Tag Archives: academia

Do We Have a Deal?

Posted on by

The famed author of Parkinson’s Law once wrote that there are two kinds of books: those with naked women on the cover, and those without. As a rule, he added, the former sell better. Over the years my blog has carried quite some pictures of women. However, not one of them shows a pair of naked breasts. Much as I love women, specifically including their bodies, it is a policy I intend to follow in the future, too.

Seriously, the blog is now ten years old. During the first four years it was clicked-on more than a quarter of a million times; at that point I lost touch. Not nearly enough to compete with, say, Stormy Daniels and her alleged presidential lover. But perhaps sufficient to merit pausing for a bit of reflection. Before I get started, though, I’d like to thank my stepson Jonathan Lewy, who has been running it on my behalf; Mr. Larry Kummer, editor of the Fabius Maximus website, who more than anyone else has taken an interest in my work and encouraged me to continue posting; my friend Bill Lind whose blog, Traditional Right, is always an inspiration; the painter Bob Barancik; various people who, either after being contacted by me or spontaneously, agreed to write their own essays; and a somewhat larger number who took the trouble to contact me and correspond with me.

Just why I started blogging and kept doing so I am no longer sure. Originally I wanted a forum on which I could write what I wanted at any time and in any form I wanted. Without, what is more, being subject to the whims of editors many of whom have their own agenda and quite a few of whom have always remained more or less unknown to me. That remains true to the present day. Another motive, which was added later, was a growing sense of obligation towards my readers. It is like being married; how could I let them down? Not that I have any illusions that they could not exist without me. However, it is as people say. The one thing worse than a Dutch Calvinist is a Jewish Dutch Calvinist.

Normally I spend about two hours on each post. Often these are times when, for one reason or another, I do not feel like doing more “serious” work. I draw my ideas from various sources. Including, above all, the daily news; any book or books I happened to be reading or working on; and friends’ suggestions. Topics I found particularly interesting included Israeli affairs—I am, after all, a citizen and a resident of that country and have long shared both its triumphs and its failures. Also military affairs in general; women’s affairs (both in- and out of the military); the shape the future might take; political correctness, which is my personal bête noire; why American kids so often take up guns and kill everyone in sight; and others.

Some of these topics have proved much more popular than others. I have, however, never succeeded in guessing in advance which ones would draw many readers and which ones would turn into flops. Truth to say, I have not even seriously tried. Perhaps it is better so; writing to please should only be allowed to go so far and no farther. Some posts, especially those that touch upon the position of women in society as well as the relationship between them and men, have drawn considerable critical fire. Good! May they continue to do so in the future, too.

One part of the work I particularly like is searching Google.com for images. Given enough patience, you will almost certainly find what you are looking for. I know there are a lot of criticisms of Google and I suppose some of them are justified. Any organization as large and successful as they are is bound to make enemies. As, in the past, Western Union, Standard Oil, General Motors, ATT, and Microsoft all did. To me, however, the company has provided a certain kind of freedom people before 2000 or so could not even imagine. Thank you, Google, for your help. It is appreciated.

Finally, I am not getting any younger or healthier. Driving up and down the hills around Jerusalem, which as a young man with twenty kilograms less around the waist I used to run over as if my life depended on it, I often wonder how long before some illness strikes and brings me to a halt. Que sera, sera. This, however I promise my readers:

Never, ever, will I use the kind of swearwords and other forms of expression that, after they have been uttered, require mouthwash.

Never, ever, will I knowingly allow my judgments to be affected by inducements—and there have been a few attempts to offer them—or threats. The kind of threats, incidentally, that are even now being issued by some elements in Israeli academia against any faculty member who dares address any kind of political issue in class.

Never, ever, will I allow anyone or anything to interfere with my right to think, say and write as I saw fit.

Always, always, will I try to keep an open ear to my readers’ suggestions and criticism.

In return, I ask my readers to go on telling me what they think. Preferably by email at mvc.dvc@gmail.com

Do we have a deal?

Writing Dialogue

Posted on by

As all of you readers know, I am not a novelist but a historian. Not just a historian, but an academic one. Which means that, over the fifty years since I got my first academic post I have never written dialogue. Except, perhaps, for some sketch at a family party; although, to be honest, I cannot remember doing even that.

The way academia sees it, and the constant call for “dialogue” between A and B and C and D and E and F and G and H apart, there are two things to be said about written dialogue. First, literature and drama are full of it. Some of it is excellent and deserves to be studied as if it were holy writ; as with the works of Aeschylus, Plato, William Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, and God knows how many others. The rest is trash and can safely be ignored. Second, worried lest they would come up with trash, modern academics themselves seldom write dialogue. Neither of the intellectual type nor of the dramatic one. It has its place, to be sure. But not within the hallowed halls where serious, meaning that it is provided with footnotes, work is done.

I, however, have just published The Gender Dialogues which is dialogue from beginning to end. A special kind of dialogue, mind you; the kind that takes place in an interview, with which I have plenty of experience. How did it all start? When a young lady from Kingman, Arizona, contacted me and asked me to do an interview for her podcast. The topic was my 2013 book, The Privileged Sex. In it I argue that the conventional wisdom is wrong. The advantages of being female are at least as great as the advantages. Everything considered, perhaps a little greater.

So she sent me some questions. And I sent her some of my own that I thought would be worth discussing. And so we exchanged views until we had enough material to talk about and did the interview. A very pleasant one, I hasten to add. By now you can find it on the Net (at https://andyoverthinks.com/womenhaveitbetter/).

As I wrote down the answers to her questions, more questions presented themselves. As I answered those, the process started repeating itself. Soon enough the material expanded. Until it became necessary to divide both questions and answers into sections, each one dealing with a different aspect of the problem. At first the sections were numbered, but later they received titles too. Until they expanded into a book 40,000 words long.

However, neither the contents of the book nor the details of its eventual publication are what I want to write about today. Rather, what I do want to write about is the dialogue form itself. Originally dictated by the interview, I found it a challenge. As well as great fun. A challenge, because I had never done anything like it before. Fun, because it enabled me to ignore the usual rules of academic writing. After half a century of doing the latter, it set me free.

Apart from reading Plato, Cicero, and a few others I have never studied how to write dialogue. Nor did I ever take a “creative writing” course. Instead I went my own way. Searching, trying, erasing, discarding, and re-writing. Thank God for word processing; Plato, it was said, re-wrote the first sentence of The Republic twelve times. As I went along I learnt, or thought I’ve learnt, a few lessons others beside myself might find interesting.

Likewise, sperm production can be improved by buy viagra in india taking 400 IU of vitamin E daily. Now, we have got the other kind of medicine that is used for curing the disease is cialis shop find out over here now. tadalafil free We can store and use these jelly very easily as they comes in little independent sachet. You will fast shipping viagra either have to follow the prescription or you will have to take guidance from the doctor as to what is the reason behind your snoring and immediately take proper steps to cure this sexual crisis. So here goes.

First, for a reader to follow a very large number of questions and answers is hard. It requires the kind of concentration and memory not everyone is capable of. Sometimes that may even include the author himself. So it you have more than twenty or so of each, better divide your work into sections. Preferably such as have titles rather than mere numbers.

Second, make sure to allow the side whose argument you want to refute to present it in as strong a form as possible. Why? Because he who answers a fool risks becoming one. Galileo in his famous Dialogue of The Two Chief World Systems named one of his characters, Simplicio. In my view that was a bad mistake. Why should anyone want to argue with what a fool has to say? Better follow Plato all of whose characters, though not necessarily very sympathetic, are smart and well spoken.

Third, allow your interlocutors to make life difficult for each other. Easy questions, resulting in easy answers, are boring. For the same reason they should also be allowed to change places from time to time. If only to show that the matter is well in hand, each should express the views of the other. 

Fourth, don’t go too far in putting your learning on display. Goethe’s dictum, mastery is knowing where to stop, applies. More so, perhaps, in a dialogue than in some other kinds of text.

Fifth, spoken language tends to be simpler and less cumbersome than its written equivalent. This fact should be reflected in the dialogue you write. Select the simplest, most succinct, forms of expression you can think of. Write isn’t, not is. Don’t, not do not. Use idioms: make peace, instead of reconcile. Unless, of course, you want to bring out the character of one of the speakers. Such as learning (real or fake), pomposity, etc.

Sixth, and for the same reason, make your sentences as simple and short as you can. They should not sound like a machine gun, which in the kind of dialogue I am writing about is out of place. However, on the whole short ones are clearer and easier to understand. There is an essay by Hugh Trevor-Roper, a one-time Oxford Don famous for his style, about how to write good English. Using the “find” function of my word processor, I checked the average length of his sentences: 18 words. I think that, writing dialogue, you should be able to do better than that.

I could go on and on. However, from this point you are on your own.  Why should you have my laurels free of charge?

On Footnotes

Posted on by

As all of you who have taken a look at this website, even the most causal one, will know, throughout my adult life I have been a scholar. And the one thing that is most characteristic of a scholarly text, as opposed to one that is not so, is the use of footnotes. I well remember the first time, in late 1965 or early 1966, when I was required to submit a seminar paper. My teachers made me look upon footnotes as if they were the gates to paradise. Nor, as I learnt both at the time and later, when I became a teacher myself, was I by any means the only one to see them in this way.

As a young student of the humanities, you learn is that footnotes are very important even though, to say the truth, not many people bother to read them. As a young student of the social sciences you also learn that footnotes are very important even though the kind of footnotes you are expected to put into your work is somewhat different. The difference is that historians care who wrote the sources they cite, where, when, and why. Social scientists often don’t. For them, (John Nobody, 2020) is no different from (Adam Smith, 1776). Nor does it matter whether the source they are quoting is (Aristotle, 350 B.C) or (Aristotle, 1999). Some of them, I suspect, do not even know that by the time the latest edition of his work came out its author had been dead for some twenty-three centuries.

What both disciplines have in common is that they use footnotes to certify that a given piece of work is, in fact, “scientific.” The more footnotes you have, the more “scientific” your work. I’ve also noticed that, the less is known about a subject or period, the larger the number of footnotes that attend the text dealing with them. I too, peppered my books with footnotes. Like many other young students I used to count them with considerable pride. Not only did I want to see how many I had, but I also wanted to know how many there were per page.

The best footnotes contain material that is “unpublished” or “archival.” Accordingly I loved writing things like “Captain von und zu Verschwind to Lieutenant Colonel Suchmir, 6.8.1941, OKH [Oberkommando des Heeres]/Genst.d.H [Generalstab des Heeres] /Org.Abt. [Organisationsabteilung] II, Nr. 10962/41, Gkds [Geheime Kommandosache], GMR [German Military Records] T-706/0001131.” Looking back, heaven knows where I found the patience. Before computers came to the rescue, each time you typed in a mistake you have to re-do the entire page.

Technology and War was the first of my books that did not have any footnotes. In part, this was because I wrote it on my new Apple IIe—which, since it did not have an automatic re-numbering command, turned the task of revision into a nightmare. In part, it was because the subject was too large. For each sentence it would have been possible to come up not with one reference but with twenty. As with the mythological hydra, each source only pointed the way to many others. Had I read everything available on the subject, the project would still have been going on today, thirty years after the book was published. As I said, instead of always searching for new sources my difficulty was how to decide which ninety percent of the available ones not to read.

Yet the above difficulties only formed part of the story and not necessarily the most important one. Years ago, in class, somebody who may have been a follower of Popper said that the purpose of studying history was to disprove myths. I answered that, in my opinion, that was wrong. To be sure, disproving myths is a fine occupation for young historians eager to hone their skills and make a name for themselves. In fact one of my own earliest published articles carried the subtitle, “the destruction of a legend.” But mature scholars should aim higher. Much higher. Instead of disproving myths others have created, they should try to produce work so good as to become myths. As, to provide just one example, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire did.

This line of thought explains why, at the age of forty-something. I was developing an obsession—one which, in retrospect, seems almost megalomaniac—with my books’ ability to withstand the proverbial hand of time. To the point where, dedicating Technology to Dvora, I did so eis aeona. To obtain an idea of how it was done, I spent considerable time and energy looking at some famous books and analyzing them for “eternality.” Not surprisingly, the precise nature of the latter quality escaped me then and continues to escape me today.

However, I did make some interesting discoveries. The most important one was that hardly any of them had footnotes. Thucydides has no footnotes. To pile insult on injury, he says that the speeches, which many think are the best part of his entire work, are for the most part pure invention. That should certainly make some of us reflect on the nature of historical writing. Polybius, Sallust, Caesar, Tacitus and Josephus do not have footnotes either. Nor do Augustine, Machiavelli, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Darwin, and, in my own field, Clausewitz. To say nothing of Nietzsche; he would have laughed at the idea. And Heine poked fun at it.

Probably the reason why these and so many others dispensed with footnotes was because they were not modern academics. Not being modern academics, they did not try to be “scientific.” They did not have to compete for tenure by having their work evaluated by a committee. One whose members, instead of reading it, count (or rather, since the actual counting is done elsewhere, take note of), the number of times it is mentioned in “scientific” journals. Leonard Huizinga, who was a modern academic, in the introduction to Homo Ludens warns the reader not to expect documentation for every word. Another very good contemporary example is Humphrey Kitto’s The Greeks (1951). As unassuming little volume, so good is it that it sold over 1,500,000 copies. In the military field there is Michael Howard’s War in European History. A real tour de force that, in my view, puts all his other, far bulkier, works in the shade.

Underside of the penis shaft buy cheap levitra http://deeprootsmag.org/2019/07/25/bob-marovichs-gospel-picks-36/ is the most sensitive part. Regardless of the mind-bogglingwell being and sleepbenefits of HGH, this optionis just cheap cialis brand not cost-effective or possiblefor most. The trial was performed by Vedic cheapest prices for cialis Lifesciences Private ltd with very positive results. Vardenafil has not been mulled over with different medications for barrenness, sample generic viagra so use in mix with different medicines is not suggested. The more I reflected on the matter, the more it seemed to me that footnotes are characteristic of the mediocre book. The best books do not have them. But neither do the worst ones. Had the autos of romance literature, which sells more than most other kinds combined, tried to document its stories by this method, no doubt they would have gone bankrupt very quickly indeed. In a certain way, footnotes represent a compromise. If you think something is too important to be skipped altogether, but not important enough to be mentioned in the text, you can always put it into a footnote. Understood in this way, footnotes, far from being the mark of good scholarship, are merely a sign of indecision and, perhaps, cowardice.

To repeat, normally the very best books are those that do not have footnotes. Nor would such a book be at all improved if it were provided with them. Imagine the Bible sprinkled with brackets, or little numbers, or a variety of other signs who exact meaning is known only to a handful of experts. Each one reminding the reader that this or that fact or idea had come, not straight out of God’s mouth but from such and such a source; or else adding some kind of information that did not seem to worthy of being included in the text itself.

I, too, hoped to write such a book. If not one that would last forever, which I early on realized is beyond my powers, than at any rate one that would fuse the argument and the evidence on which it rests so tightly that, like a creeper on an oak tree, they would become indistinguishable. Not to put too fine a point on it, I wanted what I wrote to be so good as to be almost self-evident. As, to adduce just one more example, Confucius’ Analects are. Agreement was to be achieved by persuasion, not by piling on authorities many of whom would owe their presence on my pages precisely to their obscurity.

This was the guiding idea behind my best-known volume, The Transformation of War. Needless to say, its lack of footnotes did not pass unnoticed. One reviewer greeted Transformation as follows: “A tremendous challenge with van Creveld’s text is discerning where the bulk of his information comes from. His book lacks traditional citations of outside resources and he merely relies on direct quotes, inferences, but never on annotations accepted through APA, MLA or Chicago-Turabian style guides.” Here I must confess that, until I wrote the present essay, I did not even know that such a thing as “Turabian” existed. Mea culpa.

Since then I have written several other footnote-less books. Some better, some worse, but none that contained enough “eternality” to satisfy me. More than once I compromised and put in a bibliographical list—always at my editors’ insistence, never out of my own free will. In each case, perusing the book in question a few years later, I was struck by how antiquated, how irrelevant, the lists appeared. Had the books been re-issued, I would have deleted them. Who the devil cares?

And why bring up this entire topic right now? Because, over the last few years, I’ve been slowly moving towards the writing of fiction. My first attempt in this direction was Hitler in Hell (2017). Not, I repeat not, that I invented the facts with which it is crammed out of thin air. The book, if I may say so, is as well researched as any I have ever written; the paragraphs dealing with post-1945 developments, as Hitler observes them from hell, apart, everything in it is “real” or “true.” And can be “verified.” But in that I decided to try and adopt Hitler’s own point of view as far as possible; an approach which, right from the beginning, ruled out not just footnotes but any pretense at “real” scholarship. For me the book was fun to write—which, in the end, is all that matters.

When I say fun, what I mean is a kind of freedom scholars, owing to their self-imposed limitations, do not normally enjoy. Freedom to think and talk and write outside the box, as the saying goes. Freedom to use one’s imagination in somewhat different ways, and to a different extent, from that to which I have been accustomed throughout my life. Now that I think of it I find it hard to define the kind of freedom I am referring to with any precision. All I know is that I enjoy it and will never give it up again.

So what comes next? I am just working on the final draft of another volume, The Gender Dialogues. 40,000 works long, it is the record of an imaginary debate with a young, highly intelligent, female journalist. She really exists, and her questions gave me the push I needed; however, they and my answers to them only account for a small part of the material. And I am thinking about doing another book like Hitler in Hell. This time the title is going to be I, Stalin. Pinched, of course, from Robert Graves’ masterpiece, I Claudius; but much, much closer to reality.

If I were to provide some advice to young historians, it would go as follows. First, don’t throw away the baby with the bath water; ere you dispense with footnotes as well as other academic tools, make sure you have thoroughly mastered them. Second, however preposterous it may sound, do aim at eternality; even though your chances of attaining it are practically zero. In other words, do the very best you can. And third, enjoy yourself. Partly because, if you don’t, you are unlikely to come up with something others will enjoy as well; and partly because, in that case, what’s the point at all?