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At 08:05 PM 1/22/02 -0600, you wrote: >medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture > >Of course, being terminally suspicious is as dangerous as being terminally >naive, not to mention being just plain unfriendly. If, when I meet >someone, I greet his self-presentation only with suspicion, he will think >me rather unfair, prejudiced, and inhumane. But much worse than that, my >own suspicion, if that's what dominates, will actually block my chances of >ever understanding his self-presentation. agreed. i personally don't suspect everyone as a default position. it's only when they a) protest too much (as did gregory vii), b) show significant contradictions btwn their avowed aims and their means, c) something doesn't make sense when i take them at their word. >If a person has given off evidence that suggests he is untrustworthy, then >I rightly approach him gingerly. But in the absence of evidence that >someone is untrustworthy, the courteous and indeed, human thing to do is >to accord him an open mind and conditional trust until such time as he >gives evidence that he is not worthy of trust. in interpersonal interaction, i agree. as a historian, i don't have to worry as much about the feelings of the people in question. nor is my hermeneutics of suspicion necessarily a negative judgment. i often go out of my way to try and understand why someone would do something as bizarre as present clovis as a christian hero, or torture someone in order to save his soul. i expend considerable energy trying to understand sympathetically even people i don't like (i don't much like ademar of chabannes, for example; i like glaber much better). but that doesn't mean i need to take them at their self-representation; nor does that mean i think they're hypocrites. i don't think gregory vii was a hypocrite. quite the contrary, he was particularly dangerous and destructive precisely because he really believed in what he was doing. >This I think was John Wickstrom's point and the point of the posting to >which he was responding. Unless we have evidence that people in historic >texts do not mean what they say, evidence they are lying or self-deceived, >we are unjust, simply on a human level, to attribute such dishonest >motives to them. That's not terminal naivete but simple human decency. agreed. i wdn't suspect without some indices. i just find that many historians have very high thresholds of credulity before they will begin to suspect that something's afoot. >All of us have mixed motives, [augustine smiles down on you] >few of us are totally integrated, well-adjusted, at peace with ourselves, >honest about ourselves to ourselves, let alone in our self-presentation to >others. agreed. >But if I move from that fact, which I think most of us would agree with, >to the conclusion that I must therefore greet all strangers from other >cultures or even from another neighborhood (including the Other >Neighborhood of the distant past) with a suspicious mind that pigeonholes >him as self-deceived or a deliberate deceiver, i'm not sure what windmill you're tilting at, but if you think this is my position, i've misrepresented myself, for which i apologize. >I have abused the argument from silence, filled in the gaps in the >evidence on the basis of my view of human nature. my complaint is that too often we abuse the argument from silence in the wrong way -- that somehow absence in the text means absence in reality (which is true most of the time, but almost a default position with most historians). >We do not like it when people treat us this way. When people look at >"foreign" cultures this way, we call it ethnic or racial prejudice. We >should extend the same courtesy to cultures from the past. that really depends. if the person applies the same standards to his own, then i don't think it's prejudice; and if we are so scrupulously polite that we cannot allow ourselves to either suspect, or look for patterns of (self-) deceit, then i think we make ourselves bigger fools than we need be. in any case, most of the people we meet in history about whom we have sufficient evidence are public figures with public personae, and applying the ethics of human encounter to them strikes me as just a tad too generous. i'm sure bill clinton didn't inhale and didn't have sex with that woman. >It's painful for historians because it means we often must say, "I don't >know what really motivated this person. But here's what he says motivated >him. I do not have clear evidence of other motives so,until such evidence >emerges from the gaps and silences of the tragically pockmarked historical >record, I have to suspend judgment and report what he reports of himself." it's actually not painful at all. it's really easy to take that path. it's working with the texts carefully, looking for the inconsistencies, examining tone, etc. that takes time, attention, risky speculation, and probably incurring the wrath of people offended by a picture of their "heroes" (eg the idea that Charlemagne had a millennial interest in his coronation date of 6000). >Of course, we will make use of all possible methods to extract some hint >of evidence independent of the person's self-reporting to discover better >his motives. But we have to stick to the evidence if we want to be fair, >decent human beings. i'm not sure what "sticking to the evidence" means. plenty of historians ignore the evidence when it doesn't suit their picture, others take small indices and build vast cases around them. evidence is nothing without exegesis, and "sticking" to evidence means different things to different exegetes. as for the desire to be decent and fair human beings, as i said, these are public figures, powerful people, and many of them would laugh at your scruples as they took advantage of you. >Now, of course, if one believes as a matter of principle that human >relationships are built on conflict and mistrust, that trust/love is >actually a tool used by power-elites to manipulate the weaker and that >people would be better off to learn to discover the subtext under the >altruistic self-presentations of people (either in the present or the >past), then one will be inclined to say, "I don't know for sure, but I >simply do not believe this person's self-presentation is credible." But >I've now filled in the gap based on my philosophy/religious beliefs about >human nature: is human society fundamentally and inevitably driven by >class conflict or personal conflict or whatever form of conflict one >wishes to highlight? In other words, one follows Hobbes or Marx or Nietzsche. or augustine who, i believe, called it libido dominandi, which is not the driving force of everyone, but does tend to characterize those who strive for power in the political world. hence, we historians have far more types like boniface viii than celestine to deal with in our documents. in any case, we need not be doctrinaire about it. just balanced. so we don't reduce suspicion to doctrinaire projection, nor sympathy to terminal credulity. >In my appeal (which I intend as an echo of and endorsement the principles >enunciated by John Wickstrom and Frank Morgret) to employ at least a >conditional sympathy, a hermeneutic of trust until one has clear evidence >for suspicion as the decent and humane approach to strangers, I, of >course, am operating out of underlying philosophical/religious beliefs >about human nature--that we are made for trust, that self-defense requires >us to be wary when we have evidence of untrustworthyness but not before we >have evidence, that a general suspicion of people is dehumanizing and >depersonalizing. This philosophy assumes that love, not power, makes the >world go round. Hobbes and Nietzsche thought it terminally naive. you might add augustine here, altho i know you could insist that he does believe that love makes the world go round -- just not the political world. >But it does seem to me to be implicit when one denounces racial and ethnic >prejudice or when one tells a group of students heading off for a semester >in a strange culture to "go native" as much as possible, to be alert, yes, >but not to surround oneself with a coccoon of one's own prejudices but to >conditionally drop them and have an open mind toward one's hosts, to put >the best construction possible on their actions, however new and strange >they might be, unless and until they have proven themselves untrustworthy >or dangerous. agreed. completely agreed. and i don't think i cd have written a book on ademar of chabannes -- a curmudgeonly, egotistical, ambitious, resentful, libelous, liar, sycophant and hatemonger -- without so doing. >"Proven" themselves, of course--there's the rub. What constitutes proof, >evidence that the self-presentation of the person from the past is not >what it seems to be but something different, opposite, dishonest? as i said above: contradictions. like the arrogant tone with which gregory vii demands humility from henry iv. radical disconnect btwn medium and message. francis of assissi? another matter. >That's the great challenge of historical interpretation as well as >cultural anthropology in the present. In the end, much depends on our own >honesty with ourselves. If we are engaged ourselves in a self-deception, >burdened by a conflicted conscience i'm not sure conflicted consciences are a path to self-deception. unless i misunderstand what you mean. i'd have thought that someone without a conflicted conscience, for whom the world is simple black and white, is the one likely to be prone to self-deception. >and so forth, we are far more likely to be overly, unfairly, and >dehumanizingly suspicious of those we meet--it's a common mechanism for >diverting attention from our own lies to ourselves by seeing the other >person as the liar. i'm struck by your constant recourse to "dehumanizing". i think that self-deception, disguise, even hypocrisy, are typically human traits, just as much as trust and openness are. i don't think i dehumanize someone by suspecting that they're telling me at best half-truths. de-humanizing is when you project pure malice on people, consider them either beasts or agents of evil. i think that in seeing people as complex personalities only part of which gets presented publicly, and even less gets presented in literary personas, is just seeing them as human beings. > C. S. Lewis's _The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe_, which I am > teaching to students right now as a fine epitome of these virtues, shows > this very clearly with the character Edmund, whose fundamental problem is > lying to himself. On the second page of the story he denies that he's > tired when he is tired, which leads him to be rude and mean to his older > sister. He knows the White Witch is dangerous (ignores _evidence_ of her > untrustworthyness) but enters into an alliance (trusts) her, in the > process being willing to betray his siblings to death. From that point > onward, when his sister tells him what Mr. Tumnus the faun has said about > the White Witch (that's she's dangerous), Edmund has to use hermeneutic > of suspicion on that statement in order to salvage his own (misplaced) > trust of her. Then he has to lie about having been in Narnia, betraying > his sister who had thought she now had a cowitness and would be believed > by Peter and Susan. This continues: when all four enter Narnia, Lucy > wants to trust the Robin as a guide; Edmund once more employs hermeneutic > of suspicion: how do we know we can trust the Robin. But of course > Edmund is the real liar here, the untrustworthy one. nice analysis, and edmund is a good case of a personality well worth suspecting. of course one can turn it around. he systematically trusts the wrong people. if we do history in which we trust the major players (all of whom are in a world where power and its corrupting influence are at work) and use a hermeneutic of suspicion on those who question their motivations, then we can end up like edmund. >It's a children's story, but it illustrates the basic principles I have >argued for. Who's right about human nature? Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, >Kant, Buddha, Jesus? Depending on how one answers that question, one will >suspend judgment about motives of people one meets, entertain their >self-presentations with conditional empathy, conditional trust, be highly >suspicious, etc. i wd rather handle the cases as they come than commit myself to [my own exegesis of] a "teaching". certainly buddha wd say that every persona we encounter (a fortiori on paper) is a veil thrown over reality, an intentional or uncs act of disguise. >I do believe the world would be a better place if we employed conditional >empathy until we have clear evidence of untrustworthyiness and deception. agreed. it wd also be a better place if people put more energy into being honest than into disguising themselves. and i think they are more likely to do so, the less successful disguises and deceit work out because people have good cr*p detectors. >But it's risky, of course. People have been known to get hurt that >way. On the other hand, it also permits the possibility of understanding >each other, indeed, of loving each other. But it's very risky. The >challenge is to take the decent, human risk of trusting the other while at >the same time being neither "terminally naive" (being reasonably alert for >evidence of untrustworthiness) nor terminally hostile and suspicious. agreed. >But I would be the first to admit that few of us manage this politeness, >decency, and courtesy toward the people of the past whose lives we handle >in our historical work. somehow politeness and courtesy are not the traits i would have chosen -- empathy, generosity, perhaps. i heard a good distinction btwn politeness and civility: politeness is when you say things so that there won't be a fight; civility is when you can say things and there won't be a fight. i think we owe our characters empathy, generosity, civility. politeness we can save for the living. >Perhaps it helps to try to treat them as we would have them treat us if >they were writing books and articles about our self--presentation and >hidden motives. agreed. altho all that consideration can get pretty boring. now let me ask you this, since it's been in the back of my mind as i read your recommendations. i have what i think is clear evidence that ecclesiastical leaders (theologians, bishops, computists) engaged in a systematic effort to "cook the books" on when the year 6000 was coming. http://www.mille.org/people/rlpages/cchart.html this is a multi-generational affair (goes on for over 600 years) and shows an extraordinary consistency. as long as 6000 is far away, everyone is happy to invoke it as a way to tell people to be patient. when it gets close, however, an extraordinay consensus arises to switch dating systems and make no mention of the earlier chronology when it hits its year 6000. this happens twice (500 CE and 801 CE). as paul freedman once said, my devise should be: "6000: coincidence? i think not." the standard response of my colleagues is to say, "nonsense, such conspiracies of silence don't exist" and "are you saying that these good people espoused a chronology because they were trying to manipulate popular opinion and dampen apocalyptic excitation?" yes i am. and i have a millennium-long pattern of evidence that no one has explained otherwise. but for some reason, medievalists seem virtually incapable of imagining that there might be this kind of broad, self-interested, and (certainly by the standards of those whom they were misleading) dishonest consensus. now i know these good clerics had all sorts of good and responsible reasons for changing these chronologies as they approached the year 6000, and that those who espoused them in earlier ages probably believed them with a whole heart. but that wholeheartedness was largely because they wdn't have to deal with the consequences (much like computer programers in the 1960s who created the y2k problem because it was easier and they wdn't be around to deal with it when it happened). i'm not condemning them or accusing them of being inhuman. but i'm also not ready to say (as i've heard from numerous scholars), "they were probably changing the dating systems out of a concern for accuracy." is this case relevant to our discussion? richard