Ebola, The Greek Economy, and Public Intellectuals

Last month Adam Crymble, who blogs at Thoughts on Public & Digital History, published an article in University Affairs describing some of the nuts and bolts of publishing in non-peer-reviewed publications. He feels that the future of the ivory tower should be based on scholars’ ability to inform and influence the public in widely read publications, rather than (solely, at any rate) to engage other scholars in publications read only by a small number of similarly positioned peers.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I entirely agree that the humanities and social sciences have demonstrated a disturbing tendency towards intellectual cloistering. On the other hand, I imagine anything that could be interpreted as an argument that we should all become public intellectuals will throw many, both the young and theoretical as well as the old and empirical, into fits of apoplexy.

In any case, both the need for some sort of informed sense being injected into public debate, as well as the uphill battle faced by those attempting to do so, are clearly established by a particularly bizarre comment I came across yesterday, in which the secretary-general of a supposedly important intergovernmental organization, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), attempts to draw the following strained and dubious analogy between biological infection and economic recession:

As the crisis went beyond government paper to hit Greek and Portuguese bonds today, OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria likened the troubles to the Ebola virus. “It’s not a question of the danger of contagion,” he told Bloomberg Television. “Contagion has already happened. This is like Ebola. When you realize you have it you have to cut your leg off in order to survive.”

The man in question, Angel Gurria, is a Harvard-educated bureaucrat, not a faux-populist politician pretending to be a Texan, which is why I consider the comment’s breathtaking inanity so astounding.

Oddly enough, while the comment was widely reported (and gently mocked in some corners as being rather extremist), no one in the corporate press seems to have bothered to point out the obvious: cutting off your leg is not actually a treatment for ebola. I’m not saying that knowing the difference between a hemorrhagic fever and necrotizing fasciitis is going to solve the recession, but it would be helpful if public officials displayed a modicum of informed judgement.

 

4th Edition of Runte’s “National Parks” Now Out

Rowman & Littlefield has published, this spring, a fourth edition of Alfred Runte’s environmental history classic, National Parks: The American Experience. First published in 1971, this book advanced one of the first critical arguments about the construction of national parks in America: namely, that they were created out of a sense of patriotic insecurity rather than a concern for the preservation of the wilderness, and that they were deliberately built on “worthless lands” in order to prevent damaging nationalists’ greater imperative, economic development.

The argument is an important one, written in a highly readable fashion that will appeal — and has appealed — both to a popular audience as well as to interested academics. The latter will doubtless wonder why Runte has now published a new edition rather than a reprinting, and the book unfortunately does little to explain itself on this score, beyond a dismissive reference to the work of “postmodernists” such as William Cronon.

Nevertheless, anyone who wants to be familiar with environmental historiography has to experience Runte’s work at some point, and the publication of the new edition promises to provide a window onto the field for those who have just arrived via new television documentaries (on one of which Runte is an advisor) as well as a chance for graduate students to fill out their bookshelves.

The full text of this review has been published on Associated Content.

 

National Post: Create New Historic Sites

I was really planning on sitting tight on this blog until I start my new grad studies in September, particularly since I’ll be away from my computer for most of what remains of the summer. However, what I saw this morning in the newspaper got me thinking. History seldom gets much of a nod in the public press. Usually people prefer to avoid engaging with the past anyways – take, for example, Carleton international affairs professor Fen Hampson’s recent column in the Ottawa Citizen, a celebration of this week’s visit of Japanese royalty to Canada’s capital which manages to paint a mysteriously positive gloss over the early history of Canadian-Japanese cultural relations. Ah, well.

Today’s National Post goes in a different direction. There’s an editorial suggesting that part of the government of Canada’s infrastructure stimulus program should be new investment in historic sites. Not just existing sites, but the creation of new ones. In the editors’ minds, this should be a relatively simple task: allocate some money to Heritage Canada and let them move through their annual “endangered buildings” list snapping up privately owned real estate of national historic value. Suggested properties include Ben’s Deli in Montreal and the Pantages Theatre in Vancouver.

Canadians, the paper asserts,

value our structural history too little. An old church or an old house is taken for granted. Or it is considered insignificant as compared with a great palace in India or a towering cathedral in Europe – too trivial to save.

Ironically, an American historian, Alfred Runte, argued in the 1970s that the reason North America created national parks was because our pitiful architectural heritage couldn’t hope to stand up to the ancient monuments of Europe and Asia, and we therefore turned to nature to build our monuments for us. Presumably the time has now arrived when we have viable architectural heritage, after all. Maybe, anyways. Brandon’s Dominion Exhibition Display Building can’t hope to match St. Paul’s cathedral for splendour or largesse, admits the Post – but “it does honour a time when many new prairie settlements nurtured big ambitions.”

 

Greetings…

Hello, would-be readers. As you can see, there really is nothing particularly interesting here at the moment.

I created this blog in anticipation of tracking and recording my thoughts and experiences beginning with a new course of studies I’m entering in September. Until that time there may well be very little activity on this site.

Perhaps I’ll see you again then.

D.V.