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In the middle of eating lunch at the LDS National Security
Conference the person sitting next to me was so sad they missed hearing Patrick
Mason speak and without thinking I groaned. The conversation stopped and the
table looked at me. I then awkwardly explained that I was rather
unimpressed with his scholarship in a number of ways.
Incidents like this happen on a regular basis as I receive quizzical and sometimes angry looks and questioning when I don’t share someone’s enthusiasm for a given scholar. In many cases that’s because the scholar in question is part of my overrated club. What follows is a list that doesn’t discount the meaningful scholarship of these individuals. The list is more about inflated or misplaced praise and uncritical hype. Yet those behaviors are so pervasive and shape our evaluation of ideas that I need to identify the most frequent recipients of hype.
Michael Quinn
I attended the same conference as him (War and Peace in Our
Times) towards the end of his life and the beginning of my career. The fawning
praise he received was closer to worship. Even though he was discussing an
issue for which he had no appreciable training or knowledge (military history
and ethics), and wasn’t providing anything particularly noteworthy, a reverent hush came over the room when he provided an answer.
Then the paper he presented had numerous glaring and
unexamined implications as I detailed
here. I describe how Quin uncritically accepted J. Reuben’s Clark
isolationism to such a degree that Quinn failed to notice his subject’s
hypocrisy, pro-Nazi stance, and how his views were overruled by other church
leaders at the time. The last point is especially egregious since one of Quinn’s
book invented
disputes among church leadership when it suited his arguments, but seemed to
ignore meaningful disputes in this case because of biased favoritism towards the isolationism of
J. Reuben Clark.
Those are just the problems I found in my personal interaction with him. As summarized by Sarah Allen, he was also known for his tendency to personally attack those he disagreed with, and to play fast and loose with the connections he made between the factual record and its supposed meaning. So I imagine his article about J Reuben Clark probably had even more problems than my cursory review. (As far as I know, no one has interacted with his presentation more than I have.)
His popularity seems to result from the good fortune of
being from a favored minority group, homosexuals, his writing about the same
topic, and his work was thoroughly, and rightfully I believe, dismissed by the
~evil~ “FARMS” crowd. Because Mormon historians are the most biased of any
group I’ve ever seen (while ironically calling their opponents biased), he was
criticized by the "right" group of people, as a result, those criticisms never carried the weight they should.
Hugh Nibley
I love Hugh Nibley and his work. His works helped spark my
academic journey and often helped me on my mission. But Hugh Nibley was often
too sloppy
with his footnotes and saw too many vague connections to the point that he embodied the concept of “parallel
mania.” Its a real criticism, but I should note that parallel mania is often used by his critics as a pat buzzword to
ignore the real connections that he made. Nibley’s work is extremely outdated
and there have been often decades worth of additional scholarship that
contradicts his work. This is common in academia and not a problem if scholars properly
engage and build upon previous scholarship.
But his fans are often dilletantes instead of scholars. Like
a right-wing inverse of the left-wing love for Quinn, too many people uncritically
read a Hugh Nibley book and suddenly think they are experts. He is quoted
chapter and verse, but there isn’t much thinking beyond seeing a parallel to
Nibley’s words, and a quote.
Chinese theorists had the same annoyance with people quoting
Sunzi. They ended up writing about it, and if you change the subjects to Hugh
Nibley, it is surprisingly accurate:
Even though the mouth recites the words of [Hugh Nibley], the mind has not thought about the mysterious subtleties of the discussion...[they] merely recite the empty words and are misled by the enemy...
The study of [any subject] must be from the lowest to the middle and then from the middle to the highest, so that [the learners] will gradually penetrate the depths of the teaching. If not, they will only be relying upon empty words. Merely remembering and reciting them is not enough to succeed.[1]
Patrick Mason
Given my specialty in ethics and just war I encounter Mason a great deal. I’m sorry to say, I’m just not impressed. He has all the credentials, praise, institutional power, and seems to publish or present in every conference imaginable. But I find his scholarship lacking. His book, Proclaim Peace, ignored or minimized many important scholarly points regarding just war. He tries to have his cake and eat it too by claiming the non violent ethic of Jesus from the New Testament is "absolute", while also acknowledging verses that clearly support just war. But the latter is clearly lip service forced on him because he spends so much time supporting the former.
In a Maxwell Institute funded piece
he ignored King Benjamin’s speech, distorted his preaching and policies, and invented an
offensive war to imply the Nephites were colonialist. After reading about
Michael Quinn’s lapses in scholarship, I might even say the invention of an
offensive war whole cloth from the scriptures sounds like what critics called Quinnspeak. At
best, he just didn’t read the text carefully.
After noticing his failure to read texts carefully, I started to
wonder if he read some texts at all. I carefully started looking over some of his
work, and I see a pattern where he relies on secondary sources when quoting church
fathers.[2] For example, every footnote in “Zionic
Non Violence” referencing Christian fathers refers to a secondary source. Based
on his footnotes, he doesn’t read the works of major just war theorists, he
stumbles across an occasional quote in various pacifist books. Yet he feels imminently
qualified to call them “insufficient” and he is celebrated as some kind of guru
on peace making.
Privately many people tell me that he gives vibes that he thinks he is the smartest man in the room. He asked a smarmy gotcha question to me during a conference I attended that was poor form. The peace studies program at BYU-Hawaii held a peace conference about his book, which I’m sure didn’t help his self-admitted arrogant smugness, and he and his peace studies friends in the audience actually snickered when discussing arguments from people like me.
I found that behavior rather unseemly, especially for
someone who claims his attitude will bring a Zion like peace. It’s especially hypocritical
considering the attacks levelled against FARMS for the same behavior. Anti
Mormons included an incident at a conference as one of the “top” events of 2011.
#3 on that list described
how the ~evil~ Maxwell Institute “scholars” (the scare quotes added by the
author) were seen “sniggering” before they lobbed a series of “aggressive and
mean spirited” questions in their “verbal assault” on Mike Reed. But when I’m “verbally
assaulted” by Mason’s smarmy gotcha questions and heckled by a hostile
audience, they remain celebrated peacemakers.
I liked his book about 19th century lynchings and
his advice designed to help struggling members. But his academic work on peace has
numerous methodological gaps and is celebrated far beyond its actual merit.
Even more importantly, his unseemly behavior ranging from his poor research
into Church fathers, to gotcha questions and sniggering run contrary to the
unearned praise he gets for supposedly building bridges and a peaceful Zion.
Conclusion
Many of these scholars are household names. But a close look at their scholarship suggests perhaps they shouldn’t be. The biggest flaw is that we often uncritically accept the arguments of a celebrity scholar, when we should be thoughtful and critical readers of any argument and engage their thoughts and arguments. In short, we substitute their reputation for our thought. The result is that we spend more time praising than thinking. I hope this post will help check that tendency. And maybe if you hear something from me during lunch at a conference, you'll understand. Thanks.
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*****
[1] Questions
and Replies Between Tang Taizong and Li Weikong in The Seven Military
Classics of Ancient China, Ralph Sawyer trans., (Westview Press,
1993), 338, 360.
[2] Rethinking
Righteousness in the Shadow of War, fn1 reads: Idolatry 19,
p. 73, quoted in Lisa Sowle Cahill, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Pacifism, Just
War, and Peacebuilding (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019), 77. See
also: fns. 6-10 in Patrick Mason, "Zionic Non Violence as Christian
Worship and Practice," in How and What you Worship: Christology
and Praxis in the Revelations of Joseph Smith, Rachel Cope, Carter
Charles, Jordan T. Watkins eds., (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book), 2020.
