AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 1 ike so many of the disciplines making up
the humanities, the field of history has for some time been experiencing a slow dissolution, a decline that may be approaching a critical juncture. Students of academic life express this decline quantitatively, citing shrinking enrollments in history courses, the disappearance of required history courses in university curricula, and the loss of tenurable faculty positions in all history-related areas.1 But even more disturbing indications of history’s troubled status are harder to measure but impossible to ignore. One senses a loss of self- confidence, a fear that the study of the past may no longer be valuable or important and that history itself lacks the capacity to be a coherent and truth-seeking enterprise, producing genuine knowledge that helps us locate ourselves in the broad expanses of space and time. Some of this derives from the growing vocationalism in American higher education, flowing from a desire that a college degree should lead reliably to gainful employment. But the fear rests just as
much on the belief that the road we have traveled to date offers us only a parade of negative examples of oppression, error, and
obsolescence—proof positive that the past has no lessons applicable to our unprecedented age.
This loss of faith in the central importance of history pervades all of American society. Gone are the days when widely shared narratives about the past provided a sense of civilizational unity and forward propulsion. Instead, we live, argues historian Daniel T. Rodgers, in a querulous “age of fracture” in which all narratives are contested and the various disciplines no longer take a broad view of the human condition, rarely speak to one another, and have abandoned the search for common ground in favor of focusing on the concerns and perspectives of ever-more-minute subdisciplines, smaller groups, more finely tuned and exclusive categories of experience.2 This is not just a feature of academic life but seems to be an emerging feature of American life more generally. The broad and embracing
commonalities of old are no more, undermined
Program on American Citizenship
History in the age of fracture
By Wilfred M. McClay
L
June 2015
The discipline of history is in serious decline, as both practitioners and the public lack confidence that it can be a truth-seeking enterprise or provide a coherent account of the past.
The so-called “age of fracture” in our current culture means that the broad commonalities of shared history are becoming less important than individual experience.
To overcome its current decline, history must address the public’s common past and future in a way meant to contribute to a healthy foundation for our common civic existence.
uiuiuii
KEY POINTS
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 2 and fragmented into a thousand subcultural
pieces.
This condition has profound implications for the academy and our society. The loss of history, not only as a body of knowledge but also as a distinctive way of thinking about the world, will have dire effects on the quality of our civic life. It would be ironic if the great advances in
professional historical writing that we have seen in the past century or so—advances that have, through the exploitation of fresh data and new techniques of analysis, opened to us a more expansive but also a more detailed understanding of countless formerly hidden aspects of the past—
came at the expense of a more general audience for history, and for the resultant valuable effects upon our public life.
This would be ironic, but it appears to be true. As New York University historian Thomas Bender laments in a recent article, gloomily entitled
“How Historians Lost Their Public,” the growth of knowledge in ever-more-numerous and tightly focused subspecialties of history has resulted in the replacement of the old-fashioned survey course in colleges and universities—with its expansive scale, synthesizing panache, and virtuoso instructors—with more narrowly focused courses confined to the research specialty of the professor.3
Bender is loath to give up any of the advances made by the profession’s ever-more-intensive form of historical cultivation, but he concedes that something has gone wrong: historians have lost the ability to speak to, and command the attention of, a larger audience, even a well- educated one, that is seeking more general meaning in the study of the past. They have indeed lost their public. They have had to cede much of their field to journalists, who know how to write much more accessibly and are willing to address themes—journalist Tom Brokaw’s celebration of the “greatest generation” for example—that strike a chord with the public but that professional historians have been trained to disdain as ethnocentric, triumphalist, or
uncritically celebratory.4 Professional historians complain that such material lacks nuance and rigor and is prone to repackage the past in terms that readers will find pleasing to their
preconceptions. But such works are at least being read by a public that is still hungry for history.
Not content with this state of affairs, Bender urges that we remember the example of certain professional historians—the Progressive historians, such as Vernon Louis Parrington, Charles Beard, and Frederick Jackson Turner, or a more recent one like the great Yale colonialist Edmund Morgan—who were able to write for all kinds of audiences. He ends his article with a plea for “synthetic histories” that somehow square the circle of subdisciplinary intensity and grand narrative sweep, managing to enrich the latter with no loss of the former. But his examples are less than convincing, since the Progressive historians were committed to a rather simplistic and highly political view of American history, as a constant conflict between the progressive forces of light and the regressive powers of darkness, a view that few professional historians today would countenance.5
It is worth noting that Bender is not the first to make such a plea for synthesis. As Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn remarked in his 1981 presidential address to the American Historical Association: “The greatest challenge that will face historians in the years ahead, it seems to me, is … how to put the story together again, now with a complexity and an analytic dimension never envisioned before; how to draw together the information available (quantitative and qualitative, statistical and literary, visual and oral) into readable accounts of major
developments.”6 This is another call for the squaring of the circle, and it has thus far proven insurmountably difficult to answer.
The loss of a public audience for history may be due to the loss of a history for the
public, a neglect of
history’s fundamentally
public meaning.
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 3 That we have made so little progress, in more
than a third of a century, in creating the kind of
“new narratives” that Bailyn envisioned, let alone in making them publicly useful in the ways Bender hopes for, ought to give us pause and perhaps make us wonder if we need to rethink our expectations and our premises. Perhaps something is wrong with the assumption that the problem is simply one of translating the findings of specialists into winsome and flowing language that nonspecialists and ordinary citizens can grasp. Perhaps the problem goes deeper than that. Perhaps there is something vitally important, a missing principle of organization, that professional historical writing, almost by definition, cannot provide.
The steady disintegration of history as a discipline and the loss of a public audience for history may be two expressions of the same problem: the obscuring of the fact that historical knowledge and historical consciousness derive their meaning, in a very fundamental way, from their association with our common life, especially our civic life, and therefore with civic education.
The loss of a public audience for history may be due to the loss of a history for the public, a neglect of history’s fundamentally public meaning.
To his credit, Bender recognizes this and rejects the proposition that “because our public culture has fractured and we seem to be losing our longstanding alliance with journalism, we no longer have obligations to the public that date from the founding of our profession.”7 He is not willing to accept the idea that the process of history becoming professional sets it free to go its own way, heedless of the public’s need of it. This is an admirable position, though one that most professional historians would probably not endorse. I would endorse it, and take it even further.
History as Memory, Not Science
What do we mean when we speak of “history”? Of all the recognized academic disciplines, history may well be the most difficult to generalize about.
Its scope is virtually limitless, since any
phenomenon that exists and unfolds in the medium of time can be made into history. A history can be written about any subject, using all the typical methods for the reconstruction of the past, combining narrative and analysis in a way that illuminates the emergence and evolution of the subject at hand. Almost no subject areas cannot be discussed or treated “historically,” but the reverse is generally not the case. You can write a history of botany, but you cannot write a botany of history.
It is the peculiar nature of history, therefore, that it is not so much a discipline or a definite body of knowledge, even if we often speak of it as if it were, but instead it is a way of seeing and understanding and rendering the world, and a way of seeing and understanding and rendering other forms of knowledge. Is there a proper body of knowledge that we can call “history” itself? Not really. You would have a hard time finding a group of the most eminent historians who could agree about the proper content, limits, and characteristics of their own field, let alone identify a body of historical knowledge that is essential. That this should be so is due partly to our “age of fracture,” but also partly to the nature of the discipline itself. A history is never merely history, but also a history of something.
History is also slippery to write about because it trains itself on a target that is both indistinct and constantly moving. The scientific method calls upon us to approach a stable, law-abiding natural world with hypotheses that are testable and susceptible to confirmation or disconfirmation through carefully framed empirical experiments.
The discipline of history, however, is the science of incommensurable things, untestable
propositions, and unrepeatable events—which is to say it is impossible for it ever to be a science.
Human affairs, by their very nature, cannot be made to conform to the scientific method unless they are first divested of their humanity. The study of human beings must take into account the fact that when human beings are the objects of study rather than colliding billiard balls or falling apples, human consciousness is always there to affect the terms of engagement. In physics, the establishment of certain laws of motion does not have a feedback effect on the phenomena themselves. Projectiles are not made restive and rebellious by the knowledge that they move in
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 4 parabolas; in human affairs, however, our actions
are always affected by what we know, or think we know, about the past. Often we study the past to escape from it, as the American founders sought to do, rather than to conform to it.
The impulse to “do” history seems to be intrinsic to us as human beings, because we are
remembering and story-making creatures. What we call history is merely the intensification of that basic human impulse. But the cultivation of it is essential to the perpetuation of civilized life.
Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity. Without memory and the stories memories are suspended in, we cannot say who or what we are. Without it, we cannot learn, use language, pass on
knowledge, raise children, establish rules of conduct, engage in science, or even dwell in society.
Nor can we have a sense of the future as a time we know will come because memory helps us
remember that other tomorrows also have come.
A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous and easily tyrannized because the incessant drumbeat of daily events will drown out all our efforts to connect past, present, and future and thereby understand the things that unfold in time, including the path of our own lives.
Memory is a crucial source of continuity. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, memory is “the cement, the bitumen, the matrix in which the other faculties are embedded. . . . Without it, all of life and thought is an unrelated succession.”8 It need hardly be said that the same things can be said of history, as the chief form taken by public, collective, shared memory. Without it, our common life too is reduced to a condition of
“unrelated succession.”
But something more needs to be said. We do not acquire a life-enhancing memory, or a lively historical consciousness, through the mere piling up of facts. It is not as if the more facts you retain, the better off you are. It might make you a better game show contestant, but that is its extent.
Instead, memory is most powerful when it is purposeful and selective. It requires a structure within which facts arrange themselves and thereby take on significance. Above all, it requires that we possess narratives that link facts and provide a way of knowing what facts are worth
attending to. That is how and why we remember the most meaningful things, as constellations rather than individual points of light. Without such patterns, the facts are unremembered or arrange themselves haphazardly—and the past takes on the dismal form of unrelated succession captured so memorably by the great antihistorical philosopher of history Henry Ford, who is reputed to have disparaged history as “one damned thing after another.”
A compelling illustration of this is recounted in journalist David Shenk’s fine book The
Forgetting, which is not only a haunting and luminous study of Alzheimer’s disease but also a sustained meditation on memory—and thereby, one might say, on the sources and meaning of history.9 Shenk recounts the fascinating case study of a man whom psychologists call “S.” He was a Russian journalist who “remembered virtually every detail of sight and sound that he had come into contact with in his entire life.”10 His freakish talent emerged, so the story goes, when an editor reprimanded S. for failing to take notes at a staff meeting—and S proceeded to repeat back to him every word that had been spoken in the meeting to that point. The editor sent S to the distinguished psychologist A. R.
Luria, who subjected him to a battery of tests, and confirmed that it was true: there seemed to be no limit to the number of details S could recall. He could, for example, memorize lengthy tables of random numbers in an instant and recall them perfectly for decades to come. It seemed that the man remembered literally everything.
And yet, Shenk adds, “he understood almost nothing,” because he could not “make meaning out of what he saw.” For example, when presented with tables of numbers placed in a deliberate and obvious pattern, such as a standard ordinal sequence (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so forth), he could not make out the pattern. He was chronically disorganized and struck most
observers as dim-witted because he was unable to respond appropriately to the circumstances around him. As Shenk concludes, “This astounding man, then, was not so much gifted with the ability to remember everything as he was cursed with the inability to forget detail and form more general impressions. He recorded only information, and was bereft of the essential ability to draw meaning out of events.” For him,
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 5 life was indeed “one damned thing after
another.”11
As the case of S. illustrates, what makes for genuinely intelligent and insightful memory is a certain balance in the mental economy of remembering and forgetting. Memory takes an active role in thinning out the mental trees so that forests can be discerned. It is selective by nature.
This selectivity is neatly reflected in the etymology of the ancient Greek word logos, sometimes translated as “account” or “argument,”
which derives from the verb legein, meaning “to select.” To give a rational, coherent, and truthful account of something, one has to select the details to be stressed and leave the others out. When we relate the story of a commission of a crime, we do not pause to describe the exact temperature, the relative humidity, the singing birds, the clouds in the sky, and the sounds of lawn mowers and passing traffic. We do not do that, because these things are not essential to forming a theory of the case, a logos of the crime. Instead, we seek to remember those things that fit a template of meaning and point to a larger whole. We fail to retain the details that, like wandering orphans, have no connection to anything of abiding concern.
In the Court of History
Attention to context is also an essential element in historical understanding. To know why the Protestant Reformation emerged when it did, where it did, one needs to know all that one can about the surrounding culture and the full range of relevant events, not only in the life of the papacy and the Catholic Church but also in the economic, political, and social development of early modern Germany. To know why John Locke wrote in favor of religious toleration as he did, and when he did, it is essential to know not only the books he read and his other intellectual influences but also the events in his lifetime to which he was responding, the audience for which he was writing, and the alternative positions (and those holding those positions) with which he was debating. We may well be able to read with profit Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration without reference to such things. But we will not have
read it historically, which would mean bringing to the text that particular kind of contextual
understanding that is the historian’s métier. And in failing to do so, we will have failed to do the necessary work to determine whether what he said to a British audience in the 17th century—
that religious toleration can be extended to Protestants and Jews but not to Catholics—can be applicable to questions of religious liberty and toleration in our own day.
Americans like to believe in the possibility of personal transformation. But history reminds us that our origins linger on in us. It reminds us that we can never entirely remove the incidentals of our time and place, because they are never entirely incidental. At the same time, it reminds us that this has always been true. A measure of historicity, in other words, is a universal part of the human condition. Therefore an appreciation of the past cannot be reached by mere
introspection, although it probably cannot be reached without it, and without a wide range of lived experience. C. S. Lewis, who was very far from being a relativist, nevertheless warned against the universalizing oversimplifications of what he called the “doctrine of the Unchanging Human Heart,” which posits that “the things that separate one age from another are superficial.”
He continued,
Just as, if we stripped the armor off a medieval knight or the lace off a Caroline courtier, we should find beneath them an anatomy identical with our own, so, it is held, if we strip off from Virgil his Roman imperialism, from Sidney his code of honor, from Lucretius his
The practice of history is always and inevitably shaped by the most pressing questions that the present asks of the past, and those
questions are
constantly changing.
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 6 Epicurean philosophy, and from all who
have it their religion, we shall find the Unchanging Human Heart, and on this we are to concentrate.12
This is not to argue against the existence of universals, or of personal transformations, but instead to argue that they are not easily detected and may easily be mistaken for something else.
The practice of history is always and inevitably shaped by the most pressing questions that the present asks of the past, and those questions themselves are constantly changing. “History,”
writes the Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs, “by its very nature, is ‘revisionist,’”
because it is “the frequent, and constant,
rethinking of the past,” an enterprise that, unlike a court of law, “tries its subjects through multiple jeopardy.”13 The past changes not only because it is constantly expanding but also because the things we need from it, or are drawn to search for in it, change too. Interestingly, Lukacs’s
observation is reflected with remarkable fidelity in the latest scientific thinking about the nature of memory itself, which posits that our acts of remembering are actually acts of reremembering, so each instance of recollection is less like a mechanical retrieval than like a fresh
reappropriation of the thing being remembered.14
What’s History For?
These observations brings us back to the issues with which we began, the uses of history for civic life. If history is always the history “of”
something, it is equally true that history is always
“for” something, for some person or persons or purposes. Whether we are speaking of the lovingly compiled and preserved antiquarian history of a parish church or small rural
American town, or the chronicles of great military struggles or electoral campaigns, or the analyses of inventions or businesses or social movements, histories always have particular audiences in view when they are written, and those audiences determine the character of the data that is recorded, the evidence that is adduced, the questions that are asked, and the conclusions that are drawn. A built-in perspectival dimension is driving the choice of subject and the angle of vision with which it is pursued.
Such a general acceptance of history’s inevitable perspectivalism was not always as commonplace as it is now. It was the “noble dream” of
professional historical writing, particularly as it began to take hold in the 19th century and achieved preeminence in the 20th, to overcome that partiality and establish the study of history as an objective science as rigorously methodical and reliable as the physical sciences. But, as the late historian Peter Novick’s study of the American historical profession argued, that dream has lost its plausibility and is now all but dead.15 There is still a residue of the Rankean idea of history as a representation of the past wie es eigentlich gewesen (“as it actually was”) that has not entirely died out.16 There is an admirable rigor and care in the practices of that faithful remnant. But these no longer reflect the profession’s dominant ethos.
That change, however, only serves to amplify the importance of the question of professional historiography’s audience—of who or what it is for. And as Thomas Bender’s lament would suggest, whatever that audience may be, it is not the general public. Instead, it seems that professional historiography is produced mainly for the consumption of other professional historians and, more precisely, for consumption by a small, special subset of those who share the research specialty of the author. Indeed, the very proposition that professional historiography should concern itself in fundamental ways with civic needs is one that most of the profession would find suspect and a great many would find downright unacceptable, a transgression against free and untrammeled scholarly inquiry. Such resistance is understandable, since conscientious historians need to be constantly wary of the threat to their scholarly integrity posed by intrusive officials and unfriendly political agendas.
There can be no doubt that the
professionalization of the field has brought a remarkable degree of protection for disciplinary rigor and intellectual freedom in the framing and pursuit of historical questions. But Bender is right to regret that a distinct neglect, even abandonment, of a sense of civic responsibility seems to have come in tandem with the professionalization of the field. This presents a problem not only for the public, but for the study
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 7 of history itself, which can no longer generate a
plausible organizing principle out of its own resources.
One reasonable organizing principle could come, however, out of a fresh recognition of the larger civic needs that history has always sought to address. One of the chief defenses for the study of history has always been its indispensability to the education of a broadly informed democratic citizenry, an education that gives them essential tools for assuming full, responsible, and self- conscious membership in their own society. That defense is still hauled out before school boards, state legislatures, and congressional committees, but less and less convincingly. The tenor of the historical profession, and the texture of its work in recent years, have done little or nothing to advance that cause. Small wonder that should be so, because its work, by definition, is not for the public.
Deconstructing Monuments
A conspicuous example of our current quandary is our startling incapacity to design and construct public monuments and memorials. Such edifices are the classic places where history and public life intersect, and they are by their very nature meant to be rallying points for the public consciousness, for affirmation of the body politic, past, present, and future, in the act of recollection and commemoration. There is a profundity,
approaching the sacramental, in the atmosphere created by such places, as they draw together generations of the living, the dead, and the yet unborn in a bond of solidarity. In such instances, the needs of the public cannot be ignored, since such structures must be both reasonably accessible and reasonably uncontroversial.
The great structures and statuary that populate the National Mall in Washington, DC, such as the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington
Monument, do this superbly well. But these structures were a product of an earlier time, when the national consensus was stronger—or, if you prefer, less complicated by our awareness of dissident and subaltern voices. Today, as is illustrated by the endless deadlock over the design and erection of a Dwight D. Eisenhower
Memorial in Washington, we seem to find the construction of monuments almost impossibly difficult.17 This situation summarizes what it means for a public to have lost meaningful contact with its own history.
Why has this happened? It has happened because the whole proposition of revering and
memorializing past events and persons has been called into question by our prevailing intellectual ethos, which cares little for the authority of the past and frowns on anything that smacks of hero worship or filiopietism. That ethos is epitomized in the burgeoning academic study of “memory,” a term that refers in this context to something far more suspect than the qualities of memory I mentioned earlier. The term refers to a culture’s widely held popular understandings of the past—
particularly those that revolve around the meaning of the nation.
Memory designates the sense of history that we all share, which is why monuments and other instruments of national commemoration are especially important in serving as expressions and embodiments of it. But the systematic problematizing of memory, the insistence on subjecting it to endless rounds of interrogation and suspicion, aiming precisely at the
destabilization of public understandings of the past, is likely to produce impassable obstacles to the effective public commemoration of the past.
Historians have always engaged in the debunking of popular misrenderings of the past, and that is a very important and useful aspect of their job, since truth in history matters. But memory studies tends to carry the debunking ethos much further, consistently approaching collective memory as nothing more than a willful
construction of would-be reality rather than any kind of accurate reflection of it. Scholars in the field examine memory with a jaundiced and highly political eye, viewing nearly all claims for tradition or for a heroic past as flimsy artifice designed to serve the interests of dominant classes and individuals and otherwise tending to reflect the class, gender, and power relations in which those individuals are embedded.18 Memory, argues historian John Gillis, has “no existence beyond our politics, our social relations, and our histories.” He added, “We have no alternative but to construct new memories as well
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 8 as new identities better suited to the complexities
of a post-national era.”19
Although any collective entity can be subjected to this kind of deconstructive analysis, the chief target, as Gillis’s words imply, tends to be the modern nation-state, with its panoply of anthems, stories, histories, emblems, symbols, rituals, monuments, and other elements of civil religion. The modern nation-state clothes itself in all this exquisite finery, Gillis and many others have argued, as a way of enveloping its origins in a cloak of mystique and manages to surround itself with an aura of reality sufficiently powerful and convincing to command the loyalties of its subjects. But its day is passing, or so scholars in the field seem universally to believe, and
generally they feel it incumbent upon themselves to hasten the day when it is past altogether.
The audacity of this agenda could not be clearer.
It is nothing less than a drive to expel the nation- state and completely reconstitute public
consciousness around a radically different idea of what history ought to be “for,” substituting a whole new set of loyalties and narratives and heroes and notable events, directed to some postnational entity, for the ones inhering in civic life as it now exists. It would mean a complete rupture with the past and with all admired things that formerly associated themselves with the idea of the nation, including the sacrifices of former generations.20 Ernest Renan argued that a nation itself was “a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future,” as part of a “clearly expressed desire to continue a common life.”21 That solidarity, that quest to continue a common life—
all would surely be placed in jeopardy by the agenda Gillis proposes.
What has solved the practical problem of creating monuments, at least in the short run, has been an individualizing of the commemoration: a perfect solution for the “age of fracture.” This was precisely the approach taken by Maya Lin’s highly successful Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall, a monument whose very name signaled that its purpose was to honor the individual veterans rather than their cause.22 It might have been more apt, however, to call it a
collective tombstone, upon which were inscribed some 58,000 names of those individuals who lost their lives in Vietnam, but that eschewed any reference to the larger war or the nation. Critics blasted the wall as a “black gash of shame,” but that is not the way that millions of profoundly emotional visitors have seen it. They have been willing to accept, and perhaps have been relieved by, the memorial’s bracketing of any question of the war’s meaning, since it offered a means of grieving their loss without having to consider such matters.
Something of the same approach is being taken by the new 9/11 Memorial, located on the former site of the World Trade Center. It too features the individual names of victims—nearly 3,000, including those from Pennsylvania and Virginia as well as those who died in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center—inscribed on bronze panels, deployed around pools with waterfalls.
But nowhere does the website offer an
explanation of the motives behind the terrorist attacks themselves, or a larger view of the geopolitical struggle of which they were a part.
What is being commemorated here? What is the connection between the people being
remembered and the larger task that their mass murder set before the nation? Lincoln’s great words in 1863 at the cemetery at Gettysburg sought to highlight such a connection:
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.23
But the new memorial seeks to obscure this great task—another tribute to the “age of fracture.”
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 9
Reconstructing History
Of course, one of the chief reasons why both of these monuments had a painful birth and had to strike a posture of studied ambiguity about the events they were commemorating is that those events were controversial. And whatever side one takes in those controversies, it is hard to deny the heightened moral awareness that we now bring to a consideration of our own national history. This awareness is not peculiar to the United States, but it is arguably something new in human history. As Pascal Bruckner has argued in his book The Tyranny of Guilt, this awareness permeates the way that modern European nations and societies understand their own past and contributes to a preoccupation with past sins of militarism, colonialism, racism, and the like.24 Bruckner perhaps exaggerates, but it is true that the larger narratives through which nations organize and relate their history, and through which they constitute their collective memory, are increasingly subject to monitoring and careful scrutiny by their constituent ethnic, linguistic, cultural and other subgroups and are responsive to demands that those histories reflect the nation’s past misdeeds and express contrition for them. History itself, particularly in the form of
“coming to terms with” the wrongs of the past and of the search for historical justice, is becoming an ever-more-salient element in national and international politics.25 Far from being buried and forgotten, the past is alive with moral contestation.
All of this might seem to represent a form of moral progress, just as certain in its trajectory as the scientific and technological progress of modernity. And I believe it does, on balance.
Perhaps the most impressive example of sustained collective penitence in human history has come from the government and people of Germany, who have done so much to atone for the horrors of Nazism. But how much penitence is enough? When can we say that the German people—who are, after all, an almost entirely different cast of characters from those who lived under the Nazis—are free and clear, and have paid their debt to the past? Who could possibly make that judgment?
Add to that the fact that our age’s heightened universal moral standards apply universally, which is to say that they are like weapons on a pivot that tomorrow may be whirled around and trained to devastating effect upon the very ones who are wielding them today. Those who stand in judgment can, and should, be held to the same standards they impose. The mirror of guilt points back at them, too.
But leave those knotty moral questions aside, and consider a different point that they serve to illuminate. The question of history’s relevance to the needs of the present, the question with which this essay began, is here being answered, but in a way that is double-edged and highly
problematic—as an instrument of division rather than unity. In this view, a knowledge of history is relevant to our lives not because of our deep and vibrant connection to a past that continues to shape and nourish our common lives, but instead because it is a treasury of grievances, the means by which we determine the enduring weight of historical guilt and resurrect questions of past transgression to bring them to bear on present- day concerns. In this view, our principal connection to the past is not through the history and heroes and sacrifices and beliefs and cultural artifacts we have shared, but through the weight of sin debts owed by us or to us that have never sufficiently repaid and for which the passage of time offers no jubilee. This is a connection to the past that can be toxic and endlessly punitive,
We need an approach to the past that
contributes most fully to a healthy foundation for our common, civic existence—one that stoutly resists the culture of fracture
rather than acceding to
it.
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 10 rather than one productive of a flourishing
common life.
There is a reason why the historian Herbert Butterfield asserted that the historian should be a
“recording angel” rather than a “hanging judge.”26 That said, the moral dimension of history is one we cannot, and should not, set aside, because it goes to the heart of our well-being in our civic lives. But it can be addressed in better and worse ways. The solemn acknowledgment and
acceptance of historical responsibility, as in the German case, can be a profound and humbling expression of mature historical consciousness in a society. But the crude mobilization of guilt as a powerful political or social weapon, employed by those who would seek only to profit from it, has the effect of eroding the character of civic life rather than ennobling it.
As in other areas, we need an approach to the past that contributes most fully to a healthy foundation for our common, civic existence—one that stoutly resists the culture of fracture rather than acceding to it. But this is not a call for an uncritical triumphalist account of the past. Such an account would not be an advance, since it would fail to give us the tools of intelligent and morally serious self-criticism. But neither does an approach that, in the name of postnational antitriumphalism, reduces American history to little more than the aggregate sum of a multitude of past injustices and oppressions without bringing those offenses into their proper context and showing them as elements in the great story of a longer American effort to live up to lofty and demanding ideals.
Both of these caricatures fail to do what we have a right to expect our history to do. Nor, alas, can the professional historians supply a basis for such expectations, since their work proceeds from a different set of premises. Instead, historians will find their public again when the public can find its historians, who keep in mind that the writing of history is to be for that public. Not “for” in the sense of fulfilling its expectations, flattering its prejudices, and disguising its faults. Not “for” in the sense of underwriting a political agenda, such as that sought by the Progressive historians. But
“for” in the sense of being addressed to them, as one people with a common past and common
future, affirmative of what is noblest and best in them, and directed toward their fulfillment.
History has been a principal victim of the age of fracture. But it can also be a powerful antidote to it.
About the Author
Wilfred M. McClay ([email protected]) is the G. T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma.
Notes
1. See for example Verlyn Klinkenborg, “The Decline and Fall of the English Major,” New York Times, June 22, 2013,
www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/opinion/sunday/the- decline-and-fall-of-the-english-major.html; American Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Heart of the Matter, 2013,
www.humanitiescommission.org/_pdf/HSS_Report.p df.
2. Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2012). Also see Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2013), which views the fracture in more socioeconomic terms.
3. Thomas Bender, “How Historians Lost Their Public,”
Chronicle of Higher Education, March 30, 2015, https://chronicle.com/article/How-Historians-Lost- Their/228773.
4. Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York:
Random House, 2001).
5. The classic test on this subject is Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard,
Parrington (New York: Knopf, 1968).
6. Emphasis added. Bernard Bailyn, “The Challenge of Modern Historiography,” American Historical Review 87, no. 1 (February 1982): 1–24,
https://historians.org/about-aha-and-
membership/aha-history-and-archives/presidential- addresses/bernard-bailyn.
7. Bender, “How Historians Lost Their Public.”
8. Ronald Bosco and Joel Meyerson, eds., The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843–71, Volume 2, 1853–71 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 99–116.
9. David Shenk, The Forgetting: Alzheimer’s: Portrait of an Epidemic (New York: Doubleday, 2001).
10. Ibid., 43.
11. Ibid., 45.
12. C. S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1961), 59–60.
13. Lukacs, A Student’s Guide to the Study of History (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2001).
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 11 14. Edmund Blair Bolles, Remembering and
Forgetting: An Inquiry into the Nature of Memory (New York: Walker & Company, 1988).
15. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
16. Ibid.; see useful discussion of Ranke’s famous saying on 21–31.
17. Bruce Cole, “A Monumental Shame,” New Criterion, December 2014,
www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/A-monumental- shame-8017.
18. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012 reissue edition). Also see Benedict Anderson’s influential study Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006 revised edition).
19. John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3–24.
20. Gillis, op. cit. In undertaking the task of
constructing these “new memories,” Gillis asserts, “We must take responsibility for their uses and abuses, recognizing that every assertion of identity involves a choice that affects not just ourselves but others.” One would like to know to whom the “we” in this sentence refers.
21. Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 41–
55.
22. See Lin’s own account at Maya Lin, “Making the Memorial,” New York Review of Books, November 2, 2000,
www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2000/nov/02/ma king-the-memorial/. Lin makes it clear that avoidance of any consideration of the war’s meaning was a central part of her design: “I wanted to create a memorial that everyone would be able to respond to, regardless of whether one thought our country should or should not have participated in the war.”
23. Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address,” November 19, 1863,
www.whatsoproudlywehail.org/curriculum/the- meaning-of-america/gettysburg-address.
24. Pascal Bruckner, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism, trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
25. Thomas U. Berger, War, Guilt, and World Politics after World War II (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 8–34.
26. A splendidly nuanced and thoughtful treatment of Butterfield’s understanding of the historian’s moral task is in Michael Bentley, “Herbert Butterfield and the Ethics of Historiography,” History and Theory 44, no. 1 (February 2005), 55–71. See also Butterfield’s classic 1931 work, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Norton, 1965).
