Gertrude Himmelfarb

I note the passing yesterday of historian, philosopher and public intellectual Gertrude Himmelfarb. Her obituary in the New York Times is here and her Wikipedia entry here.

I have perhaps half a dozen of her books; two copies of The De-Moralization of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values. I have not yet finished any one of them, merely, but happily, sampled them. Her breadth of knowledge and the depth of her convictions are impressive.

She brought attention to the importance of social norms and cultural values which I value and was a strong critic of the intellectual masturbation of postmodernism and all its fallacies. She could shift across fields and range from detail to high level abstract.

The NYT's obituary provides an example of the latter.

One thing about which she had no doubts, however, was the importance of footnotes. In 1991, writing in The New York Times Book Review, she said she viewed the growing absence of footnotes in scholarly books as “a moral lapse.”

Indeed. As more people receive higher education but the quality and consistency of that education becomes more uncertain, it also becomes more challenging to have real discussions. Exchanges boil down to exchanges of unsupported assertions rather than a real conjoined effort to understand the real truth.

Were the assertions reasonable accurate or widely understood, we might still make progress. But they are not. Indeed, many if not most of them are not asserted facts at all. They are asserted opinions.

Much of this can be addressed via footnotes. The place by which the pace of the argument can continue but where accepted facts can be calibrated.

I had not ever thought of it as a moral lapse but can see the reason for thinking it so.

We were fortunate to have a mind of her calibre and the circumstances for her wide-ranging thinking and writing.