On Fri, 26 Jul 1996, Richard Landes wrote:
> look forward to meeting you someday, Dennis.
>
> On Fri, 26 Jul 1996, Dennis D. Martin wrote:
>
> > So a pro-aristocracy bias is one of the handful of biases that cannot
> > contribute to insight and advancing scholarship?
>
> not my contention. but a pro-aristocracy bias is likely to blind you to
> the cases (legion) where a pro-aristocratic documentation is pulling the
> wool over your eyes. sure it can advance, and it can prevent really
> mis-conceived reconstructions for advancing, but it is very unlikely to
> break free fromt he thrall of the (very few) people who tell us what it
> was like.
I'll try one more time and if we continue to talk past each other, will
not belabor the rest of the list with this. My comments here relate both
to what your comments above and below.
Rarely, if at all, was the argument that controls over vernacular
translations of the Bible or lay preaching couched in terms of "you folks
are commoners, i.e., you are not aristocrats, so we cannot give you free
license to preach or translate because it would undermine social
stability. Rather, the arguments ran along the lines of "controls are
necessary in any ordered society." It is the modern scholar, e.g., Prof.
Landes, who inserts the following reasoning: the people doing the
controlling, writing the rules, were aristocrats. Hence their desire for
social stability was also a bias in favor of an aristocratic-peasant
society. De facto it was, because this was the only culture they had
known. They could not conceive of a mass-commoner society--I don't know
of any ancient or medieval culture that had known such. The story of the
modern Western European world is the story of the rise of the commons and
its eventual triumph (but not over the aristocracy; recall that the
absolutist monarchs of the early modern period first employed the
commons/third estate against the aristocracy to eliminate the aristocracy
as a real power, then the commons eventually triumphed over the tyrannous
kings).
Stating that viewing things from the perspective of the aristocracy
(even if as a thought-experiment) blinds me, pulls the wool over my eyes,
whereas looking at things through the eyes of the commoners tells me how
it really was strikes me as privileging one over the other, not taking
them as complementary.
I am, however, grateful, that you have some of your commitments, even if
you deny they are commitments. We can agree to disagree about the
terminology; the effect on your reading of history is visible, I think.
>
> > A pro-stability bias
> > does not have equal standing at the bar with a pro-commoner bias?
>
> i believe i argued that stability and pro-commoner bias are not mutually
> exclusive. it is the aristocratic claim that only they can assure
> stability that makes me uneasy. that, i believe was the official position
> of the augustinian church.
>
> > Having
> > lived in stable society most of our lives, we can afford, perhaps, the
> > luxury of a bias in favor of instability and revolution. But, looking
> > down the road a bit, stability and prevention of anarchy becomes more
> > attractive to some of us.
>
> granted. and we need to understand how to deal with instability without
> making resort to the kind of "solutions" that the church of the 13th-14th
> cns came up with.
I did not resort to those solutions. I said they are
criticizable. But I asked you to acknowledge what appears to me
to be a fairly sizeable chip on your shoulder even as I acknowledge my
commitments and hermeneutic privilegings.
Dennis Martin
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