The End of History

Or the end of historians?

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“All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.”  It is with this advice in mind from one of the greatest historians of the 20th century, Carl Becker, I want to challenge in part what I see as the hubris of historians turned public intellectuals like Daniel Bessner.

The general point of his essay “The Dangerous Decline of the Historical Profession” is, in my mind, unassailable.  The “American Mind” does not give due honor to the profession.  That is clear not only now but throughout our history.  My colleague at Heidelberg, Dr. Bonnie Fors, a historian, named her cat “Bunk” after the judgment Henry Ford rendered on the discipline. 

I would hazard to say that throughout my own education, from a progressive private elementary school founded by students of John Dewey through high school at one of the premier public schools in the country and then at Yale, I was exposed to a rather narrow view of America’s past.  There were fine scholars that taught at Yale and other universities, and I benefited from their scholarly writing, but on the whole “tricks” were performed. 

And today I have benefited greatly in retirement for the chance to read many new studies of the American past, written by exceptional current historians, that have helped me rethink my understanding of American history.  There may be fewer historians writing today, as Bessner claims, but they have available many new sources of information and have explored new topics with remarkable clarity and old topics with new lenses.  At least some of the biases that Becker acknowledged have been challenged.   

Yet, in the polemics of someone like Bessner, we catch the “sigh” of another long-standing trope of American culture.  The people do not give us proper honor.  The statues of my elite heroes, the intellectuals, are placed in the back reaches of the public park. 

And the refrain from the disgruntled is ever thus:  Administrators multiply, science is fashionable, and the humanities, particularly history, are allowed only a few seats at the back of the academic bus.

We can do more than bemoan the fate of the humanities in the 20th century.  We need to defend the value of historical research and writing.

There is a battle taking place for the future and it involves our understanding of the past.  Education is always a battleground of ideas.  The winners are still writing history. 

The prestige of historians is not the issue.  The number of PhDs awarded is not the metric.  It is the quality of their teaching and the relevance of their ideas that counts.

The Bessner article is interesting for the extent it seems to miss the point.  There is nothing new about how we judge and value the “project” of history. His "voice" echos a century of similar laments.  American intellectuals in general, and the ideas that they value, have never been favored in this culture and often for good reason. 

The problem is not the number of PhDs, but the content of what is taught and its reach and effect in the larger battles we face. 

How much dead weight, like a regular banking deposit, do we drop into our student's minds.  Too many administrators, yes.  Perhaps because professors have failed to do their part in the overall work of the college.  Lack of "relevance?"  How easily have we accepted the nonsense that students are customers asking to be machined and certified as "job ready" as they come off the line?

We don’t “defend” the humanities by rhetorical laments. Establishing the role of history and historians in the education of the next generation is politics and politics is "hard ball."   We have to fight this battle.   History is not simply "a legitimate lane of study."  Along with philosophy and literature it is the paramount need of our time.  As we learn to track the past we develop the ability to explore the present and travel the future as self-conscious men and women, interrogating our experiences, discovering our common interests, and deploying all the mental and emotional skills we can master.