Longstanding and attentive listeners have heard me inveigh against “useable history,” or the weaponization of it to win the political arguments of today. Among the many reasons to oppose the weaponization of history, which I discuss in the second half of this episode, is that using history to shape politics undermines its greatest value. What is the greatest value of history? In the fewest possible words, “history teaches epistemic humility.” The term has a hardcore philosophical meaning, but in my four-word justification for studying history I mean it in a more popular sense: That history teaches that even the greatest and most consequential humans – not to mention perfectly ordinary people – were capable of astonishing errors, lapses of judgment, and moral failing, and therefore so are we all. History teaches that we should be humble rather than certain in our beliefs, for they probably won’t stand the test of time.
The problem, of course, is that partisan politics, especially as practiced today, requires precisely the opposite: Absolute confidence in one’s beliefs, however unwarranted that confidence may be. The political use of history, therefore, corrupts history absolutely — the purpose of history is to teach epistemic humility, but partisans use history to bolster epistemic confidence, the antithesis of its purpose. That is what I mean when I say that politics corrupts history absolutely.
All of this came to mind this morning while reading a piece in The New Criterion by Wilfred McClay, professor of history at Hillsdale College, which is famous for its traditional – some would say right-wing – approach to the education of our callow youth. McClay’s essay tackles the “burden of the humanities,” by which he means their purpose. It’s worth your time if you are worried about that sort of thing. Regardless of his broader arguments, I did agree with McClay’s lamentation on the state of the study of history, which I reproduce below in a fair-use extract. Nothing more follows.
I look with dismay upon what has become of my own discipline of history.
History ought to be the most humbling and humanizing of subjects. It opens the world to us in all its fabulous variety, both as it is and as it has been, and provides us a window onto the astonishing range of human experience, from the earthbound world of ordinary peasants and servants to the rarefied universe of the mighty and wealthy, and everything in between.
Its forays into unfamiliar territories can both shock us and enlarge our sympathies, and increase our awareness of the many ways that human beings have gone about the business of being human. By rescuing precious things and memories from the darkness into which they would otherwise disappear, it affords an understanding of our continuity with the past and sharpens our sense of human possibility. This is all the more so if we seek to provide a balanced and honest record of humanity’s achievements and enormities alike and are generous enough to acknowledge the mixture of motives, both noble and ignoble, that each and every one of us flawed humans brings to life’s tasks.
That, at any rate, is how it ought to be. But today, instead of expanding our minds and hearts, history is increasingly used to narrow them. Instead of providing a way to deepen ourselves and helping us to embrace a mature and complex view of our past, history is increasingly being employed as a simple bludgeon that picks its targets based on a litmus-test standard—often little more than a popular cliché—applied mechanically.
Perhaps the best example of this is the pell-mell rush we have seen in recent years to pass judgment on heroes of the past and demolish the monuments to them: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and their likes. Are we really so fragile and so faint of heart that we can no longer bear to allow the honoring of giants of the past who fail in some respects to meet our current specifications? Let us grant that all three men had racial beliefs that we would find unacceptable today. Does that exhaust everything we need to know about them? Ought it to outweigh automatically the value of everything else they did?
Are we really so fragile and so faint of heart?
Apparently in some people’s minds it ought. For them, the transformation of history into a weapon depends upon a brutal simplification of the historical record, so that Washington’s ownership of slaves becomes the only relevant fact about him. A genuinely historical use of history would acknowledge, even insist upon, this fact. But it would then go on to consider it from the larger perspective of the ubiquity of slavery throughout most of human history. It would weigh the many aspects of a long, important, and consequential life. It would examine Washington’s beliefs and actions carefully in the context of their time and would take into account the provisions he made to free his slaves on his death. That kind of respectful detail and complexity are what we no longer seem to be getting today.The weaponizing of history, then, corresponds invariably with a remarkable hostility to history. It is content to extract a single fact out of a complicated web of details, and then to drive that fact home with the mindless sloganeering of protestors who can only repeat a memorized chant.
Why should we study the past? If the state of our present discourse is any indication, the point of doing so is simply to provide us with ever better weapons to use in our present battles, ever more unanswerable supports for our invincible grievances. But that cannot last forever. Once history becomes transformed into a weapon, and everyone sees that it has been, it ceases to be a source of insight. It will not be long before it loses its credibility as history.
So what to do? If we care about history, we must rescue it from its would-be weaponizers, insist upon history’s richness and complexity, and recover the humane insight of the historian Herbert Butterfield, who argued that the historian should be a recording angel rather than a hanging judge—let alone a summary executioner.
