History: Remembered?

This is a review of the 2020 book History: Forgotten and Remembered by Andrew Zwerneman.

In my process of trying to understand what is going on in the world I've written a time or two on the postmodernist / Critical Theory re-framing the study of history to open the door for an anti-Christian and anti-Western worldview. History: Forgotten and Remembered is the positive antidote to the negative I have hitherto dwelt on. Though Zwerneman clearly recognizes the problems - referring to history as "increasingly under siege," and recognizing "this assault" as "a symptom of the declining study of the humanities," the book stays optimistic and provides teachers (and, I'll add, learners like myself) a positive framework of how history should be taught and experienced, and a reminder that the postmodern way is not the only way. 

Note: "Postmodern" and "Critical Theory" are my words; I don't think Zwerneman ever references either. At most he references Marx and Marxism a few times but does not attempt to assign blame or trace the origins of the "forgetfulness" (his word) of history, preferring to focus on his positive and empowering vision for teaching history.

The introduction starts out with a quote from the late Donald Kagan, whose name has quietly come up  several times in my blog posts already. This is from his 2005 Jefferson Lecture, In Defense of History:

History, it seems to me, is the most useful key we have to open the mysteries of the human predicament.

I am tempted to agree with him, at least so long as the study of history is informed by the values and worldview of Christianity. Those that have placed history under siege also understand the foundational importance of history, which is why they seek to undermine and re-frame the study of history to force-fit it to their ideology. The stability of our society depends on our interconnection with each other in society, as well our connection to the past. Zwerneman quotes this passage from Edmond Burke's famous Reflections on the Revolution in France:

Society is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead and those who are to be born.

The postmodern disruption of our understanding of history has consequences that will be felt by all, even if we don't all make the connection.

Unity

The most important point stressed by Zwerneman is the potential of history as a unifying force. An understanding of our shared history will bring us together as a society, something that is desperately needed. History: Forgotten and Remembered gives a brief but scathing assessment of the impact the new approach to history has had on our culture.

We are all witnesses to forgetfulness at work in our contemporary national culture. We are increasingly divided from our past and from one another. Our forgetfulness severs us from our origins at the American Founding and in the foundations of the West; it severs our bonds to one another. …

The study of the West now gives way to alternative cultural studies - contemporary expressions of sub-group identity. ... In other words, cultural tribalism displaces a culture we all hold in common.

I feel this is completely justified criticism. The new approach to history not only makes it harder for us to connect with our past but divides us all into separate categories by race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., and promotes the grievances of one side against another. In the most poignant plea of History: Forgotten and Remembered, Zwerneman cites the Irish poet Seamus Heaney's 1995 Nobel Lecture as an example of how to do history, even of a very contentious subject, in a way that deliberately unites rather than aggravates grievances. He shares a terrifying story of injustice:

One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them, “Any Catholics among you, step out here”. As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions. It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don’t move, we’ll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was thrown backward and away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA.

Zwereneman analyzes Heaney's approach to the historical tragedy:

Heaney might well have focused his account on the terrorists, the story's oppressors. As a master rhetorician, he could have wielded his words like bullets from a gun and fired off a moral hail against the workers' mortal enemy. Along the way, Heaney might have turned his pen on the British who, in the first place, bore no small responsibility for the present disorder that marked Norther Ireland. Instead, he focuses our gaze elsewhere in the event to what is most memorable, meaningful, and hopeful:

The birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.

Understanding and Context

The postmodernist / Critical Theory approach emphasizes the moral failures of the Founders of the USA and the West with zeal, glossing over or ignoring their accomplishments and the positive impact this has had on the world and our own lives. The New York Times' 1619 Project is recent example, falsely centering slavery rather than freedom as the motivating force for the Founders. Howard Zinn's influential A People's History of the United States (1980) is a seminal work in this genre, focusing not on understanding the past but on agitating sub-group grievances in order to encourage ideological activism today. A 1998 interview with the author makes this motivation explicit. (FP is the interviewer from Flagpole Magazine; HZ is the author):

FP: In writing A People's History, what were you calling for? A quiet revolution?

HZ: A quiet revolution is a good way of putting it. From the bottom up. Not a revolution in the classical sense of a seizure of power, but rather from people beginning to take power from within the institutions. In the workplace, the workers would take power to control the conditions of their lives. It would be a democratic socialism.

History: Forgotten and Remembered is very clear on the point that understanding, not activism, should be the goal of history. Context and understanding tend to be lost when they are not the focus, especially if the real agenda is political radicalization.

Zwerneman quotes Bernard Bailyn extensively, summarizing his approach as "start with the past, understand it in its full context, and trace the changes, sometimes significant, that brought us to the present." Unfortunately history as a field and in education has moved away from this model in the last maybe 80 years. Mid-20th century historian Herbert Butterfield, wrote in reaction to mid-century trends in history: "The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves." In The Whig Interpretation of History, Butterfield gives clarification on what it means for a historian to seek understanding:

Instead of being moved to indignation by something in the past which at first seems alien and perhaps even wicked to our own day, instead of leaving it in the outer darkness, he makes the effort to bring this thing into the context where it is natural, and he elucidates the matter by showing its relation to other things which we do understand. ... It is this sense that he is always forgiving sins by the mere fact that he is finding out why they happened. 

Nothing describes postmodern history more than the phrase "moved to indignation." Note that to understand the past in context doesn't mean we must accept any false premises that were part of the historical context any more than we ought to accept the false premises of our own age, but it does mean we should be forgiving of those who lived within that context as we seek to understand them. 

Narrative and teleology

I found it surprising when I learned that narrative history has been a special target of the postmodern / Critical Theory movement from the 1930s. Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School said in 1937 "Previous history thus cannot really be understood; only the individuals and specific groups in it are intelligible." Fellow Frankfurt School theorist Theodore Adorno said "Universal history must be construed and Denied." Michael Focault worked to redefine history (and even knowledge itself) within a model he labelled "Archeology," which he described thus:

Archeology does not seek to rediscover the continuous, insensible transition that relates discourses, on a gentle slope, to what precedes them, surrounds them, or follows them. It does not await the moment when, on the basis of what they were not yet, they became what they are; nor the moment when, the solidity of their figure crumbling away, they will gradually lose their identity.

This influence resulted in academia and educators focusing on individual people (especially the oppression they experienced) or within individual events, without the needed context, without trying to understand how these points fit into the larger picture, and without looking into cause and effect over time or differences between cultures. Narrative history was out. 

Of course History: Forgotten and Remembered doesn't dwell on this negative, what the author calls "the fragmentary past." Instead a blueprint is given for "the purposeful past," in which "society moves in time as a whole and in continuity between the past, the present, and the future" with a purpose or "teleology." The teleology of the United States for Zwerneman should be the principles of hope, democracy, and freedom upon which it was Founded. A teleological history "draws on the past to offer understanding to those in the present." Zwerneman points out that the fragmentary historians are also not without teleology, but theirs is the promised "end of exploitation" of Marxist utopia. However, while the teleology of narrative history is characterized by a striving toward the good, the fragmentary teleology strips the past of its goodness, leaving "an emptied reality [that] is not reality." Later, 

In the fragmentary approach, what defines us is the struggle for power, each group against the other, not mutual personhood and responsibility.

Instead, we should remember the hope and promise of the West founded in Athens and Jerusalem, as it is sometimes formulated, or as Zwerneman puts it:

We find that the West was founded in large measure on two great loves: the love of wisdom, on the one hand, and the love of God and neighbor, on the other. In turn, we find that those loves are expressed in a myriad of ways throughout Western history all the way down to our time. ...

No civilization in history has ever developed a comparable culture of learning, nor has any produced a comparable body of knowledge and invention as has the West. Nor has any offered humankind comparable habits of open-mindedness and self-criticism, understood as the individual and social habits of distinguishing between the stronger and weaker arguments, better and worse choices, and truer and less true ways of organizing society.

America has in some ways fulfilled the promise and hope upon which it was founded, and in some ways has failed (or maybe, not yet succeeded). But we push forward in the expectation that as long as our society retains the values and principles of its founding that we will make further progress toward these objectives as we move from past to present to future.

Note: There is a quote from Eric Voegelin to open Chapter 13: "Between Disorder and Order". I have been exposed now to Voegelin in several places and hope to become more acquainted with his thinking.

The civilizational crisis of which everyone so readily speaks, does not by any means have to be born as an inevitable fate... No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crises of society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid the folly and live his life in order.

I like that reminder. We can individually move forward in our own lives, spiritually unperturbed, even as the world around us drifts down dangerous paths. This outward decay doesn’t have to cause us internal anxiety if we are personally firmly grounded in spiritual order.

History: Remembered?

My impression is that many academics are aware that history and the humanities can be and used to be taught through a very different lens than the present one. Some are in favor of this "Forgetfulness" while others are not. Those that are not in favor, however, often consider opposition to the Forgetting a losing cause and don't speak up for fear of being shouted down and losing prestige in elite academic circles which have become dominated by the new approach. But most people, especially young students, have no idea that anything used to be different or that it could be reasonable to think of the world in any other way than the worldview they are taught in school and in the University. After a generation or two the Forgetting will become complete unless something changes.

Today there is a small opening for optimism. While Critical Theory still dominates social science departments, many outside academia have become aware of it and have started to speak out against the irrationality and anti-Western spin. It is now possible for academics in elite research universities to write positively of Western Civilization and even Christianity in the world context (so long as discussion of Christianity remain on the sociological level and doesn’t stray into the spiritual). Andrew Zwerneman and Cana Academy give me a grain of hope that maybe there is a nucleus of educators who recognize The Forgetting and are working actively to balance it with a new Remembering. With any luck something greater will form around that small nucleus.

Update [Jan 11,2022]: Looks like the Pope and Andrew Zwerneman have been sharing notes.

In a strongly worded speech yesterday to diplomats gathered at the Vatican, the Pope said 'a kind of one-track thinking is taking shape, one constrained to deny history or, worse yet, to rewrite it.'... The Pope said the trend was influencing diplomacy, creating 'a mindset that rejects the natural foundations of humanity and the cultural roots that constitute the identity of many peoples.' … ‘Under the guise of defending diversity, it ends up cancelling all sense of identity, with the risk of silencing positions that defend a respectful and balanced understanding of various sensibilities.'

P.S. I wrote Andrew Zwerneman on LinkedIn asking for more on what caused the Forgetting - especially into the 1960s, since he clearly has a great familiarity with this but didn't write on it in depth here. I feel like I had a reasonable enough picture in my head from Hegel to Marx through the mid-20th century, but I needed help finding the scent from there. He suggested I read Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands by Roger Scruton. Very interesting book. His description of Sartre was powerful, and he treated a number of Marxist thinkers of the age.

P.P.S. Reading Scruton helped me get a bigger picture of what was going on through the 1960s and 1970s, and caused me to improve my mental model slightly from earlier posts. Specifically I may have over-emphasized the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory prior to the 1960s. I think between the 1930s and 1960s there were a lot more old-school Marxists in a parallel stream beside the more pessimistic Frankfurt School, which was a smaller group. I think that after the abortive revolution in the 1960s it became clear that more radicalization was needed outside of academia before the true Revolutionary Moment could occur. In response, most Marxists converted in the 1970s and 1980s to the sneaky, under-the-radar neo-Marxism of Critical Theory, which then boomed through the 1990s and has been absolutely exploding into the 2020s so far, so much that it is hard to keep it under the radar any more. Since Critical Theory is designed to be underground and slippery practically until the Revolutionary Moment, I'm not sure what this public exposure portends for the future of the Marxist movement or for our society as a whole. Hopefully I'll get a chance to write more on this soon. I have to think this is the key philosophical struggle of our time, and coming to a head quickly.

P.P.P.S. I liked Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands, so I also read Scruton's The Soul of the World. A very interesting and powerful philosophical attack on reductive materialism. However, the book was also designed to be a defense of faith - but somehow it was faith in the absence of God; or in other words, a defense of a version of faith that didn't necessarily mean faith in God. It left me sad, like he wanted to believe but just couldn't go the distance mentally and spiritually. Hopefully I can get to a post on Scruton sometime. But I have more topics than time, and a lot of other things to get to, so we will see.