Bellesiles and the Culture Wars

InstaPundit observes this morning that “[t]he Emory Wheel … is doing a lot better job of covering [the Bellesiles controversy] than the New York Times, and he’s absolutely right. He links to a recent article and editorial in the Wheel.

It is all the more remarkable that the NYT has dropped the ball on Bellesiles because it claims special pre-eminence in covering “culture,” including especially its largely home town publishing industry. Knopf, which published Arming America, is just across town; the New York Review of Books, which gave Bellesiles a glowing review that has not been retracted, is just uptown; Columbia University, which administers the Bancroft Prize Bellesiles won and still has, is farther uptown; and of course the New York Times Book Review, source of another glowing, unretracted review, is right down the hall.

Anyone who hasn’t done so should follow the InstaPundit links given above to the recent article and editorial in the Emory Wheel. They are each remarkable documents, and, I think, highlight an aspect of the debate that has not been sufficiently appreciated.

Odd as it seems, reading them I was struck by the fact that Bellesiles’ defenders and critics actually agree on what they disagree about. They both believe that more important than the guilt or innocence of Bellesiles himself — whether of fraud or sloppiness — is the larger matter of the influence of politics on scholarship. Bellesiles and his defenders imply, and frequently assert, that he was attacked — and now they will surely add, hounded out of the academy — because he had the temerity to challenge “the gun lobby” and what Bellesiles calls the “invented tradition” of our early gun culture that it has promulgated. Thus they tend to view his critics as either witting or unwitting members of a vast right wing conspiracy determined to stamp out dissenting scholarship. Bellesiles’ critics agree that gun politics are corrupting scholarship, but in their view Bellesiles ignored, distorted, or manufactured evidence in order to bolster his pre-conceived conclusions.

In my view, this conflict can best be seen, not as an argument over the politics of guns, but as another significant skirmish in the ongoing culture wars. For Bellesiles and his defenders, all that matters is his interpretation that in early America guns were much less prevalent and prominent than the gun lobby would like us to believe. Sure, he made mistakes, but everybody makes mistakes. Even if he cut too many scholarly corners (and of course the defenders don’t concede that he did), all that would mean is that he was a flawed messenger (here they would chortle over turning Prof. Jerome Sternstein’s “Shoot the Messenger” criticism back against him), not that the message was wrong. In this view, as we shall see in more detail below, Bellesiles thus begins to resemble an academic Clinton, doing good work despite his all too human flaws, and Lindgren, Sternstein, and those Jon Wiener is pleased to call the “pack of critics” don the inquisitorial robes of Ken Starr.

This flag was raised by Bellesiles himself in his statement included in the Emory report. “It seems to me that raising uncertainties that question the credibility of an entire book, without considering the book as a whole, is just plain unfair,” Bellesiles wrote. Sure enough, some are already falling into line to salute.

Thus the Emory Wheel article linked above states that

Michael Zuckerman, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, downplayed the results of the report. Zuckerman said Emory framed the charges of the committee so “unbelievably” narrow that he would not have served on the committee if asked.

“Emory’s losing an immensely talented historian,” Zuckerman said. “He’s got a million other pieces of his argument that don’t remotely touch on [probate] inventories.”

Wiener also argues that “the probate records play an extremely small part” in Bellesiles’ book, and he also quotes Zuckerman as saying “[t]he critics stuff on probate inventories is bad news for Michael, but the book in no way depends on that. He’s got myriad arguments.” Jack Rakove, Pulitzer prize winning historian at Stanford, is quoted by Wiener arguing that “[e]ven if a substantial portion or even majority of households possessed guns, genuine questions about their use would still remain.” All these arguments imply that it doesn’t really matter very much whether he was sloppy or presumably even cheated in some parts of the book; all that matters is whether the overall “argument” is persuasive.

According to the same Wheel article, Clayton Cramer, one of Bellesiles’ earliest, most thorough, and most persistent critics, also agrees that the Emory Report was too narrow. He is disappointed that it did not pursue “the much larger and more obvious examples” of what he is convinced was intentional fraud.

Cramer and some other early critics were skeptical of Bellesiles’ claims from the get-go because of their familiarity with, or sometimes merely interest in, the history of guns in America. These critics, unfortunately, were initially simply written off by most of the history profession as amateurs or gun nuts, an odd response when it came from scholars who in other circumstances argue that scholarship is not unworthy simply because scholars pursue political interests and objectives.

I’ve never met Professors Lindgren or Sternstein, widely recognized as among the most highly regarded of Bellesiles’ academic critics, but from reading their criticisms my impression is that their motivation has nothing to do with guns but rather with scholarly standards. Certainly that is the position of Emory University itself. Again, according to the Wheel article,

[Interim Dean of the College] Paul said the committee was charged with evaluating five specific aspects of alleged research misconduct, in order to keep the committee focused on academic issues in a controversy that some say has been fueled largely by gun politics.

“I would like to state to the world at large that this panel was asked to answer questions that had specifically to do with questions of research misconduct, not with either error or poor research quality,” Paul said. “And that given that, this report in no way addresses the question of the validity of the overall theses in the book which still remain to be settled by scholarly debate.”

But scholarly debate isn’t what it used to be. Objectivity, truth, even honesty are now contested notions in the academy. The Wheel editorial linked above takes a strong stand on this issue:

[Bellesiles] … claims the scope of the committee’s investigation was too narrow, and that his main thesis still holds true despite the errors found in a minor part of his research.

By making this claim, Bellesiles is skirting the real issue. It doesn’t matter now if the argument in Arming America is valid — it matters that he has lied numerous times in defending his book….

The investigation, and Bellesiles’ subsequent resignation, should be a reminder to the Emory community that academic research is, above all, about searching for the absolute truth. That’s what our professors teach students every day. We should expect the same from them.

If the Emory faculty is united in its commitment to the search for absolute truth, it must be one of the few that is. Forget the “absolute.” I suspect that a poll of most faculties about whether they saw their role as searching for just plain truth would itself reveal a good deal of controversy and uncertainty, with more than a few write-in answers saying it depends on what the meaning of “truth” is.

At the risk of oversimplification, on one side of the increasingly barbed cultural barricades are those who believe truth is whatever serves justice, i.e., women, minorities, critics of American foreign policy, gun control. Thus Wiener returns over and over to “[t]he political implications” of Bellesiles’ book. “The Second Amendment,” he says it suggests, “was not adopted to protect the widespread ownership or popularity of guns … it undermines the NRA’s picture of a citizen militia (rather than a national army) as the bulwark of American freedom” etc. And he closes his article with the following dark warning:

But the campaign against Bellesiles has demonstrated one indisputable fact: Historians whose work challenges powerful political interests like the NRA better make sure all their footnotes are correct before they go to press.

On the other side of the cultural divide are those still dedicated to an older “correspondence theory” of truth as reflecting, however imperfectly, some objective even if not completely knowable reality. They are indifferent to, or at least not transfixed by, the “political implications” of the work and more concerned with the book’s basic honesty and whether the history profession relaxes its professed standards for politically correct interpretations.

Thus it is not surprising that the Bellesiles debate has quickly ballooned into a familiar debate over these old chestnuts from the cultural wars. Take a look, for example, at this exchange over Prof. Sternstein’s recent article on the History News Network:

John J. Brennan, III: Thank you, Professor Sternstein. The most disturbing aspect of this is the utter obliviousness of Bellesiles and his defenders to the damage to the cause of honesty. Certainly, it demonstrates their willingness to sacrifice a core value of human discourse if it advances their agendas.

Clayton E. Cramer: If I had to pick a sentence that describes the problem that Mr. Brennan is observing, it is that this is a crowd that thinks, “What is the meaning of ‘is’?” is a clever response to a question.

Steve Lowe: This is exactly the kind of comment that irritates liberals like me: the implicit comparison of Bellesiles and Clinton, as though the fact that both are weasels means all liberals or, indeed, anyone favoring gun control or, indeed, anyone who isn’t currently heating the tar and plucking the chickens for Bellesiles is also a weasel.

I think it’s possible to believe that Bellesiles is wrong, that Clinton was a good president with _serious_ personal shortcomings, and even be ambivalent about gun control.

Damning people because of their associations of beliefs is exactly what Prof. Sternstein is criticizing, Mr. Cramer.

Ekleketos: There were plenty of honest liberals out there, instead the dnc attached itself to the butt of a lying criminal. They were so preoccupied with not admitting they were wrong about the man that they defended anything he did. Much as [Wiener] is defending Bellesiles.

Thus in many respects the Bellesiles controversy is simply another postmodern pothole, albeit a big one, in the increasingly bumpy road of contemporary academic culture.

UPDATE

Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal takes a similar view:

From the start, the Bellesiles battle was portrayed as the usual one–between right-wing gun owners and left-wing gun regulators. But to look at “Arming America” that way is to miss the real divide.

Yes, the spokesmen for the opposing interest groups threw themselves into the fray. But soon the real split became one within academia. It pitted those who cared about scholarly integrity against those who were happy to ignore, or promote, Mr. Bellesiles’s shoddy, perhaps fraudulent, work if it helped their political agenda.