Thread by @mccormick_ted

This is a good example of Quillette’s and the IDW’s style of engagement with ideas: rather than thinking, find the quickest way to a simplistic one-line dismissal, ideally putting a Nazi reference in your target’s mouth, naturally.

Now, you may or may not agree with the point the article and tweets make about gardening; you may be unable to get past their language.

But it’s not really controversial that gardening is and has been “political.” It is, after all, a matter of land and labor (or leisure).

It’s also a matter of longstanding historical knowledge not only that gardening has been a form of elite display but also that botanical gardens (like Kew, with which the author of the piece is familiar) have been centrally in extracting wealth and knowledge through colonialism.

See virtually any work on Joseph Banks (of Kew) or the Comte de Buffon (of the Jardin Botanique) or on the network of botanical gardens set up by every European imperial power to transplant, domesticate, and commodify colonial flora. This is old hat. If you read.

So much for imperial institutions. But “ordinary” gardening was also a way of pacifying and civilizing colonial places and people, at least by the English (I will limit myself here to what I know directly from my own archival research, but I would be surprised if it was unique).

In Ireland, for example, Cromwell’s helper and early economic writer William Petty made the creation of English-style houses and gardens part of his project to subdue rebellious Irish Catholics. Forcing them to intermarry with English women was another part of his scheme.

To the extent that the garden was part of the ideal English household, gardening was an aspect of the civility colonizers hoped to impose on colonial territory. It required, of course, the prior imposition of a suitable set of property arrangements. This is not hard. If you read.

Beyond and behind all this, of course, the argument that uncultivated land was vacant was (and remains) a major justification for imperial conquest. The absence of “recognizable” gardening had political consequences, just as its introduction had political requirements.

Anyway, this knowledge is not by any means new to readers of history. So Kay here is not making some clever point about the current hyperpoliticization of everything. He’s just showing his own ignorance of facts that are neither far to seek nor hard to grasp.

In no particular order, here are some works that deal with the political (especially colonial/imperial) history of gardening:

Lucille Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion
yalebooks.yale.edu/book/978030009…

Emma Spary, Utopia's Garden
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book…

Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire
hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?is…

Richard Grove, Green Imperialism
cambridge.org/ca/academic/su…

Jill Francis, Gardens and Gardening
yalebooksblog.co.uk/2018/05/22/gar…

Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession
cambridge.org/ca/academic/su…

Joan Thirsk, Agricultural Change: Policy and Practice (not her most recent work but a favourite of mine) and her Alternative Agriculture: A History
amazon.com/Agricultural-c…
amazon.com/Alternative-Ag…

It's not my main focus, but I touch on some links between gardening and empire in the seventeenth century here. (There are far too many articles on these connections to link to here but others are welcome to add)
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book…

I could add more but I think the point is made.

If you're getting your history from Quillette, please stop before you hurt yourself.

*central in

It really is just a machine that substitutes outrage (mostly faked, for its editors; apparently real, for its fans) for learning

In this, of course, it’s not alone. The replies are a masterclass in getting people who won’t read a whole tweet thread upset about what they imagine that thread might say

The best response, though sadly it requires reading. I guess the real Nazis here are the ones who read, research, and think about their subjects

https://twitter.com/botanygeek/status/1338047634771238914

And here are some entirely predictable examples of how further explanation by the author just meets with doubling down on the original, intentional misreading. Not one engagement with any specific point he makes.

The only move they have is to amplify their own disinformation.

This isn’t “satire”; it’s neither witty nor related to the specifics of the piece. It’s not criticism, either, because, again, none of the actual claims he makes enter into it at all. It’s just unintelligent disinformation, repeated in different tones for different audiences.

The point isn’t to educate, or debate, or challenge on the merits; any of these requires engagement, not mischaracterization. It’s to demonize and dismiss academic work. It’s to keep the audience from reading or thinking about things, from engaging with unfamiliar or new ideas.

And here’s the entirely predictable (because so often repeated) result of the Quillette method of engagement.

One way of telling whether something is witty satire or rational critique or just mindless outrage is how quickly and directly it leads to threats against its target.

This way of misrepresenting, demonizing and dismissing academic work only ever results in making life and work harder for the researchers involved. And that is the point. It’s not about ideas, it’s not about truth, and it’s not about humour, either. It’s about shutting people up.