~magpie@TTBP



05 september 2022

Thoughts on Wolff's Postcards from the End of the World

tw: discussion of child abuse

Reading this not as part of AHA Reads, but because it's been on my book list for awhile. I'm about halfway or so done with the Hummel case and I find a lot of Wolff's analysis to be a bit odd.

He makes much of the how the lack of confession to murderous intent is a problem to the prosecution, because the law does not really have a concept of child abuse and lack of intent to kill would imply this is not murder.

But like isn't that a concern in the modern US legal code. Perhaps less of a problem because many parts of the US have felony murder laws, but still issues of intent can be important in the US. For that matter, he catches on to a particular phrase that the child was not murdered but slaughter, but while this might highlight the brutality of the act, it is not clear to me that it undermines the prosecutions case. I guess I'd read it as 'not (just) murderd, but (also) slaughtered'.

My German is terrible and reading Fraktur just gives me a headache, but I half remember that it is improper to use 'aber' for 'but also' -- in that case you should use 'sondern' -- so I wondered if the newspaper had used 'aber'. The article seems to use neither. It seems to just connect the thought with a 'nein', but I haven't read it fully and my German is bad, so perhaps I misunderstand.

Similarly, the describing of the trial comes off as just really strange to me. He'll note that people are laughing at certain points as if that's odd, but honestly when he quotes from it, it comes off as quite farcical. Like, I'm a true crime junkie, so the idea of someone laughing at the bad attempts of a criminal to shift away guilt seems pretty standard to me.

Even the comments about how the Viennese audience cannot handle psychological ambivalence -- a mother both loving and hating her child -- seems weird. Can they not handle that ambivalence, or do they have good reason to question it. Like, if someone tells me the love someone, but they've beaten, burned, and starved them to death, then I'm going to be very sceptical they in fact love them. Maybe they do, but I'd need to see much stronger evidence than just saying 'I love them' and failing that I might well laugh because such a statement will seem like a bold-faced lie.

I'm also a bit confused about his account of the discovery of the concept of child abuse, particularly the comment that child abuse was in part unrecognised because the child was viewed as the property of the parents. Conceptual history, like all history, isn't my forte. But in Wolff's account,

  1. The parents received an official warning from the police about mistreating their daughter.
  2. Other parents seem to react negatively to the behaviour and attempt to assist.
  3. The judge seems to distinguish between punishing and mistreating a child.

This all seems to suggest that there were limits to what people thought appropriate to do to children and that these limits were themselves encoded into law.

Let me be clear, I certainly accept that in the past particular actions which we now conceive of as abusive were considered part of parental rights.

And I also accept that there may have been a shift in social norms relating to dealing with child abuse, legal norms delineating and investigating child abuse, and public attention / awareness of the frequency of child abuse, but I am somewhat sceptical of the framing of this trial as representing (or being part of) the discovery of the concept of child abuse in Vienna, since, so far, it doesn't seem like there was either a belief in the parents having limitless power over children nor a legal system unable to punish parents who abuse children. (Even if it might not have done it well!)

On the other hand, I'm not through with the case yet. Perhaps my mind will change as it develops.

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04 september 2022

Twitter is such a frustrating website.

I used gephi to sort people I follow into communities. I was planning on making lists for each community and pruning the list over time. But after adding 90 people to a list over maybe an hour, Twitter decided stop me. No clear indication about what happened, I just wasn't able to add people to lists anymore. I waited for about two hours, still couldn't add anyone.

At that point, I gave up trying to work with Twitter's interface.

Now I have a bunch of spreadsheets which I'm converting to nitter urls, so that I can follow groups of people at once. I've heard that it's best to keep lists like that to about 25, because of limitations Twitter imposes, which is annoying, since my communities range in size from 400 to 50.

For my largest community, I just broke them up into groups of 20 in order. But I am tempted to see if I can use the same network analysis software and gephi to break up the larger communities into smaller subnetworks.

Once done, I might just use nitter's rss feature to load those groups as rss feeds lol rather than through my browser. Although using livemarks in Firefox suggests that the feeds fail to load somewhat frequently, so that migth get annoying.

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31 august 2022

Table of Contents

  1. Sympathetic Note
  2. A More Critical Note
  3. Who and why
  4. Coda

Disclaimer: I am definitely not an historian. Discount heavily.

I wanted to think through James Sweet's Is History History. I found out about the controversy not from reading Perspectives religiously, but from a thread on r/AskHistorians. I read a few of the tweet threads and the linked articles. I'm not engaging with each piece, but each did influence my thoughts at least a bit. This is relatively stream of consciousness. I've thought it over a bit and tried to edit it, but it isn't a fully finished work by any means. I apologise if I did not clearly note an influence, either from the above or from elsewhere. Feel free to tell me and I'll either edit or post a correction.

Sympathetic Note

  1. I think the scene surrounding Elmina Castle is surprisingly poignant, but is marred by a lack of engagement with any of the individuals.

    1. McKinney thinks there is a subtle implication that the black multigenerational family is in some ignorant. I felt the same implication. On a second read, I do not see it clearly in the text, and instead see the focus on the black family as agents of American imperialism. Regardless, there's nothing to show he talked with them or tried to understand their perspective.

    2. How Ghana should deal with its history of slavery is interesting, but I don't know enough about the modern politics of Ghana to comment.

    3. Whether or how American imperialism influencing depictions of slavery in Africa, privileging an African American perspective on slavery over a wider black diaspora is quite fascinating to me. But, I can't help but wonder if this relates to presentism or to capitalism. Is it that historians in Ghana are too caught up with race, or that African American families have more dollars to spend and so historical sites cater to them? That might be bad, but I'd think the solution is economic rather cultural.

    4. I think there's a tension between (1) and (3). I'm still left confused on the focus on the dog-eared 1619 book though. Is it to signal how American authors have effectively deluded their audience, by inspiring them to treat a site of diasporic history as African American history. Or are they right in drawing some connection there with the harm coming from the owners of the site shaping it to African American tastes? Or both?

  2. Regardless of what exactly that scene is trying to convey, not talking to the black family seems odd because it seems to go against his position of trying to understand 'the values and mores of people in their own time'. I assume that talking to people or reading their writings is the first-line method for understanding them. That he misses the opportunity to do this by not engaging with these people seems odd.1 People's motives can be complex, so not talking to them denies us information about those motives.

    For example:

    • Maybe they have a stronger connection to the Afro-Caribbean than might be apparent. Family lore has it that my great-grandfather came from the Jamaica to Panama and his children to the US, but I do not think anyone in my family views themselves as Afro-Caribbean. Perhaps they wanted to try to connect with their Afro-Caribbean roots.
    • Ghana has a right to abode for black folks. Perhaps that was a not inconsequential reason for this venture.
    • Perhaps the book was a comfort book or was thought to be in some way appropriate without implying anything deeper. Analogous to how many people (claimed to) read The Decameron during covid. Or how I instead read Evans' Death in Hamburg because Evans is my comfort read lol.

A More Critical Note

  1. The parallel between a certain conservative jurisprudence and the 1619 project seems underdeveloped. I think what Sweet is going for is that both take from history, what they need and no more. But do they do it in the same way? Even in his account it doesn't seem so. The language he uses for the 1619 project seems one of interpretative debate. Would it be different if it noted the hemispherical nature of slavery? Probably, because the focus would be different. But that doesn't seem to imply the project is wrong.

    Analogy: If I write a book about evolution and draw most of my examples from vertebrates, my story will be different than if I drew my examples from vertebrates and invertebrates in proportion to their sizes. But it is not clear that the former story would be wrong.

    By contrast, in the description of the Dobbs v. Jackson decision, Sweet seems to imply that the decision is factually incorrect. Alito is wrong that there is an unbroken tradition of abortion prohibition, because there is a tradition of not punishing pre-quickening abortions. More analogous is Dahomey film, but that presents its own problems.

  2. In Hunt's account of presentism, she gives two different types:

    • Presentism as misinterpretation: where we interpret the past according to the standards of the present.
    • Presentism as interpretative focus: where we focus on issues or topics that are important in the present.

    But, well these are distinct phenomena. You can have one and not the other. And you can oppose one and not the other. Or think there are degrees in which either is useful independent of the other. Our present interests might shift what sources we are interested in reading, thus revealing more. To think of race as example, it might be the case that there have historically been different conceptualisations of race.

    That is:

    • self-identification
    • terminology
    • and ontology

    may vary over time.

    If we are studying race, ascribing our current understanding to past actors might lead us astray. If one time conceives of blackness following the one-drop and another time does not, then applying the concept from time to other is wrong. But our own interest in race provides us reason to look at how race has changed over time. And might lead us to construct taxonomies of racial conceptualisations.

  3. Reading the piece, I can't help but think that Sweet has accidentally made an argument against the study of history. If we live in a world ruled by capital, nations, race, gender, and sexuality, and if sociology, political science, or ethnic studies degrees are better able to deal with those topics in a manner that people find relevant, then maybe history just isn't a useful field of study.

    I feel that this is another place where Sweet's vagueness gets in the way. He says presentism doesn't lead to good politics, and as far as I can tell the explanation he gives is that the current 1619 movement has lead to a conservative counterattack. But its not clear to me that the status quo antebellum was particularly better. And I don't think that Sweet believes that only good politics justifies a thing.2 He calls the 1619 project powerful and effective journalism. Perhaps that's not equivalent to 'good journalism', but that sounds like praise. If we have a choice between praiseworthy (perhaps good?) journalism or good history, which should we choose? Do political results break the tie? Something else? To put it pointedly: If other academic disciplines can give people what they want, and if history cannot, then perhaps we shouldn't want history.

  4. I find myself slightly more annoyed at the apology than at the original.

    If Sweet wanted to have a discussion, then why is it a provocation? and why is it framed so aggressively? I want my conversations, particularly between peers, to be respectful. But if someone starts off with the intention to provoke, it doesn't seem like they are respecting me. I'll note that a provocation can be fine if everyone is aware of the game, but if not, then it can certainly derail the conversation by leading at least to misunderstand – since when we frame our arguments provocatively, we might not make clear the actual limits of the argument – and at worst pain. Reverse the concerns depending on whether you think harm to people is worse than harm to discourse.

    Similarly, if we are having a discussion about how to do history, it might be useful to start from the perspective that there are multiple types of history being done and these at least feel reasonable. Nowhere in the piece does he give a reason for why people would find this method attractive intellectually, rather than emotionally (e.g. solidarity) or politically (e.g. a usable black past). I like to paint myself in the aesthetic of new social history although I don't go as far as saying that the only thing that historians should study is large-scale social formations. I care about people's thoughts a bit too much. But, I recognise that the new cultural historians were actually trying to solve a problem.3 And it seems that any attempt at critiquing cultural history should acknowledge those real issues. Mutatis mutandis for presentism in history.

Who and why

  1. He doesn't really mention any examples of historians being presentist.

    • Hannah-Jones is a journalist.
    • Alito and Thomas are jurists.
    • The Dahomey movie is, I assume, made by film makers.

    And, at least for the first, he seems to accept it as having some positive qualities. I wonder too if this was supposed to be professional courtesy; Sweet, the president of the AHA, didn't want to use his position to name and shame younger scholars. But, if so, it seems to have backfired, because it came off as casting vague aspersions over entire fields of study, with a particular impact on black scholars.

  2. The closest we get to historians behaving badly is a shift in focus to 20th century history. But his account of causation seems odd to me. On his account, the issue is presentism, or perhaps social pressure leading to presentism, but it seems like there might be a number of causes.

    Perhaps time marches on and so historical interests shift. The end of WWII is almost 80 years ago as far ago from the present as Wilhelmine Germany was from the 60s. Aside: And writing that, I realise it is a paraphrase from Blackbourn's 'Honey, I shrunk German History'.4 He gives quite a bit of data and showing a shift at least in the field of German history to the 20th century. And he offers up the temporal argument as well. He also notes career prospects. The job market asks for historians with 20th century experience, some grants support only 20th century as well. But, he offers a somewhat interesting rejoinder. The issue isn't just temporal or economic, but instead has to do with a focus on the contingent and conjunctural. That is, people assume that events in the distant past (200 years ago) do not have much impact on the present or on later periods.

    This seems to me to be the inverse of the problem outlined by Sweet. The issue isn't that people only care about things in the present, it's that they think the past is so different – has its own values and mores – from the present (or the 20th century, modernity, whatever) that they do not study it.

Coda

  1. I write this from a place of disillusionment. I studied history and I am a member of the AHA. I've even been to a few annual meetings. Although I am no historian! But, I've been drifting over to the human behavioural ecology crowd. It is difficult to put into words why, but the slogan form would be 'I want change over time, but I want to know why things change, not just that they do.' History seems to have an antiquarian mood. Where we collect interesting little facts of the past, store them away, perhaps admire their beauty or their oddness. Things change, but why (and sometimes how) they change isn't clear.

    It's not clear if something is the result of

    1. influence
    2. short-term factors
    3. long-term factors
    4. parallel development
    5. convergent development

    That's not to say historians don't do great work! I recently read Mary Nolan's book for AHA Reads and I loved it. I loved both her explanation for why Dusseldorf workers were so radical and for why the revolution failed. And there were so many fascinating details.

    E.g. Her discussion of how the rank-and-file membership of the SPD wanted more Marxist theory is both inspiring and hilarious.

    But I couldn't help but wonder, how much does this generalise? would it be the same in other countries? did similar processes happen in other regions?

    And that reminded me of the 'AHR Conversation Explaining Historical Change; or, The Lost History of Causes', which while a fascinating read can't help but be a bit depressing. It seems to portray a field that isn't sure if causes are important, what causes are (to be fair, that's an issue fraught with metaphysics), or to what extent causative arguments currently take place in history. Which then reminded me of the debates about the New Historians of Capitalism, where at least some were accused of failing to take into account research by economic historians.

    I remember disliking The History Manifesto5 and so I don't want to appear as if I am supporting that position, but I do wish the descriptive work that historians do, much of which is useful and valuable, were better integrated so that explanations could be compared, data could be used as input for future research, and methodologies and theories could more easily move across fields. E.g. I received no training in oral history.

  2. Beyond those academic disappointments, I just find history not as useful for certain goals. Sometimes, it helps me understand the world, but other times I can't help but wonder if Darwinian anthropology, or historical sociology, or economics, might not prove better. And, as a socialist, I can't help but think that there are enough history talkers, and really we need more linear algebra people to distribute goods. Although I learned that mostly from Red Plenty6

  3. Finally, on a brighter note, my slight interest in actually talking to people as if they were rational agents rather than objects whose mysteries must be uncovered comes from a realisation reading Kelly and Lee. Kelly7 has a fascinating quote about how in egalitarian societies every person is 'headman over himself' and cites Lee (and Bird and Bliege Bird). I don't have the latter or the original Lee, but in Lee's new text8, I found that the phrase is a statement by /Twi!gum to Lee. Optimisation models are certainly necessary to understanding certain decisions and people's introspection about their motives or others are only weak evidence and I'm no supporter of ethno- or sage philosophy, but I must admit that it is so useful to just talk to people and listen to what they have to say.

Footnotes

1 This isn't to argue that we have an obligation to educate white people. Or even that it would be polite to quiz them. Merely that if we want to understand people's values, talking to them is a good way to do it, and his failure to do that seems odd.

2 Perhaps he does? I have not asked him.

3 (I'd frame that problem as

  1. issues relating to textual interpretation,
  2. concerns about the stability of categories,
  3. desires to take advantage of new source bases,
  4. limitations of data regarding certain populations.

Each of the above are intellectual concerns. There might have been other too. Cynically, perhaps many rationally decided they were good at learning languages, but bad at learning maths, so favoured those methods that played to their strengths.)

4 Warning: The PDF cuts off some lines.

5 Although now perhaps I should reread it to see if my opinion has changed

6 And the Crooked Timber Red Plenty Seminar. Please check out Cosma Shalizi's essay in expanded form.

7 The Lifeways of Hunter-gatherers

8 The Dobe Ju​/'hoansi, 124.

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21 august 2022

Thought I'd actually start a feels blog lol.

I just finished the American Historical Association's summer reading event -- AHA Reads. I want to go over the three books that I read. This post will deal with the first book.

First book I read was The Seduction of Youth by Javier Vendrell. I want to discuss its main points and talk about what I perceive to be some concerns.

tw: pederasty, homophobia,

disclaimer: I am not an historian! Or a social scientists! Or knowledgeable about the world. Please discount heavily.

Summary

I'd read it as dealing with three broad issues:

  1. A moral panic surrounding the idea that adolescent sexuality is flexible, thus exposure to gay people, writing, or images would cause children to be gay.
  2. The emergence of a mass market gay culture in Weimar and its attempts to deal with (1).
  3. The failure of respectability politics to actually ensure the queer rights.

From my notes, I listed three actors.

  1. Adolf Brand and Der Eigene - Elitist (artistic), has a masculine model of homosexuality, flirts with the far right.
  2. Magnus Hirschfeld and the Scientific Humanitarian Committee - Elitist (scientific), has an inverted model of homosexuality, Social Democratic.
  3. Friedrich Radszuweit and the League for Human Rights - Popular, has a masculine model of homosexuality, nonpartisan, but seems to shift between centre righ to Left.

There's so much to explore even with that brief outline. For inverted, the idea is that gay men innately possess feminine traits and mutatis mutandis for gay women.

Part of the division between the groups (and society) is to what degree homoesexuality is viewed as innate.

Since there was a societal view of homosexuality as both defective and contagious, there was a push to prevent young boys from being seduced into homosexuality. And the magazines that each of the groups ran were understood as homosexual propaganda that could seduce youths into homosexuality.

The Radszuweit group seemed to favour a broader accomodationist view. Homosexuality should be normalised, acted upon in private, the age of consent should be higher for homosexual relations, and male prostitution should be banned.

The Hirschfeld group favoured a more inclusive view. Gay and lesbian people's gender inversion should be respected, the age of consent for same- and different-sex relations should be equalised, and male prostitution should be allowed.

Overall, the author seems to favour Hirschfeld over Radszuweit, viewing the latters position as incoherent and in the end ineffective.

But there is one interesting wrinkle. There was apparently a far degree of homoerotic literature (and photography) that focused on youths. While ages aren't given, these youths seem to be in their late teens to early twenties. In particular, there was an elitist tradition that romanticised 'Greek love' between older men and boys, which was apparently quite openly supported by the Brand group. This traditon also included the idea of 'pedagogical eros', which is pretty much what you imagine when you hear Greek love. Albeit not all pederasts conceived of themselves as homosexual. Ignoring the issue of inversion, some believed that there desires were 'chaste' in some sense. Others simply refused to associate with the movement.

But even though Radszuweit and those around him in principle opposed pederasty, in practice the magazine had stories of intergenerational relationships, and had relatively erotic images of teens and early twentysomethings. I think the author is unsure if this was a market demand issue or an issue of personal taste on the part of Radszuweit. (His partner was some twenty years younger.)

The title then is intentionally ambiguous. It is about fears of the seduction of youth by gay men, but also the desires of (some) gay men to seduce the youth.

Critique

But I find that part a bit weak because I don't have a good idea of how these desires compare to contemporaneous heterosexual desires. While not taking place in the same period, I know that the Sunday Sport used to run picture models of scantily-clad 15-year-old models with countdowns until their 16th birthday, when they could then legally be shown nude. Fortunately, the laws for child pornography were changed in 2003 to prohibit that. Wait. WTF. The UK only banned naked images of 16 year olds in 2003? Or the sexualisation of Britney Spears as a teen. Or Courtney Stodden for that matter.

Now let me be clear. The concern I have isn't to esculpate anyone. I just think there's some value in seeing if this interest in youth can be traced to some homoerotic tradition going back to Greek love or a broader set of community norms regarding erotic interests.

Part of the reason this interests me is that:

  1. There's one excerpt of a letter that mentions particular distaste at the idea of a teacher having sex with a student under 16.
  2. There's mention of Moll and Hirschfeld finding that sexual attraction to prepubescent boys and old men are quite uncommon, albeit attraction to people in late teens or early twenties is common.

Basically, I want to know what the demographics of this are like. Both for the heterosexual and non-heterosexual community.

I also wish the author was a bit clearer about his position. Sometimes I'll read his tone as condemnatory, but other times his tone seems relatively sympathetic. Not trying to be overly sensitive, but this work clearly has a moral core insofar as it supports liberation, so it'd be nice to know how the author conceives of this as a moral problem.

It would also be nice to know how the youths felt. I think this might be a result of a lack of sources, but there's much about youth as object either of sexual desire or concern but not much of youth as subject or actor.

Unrelated to the above, much is made of Radszuweit running his magazine as a business, but it isn't clear to me if he conceptualised his actions as such, or the author is using that phrasing to pick out how the author believes it differed from other groups.

Final thoughts

I'd recommend. Despite the big concern noted above, it has a really interesting overview of queer groups under Weimar. It's interesting to read about theories of sexual undifferentiation being mainstream. There's an obvious parallel between the seduction moral panic in Weimar, the seduction panic in the US, and the social contagion panic regarding trans rights now. It'd be interesting to see how those panics comparatively developed. It's also interesting to see the odd hiatuses. Although again sometimes it's not clear if that's the text or the times. E.g. The focus on pederasty seems to be on conversion rather than lack of consent.

The text inspired me to check out Gay Berlin, Gay New York, and Queer Budapest along with Marhoefer's work. Not sure I'll get to it any time soon.

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