This is a great editorial. Of course he was quite thoroughly canceled for it, & the AHA has now locked down its twitter account amid the controversy. The only thing he did wrong was apologize to the mob. historians.org
When I was in grad school for history at Harvard Divinity, trying to give an account of “what actually happened” was considered at best midwit + ngmi, at worst politically suspect. The whole point of doing history was to “recover” liberatory narratives etc.
It was not this way at U of C, which is why I went there for my PhD. I wanted try the old ways — what historians at HDS considered quaint 19th century scholarship. The old ways were better. The politically motivated stuff being done in trendy departments is toxic trash.
The sad thing is there were some older European profs at HDS (all dead now) who thought the trendy political stuff was a fad that would pass. It wasn’t & it didn’t. They were what ended up passing, & the trendy stuff not only still there but it’s gotten even more psychotic.
IMO what’s happened in these departments is downstream of larger tectonic forces in the culture, & no amount of calls for reform will roll it back. To borrow from “The Sovereign Individual,” it’d be like trying to bring back the Middle Ages via calls for more chivalry.
Just like you can’t fix journalism by haranguing editors about best practices, you can’t fix history departments by decrying presentism or making arguments. There are other forces at work upstream of these battles around practices & the like.
To scoop myself a little, I’m planning to write about how IMO we’re definitely into Part I of this story & I’ve chronicled quite a bit of that on my Substack without even knowing about this essay until recently. lesswrong.com
It’s not just ML tho. ML is an accelerant, but you can get all these effects with human institutions and bad incentives. The combination of Twitter + online media + ML tho has poured gasoline on this particular fire. We may even be into Part II of his scenario, but def Part I.
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