Hypertext documents vary a good deal, so statements beginning “Hypertext is…” are likely to obscure more than they reveal. In three posts, I’ll discuss the dominant style (“wiki traditional”), one that flips the emphasis (“Zettelkasten”), and how well two metaphors (“garden” and “rhizome”) work for each. My premise is that if you understand what you’re doing when you write a particular kind of hypertext, you’ll do it better.
I propose resurrecting the old-time Republic of Letters to encourage more thoughtful writing. “The Republic of Letters was the long-distance intellectual community in the late 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and the Americas. It fostered communication among the intellectuals of the Age of Enlightenment.” – wikipedia Many names you’ll recognize were participants in the Republic of Letters. For example, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, perhaps the last true polymath, wrote tens of thousands of letters.
Author’s note: This is an essay that does a “close reading” of a particular essay that critiques deconstruction (or, really, the modern humanities). A valid objection is that I have devoted a lot of effort to an essay that probably wasn’t intended to be a finely-honed, final statement of someone’s opinion. However, I think it’s still worthwhile, because it illustrates something literary-style criticism is for: you’re reading along in something when an oddity brings you up short.
In 1993, the software engineer Chip Morningstar published an essay called “How To Deconstruct Almost Anything.” In it, he surveys what he learned reading Jonathan Culler’s 1982 book On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, which was a standard text at the time for people who want to do literary criticism. Nowadays, he’d have had an easier time. I would recommend Peter Berry’s 1995 Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory or Lois Tyson’s 1998 Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide.
Interviews are a staple of the journalist-equivalent essay or book. They seem credible. If something is taken out of context or completely made up, surely the interviewer won’t get away with it? Well, as Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710, “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.” A correction inevitably gets less attention than the original misquotation, and there are only rarely any penalties for misquoting people. So, in a polemical work like Illiberal Education, if you wouldn’t believe the author’s opinion stated directly, you shouldn’t believe it when confirmed by an interviewee.
In his Illiberal Education, D’Souza uses numbers and statistics, um, liberally but not informatively. In this post, I’ll mix up discussing how he misleads and how you might recognize what he’s doing without having to look at his sources. As with all these posts, I link to archive.org’s copy of Illiberal Education so that you can check my citations. Throughout, boldface indicates my emphasis. Numbers are for comparing D’Souza sometimes uses numbers to establish a vibe: a feeling that he’s bathing you in a sea of facts.
In the previous post, I showed that Dinesh D’Souza egregiously mischaracterized Rigoberta Menchú’s memoir I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala in his 1991 book, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. That was relatively easy to do because Menchú’s book is available online, as are Wikipedia, the archives of the New York Review of Books, and the Nobel Peace Prize’s website. I did the digging because I get obsessive about things, but it ought to be possible to get pretty suspicious of D’Souza’s summary from his writing alone.
Authors frequently refer to other books to support their argument. Readers are trained to assume the author actually read the book and is summarizing it fairly. In chapter 3 of Illiberal Education (1991), D’Souza uses four pages to summarize a book, the memoir I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala. His summary describes the book he needed for his argument, not the book Ms. Menchú produced. (I say “produced” rather than “wrote” because the book is based on 24 hours of interviews, transcribed and edited by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray.
In this series, I’m proposing heuristics you can use to guess that an author is lying to you. For this post, I’m using chapter 5 of D’Souza’s Illiberal Education, titled “The New Censorship: Racial Incidents at Michigan.” It begins with this anecdote: “On February 4, 1987, undergraduate Ted Sevransky, hosting his talk show on the University of Michigan radio station WCBN, asked listeners to call up with their favorite racial jokes.
This series was inspired by an offhand comment by one of the hosts of the Origin Story podcast (which I quite like). They have an 2022 episode titled “Woke: The word that splits the world.” The host read Dinesh D’Souza’s 1991 book, Illiberal Education: the Politics of Sex and Race, and made this comment about it during minute 22: “Considering that Dinesh D’Souza is now a lunatic, the book itself [is] not anywhere near as wild as you would think.