Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Collapsing The Traditional Distinction Between History and Theory

There was a time that this article from Front Page magazine about a professor who is arguing that that there is no evidence that Jews ever occupied Palestine would have shocked me. No longer.

In her introduction, El-Haj explains that she works by “rejecting a positivist commitment to scientific method,” writing, instead, within a scholarly tradition of “post structuralism, philosophical critiques of foundationalism, Marxism and critical theory and … in response to specific postcolonial political movements.” And the particular theory that El-Haj puts forward is that the “ancient Israelite origins” of the Jews is a “pure political fabrication” – a machination she proceeds to blame on “Israeli archaeologists” who were called upon to “produce … evidence of ancient Israelite and Jewish presence in the land of Israel, thereby supplying the very foundation, embodied in empirical form, of the modern nation’s origin myth.”

Deplorably, in the rarified air of Morningside Heights, some Columbia faculty appear to celebrate this sort of “liberation” of scholarship from any necessity to encounter verifiable facts. For example, Keith Moxey, the Ann Whitney Olin Professor Professor of Art History at Barnard College and one of five members of the committee that will vote on El-Haj’s tenure bid, lauds “The abandonment of an epistemological foundation for … history and the acknowledgment that historical arguments will be evaluated according to how well they coincide with our political convictions and cultural attitudes collapses the traditional distinction between history and theory.” (See Moxey’s The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History.) In other words, evidence, verifiability, probability and explanatory power become irrelevant, for what counts is that an argument “coincide with our political convictions.”

There's just too much historical and archaeological evidence that Jews occupied what is now Palestine for more than a thousand years until the Roman destruction of the second Temple. Is it possible that there is no longer a purpose to institutions of higher learning, when garbage like this starts to become acceptable? As Classical Values observes:

This all leaves me wondering.... If crackpots who spout Israelite denial can get tenure, what's next? Will Barnard and Columbia start offering courses in Holocaust Denial Studies? (A department, perhaps?)

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