A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Amateur Hour

 

One thing that is fascinating about social media reaction videos is that they are largely, if not exclusively, the territorial domain of the amateur. What is perhaps even more fascinating is that these amateurs want to remain amateurs. They do little if any research on the shows they are watching. Many Buffy the Vampire Slayer reactors, for instance, do not do any research on the show they are watching and seem blissfully unaware that Fox, when it transferred Buffy into high defintition did it in the most amateurish way possible distorting the original academy aspect ratio and even changing the colour scheme of some shots, particularly special effects shots. Even so-called professionals seem amateurs in skank capitalist America these days. Being sure that they are watching a Buffy text that looks the way those who created Buffy wanted the show to look a does not seem at all important to them though admittedly some of them have switched to the original recording of the show when they learn about Fox's massive cock-up in reproducing the series in hi def

This amateurism and near valorisation of amateurism has a long history both in general and in the United States in particular. The US, for example, has a long tradition of anti-intellectual intellectualism stretching back to the anti-intellectual intellectualisms of old Europe and particularly England and to the rise of anti-intellectual Christianity in the US in the 18th century. Many right wing Christians, for instance, seem to have no problem with the fact that much if not most of their biblical interpretations are  grounded in an almost total lack of historical knowledge and a lack of knowledge of the original languages of the Bible, the book they consider holy, though not holy enough to actually do more than amateur surface research on a book they consider to be the word of god. What is, of course, humorous and absurd about such interpretations is that even right wing Christians cannot agree on the message of the book they consider holy writ. Welcome to a world with multiple domains of blissdom.

Recently, while watching Buffy reaction videos on YouTube, I happened upon EvilQK's Buffy reactions. It wasn't EvilQK's amateurish "readings" of Buffy that drew my attention, however. It was some of the comments reacting to EvilQK's reaction videos on Buffy season one episodes. Many if not all of these, seemed at least to me, to be prime examples of what one might call fundamentalist or amateur approaches to Buffy, approaches that revel in a kind of anti-intellectual intellectual amateurism. Shadowman4710 and Roderick Hale, for instance, posted, in third person god like declarative sentences that are the common currency of amateur fanboy and fangirl reactors, that "Angel" (1:7) was the first really great episode of Buffy. Did they, however, cite any data that supported their "hypothesis"? Of course not. This is amateur hour after all and empirical data related to hypotheses seems totally unimportant to those locked into amateur fanboy and fangirl mode. And many wonder why so many fall for loopy conspiracy theory bullshite these days.

The poster I found most interesting on EvilQK's "Angel" reaction was Paul Knight. Knight, like posters on social media in general, plays in god like declarative sentences implying that only his perspective is the right one, an approach, of course, typically characteristic of fundamentalisms of all types whether Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and more recently, Hindu. Knight goes on to argue that season one of Buffy "sucks" (note the level of "critical" discourse here) and that it was, generally speaking, "lame" and "corny" (note the lack of scholarly definitional precision here). He tried to "prove" this hypothesis by citing audience viewing data. For Knight, season one of Buffy, because it drew smaller viewer audiences than season two, was of lesser artistic value to later seasons that drew greater numbers of viewers, relatively speaking.

Needless to say, anyone familiar with empirical and analytical approaches can find a lot to scratch one's head about when engaging Knight's discourse. First off, Knight, like others of his amateur ilk, fails to recognise the empirical fact that beauty is in the socialised eyes of the beholder. It is an empirical fact that some of those who watched Buffy actually "liked" season one of Buffy and that not every reactor was a fan of the episode "Angel". Many novice reactors, in fact, considered "The Witch" (1:2) to be one of their favourite if not their favoourite first season episodes of Buffy. To get personal, for a moment, I am a fan of "The Pack" (1:6) and "Nightmares" (1:10) and regard both as two of my favourite episodes of Buffy because of their emotional terror, Xander's monologue about not having to look at Willow's pasty face any more in the former and Buffy's father's horrific speech to Buffy in the latter. So, claiming that "Angel" is the first great episode of Buffy is rather problematic given that no evidence is provided to support such a claim and no evidence is given to indicate that the majority of Buffy viewers like "Angel" the best. Furthermore, the claim that Buffy is "lame" and "corny" fails to address the fact that Buffy was intentionally parodic and satiric (I assume this is some of what amateur reactors mean by "lame" and "corny", terms that are as anemically defined as that other favourite of the post baby boomers, "cheesy"), among other tonal things.

Second, Knight's attempt to argue that Buffy season one is "lame" and "corny" because fewer people watched it than in season two and season three ignores several facts, paramount among them the fact that quantity does not and never has been a synonym for quality. A show like Seventh Heaven, for instance, also, like Buffy, on the WB and, in fact, the show that the WB chose to go ahead with over Buffy. drew, by season two and particularly in seasons three and four, substantially more viewers than Buffy (for a variety of different reasons, of course) ever did. Does that mean that Seventh Heaven is superior to Buffy? It drew more viewers after all. I certainly wouldn't make that argument but then I am not a devotee of the commodity aestheticism that dominates so much American culture these days. Furthermore, Knight ignores the fact that Buffy was a mid-season replacement on the WB, hence the twelve episode season one order and no promise of renewal from the netlet. Given that mid-season replacements usually take time to build momentum and increase viewership in the American television landscape at the time (this is now almost passe even at HBO, the network that sold itself by being different), the lower viewing numbers for season one compared to later seasons, though Buffy viewing numbers were akin to the capitalist economy with booms and busts over seven seasons, are understandable. 

Finally, there is the issue of whether Knight understands classical narrative styles, of which Buffy is an example. The fact of the matter is that Buffy season one sets the template for the rest of the seasons of Buffy. In this it is like Lev Tolstoy's classic for a reason Anna Karenina where the early chapters of the book set the template for the narrative, plot, and character developments to come and are, as a consequence, essential to the reader if he or she is to fully grasp the essence of that book. Like Anna, Buffy season one gives us characters who develop over the course of the season and of the show. It gives us the colour scheme that will dominate the show. It gives us the first big bad of the show. It gives us the mise-en-scene that will dominate the show at least through season three. It gives us the tonal complexity that will characterise the show including comedy, drama, tragedy, satire, parody, melodrama, and emotional and other horrors. It is, by the way, this tonal complexity that, I would argue, makes Buffy one of the most interesting television shows ever made. And it gives us the attention to detail and continuity that makes Buffy one of, in my mind, aesthetically successful television shows ever made, something that differentiates Buffy from earlier shows that ultimately (particularly for commercial reasons; both of these cult shows became mainstream and this negatively impacted narrative continuity) were characterised more by discontinuity than continuity, shows like Twin Peaks and The X-files.

I am sure none of these criticisms will be relevant to the amateurs with their uncritical and unreflective fetishisations and universalisations who populate and dominate the landscape of social media these days. it is, however, relevant, to those of us who seek to understand and fully grasp the human comedy, farce, tragedy, and drama in all of its absurdity.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Radiant Future is Now

 

One would think that after the twentieth century, an era characterised by technological utopianism along with the many negative impacts of this technological change, that many more post-baby boomers would be skeptical of the notion that now, today, is the best of all possible technological worlds. Even a quick peek at reaction videos on social media and particularly YouTube, however, quickly disabuses one of the hypotheses that technological utopianism has declined in the wake of a century of genocide, mass murder, and environmental devastation, much of it, of course, the product of the very technological changes many regard as utopian. After all, while the twentieth century gave us the washing machine, the motor car, aeroplanes, and cotton candy, which was developed in the late nineteenth century, it also gave us the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the mass murders at Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, toxic chemicals in the environment and in our homes, and climate change. One would think that by no2 many, as many counterculturalists recognised in the nineteen-sixties, would realise the fact that technology, like virtually everything, is a double edged sword.

Recently, while doing ethnography on YouTube, I ran across a reaction video on the first episode of the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) by one EvilQK. I found a number of things interesting about this "reaction" video beyond the fact that EvilQK did not do much research about the television show (something that seemingly 99% of YouTube reactors do not do) and as a consequence had little sense of the economic realities Buffy had to operate within in season one or the intentions of those who created and made Buffy. Like so many of her generation it became quickly apparent that EvilQK is embedded within a ideology in which current technologies are thought to be inherently better than those of the past and this led her to take a highly critical stance on the special effects of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. According to Evil, if only Buffy had been made today it would have been so much better.

But does the supposed technology primitivism of Buffy and a host of other television and films of the past damn these shows to a special level of critical hell? Many post-baby boomers, of course, enamoured of special effects as they are today, miss several facts. First, given that technological change in film and television is a constant, and perhaps even more constant in the brave new digital era, they don't seem to grasp the simple historical fact that the technologies of today will seem primitive from the vantage point of the future given that technological change is a constant. Many post-baby boomers, in other words, lack a historical sense and consciousness when it comes to television and film and beyond.

Second, and this is something that post-baby boomers don't seem to grasp either, on an aesthetic or artistic level technological change is not always, if we want to engage in a descriptive meets normative analysis, for the better. Black and white, something that seems to be seen by many of todays post-baby boomers as evil incarnate for a variety of reasons--it is coded as old and hence inferior by many and it is seen as less "realistic" than colour television and film--is actually artistically much more interesting than generally bland colour television shows and films. The reason for this is simple, it is difficult if not impossible for colour television shows or films to manipulate light and dark, shadows, fog, or smoke rings, in the way that black and white can and has in the classic past. This is not to say that some colour television or film do not strive for and even achieve visual art. The colour television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance, uses filters, including red filters for obvious reasons, and the contrast between light and dark in very interesting ways. In many ways, in fact, Buffy is so dark that it seems like a colour television striving for black and white and the aesthetics of black and white. Additionally, the gorgeous colour film Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) uses colour in an artistically breathtaking way as anyone who has seen that cult film hopefully recognises. Killer Klowns is, however, the exception that proves the rule that colour is, generally speaking, less interesting and less artistically successful than black and white films in general. Classics are classics for a reason.

This notion that technology today is better than the technology of the past is, of course, grounded in a number of cultural ideologies. It is, as I noted, grounded in the utopian notion that the past is prologue to the present and the present is better than the past, an ideology that goes back at least to the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. This notion is also grounded in the ideology that realism is always better, an ideological notion also tied to ahistorical notions that the present is more realistic than the past because of superior technologies that, it is believed, make television shows and films progressively more realistic. Technological teleologism. This notion that television shows and films of the present are more real than the past, of course, in order to be believed, must elide the fact that many considered nineteenth century photography and films, particularly talking films in black and white, more realistic than the painting and theatre that came before it. It is a notion that is also grounded in an absurd contradiction because television and shows before digital technologies were actually more realistic since they actually blew up real cars rather than computer simulations and filmed rain that looked more like rain than digital technologies. And this is a notion that, as very few reactors grasp, is grounded in a delusion for neither television or film, including documentaries, are realistic given that they manipulate story, narrative, plot, tone, music, and mise-en-scene for dramatic, tragic, comic, for entertainment and financial, and, if in much less numbers, for artistic purposes. Neither television or film is thus real. Real would be following me around 24-7 as I go to the restroom, cook, clean, or watch television and films, all things that would bore most viewers probably to death. Interestingly, if social media polemicists and apologists for realism really wanted realism in their films they would watch the films of European directors like Ingmar Bergman or Eric Rohmer (though admittedly America had its cinematic and television realism--real locations--in Naked City (film, 1948, television, 1958-1963) and Route 66 (1960-1964). They won't do this because, of course, because they have an emotion based irrational fear and hatred of subtitles. Welcome to the world of the analytically challenged.

In the end, it is, speaking of tone, a tragedy and a comedy perhaps even a farce that so many post-baby boomers who have been socialised into the Hollywood special effects dominated television and film unthinkingly (embodying) think that that form of television and film is the only television show or film worth watching. It is a tragedy because it means that so many don't understand that classic films and television shows are founded on story, plot, narrative, and character development, something lacking in any deep way in so much of the, at best, mediocre film and television product that comes out of Hollywood and its many close cousins these days. It is a farce because this situation where culture and ideology creates reality keeps happening again and again in human communities despite the availability of evidence, at least to those empirically inclined, that shows that the present is not really better than the past. It may be different but in the end humans, who have produced these new technologies, are, like the technologies they produce, a double edged sword. They too are flawed.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Is That Really in the Text?:

 

Ethnography, the study of human behaviour in real world geographical, political, economic, demographic, and cultural settings, has long been at the heart of professional social and cultural anthropology. In fact, going to an "exotic" locale for a period of time to study, observe, and even participate in how real human beings, or at least one important human being, an informant, thinks, behaves, and interacts has long been a central rite of passage in the training of professional social and cultural anthropologists for around a hundred years in the discipline.

The rise and spread of new digital media such as social media like YouTube, has provided ethnographers with a somewhat novel "exotic" setting that they can travel to all from the comfort of their "armchairs" in front of their computer screens, an exotic setting that allows them to explore "real" human behaviour in action in the brave new world of digital media. Today's ethnographer,  for example, can travel to YouTube land and observe what real people think about television shows, movies, books, or music. 

Since the Covid crisis a number of reactors have posted their reactions to the television show Buffy the Vampire Slayer which ran on the WB and later UPN from 1997 to 2003. As always the ethnographer has be cautious about ethnographic work in cyberland since informants, which is basically what social media reactors are, aren't always forthright about their reactions to television shows, films, books, and music. They, after all, tend to give positive responses to what the see and hear since positive responses, almost certainly, garner more comments and likes and hence monies, meagre monies it is true, for the YouTube reactor. Additionally, although one can find commonalities in how reactors react to a television show like Buffy, ethnography is not, as quantitative methodologists love to remind those engaged in qualitative ethnography, grounded in a random sample. And while those who react to Buffy do not constitute a random sample of viewers and reactors they do constitute a convenience sample and as such reveal a lot about how those who chose to react to Buffy react to Buffy.

Recently I have been observing and occasionally participating (by responding in the comments section)  in the reactions of two reactors to Buffy, Dakara or Dakara Jane and JayPeaKay. Both of these reactors are, I suspect, part of one of the post-baby boom cohorts. Both also hail from England, the former likely from Liverpool and the latter from the Home Counties, though whether this matters in a globalised media world is an open question. Both Dakara and Jay been reacting to the third season of Buffy pretty much simultaneously though Jay is slightly ahead of Dakara in his viewing at this point. Both have also been characterised by a similar reaction to the Big Bad of season three (Buffy has a Big Bad that the Scoobies, Buffy and her friends-allies, fight during each of the seven seasons of the show), Sunnydale's Mayor Richard Wilkins.

It is in season three of Buffy that viewers were introduced to the third slayer in the, Buffyverse, Faith. It also introduces, as Buffy does in each new season, to the newest of the Big Bads, the mayor. One interesting aspect of previous seasons of Buffy and of season three of the show are the parallels it draws between a series of doubles or doppelgängers.  In season three, for instance, the show draws parallels between the two slayers, Buffy and Faith, just as in season two the show drew parallels between slayer Buffy and slayer Kendra. This parallelism and doubling, by the way, allows Buffy to escape the iron cage of manicheanism that characterises so many American television cop, fantasy, and science fiction shows. Season three also draws parallels between the two caring surrogate father figures of those two slayers, Giles, the surrogate father figure of Buffy, and the mayor, the surrogate father figure of Faith after the episode "Bad Girls/Consequences". Season three, it should also be noted, also introduces us to doubles of Willow and Xander, two of Buffy's friends and slayerettes, VampWillow, Xander and VampXander, and reintroduces us to one of Giles's doubles, his friend from his rebellious college years and now nemesis, Ethan Rayne. Parallelism and doublings are central aspects to the Buffy text.

While earlier episodes of Buffy season three foregrounded similarities between the two slayers-- Faith, called to be a slayer after the death of by the book Kendra who, in turn, was called to slayerhood as a consequence of the brief death of Buffy in the finale of season one, "Prophecy Girl"--also foregrounds significant differences between the two slayers, differences that turn out to foreshadow things to come in season three and beyond in both Buffy and its spinoff Angel. Buffy is a less by the watcher book then Kenya while at the same time being a more by the watcher book than the rash "want, take, have" Faith. These differences become particularly apparent in the important nearly two hour long episode "Bad Girls/Consequences" in the middle of the season, the episode in which the rash Faith, despite Buffy's attempt to stop her before she sinks her wooden stake into what turns out to be the Deputy Mayor Allan Finch, becomes a murderer and killer. Faith reacts in Nietzschean fashion to her murder of Finch arguing that slayers are outside of and above the law because of the role they play in preserving human life and human society. We more than balance out the scales, Faith claims. For Faith slayers are thus uberfraus who save the world again and again from seemingly endless apocalypses. Buffy, on the other hand morally wrestles with the death of Finch and grieves for the murder of an "innocent". By the end of the episode Faith, who, the Buffy text has told us and shown us on several occasions has issues, goes to work for the mayor after she kills his right hand vampire man, Mr. Trick, while saving, somewhat ironically, Buffy's life in the process.

Despite the clear parallels between Giles and the mayor in the Buffy text--both, the show repeatedly shows and tells us, care deeply for their charges, Giles for Buffy, and the mayor for Faith--both Dakara and Jay interpreted the textual evidence of the mayor being, like Giles, a surrogate father for their respective slayers, in skeptical if not cynical fashion. Both thought the mayor was simply using Faith, manipulating her, solely for his own personal devilish ends, namely, his plan to ascend to pure demon, something that happens in the last episode of the season. 

Why this jaded interpretation of the mayor? Was it the product of the dissonance associated with Faith, someone they repeatedly said they liked, going rogue by taking a job with the mayor? Both Dakara and Jay, after all, mentioned that they didn't think that Faith was evil and that they believed and hoped that at some point she would see the error or her ways and return to the white hated Scooby fold. Was it the product of increasing numbers of sensationalistic media reports since the 1970s about older men (or older women) using young people for their own selfish ends? Was it due to the increasing cynicism of young about politicians, a cynicism that has increased since the 1970s? Was it due to an emotional reaction to the relationship between younger women and older men, one that has become increasingly common since the 1970s? Both Dakara and Jay, after all, had a similar reaction to the romantic interest the 18 year old Cordelia, a sometime Scooby, who, by California law is an adult who can thus marry without parental consent, expressed toward the new watcher of season three, Wesley, a relationship, by the way, played for comedy in the Buffy text. Was it the product of that new life cycle stage, young adulthood with its arrested adolescence, something that can be traced to changes in the economy (globalisation, postmodernism and the dominance of the retail sector with its low paying jobs)? Is it a study diet of manichean Hollywood fairy tale films and television programmes--Buffy is not one of these thankfully--where the villians are pure evil and the good guys are pure good? Is it some combination of these?

Whatever the source or sources of this "reading", what was interesting to me was that the interpretation of the Faith mayor relationship of season three was an extra-textual interpretation that overrode what the text itself actually "said". After all, as the Buffy text clearly and repeatedly shows and tells us, the mayor, who is actually honest and genuine in his expression of family values and fear of germs, is forthright in his love for Faith, a love that Faith needs, a love that the Scoobies cannot provide for Faith, and a devotion that proves to be the mayor's Achilles heel in the finale of season three, "Graduation Day". It is, in fact, the mayor's love for Faith that proves his undoing and allows Buffy and her slayerettes to defeat the mayor in the finale of season three. It is, of course, that fact, the fact that the mayor genuinely cares for Faith, that closes off any counter interpretation of the relationship between the two like the empirically problematic one offered by Dakara and Jay.

Readings of the mayor and Faith relationship are not the only misinterpretations of the text one finds among Buffy reactors. The LexiCrowd and SoFieReacts, for instance, have been waxing apoplectically about Giles's attempt in season six, the, according to Joss Whedon, "oh grow up" season of Buffy, to get Buffy to act responsibly toward her financial and family obligations, an attempt that ultimately results in Giles returning to England since that is the only way he sees of not "standing in the way" of Buffy growing up. Both of these post-baby boomers--GenXers? GenZeders?--have criticised Giles in the harshest of terms on numerous occasions for leaving Buffy. One has to wonder, as one did with respect to those who misinterpret the mayor/Faith relationship, if the reason for this is generational and hence social and cultural, if it is the product, in other words, of generational differences between those who grew up in an era typified by that new life course category of young adult and who are increasingly living into their thirties, in some cases, with their parents and those who grew up in the era of you left home at 18, got a job--which were plentiful and often lasted a work lifetime- immediately became and adult and almost immediately started down the primrose path to having 3.67 children. 

The Books of My Life: Ecological Imperialism

 

As anyone who has studied imperialism, something that has been around at least since the rise of city-states in large scale agricultural societies in the Near East and China, knows there have been and are several types of imperialism. There is, for instance economic imperialism, such as the imperialism associated with the Western run and dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund, both of which were the latest update of what has happened on a number occasions since the Congress of Vienna in which elite Europeans remade Europe and even the globe in their own image. The World Bank and the International Monetary fund, of course, "loan" monies to semi-peripheral and peripheral nations all the while expecting a little something in return, usually privatisation of their markets and access to their raw materials. There is political imperialism, an imperialism in which one state dominates another politically without colonising that other state, the situation we have today in which the great power US dominates Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom politically. There is cultural imperialism, an imperialism such as we have today in which Western media, such as Hollywood and, to a lesser extent, the UK, dominate the global communications marketplace. There is demographic imperialism, where one demographic group dominates another even if they are a minority as was the case in many of the Pacific Islands after the age of European colonisation or in the US, Canada, and Australia, where Anglo-Saxon Whites became dominant and still are, to some extent. Finally, there is geographic imperialism or colonialism, an imperialism in which one territorial political entity "conquers" or takes over another and colonises it, such as what happened in what we today call North America thanks to British, French, US, and Canadian manifest destiny or a type of imperialism in which the flora and fauna of one part of the world become dominant in another, as was the case in most of the European settler societies in the temperate areas around the globe.

Alfred Crosby's Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press second edition 2004), while touching on other ideal types of imperialism, focuses on geographical imperialism, on the transfer not only of human animals but of other fauna and flora and germs, from, for example, old Europe to a host of Neo-Europes, including Argentina, Brasil, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, after the age of European imperialism, that age where Europe, or more accurately, Western and Northern European, states settled in and conquered, economically, politically, culturally, demographically and geographically, various parts of the globe. 

Crosby notes that geography was central to the rise of greater Europe. Europeans, as he notes, were better at creating settler societies in areas that were climatically similar to their own, such as, for example, much of the United States, the areas that were settled on what became the border between the US and Canada, and the coastal areas of what became Australia. The Europeans were not, as Crosby points out, as successful in making areas that were geographically different from Western and Northern Europe, such as the Canadian shield and the Australian outback, areas that were cold, arid, or dry. Reservoirs built by the US government, of course, allowed for extensive settlement and development in the dry and mountainous parts of what we today call American West though whether these settlements will survive as they are now is an open question thanks to periods of drought--another one of which large parts of the American West are experiencing at the moment. Needless to say, the issue of drought and the settlement of the American West takes us back to the caveats raised by that now famous American government geologist and explorer of the US West John Wesley Powell in the nineteenth century.

While Crosby doesn't ignore colonisation in Ecological Imperialism it isn't territorial conquest that Crosby's book focuses on. Rather, he explores how the first settlers in what would become what he calls the neo-Europes, prepared the way, thanks to the transformations of their new environments, for the far greater ecological transformations (for example, "weeds", cows, pigs, goats, horses, bees, insects, rats, squirrels) of the Europeans after the fifteenth century. Crosby's book also focuses on germs, pathogens, and diseases, such as smallpox, something that both the Australian geographer and historian A. Greenfell Price had explored in his 1963 book The Western Invasion of the Pacific and other of his more geographically focused monographs on the Pacific, and something that Canadian born University of Chicago historian William McNeil had explored in his 1963 book The Rise of the West and in his 1976 book Plagues and People. Germs, pathogens, and diseases, Crosby reminds us, decimated indigenous populations in what became Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand, Some scholars estimate, for instance, that some 90% of the Wampanoag of what is today Massachusetts and Rhode Island, were killed by European diseases and particularly smallpox in the seventeenth century. Probably 50% of New Zealand's Maori died thanks to the germs the Pakeha brought with them. As Crosby notes, it is no wonder, given this, that so many Europeans proclaimed the lands they "discovered" empty, something that was, of course, an ideological rationalisation, along with European notions that indigenes were not using the land as god or nature intended, for European conquest, genocide, and colonisation.

Crosby's book is a must read for anyone interested in imperialism in general, in European imperialism in particular, and even more specifically in ecological imperialism, in European settler societies, in human biology or biological anthropology, and in historical botany. It is an excellent synthesis and update of earlier works on ecological imperialism. While Crosby's book did not garner the kind of celebrity Jared Diamond's 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel did, it covers much of the same terrain in very readable prose. Highly recommended.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: What YouTube Tells Us About the Cheesy State of Intellectual Life in the English Speaking World

I am increasingly convinced that nothing tells us more about the desultory nature of intellectual life in the English speaking world than YouTube reaction videos. Recently I ran across YouTube reaction videos on the first episode of the American television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Welcome to the Hellmouth/The Harvest" by Java and Jave and to the tenth episode of season three of Buffy, "Amends" by Haarute. Nothing, I think, better encapsulates the dismal state of scientific literacy and practise than both of these YouTube reaction videos. Reaction is, by the way, a rather appropriate term for these at best mediocrities since there is really not much thought behind them as a general rule.

One of the things that both Java and Java and Haarute harped on was an ill defined term that seems to have become the knee jerk mantra of post-baby boom cohorts, "cheese". In"The Harvest", the second part of the first episode of Buffy, Java femme made the claim that some of the acting in that episode was "cheesy". Haarute, on the other hand, seemed--I say seem because like so many kids stuck in adolescent development he wasn't precise in his terminology--to use "cheesy" as a synonym for Dickensian sentimentality and melodrama. As I wasn't clear on how these kids were using "cheese"--they clearly weren't using it in scholarly or systematic and analytical fashion and they clearly were not using it as a synonym for trite or hacknayed--all I got from Java femme was that the "cheese" was in the extras, the acting extras. All I got from Haarute was a substanceless deflection and--though largely unsuccessful--an attempt at wit. When I pushed both for a more precise, systematic, and scientific definition of the term the best our reactors could offer was, in the case of Java femme, substanceless repetition, something, I suppose, appropriate to a medium that is in itself repetitive in its genres and tones. It, "cheese", she repeated, is in the fried cheese extras, and silence. Haarute, on the other hand, offered nothing of substantive value, something common among those engaged in YouTube reaction videos for fun and--limited--profit.

Interestingly, another poster on the Java and Java "The Harvest" thread was more up for the reasonable challenge of defining "cheese" and "cheesy" than was our Java female. He actually did try to offer a more precise definition of the term, one interestingly blissfully ignored in subsequent replies by Java femme. According to the poster M.S. "cheese" was a synonym for "inauthentic" acting by extras.

There are so many problems, as I pointed out to Java femme, M.S, and Haarute to no avail--Java femme soon knee jerked into that curious mixture of anti-intellectualism, arrogance, ignorance, self-righteousness, dogmatism, and cry baby cry snowflake mode so characteristic of amateurs--with both of these "definitions" that it is difficult to know where to begin our critique of the use of the term. Let's begin with the term itself. If "cheese" is inauthentic than the use of the term "cheese" by these kids is clearly inappropriate. Cheese is real. Velveeta, processed cheese, somewhat inauthentic cheese, would probably be a better term for supposed television acting inauthenticity. But let's not forget that many post baby boom fanboys and fangirls have never been particularly known for either their aesthetic use of the English language or for their scientific precision.

Another problem with the use of the term "cheese" is that the use of it by these two reactors is ahistorical. The conception of cheese as a synonym for inauthentic is grounded in a realistic conception of television (and by extension, theatre, film, literature, and popular culture). The problem here, of course, is that television (and by extension theatre, film, literature, and popular culture) are not real. They are economic products that use editing, tone, genre, mise-en-scene, music, and visuals to manipulate reality by turning a representation of reality, at best, into a story, into a narrative with a plot and even, if too rarely, character development, all in the hope of getting people to watch so that those who make film and television ca, in the process, make lots of monies. Television (and theatre, film, literature, and popcult) is, in other words, inherently inauthentic. Even documentaries are not realistic for the reason that they too manipulate "reality" through editing, tone, genre, mise-en-scene, music, and visuals. When this fact was pointed out to both Java femme and M.S. the only response I got something that did not surprise me, dead silence, something one would expect from those ill educated in science and the call and response nature of intellectual culture.

A further problem with the use of the word "cheese" to describe a supposed inauthentic style of acting is that this use of the term is ahistorical. Those who throw it around like tossed salad don't seem to grasp the historical fact that acting has never been singular. There have long been various approaches to acting across time, across space, and within time and space. While both the method and Brechtian approaches to acting, for instance, are equally grounded in notions of realism, the notions of realism and the acting practises they give rise to are different and inconsistent with each other. There has thus never been a singular notion of what "realist" acting is. Finally, notions of what constitute realistic acting has never been consistent across time within space. One suspects that the psychological realism of the method actor Marlon Brando would not be considered realistic by our fangirl Java femme or our fan boy M.S., today. The realism of past generations, in other words, is not necessarily the realism of the historically illiterate generation of post-baby boomers today. Unfortunately, given their ethnocentrism, their fetishisisations, and their ahistoricism, I suspect both Java femme and M.S. would argue that acting is more realistic today than in the past. Perhaps they will live long enough to hear the realism they argue for referred to as cheesy by future generations of historically anemic young people.

Another problem with YouTube reactors and the videos they grind out for money is the general lack of knowledge each of these reactors have about the very show, its tone, and its genres and the history of the medium and research on it they are engaging. Java femme seems blissfully unaware of the history of satire, black comedy, and parody and the acting strategies associated with each, which are themselves multiple. Haarute seems blissfully unaware of the long history of melodrama and he seems blissfully unaware that, if we link melodrama to inauthenticity in order to try to square the "cheesy" circle, that humans have historically loved sentimentality and melodrama in the stories they tell amongst themselves and in the stories, the fairy tales, that are told to them. The fairy tale film Pretty Woman (1990), for instance, a reworking of Cinderella, was  despite its inauthenticity, quite popular at the domestic box office as were and are many of the hyper-unrealistic superhero films that come out of Hollywood in droves.

Then there is the problem of the term itself. Is "cheese" a synonym for parody, satire, black comedy, melodrama and the acting styles associated with each?  If so, why use an imprecise term like "cheese" when more precise terms that have been used for years are available to describe these varying general acting styles? Additionally, we should not forget that Buffy itself is multi-tonal and hence parodic, satiric, and dark comedic styles and forms of acting may be intentional on the part of those who made the television show.

Finally, there are the acting issues themselves. What does it mean that extras are "cheesy"? They are extras, after all, and do not have speaking parts. Is it in their smiles, their frowns, their quizzical looks? In the way they walk? in their gazes? in the way they move their eyes? Is it in the way they move their heads? in the way they dress? in the way they walk into a classroom? If the answer is yes to any of these or similar others it is incumbent on the person making the claim to detail precisely how the extras are acting "cheesily". Needless to say, neither Java femme or M.S. do this pointing up just how lacking in scientific precision and analytical skills their "approach" is.

All in all, the imprecise, ahistorical, and lazy use of the term cheese by the younger generations is sadly reflective of something going on in the broader core nation English speaking world, namely, a lack of education and schooling in critical approaches to television and beyond, and in scientific approaches to texts. Science, after all, strives for precision rather than imprecision. In the end, perhaps, "cheese" and "cheesiness" is best understood as an inauthenticity of approach by some human beings, particular those human beings engaged in offering reaction videos on YouTube and other social media sites. And while this has long been a common problem it is now, in the brave new world of digital media, simply more noticeable because of the omnipresence of reaction videos like that of Java and Java and Haarute, reaction videos which point up the lack of historical and scientific literacy amongst even the semi-schooled in English language core societies.

 

The Books of My Life: One Nation, Two Cultures

 

Polemics and apologetics are, of course, two sides of the same demagogic coin. Demagoguery itself has a long history both inside of and outside of academia. The Athenian leader Perikles, for instance, warned of the potential influence of demagogues during Athens's war with Sparta. Many of the early Christian fathers proudly identified themselves as polemicists and apologists as they argued for the falsity of other faiths or meaning systems and proclaimed the truth of their own. Many true believer monotheists have engaged in polemics and apologetics ever since, though many have not acknowledged the fact that that is what they do. Polemics and apologetics have been central to American, Canadian, and Australian political culture almost since the "birth" of those British settler societies.

The academy, at least since the late 19th century, thanks to the impact of positivism on the hard and soft sciences in the ivory tower, have, at least in their official rhetoric, abjured polemics and apologetics in favour of empiricism, though some might argue and several have that empiricists have proclaimed their value freeness way too often for as Max Weber noted in the early twentieth century what academics choose to study reflects, on some level, the values of the researcher. 

Despite their proclamation of value neutrality academics have, on occasion self consciously and almost messianically waded into polemical and apologetic waters. Historian Jack Granatstein's Who Killed Canadian History (1998 and 2007) and historian Keith Windschuttle's Who Killed History (2000), for instance, are, respectively, apologias for "traditional" Canadian and "traditional" Australian history as they define it--an emphasis on "traditional" political history and the great men who helped make it--and polemics against Canadian and Australian social and cultural histories, which they see as arising out of the cultural ferment of the countercultural 1960s, an era they generally bemoan and see emblematic of the decline of America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and so on. An American variant of this argument can be found in historian Gertrude Himmelfarb's One Nation, Two Cultures: A Searching Examination of American Society in the Aftermath of the Cultural Revolution (New York, Vintage, 1999, edition with a new afterword, 2001). 

While Himmelfarb trods terrain similar to that of Granatstein and Windschuttle, her polemic and apologetic is more broadly focused than either those two, who focus their gaze on education and more particularly on higher education. Himmelfarb, like Granatstein and Windschuttle, sees academia as impacted by post-1960s social and cultural historical fads. She traces these, as has become common among intellectual conservatives in Canada, Australia, and the United States to the situational pluralism, multiculturalism, and relativism of the sixties counterculture, which, she argues, has now become the dominant cultural strain in late twentieth and early twenty-first century America.

While Himmelfarb claims that the cultural ideologies of 1960s counterculturalists have become the dominant paradigm in the United States since the 1970s, a claim some might dispute given the fact that the US seems evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, exemplars of liberalism and conservatism (really "traditional" liberals) and right wingism respectively in fin-de-siecle and early twenty-first century America and little in the way of bipartisanship in the American federal legislature. Himmelfarb argues that there is also an oppositional culture of dissent from this pluralist, multicultural, and relativist hegemony, an oppositional culture that remains prominent and significant in the United States, the dissident culture of traditionalists, by which Himmelfarb seems to mean those who continue to promote the Victorian values of self-discipline, self-help, family, civil society, sexual morality, patriotism, and religion or morality. She counterpoints these values to the values of the counterculturalists which, she argues, have given rise in late twentieth and early twentieth century America to increased divorce rates, increased crime rates, increased drug abuse rates, increased female headed families living in poverty rates, increased cohabitation rates, increased narcissism, and increases in a host of other immoralities.

As I noted, Himmelfarb's polemics and apologetics have become standard jeremiad fare among intellectual conservatives like Himmelfarb and fellow travellers like Lynne Cheney, William Bennett, and Robert Bork. This world of late twentieth century and early twenty-first century polemics and apologetics, however, seems rather quaint, dainty, and passe in the age of that right wing demagogue who has dominated so much discourse in the early 21st century, Donald Trump. Trump, of course, is someone who has been married multiple times, committed adultery on several occasions, brags of his sexual strategies and conquests to friends and media celebrities, makes fun of the disabled, proffers crazy and delusional conspiracy theories, rages at hallucinated un-American traitors in his midst, fellow travels with racists and Nazis, and who is the supreme example of a flim flam capitalist narcissist. Trump, who is hardly the paragon of Victorian ethical and moral and virtue Himmelfarb preaches, surprised many of the punditariat by winning the presidency of the United States in 2016 and who has become, since his run for the presidency in 2016, the totem figure of a purification cult grounded in a variant of the American nationalist faith, a cult centred on Trump and which has, as one of its major statements of faith, the belief that their great leader is a man called by god or nature to "make America great again". Himmelfarb's polemics and apologetics, in other words, echo an intellectual world that has, at least for the moment, passed just like the age of Victoria has passed.

There are a number of other problems with Himmelfarb's declensional polemic and apologetic. On the theoretical level she argues for a cultural determinism or reductionism that is ultimately similar to and as problematic as the economic determinism of vulgar Marxists. And while culture, which Himmelfarb emphasises, is important, so are economics (class, poverty, we have to eat), politics (status, humans, who have always lived in groups, have to live together), geography, and demography (age, cohort). Additionally, Himmelfarb fails to distinguish descriptive or empirical relativism from normative or ethical and moral relativism, a common demonising strategy used by many conservative and right wing polemicists and apologists or demagogues.

On the methodological level Himmelfarb seems to argue, on the one hand, that the hegemonic postmodernist culture of situational tolerance and its heirs and the dissident culture of "traditionalists", with which she identifies, are Weberian ideal types and that they intersect and interact in a variety of ways in practise. At the same time, Himmelfarb seems to view these two cultures (a riff on C.P. Snow's two cultures of science and the humanities?) as distinct or binary movements engaged in a manichean culture war for the very soul of America. Additionally, Himmelfarb utilises and mixes and matches both quantitative and qualitative anecdotal data, which sometimes makes her argument less compelling and convincing.

On the cultural level Himmelfarb conflates intellectual and popular culture. While the United States does have intellectual cultures, which take a variety of forms in their culture, their politics, and their economics, the US also has a long tradition of anti-intellectualism and anti-academicism particularly on the right, a movement distinct from traditional liberalism or conservatism. Additionally, Himmelfarb, who sees religion as a bulwark of Victorian values, misses the increasing age, cohort, and cultural tensions within American intellectual evangelicalism at places like Calvin and Wheaton (Illinois) these days.

Speaking of the religious culture, Himmelfarb finds greater cultural and ideological coherence in right wing religion than there is. She fails, for example, to distinguish between conservative intellectual Christianity, such as that found at Calvin College, Wheaton College (Illinois), Brigham Young University, and the University of Notre Dame, separatist Protestantism, such as that at Bob Jones University, and mainstream right wing anti-intellectual Christianity, which preaches the anti-intellectual gospel of everyman a Bible scholar regardless of whether they know Hebrew, Aramaic, koine Greek, and Near Eastern history or not, the gospel of free market capitalism, something non-existent in biblical times, the gospel of Anglo-Saxonism, and the gospel of theocratic we are OK you are not OK intolerance.

On the geographic level HImmelfarb's claim that the US is one nation and two cultures is problematic. Joel Garreau (The Nine Nations of North America, 1981), for instance, argues that there are nine nations with varying cultures in North America while Edward Crabb and James Curtis (Regions Apart, 2005) argue that the United States and Canada are really four nations or societies with different cultures: the francophone and the anglophone in Canada and the North and the South in the United States. I would argue that there are at least two nations in the United States, the Northeast and Pacific Coast and the South, and that one can find elements of each in other parts of the US. Austin, for instance, is more Northeast and Pacific Coast than rural Texas. Salt Lake City is more Northeast and Pacific Coast than most of the other parts of Mormon Utah and the Mormon culture region save perhaps for St. George. The South continues to be characterised by strong elements of theocratic Christianity and White identity superiority while the Intermountain West, save for Mormondom, continues to be characterised, in part, by European post-imperialist racism and rebellion against the federal government, which owns substantial amount of real estate in the West, despite the fact that without government intervention, interventions in the form of things like the Boulder Dam, the West would be a very different place.

Personally, I think one can make a compelling argument that there may be more than only two Americas. The American sports world, which can serve as an excellent transparent mirror into American culture and society, is tribal. It's the Dallas Cowboys and their worshipful fans versus the New York Giants and their devoted fans, the New York Yankees and their devoted fans versus the Boston Red Sox and their worshipful fans, the Chicago Bulls and their worshipful fans versus the Los Angeles Lakers and their devoted fans. The US, this sports tribalism suggests, is a land of tribes where national teams, like the US men's and women's soccer teams, are barely a blip on the national radar. It is, of course, different in other parts of the world. New Zealand, for instance, worships its national rugby team, which is central to Kiwi civic religion. Canada worships its national hockey team, a sport central to its public religion. Brasil worships its national football or soccer team, which is central to its civil religion. Generally speaking, one finds, in nations where a national sport is prominent and central, a greater sense of national identity, though there are interesting caveats here. In the US, for instance, the coding of the military and the police as sacred and the myths associated with them play an important role in the conceptualisation of national identity among right wing groups.

On the educational level Himmelfarb treats academia as too consensual. As several surveys have shown over the years there are a number of significant cultural and ideological differences between academics in the hard sciences, the social sciences, humanities, those who teach law, those who teach the medical sciences, and those who teach in other of the applied sciences. Social scientists and those in the humanities seem to best fit Himmerfarb's caricature and stereotype of the "typical" academic.

On the political level Himmelfarb makes the common mistake that the United States is a democracy. Even if one accepts the notion that the US is a republic the reality is that America is, like all core modern and postmodern societies, bureaucratic. As Weber and Michels noted in the early twentieth century, all modern and postmodern bureaucracies are pyramidal in form with structured and inherent inequalities of power, authority, and wealth embedded and institutionalised in them (See GE, Apple, Kroger's, the government of the American state of Indiana). And while one might argue that these structured inequalities are grounded in merit, one of the central myths of British settler societies, the realities of nepotism and structured inequalities related to social and cultural capital, suggest that merit is, at best, only partially at play in American economics, politics, and culture. So, if one is going to argue that the US is a democracy the person or persons making this argument need to provide empirical evidence as to why a society characterised by bureaucracies with embedded structural inequalities and impacted by favouritism are democratic. Personally, I don't think anyone can do this because the US is, by definition and as a consequence of its bureaucracies, an oligarchy and always has been.

Another political level problem one finds in One Nation, Two Cultures is Himmelfarb's failure to distinguish, as I noted earlier, intellectual conservatism from right wing political culture. These two cultures, and subcultural and countercultural variants within each, are different and distinct though there is overlap on some issues. Conservatives, historically speaking, have their origins in the intellectual opposition to the Enlightenment and particularly the French Revolution though one might argue that foreshadowings of it appear in the defenders of the monarchical faith. The right, on the other hand, has its origins in religion, anti-intellectualism, and a culture of white superiority. Both may preach the gospel of the free market but that doesn't mean that they have the same historical origins and that they are the same culturally and ideologically. As for Himmelfarb's conservatism, it is actually old Enlightenment liberalism, the liberalism of Adam Smith, the liberalism, if somewhat tensely, of John Stuart Mill, and the liberalism that was shocked by the French Revolution. 

On the social ethical level Himmelfarb is a bit confusing. Is Himmelfab arguing that counterculturalists have a situational morality, or does she maintain that the counterculturalists have no real ethics or morality at all? Can Himmelfarb admit that some elements of the "counterculture" have as ethically valid and thought out conception of the public sphere and of virtue, a virtue tied to human rights, as conservatives and right wingers? It seems to me that Himmelfarb wants to have it both ways, that she wants to have her cake--yes they do have an ethics and a morality--and not eat it too--no they don't have a social ethics and morality beyond a selective situational ethics and morality, which may be no ethics or morality at all.

Postscript: I am proud to say that this review was banned by Amazon for possibly violating "community standards" though how it violated I don't know because whoever categorised it as such--amateur suits, fundamentalist bots, politically correct ideologues--don't tell you how said review may, and they do use the word may, violates community standards. Whatever the reason it was banned and a censored version was requested, it is clear that autocratic and despotic Amazon is not committed to real freedom of speech and that says it all.

The Books of My Life: Who Killed Canadian History?

Though a number of commentators have traced the history of the history wars back to the mid- to late 1960s and made the sixties either the hero or villain of the piece, depending on the ideological perspective of the polemicist or apologist writing the tale of the history war, battles over history--who tells it, how it is told, and the stories it tells--go back much further in human history than the 1960s. Polemics and apologetics, in fact, have been a central part of the writing of history for as long as there has been "history".

The historically oriented books of the Tanakh, for instance, and particularly the historically oriented books of the Torah, tell the inherently polemical and apologetic story of god's chosen people and their trials and travails as they tried to live up to the covenant they made with Yahweh at Mount Sinai, the site of the covenant in the Yahwist and Priestly versions of the tale of the chosen people in the Torah, or Mount Horeb, the site of the covenant in Elohist and Deuteronomist retellings of the sacred story. Israel's prophets, the nevi'im offered polemical and apologetic commentary, a kind of midrash before midrash, on these sacred texts pointing out the failures of the chosen to live up to the covenant they made with Yahweh or Elohim and the punishment the lord or god brought to bear on his chosen as a consequence of their failures to live up to the covenant. Ancient Egyptian texts polemicised about the greatness of their civilisation, a greatness that demanded that battles lost to the Hittites be rewritten as victories. The "histories" of the Ancient Greeks and Ancient Romans are filled with examples of polemics and apologetics over hubris, barbarians, Socrates, Alkibiades, particular emperors, such as Nero or Justinian, or particular empresses, such as Theodora.

Polemics and apologetics didn't end with the advent of professionalised history and professional historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both can still be found on the surfaces and in the deep structures of contemporary historical writing despite claims by many professional historians that history has become, with them, empirical and objective or, at least, dispassionate. Professional historians of American Christianity, for instance, wrote empirically grounded histories of particular Christian denominations grounded in primary source material that were undergirded with polemical and apologetic assumptions and presumptions that Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, and even more particularly American Protestant Christianity, was god's one true religion and that the denomination they wrote their histories on and about was god's true Christianity. 

Professional historians have, over the years, fought a variety of polemical and apologetic battles. They have battled over whether history should be--note the normative phrasing here--narrative in form, whether it ought to be methodologically sensitive incorporating quantitative methods into what has largely been a qualitatively oriented discipline, and whether historians should be theoretically literate. Many professional historians, for instance, reacted negatively to Charles Beard's Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States when it was published in 1913 finding it too theoretically oriented and too reductionist. One invariably wonders if some of this unease with Beard's book was due to the fact that Beard's book de-mythologised an American sacred text and, in the process, demythologised American sacred history. Some have reacted negatively to the theoretical and methodological approach of the French Annales school of history, a historical school that goes back at least to the late 1920s. Several of the Annales historians argue that history should be quantitative, qualitative, and theoretical, contending that history must be understood as made or caused by both long term economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic forces, such as the great power struggles that led up to the Great War, great power struggles that go back hundreds of years, and short term economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic events. such as the assassination of an Austrian-Hungarian archduke by a Serbian nationalist in 1914. Many historians find the Annales approach too theoretical, far too focused on economic events, far too quantitative in orientation, and too far removed from the traditional great events and great men approach, arguably a somewhat secularised version of the Christian lives of saints and the mode of history writing that has dominated history in both its "amateur" and "professional" forms for some time.

Others, a minority of historians like myself, a historian deeply impacted by cultural anthropology and sociology, have long found the Annales approach to history quite compelling. In fact I would argue that the Annales approach to human history best helps us understand and comprehend the culture wars and the battles over history that have often reared their heads throughout human history and have been particularly prominent since the 1960s. When we apply the Annales approach to the culture wars it is clear that the culture wars and the culture wars over history have been going on in the West, as I noted earlier, for centuries, the longue duree, and we can see that the culture wars are also stimulated simultaneously by specific events, such as the impact of renewed social and cultural history on the historical profession after the 1960s. Recently, there has been a lot of ink spilled over the history battles that erupted out of the countercultural 1960s. At the heart of these battles over history are the same questions that have troubled historians for years. Should history be mythic-empirical? Should it be objective-empirical? Should it be hermeneutic-empirical? Should it be narrative in form or quantitatively grounded? 

One of the most prominent polemicists and apologists fighting the post-1960s culture war over Canadian history has been the retired York University historian, former member of the Royal Military College Board of Governors, former Chair of the Council for Canadian Security in the 21st Century, and former head of the Canadian War Museum J.L. Granatstein (sometimes aided and abetted in his culture war by fellow historian David Bercuson and others of a cult of militarism that seems aristocratic in nature). Granatstein, who has written extensively on the Canadian military and Canadian foreign policy has engaged in polemics and apologetics on at least two different levels. On one polemical and apologetic level Granatstein has advocated for the transformation of Canada from a peacekeeper nation to, what Ian McKay and Jamie Strong call, in a nice turn of phrase, a warrior nation in order to protect Canada's interests. That this Canadian warrior nation is likely to be little more than a player sitting on the American junior varsity imperial bench along with England and Australia seems to be acceptable to Granatstein. How a Canadian nation that is small in population and next door to the, by far, dominant superpower of the post-Cold War world, an imperial power that dominates Canada economically, politically, and culturally and hence doomed to be, in the foreseeable future, a junior partner on the American imperial team is going to protect its "national interests" (read elite interests) which are intimately tied to American interests (read elite interests) is beyond me, however. Perhaps they don't have a problem with Canada taking care of the gatorade and the dirty laundry for the Team America.

On another polemical and apologetic level Granatstein has waded into the polemics and apologetics surrounding the rise of a "new" Canadian history, a "new" Canadian history dominated, he claims, by social and cultural history and by quantitative and hermeneutic methodologies and approaches. In his provocatively titled monograph Who Killed Canadian History (Toronto: Harper Collins, 1999 and Toronto: Harper Perennial, revised and expanded edition, 2007) Granatstein argues, much as did Australian historian Keith Windschuttle before him in his equally provocatively titled The Killing of History: How a Discipline is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists (Sydney: Macleay, 1994), that the counterculture of the 1960s gave rise to a social and cultural history that is killing, murdering, and savaging traditional and national Canadian (or in Windschuttle's case Australian) traditional great man and great events political history. The social and cultural historians who came of age in the economic, political, cultural, and demographic ferment of the 1960s in Western Europe, the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, have, Granatstein argues, replaced the history of the state, politics, foreign policy, and wars with the history of common men, women, and ethnics, a history that is, Granatstein claims, far too focused on historical trivialities, something that has often been a problem in a discipline that has often avoided and demonised theory and methodology and hence, questions related to historical significance. 

Granatstein also argues that this "new" once countercultural and now dominant history has negatively impacted Canada beyond the academy. These "new" histories, Granatstein argues, have linked up with progressive educational reforms afoot throughout Canada in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, educational reforms that emphasised the need for education for individual and identity group self esteem. This has resulted, Granatstein argues, in a history that celebrates the achievements of identity groups like women and selective ethnic groups. Combined with the limited mandates for history courses in Canada's primary, secondary, and higher educational institutions, the "new" histories and the "new" historians, Granatstein contends, are undermining Canadian national identity, something that is essential if the Canadian nation is, claims Granatstein, to survive and thrive as a common culture.

Granatstein's argument that the lack of a common history resulting from acids associated with the "new" social and cultural histories along with post-World War II battles between the Canadian federal government and the provinces over power and authority (as I write Alberta is set to institute a policy which would allow the political elites of that province to effectively check what comes out of Ottawa and check any challenges to that power in the courts), is grounded, whether consciously or unconsciously, in theoretical perspectives that go back at least to the European Enlightenment and the Romantic era and to the Enlightenment philosophe and romantic social and cultural theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the founding father of sociology and ethnology, Emile Durkheim. Rousseau and Durkheim, more analytically, argued, as does Granatstein and others before and after him, that for a nation to effectively function as a nation and survive as a nation, it must have a common culture and a common set of values and norms. There is, of course, a lot of truth to this perspective though this approach raises a question Granatstein barely if at all addresses, namely whether Canada with its two and perhaps now three, four, five, or ten solitudes, has ever been a single nation and has ever had a common national culture, questions that can equally be posed about the United States with its at least two founding solitudes, that of the North and that of the South.

There are a number of other empirical, methodological, and theoretical issues one could bring to bear on Granatstein's polemic against the "new" social history and cultural history and their postmodernist impact on modernist history. Granatstein, for instance, does not, in his rather too broad brushstrokes, distinguish between various types of academics inside Canada's ivory towers. As numerous surveys have shown over the years, those who teach in the professions, in the hard sciences, and in the applied sciences are not the same culturally as those who teach in the social sciences and humanities. Those who teach in the social sciences and humanities are closer to the caricatures and stereotypes Granatstein plays in in Who Killed Canadian History. Additionally, Granatstein ignores, to some extent, the impact the old analogue media and the new digital media have had on academic history textbooks. When I was an undergraduate, for instance, I had to read thirteen books for an introductory class on Greek history, texts that would not be considered textbooks today. Today a teacher is lucky if she or he can get her or his students to read the one brief textbook generally assigned for introductory courses today. Publishers, of course, have tried to sex up textbooks to get professors to assign them for classes and that, they hope, will move students to read them. They have added a host of colour photos, a host of topical elements, a host of anecdotal introductions that mimic film and television narratives, and a host of graphs, maps, and charts that they hope will stimulate and generate student engagement with the textbook. I have, however, have seen no evidence that this publishing strategy is working. What this strategy has done is to raise the cost of textbooks to astronomical levels, price levels that not all students can afford.

Some of the elements added to modern postmodern textbooks, of course, are related to gender, ethnicity, and class, all phenomena that have been prominent and significant factors in the making of history over the centuries and all things the "new" historians focus on and should--yes I am going normative here--focus on. Granatstein and his colleagues have qualms about this increasing focus on gender, ethnicity, and class, because, as I noted, they think they are pushing much needed political, diplomatic, legal, and military history out of history textbooks and out of history classes alienating students from history courses in the process. According to Granatstein students are still interested in these "traditional" subareas of the historical profession. He cites somewhat anecdotal data--student interest and attendance in courses in these areas--to make his case. But is this really the case? Is this anecdotal evidence sufficient to prove the point? Shouldn't historians (not to mention publishers) be engaging in ethnography to find out what really interests students? Beyond these, hasn't the old great men and great events history proven to be as if not more "boring" to many contemporary history students?

Speaking of university textbooks, I perused several introductory texts on Canadian history chosen somewhat randomly while reading through Who Killed Canadian History in order to test them against Granatstein's hypotheses. What I have found suggests that Granatstein overstates his case about the decline of traditional history and its replacement by trivial history and vanity history, both things that history has long been anyway and something that should not be surprising given that Granatstein is, after all, engaging in polemics and apologetics. In the 529 page Canada: Unity in Disunity by Paul Cornell, Jean Hamelin, Fernand Ouellet, and Marcel Trudel, a textbook that early on tried to deal with the realities of Canadian multiculturalism and pluralism, there are 19 references to John Macdonald, 10 pages on World War I, and 21 pages on World War II. In the 537 page second edition of the introductory textbook Destinies: Canadian History Since Confederation written by R. Douglas Francis, Richard Jones, and Donald Smith and  published in 1996, three years before the first edition of Who Killed Canadian History,  23 pages are devoted to the Great War while there are 50 references to John Macdonald. The 568 page 2003 edition of the single volume Canada: a National History by Margaret Conrad and Alvin Finkel, both of whom Granatstein brands as killers of Canadian history, devotes 19 pages to World War II, including brief sections on the air and sea war between 1939 and 1944, while Pierre Trudeau garners 5 references and the Charter 1. By way of comparison, the 567 page Nation: Canada Since Confederation, the 1990 textbook written by Granatstein himself along with Irving Abella, T.W. Acheson, David Bercuson, R. Craig Brown, and H. Blair Neatby, a textbook that is no longer in print, devotes 67 pages to the period from 1911 to 1919,  54 pages to the period from 1939 to 1957, references Macdonald 10 times, Trudeau 21 times, and the Charter once. While Nation has chapters on industrialisation, labour radicalism, and immigration, the bulk of the textbook is devoted to political history raising the question of how serious "traditional" historians like Granatstein are in advocating for an integrated political and social and cultural history in introductory classes and texts, particularly since the Francis, Jones, and Smith and Conrad and Finkel do integrate "traditional" and "new" histories.

I found Who Killed Canadian History in both of its editions--they do differ from each other as the revised and expanded edition adds a couple of chapters and some parts of the text have been deleted and other material added to the text in the second edition--an interesting if not fully compelling polemic on how Canadian history and history in general should be done. I agree with some aspects of Who Killed Canadian History, such as the need for politics to be a central part of introductory courses and introductory textbooks on Canadian history. But so should historical approaches that emphasise economics, culture (gender, ethnicity, class), demography, and geography, all significant and important forces that impact human beings and the worlds humans have created and all of which are essential frames through which we can understand the human species from prehistory to today. As for who might be interested in Grantstein's polemic, it is likely to be of interest to those interested in polemics and apologetics over how to do history and to those interested in cultural divisions within the humanities and the social sciences in contemporary Canadian universities, itself an iteration of the broader Western culture wars that have long impacted human history and human culture, particularly in the core nation world.