Abstract
Plenty of inveterate book-readers worry aloud and regularly about the likely elimination of commercial publishing due to screenal presentations of information, debating more the “when” than the “whether.” Since one cannot easily search for terms or ideas in a printed book, even one with an excellent index, and, worse still, cutting and pasting materials is much harder working from inked paper than with pixels, anxiety among the shrinking bibliophilic constituency is rational. Younger students upon entering an academic office filled with bound volumes are likely to exclaim, “Wow! So many books!” with the same intonation they use when seeing the splendid fishes at the Baltimore or San Diego or Atlanta aquaria—peering into a world of mystery and colorful exteriors which will forever seem strange to them.
Yet as troubling as this global tendency surely is for publishers and consumers of printed materials, particularly of The Academic Monograph, it remains true that CS last year received for review over 1,300 new books, so the end of print is not quite yet with us. A more insidious worm in the bud involves readers’ attitudes toward the work they are asked to evaluate, either for publishers prior to publication, or by review-journals after the fact. (“The Courage to Publicize One’s Convictions” [CS, November 2010] deals with one aspect of this situation.) An intriguing study of an eighteenth century social theorist lately arrived in the journal’s office for review consideration, fairly brief, 45 percent endnotes and sources, brought out by a fine university press, expensively priced. It opens with “Acknowledgments” that consume no fewer than four complete pages of earnest thanks, distributed by the author among ten funding agencies and foundations, several think-tanks, scores of intellectual sponsors, scholarly helpers, and, of course, the long-suffering spouse and children; surprisingly, no mention of the family dog. It will be almost impossible to find a reviewer of the book who has not been preemptively eliminated for consideration by virtue of having already participated, even to some small extent, in its production over the decade it was in process.
Profuse, even belabored thanks at the beginning of a monograph have become of late a cliché in academic publishing—especially, it seems, in products of the most highly regarded presses—partly one suspects to legitimate the book prior to being read, partly to defuse anticipated criticisms by reviewers. Chastising such a book, collectively created, means thereby attacking dozens of interested parties rather than only its apparent author. (Additionally, the Culture of Politeness has overtaken scholarly discourse in a way that has not always been the case, about which more below.) When Erving Goffman published The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (first as a dissertation at Edinburgh University in 1956, then as the famous Doubleday Anchor paperback in 1959), his acknowledgements occupy 40 percent of a single small page, wherein he thanks eight people, including his wife and the Ford Foundation for what was surely a very small grant. W. I. Thomas’ The Unadjusted Girl (1923)—which gave sociology “the four wishes”—bears no acknowledgments. The Lynds in Middletown (1929) use part of one page for thanks, half of which goes to their three female “field assistants,” in addition to six scholars and one funding source. Middletown in Transition (1937) omits the scholars and gives its single acknowledgments page mostly, again, to the five female “field staff” members, plus the unnamed citizenry of “Middletown.” Peter Berger thanks one of his teachers, his wife, and two friends in Invitation to Sociology (1963), and C. Wright Mills uses two full pages of thanks in The Power Elite (1956) at the end of the book. Yet he consumes 1.5 pages of that defending his methods of composition, leaving only a half-page to acknowledge help from the SSRC and three other institutions, plus five helpers (wife included), and 13 scholars and writers.
Charles H. Page, ASR editor (1957-1960), first chair of the newly founded Princeton sociology department (1960), and author of Class and American Sociology (1940), begins his single acknowledgment page with the names of his wife and mother, then thanks 17 scholars (including Robert MacIver, Willard Waller, E.A. Ross, Merle Curti, Robert Lynd, and Joseph Dorfman), plus two other helpers. This same, ancient scholar looked at me during a theory seminar in 1973 (his age then close to mine now) and said “The critic’s throne is the easiest to occupy, Mr. Sica.” He was not pleased with my easy and ignorant dismissal of Emile Durkheim’s oeuvre as the work of a political conservative, pointing out that I could read Socialism and Saint Simon to relieve my blindness to the facts of the case. Similarly, well-bred children still can hear, even outside the Midwest, “if you cannot say something nice, say nothing.” And like this motherly incantation first heard when very young, Page’s Dutch-uncle response to my short-sightedness has resounded in my head ever since.
I suspect that similar sentiments live on within the “moral compass” of many U.S. scholars after they repeatedly hear hortatory injunctions about kindness, fairness, balance, and reasonableness. Recently CNN ran a story entitled “Stop Sugarcoating the Bible: The Bible is raw and brutal, with vivid descriptions of murder, witchcraft and erotic sex. A Christian author argues that it was written that way on purpose to connect with real people, and that it’s too often run through amodern-day politeness filter” (published online, February 26, 2012; emphases added). Who invented this “filter,” if, that is, it actually functions beyond the social circle of the upper bourgeoisie? A convergence of many social forces, surely.
One enterprising comparative literature professor at Johns Hopkins has systematized his felt need for broad-scale politeness in a best-selling book, Choosing Civility (Forni, 2002) and the accompanying “Civility Web Site” of The Johns Hopkins Civility Project. From this volume hoi polloi can adopt “The 25 Rules of Considerate Conduct,” none of which would have surprised Queen Victoria or Jane Austen. Number Five, though, speaks to our epoch rather than theirs: “Be inclusive.” Since most people’s circle of friends remains stubbornly circumscribed via similar backgrounds and beliefs, such a rule might be pushing the envelope, unless one happens to live in Queens, New York—the most “diverse” area of U.S. urban geography. Number 6, (Speak Kindly), Number 7 (Don’t Speak Ill), and Number 12 (Be Agreeable) all work against scholarly candor even if they surely benefit everyday interaction. And they seem to conflict with No. 17: “Assert yourself.” Teaching today’s citizens how to behave has brought Professor Forni acclaim, including the 2009 Bravo Award from the Association of Image Consultants International. One wonders how Professor Forni handles the tricky issue of reviewing scholarly publications.
The multiple and regular attacks upon rudeness in our society have borne fretful fruit, at least among younger writers. A steady stream of emails to the journal office beats out the same rhythm of self-restraint and circumspection, even if on differently shaped drums. Two that just arrived are symptomatic of a particular frame of mind, both from talented junior scholars, one of each gender. The male wrote that “Given that I hope it [will] not generate enemies, I’m planning to shop the piece to a few colleagues for feedback this week,” suggesting that the reading from trusted advisors would not be so much along substantive grounds as a check for what might be construed as offensive to some imagined readership. “Not generating enemies” can come at a high price for the scholar, so I counseled him not to worry overmuch about niceties, but instead to focus on the accuracy of content.
One of the most elaborate and “sensitive” emails arrived not long ago, also from a bright young scholar with excellent credentials. The invited reviewer wrote to say that the book in question was indeed well within her range of knowledge and research, but: “I am reluctant to say no, but I suspect I do have a major disagreement with the general orientation of the book, given that its beginning premise sounds opposed to the conclusions of my own recent work. I would be glad to find another person to review it, however, if you do not have others on your list. Please let me know if you’d like me to ask colleagues.” I responded: “A legitimate intellectual difference of opinion is not a ‘conflict of interests.’ If you want to review the book, we’ll send it to you, unless you really believe that it would be impossible for you to give it a fair reading. If so, then names of other possible reviewers would be helpful.” She came back with “OK, if you would still like me to do it, then I will.”
I continued the dialogue, sensing some unfinished business: “If, after getting into the book, you are so bent out of shape that you can’t write a useful review, let us know, and we’ll start over looking for another reviewer . . . ” and at that point, she delivered the defining sentence, the one which Goffman, Mills, the Lynds, and Berger would have highlighted in their own ways: “I wrote a tough review once that really offended the author, so I am sensitive about not doing that again!” The phrase “I am sensitive” stood out for me like the immortal scene from the 1960 eponymous film when all the gladiators say seriatim, “I am Spartacus!” to the murderous displeasure of their Roman overseers. It became morally impossible for his colleagues not to protect Spartacus by lying about their true identities. “I am insensitive” is no more acceptable today among the literate class than “I am not Spartacus” would have been in 71 BCE among the rebellious gladiators.
At this point I thought it was time to move our discussion to another level, so I responded: “I’ve written dozens of tough reviews that offended everybody. . . it’s part of the job. You’ll survive. And the discipline will be strengthened because of it.” Her answer was as emblematic of her generation, I imagine, as my words were of mine: “Interesting to hear you say that, as everyone else I’ve spoken to has told me that writing nice reviews is just a convention that we are supposed to respect.” Who, one must wonder, is “everyone else”? Without this key datum, I could only hypothesize, and not probably with much exactness, but this in essence is how I responded to her apparent belief that “writing nice reviews” has become the coin of the realm:
Well, things do change. The relatively recent influx of “nice people” into the discipline who were schooled to get along in a diverse society and not make “scenes,” has created an intellectual environment that is very different from what preceded it by a couple of hundred years. Reviews that are honest in disagreement, elegantly written, informative, and fair-minded, without always being “nice,” have been an essential part of intellectual life ever since Samuel Johnson and Voltaire were writing theirs. In fact, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, Isaiah Berlin, Robert K. Merton, Susan Sontag, George Steiner, Diana and Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and a host of other “serious” intellectuals wrote extraordinary reviews regularly, and very few of them would have been considered “nice” by any standard—for instead they were uniformly smart, informative, even inspiring for readers less learned or less gifted in exposition than the reviewers.
Perhaps the tragedy of 9/11 made everybody in the United States more sentimental and hypersensitive, but that is just a notion. The more important issue is that for lots of reasons, some of them obvious, others obscure, that part of the scholar’s duty and right, to analyze other scholars’ work honestly, has been buried under an avalanche of Niceness—and also, let’s be honest as they say in D.C., because the next grant proposal might be vetted by somebody who can torpedo the whole thing if their last book was blasted in CS or elsewhere by the proposal writer. There is considerable log-rolling in some fields: you cite me, I’ll cite you, and together we will protect and boost our careers. Nothing intellectually useful comes out of that, any more than does good government in Washington through similar mechanisms. There’s also a venerable tradition among the more selective institutions of being careful not to trash one’s colleagues because “we’re all geniuses here, and who can say otherwise?”, but that’s another angle entirely, and not probably the most important one.
So ended my email. My guesses for this sea-change in sentiment could be all wrong, yet the fact remains: an increasing number of scholars hesitate to tell the truth in print about other scholars’ work, which makes running a book review journal an obstacle course, where signed reviews are the norm.
As is my wont, I return to some older sources in order to “win a purchase” on the issue at hand, to get some perspective. Sam Johnson’s Dictionary (1755) is always useful: “polite: glossy, smooth; elegant of manners.” His examples include Newton’s Opticks, with its “polite surfaces” that reflect light well. If we keep things smooth, without bumps, free of potholes, unlumpy, life moves along gracefully, protected from embarrassing disagreements of the kind that mar family gatherings or business deals gone sour. On the other hand, Johnson also provides ammunition for the contrary position: “Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense” (The Idler, No. 60). I hear Charles Page’s gentle snarl echoed in this observation, two hundred years after Johnson. And on October 9, 1747, Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son, “Politeness and good breeding are absolutely necessary to adorn any, or all other good qualities or talents. . . The scholar, without good-breeding, is a pedant; the philosopher, a cynic; the soldier, a brute; and every man disagreeable.” One assumes that Professor Forni at Hopkins would embrace Chesterfield’s advice—until he caught up again with Johnson’s remark to Boswell while touring the Hebrides on August 21, 1773: “Politeness is fictitious benevolence.”
One of the finest modern British epigrammatists was Bertrand Russell’s sometime brother-in-law, Logan Pearsall Smith, who wrote in Afterthoughts (1931): “If we treat people too long with that pretended liking called politeness, we shall find it hard not to like them in the end,” a truth which surely applies to the printed word as much as to social interaction. When the critical sense, rather than being sharpened by practice and growing skill, is blunted from the outset, so that everything one reads becomes “interesting” (the weakest scholarly compliment) or allegedly “exciting,” then so-called “discourse” dies on the vine, and what we have in its place is harmless chatter, insipid backyard complimenting of the neighbor’s zoysia grass and new lawn furniture. The main reason people become intellectuals or scholars or researchers is because their minds light up with irresistible chemical explosions when new and genuinely thrilling ideas enter them—like the first time a fundamentalist sophomore reads about the Protestant ethic, and finally understands things about his or her family’s dynamics which seemed inscrutable before.
Let us, then, ward off the temptation to join in that ongoing campaign, suitable for grammar school and church functions but wholly alien to “the life of the mind,” which The Oxford Companion to the English Language (1992) calls “Nice-Nellyism”: “Excessive prudishness in speech or behavior. . . a genteelism,” e.g., “Mr. Pyles attributes much of the nice-nellyism that blighted polite speech and writing during the nineteenth century to Webster’s Puritan prudishness.” In a culture which happily accepts and pays for a book called The F-Word, assembled by an OED editor and published by no less a house than Random (1995; 3third edition, Oxford University Press 2009), we do not suffer from prudishness regarding body parts and functions. Our special and newly formed version of Nice-Nellyism is different, in banishing to the outhouse scholarly criticism that might be interpreted by somebody or other as “harsh” or “unfeeling” or “off the wall” or “unsupportable,” et cetera. If an entire generation of bright young scholars is schooled to believe that one should only write complimentary commentary about research which falls squarely within one’s zone of competence, the future for serious thought and analysis does not look promising; worse, those so socialized will have been cheated of their right and their responsibility as intellectuals: to tell it like it is.