Rose-Tinted Glasses by Any Other Name

I read an interesting blog post the other day.

/https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-death-of-scholarship/

Although I generally agree with his position, I found the author's style a bit off-putting, because he seemed to just assume that there is a clear white and black/ right and wrong nature to "right" and "left" thinking with regard to scholarship. That seemed a little simplistic to me, but, overall, I thought his point was a good one.

I had heard rumors of black-listing against conservative-minded professors in academia, and while the author (somewhat tacitly?) acknowledges that, he goes deeper than that. It's easy to see those sorts of statistics feel frustrated, but I appreciate that Treadgold dug deeper than conspiracies and victimhood, and looked to address root causes.

This statement was a real eye-opener:

The truth is that non-leftists are discriminated against not so much because of their politics (which they can often hide) as because of their failure to do the kind of scholarship that hiring committees want.

As a free-market guy, the statement doesn't bother me so much on the surface, but the implications behind it cause me consternation.

Reading the article and its explanations of the different philosophical approaches to scholarship and historical analysis brought to my mind advertising through contrasts.

Imagine I want to sell something for $3.00, and my friend offers to sell the same thing for $2.00.

Is his price 50% lower or 33% lower?

Well, it could be either. His price is 50% {of his price} lower than mine (as he would do well to emphasize), but it's *only* 33% {of my price} lower (as I might try to point out).

The problem is one of ambiguity, and it's a complication that's baked in to the very nature of the situation. When comparing and (more importantly) contrasting two distinct contexts or frames of reference, then there is no objectively neutral context to serve as the "standard."

In advertising, is your product or the other guy's the standard-bearer for deriving your calculations for quantifying how much better, brighter, cleaner, etc. yours may be? Well, it probably depends on which one makes for a more favorable percentage.

Scholarship should be more intellectually honest than that, though. Maybe I'm biased, but it seems to me that it's more consistent (and charitable) to read history through those actors' contemporary lenses rather than our own.

I can definitely see interest in juxtaposing Shakespeare, et al. against the politics and mores of our present age, but I think we're doing a tremendous disservice to those historical figures as well as ourselves if our academic pursuits stop there and we only analyze things through the lenses we are already comfortable with.