How Skeptical is Too Skeptical? The Higher Naivete
The best scholarship requires both deep knowledge and an openness to the possible.
When beginning to study social science, there is a well-warranted focus on empirical study and sound theory. Over time, as you read literature reviews in papers, and write your own, you will get a sense of when the basis of when a thesis seems solid and when it seems more like a hunch. Also, taking from my time in divinity school, it’s good to always think of:
What is behind the text, or the historical and ideological environment in which you read books, papers, and analyze content.
What is within the text, such as word choice, overall structure, the layout of any qualitative or quantitative data.
What is in front of the text, which is you! What ideas, worldviews, and identities you bring when approaching a text. This can be as straightforward as hearing people say Marx’s Capital is really difficult to get through the first couple of chapters, which can affect your overall expectations when you read it yourself.
The history of all study though, is that academic consensus is also over time shown to be partly or wholly incorrect. For instance, many people are aware of the research (perhaps the first example of data journalism) by John Snow (1813-1858) where he showed a single water pump in London with an infected water supply was the commonality in a cholera outbreak (Map Men have a video about it here). The popular theory that cholera was related to miasma or bad air, was tested and found wholly inaccurate, it couldn’t explain commonalities and also exceptions- John Snow found that places with very few cases close to the pump had their own sources of water, so there was no relation with bad air.
So there is an idea, which I first heard stated by Donald Kagan (1932-2021), a very influential historian of Ancient Greece at Yale who did a lecture series that was on iTunesU (remember iTunesU?), their e-learning platform they had for a bit. Kagan is interesting because the view of historians in antiquity is always a tension between primary sources of or near the time, archeology, and a general sense of the possible. The question is what passes muster at true, what is a complex mixture of history, cultural mythmaking, and propaganda, and what’s kinda just bullshit all the way through.
Kagan describes his approach to ancient Greece as “higher naïveté” which is summarized here (emphasis mine):
this critical school that says, “I won’t believe anything unless it is proven to me.” At the other extreme, there’s me, the most gullible historian imaginable. My principle is this. I believe anything written in ancient Latin or Greek unless I can’t. Now, things that prevent me from believing what I read are that they are internally contradictory, or what they say is impossible, or different ones contradict each other and they can’t both be right. So, in those cases I abandon the ancient evidence. Otherwise, you’ve got to convince me that they’re not true.Now, you might think of this as, indeed, gullible. A former colleague of mine put the thing very, very well. He spoke about, and I like to claim this approach, the position of scholarship to which we call the higher naiveté. The way this works is, you start out, you don’t know anything, and you’re naïve. You believe everything. Next, you get a college education and you don’t believe anything, and then you reach the level of wisdom, the higher naiveté, and you know what to believe even though you can’t prove it. Okay, be warned; I’m a practitioner of the higher naiveté. So, I think the way to deal with legends is to regard them as different from essentially sophisticated historical statements, but as possibly deriving from facts, which have obviously been distorted and misunderstood, misused and so on. But it would be reckless, it seems to me, to just put them aside and not ask yourself the question, “Can there be something believable at the roof of this?”1
As an example, he points to how in the 19th century, the Trojan War was not viewed as having much meaningful historical basis, and was instead a work of myth that became part of ancient literature. Kagan points to Heinrich Schliemann, who was a businessman with no formal academic education. He long believed that Troy was a real city, as were other locations known from the Iliad and Odyssey that did not have an established location. His ultimate discovery of Troy and Mycenae, which he pursued precisely because he wasn’t a skeptic, led to the current synthesis which is that there are definite historical elements to what is described in the works of Homer and a lot of material culture.
Now it should be said that Schliemann’s lack of area knowledge led to a huge amount of destruction, in that he wasn’t competent to do an excavation and misunderstood the timeline of the layers of Troy. Schliemann was the first stage, naive. His skeptic detractors were the second stage. The third stage, Kagan posits, is you revisit that naivete with the skills and knowledge you have learned.
Since I started with my time in seminary, I will mention a dialectic in basically all archeology, but most known in Biblical archeology: “minimalism” vs. “maximalism.” This debate is now pretty dated and it’s pretty much only used as a pejorative at this point, but “minimalists” are skeptical of the Hebrew Bible having much genuinely historical content, and “maximalists” are more optimistic towards things that aren’t proven to be totally impossible.2 I developed an appreciation of Israel Finkelstein (1949-), who is considered a minimalist by some, but has written some of the best archeological works about the Hebrew Bible. In particular I used The Forgotten Kingdom (2013), which focuses on the northern Kingdom of Israel, for a paper when I was trying to discern what the very limited part of scripture about it might connect to historically. These labels are really two extremes that most serious academics never truly embodied, and today pretty much everyone would say either “both” or “neither” when asked. The higher naivete I would place in being more optimistic about historical content in the text, while still have deep subject knowledge such that it does not wander into unsubstantiated speculation.
In this era of the internet and modern conspiracy culture, propaganda, misinformation, and now the rise of AI, it would be good to have healthy skepticism of what you read, see, and hear. As Dan McQuillian, one of the most well-spoken thinkers on AI says, “ChatGPT is, in technical terms, a 'bullshit generator'. If a generated sentence makes sense to you, the reader, it means the mathematical model has made sufficiently good guess to pass your sense-making filter. The language model has no idea what it's talking about because it has no idea about anything at all. It's more of a bullshitter than the most egregious egoist you'll ever meet.”3
So can one be anything but highly skeptical in the modern age? I think one can with some guiding rails.
In my next post, I will be pointing here to the work of American anthropologist David Graeber (1961-2020), both his solo publications and his collaboration with David Wengrow (1972-), a British archeologist. Together they published The Dawn of Everything (2022), an incredibly valuable work I think everyone should read. I believe it embodies both the higher naivete and also how skepticism runs into validity issues when it refuses to adapt to new facts emerging from the material culture of the past.
Donald, K. (2023). CLCV 205 - Lecture 3 - The Dark Ages (cont.) | Open Yale Courses. Yale.edu. https://oyc.yale.edu/classics/clcv-205/lecture-3
Lendering, J. (2020, October 12). Maximalists and minimalists. Livius.Org. https://www.livius.org/articles/theory/maximalists-and-minimalists/
McQuillian, D. (2023, February 9). ChatGPT Is a Bullshit Generator Waging Class War. Vice.com. https://www.vice.com/en/article/akex34/chatgpt-is-a-bullshit-generator-waging-class-war