The Review: Knowledge and Paranoia; the Year's Must-Reads

These are 2021's don't-miss essays — from The Chronicle and elsewhere. ADVERTISEMENT [Academe Today Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. A little learning is a dangerous thing, but sometimes a lot of learning is, too. That’s one lesson of the Hopkins historian Christopher S. Celenza’s recent Chronicle Review [essay]( on the 17th-century Jesuit philologist Jean Hardouin, one of the most learned men of his age and one of the craziest. After a lauded career in textual scholarship — he specialized in the literature of Roman antiquity — Hardouin took a strange turn in the 1690s, when, as Celenza says, “something changed.” Hardouin started to suspect that the writings of St. Augustine were a fraud, a forgery perpetrated by Italians. And not just St. Augustine. Eventually, Hardouin decided that almost all of the literature of antiquity was fake, part of a “vast mosaic of forgery,” as Celenza puts it. As Anthony Grafton explains in a 1999 essay for The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, “Jean Hardouin: The Antiquary as Pariah,” Hardouin suspected that a sinister clutch of super-scholars “had forged the entire literary heritage of the West.” Hardouin wrote: This impious coterie had in their service mathematicians who computed eclipses, lawyers who framed codices and laws, medical men who wrote on medicine, poets who put forth their poems, linguists and interpreters in their service, who turned their Latin writings chiefly into Greek. Celenza compares this kind of sweeping paranoia to modern “conspiracy theories like QAnon.” Grafton risks a similar analogy. “In a later age,” he writes, Hardouin “might well have written interminable commentaries in order to prove the Baconian authorship of Shakespeare’s plays or the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” But both Celenza and Grafton are at pains to emphasize that Hardouin’s hermeneutic pathologies deployed the very methods and techniques in which the science of philology was grounded. Hardouin, Celenza says, “continued his detail-oriented work, examining texts line by line, word by word. But he began to use those talents in service of proving the conspiracy.” Grafton goes further. Hardouin’s contemporary critics, he says, were sometimes right for the wrong reasons. “What energised much of the resistance to Hardouin was not reasoned resistance to his theories but unreflective objections to any radically new idea.” In at least one instance, Grafton says, a correct idea of Hardouin’s — at issue was the meaning of an inscription on a 16th-century coin — was rejected unthinkingly by his critics. “In this case at least, hatred of new theories … enabled intellectual bad money not just to drive off the good, but to prevent it from entering the marketplace of ideas.” For Celenza, Hardouin offers a warning story about the present: Information overload can disorder our sense of the plausible and drive some of us to madness. That is surely right. But Grafton’s essay suggests another, complementary lesson: Sometimes the agreement of sober-minded experts is a mask for intellectual laziness and ideology. Consider the liberal political consensus around Covid. That consensus has, in almost all cases, been more essentially correct — more in line with the facts — than its conservative and libertarian opposition. But there are at least two exceptions, and they are important ones. The first occurred before the pandemic had reached American shores, when Bill de Blasio encouraged New Yorkers, in February of 2020, to [dine out]( without fear. De Blasio specifically mentioned Chinatown restaurants. It is easy to forget, but at that time fear of Covid was seen as, and sometimes was, a symptom of xenophobia. Might NYC’s early Covid response have been better if it hadn’t been conditioned by a reluctance to appear to be siding with the bad guys? The second was more serious, from the point of view of scholarly integrity if not of public health. In March 2020, prominent scientists published an open letter in The Lancet “to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that Covid-19 does not have a natural origin.” Democratic politicians and media followed suit. For a substantial span of time, any interest in the lab-leak theory was treated as a kind of intellectual deformity, naïve at best and racist at worst. Eventually, other, more honest members of the scientific community explained that, in fact, the jury is very much still out. As the Yale immunologist Akiko Iwasaki [told]( the Times, “In the beginning, there was a lot of pressure against speaking up, because it was tied to conspiracies and Trump supporters. There was very little rational discussion going on.” One possible consequence of the pressure Iwasaki refers to is the radicalization of dissenters. As Grafton writes, “Hardouin’s enemies did much to make him the paranoid he eventually became.” Read Grafton’s essay [here]( and Celenza’s [here](. And read on for two end-of-year lists. Write to me, at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin SPONSOR CONTENT | ready education [Learn how institutions are defining the digital student experience.]( 10 Chronicle Review Must-Reads From 2021 Marco Roth, “[Adult Diaper Porn Versus Henry James]( Cornelia Lambert, “[Why I Quit]( Maggie Doherty, “[The Quiet Crisis of Parents on the Tenure Track]( Simon During, “[‘Whiteness’ and the Humanities: An Impasse]( Jason England, “[The Pernicious Fantasy of the Nikole Hannah-Jones Saga]( Lee Burdette Williams, “[‘How Much Damage Have My Colleagues and I Done?’]( Mark Dery, “[The Professor of Paranoia]( Chad Wellmon, “[The Crushing Contradictions of the American University]( Matt Feeney, “[The Abiding Scandal of College Admissions]( Paula Rabinowitz, “[The Associate-Professor Trap]( ADVERTISEMENT UPCOMING EVENT [Join us January 18-22]( for a virtual professional development program on overcoming the challenges of the department chair role and creating a strategic vision for individual and departmental growth. [Reserve your spot now](. Space is limited. The Latest THE REVIEW [A Descent Into Textual Paranoia]( By Christopher S. Celenza [STORY IMAGE]( What book history can tell us about the lunacies of the present. ADVERTISEMENT Recommended — Year’s End Roundup One of the great pleasures of writing this newsletter is the chance to try to impose my preoccupations on you via the weekly “Recommended” section, which draws from outside of the Chronicle. Here are twelve essays published between December 2020 and December 2021 that have stayed with me: Nan Z. Da, “[Disambiguation, a Tragedy]( (n + 1) Sumana Roy, “[Beyond the Guilt Tax]( (The Point) Yuliya Komska, “[On the Wire Above the Ruins]( (Cabinet) Stassa Edwards, “[An Unwitting Monument]( (Lapham’s Quarterly) Blake Smith, “[The Woke Meritocracy]( (Tablet) Becca Rothfeld, “[Stalking]( (The Yale Review) J. Hoberman, “[A Frank Exchange of Views]( (The Point) Alexander Stern, “[Critical Theory and the Newest Left]( (The Hedgehog Review) Katie Kadue, “[Suspended Hell]( (n + 1) Kelefa Sanneh, “[The Spaced-Out Jazz of Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes]( (The New Yorker) Elaine Blair, “[Hemingway’s Consolations]( (NYRB) Sam Kriss, “[It’s Not All in Your Head]( (First Things) And I’d hate to leave out several significant essays that I ended up writing about in other parts of the newsletter: Anne Enright’s “[Spirited Away]( (NYRB); James Robins’s “[Can Historians Be Traumatized by History?]( (The New Republic); Daryl Scott’s “[The Scandal of Thirteentherism]( (Liberties); Christine Smallwood’s “[The Power of Questions]( (NYRB); Matthew Karp’s “[History as End]( (Harper’s); T.J. Clark’s “[Masters and Fools]( (LRB); and Christian Parenti’s “[The First Privilege Walk”]( (nonsite). The Review newsletter will be on vacation for the rest of the month. I’ll see you in the New Year. 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