{Richard Bushman is a Mormon scholar and a respected historian of nineteenth-century America. In the following excerpt, he acknowledges the difficulty of pursuing ‘objective’ scholarship in the face of the myriad personal and social factors that influence everything from our choice of subjects to our selection, arrangement, and interpretation of facts.}
“We all have our tribes.” (Richard Bushman)
Richard Bushman (from “The Social Dimensions of Rationality”):
We live at a moment in history when the Enlightenment dream of scientific scholarship has been eaten away by doubts about the possibility of scholarly objectivity. A host of thinkers (many of them French) have called into question the very possibility of dispassionate inquiry. They argue not merely that objectivity is an impossible achievement for human beings, who can never detach their minds from the rest of their being, but that the pretense of objectivity is an exercise in self-aggrandizement. Objectivity, they say, disguises a play for power by those who pretend to the authority of objective scholarship when they are every bit as self-interested in the outcome as any religious [or ideological] apologist. The scientific authorities of an era, according to this theory, claim to speak only for truth against error, when in reality they stand to benefit by promoting their particular truth and vanquishing all others. No truth, not even the most rigorously scientific, is objective. All truth is colored by personal interest of some sort.
I am loath to go all the way with such postmodern thinkers, or to relinquish faith in some measure of objective scholarship. We can recognize utterly biased and self-serving scholarship that we know would not hold up under scrutiny, or history writing that is filled with factual errors. We want to reserve the right to correct such corrupted work in the name of some kind of objective truth.
But if we cannot go all the way with critics of the Enlightenment, we can at least admit that no scholarship, no truth, exists in a social vacuum. Though it is rarely mentioned in the work itself, all scholarship is tied to a community of some kind and bears the marks of that community’s influence. Scholarship is the product of people who are located in institutions—universities, research institutes, or circles of like-minded thinkers. They publish their work and want to have it read by others. Their reputations, promotions, pay raises, and appointments depend on how that work is received. When they write, they use the language, the mannerisms, the forms of their scholarly community. In taking an intellectual position, they silently, but inevitably, associate themselves with people of a similar outlook. Scholars take pleasure in hearing references to their work at scholarly meetings or seeing it mentioned in publications. In the scholarly work itself, a conclusion is presented as the outcome of careful scrutiny and rigorous analysis of the facts; but the assumptions, the perspective, the fundamental attitude of the work come from some community, from a society with which the scholar is implicitly and probably quite hopefully associating.
Every form of scholarship is rooted in a society, an imagined community of scholars, in which the teachers or writers live and move and have their being. We cannot take a position on a scholarly issue without implicitly forming or breaking a social relationship. Everything we write and say links us to other people, with all the tangled consequences for our self-esteem, our personal identities, our hopes and aspirations. There is a social and personal dimension to every form of rational discourse, which means that all beliefs, not only religious beliefs, are both rational and irrational.
For example, we may be persuaded rationally that the Book of Mormon is a nineteenth-century production. There may be hundreds of facts we can invoke to sustain this position. But in making that assertion we are forming and breaking human relationships that unavoidably influence our thinking, just as the memories of a religious upbringing (or of a transforming conversion) coil around the work of Mormon apologists.
I acknowledge my own subjectivity and the influence of a million personal associations. But this recognition of my own limitations makes me deeply skeptical of all who claim to escape their subjectivity, who think they have rid themselves of the prejudices of their tribe. We all have our tribes. The desire to form tribes, to join tribes, to triumph within our tribes, drives and shapes our scholarship. Every form of discourse, every rationality is rooted in a society and serves social purposes. Every truth is socially conditioned and socially motivated. All truth, religious and scientific, is of necessity social truth and is profoundly affected by human associations.
In what, then, can we put our trust? If truth always grows from a particular society, how do we choose among the perplexing confusions of multiple and confusing truths? If the Enlightenment quest has faltered, if the pursuit of knowledge seems mired in subjectivity, and if scholarship is entwined in the corrupting pursuit of power, what can we cling to? What can replace objective scientific truth as a foundation for culture and personal identity?
Where do we go, that is, when we are post-Enlightenment, postmodern, post-everything?
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If you have any interest in Mormon history, Richard Bushman should be one of your go-to sources, along with Fawn Brodie, author of No Man Knows My History, a biography of Joseph Smith.
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