Forty-six: Historian on a Sunday

A Sunday a while back, that is:

There’s an interesting review of Margaret MacMillan’s Dangerous Games in The New York Times Book Review section (7/19/09), written by David M. Kennedy – one elite Stanford historian reviewing the work of an elite Oxbridge one, and very gracious he is too. 

I haven’t read the book, so I don’t intend to judge its merits, but if the review is an accurate one (and I don’t see any reason to believe otherwise), then it raises interesting questions about the practice and purpose of history. What history is good for, MacMillaan claims, is teaching us humility and skepticism. This is something that I would certainly agree with in broad strokes, and it is certainly the case that professional historians should spend most of their time teaching critical thinking tools, rather than imparting certain “facts” to captive audiences. But, does it ever really teach people humility and skepticism? 

The secular humanist might want it to do so, and I would certainly fit in that category, but this article is intriguing to me because it doesn’t appear to recognize one of the central problems inherent in the desire to impart skepticism and critical thinking. It can be boiled down to this: skepticism is frequently the privileged vantage point of people who survive on the labors of those who do not have the same privileges that they do. Ouch! 

There are several points of note that derive from this axiom:

1) Reaching for skepticism (for the professional historian) can become an exercise in cutting off the nose to spite the face. Take, for example, that oft-repeated George Santayana statement, quoted almost ad nauseam, “those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” This statement, or the sensibility it reflects, fuels much of the public desire (and imperative) for history, and going too far in the direction of saying that such comments are utter nonsense (which logically they are, if one deploys any degree of skepticism whatsoever), might undermine the exalted position of history in the schools and the academy. For instance, saying that the history taught in high schools is largely nationalistic propaganda, treating it skeptically, would be to threaten a privileged position it has held in the curriculum.

Indeed, the discipline has been embedded in and tied to the ascendancy of the nation state; its continued “health” might be considered dependent on the perceived need that fosters federal and state funding of our institutions. If one says to the state legislator that history only teaches skepticism, and shouldn’t bolster un-skeptical notions like patriotism, he or she will wonder what it is that the state is getting out of the funding put into the colleges. This has no doubt already occurred to many legislators. This isn’t to suggest that we should stop being skeptical, but it is to gesture in the direction of Spivak’s “strategic essentialisms,” a common state of existence for the public functionary, and somewhat compatible with skepticism (serving the public good may be a good a thing to do).

2) We end up being critical of those still more skeptical than ourselves. Watch out for those Cultural Studies relativists, they are going way too far and end up being merely nihilists. Logically again, if one is a skeptic, there is no reason to feel this way. The problem is that the Cultural Studs go beyond what we might consider the bounds of professional decency (as defined at Stanford and St. Anthony’s) – they are self-referential and argumentative and they blur empiricism in all their theoretical gobbledygook. MacMillan “inveighs against the eclipse of ‘professional historians’ by ‘amateurs’” – but on what grounds, as a skeptic, can she do so? One does so out of insecurity, derived from the fact that once you accept the skeptical position it is difficult to police the boundaries of the discipline – such policing tends to end up being done in the readers’ reviews of manuscripts, submitted to publishing houses and journals (themselves feeling the heat), and tenure and promotion decisions – frequently by people who feel embattled and concerned about the problems of carrying out these gate-keeping functions.

3) Finally, having outlined the problems in national historiographies, how does one single out the Afrocentrist for particular scorn – comparing its relationship to the past as similar to the relationship between The Da Vinci Code and theology?  Surely (speaking in the tongue of the skeptic) the Afrocentric history is no different from other histories, except that it is the marker of the unprivileged (largely), or it is the marker of those who would use its narratives to attain such privilege. But the historiographies through which Kennedy and MacMillan have attained their vaunted positions in the profession could be described in similar terms perhaps. And at least Afrocentric histories haven’t as yet been responsible for wars and genocides, in quite the same way that other histories demonstrably have been.

Being a skeptic and learning humility from history is not only recognizing (as MacMillan does) that we learn of the error of our ways through study of the past – that if we are critical of what people have done in the past, others who follow us will be critical of what we do. It is as also about being aware that for most people history is going to be something altogether different – it will be the means through which they pass onto their children and their communities their views of the world, which are anything but skeptical and are lacking in humility – they will tend to be triumphalist and positive. And, when push comes to shove, we have to recognize that in spite of our privilege as professional historians we are frequently ourselves to be located in this position also – not least because we are unwilling to acknowledge our own privileged locations.