Re: The death of the Mormon Apologist - RIP 1832-2015
Posted: Fri Feb 27, 2015 9:03 am
I almost agree with the sentiments of the OP. Apologetics is nearly dead. And what they are doing at MDDB and Mormon Interpreter is not really apologetics.
Apologetics is a response (X) to a stimuli (Y); response means the X and Y are talking. Private apologetics is as contradictory a term as private criticism. When apologists stop talking to / arguing with critics and critics to/with apologists, they are no longer apologists and critics.
In a sense, traditional apologetics started to die when its practitioners first started plying their trade on the internet rather than in print, where Petersonian apologetics is completely dead by now. Indeed, I think there is an inverse relationship at work: the more internet-based Petersonian apologetics became, the less it operated in print (cf. the consistent flow of Nibley reprints, along with a pretty active article industry through FARMS and even a monograph or two throughout the 80s and 90s). As the book review became the dominant form of print apologetics at the MI, apologetics naturally became more about personality than about ideas, and it became a very natural step to work online, where discussion is rarely about ideas and rarely NOT about personality.
Print mediates that dynamic; writing a journal article is a long, tedious process that whittles away at the spontaneity and shallowness that characterizes internet "discussion." Writing a book is a years-long slog that forces one to think and rethink at every turn. It's hard to get an article published or to write a sustained work of scholarship if all you've got is ad hominem. Greg Smith seems determined to prove that it can be done, but working against him is the fact that most people who are not him would prefer to read 100+ pages about something interesting rather than summaries of Facebook posts. It's not just that print has certain rules but that you have to engage readers somehow. In the 80s and 90s the apologists were trying to engage readers by applying Nibleyism. Even if you were more of a Dialogue/Sunstone Mormon, at least they were some of the stuff they were writing was interesting enough to read (or at least to me it was). The turn to the ad hominem book review as the primary genre for apologetics (a boring genre because it is so predictable in both ends and means) meant that the Nibley brand of apologetics had run out of intellectual steam and started to rely on personality as it became Petersonian apologetics: and a personality focus is prime material for the internet.
One of the central mythologies of the internet is that it fosters openness and dialogue, difference and diversity, but of course it is actually a series of contiguous echo-chambers stocked with megaphones for narrow-mindedness and sameness. What gives rise to the mythology is that these echo-chambers are merely aware that there are other echo-chambers out there. But they don't listen to each other at all.
Another aspect of internet mythology is the so-called democratization of the practice of knowledge which is, in fact, the vulgarization of knowledge-work. Internet Mormonism is something I only encountered relatively recently (not very unusual for millennials, by the way, and see the recent article in the Washington Post about how most millennials prefer print, because having grown up with the internet, we understand better what it is and what's it's limits are, and it's not the novelty to us that it continues to be to baby-boomers and X-ers). Most of the so-called difficult questions were things I discovered through reading print (books and journals), not through Google or message boards. One of the things that I found difficult to understand when I did find forums like this is how easily someone could earn the label "apologist," both from other "apologists" and from critics: all you had to do, it seems, is express the views of a traditional believer. Whether one was an apologist or not was therefore an issue of personal taste. But in Nibleyan apologetics, as in most traditional kinds of apologetics, you were only an apologist if you actually produced a body of apologetic work. You actually had to make a kind of contribution. That criterion simply does not exist in internet-land, a place where clicking "like" is thought to be an act rather than the mere sentiment it actually is.
As far as I'm concerned, apologists are people like Hamblin, Peterson, and to a degree David Bokovoy. Most of the people that I've always thought of as apologists (people like my former teachers Stephen Ricks, Donald Parry, John Gee, Robert Millett, and many others) have almost no presence online (Gee's sporadic blog is the exception that proves the rule). You may hate or love their work, but at least they've actually done some work, small though that body may be. What is sad about especially Hamblin and Peterson is that without access to the print environment of the MI, they have become indistinguishable from people like Droopy. The only reason they are taken seriously as "apologists" is not because of what they say in the present in online fora but because of what they did in the past in print. If you didn't know that Daniel Peterson was behind "Sic et Non" you wouldn't even bother clicking the links to its pages that are frequently posted here. And just in case you forget who he is, the good professor has put a picture of himself in a benign and meditative gaze at the top (Hamblin too puts his picture at the top of his blog, tellingly; this is not something done by younger people who are largely unknown and who can't rely on recognition of past work for their present readership).
With a watered-down definition of what apologetics is and who apologists are, it is not surprising that these "apologists" have migrated away from places like this into the safer, self-contained sanctuaries. In the Hobbesian chaos of the internet, people naturally seek order. I don't fault them for that, but once they are in there refuges, you can't claim that what they are doing is apologetics because they are no longer responding to anything. It's an echo-chamber.
The only apologetics I see happening is at the new MI and especially Bokovoy and Givens. I suspect that one of the reasons Bokovoy is drawing the online ire of Petersonians is that he, unlike they, is actually producing a body of work in print. I don't doubt that they sincerely hate his ideas, but they are taking them seriously enough to respond because his ideas are actually in print and therefore will have a longer shelf-life than the comments section on "Sic et Non," or here for that matter (I think they leave Givens alone because he is a much harder target, and he threw them a bone by giving them some respectability in "By the Hand of Mormon," but really he was throwing the bone to Nibley, not the Petersonians). The traditional apologists did have a body of work, but the thing is that it was a very, very small body. Other than Nibley reprints, the main genre in print apologetics became the book review, which by the early 2000s had dwarfed what they had done in the 80s and 90s. There is not one substantial book that you could point to and say, "ah, now there is something that has had influence." Instead of using their control of the print apologetics to produce lasting contributions to Mormon intellectual life in the form of books that have long-term results, they wasted that control on short-term personality games that are better suited for internet echo-chambers than genuine apologetic operations. In their propensity to squander resources and their fondness for missing opportunities, they have shown themselves typical of their generation, as they have also in their disgust with the younger generation of apologists who are actually trying to do something useful and meaningful in the face of bitter resentment from their more well-known elders. If only what they are well-known for were something more substantial than book reviews and more beneficial than their pre-internet embrace of some of the worst parts of internet culture.
Apologetics is a response (X) to a stimuli (Y); response means the X and Y are talking. Private apologetics is as contradictory a term as private criticism. When apologists stop talking to / arguing with critics and critics to/with apologists, they are no longer apologists and critics.
In a sense, traditional apologetics started to die when its practitioners first started plying their trade on the internet rather than in print, where Petersonian apologetics is completely dead by now. Indeed, I think there is an inverse relationship at work: the more internet-based Petersonian apologetics became, the less it operated in print (cf. the consistent flow of Nibley reprints, along with a pretty active article industry through FARMS and even a monograph or two throughout the 80s and 90s). As the book review became the dominant form of print apologetics at the MI, apologetics naturally became more about personality than about ideas, and it became a very natural step to work online, where discussion is rarely about ideas and rarely NOT about personality.
Print mediates that dynamic; writing a journal article is a long, tedious process that whittles away at the spontaneity and shallowness that characterizes internet "discussion." Writing a book is a years-long slog that forces one to think and rethink at every turn. It's hard to get an article published or to write a sustained work of scholarship if all you've got is ad hominem. Greg Smith seems determined to prove that it can be done, but working against him is the fact that most people who are not him would prefer to read 100+ pages about something interesting rather than summaries of Facebook posts. It's not just that print has certain rules but that you have to engage readers somehow. In the 80s and 90s the apologists were trying to engage readers by applying Nibleyism. Even if you were more of a Dialogue/Sunstone Mormon, at least they were some of the stuff they were writing was interesting enough to read (or at least to me it was). The turn to the ad hominem book review as the primary genre for apologetics (a boring genre because it is so predictable in both ends and means) meant that the Nibley brand of apologetics had run out of intellectual steam and started to rely on personality as it became Petersonian apologetics: and a personality focus is prime material for the internet.
One of the central mythologies of the internet is that it fosters openness and dialogue, difference and diversity, but of course it is actually a series of contiguous echo-chambers stocked with megaphones for narrow-mindedness and sameness. What gives rise to the mythology is that these echo-chambers are merely aware that there are other echo-chambers out there. But they don't listen to each other at all.
Another aspect of internet mythology is the so-called democratization of the practice of knowledge which is, in fact, the vulgarization of knowledge-work. Internet Mormonism is something I only encountered relatively recently (not very unusual for millennials, by the way, and see the recent article in the Washington Post about how most millennials prefer print, because having grown up with the internet, we understand better what it is and what's it's limits are, and it's not the novelty to us that it continues to be to baby-boomers and X-ers). Most of the so-called difficult questions were things I discovered through reading print (books and journals), not through Google or message boards. One of the things that I found difficult to understand when I did find forums like this is how easily someone could earn the label "apologist," both from other "apologists" and from critics: all you had to do, it seems, is express the views of a traditional believer. Whether one was an apologist or not was therefore an issue of personal taste. But in Nibleyan apologetics, as in most traditional kinds of apologetics, you were only an apologist if you actually produced a body of apologetic work. You actually had to make a kind of contribution. That criterion simply does not exist in internet-land, a place where clicking "like" is thought to be an act rather than the mere sentiment it actually is.
As far as I'm concerned, apologists are people like Hamblin, Peterson, and to a degree David Bokovoy. Most of the people that I've always thought of as apologists (people like my former teachers Stephen Ricks, Donald Parry, John Gee, Robert Millett, and many others) have almost no presence online (Gee's sporadic blog is the exception that proves the rule). You may hate or love their work, but at least they've actually done some work, small though that body may be. What is sad about especially Hamblin and Peterson is that without access to the print environment of the MI, they have become indistinguishable from people like Droopy. The only reason they are taken seriously as "apologists" is not because of what they say in the present in online fora but because of what they did in the past in print. If you didn't know that Daniel Peterson was behind "Sic et Non" you wouldn't even bother clicking the links to its pages that are frequently posted here. And just in case you forget who he is, the good professor has put a picture of himself in a benign and meditative gaze at the top (Hamblin too puts his picture at the top of his blog, tellingly; this is not something done by younger people who are largely unknown and who can't rely on recognition of past work for their present readership).
With a watered-down definition of what apologetics is and who apologists are, it is not surprising that these "apologists" have migrated away from places like this into the safer, self-contained sanctuaries. In the Hobbesian chaos of the internet, people naturally seek order. I don't fault them for that, but once they are in there refuges, you can't claim that what they are doing is apologetics because they are no longer responding to anything. It's an echo-chamber.
The only apologetics I see happening is at the new MI and especially Bokovoy and Givens. I suspect that one of the reasons Bokovoy is drawing the online ire of Petersonians is that he, unlike they, is actually producing a body of work in print. I don't doubt that they sincerely hate his ideas, but they are taking them seriously enough to respond because his ideas are actually in print and therefore will have a longer shelf-life than the comments section on "Sic et Non," or here for that matter (I think they leave Givens alone because he is a much harder target, and he threw them a bone by giving them some respectability in "By the Hand of Mormon," but really he was throwing the bone to Nibley, not the Petersonians). The traditional apologists did have a body of work, but the thing is that it was a very, very small body. Other than Nibley reprints, the main genre in print apologetics became the book review, which by the early 2000s had dwarfed what they had done in the 80s and 90s. There is not one substantial book that you could point to and say, "ah, now there is something that has had influence." Instead of using their control of the print apologetics to produce lasting contributions to Mormon intellectual life in the form of books that have long-term results, they wasted that control on short-term personality games that are better suited for internet echo-chambers than genuine apologetic operations. In their propensity to squander resources and their fondness for missing opportunities, they have shown themselves typical of their generation, as they have also in their disgust with the younger generation of apologists who are actually trying to do something useful and meaningful in the face of bitter resentment from their more well-known elders. If only what they are well-known for were something more substantial than book reviews and more beneficial than their pre-internet embrace of some of the worst parts of internet culture.