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dolorosa_12) wrote2021-09-28 04:50 pm
dolorosa_12) wrote2021-09-28 04:50 pm
Entry tags:
The only possible reaction is weariness
As many of you know, although I am a librarian now, I used to be in academia. Before moving into librarianship, I did a PhD in medieval Irish literature, and was, during that time, pretty firmly ensconced in Celtic Studies academia — a multidisciplinary field that covers languages, history, literature and material culture, ranging in time from prehistory to the contemporary era.
We get a lot of cranks contacting us — people convinced they have evidence for a real, historical King Arthur, neopagans who think there is extensive evidence for pre-Christian 'Celtic' religious beliefs and practices documented in medieval literary texts (which is a whole other story, but suffice it to say the evidence is thin), Cornish nationalists who want to coopt us in their language revival debates, and so on. Most of the time, it causes a bit of grumbling and sighing, but it's relatively harmless, we do our best to gently correct these people's misapprehensions, and they wander off.
Unfortunately, there's also the far right.
Like most disciplines that encompass some degree of medieval studies, Celtic Studies unfortunately attracts attention from white supremacists. Most people I know in the field have been doing good work debunking far-right talking points and preempting them (while being upfront about reasons why medieval studies is perceived as attractive by far-right groups). Unfortunately, these efforts do little to reach the people already enmeshed in white supremacist groups or susceptible to their thinking. Which brings us to the current dispiriting state of affairs that's caused much discussion and consternation within my academic social circles in the past few days.
I don't want to directly link to the group involved, since they don't need any further attention or notoriety, but basically suffice it to say that a bunch of white supremacists in the US have decided that a) they are the inheritors of some sort of pure 'Celtic' legacy that people in historically 'Celtic' countries have betrayed by being part of the EU, wanting to be part of the EU, and/or letting non-white people live among them as residents or citizens, and b) the Roman Empire was the originator of this state of decline in 'pure' 'Celtic' countries because Roman legions in Britain had non-white soldiers who settled in the region. There's a lot of posturing about 'globalism' and so on — the usual antisemitic, racist white supremacist talking points.
They also preemptively blocked on Twitter all Celtic Studies academics, all people advocating for an independent Scotland and/or Scotland rejoining the EU, all people involved in Irish, Welsh and other minority Celtic language communities, 'Irish Twitter' (which is a sort of vague collection of people discussing everything from Irish politics to pop culture and memes), and anyone else who looked likely to push back against their foolishness.
Most of my friends feel that the best way to deal with this group is to deny it the oxygen and attention it so clearly craves, and they're probably right, but the whole situation just makes me feel utterly weary. Not because I'm shocked that a bunch of white supremacists have popped up spouting dangerous nonsense about history and celticity. But I'm so fed up with the state of the world being such that expertise is so devalued, that — whether in the sciences or the humanities — one person's ignorance is treated as equal to another's knowledge or experience. (One of these days I'll write that blog post about the grave concern I've always had with 'just Google it/I'm not here to educate you' being the standard response among progressives when someone comes to them with questions.)
It's not that I think just calmly, rationally talking to this pack of neo-Nazis and pointing out all their errors in scholarship would do any good. I guess what I'm saying is I'm sad that the world values expertise so little that there was no point at which any earlier intervention would have led to a curiosity and nuanced understanding of studies in this field, and a comfort with history being messier and our understanding changing over time than the rigid thinking of the far-right makes possible.
We get a lot of cranks contacting us — people convinced they have evidence for a real, historical King Arthur, neopagans who think there is extensive evidence for pre-Christian 'Celtic' religious beliefs and practices documented in medieval literary texts (which is a whole other story, but suffice it to say the evidence is thin), Cornish nationalists who want to coopt us in their language revival debates, and so on. Most of the time, it causes a bit of grumbling and sighing, but it's relatively harmless, we do our best to gently correct these people's misapprehensions, and they wander off.
Unfortunately, there's also the far right.
Like most disciplines that encompass some degree of medieval studies, Celtic Studies unfortunately attracts attention from white supremacists. Most people I know in the field have been doing good work debunking far-right talking points and preempting them (while being upfront about reasons why medieval studies is perceived as attractive by far-right groups). Unfortunately, these efforts do little to reach the people already enmeshed in white supremacist groups or susceptible to their thinking. Which brings us to the current dispiriting state of affairs that's caused much discussion and consternation within my academic social circles in the past few days.
I don't want to directly link to the group involved, since they don't need any further attention or notoriety, but basically suffice it to say that a bunch of white supremacists in the US have decided that a) they are the inheritors of some sort of pure 'Celtic' legacy that people in historically 'Celtic' countries have betrayed by being part of the EU, wanting to be part of the EU, and/or letting non-white people live among them as residents or citizens, and b) the Roman Empire was the originator of this state of decline in 'pure' 'Celtic' countries because Roman legions in Britain had non-white soldiers who settled in the region. There's a lot of posturing about 'globalism' and so on — the usual antisemitic, racist white supremacist talking points.
They also preemptively blocked on Twitter all Celtic Studies academics, all people advocating for an independent Scotland and/or Scotland rejoining the EU, all people involved in Irish, Welsh and other minority Celtic language communities, 'Irish Twitter' (which is a sort of vague collection of people discussing everything from Irish politics to pop culture and memes), and anyone else who looked likely to push back against their foolishness.
Most of my friends feel that the best way to deal with this group is to deny it the oxygen and attention it so clearly craves, and they're probably right, but the whole situation just makes me feel utterly weary. Not because I'm shocked that a bunch of white supremacists have popped up spouting dangerous nonsense about history and celticity. But I'm so fed up with the state of the world being such that expertise is so devalued, that — whether in the sciences or the humanities — one person's ignorance is treated as equal to another's knowledge or experience. (One of these days I'll write that blog post about the grave concern I've always had with 'just Google it/I'm not here to educate you' being the standard response among progressives when someone comes to them with questions.)
It's not that I think just calmly, rationally talking to this pack of neo-Nazis and pointing out all their errors in scholarship would do any good. I guess what I'm saying is I'm sad that the world values expertise so little that there was no point at which any earlier intervention would have led to a curiosity and nuanced understanding of studies in this field, and a comfort with history being messier and our understanding changing over time than the rigid thinking of the far-right makes possible.