History under fire . . . Tenured Radicals . . . Tom Sawyer trickery . . . Clarity a sign of weakness . . . Socrates knew . . . Obscurity rules . . . Apply grand theory . . . Allan Bloom . . .
The history-as-myth approach is killing history, according to Australian writer Keith Windschuttle in The Killing of History: How a Discipline Is Being Murdered by Literary Critics and Social Theorists. The subtitle says a lot, but suffice it for now to add that this is about a revolution that moved from street and campus of the '60s into classrooms of the '70s, '80s, and '90s -- the tenured radicalism that Roger Kimball described in his book Tenured Radicals.
Let us consider this Windschuttle book, dipping into it for a sense of what's happening, baby, in the world of academe and therefore, inevitably, in the world at large.
One particularly fascinating observation to be found in Killing is that these revolutionaries place high value on being obscure. When people can't understand you, they can be made to feel inadequate. It's like Tom Sawyer rejoicing after talking another kid into paying him to whitewash a fence for him.
So with these tenured radicals. You can't figure out what they're saying? You may have a problem. They're pretty bold about it. One of them dismissed a critic because of his "unproblematic prose and the clarity of his presentation, which are the conceptual tools of conservatism"! If this be conservatism, make the most of it. (Thank you, Patrick Henry.)
We do murder scenes . . . Windschuttle seeks to elucidate history study in the higher reaches, where tenured radicals hold sway and bid fair to change our children's and grandchildren's notion of how the world works. (Florid, but true.)
They have these theories in the upper reaches that draw on old though recent philosophies. These are blokes whom Socrates had to contend with, crafty fellows who with Sport'n Life of Porgy say it ain't necessarily so what we have been hearing. That's a noble enterprise sometimes. Not here, however.
Cortez, Bligh, and all that . . . For instance, you might think cannibalism is one of the ultimate yucky things. No, just different. Equal but different, culturally speaking. The noble Aztecs so cruelly wiped out by ignoble Cortez -- what? our stout Cortez? -- may have routinely (quarterly, in fact, like stock reports) divvied up people for dining on. So what? Just different.
Scott Fitzgerald tried that on Ernest Hemingway about rich people. Different from you and me, he said. Yes, they have more money, said E.H., who admittedly had a way with words.
Or Captain Bligh's problem wasn't being an s.o.b. (actually, his sailors got fewer lashes than other crews of the day) but he gave too many conflicting signals to first mate Fletcher Christian and the rest, so that they couldn't stand it any more and mutinied on the good ship Bounty.
Let us explore the mind of Windschuttle, an Aussie writer and university teacher who in this his [then] latest book mounts "a splendid attack on cultural and ethnic relativism," according to blurb writer — when the book came out.
Currently, the book “seeks to prove that history is being perverted by literary and social theorists who believe that the past can be perceived only through individual cultural interests and attempts to separate fact from fiction to preserve the truth of events.”
How come you talk like that? . . . Back to the Upper Reaches, whose great thinkers would have us rethink things -- not a bad goal in itself, as I said. One bad thing about them is their obscurity, which Windschuttle calls "a clever way to generate a following." That is, you barely make sense, then look down your nose at someone who says he doesn't get it. The rule is: obscurity = profundity. And offer maddening silence in the face of demand for meaning. That way, you preserve respect for "the Unsayable."
As said above, to be clear is too be "obviously conservative."
They celebrate the return of "grand theory" over "empiricist and positivist" approaches. You take that grand theory and impose it on the data. What's the fun of it if you have to start and stay with data? It's borrrrinnnnggggg.
These Higher Reachers are found mostly on college campuses, most of all in the U.S. In Britain, a British reacher moaned, it's necessary to use "heavy disguises" to push your cultural-studies agenda. Cultural studies = Anything But History.
So we have "new humanities" aimed at abolishing existing disciplines -- history, for instance, with its sometimes laborious sifting of evidence.
Furthermore, the goal is to abolish distinctions between disciplines, with emphasis on what’s "interdisciplinary."
It used to be that the historian was to discover "what really happened." Forget it. Now there are "social philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, scientists, and political, literary and feminist theorists" who have "exploded" this "old-fashioned concept."
Windschuttle made this up? Nope. It's in a 1991 U. of Sydney catalog describing a seminar required of history honors students.
The late Allan Bloom said we are at "a crisis at the peaks of learning . . . an intellectual crisis of the first magnitude."
What to look for are "studies" — as cultural, textual, women's, peace, media -- and one might add, American, African, Bohemian, Illinois, Oak Park, Marion Street, 127 North Marion, #8, Jim Bowman, Jim Bowman's navel, etc.
Each field is given its topical name, as if one approach fits all. It's part of undermining the disciplines with their rules of evidence and the rest. It's tenured radicalism.
Out of architecture schools (yes, architecture, the queen of the building trades) come "deconstructivist clones" barely fit for practice -- ennui-ridden burnt-out cases bored with what paying clients want.
There is post-structural accounting! And "the rewriting of law as postmodern fiction." There is medicine in which the terms "patients" and "illness" are "sociological fictions"!
— To be continued! —