Kishkumen wrote:Rosebud wrote:2. I don't think it's possible for me or Kish or anyone else here or anywhere to really know what Nibley believed or didn't believe about the veracity of Mormonism. It's a guessing game. My interpretation is based on my life experiences etc. and Kish's interpretation is based on Kish's life experineces, etc. Both of us are interpreting and neither of us (and no one else) really knows. It's silly, in my mind, for anyone to claim in surety that they know what Nibley really thought or believed.
I suppose that yes, ultimately, no one
truly knows the inner life of any other person, including one's own spouse, beloved, child, parent, etc. We size people up the best we can and proceed on faith. My judgment based on personal experience and the experience of his friends, both those I knew personally and those who reported their experience of Nibley, is that he believed in Mormonism and was boosting it in the best way he knew how. I will go with those kinds of conclusions over psychological speculations and sensational memoirs every time.
This is interesting. You choose the adjective "sensational" to describe his daughter's work but not his work. At the same time you seem to insinuate (correct me if I'm wrong) that some close family relationships bring us closer to knowing what someone's true beliefs might be (by using the examples of "spouse," "beloved," "child" and "parent" to emphasize your implied point). I think this is true even if this is not what you're getting at, for what it's worth. The way I see it, his daughter is/was a close relationship and likely had more insight into his actions than less close relationships and that both her work and his work could be described as "sensational." Yet her perspective about Nibley is discredited over less close relationships with whom you've spoken and her work is minimized with the adjective "sensational" while his work is defended.
I think I'm more a probability and an accountability person than a person who is interested in the quality of scholarship. I don't really care about his scholarship because I don't really care about Mopology or him. I care that people care enough to defend him when it's more probable than not that he knowingly faked a lot and that what he faked was highly influential during his time period and therefore, in my opinion, had a deleterious effect on a lot of people. I'm tired of people with authority, influence and power behaving badly while they're publicly defended while people with less power have their positions minimized (through words like "sensational" applied unevenly, etc.) even when there is a higher probability that the person who is being publicly minimized is speaking more honestly than the person who is being publicly defended. Public defense goes to the person with power and influence and public minimization goes to the disempowered party.
This pattern of defense of the person in power and minimization of the disempowered happens again and again. This reminds me of TBMs defending the brethren no matter what they do and say against disempowered Mormon populations. Defense of public heroes with influence is one of Beck's main theses and is a pattern that occurs inside and outside of Mormonism, and often. This pattern is what I see in your words, Kish. Common human behavior and, to be frank, I'm sick of it. I'm sick of it because it's such a big part of Mormonism.
Here are the sorts of probabilities I think through when I am assessing which party is being more honest, which party had more power and which party needs to be held accountable. Yes, I am just pulling these out of my head.
Probabilities I consider as I'm assessing Nibley's honesty: *Probability that Nibley was highly educated: 100%
*Probability that Nibley understood he was ethically responsible to write and speak accurately regardless of whether or not his work would be subject to peer review: 100%
*Probability that the Book of Mormon is a translation of ancient gold plates: 0%
*Probabilty that Nibley knew the things he wrote were inaccurate: 95%
*Probability that Nibley was sloppy in his scholarship: 95%
*Probability that Nibley believed his sloppy scholarship was accurate: 5%
Probabilities I consider as I'm assessing Nibley's power: * Probability that Nibley understood that his sloppy scholarship would be believed by his audiences and was highly influential: 95%
Probabilities I consider as I'm assessing the harm Nibley may have done:
* Probability that the nonsense that Nibley wrote and said led people to draw inaccurate conclusions: 100%
* Probability that there might be some truth in what Beck wrote about her father committing crimes against her: idk... I'll say 50% to be safe, but not 0 and not 100 and not something like 5% or 95%. I just don't know. Lots of fathers commit crimes against their children. If it seems safer, I can move the number down to 25% or maybe 33% since between 1 in 3 and 1 in 4 children are victims of child sexual abuse. That way I'm not making any rash statements. She knew him well and for whatever reason, she make the decision to write an exposé.
Probabilities I consider when I am assessing Beck's honesty: Probability that she believed what she said was true: 95%
I don't really know how to assess probabilities of Beck's power or the harm Beck may have done because I don't know if what she said was true or not. If there is some truth to it, then she was a very disempowered person who probably took some power back through writing the book. If he did commit crimes, she had a right to write it. If there is no truth to it and she still believed it, then she is still a disempowered person who took some power back through writing the book. This just doesn't compare to me to being similar to being a highly educated, powerful and influential person knowingly engaging in sloppy influential scholarship. I don't even know that it's more extreme. The dad had power and prestige and influenced far more people than the daughter. If he was dishonest, his behaviors are very extreme. Again, I would use the word "sensational" to describe both of them.
If Beck's book has been harmful to guilty parties, that's probably a good thing. If it has been harmful to innocent parties, that's a tragedy. But I don't know how I can use probabilities to assess those things because I just don't have the kind of information I would need about what happened in their family. But regardless, I know the Book of Mormon isn't the word of God and that Nibley's ideas were nonsense. I have more information about what he should be held accountable for than I have about what she should be held accountable for.
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And, to repeat, my concern is the common defense of powerful and influential people with the simultaneous minimization of disempowered people. People commonly have the tendency to give the powerful party a pass while they hold the disempowered party rigidly accountable. (Just look at the way TBMs defend the brethren's LGBT excommunication policy. Same phenomenon.)