The Uses and Disadvantages of Historovox For Life

Just 2, ok.

2) ‘Historovox’ affords a distorted view.

I think you really need to specify more. This initial version is unfortunately close to “all perspective is bias”, a comment which isn’t terribly helpful to anyone. I think Corey (and you) have something more specific in mind about the nature of the distortion, and I think it’s important to dig into that so we can talk about it properly.

Each of the following is a direct quotation from Corey’s Historovox piece (linked at the top of the OP):

Perhaps the answer lies in a new genre of journalism that forgoes the pedestrian task of reporting the news in favor of explaining it through the lens of academic research.

There’s one thing that’s missing from the world of the explainers, though: facts.

There’s a bad synergy at work in the Historovox – as I call this complex of scholars and journalists – between the short-termism of the news cycle and the longue duree-ism of the academy.

The task is not to provide useful knowledge to the present; it is to insist on, to keep a record of, the most seemingly useless counter-knowledge from the past

Based on these pieces (and I hope I successfully grabbed an acceptable summary!), I would edit (2) to say the following:

2a) Historovox presents as scholarship but actually functions in the same way as day to day news reporting.

2b) Historovox is worse than day to day news reporting because its pretense of scholarship lends bad work more authority.

For my own part, if I’m prepared to concede 2a, then I think 2b follows naturally and Corey’s point is made. I am not, at this time, prepared to concede 2a. In my response to Corey’s post, I raised some specific concerns about the examples in the article. Here, I am less sure how to respond. I’ve addressed the top half (roughly) of your post up to now, and this is the part that I understood and felt comfortable with. I want to say something about the rest, and I feel I should preface this with I don’t have a clue what you’re saying. I’m writing on largely in the hope that from my response you’ll be able to figure out where I got lost and help me recover. Thanks! A third read through the Nietzsche section in particular seems to have cleared up a surprising amount of my confusion. To anyone else lost, I recommend giving it that third go in between writing whatever response you had planned and actually hitting “Submit.” John, hopefully you’ll still point me in the right direction if I’ve gone astray here!

I think the middle paragraphs (with Moloch up to before “break the cycle”) are re-raising the idea that the issue is not Vox per se, but that the whole project which is Vox’s reason for being is fundamentally flawed. I don’t really feel the need to protect Vox from singling out here, since either they’re right or they really should have known better.

I’m confused as to what cycle we’re supposed to break. This looks like a tautology at first glance, but I’ve seen enough statements like this to suspect that this is a metaphor. I think the first cycle is the (something?) cycle which has resulted in Vox doing allegedly bad things up to now, and the second cycle is Vox itself (and media like it).

The Nietzsche… I don’t think it helps your point. As best I can tell, the contemplative, lacking vigor and action, risks turning into a “philistine”, and that this is very bad. Wikipedia tells me that by “philistine”, Nietzsche means more-or-less an anti-intellectual. Focusing in on my best guess at the crux of the matter, I think you still need to make the case that Nietzsche’s Faust/contemplative (a) has an opinion about the type of content they consume, and (b) that there is no comparatively compelling value to Vox-style explainers. To make a food analogy, I’m not convinced that (a) Faust cares about bananas, nor that (b) only Faust cares about bananas. I think I would want both, or at the very least one of them and an “ish” on the other, before I agreed that we should throw all the bananas in the dumpster.

I realize what I just said sounds kind of obvious, minus Nietzschean flourish for style points.

This was the response I was formulating, but wouldn’t have put it this succinctly. Well done!

But I think there’s a level at which what Corey is saying in that piece is kind of obvious.

Well yeah, except the part that’s wrong. But you acknowledge that, too:

There’s also a level at which it might be wrong. But better to agree about the obvious stuff first.

This is more or less the opposite of Corey’s approach, and I think Corey’s approach is correct, even if he gets poor results. Corey writes his essay because he is interested in what is wrong with Vox. I respond to Corey because I’m interested in what he’s done wrong.

‘The distortions we see in the mirror of Historovox reflect us. [//…] why do I read so many Explainers? What is it doing to me?’
I tried to gaze long into an abyss but it turned out to be only a mirror.

‘… perhaps academic literalism is diffused from the mainstream venues where scholars often publish. Vox in particular, setting out as it does to “explain the news,” has built a brand around a house style that blends earnest righteousness and complacent, self-satisfied wonkery.’ — CHE

and/but visavis framing, cf CJR on Why the Left Can’t Stand the NYTimes and/or [Nicholson Baker’s] Brain on Cable News

I had to look up “flack” but thankfully there’s the internet:

“The flack for the tobacco company took flak over his statement that cigarettes were not proven to cause cancer.”

Methinks the connection between Faust and “Historovox” needs elaboration. Why is Faust exemplary for the particular combination of academic and journalistic truth-seeking that Robin is talking about? Why are pure academic research and pure journalism less Faustian than the combination of the two?

The idea here is that if you have product A – a load-bearing device – that markets itself as stronger than B, when actually it’s pretty much the same, then A is worse. Because the customer is likely to trust it too much.

But what is the comparative product? I read that as claiming that vox (and 538, etc) do not inform readers any better than traditional journalism (not that they fail to inform people as well as a careful reading of academic work would do) and I’m not convinced that’s true.

The issue with Vox, it seems to me, is the attempt to combine the slow and the cold of the scholarly (critical) view to the speed and the heat of the hot take – i.e., internet journalism. I only scanned Corey’s article, so maybe he said this explicitly, maybe it was implied, or maybe he didn’t really say it all; but that is what I take to be the problem of historovox or whatever.

At least that’s my problem with it. I leave it for others to work out what problems cascade from the initial one ….Actually no, I won’t. First, the hot takes of journalism are meant to be part of the present political discourse, perhaps to shape, nudge, deform, or redirect the present political discourse in some way, but they’re decidedly within an eternal presentism native to journalism, but lately intensified by internet things. The scholarly, slow and cold, view may seek to do the above in various ways, but its modes for doing so are not and cannot be the same as hot take journalism – mostly for tactical and strategic reasons, and b/c the risk of erasing the virtues of the scholarly take are too great; it just becomes another shitty hot take. But more significant is the scholarly take’s real power, if it has any at all, does not come from being one take among many present takes. It comes from (ideally) being unconcerned with influence, status, shares, and likes. It comes from a remove, and thus seeks to take stock of all the active, fleeting, presentist takes from a historically informed and grounded perspective.
Second, there is something of a bait-n-switch going on with the Voxish model which I kinda got from scanning Corey’s piece. That is, it engages and adorns itself with the virtues of the scholarly while really just doing day to day, dopamine hit, internet hot take journalism. Prime example: the article/opinion piece on the day after Trump won the election in which Yglesias dispensed with the mask of the chin stroking, dispassionate, objective wonk. It was an absurd and telling burst of spleen, toddler-appropriate raging, and sub-Facebook level pissing in the wind.

The thing with Holbo’s Nietzsche’s Goethe’s Faust, which is a fun, entirely roundabout, intellectual catnip way of framing the problem, is it ought to make the tension of the action/non-action axis more explicit. The key is: “When the German ceases to be Faust there is no greater danger than that he will become a philistine and go to the Devil” and “The Goethean man is a preservative and conciliatory power – but with the danger, already mentioned, that he may degenerate to a philistine…” IOW, when the German/Faust/Goethe – for our purposes, the scholar of takes – wishes to become a “revolutionary” or an influencer with the hottest takes he/she merely becomes an ineffectual, mostly clueless sap overwhelmed by the never-ending, immediate contingencies that arise when one chooses to directly effect changes to the world. It requires a certain blind, willful, single-mindedness and determination that cuts directly against all “preservative and conciliatory power”, thus sending such souls straight to the devil.
IOOW, one can know or one can do. Even Goethe couldn’t manage both.

I fear we are just overthinking it, which comes of posting about it too much! Explainers are a new, hybrid sort of journalism and it comes with its own set of likely biases and weaknesses.

I think we agree, and I was thinking that when I wrote that any new form is likely to preserve some of the disadvantages of the older models while introducing new ones as well — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying new things.

First, the hot takes of journalism are meant to be part of the present political discourse, perhaps to shape, nudge, deform, or redirect the present political discourse in some way, but they’re decidedly within an eternal presentism native to journalism, but lately intensified by internet things. The scholarly, slow and cold, view may seek to do the above in various ways, but its modes for doing so are not and cannot be the same as hot take journalism – mostly for tactical and strategic reasons, and b/c the risk of erasing the virtues of the scholarly take are too great; it just becomes another shitty hot take. But more significant is the scholarly take’s real power, if it has any at all, does not come from being one take among many present takes.

This argument doesn’t apply only to vox. The same tension could be said of almost any journal of ideas (NYRB, Harper’s, CJR, take your pick). Vox clearly operates on a shorter time frame than any of those magazines, but they also aspire to, “be part of the present political discourse, perhaps to shape, nudge, deform, or redirect . . .”

My position is still, “criticize the failures and praise the successes.” I think there’s value in being clear about common categories of mistakes, but I don’t see that as a reason to abandon the entire project of publications trying to draw upon the knowledge and practices of both the academy and journalism.

Re: Schopenhauerian man?

Where is he ?

sidd

The Historovox as a hegemony seems to me like a version of the keys-under-the-lightpost fallacy: if everyone does what they know how to do, truth will emerge. The distinctiveness is a new way of training journalists. As a fallacy, it seems as good as any other. The criticism may be valid, but the perfect is the enemy of the good, and so on. Should we common readers be appalled by the whiplash, or should we understand that it is whiplash, and move on? That’s not in the wheelhouse of either the Historovox or the emerging Historovox-critique industry.

I think that Corey caught a great deal of well-deserved flack for his Historovox piece. Basically, he seems extremely unwilling to understand the argument that Jeet Heer, Matthew Yglesias and their ilk are making, and so his piece reads as an attempt to evade engaging with an actual honest disagreement.

Namely, the people he criticises already accept his point (1), that Trump is weak. Trump is foolish, ignorant, inattentive, greedy, disloyal, vindictive, deceitful, and so on and so on. How could he not be weak? A version of the actual argument being made is:

(1) Trump is comprehensively incompetent, and consequently unable to work the levers of power effectively, and even unable to effectively cover up his flagrant corruption. (Contrast Trump’s corruption with Dick Cheney’s, say.)
(2) As a result, he turns to overtly-illegal and authoritarian means to protect himself and achieve his ends.
(3) To defend him, mainstream Republicans have to overtly and explicitly defend his lies, corruption and general lawlessness.
(4) Their defence normalises and mainstreams fascist thinking and rhetoric at the highest levels of right-wing politics in a way that is genuinely new. (In contrast, the right-wing establishment was happy to use the Birchers, but also kept them away from the levers of power.)
(5) This leaves us in a very perilous situation with respect to the next Republican president: what if he is an authoritarian who is both intelligent and disciplined, unlike Trump?

Now, you could certainly dispute this argument (if you want to, David Neiwert is probably your man), but Corey does not seriously try. As a result, his article reads like an attempt to use a structural critique to cover up his inability to rebut the actual argument.

– and can’t we just tell the uncomfortable truth -(for a change)

There were – and there STILL are these… dudes like Mr.Robin -(or Mr. Greenwald?)
who really – REALLY completely misunderstood Von Clownstick – and now they write all these articles and blog post trying to argue that the FF isn’t what he always
WAS! –
IS!!
and
WILL BE!!!

But that’s NO excuse for all of this… this? … how do pundits love to call it?

”PIVOTING” from the real issue.

Or let’s call it: ”Downplaying the danger of a FF like Trump”.
JUST because America doesn’t let him realise all of his Fascistic Dreams!

Explainers are a new, hybrid sort of journalism and it comes with its own set of likely biases and weaknesses. This is just common sense. But it’s good to put it into words.

“Just common sense” in this context is the “triviality” of the famous two-step. If you actually set out to critique Vox-type journalism — if you want to “put it into words” — you start on the wrong foot:

it’s a mistake to single out particular Vox writers, or pieces – as if something about them, in particular, is the problem.

And if you’re not critiquing that style of journalism, but rather the expectations of readers, then you have to come up with examples of that.

I think the failure of people to take an interest in Vox-type journalism is a much, much bigger problem than Vox-type journalism itself, which (as you acknowledge but Corey does not) is quite useful.

Me, I’m more interested in how scholars balance the requirements of disciplined thinking with their desire to present in the best possible light the work of a respected colleague who has strayed from that path.

As I posted on Corey’s blog after comments closed on his original Historovox post on CT, an important caveat is that the Historovox isn’t just journalists dipping lazily into JSTOR to make haphazard use of scholarly tropes, because plenty of historians and other scholars are willing to enter the public arena to participate in this process too. The problem there is that the dumbed-down sycophantic terms on which scholars are allowed to take prominent positions in the public arena are increasingly incompatible with the terms of serious scholarship, so what you often see in the public arena is a mishmash of scholars who have long possessed little to no scholarly authority within their field of study, and by this point are basically just pundits with PhDs (e.g. Niall Ferguson, Charles Murray); scholars who have largely abandoned serious scholarly work in their field of study in order to pursue more public-facing careers, and whose scholarly authority within their field has steadily atrophied as a result (e.g. Timothy Snyder, Richard Dawkins); and scholars whose public-facing work is largely outside their actual field of study altogether, whose work is seen by practitioners of the field in question as essentially no different from unscholarly punditry, but whose capitalize on their status in unrelated fields to assume an unearned aura of scholarly authority in the public arena nonetheless (e.g. Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond).

Part of this disconnect may have to do with scholarship in fields like history becoming more rigorous and drifting closer to the truth (some might say more far-out radical leftist… po-tay-to, po-tah-to) than it was back in the days of widely respected liberal public historians like Hofstadter, and part of it may also have to do with public discourse in the era of the 24-hour news cycle growing more simplistic and less tolerant of nuance or complexity. Aside from these issues of higher or lower “standards,” which of course are nebulous and can be debated until the cows come home, I think at least two other relevant points are worth considering. First, the general economic precarity of scholarship and the constant hum of threats to the basic funding structures of the academy, which seems like it would lead scholars in general to adopt a less confrontational or contrarian public approach in the public arena as a matter of collective self-preservation: “sure, go ahead, plumb JSTOR for whatever the hell you want, just don’t get mad and decide to try to slash state university funding again!” Which of course also holds true for the economic precarity of scholars on an individual level: “sure, go ahead, quote me in your next dumbed-down oversimplistic Vox explainer, hopefully the right hiring committee member will read it on their news feed and remember my name when they see my next tenure-track application!”

Second, as Phil Mirowski might argue, the Historovox is entirely compatible with a core aspect of neoliberal ideology: the belief that knowledge production is best left to the unfathomable workings of the “marketplace of ideas,” that individual claims to broad systemic-level knowledge are a “fatal conceit” (as Hayek famously put it), and that cybernetic-style feedback loops of mass popular ignorance and dumbing-down (including phenomena like “fake news” or “alternative facts”) are actually a positive good, since these are precisely the mechanisms by which the grander information-processing system called the Market pursues its higher truth. In other words, as far as a true Hayekian neoliberal is concerned, Corey may as well be totally correct about the Historovox and its manifest flaws as a way of making individual readers more knowledgeable — but these flaws themselves should only be encouraged, because any individual who presumes to challenge the flawed epistemology of the Historovox is thereby challenging the supreme information-processing capability of the Market, and needs to be burned like Icarus by the hot sun of economic reality to learn their lowly place before the supreme all-knowing Market god.

@29
”The problem there is that the dumbed-down sycophantic terms on which scholars are allowed to take prominent positions in the public arena are increasingly incompatible with the terms of serious scholarship”

Or the real problem is:

In the case of FF von Clownstick the dumbed-down sycophantic terms of a Presidency on which scholars are allowed to take prominent positions in the public arena are increasingly incompatible with the terms of serious scholarship?

isn’t it just too silly to review a clown-show in serious scholars terms?

LFC, this is exactly why it’s so useful to contrast the Hayekian neoliberal perspective against earlier liberal thinkers like Mill, Holmes, or even Dewey, because part of what distinguishes Hayek (also, hint hint, part of what distinguishes neoliberalism in general from earlier non-“neo” liberalism) is that he takes the “marketplace of ideas” concept far more seriously than the older liberals do, placing it at the very center of his view of knowledge itself. Thinkers like Mill might use the marketplace of ideas as a metaphor to justify freedom of thought in a very abstract sense, but they still ultimately accept the inevitability of market failures in the provision of knowledge, which is why they argue for the role of the state as a “night watchman” for the market in correcting market failures, even setting limits to the market’s sphere of influence through non-marketized services like universal public education or public broadcasting networks. Similarly, Holmes’ free speech jurisprudence is largely about identifying situations in which the state must override the judgment of the marketplace of ideas, by banning the “sale” of certain “information commodities” (such as “hey, everybody in this crowded theater, there’s a fire! let’s panic!”) based on the judgment of a higher authority who, to paraphrase another famous Supreme Court precedent on limits to free speech, knows a failure in the marketplace of ideas when he sees it.

By contrast, one of the core neoliberal arguments is that this old-school liberal appeal to a higher non-market authority, this idea of a non-marketized bedrock of common knowledge that can be decided through a predefined political process, is itself a key part of the problem. The Hayekian view of knowledge in society is about taking the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor far more literally than Mill or Dewey ever would have dreamed, interpreting the market as a sort of cybernetic information-processing system with individual economic actors functioning like nodes in a connectionist neural network, collectively producing forms of distributed knowledge that inherently transcend the cognitive capacity of any individual human node, much like the forms of knowledge attainable by a human brain transcend the cognitive capacity of an individual neuron. A true Hayekian would see the Historovox as an extremely good thing, a necessary corrective to the pretensions of intellectuals that they could ever possibly produce or understand meaningful systemwide knowledge on their own, instead of surrendering their thoughts and ideas to the cybernetic networking capacity of a marketplace of ideas like the modern rapid-fire news cycle — and what puny individuals like you or me or Corey may think are the Historovox’s manifest flaws and failures as a form of knowledge production are actually an essential part of the process, since learning to accept these perceived market failures as natural and inevitable is how we learn to disabuse ourselves of what Hayek calls “the fatal conceit,” the delusional belief that one flawed little human should ever try to second-guess the market as a totality.

Now even though I think Hayekian neoliberal arguments and their epochal influence are extremely important, I’m obviously not a Hayekian myself, since among other things, I’m not committed to the marketization of non-market-based standards of knowledge production like scholarly authority and peer review. In fact these are precisely the standards by which a perennial Historovox mainstay like Steven Pinker can be regarded as a pseudoscholarly charlatan: his background in cognitive psychology and generative linguistics gives him little to no inherent authority on issues more native to fields like economic history, cultural anthropology, archaeology, or political philosophy, and his recent non-peer-reviewed work in books like The Better Angels of our Nature or Enlightenment Now is all but useless as a contribution to the progress of scholarship. (The possibility of these works earning some measure of scholarly credibility despite these obstacles is undermined in part by Pinker’s further disregard for scholarly standards in deciding which other work to cite as authoritative, e.g. his reliance in Better Angels on the work of “atrocitologist” Matthew White.) And when the pop-scholarly work of people like Pinker comes into conflict with scholarly interlocutors, it’s telling that their defenders so often make little effort to argue the case on the intellectual merits (the way, for instance, academic Marxists often do at great length when their economic arguments come into conflict with mainstream neoclassical and/or neoliberal economics) but instead tend to default to a crude, implicitly Hayekian appeal to the overriding epistemic authority of the marketplace of ideas: pop-scholars like Pinker sell far better than their scholarly interlocutors (who after all are often reduced to publishing their lay-oriented rebuttals in marginal lefty outlets like Jacobin) which is at least a strong indicator that they must be right and their scholarly interlocutors must be wrong.

@34: the sheer gross tonnage of hot takes on Trump’s presidency has given us … a lot of insight into the psychological crackup that accompanies the breakdown of certain class pretensions and self-regard, but that’s about it.

Unfortunately, I think there’s a lot of truth in that, much as it pains me to say it. Another way of approaching the problem might be to ask why an academically informed Vox Explainer always ends up resembling the rest of Vox in its politics and world view and not those of, say, Le Monde Diplomatique. (Or, heaven forbid, The American Conservative.) What does that tell us about the role, agency, and ideological composition of the academic component within (and without) “Historovox”?

Two overlapping explanations suggest themselves. One is that the role that academic content in Historovox plays is simply that of a means to an end—a conveniently authoritative-looking hook on which to hang an already ideologically determined conclusion. The academy has no agency here, in other words—it’s just a storehouse of arguments from authority to be drawn on as necessary to prop up the Vox way of seeing things. The second explanation is that there’s actually a very significant ideological crossover and class-interest convergence between the Vox world view and academia. If we take this tack, the reason that Historovox never resembles Le Monde Diplomatique is the same reason that there are no overt Sanders supporters among my American academic Facebook friends. Anglo-American academia, in other words, leans overwhelmingly liberal-technocratic, but it certainly doesn’t lean Left. That’s why it plays so well with Vox. (If this comment were an essay, I’d here footnote Jeff Schmidt.)

There’s a striking bit in Capitalist Realism in which Mark Fisher talks about the “hedonic consumption” patterns of his FE philosophy students. They’re constantly eating junk food in class, and they correspondingly want him to feed them Nietzsche as though it were a hamburger. I see something oddly similar among my academic friends—only this is a tendency towards a kind of “anhedonic consumption.” They’ve spent the last two years sharing stories on social media about Russian collusion, “Putin is a Global Puppet Master” scare-pieces, and the impending likelihood of impeachment. (Any day now, apparently.) Loading up Facebook nowadays, my news-feed is just a constant parade of Trump outrage stories posted by academic FB friends. You’d think they’d have stopped by now, or at least started to consider the possibility they’ve been gas-lighted due to the fact none of the conspiracy theories they’ve advocated for ever pans out, but no. It’s like they’re addicted to Trump—or the pose of outrage against Trump—in the same way Fisher’s students were addicted to Big Macs. And in both cases, it’s this addiction to easy digestibility (the dopamine rush of the “hot take”) that’s causing them to miss the bigger picture, in which Trump (and Brexit) are merely symptoms of a much deeper and quite possibly terminal malaise and not the proximate cause.

Thinking about the professional-managerial class allegiances here, as well as the news consumption patterns of a great many academics, to me helps explain both Historovox itself, and the evident passion many seem to have for Historovox. It just tastes so good!