Two kinds of outrage, two kinds of scholarship: MGH versus SSHRC

A major German daily newspaper recently ran a story telling that some cheeseheaded bureaucrat in the state government of Bavaria has proposed to bring the Monumenta Germaniae Historica project into a single humanities research cluster, alongside, for instance, the research group on the philosopher Leibniz, ostensibly in order to save on administrative costs.

Monumenta Germaniae Historica (Historical Monuments of Germany) is a historical research project which has been going on for about a century and a half. Its chief purpose is to edit and publish medieval historical documents which illustrate the history of Germany: which includes in its scope all the German-speaking countries, France (at least to the time of Charlemagne), northern Italy, and the Papacy. It is one of the Great Historical Enterprises. The Benedictine monk David Knowles published a wonderful book of that title in 1962; he relates the history of four enterprises to edit and publish historical texts: the Maurists (French), the Bollandists (Belgian), the Rolls Series (English), and Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Among the four, however, MGH is the only one which has continued to consistently produce works of an excellent standard of scholarship up to today.

In actual fact the proposal to merge the MGH with other humanities research projects is a proposal to destroy the MGH. Once its identity and definite aim have been destroyed, it will cease to function, scholars will cease to contribute to it—for free, mind you: the administrative cost of the MGH maintains a handful of staff who run the office; the actual work is normally done for free by outside scholars. Melt down the identity of the MGH, scholars stop contributing, and you end up with a useless anachronism, accomplishing nothing, but going on getting funds for another decade… which is the normal end product of such outside interference by bureaucrats.

Happily, this may not happen. Germans respect scholarship—especially history, where they are unrivalled—and care deeply about its contribution to German culture today. Hence a daily newspaper can carry a story like this, and, though in another country it might not make a stir, in Germany it surely will. Germans will get uppity to protect their history. So MGH may be yet be safe.

I bring up the MGH to contrast it with another kind of scholarship which is far more popular in humanities departments in the English-speaking world. And I can illustrate it with another newspaper stir.

Do you remember a few years ago a story in the Globe and Mail about a professor who got funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council to study the history of strippers in Vancouver? Canadians were (so said the newspapers) outraged that the government was taking taxpayers’ money and using it to fund such ludicrous work.

I happen to have read this professor’s work and it is a textbook example of what is wrong with history departments in Canada. In fact it shows quite clearly the truth of what John C. Wright wrote about Leftism here: http://www.scifiwright.com/2014/03/the-unified-field-theory-of-madness/

“All behaviors, no matter how obviously disgusting and wrongheaded and warped, no matter how unsuccessful by any measure, … by this perverse Leftist logic must be granted honor and glory precisely because they are dishonorable. … Not once or twice or some random percent of the time, but in every case and in one hundred percent of the time, driven by the inexorable logic of their theory, the Left must reward and laud the destructive and self destructive behaviors of the vice-ridden and barbaric and backward men within the nation.”

This professor writes about the history of the profession of stripping in Vancouver, chiefly in the first half of the twentieth century. The way she presents it, every woman who strips is an artist, a crusader for sexual freedom, a martyr: in short, a hero and role model. To everyone else, she doles out blame or praise following precisely the criteria outlined above: in proportion as the person is unsuccessful, barbaric, and immoral, is he rewarded with praise; in proportion as the person is successful, civilized, and moral, is he blamed, punished, insulted, and shamed. Christians who tried to close strip clubs and banish stripping from the city are the chief villains in the story. They get the Cruella De Vil treatment. The police come in for a fair share of it. One would think that the patrons of the stripping business, without whom it could never exist, would earn some part in the heroism of the strippers: but oddly enough, the men who frequented strip clubs get little credit for supporting this fine art, because they bear the mark of Cain of being mostly white, straight, and middle-class. Instead it’s the strip club owners themselves, and the people who worked in the business as stage hands, cleaners, and so forth, who carry some of the reflected glory of the strippers.

Not only does this professor exhibit Leftist inversion of good and evil in the content of her history, she even does it in the manner of her writing. She consciously adopts coarse language and peppers her writing with four-letter-words; she also (what is very fashionable in academia today) uses slang from queer culture without explanation. She has also been quoted in other contexts criticizing Disney for its depiction of women and praising pornography as “having the moral high ground.”

In short, this professor is a perfect Tenured Radical. This is a most egregious example of what the government has been funding, and the rest of us have been enduring, as ‘scholarship’ in Canada.

The MGH presents a useful illustration of the difference between constructive and destructive scholarship. By editing and publishing medieval documents, written chiefly on thousand-year-old parchment, MGH preserves them for later generations and also makes them widely available (especially since most of them are now posted for free online: http://www.dmgh.de). In doing this it performs a service to all of us, because it makes knowledge of the past possible. (C.S. Lewis said that we urgently need intimate knowledge of the past in order to have something to contrast to the present.) Moreover as a project receiving German tax money, the MGH can justify itself because it contributes to building up German identity, German pride, and the continuance of German tradition.

This SSHRC-funded research on strippers, like much of the work that goes on in humanities departments today, publishes and preserves no documents, and therefore does not make any knowledge of the past possible beyond the interpretation of this one professor. Fair enough; we cannot all be editors of texts: but the Leftist method makes the work itself entirely destructive. It inverts good and evil, beauty and ugliness, truth and falsehood; it promotes perversion as health, vice as virtue, failure as success... What’s more, by vilifying whites, law-abiders, Christians, and in general everything traditional and civilized, it contributes to the overall academic project of destroying Canadian identity and tradition. And, not least, Canadian pride: for once more it presents a story of bigoted, barbaric Canadians persecuting the righteous saints of a minority group. For pornographers and strippers, the laurel crown; for the rest of us, sackcloth and ashes.

And both of these projects are allotted government funding.

Canadians are sometimes accused of anti-intellectualism, especially under the reign of Stephen Harper, because they aren’t screaming themselves hoarse to acclaim the work of SSHRC-funded scholars like this one. “Look at the Germans, who love their academic projects and want their government to fund them!” Well, look at German scholarship and then look at what passes for scholarship in Canada. Better say that Canadians have a sound estimate of its value, and rightly want their money back.