Calhoun isn’t considered worthy of having a college named after him anymore, based on the standards of our time.

Because he was for slavery, and we don’t like that anymore.

Right.

Because back when Calhoun was alive and the college was named for him in the mid-1800s, his support for slavery wasn’t a problem, and how dare we meddle with this traditional college and its name today.

Only:

Calhoun College opened in… 1933, more than 80 years after Calhoun’s death.

To open and name a Yale college in 1933 after an avowed white supremacists was a political act.

So was renaming it Grace Hopper College in 2017.

It *is* wrong to ahistorically judge people from the past by the standards of our time.

But who gets to define these standards? They’re certainly not universal.

They weren’t universal in any time. They were always fought over and contested.

Stephens is making an argument here that could just be based on ignorance of the past.

More likely, it’s a political input from one side of a debate raging today that rhetorically pretends it’s not a specific faction’s opinion, but a call to return to a reasonableness lost.

Because, turns out, a lot of people in his own time would not have supported John C. Calhoun getting a college named for him.

Albert Gallatin, a contemporary, called him “one of the first among second-rate men, but of lax political principles…”

That’s a standard of his time.

The "judge by the standard of his time" argument really always needs to consider that it is very unlikely there would have been one standard by which people were measured in any time, in any society.

What it’s saying is: people in power at the time didn’t seem to mind, so neither should we.

Why should we only listen to what some people in another age thought of others? We should contextualize.

We should make decisions for our particular society in our particular time and place, and not expect future generations to go along with that; knowing that who "we" are is subject to change.

As well it should be, even if those paid handsomely for having an opinion do not agree.

And since this is a #twitterstorians thread, let me link some sources:

Gallatin on Calhoun is easily found in the Britannica article on Calhoun: britannica.com/biography/John…

Schlesinger’s "Disuniting of America" can be gotten at many places: books.google.ca/books/about/Th…

Andan article on the renaming of Calhoun College for Grace Hopper here: news.yale.edu/2017/02/11/yal…