The Rise and Fall of Facts.

Fact-checking is perhaps peripheral to the concerns of LH, but it was a focus of my copyediting career and is something I do on a regular basis when I read, so I was glad to see Colin Dickey’s CJR piece on the subject:

Early newspaper printers had more interest in opinion and polemic than objectivity. There was little premium on facts—readers wanted the news, but they wanted it slanted. This began to change with the advent of wire services, where space was precious. In 1854, Daniel H. Craig, the head of the Associated Press, sent out a circular to his agents detailing a request for only “material facts in regard to any matter or event”—in as few words as possible. “All expressions of opinion upon any matters; all political, religious, and social biases; and especially all personal feelings on any subject on the part of the Reporter, must be kept out of his dispatches.” Wire reports couldn’t afford to expend wasted verbiage on opinion or local idiom—they needed to distill newsworthy content to its bare minimum. Doing so was a good business: the Associated Press packaged its content as the raw material that local newspapers could fashion into their own opinion and spin. […]

In 1923, Briton Hadden and Henry Luce revolutionized the role and purpose of facts. Their fledgling publication—Time magazine—would gather up other outlets’ work and edit it into bite-size reports and commentary. To ensure before publication that every printed word was objectively verifiable, they added another major innovation: a research department, or what we now call fact checking. (The working title of the magazine was Facts.) Editor John Shaw Billings crowed in 1933 that “We can ask what dress Queen Mary wore last Thursday and have an answer in twenty minutes.” […]

The research process at Time would set the standard for American magazines. But no publication has been more consistently identified with its rigorous fact-checking than The New Yorker. It began to mercilessly check facts after an error-plagued 1927 profile of Edna St. Vincent Millay led to Millay’s mother threatening a libel suit against the magazine. The New Yorker’s obsession with facts quickly became almost an end unto itself. The magazine established a fact-checking empire, one composed of telephone directories and reference books, carbon copies and filing systems. […]

If writers were pitted against fact checkers, it was because the former resented a check on the idea of the lone genius whose words were unassailable. In the era of New Journalism, The New Yorker’s fact-checking arm came in for criticism from figures like Tom Wolfe, who saw in it a form of groupthink and regarded it as a cabal of women and middling editors all collaborating to henpeck and emasculate the prose of the Great Writer.

Since the dawn of the digital age, upstart and august publications alike have largely abandoned fact-checking when it comes to online stories. Unlike print, digital content is never completely set in stone, so websites have returned to an ethos closer to that of the New York World’s Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play, issuing post facto corrections as needed in lieu of prepublication checking.

I know it’s been fashionable since at least the 1960s to mock the very idea of fact-checking as bourgeois frippery or (since the advent of French theory) as inherently senseless, since there’s no such thing as objective reality (or whatever — I could never figure out what they were saying in enough detail to even provide a nutshell caricature), but I have no patience for that sort of thing, and I think a lot of people have realized recently that it has very unfortunate real-world consequences. Just because facts are hard to pin down and you can rarely be completely sure of them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

Comments

  1. I’m always slightly reassured by the New Yorker‘s reputation but the unreliability of official facts is one of the reasons historians were so keen to begin taking oral histories. Facts don’t exist in photographs; even before they’ve been photoshopped you’re seeing one person’s view, not an undeniable fact. I think that’s what the French were on about. Then there’s the ten-year-old meme of adding “FACT!” to easily disputed opinions like “Basil is the sexiest boy alive.” Factcheck that one, motherfuckers.

  2. It seems to me that an obsession with fact-checking has never reached the Murdoch press, at least not in Southeast Queensland.

    Take the Sunshine Coast Daily Weekend of 28 Dec. The front-page headline blares “TOO FAST, TOO STUPID” (“A Coast man has clocked up one of the highest speeds of the Christmas break after police caught him driving 60km/h above the limit. To make matters worse, the 27-year-old Glenview man then allegedly returned a breath-alcohol concentration more than twice the legal limit.”) Ok, the facts are there (there is even an “allegedly” thrown in), but the spin overwhelms the story. This is typical of this newspaper, which carries a mixture of sensationalised stories, human-interest and feel-good stories, thinly disguised plugs for real-estate developers, and the reporting of people’s opinions as news stories (“MPs target fuel loads as key cause of recent fire emergency. Climate not all to blame.” The story goes on to report the opinion of Sunshine Coast’s federal politicians who fell in line to back their leaders.”) Letters to the editor are mostly from crackpots. And of course there is sport and funnies.

    Perhaps that is typical of small-town newspapers around the world, but things are not much better in the Courier-Mail (Brisbane). Try today’s front-page exclusive, a “bombshell interview” with the leader of the State opposition party, who “sensationally accused Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk of being more concerned with her image than running the State”. Headline: “Real me versus Princess Premier”. The Murdoch press at its best. (Incidentally, Palaszczuk is pronounced “pallashay”).

    I would welcome something approaching the obsession with facts of Time or The New Yorker, but that appears to be too much to expect.

  3. Like Hat, I could never make out exactly French theory’s take on what I old-fashionedly continue to call facts.

    Is the birthplace of Trump’s father or of Obama something we can call a fact? Can we call out Trump when he makes false claims? Or is Trump merely expressing a for-him ‘reality’: he feels like his father was German; he feels like Obama is Kenyan.

  4. The alleged motto of the erstwhile News of the World (or maybe of the still-extant Sun): Make it thrilling, make it fast, and make it up.

  5. J.W. Brewer says

    You needn’t get all French-Theoryish about whether “facts” exist in an abstract sense to be suspicious of a bourgeois “fact-checking” enterprise whose process for “verification” largely consists of having drudges make sure that the factual assertions in a draft article are consistent with those in standard reference books. That there is likely or even certain to be a fact of the matter does not, by itself, mean that we actually have a reliable or efficient or cost-effective process for determining (to any particular degree of certainty) what it is. “There are X stars in the universe” is a factual assertion which ought to be true for some value of X and false for all other values of X, but that doesn’t mean we’re well-positioned to figure out whether a given X is true or even in a range that’s likely to be true. (FWIW I was just told by a five-year-old with a confident tone of voice that X is “ten billion and seven.” Not sure how The New Yorker is going to debunk that.)

  6. I don’t know, you’re sounding suspiciously French to me.

  7. Facts exist, but they’re not the only things that exist.

  8. The same is true of food, but we can’t do without it.

  9. David Marjanović says

    Perhaps that is typical of small-town newspapers around the world, but things are not much better in the Courier-Mail (Brisbane).

    Austria’s largest newspaper, read by half the country, is also its worst, and things aren’t much better in Germany.

    Incidentally, Palaszczuk is pronounced “pallashay”

    …Did she intentionally create a Featherstonehaugh situation?

    Not sure how The New Yorker is going to debunk that.

    By pointing out that the real number, whatever it is exactly, is a bunch of orders of magnitude larger than that. Even the number of known galaxies is a lot larger.

  10. Well, facts certainly are not found in oral histories either. You need a confluence of sources. Of course, to a lawyer fact means ‘point not in dispute in this particular legal case’.

    Adam Gopnik’s riff on fact checkers and theory checkers, quoted at the Log.

  11. It is with a heavy heart that I must defend French theory against Hat’s accusation – verificationism was already a charred corpse by the time they appeared on the scene, thanks to Karl Popper (with assistance from Quine). RIP.

    I’m not opposed to fact checking – but we should recognize that it rests on the notion that there is something “objective” about a 24 year old Ivy League graduate who we are relying on to 1) select statements to fact check, 2) evaluate the credibility of competing sources, and 3) do this without crossing the line into editorializing. We should recall that this vaunted process failed to spot a number of obvious fabrications by Jonah Lehrer. It proved to be equally ineffective against Joan Acocella unleashing a torrent of derp against linguistic science. It reminds me of law review – where i furiously exerted myself in checking citations while giving no thought to the thrust of the argument or itsstructure; it didn’t make the articles any better or more insightful. Doing more of it wouldn’t help anything.

    Still, at least the New Yorker takes the task seriously and performs it diligently. But fact-checking is also how the Washington Post describes the tedious and inane Pinocchio-awarding columns by Glenn Kessler. As AntC says, for journalists it is enough that a proposition coheres with an existing framework of belief for it to count as “objective” and “verifiable”. And this is worse than no fact checking at all – it’s the classic “view from nowhere” presented as “objective truth”, inevitably located in the middle of two opposing views on the issue. (And unbelievably Facebook’s “fact-checking” is somehow even worse than that.)

    There is a seductive simplicity to the notion that mistaken beliefs are rooted in mistaken facts, so correcting the fact would naturally serve to correct the belief. If nothing else, the last 3 years have shown us that fact checking is at best an ineffective tool against misinformation.

  12. Very true, but the fact that fact checking doesn’t solve all problems and that it’s not perfect doesn’t give us license to chuck it all and say “Whatever, dude! Everyone gets their own favorite facts!” I know you’re not saying that, and I’ll take your word for it that French theory wasn’t saying that (since you’ve been able to take it on board, and I haven’t), but it’s definitely been a thing recently, and I’m fed up with it. Relationships fail too, at discouraging rates, but that doesn’t mean love doesn’t exist or that it isn’t worth trying for.

  13. Bourgeois Nerd says

    The turn away from fact-checking isn’t due to French theory, though. It’s newspapers cost-cutting in the pursuit of profit. As the media landscape has convulsed and fractured, “fripperies” like fact-checking aren’t “worth” the cost.

  14. “Half of all marriages end in divorce, and the other half in death. Forget the whole thing.”

  15. Well, facts certainly are not found in oral histories either.
    Any history that’s worth reading is about assembling a case for an opinion rather than just listing facts (I’d put facts in inverted commas if I thought that would help, but I’m sick of it, At Language Hat, you can be the judge). Oral histories make new evidence available: stories that can sometimes be verified, privately owned photographs, the weight of opinion about an event, lots more. A former suffragette’s account of her social life and friendships can provide more clues to what went on than a contemporary official document on suffragettes might. Both or either can be true yet only the latter is a fact – the fact being that it’s an official document.

    To a lawyer fact means ‘point not in dispute in this particular legal case’.
    And ‘not in dispute’ doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be.

    Bourgeois Nerd uploaded a very nice little drawing in a style that looks familiar (and I’m pretty sure it’s from an American strip), but I can’t place it. Where is it from, BN?

  16. The turn away from fact-checking isn’t due to French theory, though. It’s newspapers cost-cutting in the pursuit of profit. As the media landscape has convulsed and fractured, “fripperies” like fact-checking aren’t “worth” the cost.

    True, but the cultural climate doesn’t help.

  17. Since birthdates have been invoked, let me recall, just to be annoying, a discussion I once read about “scientific objectivity” in which one of the panelists, a practicing scientist, repeatedly used, as his example of a solid, indisputable fact, “George Washington was born on February 22, 1732.” Uh, sir, I learned in middle school (in a science class) that when GW was born, the calendar on the wall read February 11, 1731.* Of course the fact that somebody can mistake the Gregorian calendar for a fact of nature rather than a product of history and society doesn’t mean that “the earth goes around the sun” is just a social product (as I’ve heard seriously maintained). But it does mean that people who respond to every invocation of history and society with a growl about “postmodernism” might want to learn something about historical and social FACTS.

    *Voltaire, about that time: “The English would rather disagree with the sun than agree with the Pope.”

  18. I know all about the relativity of dating and cultural assumptions et tutti quanti; I’ve read enough discussions of the stuff to fill a warehouse. My point is not that FACTS are FACTS DAMMIT and why is everyone so damn picky; my point is that even though many facts can never be known and many others can only be known approximately and the whole thing is very hard, none of that means that facts don’t exist and we can all choose what we want to believe and it’s all groovy. As long as you accept the existence and importance of facts (actual hard truths about the world that are not dependent on point of view), then we’re on the same page and there’s no point going on about edge cases. If you don’t, we are at daggers drawn. (“You” being the impersonal “you,” of course.)

  19. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    I know it’s been fashionable since at least the 1960s to mock the very idea of fact-checking as bourgeois frippery or (since the advent of French theory) as inherently senseless,

    This one puzzled me: what on earth is French theory? A theory introduced by a chap called French, like the French Press (the one for breaking bacteria, not the one for making coffee, of which I know only that it exists)? A theory of epistemology popular in France? Something else? From DuckDuckGo I learn that it’s something between options 2 and 3, but my impression is that Derrida etc. have more prestige in the USA than in France today.

  20. *Sings* Da da da, derri derri da da, da da.

  21. my impression is that Derrida etc. have more prestige in the USA than in France today.

    Irrelevant; it’s called French theory in English, at least if you’re tired of calling it postmodernism or deconstructionism. Or, of course, you can just call it Theory. I say it’s spinach.

  22. As always, my prejudices are my own and I have no desire to foist them on anyone else. Anyone who’s read and understood Derrida is one up on me, and is welcome to cock a snook at me.

  23. Though I guess it would be more fitting to give me the bras d’honneur.

  24. Fact is what people say is fact.

  25. What do you mean by that?

  26. If I say “The earth is flat,” is that a fact?

  27. Hat, I couldn’t agree more. In 1972 I was sitting in on a class by a well-known English scholar who was the one who told us, “In the Middle Ages it was true that the sun went around the earth.” I didn’t have the balls to ask him–he was Jewish–“Well then, was it true in the Middle Ages that Jews ate Christian babies?”

    Not an idle question either. I’m rereading John Crowley’s Aegypt quartet, whose main point (on the historical/social level) is that the devaluation of reason in those days led, once the pixie dust had settled, to the upsurge in fundamentalism and general obscurantsm that continues to rage. “What he could not have expected, what he would not ever have thought possible: that his old God … should suddenly come alive, factitious but animated, stirring like an eyeless lump of foulness in a dream. … Old Nobodaddy, liver-spotted greasy-bearded jealous God, spread over his hoard of blessings like the Dragon, surrounded by his sycophants singing praises, never enough though.”

    Anyhow, my impression is that in academe today, the facile relativism of those days has gone the way of the facile rationalism of my own undergrad days, the facile idealism that (I now know) preceded it, etc., and that deconstructionists are now like the New Critics were in my day, the harrumphing seniors that the young roll their eyes at. And not a minute too soon.

  28. In 1972 I was sitting in on a class by a well-known English scholar who was the one who told us, “In the Middle Ages it was true that the sun went around the earth.”

    Ooh, how that would have enraged me!

    And not a minute too soon.

    Amen.

  29. How do you know something is a fact?

    Because people say so.

    Only a very tiny share of all the facts you “know” you can actually ascertain yourself.

    All the rest is the stuff other people said is a fact.

    So what is actually “fact-checking”?

    It’s making sure enough people (and right people) say this is a fact.

  30. Trond Engen says

    I have never had time for philosophers, French or otherwise, but surely, much of the discussion here is due to insufficient structuring in levels of abstraction. There is such a thing as facts. FACT! But there’s also different ways to arrive at knowledge of the facts, or best approximations of facts, or apportioning of beliefs according to weight of evidence, and we all depend on trust in methods and culture to have set the axioms right for us. The earth rotating around the sun is a fact, or a good approximation of the facts for certain purposes. The earth and the sun both rotating around their common center of gravity is a better approximation. And there are still better approximations all the way down. Still, all are factual statements that can be arrived at through means of observation independent of the ideology or beliefs of the observer.

    But the acceptance of a system to arrive at this knowledge, at evidence gathered independent of ideology or beliefs, is a social convention. And the way society at large treats knowledge is another socuial convention. On the social and individual side there are conventions all the way down.

    This means that when the object of study is human, or highly dependent on human report, the conventions themselves are important parts of the study. It does not mean that every way to arrive at any opinion is equally valid, but if you are to understand humans, you have to understand what is visible from where they stand, and it’s worth acknowledging that whatever we think we know, we too are looking out from a window that somebody opened for us.

    I was going to keep ranting, but they’re coming to take me away to a Christmas party.

  31. they’re coming to take me away to a Christmas party

    *envy*

  32. they’re coming to take me away

    Ho ho, hee hee, ha ha.

  33. I’m with Hat. Facts exist and any good editor should always know them. When he or she chooses to ignore them and states news-grabbing opinions as fact, that’s the beginning of the Slippery Slope because someone somewhere will be misled by them.

    And thanks for the reminder of that song, John Cowan!

  34. As a matter of fact, on hundreds of occasions I have used a French Press to disrupt the plasma membrane of microorganisms.

  35. Stu Clayton says

    This means that when the object of study is human, or highly dependent on human report, the conventions themselves are important parts of the study. It does not mean that every way to arrive at any opinion is equally valid, but if you are to understand humans, you have to understand what is visible from where they stand, and it’s worth acknowledging that whatever we think we know, we too are looking out from a window that somebody opened for us.

    This is wonderfully clear and pragmatic, Trond. It’s essentially how I have come to think about these matters after reading Luhmann. He himself never issued advice or tried to improve the world.

  36. I know an elderly Clasics professor (WW2 veteran) who refers to Foucault, Derrida, and the rest as the ‘Frog Chorus’. Whether he ever does so in public or in print, I do not know.

  37. PlasticPaddy says

    @ajp
    The image is on pinterest and placed there by spacey linenkitty with the helpful title “cartoon man reading book”. Seems to be “out-of-copyright advertisement catalog art”.

  38. I know an elderly Clasics professor (WW2 veteran) who refers to Foucault, Derrida, and the rest as the ‘Frog Chorus’.

    I think I’ll adopt that forthwith. Brek-kek-kek-kek!

  39. David Marjanović says

    On postmodernism, I recommend this thread, where I cited a LH thread. ^_^

  40. Brek-kek-kek-kek-zit

  41. Plastic, thanks.

    I tried google images, but when I did it nothing came up.

  42. David Marjanović says

    bras d’honneur

    Nowadays widespread outside of France – in combination with the middle finger.

  43. J.W. Brewer says

    This rather lengthy piece on the recently-departed Harold Bloom from the TLS last month is not particularly relevant to this thread, except that I was struck by the off-hand casual dismissiveness of the sentence “Nor has it anything to do with French theory” — as if written on the assumption that the median TLS reader would know exactly what was meant by “French theory” and roll their eyes accordingly. (I had a bit of trouble figuring out what the antecedent of the “it” was in the sentence — something like “HB’s view of the overriding importance of the sublime,” I think.) https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/strong-man-competition/

  44. as if written on the assumption that the median TLS reader would know exactly what was meant by “French theory” and roll their eyes accordingly.

    Delete “exactly” and I’m pretty sure that’s a reasonable assumption; nobody knows exactly what French theory means. Not even the French. (Of course, they believe in rhetoric and logique, not facts.)

  45. Eeeeh, isn’t one of the ideas of the vaunted French theory is that there is no such thing as a meaning? Meaning is correspondence of our linguistic description to something outside it, being it reality or some other construct of the mind. If there is no reality than we are back into the Humpty-Dumpty territory and everyone is allowed to mean by French theory whatever they want. Doesn’t even need to be French.

  46. J.W. Brewer says

    I fear I may have been misunderstood. The referent of the NP “French theory” need not itself be intelligible or coherent for many or even most other speakers of English to know what referent is intended in context by the use of the phrase. Perfectly cromulent words like “indescribable” or “incoherent” or “nonsensical” do not, as words, suffer from the defects imputed to their referents.

  47. SFReader: no, fact checking is comparing claims to sources. If my article says “in his philosophical treatise, Aristander argues that ‘all Xes are Y'” and a checker takes that treatise down and reads “some Xes are not Y'” then my article is wrong. Checking intermediary sources is sometimes necessary but always unreliable. A good paper to read is Anne-Wil Harzing, “Are Our Referencing Errors Undermining Our Scholarship and Credibility? The Case of Expatriate Failure Rates,” Journal of Organizational Behavior, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Feb., 2002), pp. 127-148

  48. Anyhow, my impression is that in academe today, the facile relativism of those days has gone the way of the facile rationalism of my own undergrad days, the facile idealism that (I now know) preceded it, etc., and that deconstructionists are now like the New Critics were in my day, the harrumphing seniors that the young roll their eyes at. And not a minute too soon.

    Sadly I don’t think this is true at all.

    Or rather, it is true only in the narrow sense that particular names and texts have certainly tumbled from the peaks of broad currency and familiarity they once enjoyed among a generation or so of humanities academics from the 70s to the 90s. As I see it, the lasting triumph of (the American interpreters and promulgators of what we call by way of shorthand) “French Theory” has become so thoroughly institutionalized as to make its influence transparent.

    That Derrida and Foucault (who are actually quite different) are less read now than before is probably true, though I have a strong suspicion that their ideas were always more subscribed to than actually read through anyway, even in the heyday of their popularity. But in any case the basic orientation of emphasizing the cui bono over the quid of facts has clearly gained the field, however lost to collective memory the history of blows traded over any particular section of the battlefield may become.

    This can clearly be seen in the sneering dismissal with which (again in the literary humanities) a care for ascertaining the facts of cultural history is so often rejected as (obviously naive, and probably also reactionary) “positivism.” It can clearly be seen in the way (intuited!) subjective protagonism (yes, even of fictional characters) is so often given greater weight in literary scholarship than observable features of texts and their environments. In every circumstance where the (very real) imperfections of objective falsifiability are taken as license to prefer unfalsifiable and often emotionally charged narratives instead, the influence of that critical movement is very present and controlling still, whoever’s flag it happens to be flying at any given time.

    tl;dr, I think Hat’s suspicion that something in academic debates of a generation or so ago is very much in the background of our painfully fact-challenged present is absolutely on the mark, even if the detailed workings-out of that movement are not satisfactorily captured by the shorthand of “French theory” as a single descriptive term.

  49. The idea that a lot of the things we rely on everyday as ‘knowledge’ are just hearsay is pretty widely acknowledged, and most empiricists would say “you are right, that kind of ‘knowledge’ is less reliable than things known directly.” There are also issues with human sense-perception and memory (Lucretius talks about the former). But that does not mean that checking claims against the objects they claim to describe is not the best way to decide whether the claims are true, or that “I have that book in hand, and page 33 says …” is not a stronger test than “twenty years everyone was talking about that book, and I heard that it said …”

    One reason that fact-checking is important is to counteract the limits of human memory and our trouble keeping track of the basis of different ‘knowledge.’

  50. PlasticPaddy says

    I think there at least three problems: (1) inappropriate application of statistics or “objective” measures in the social sciences
    (2) Claims that all questions can be reduced to or replaced by questions that are amenable to empirical study
    (3) Claims that empirical conclusions are “really” due to selection bias or confirmation bias on the part of investigators
    For (1) this is detectable and correctable. For (2)-(3), maybe the claimants are exaggerating their claims and do not really believe them in the above form. So the individual can extract whatever they find to be useful from the claimants’ publications. For example, the “fact” that Berkeley was obsessed with tarwater purges does not explain his philosophy, but illuminates its origin and formation.

  51. D.O. Doesn’t even need to be French.
    No. I observed, post 1980ish, that what had been known as ‘History of Art’ or ‘Architectural History’ began to be called just History-slash-Theory, Critical Theory, and simply Theory, in schools of Art and or Architecture. This has hefty French po-mo input; the usual suspects plus, in architecture, Merlot-Ponty & some non-Frenchpersons on phenomenology, and nowadays ‘Theory’ includes more recent research topics. If you should want to work at a museum or be a curator or a writer, History of Art is still a subject. It’s taught at specialist schools like the Courtauld or the NYU Institute of Fine Arts as well as at undergraduate-level universities.

  52. Stu Clayton says

    the “fact” that Berkeley was obsessed with tarwater purges does not explain his philosophy, but illuminates its origin and formation

    That particular light is so faint that I am unable to see more in his ideas than I could before you turned it on.

  53. PlasticPaddy says
  54. The link gives the authors as “John Oulton Wisdom, Ernest Jones”. I’m guessing that you knew Wisdom, not Jones, who returned the significance-laden spoon [Ger.loc.] in 1958. I see he was the general editor of the Library in which Wisdom’s book appeared.

    “The unconscious origin of Berkeley’s philosophy”. How rosy life now is after the Death of the Author, taking with it speculations about his motives !

  55. Ernest Jones is the psychiatrist & biographer of Freud who has given his name to a chain of London jewellery shops.

  56. Yes, he who also gave us “cathexis” et al., instead of terms like the suggestive and much more intelligible German ones Freud used. This was discussed at length here many years ago.

  57. In 2005, and I think elsewhere.

  58. Stu Clayton says

    That was before my time. I vaguely remember putting my oar into the discussion.

  59. It came up in this 2010 thread, in which you took part.

  60. >I know an elderly Clasics professor (WW2 veteran) who refers to Foucault, Derrida, and the rest as the ‘Frog Chorus’.

    This will probably get hung up in the filter, but from my daughters’ favorite band:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avEF6t0Dz_c

  61. Voltaire, about that time: “The English would rather disagree with the sun than agree with the Pope.”

    Just ran across another Voltaire quote that perfectly sums up the attitude (not held by all Frenchpersons! I am not Frenchist!) that I so strongly deprecate:

    Malheur aux détails! la postérité les néglige tous: c’est une vermine qui tue les grands ouvrages.

    Note that this is more than two centuries before Derrida & Co.; clearly the French preference for grandeur over détails goes way back.

  62. Cf. noted French(-influenced) theorist Samuel Johnson on “just representations of general nature.”

  63. John Cowan says

    The Augustans in general were big on that, hence Blake’s snarl “To generalize is to be an idiot. To particularize is the alone distinction of merit. General knowledge are those knowledge that idiots possess.” This also reflects Blake’s training as a visual artist: you can’t draw or paint a generalized tiger, only a particular (real or imaginary) tiger. A generalized tiger would be a blur, which is something that Blake abhors.

    In one of Blake’s annotations to Berkeley, “Man is All Imagination God is Man & exists in us & we in him / What Jesus came to Remove was the Heathen or Platonic Philosophy which blinds the Eye of Imagination / The Real Man”, the key word is “Platonic”: for Blake, Plato is the supreme generalizer.

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