When the floor gives way beneath you.

Naomi Wolf is one of those denizens of the mainstream media whom you can enjoy reading in order to be enraged. Or one whom you can enjoy ignoring. I am in the latter camp. I am aware of her and some of her contretemps but have never found a compelling reason to indulge in her particular brand of postmodernist critical theory. She has always struck me as someone being famous for being famous.

She has a new book out, Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love, whose central thesis is:

The best-selling author of Vagina, Give Me Liberty, and The End of America illuminates a dramatic buried story of gay history—how a single English law in 1857 led to a maelstrom, with reverberations lasting down to our day

Until 1857, the State did not link the idea of “homosexuality” to deviancy. In the same year, the concept of the “obscene” was coined. New York Times best-selling author Naomi Wolf’s Outrages is the story, brilliantly told, of why this two-pronged State repression took hold—first in England and spreading quickly to America—and why it was attached so dramatically, for the first time, to homosexual men.

Before 1857 it wasn’t “homosexuality” that was a crime, but simply the act of sodomy. But in a single stroke, not only was love between men illegal, but anything referring to this love became obscene, unprintable, unspeakable. Wolf paints the dramatic ways this played out among a bohemian group of sexual dissidents, including Walt Whitman in America and the closeted homosexual English critic John Addington Symonds—in love with Whitman’s homoerotic voice in Leaves of Grass—as, decades before the infamous 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde, dire prison terms became the State’s penalty for homosexuality.

Apparently a key piece of evidence she advances is the continued execution of men for gay relationships through the nineteenth century.

In a BBC interview, the interviewer introduces evidence which suggests Wolfe doesn't know what she is talking about.

Everyone listen to Naomi Wolf realize on live radio that the historical thesis of the book she's there to promote is based on her misunderstanding a legal term pic.twitter.com/a3tB77g3c1

— Edmund Hochreiter (@thymetikon) May 23, 2019

Click for thread.

Here is the actual interview, the relevant section starts at 19 minutes and is about six minutes long.

At first, my reaction is that this is yet one more example of disgusting gotcha journalism.

On reflection though, is it? The interviewer bothered to read her book and then researched some of her claims. In doing so, he finds that several dozen cases where she had claimed men were executed for homosexual relationships were not that at all. They were men who had committed sexual assault on men and boys and who were found guilty of that assault. The law apparently required a sentence of execution but by that point in time, mid-century, judges were no longer imposing those sentences. Instead, they entered "death recorded", i.e. the person was found guilty of a crime requiring execution. However, they instead sentenced them to jail or transportation. Wolfe misunderstood the legal term and built her whole thesis on that misunderstanding. She thought "death recorded" meant they had been executed. She also apparently did not bother to investigate the underlying crime which would have revealed that they were crimes of assault, not homosexual love.

So the interviewer did the rudimentary due diligence (sounds like it was entirely done online) which one would expect and hope for and found in advance of the interview that Wolfe's core thesis was based on her own misunderstanding and lack of research. Clearly her academic reviewers, her editors, the fact-checkers, all let her down. She went from hypothesis to sketchy research to written book, to edited book, to publication without anyone noticing what could be disproved simply by researching online.

So what if I am the interviewer and have discovered this? Do I share it in advance? What if I, the interviewer, am the one who has not understood? Perhaps Wolfe has the evidence to support her thesis and I have either misunderstood her argument or I have misunderstood what is online. Is it my task to conduct an academic discussion off-line or do I just bring it up in the interview to test whether my research as an interviewer is correct or not?

Factor in the likelihood that they are both working against tight schedules and cannot easily carve out time for academic discussions. He has multiple interviews to do this week, each requiring preparation. She has multiple interviews to give and events to attend promoting her book. They are both locked into an unforgiving schedule which almost inherently creates awkward moments when rudimentary research snatches back the wizard's curtain to reveal there is nothing there.

I am a management consultant and am fully accustomed to doing research which I have to defend to clients and skeptics, people for whom the research and conclusions are not academic at all but consequential. Money, and jobs, and careers are on the line. Conclusions must be sound. It is never easy, and you are constantly on the alert for something you might have overlooked or an assumption you made without even thinking about it as an assumption. I have been fortunate and never been in a position where someone has revealed that a key work-product was simply wrong because of my own incomprehension or lack of diligence.

Not to say that everything is always right to the nth degree. I have had lots of instances where I have had to recast using different assumptions for what-if scenarios or extend analysis to a further degree of detail, or had to muster yet more evidence to address yet more questions. It happens.

But being plain wrong. In public. That is a nightmare. As a person, I can empathize with Wolfe and admire that she handled the revelation with grace. But still. Ouch.

However, it is another great revealing. For most these public intellectuals, we assume that there are iterative protections to test ideas and fact-check and test before they see the light of day. For a simple but central error to make it through from hypothesis to publication is astonishing. It is as if everyone so wants the thesis to be true that they cannot be bothered to check.

So much of our Mandarin Class want to play with feel-good provocative ideas instead of focusing on whether what they are saying is true. They are steadily undermining public trust, an attribute not easily recaptured. In order to restore public trust we need public intellectuals and technocrats with diligence and humility. Not much of that out there at the moment it seems.

A PRE_UPDATE: Well, I m caught in a bit of a time warp. I wrote this post at the time of the occurrence thinking no one would pay much attention to the incident and therefore scheduled it to post at the end of the month. Apparently I was dramatically wrong and I see many posts and articles about Wolfe's shame. Do I leave it to post later or bring it forward. Guess the latter makes most sense.

Ann Althouse points out something I missed. From The NYT is very gentle with Naomi Wolf — the "prominent author" who was humiliated in an on-air interview. Read the whole thing.

Dr? What is her doctorate? I looked it up on Wikipedia:

From 1985 to 1987, she was a Rhodes Scholar at New College, Oxford, but did not complete her original doctoral thesis.... Wolf returned to Oxford to complete her PhD in 2015, supervised by Dr Stefano-Maria Evangelista. The PhD thesis that she wrote was the basis for her 2019 book Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love.

Oh! So this book was an Oxford PhD thesis?! Wow. Oxford needs to account for itself. There's a brand that ought to mean something. Do the thesis advisers there rely ultimately on authors for the integrity of their research and fact-checking? Did the NYT attempt to talk with Stefano-Maria Evangelista? Can we get him on the air at BBC?

The latter excuse, that they rely on the author, was offered by Wolfe's publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, to explain why they were publishing a book with a central easily checkable fact which, if checked, would have revealed that the whole thesis lacked evidence.

So to recap.

Public intellectual writes a book based on her ideological priors and doesn't understand enough about the evidence to recognize that she has misinterpreted a single phrase in a fashion that calls into question the empirical support of the whole thesis.

Her PhD advisor at Oxford did not catch the central error despite it being easily researched online.

Her publishers did not catch the central error despite it being easily researched online.

Her publicists did not catch the central error despite it being easily researched online.

Her advance reviewers (other than Matthew Sweet) did not catch the central error despite it being easily researched online.

This is the Mandarin Class which thinks the public ought to trust them to make accurate and wise decisions. Hmmm.