Author: Andrew Sullivan

A few readers sound off in detail:

Contrary to what Tim Parks may say, footnotes are not simply a “protocol for checking the quotation.” Rather they are the steel in a scholar’s argument. I’ve always imagined texts I read to be like a ship. Good scholars (the best ones I was lucky to know, anyway), like good shipwrights, need only “go below” into the notes to discover if the arguments have been put together thoroughly and whether the structure of the analysis is sound. Far from being pointless, over-long lists to “cover one’s rear end,”as Parks claims, a thorough footnote with a sizable number of sources can give away the game: has this person mastered the relevant literature, and if they have, whose design are they building on to navigate this topic? Are there any major sins of omission?

And, yes, the pesky details of publication matter.

The year of publication says a lot about what trends in the field influenced the writers’ intellectual development, and the state of their discipline at the time of publication. And presses have agendas: editorial directors and staffs at university presses are curators who sign books to build their press’ reputation in certain sub-fields (criticism of nineteenth century French literature, say). Seeing a press name in the notes makes a good shorthand for discerning biases and points of view. Even the city matters. Of course Oxford University Press is in Oxford, England, but if the footnote reads, Oxford University Press, New York, then that is a whole different shop within the organization.

Celebrity scholars like Doris Kearns Goodwin, who abandon the plodding craft of meticulous citation for the art of a ripping yarn, and then leave the details to their research assistants, who think footnotes are just hyperlinks to library databases, run leaky ships and get entangled in plagiarism accusations brought by eagle-eyed peers. Their academic reputations get sunk.

Another has a very different take:

Hear, hear to Tim Parks! Here’s my story: I completed an M.Litt degree (essentially 1/2 a Ph.D, or in other words a 50,000 word thesis of original research) in Medieval History (specifically 15th century English military history) at Oxford in 1999.

What, you may ask, was the most daunting aspect of my work? Finding and painstakingly unrolling yellowed muster rolls from the 15th century at the Public Record Office? Trawling the works of chroniclers long forgotten for tidbits on important events? Deciphering Latin or French as well as the handwritten shorthand of scribes working on horseback for an impatient Henry V of England?

No, the most daunting aspect of my work was keeping track of all of the footnotes. Here’s an example:

If I was to write a sentence such as “Henry V’s fleet left port on the morning of July 30th with approximately 600 ships and 50,000 men in his army” I’d need a footnote citing every source that substantiated those facts, and in addition explain those who varied (unless that explanation was of enough interest to require more main text). That was tough enough. But what if I broke that sentence apart? I would need to keep track of which sources confirmed it was July 30th, which mentioned it was in the morning, and which sources recorded the numbers of the ships and/or men.

For a 50,000 word these I ended up with over 600 footnotes, almost each one containing multiple citations. In many cases my prose was stilted due to a need to avoid breaking up sentences and having to review the footnote attached to place the references where they needed to be. Eventually, as I was writing, I developed a significant aversion to any revision of what had been written so far, probably to the detriment of the writing.

That’s not all. A mere 10 years before I did my work (i.e. predating the World Wide Web) it was considered adequate in my field for you to consult sources readily available in the Oxford and Cambridge libraries, the British Library, the Public Record Office and maybe the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris. But by the time I was working if an article was published or thesis pursued anywhere in the world that was even tangentially related to my area of study, I was expected to have considered it.

Here’s the kicker: once you are finished and have submitted your thesis for review, you are scheduled for what’s called a “viva”, where you are interviewed by, in my case, 2 fully-fledged experts in the field. In my case one professor was an Oxford don who was a 20th-century giant in the field. The other was a budding giant in the field. They spend the first 30 minutes asking minutiae questions to, as I was told, “confirm that you actually wrote the thesis” and then past that it’s a more congenial conversation regarding your findings.

I enjoyed my time at Oxford and will always be proud of the work I did and degree I obtained, but this was one of the many reasons I did not stay in academia. I hope the increased number of texts actually available online is making this work somewhat easier for the postgraduates of today, but I kind of doubt it.

Republicans think pols aren’t doing it enough, according to a recent Pew poll (the same one showing how self-pitying white evangelicals are). Christopher Ingraham elaborates:

Fifty-three percent of Republicans say that political leaders are talking too little about their faith, compared to less than a third of Democrats. Again, while Democrats have remained consistent on this measure since 2010, Republicans have shifted nearly 10 percentage points. For reference, in September, the word “God” has been spoken on the House and Senate floors 75 times, “Christian” 65 times and “Jesus” 10 times. Democrats and Republicans seem to use these words at similar rates.

Paul Waldman remarks, “I actually don’t have a problem with it on an individual level, much as I might bristle at the endless Prayer Breakfasts”:

The reason politicians don’t do it more isn’t because there’s some kind of stigma associated with proclaiming your piety, because there isn’t. They don’t do it more because they know it comes off as exclusionary. If you ran a campaign under the slogan, “John Smith: Because we need more Baptists in the Senate,” everyone who wasn’t a Baptist would think you won’t care about them and their concerns, and that isn’t something too many candidates want to risk.

Politicians don’t want to draw those stark lines, which is why there are only a few (who come from homogeneous districts) who talk publicly in religious specifics, like mentioning “Jesus” as opposed to just “God.” Likewise, they want the churches’ help, but they could probably do without direct church endorsements, because then it would look like they’re the candidate of one particular sect. Which is to say that even if lots of voters express the opinion that they’d like to see more religious involvement in partisan politics, what they have right now is probably all they’re going to get. And that’s plenty.

#Tunisia: #SecurityForces Assault Journalist & Blogger #LinaBenMhenni http://t.co/bKenXVxjhx #ANHRI #FreedomOfPress pic.twitter.com/wgRcHh4FXs

— ANHRI (@anhri) September 1, 2014

Robert F. Worth reviews Juan Cole’s The New Arabs, which offers reasons to be hopeful about the future of the Middle East, focusing on the generation of young activists that “has already wrought deep social changes, and is likely—eventually—to reshape much of the Middle East in its own image: more democratic, more tolerant, and more secular”:

Cole describes a dedicated and influential group of Internet activists who came of age in the early years of this century in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya (his book excludes other Arab countries where uprisings took place, conceding that young people had less impact there). Focusing especially on the Internet’s liberating effect, he traces figures like Lina Ben Mhenni and Sami Ben Gharbia in Tunisia, and Wael Abbas, Shahinaz Abdel Salam, and Amr Ezzat in Egypt. These young activists were less ideologically inclined than their elders, more willing to work with Islamists, and eager to form links with labor. Ahmed Maher, the charismatic and principled cofounder of Egypt’s April 6 movement, appears frequently throughout Cole’s book, as a kind of model figure of the “revolutionary youth” who helped focus the discontents that produced the 2011 uprisings.

Cole may be right that these people will continue to press for democratization, and that “as the millennials enter their thirties and forties, they will have a better opportunity to shape politics directly, so that we could well see an echo effect of the 2011 upheavals in future decades.”

The memory of 2011, and the glimpse of unity and civility it offered, can never be taken away, and surely it will inspire many young (and old) people in years to come. One line of thinking, often heard among liberal revolutionaries, holds that the current chaos across the Middle East is the result of a doomed, desperate ploy by the various Arab anciens régimes to cling to power and forestall the inevitable triumph of a new order. Like many others, Cole invokes a parallel with the European revolutions of 1848, suggesting that something like France’s relatively liberal Third Republic, established in 1870, is around the corner for the Arab world.

Another book Worth considers, however, suggests a more fraught way forward. He looks at Shadi Hamid’s Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East:

The secular youth movements of 2011 seemed so powerful and prophetic largely because they managed, briefly, to unify their efforts with those of Islamists and labor movements: a synthesis made possible by the catastrophic misrule of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, and Mubarak, among others. (Several young people in Tahrir Square in 2011 told me earnestly that they were grateful to Mubarak for causing them to reconcile with their ideological rivals.)

The fissures reappeared soon afterward. But many remained optimistic because of a belief—more widespread in the West than among Arabs—that attaining power would necessarily moderate political Islamists, reining in their ambitions to impose sharia. What came to be known as the “pothole theory” was famously articulated a decade ago by George W. Bush, among others: being responsible to constituents makes you focus less on ideology than on day-to-day governance.

This hopeful doctrine, Hamid argues, is largely refuted by the experience of recent years. Islamist parties in Egypt, Jordan, and Tunisia grew more moderate over the past two decades during a period of renewed government repression, not democracy. “There was never any reason to believe that this process of moderation would continue indefinitely under an entirely different set of circumstances,” Hamid writes. “Some Islamist parties, such as in Tunisia, are more willing to come to terms with liberal democracy than others. But all Islamist parties, by definition, are at least somewhat illiberal.”