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Killing History
I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. — Patrick Henry, 1775
Nearly twenty years ago, Australian historian Keith Windschuttle wrote a scathing indictment of contemporary historiography. He attacked the prevailing post-modern analysis as little more than “Parisian labels and designer concepts.” The book, Killing History, established the basic argument against history written in a way that was divorced from empirical evidence and a sense of universal standards.
This is how we’ve come to understand the history wars: the destruction of the past through the use of distorted evidence and the rendering of Western history as the bigoted story of small pox blankets and war-time internments. While framed as a fight against the biases of traditional history writing, the post-modern approach commits its own sins while attacking those of its enemies. The world of the po-mo historian is a world in which only white Europeans have agency, while the remainder of mankind is made up of hild-like victims of European greed and lust.
Subversion is one way to fight a culture war. Another, arguably more effective way over the long run is ignorance. Shortly after Windschuttle published Killing History, the eminent Canadian historian J.L. Granatstein wrote Who Killed Canadian History? Whereas the former work raised the hue and cry about political correctness, the latter pointed to another more insidious danger:
Who, in particular, is responsible for this decimation of our history?
- The provincial ministries of education for preaching and practising parochial regionalism and for gutting their curricula of content.
- The ministry of bureaucrats who have pressed the “whole child” approach and anti-élitist education.
- The ethnic communities that have been conned by Canada’s multiculturalism policy into demanding an offence-free education for all Canadian children, so that the idea that Canada has a past and a culture has been all but lost.
- The boards of education that have responded to pressures for political correctness by denuding their curricula of serious knowledge and offering only trendy pap.
- The media that has looked only for scandal and for a new approach to the past, so that fact becomes half truth and feeds only cynicism.
- The university professors who have waged internecine wars to such an extent that they have virtually destroyed history, and especially Canadian history, as a serious discipline.
- The university presses and the agencies that subsidize professors for publishing unreadable books on miniscule subjects.
- The federal governments that have been afraid to reach over provincial governments and the school boards to give Canadians what they want and need: a sense that they live in a nation with a glorious past and a great future.
What was said about Canadian history nearly a generation ago will soon be said about American history. Don’t believe me? Here’s a story from the American Heartland:
North Dakota students may or may not learn about the first 100 years of America’s history.
Important topics like the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War and the framing of the U.S. Constitution may [continue to be] simply be ignored by teachers under new history standards approved by the state’s board of education last Monday, the Argus Leader reports.
Current standards [i.e., those being replaced] do not allow history teachers to delve into topics before the Civil War, so the new standards open up the door but don’t require teachers to cover early American history, as many would have preferred. The recently adopted history standards are set to take effect in 2016-17 school year and whittle the current standards from 117 pages to 44.
If a math teacher was to suggest teaching calculus before algebra he’d be considered incompetent. Teaching the Civil War without explaining the Founding Era is every bit as absurd. Even if such a history was taught without overt bias, it would still serve to completely undermine the student’s understanding of the past.
Teaching history as a series of disconnected facts serves two purposes: It kills the child’s interest in the subject by turning it into a very boring version of Trivial Pursuit and it insures that he will remember the facts but not the context. It’s that last element that’s vital in the culture wars.
Take slavery, the granddaddy of all dark moments in American history. Let’s say you teach the history of slavery but only with reference to American history, ignoring what happened in other times and places. You spend a great deal of time on the experiences of individual slaves, the conditions on southern plantations, and the economic importance of slavery to the overall economy. The work of the abolitionists, the Lincoln-Douglas debates and the Civil War are glossed over.
The impression left is of a terrible evil that is at the heart and soul of American history. There must be something genuinely dreadful about a country that would tolerate such evil for so long. How hollow and cynical do the words of the Declaration of Independence ring then? Note that no outright lies have been told with this approach, yet the context has been repeatedly dropped.
Now imagine teaching the history of slavery in its full context. That slavery and other forms of coerced labor have been an accepted part of countless human societies down the ages. That, until the time of the Founding – a few theologians and philosophers notwithstanding – no one much cared about the moral questions raised by slavery. That the Founding Fathers struggled greatly with the moral and political consequences of the “peculiar institution.” That no other nation on earth had the moral courage to fight and win a great war on the issue of slavery.
Both approaches are “correct” in the sense that the facts are historically validated. The first approach, however, leads the student to conclude that America is evil. The second approach that America is basically good, though with a checkered moral history. If your goal is to raise a generation eager to blast away at the foundations of the American Republic, the choice of approaches is very obvious.
Published in General
In reference to 24 refering to 9.
AriPat,
Sorry, can’t let that a snub of David Hackett Fischer just slide by! Your point is taken, but if it is taken too much to heart then “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” As I recall “Champlain’s Dream,” DHF does not deny any of your details. Rather, he’s saying all humans are human, and need to be treated as such and looked on as such.
Painting a group of individuals as a group rather than a collection of individuals, and then smearing the entire group – or exalting the entire group – is a progressive trick. In fact that’s what DHF meant by “saints and savages.”
Hanging Teddy Roosevelt around our necks… Now, that is really low. They have no shame.
I work in international schools, and many of the international schools operate under this model. At one rival school, they teach World Studies instead of World History. This allows them to teach units like Slavery out of context. Another common program in international schools is the Middle Years Program from the International Baccalaureate. In this model, students do “units of inquiry” on topics like the environment and inequality and come away with wildly inaccurate notions about economic development and a particular animus towards America.
Are you sure that is a side-effect?
I do not intend to smear individual Indians. They were products of their culture, and that culture was primitive and savage. I think that this is an objective fact. There were noble aspects to Indian culture, and I don’t doubt that many individual Indians behaved admirably on countless occasions. As only one example, many Indians exhibited extraordinary courage and tenacity in war against American and European invaders, who had overwhelmingly economic and military power.
I must disagree with DHF. The Leftist-progressive trick is to adopt a non-judgmental, multicultural attitude, supposedly about all cultures, but actually exempting Leftism from this rule and believing that all of the tenets of Leftism are undeniably correct.
[Cont’d]
[Cont’d]
I assert that Christian American civilization was unambiguously better than Indian culture. This does not mean that all Americans are saints — in fact, Christianity teaches that all Americans, like all Indians, are sinners. I am comparing cultures. It also does not mean that our civilization is perfect, but it is vastly better than pre-Columbian savagery.
I may be misinterpreting DHF’s “saints and savages” argument, but it comes across to me as multi-culti nonsense, nominally aimed at a strawman argument about American perfection, but really seeking to undermine the idea of American exceptionalism.
Sadly, I don’t think that current American civilization, which seems to be following Europe into a post-Christian period, is nearly as good as what we once had.
I’m with Matty on his comment 31 in how I read it (and am also a reader and admirer of Hackett Fisher’s work which I see as proudly American and inspiring). In any event, it would be a major advance just to get to the place he’d like to be, given how history is currently taught and written about by academics- it’d be a major reversal.
My earlier comment (#15) about the young Iranian hostage taker who’d been educated in the U.S. and was lecturing an American hostage on the evils of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, triggering this interplay:
reminded me of something else I’d read, written by someone who apparently had the same type of education, which I’ve tracked down:
– Barack Obama, Dreams From My Father, writing of the transformative experience of hearing Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who became his spiritual advisor and religious guide, though to be fair it is probably consistent with the history he learned at Pepperdine and Columbia.
Arizona Patriot: “I must agree disagree with DHF.”
MatV: I’m pretty sure you have not read any David Hackett Fischer since he will confirm your sense of the importance of culture probably more than any historian writing today. As Mark points out, his histories are also “proudly American and inspiring.” But to your point on culture, it is DHF who has essentially created a new field with his epic work from 1989, Albion’s Seed. He postulates there the importance of culture in the creation of America by following the four main cultures from the British Isles to America. This book is incredibly explanatory of American history.
For example, The Puritans of East Anglia escaped Royalist rule to New England when Royalists were on top. They seeded northern culture. Royalists (or Cavaliers, as he calls them) escaped Puritan rule, along with borderers from borderlands and SW England to Virginia when Puritans were on top. They seeded southern culture. He goes through a wide range of cultural differences between the groups which arose not in America but were brought from England, even down to food culture. Puritans baked and borderers fried even in England. And differences much more important than dietary set them in violent conflict. They fought each other in the English Civil war of the 1630s and then repeated their war again in America in the 1860s. Each side fought the same way for many of the same reasons and with largely the same results in both places, and though the Puritans won each time, the culture war still rages today within America. So your idea about Christian culture is a good, but within Christian culture there are important differences explicated by DHF.
The other important historian of the importance of cultural differences is, of course, Thomas Sowell. Sowell takes a global view, and approaches the field as an economist, but he often refers to David Hackett Fischer.