We were talking about herrenvolk democracy in class last week, and I happened to come across a book, The Idea of Israel, published in 2014 by Ilan Pappe. He’s an historian from Israel, now working in England, and his book focuses on the period in the 1990s when it became prevalent in Israeli academia, arts, and the news media to challenge the standard patriotic (“Zionist”) view of the history of Israel/Palestine. Pappe argues that before the 1990s there were almost no prominent anti-establishment voices, then there was a blooming in the 1990s (the “post-Zionist moment”) followed after the failure of the Oslo peace process by a “neo-Zionism” in which dissenting voices have been quieted.
It’s an interesting story and it makes me wonder how it would work in other countries.
U.S. academia has its share of opposition to established narratives, with a tradition going back at least to Charles Beard in the early twentieth century and continuing today, and we see some of this in the news media as well, as least in the soft version such as proffered by TV documentarian Ken Burns. Maybe one reason for this is that the centuries-old political divisions between the North and the (white) South have been accompanied by alternative national myths. So, once you get past 1783 or so, you have two established narratives to choose from, which means that in some ways just about everyone is oppositional. That said, as someone who was born and raised in this country, it’s hard for me to put myself in a state of equipoise where I can read about the American revolution, the First World War, the Second World War, or the Cold War, and not root for our side. I wouldn’t deny that atrocities were committed on all sides of these conflicts, so I’m not saying I’d drink the straight-up 200-proof patriotic history here, but I still have that bias. Then again, I’m not a historian. If I were, and given my temperament, I’d probably just kinda get technical and avoid taking a stand on the big issues.
What about other countries? I have no idea what academia and the news media are like in Egypt, say, but my guess is that they depart from the national party line much less than their counterparts in Israel, let alone in the U.S. What about our neighbors? I’d guess that Canadian academia and culture are similar to the U.S. in broadly supporting the national myths while allowing a fair share of dissent. Mexico is like the U.S. in a different way in that revolution and conflict are part of its national culture: unlike in Israel or Egypt, I doubt there’s a single dominant national myth in Mexico, so I imagine there’s space in Mexican academia and culture for a variety of takes on the country’s history.
There have also been changes over time. I’ve been reading the memoirs of Raymond Aron, a French sociologist who was highly politically engaged for much of the twentieth century, and his stories of the tumult in French academia and news media in the late 1950s during the war in Algeria reminded me of Pappe’s discussion of Israel. There were dissenting voices in France at that time, Aron’s among them, but the dissenters got a lot of angry pushback: they were attacked as traitors, and the opposition was not a comfortable place to be. Perhaps if Charles de Gaulle had been assassinated and a hard-line government had taken over, France in the 1960s might have moved to a neo-patriotic period of cultural repression in the mode of Israel’s neo-Zionism.
After finishing a book I like to triangulate by reading some reviews to get other takes. Directly googling Pappe’s The Idea of Israel was not helpful because all I got were brief positive reviews that didn’t add anything to the book. But more searching yielded some harsh negative reviews of some of Pappe’s earlier books. Some of these were just empty political attacks, but I came across two meaty negative reviews by Benny Morris, an Israeli historian, roughly the same age as Pappe who followed a different political trajectory. Like Pappe, Morris wrote from the late 1980s onward about Israeli war crimes (covering the period before, during, and after the 1948 war), but then Morris moved to what Pappe would call a neo-Zionist position. So the two historians are now in political opposition, even while they agree on many of the historical facts.
In his reviews from 2004 and 2011, Morris pulls no punches, using terms like “complete fabrication,” “absurd,” “can almost be called a deliberate system of error,” “one of the world’s sloppiest historians,” “he will also simply and straightforwardly falsify evidence,” etc.
I can also point you to Pappe’s response to the 2004 review. After reading Morris’s reviews and Pappe’s response, I have to say that I don’t know what to think. I’m no expert on the history of the Middle East and am even less of an expert on the historians of the Middle East. Further googling led me to this Reddit thread which makes a pretty convincing case that Pappe has indeed been sloppy in his historical writing. And, yeah, I know, Reddit, but, still my current thinking is that Morris has a point. I’d have more respect for Pappe if, in his reply to Morris, he’d had some “my bads” to acknowledge errors or misleading passages in his books.
That said, I still find the intellectual-history aspect of Pappe’s book to be interesting. In chapter 3, for example, he supplies this quote from a “history book on 1948 that was used as the main professional text in Israel for many years — The Edge of the Sword”: “Israel’s victory in the war was a miracle performed by divine authority, by a God who has not deserted his people in their hour of need. . . .” This is a book from 1961, so I guess it hasn’t been the “main professional text” for many years, but still.
Setting aside disputes over the facts, which don’t seem like much of a dispute here, actually–Pappe and Morris seem to agree on most of the key points, with the disputes being over various minor details–, this really seems like a debate about legitimacy. In Pappe’s view the pro-Palestinian historical perspective was marginalized in Israel for many years, was briefly taken to be a legitimate position (but hardly the dominant position), and then became delegitimized. Morris seems to be arguing that the pro-Palestinian view indeed should be illegitimate within Israel. I don’t think he’d argue that nobody in Israeli academia, arts, or the media should espouse such views, but he doesn’t think they deserve any respect, in the same way that I wouldn’t think that any respect would be due to an American political scientist who argued that we should bring back the monarchy and become subjects of King Charles III. Or how I think that fringe scientific views such as HIV denialism or belief in ghosts belong on the fringe.
The question of professional balance, or whatever you want to call it, is tied in with what views are considered to be acceptable. For example, in a history of the Second World War, you want to give all sides in historical perspective but the Nazi racial theories would be historicized, not taken as serious arguments. I guess there’s room in academia for a few hardcore Nazis–the government and social media seem to be filling up with them now–but I think it’s also ok to disrespect them. And from the perspective of Morris and other neo-Zionists, there’s not much difference between Pappe and a Nazi, so they don’t have much sympathy for his complaint that he and other post-Zionists have been pushed to the edge of the Israeli conversation.
Even in a technical field such as statistics, I think some leading academic figures have been getting things completely wrong, and I don’t think they’re doing it on purpose, I just think they’re missing the point, that there’s a disconnect between their theory, their methods, and the applied problems we’re all trying to solve.
What I’m getting at is that, in any space of discussion, there’s a question of how much bandwidth to give different views, which perspectives should be taken seriously and which should be dismissed. National history is an interesting example because we’re immersed in it from childhood and it has serious consequences.
From time to time a misguided but fashionable idea will take over an academic field or subfield in a country. Examples are Lysenko’s biology in the Soviet Union, junk social psychology in the U.S. in the 2010-2015 period, Chomskyian linguistics in the U.S. for a few decades, string theory in physics (ok, I’ll leave that one to others to decide how misguided it is), etc. When this happens in science, we see it as an aberration. But when it comes to history, I’m guessing that extreme nationalism is the usual dominant position and that it is rare for countries to give serious consideration to alternative views.
So you can take this post as a general comment about how to think about “The idea of X,” in environments where the range of discussion can shift a lot in different decades according to political, economic, and social conditions.
This post is timely for me: I’ve been mulling over just how bad credibility has become. I never trusted Iranian pronouncements or those of Hamas, but I used to be sympathetic to Israeli views and even US government accounts at times. Now I believe all sources have squandered any credibility they might have had – and I don’t see how they can regain any trust. Historical views are similar in that they paint stylized creations although there are always differing portrayals as you point out. But one would think that the historical accounts would be somewhat more reliable, as inaccuracies and extreme opinions get weeded out over time. Of course, there is the countervailing force that time erases memory (especially as people die so that all that remains are 2nd, 3rd, or more distant accounts. So, I view these disparate views of the past as quite similar to the disparate views of current events. I think its fair to say that no clear account of the past or present is true – nobody is purely good or evil, everything is shades of gray. But the shades matter.
The American revolutionaries were not absolute pinnacles of morality, nor were they purely evil conquerors. Trump is not pure evil, despite the difficulty I have seeing him any other way. The Nazis were not pure evil? That one is hard to digest, except that there must be a difference between the leaders and the followers – the latter group ended up doing evil, but probably got there in a more roundabout way.
Maybe the question is why we have a need to choose an oversimplified and inaccurate view of the past and present. Is it our innate tribal instincts that require us to choose a team that is good pitted against one that is bad? I think that is true as an evolutionary trait – it is only our effortful rational mind that we can use to avoid succumbing to our tribal instincts. But I really wonder whether we have made any progress in that respect: were people in the 1700s more or less able to see through their tribal veils to contemplate competing views of facts and meaning? I’ll admit that it is hard for me to see current generations as having made much progress. And, while academics are trained to use their rational minds, it isn’t clear that current academics are any more capable of this than the academics of past centuries.
Dale –
“Now I believe all sources have squandered any credibility they might have had”
Not sure why you ever gave them credibility, but it’s telling that over and over, the talking point is that “Iran started this war 47 years ago” with absolutely zero reference to what preceded (to, oh I don’t know, the point where the US effectively overthrew Mossaddech’s elected government?). It’s just like when we’re told that Hamas started a war with Israel on Oct 7, 2023.
“Not sure why you ever gave them credibility.” While I’m tempted to agree, it is a very disturbing conclusion. Since so much happens outside of our direct experience (which has its own issues of reliability), if you view no sources as credible, it doesn’t leave you with much. We have to trust someone or some sources for any form of civil society to function. In idealized tribal societies, the leaders had credibility, without which they could not function. Now that thinking people are concluding that no external sources have any credibility, we are rapidly seeing a breakdown in civility. No wonder that we are rapidly heading towards order established by who has the biggest gun.
Colonists accounts of native American groups in the 1700s describe many of them as essentially hierarchy free. People didnt place trust in some authority because they didnt have authority. Leaders arose out of their ability to convince, at any point if they failed to convince their capacity to lead dissolved
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-41-02-0280
Franklin specifically remarked that “there is no Force, there are no Prisons, no Officers to compel Obedience, or inflict Punishment. Hence they generally study Oratory; the best Speaker having the most Influence”
Oratory has its own capacity for deception, but without force to back it when deception is discovered leadership is likely to dissolve much quicker than for example Trumps capacity to command the entire US military into a giant shitstorm in Iran leading in all likelihood to the downfall of the modern oil fueled economy.
Dale –
“if you view no sources as credible, it doesn’t leave you with much. We have to trust someone or some sources for any form of civil society to function.”
I agree strongly, except I don’t frame this as a matter of trust. I consider it a matter of probabilities – who is relatively more or less likely to be giving an accurate portrayal?
Daniel –
“Colonists accounts of native American groups in the 1700s describe many of them as essentially hierarchy free. People didnt place trust in some authority because they didnt have authority. Leaders arose out of their ability to convince, at any point if they failed to convince their capacity to lead dissolved”
I assume that you’ve read “The Dawn of Everything?”
If you haven’t, I think you’d find it very much worth your time. It gives a very through explication of what you describe.
https://www.google.com/search?q=the+dawn+of+everything&oq=the+dawn+of+everything&aqs=chrome..69i57.4849j0j1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
I grew up skeptical of dominant cultural narratives but not skeptical enough. Ive always been particularly skeptical of nationalism, but it took me ~45 years to recognize the issue isnt what form nations should take but rather, how can we rid ourselves of the scourge of the state entirely?
Theres an interesting book by an Italian author that ive got a copy of but haven’t had the chance to read past the introductory pages, still the introductory pages are pretty strong!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism:_A_Counter-History
I certainly agree regarding our tribal instincts, but I think the world is so complex that you have to choose an oversimplified view of the past in order to write anything intelligible about it. This is isn’t just about history, it is also true of, say, ecology. Recall Darwin’s point that “How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service!” The question is how much people select observations because they are for or against some view. You need to to some degree in order to write something coherent, but it is easy to overdo.
As for the current generation of historians, don’t get me going on post-modernists.
That should be “I certainly agree with Dale regarding out tribal instincts ..”
Dale, regarding your interest in historic accounts of the Israeli / Palestinian conflict.
Some time ago I researched which books by to read. I wanted to read an account that is as objective as possible. I found this book:
“A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Second Edition” by Mark Tessler.
I did not read it yet, it is long, some 1000 pages, but I read the introduction. In it, he says something along these lines: “When I started working on the book I wanted to figure out the truth. But I soon realized; it is impossible. All we can really do is to figure out which narratives are plausible and which are really not.”
His basic idea with the book is of course presenting a defensible historic account of the conflict but it is also to give respect to both, the Israeli and the Palestinian view of the conflict. I think this is important in this conflict and in many others: Acknowledge that the fears and views of the opposing team actually are legitimate, in the sense that they form a plausible narrative.
I’ve been looking for the same so thanks for this! It’s even in JSTOR.
Andrew —
I should say up front that my own ideological sympathies line up much more with Pappe than with Morris. But that given, I want to make a point about framing.
The phrase “Morris probably has a point” feels underspecified to me. Morris’s critiques mix together several different domains: archival accuracy, interpretive framing, rhetorical style, and his own ideological commitments. Unless we identify which domain you mean, the conclusion floats free of the context that would make it meaningful, and ends up feeling too much like an overall conclusion to me.
In the spirit of your broader theme about how certain perspectives get marginalized or treated as less legitimate, it seems equally important to note that Pappe “has a point” too. Whatever one thinks of his overstatements, he is on solid ground when he argues that national narratives routinely suppress uncomfortable facts about 1948. Even historians who disagree with his framing accept that part of the critique. So if we are going to say Morris “has a point,” it seems just as important to specify the domain in which Pappe does as well. Otherwise we risk reproducing the same bandwidth allocation dynamics you are analyzing.
You cite a quote that Pappe uses “In chapter 3, for example, he supplies this quote from a “history book on 1948 that was used as the main professional text in Israel for many years — The Edge of the Sword”: “Israel’s victory in the war was a miracle performed by divine authority, by a God who has not deserted his people in their hour of need. . . .” This is a book from 1961, so I guess it hasn’t been the “main professional text” for many years, but still.”
I cannot find that quote in the book.
The closest I can find is “How can we account for Israel’s victory in the War of INdependence at the cost of the lives of over four thousand soldiers and two thousand civilians?…The people of Israel believe a decisive role was played by the will to sacrifice, consciousness of war aims and the recognition that there was no other choice. Others ascribe victory to the patient organizing work of Haganah over the years, and the assistance of Jews in other lands. There are many who attribute the triumph of arms to divine providence.” This latter was on p. 450 and Pappe cites p. 1, which does not exist.
I looked at the 1961 edition (in archive.org) and Pappe cites an edition from 2003 so perhaps it was added in a revised edition?
Total:
Pappe’s citation is to page 1 of the 2003 edition. So I guess not the version that was used as the main professional text in Israel for many years. That 2003 edition is hard to find! It’s not at the Columbia library or at the New York Public Library; both of them have editions from 1961 and 1968.
The 1961 version (in English) is available on the internet archive. I just read the preface by S. L. A. Marshall, and . . . wow! Things have changed. Here’s Marshall:
Lorch’s 1961 book does begin with this bit of religious fundamentalism:
This statement is true in a literary sense–if you believe the chronology in the Bible, the Jewish people were in the holy land at that time–but I don’t think it reflects the historical consensus. I guess this would be like a Christian book referring to the day that Jesus rose from the dead.
If anybody out there happens to have a copy of the 2003 edition, maybe they can share page 1 with us. The 1961 edition appears to be straight-up history, albeit from a Zionist perspective.
OK, more information. I contacted Pappe asking him about the quotation and he replied:
It’s good when people reply to emails!
“The proper reference is Netanel Lorch, Korot Milhemet Ha’azmaut (the history of the war of Independence) but the Publisher is Masada and the year is 1958.”
Interesting, thanks. So his original citation is incorrect (“Pappe’s citation is to page 1 of the 2003 edition”)? Or, no, it could be that the 2003 version was a better translation of the original 1958 volume than the 1961.
Kind of Pappe to email back.
Yes, Pappe said that his citation was incorrect and he’d correct it in the next issue. I don’t have access to the 1958 edition and I can’t read or speak Hebrew so I’m just taking other people’s word on this one.
Okay. I checked the edition to which Pappé referred, the 1958 Masada edition (Hebrew).
I have no doubt that Total is right. The relevant passage appears in the “Afterword” added by the author of the book, Netanel Lorch, on the very last page of the volume. Here it is (chatgpt translation):
“Whence came the victory in the War of Independence? What were the reasons and factors that brought about a military decision in Israel’s favor and the defeat of the Arab peoples and their armies?
This question, which presently occupies statesmen, will perhaps not find an agreed-upon answer even when historians turn their attention to it.
The Arabs explain their defeat variously: by the betrayal of the British, or by the betrayal of the Arab governments, all or some of them; by their own fragmentation and mutual suspicion, by the absence of unified command and a coordinated plan, and by the Mufti’s arrogance and lust for power. Among them are also those who emphasize the Arabs’ backwardness in technical and organizational matters, as well as in the education and health of the population.
We see the decisive factors in the spirit of sacrifice and readiness that seized the leaders of the people and gave them the strength to stand against an enemy which, at the critical hour, surpassed them many times over in numbers and equipment; in the recognition of their mission and of the fact that there was no alternative; in the gray and diligent preparatory work of the Haganah organization over many years; in the solidarity of the Jewish Diaspora with the Jewish community in the Land of Israel; in flexible and daring command, and in wise and energetic leadership. And there are those who see Israel’s victory in the war as a kind of miracle from Divine Providence, from the guardian spirit of the nation that did not abandon its people in their hour of distress … It is not for us to decide between these.”
Incidentally, at the beginning of the book there is a foreword by Yigael Yadin, who effectively served as Chief of Staff during the 1948 war and later became the second Chief of Staff of the IDF. There he addresses this very same question.
“The author concludes his book with the question: Whence came the victory in the War of Independence? Indeed, this question will occupy historians in the years to come. However, since in such cases material facts usually serve as the primary point of departure for historians, who rely mainly on written sources, it is our duty — we who witnessed this victory — to give a decisive answer to this question.
If we must reduce all the factors that brought about the victory — and they were many — to a single factor, I would not hesitate to attribute it to the extraordinary qualities of Israeli youth during the War of Independence. This youth seemed to have stored within itself the full yearning of the Jewish people, throughout thousands of years of exile, to return to its land and live a life of freedom and independence — like a giant spring, stretched and compressed for a very long time to the utmost limit of its tension, and then suddenly released – and liberated.”
[The last three words are a Hebrew pun that cannot really be translated, but their meaning is as rendered here.]
This may or may not be relevant to the OP, but I think there’s an interesting meta-story about Zionism. I was brought up believing that the creation of Israel was a difficult but necessary response to the Holocaust. Israel, in a nutshell, was about saving Jews.
Later, I learned it wasn’t so simple. The Jewish Agency was selective in who it permitted to emigrate to Palestine prior to the creation of the state. Its mission was not saving Jews as such but creating a homeland. So even Jews at immediate risk of persecution or worse were turned away unless they were deemed as having the right skills and demographics to build the state. Only later, after 1949, were the doors opened fully.
What this means is that there are two Zionisms. One is a political project, conceived in the nineteenth century and carried out strategically, to create a Jewish state. The other is a set of measures taken to rescue and support actual Jewish people. They overlapped, almost entirely after 1949, but diverged before then.
This matters for the political interpretation given to the Nabka. If your Zionism is of the “rescue Jewish people” variety, you can rationalize it as an unfortunate but unavoidable cost of preventing a worse tragedy. If it’s of the “create a Jewish state” variety, there isn’t really a moral case for the Nabka, only a cold, instrumental one. Sorry, but you were in the way.
Incidentally, the generation of left wing Jews, like Einstein and Arendt, who opposed Zionism understood it as a political project rather than a humanitarian one, but they had lived through the debates in the 20s and 30s about whether Jews should invest in reforming the societies they lived in or decamping to a new one.
But now I have to admit that I don’t know where Pappe and Morris come down on these two versions of Zionism, and whether there’s a difference along this axis that helps explain their broader disagreement.
Peter,
Yes, Pappe addresses this issue of two Zionisms in his book. I don’t know what Morris’s take is on the topic.
Jews are known for disagreeing with other members of the tribe. Today, we have a case of Andrew disagreeing with himself regarding the indefinite article attached to the word “historian.”
“He’s an historian from Israel”
“I’m not a historian.”
I bring up this trivial topic because if we can’t solve this pressing linguistic issue, is there any hope regarding real problems?
For more detail than you ever knew you wanted about the indefinite article
https://chatgpt.com/c/69af1726-d918-8327-844c-1e33739835c9
where one finds: “Major dictionaries and style guides now treat “an historian” as old-fashioned.”
Paul:
I would only ever say or write “a historian.” I actually remember the reason why “an” ended up there! I originally wrote “an academic historian” but then decided that “academic” was unnecessary so I removed it, but I didn’t reread so I didn’t think of changing “an” to “a” there.
Of your examples of what are or should be illegitimate in U.S. academia, this seems most connected with the “idea of America” (along with anti-Nazism). HIV denialism and belief in ghosts less so.
Setting aside the specific idea of bringing “back” Charles III, the strength with which even educated Americans identify as anti-monarchist is strange to me.
Leon:
Yeah, fair enough, I’m a typical American in that way!
I dunno. I hear a lot of coastal Americans fantasizing that their state be annexed by Canada. That would certainly bring back Charles III.
Leon: Is anti-monarchism more of a working-class belief in the UK, where I presume you’re located? In America, we’re all taught how a King/monarchy is literally un-American, that’s the core idea of the Revolution. In fact, I believe the phrase “all men are created equal” is better understood in modern terms as “there’s no divine right of Kings, the King’s an ordinary man with no special right to rule”.
I’m from Australia and it seems like in our most recent referendum there was an urban/rural split. I wasn’t so politically conscious at the time.
It is rare to hear elites explicitly defend Australia’s monarchy. Explicit criticism is less rare, but still uncommon. Republicanism is in the center-left party’s platform and is common on the center right as well. Older lefties often have strong feelings about the one time the monarchy was extremely politically consequential here but I think most people do not.
My sense is that many don’t care either way, but also that the public is extremely averse to constitutional change in general. This is partly an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality and partly strong antipathies and disagreements around specific republican proposals (e.g. directly elected president vs. president appointed by parliament).
Like Andrew, I’m a typical American in that I’ve never considered, let alone understood, the value of a monarchy. Can someone educate me as to what a “pro-monarchist” position would be?
I thought it was well known a wise and benevolent dictator is best, but also has the worst succession process. So that is actually the worst form of government.
Look at how people treat chatbots (like some kind of wise godlike entity), and how non-human personhood has already been legalized for corporations. Its only a matter of time before these bots start getting elected and there is no clear need for succession.
Ive not studied the area, just many years of talking to people. A pro monarchist position can be quite emotional so isn’t necessarily rational but the sentiments I’ve encountered are: tradition (something the brits do quite well, hence all the tourists in London), sense of national identity, nostalgia for a world that most people havent actually experienced, and then we get to the religious aspects dating back to the separation from the Catholic Church- you might imagine that this was several hundred years ago but it remains core to some people’s identity. Some people just like the royal family as a concept. I wouldn’t say that anti monarchism is a working class sentiment – i know lots of working class people who like the monarchy.
Tom,
According to this poll, most Britons support the monarchy, with no differences by social class. There are big differences by age and political party, in the expected directions: oldsters favor the monarchy much more than youngsters, and Conservatives favor the monarchy much more than Labour voters.
“I’m a typical American in that I’ve never considered, let alone understood, the value of a monarchy. Can someone educate me as to what a “pro-monarchist” position would be?”
A modern “pro-monarchist” position (as opposed to the divine right style of the middle ages) would be that the monarch is good as a symbolic head of state, personifying the nation in a continuing way, while leaving the running of the country to a series of elected governments. The monarch doesn’t need to get elected & re-elected and thus is not prey as much to the varying moods of the electorate on cultural things.
That’s one form of pro-monarchy position. Another form is this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Fuentes
“Fuentes has described himself as a reactionary who supports autocracy, Catholic monarchy, just war, the Crusades, and the Inquisition. Fuentes opposes democracy.[157]”
Thanks for your responses, everyone! I truly had never considered what it would mean to be “pro-monarchist”, and so I’ve learned a lot.
It sounds like a cultural/historical connection is an important element of support for a monarchy. That explanation may also apply to Nick Fuentes’ various fetishes as mentioned by Daniel.
The reasons I said “the strength with which even educated Americans identify as anti-monarchist is strange to me” is that I’m surprised the following have not had more influence on center-left American elite opinion:
1) “1619 Project”-type revisionism that (putting it crudely) the Founders were genocidal land-grabbing slavers rather than the heroic freedom fighters of American Civic Religion
2) the prevalence of constitutional monarchies among rich well-functioning welfare states that such opinion typically views positively (Norway/Sweden/Denmark, Netherlands, Canada/UK/Australia/NZ, Japan …)
3) to a lesser extent, the fact that during the mid to late 20th century there was (it seems to me — commenting with some trepidation here) a mixed or ambivalent relationship between the commonest forms of despotism/dictatorship and monarchy, especially in Spain but also e.g. in Greece and to some extent Italy. Despotic kings seem rare in recent times compared with despotic presidents or generals.
I imagined all of these these would have weakened the “king = despot” equation.
Leon:
Point 1 doesn’t change anything, because it doesn’t affect the idea that the King isn’t ruling by divine right. It’s basically trying to argue that people should be favorable to a big thug in power, because the ones who got rid of him where thugs themselves.
Point 2 isn’t attractive either. Given that the Western world has gotten mostly rid of Kings in power, i.e. turned them mostly into tourist attractions, that hardly makes it appealing to set up one anew. It seems retrograde. We have Disneyland, we can do our own tourist attractions.
The following is not historically accurate. But it’ll give you an idea of what the American viewpoint is on Kings:
Schoolhouse Rock – No More Kings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvOZs3g3qIo
I think it’s a fairly mainstream opinion that those constitutional monarchs serve more of a spiritual or symbolic purpose than a political one. I suppose you could argue that the cultural function of those monarchs is also a political one, in that they enhance national unity.
Even more deeply than that, I would argue that we in America COULD NOT reproduce the cultural institution of constitutional monarchy. If we tried, it would merely be Disneyland. We cannot make a Buckingham Palace, only Hearst Castles and Magic Kingdoms. Channeling Umberto Eco, it would be an absolute fake, a simulacra of a connection to history we don’t have and a symbol standing in for someone else’s symbol. So even if you view constitutional monarchy positively for its cultural impact on national unity or whatever, it’s an option that is simply not available to us anyways.
On what grounds do you claim with such confidence that “Chomskyan linguistics” is comparable to Lyssenko’s biology? It is fashionable these days to claim that “Chomskyan linguistics” has been refuted; that it is fashionable does not make it true, as you yourself note in this post. One popular argument is that LLMs have proved that there is no innate specialization for language in humans, but if you think about it, this is obviously silly, as it presupposes that humans learn language the way LLMs do, and also that the architecture of LLMs that allows them to acquire language is no way specialized and adapted to this task. LLMs in fact are the result of a selection process that makes their underlying architecture particularly adapted to the tasks they are meant to perform (as forcefully argued here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09544). The idea that LLMs provide a good model of human language learning is certainly not the consensus position of scientists who actually engage in the systematic comparison of human language learning and LLMs (cf. among many other https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.521/). I am a linguist but I am not myself a “Chomskyan” in any narrow sense, and I am in particular quite critical of Chomsky’s way of dismissing criticisms, as well as of the direction that generative syntax has taken in the past two or three decades, but I find it quite incredible to compare Chomsky to Lyssenko and to dismiss his major contribution, which is often acknowledged even by people who are quite anti-Chomskyan, see for instance by Geoff Pullum here: https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/revolutionary-methodological-preliminaries. I would urge you to read this in the hope that you might realize that your blanket dismissal is not warranted (since I otherwise read your blog with great interest).
Anon:
I’m no expert on linguistics; on that I’m relying on the views of others, just as I am when speaking of Lysenko’s biology and string theory.
I agree that Lysenko is different than those other cases in that he appears to have been a pure fraud, whereas, as you say, even the skeptics of Chomsky’s theories respect that there is something to them. Similarly, skeptics of string theory recognize that there’s some real math there, and not all of social psychology is junk science. What these examples have in common is that certain niche ideas became dominant in these academic subfields of different countries. One can accept the value of some social psychology while recognizing that the prominence of junk versions of it in the U.S. academia and the news media was aberrant; similarly with string theory in U.S. academic physics and Chomsky’s acolytes in academic linguistics. My problem, or I guess I should say my linguist colleague’s problem, is not with Chomsky’s early work or with the existence of some Chomskyians in the academic field of linguistics; it’s with the way that in many departments the Chomskyians became dominant and distorted the field.
Andrew —
“i agree that Lysenko is different than those other cases in that he appears to have been a pure fraud,…”
There you frame the distinction in terms of degree of fraud, but I think it’s also worth noting that there’s another aspect where the comparison breaks down.
I’ve watched climate‑change “skeptics” invoke Lysenko for years as a way to cast themselves as victims of scientific authoritarianism. It’s a ubiquitous contrarian move where “experts” become the oppressors and the critic becomes the martyr. That background probably makes me overly sensitive to how quickly the analogy can slide from “a field became insular” to “this was an authoritarian suppression of truth.” But that kind of dramatic framing is exactly what the contrarian crowd trades on.
The extent that Chomskyan approaches became institutionally dominant and dismissive of alternatives is a real and important dynamic. But it’s nowhere near the plane of Lysenko’s role in the Soviet Union, where state violence shaped what counted as acceptable science. The scale and mechanism of distortion are fundamentally different.
I get your broader point about how academic subfields can drift toward narrow orthodoxies. I just think the Lysenko card carries more dramatic baggage than the situation in linguistics warrants. And it treads into collapsing distinctions that are worth keeping clear. I think the point can be made better without invoking Lysenko.
That’s a very different thing than saying the original work was a fraud. It’s a more interesting sociological and institutional question to ask why that happened in linguistics and also happened in some other fields.
Paragraphs are your friend.
“Pappe argues that before the 1990s there were almost no prominent anti-establishment voices, then there was a blooming in the 1990s (the “post-Zionist moment”) followed after the failure of the Oslo peace process by a “neo-Zionism” in which dissenting voices have been quieted.”
Avi Shlaim argues this position too. Even Morris acknowledges that Shlaim’s work is valuable.
https://www.ft.com/content/fcf7575d-3f4f-4299-b24b-51d058ccca18
In recent years, people have become more aware that expertise in one field doesn’t result in expertise in other fields (see James Watson, Ben Carson, Larry Summers,…). I think it is now time to conclude that expertise in one field doesn’t even result in expertise in that same field. After all, Pappe and Morris seem to consider each other to be hacks, and they definitely know more on the subject than we do.
Morris wrote the most comprehensive history of the expulsion/flight of hundreds of thousands of Arabs in 1948. It was very critical of Israel. He later changed his interpretations and judgments quite significantly.
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Morris) quotes him in 2004 with the statement:
“But in certain conditions, expulsion is not a war crime. I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. […] There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing.”
He also said (not quoted in English wikipedia) about Palestinians: “Something like a cage has to be built for them. I know that sounds terrible. It is really cruel. But there is no choice. There is a wild animal there that has to be locked up in one way or another.”
I don’t think that “Morris has a point” in his feud with Pappe, and I don’t think his more recent work deserves to be quoted for any other reason than to condemn it.
“a” is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
I can’t imagine rooting for the Americans and not for the Vietnamese in that conflict.