Those on the conventional right incessantly lament the ignorance of history from which younger generations of Americans suffer.\u00a0 While it is true that Americans appear to know frighteningly little about their country\u2019s past, perhaps this has something to do with the abuse to which the concept of history has been subjected.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n
The very concept of \u201chistory\u201d is in an abysmal condition of neglect.\u00a0 For this, partisans from across the political spectrum are to blame. Much more frequently than not, when those on both the right and the left advocate the teaching of \u201chistory,\u201d it isn\u2019t a distinct, autonomous line of inquiry or discipline to which they want people exposed; rather, what they champion is the promotion of their respective political-moral visions under the guise of \u201chistory.\u201d\u00a0 That this is so is readily born out by the titles of some of the more popular contemporary \u201chistory\u201d books: A People\u2019s History of America; The Last Best Hope; The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History; A Patriot\u2019s History of The United States, <\/em>etc.<\/p>\n In other words, \u201chistory\u201d has been reduced to morality.\u00a0 Those on the left exploit the name of \u201chistory\u201d in order to impress upon audiences their notion of an Americaconceived in corruption.\u00a0 Thus, \u201chistory\u201d texts authored by leftists invariably accentuate those passages of our national life that fit most readily into the template of \u201cracism\u201d and \u201csexism\u201d that they seek to impose upon them.\u00a0 In contrast, those authored by rightists, while not devoid of all references to some of America\u2019s more oppressive chapters, tend to romanticize our country.\u00a0 Among the most salient ways in which they seek to obtain this end is by stressing what is commonly called \u201cAmerican Exceptionalism,\u201d the concept that the United States stands alone among the nations of the world in being the only country that has ever been founded upon, not \u201cthe accidents of history,\u201d but a universal, self-evident <\/em>moral truth: the truth that all <\/em>human beings are possessed of God-given \u201cunalienable rights.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But if history is a distinct discipline, then it is as illegitimate to import moral <\/em>judgments into it as it is illegitimate to import aesthetic judgments into, say, the study of biology.\u00a0 Just as the marine biologist looks upon the ocean, not as God\u2019s creation or an artwork, but as the environment that nurtures the organisms on which he sets his sights, so the genuine historian is concerned with informing us of what <\/em>happened in the past\u2014not what should have <\/em>happened. \u00a0For example, it is proper for the moralist to characterize slavery as \u201creprehensible\u201d or \u201cevil\u201d; the mode of the historian, on the other hand, is devoid of all such normative terms.<\/p>\n Biographies of, say, Abraham Lincoln, that heap either praise or scorn upon our sixteenth president, although they may be truthful, are not historical.\u00a0 <\/em>Lincoln may very well have been among the wisest of men as Harry Jaffa and legions of others insist, or he may have been a deceitful tyrant, as Thomas DiLorenzo and a not insignificant minority of scholars contend.\u00a0 What we must grasp is that this is a debate that lies outside the province of the historian.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n If we are in the right in regarding history as a distinct field of inquiry, then it is improper for us at the same time to enlist it in the service of either present or future moral ends.\u00a0 Most \u201chistorians\u201d today actually exploit <\/em>the past for the sake of advancing a moral or political agenda of one sort or another.\u00a0 Now, there is nothing illicit about the activity of drawing upon the past in order to illuminate present circumstances; indeed, it is both necessary and desirable that we do as much.\u00a0 The point, however, is that whatever else we may say of this engagement of mining the past for present reward, we must not <\/em>say that it is historical.\u00a0<\/p>\n Because a person\u2019s very identity is constituted by the events that he\u2019s experienced, it is inevitable that we shall be forever recalling episodes from our pasts.\u00a0 Yet only if we are determined to divest the concept of history of all meaning will we then conclude from this that each of us is a historian.\u00a0 If everyone is a historian, then no one is.\u00a0 Similarly, the examples of virtuous characters from our civilization\u2019s past promise to impart much in the way of moral instruction.\u00a0 Unless, though, we want to regard \u201chistory\u201d texts along exactly the same lines as we tend to regard children\u2019s stories\u2014as sources of moral education and entertainment\u2014we must grant that searching the past for even noble present purposes like the inculcation of excellence is most definitely not <\/em>an historical<\/em> enterprise.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n No, as Michael Oakeshott observed, it isn\u2019t the historian\u2019s interest in the past that distinguishes him as the figure that he is; it is his interest in the past for its own sake <\/em>that makes him a historian.\u00a0<\/p>\n The nineteenth century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche thought that objectivity was a fiction.\u00a0 Every living organism, he argued, was fundamentally motivated by what he called \u201cthe will to power,\u201d the impulse to satiate its needs and desires by dominating its surroundings.\u00a0 The human being differs from all other living things only insofar as his intelligence is concerned, for humans seek to exploit and subjugate one another not just through brute force, but through what we may call rational coercion. <\/em>No person will come right out and tell others that he needs <\/em>for them to believe as he does; this simply would go no distance toward attaining the sought after objective.\u00a0 Rather, he will do what, according to Nietzsche, philosophers have been doing for as long as they have been around: he will avoid all self-references and appeal only to such \u201cobjective\u201d criteria as Reason, Truth, Natural Law, God, and so forth.<\/p>\n Now, there is much over which to quarrel with Nietzsche. \u00a0But his thought is not without its share of insights.\u00a0 There can be no denying that far too frequently the beliefs that we profess are informed by motives that haven\u2019t anything to do with the search for truth.\u00a0 Neither can we deny that just as frequently we attempt to hide these motives, from both ourselves and others, by cloaking them with the language of objectivity.\u00a0<\/p>\n The appeal to \u201chistory,\u201d I hope the reader now recognizes, is but another way that ideologues of one sort or another have done this.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.<\/p>\n originally published at The New American\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Those on the conventional right incessantly lament the ignorance of history from which younger generations of Americans suffer.\u00a0 While it is true that Americans appear to know frighteningly little about their country\u2019s past, perhaps this has something to do with the abuse to which the concept of history has been subjected.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 The very concept…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-162","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n