{"id":81805,"date":"2019-01-29T00:05:17","date_gmt":"2019-01-29T06:05:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/?p=81805"},"modified":"2019-01-26T10:07:18","modified_gmt":"2019-01-26T16:07:18","slug":"o-yes-it-always-matters-where-you-start","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/2019\/01\/29\/o-yes-it-always-matters-where-you-start\/","title":{"rendered":"O Yes, It Always Matters Where You Start"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Source<\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n

As anyone on Twitter knows, public culture can be quick to attack, castigate and condemn. In search of the moral high ground, we rarely grant each other the benefit of the doubt. In her Class Day remarks at Harvard\u2019s 2018 graduation, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie addressed the problem of this rush to judgment. In the face of what she called \u2018a culture of \u201ccalling out\u201d, a culture of outrage\u2019, she asked students to \u2018always remember context, and never disregard intent\u2019. She could have been speaking as a historian.<\/p>\n

History, as a discipline, turns away from two of the main ways of reading that have dominated the humanities for the past half-century. These methods have been productive, but perhaps they also bear some responsibility for today\u2019s corrosive lack of generosity. The two approaches have different genealogies, but share a significant feature: at heart, they are adversarial.<\/p>\n

One mode of reading, first described in 1965 by the French philosopher Paul Ric\u0153ur and known as \u2018the hermeneutics of suspicion\u2019, aims to uncover the hidden meaning or agenda of a text. Whether inspired by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche or Sigmund Freud, the reader interprets what happens on the surface as a symptom of something deeper and more dubious, from economic inequality to sexual anxiety. The reader\u2019s task is to reject the face value of a work, and to plumb for a submerged truth.<\/p>\n

A second form of interpretation, known as \u2018deconstruction\u2019, was developed in 1967 by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It aims to identify and reveal a text\u2019s hidden contradictions \u2013 ambiguities and even\u00a0aporias<\/em>(unthinkable contradictions) that eluded the author. For example, Derrida detected a bias that favoured speech over writing in many influential philosophical texts of the Western tradition, from Plato to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The fact that\u00a0written<\/em>\u00a0texts could privilege the immediacy and truth of speech was a paradox that revealed unarticulated metaphysical commitments at the heart of Western philosophy.<\/p>\n

Both of these ways of reading pit reader against text. The reader\u2019s goal becomes to uncover meanings or problems that the work does not explicitly express. In both cases, intelligence and moral probity are displayed at the expense of what\u2019s been written. In the 20th century, these approaches empowered critics to detect and denounce the workings of power in all kinds of materials \u2013 not just the dreams that\u00a0Freud<\/a>\u00a0interpreted, or the essays by Plato and Rousseau with which Derrida was most closely concerned.<\/p>\n

They do, however, foster a prosecutorial attitude among academics and public intellectuals. As a colleague once told me: \u2018I am always looking for the Freudian slip.\u2019 He scours the writings of his peers to spot when they trip up and betray their problematic intellectual commitments. One poorly chosen phrase can sully an entire work.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, these methods have fostered a rather paranoid atmosphere in modern academia. Mutual monitoring of lexical choices leads to anxiety, as an increasing number of words are placed on a \u2018no fly\u2019 list. One error is taken as the symptom of problematic thinking; it can spoil not just a whole book, but perhaps even the author\u2019s entire oeuvre. This set of attitudes is not a world apart from the pile-ons that we witness on social media.<\/p>\n

Does the lack of charity in public discourse \u2013 the quickness to judge, the aversion to context and intent \u2013 stem in part from what we might call the \u2018adversarial\u2019 humanities? These practices of interpretation are certainly on display in many classrooms, where students learn to exercise their moral and intellectual prowess by dismantling what they\u2019ve read. For teachers, showing students how to take a text apart bestows authority; for students, learning to read like this can be electrifying.<\/p>\n

Yet the study of history is different. History deals with the past \u2013 and the past is, as the British novelist L P Hartley wrote in 1953, \u2018a foreign country\u2019. By definition, historians deal with difference: with what is unlike the present, and with what rarely meets today\u2019s moral standards.<\/p>\n

The virtue of reading like a historian, then, is that critique or disavowal is not the primary goal. On the contrary, reading historically provides something more destabilising: it requires the historian to put her own values in parentheses.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Source: As anyone on Twitter knows, public culture can be quick to attack, castigate and condemn. In search of the moral high ground, we rarely grant each other the benefit of the doubt. In her Class Day remarks at Harvard\u2019s 2018 graduation, the Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie addressed the problem of this rush to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-81805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nO Yes, It Always Matters Where You Start<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Source: As anyone on Twitter knows, public culture can be quick to attack, castigate and condemn. 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