My first degree is in History. I'm very proud to say that I am a historian by exceedingly good training as well as by inclination. Even when I was doing poorly at school, I top graded in History. History is my subject. So I was interested to hear what Mallen Baker said about the way that History is being taught today, describing it as “a failure in education” that is “widespread.”
His comments come at 18-40 in this video:
Nordstream sabotage - now it's getting weird | The Mallen Baker Show
That has been my understanding for a very long time now. Whether it is TV or social media, I see views being expressed which would not have been allowed at the most elementary of levels. Even at the highest levels I am seeing works being praised and honoured which are no more than fashionable nonsense fitting contemporary political and cultural norms (“good” and “bad”, up with this and down with that).
I recently corrected the people sharing a meme to the effect that History should make you angry, upset etc. That view of History is ridiculous. If you spent your time getting outraged at past events, your nerves would never survive any extensive period of historical study. History is full of the worst that human beings can do to one another, it is not a place for the easily – and endlessly – upset. History is about stepping back from events and actions and understanding where these came from and how they happened. History is for cool heads, its temper is judicious.
I made my points along the above lines and was subject to a pile-on on the part of those who simply want to grind their political axes into the heads of opponents, all in the name of history. It all somewhat proved my point. I was told my views were “remarkably condescending.” And I really don't care. My best tutor was a very cold man, dry as dust, and a stickler for facts, detail, and accuracy, regardless of upset. At the end of one tutorial a friend turned to me and said about this tutor “he doesn't suffer fools.” He didn't. And he didn't suffer high-sounding ideals and phrases that were lacking in experience, and he didn't suffer political point-scoring masquerading as historical examination. He was actually my form tutor and a hard task-master and hard marker. He would take marks off for the slightest error in citation. But you learned how to do History properly.
History is my subject, this is where my expertise lies, this is where I earned my academic spurs. And what is presented as history now is a complete joke, merely a political screed in which those with certain value preferences and positions to defend and advance in the present re-write the past in accordance with their prejudices and interests. That is not history at all but its very antithesis. And it will damn us all. The problem is, as a result of a failure in education, it is well-nigh impossible to argue these points. So many have become so accustomed to grinding their political axes in history that they look upon people like me as the ones who are in error. That is an inversion of the truth, and I was glad to hear Mallen Baker speak up on this. He begins by noting that he hadn't realised how bad things had become in the teaching of history, and ends with this statement:
“If I was talking to a young person today about how to make enough sense of the world in order to be able to successfully change it, I might talk about the solid understanding of science … but I would surely start with the admonition to READ HISTORY, read it across numerous nations and timespans, it will teach you more about yourself and your surroundings than any number of modern studies on human psychology. It'll teach you as well that battlefields and similar grim end-places are littered with the corpses of people who failed to understand reality with clarity and therefore acted on faulty premises. It might just help you to avoid being one of those people.”
If you want to understand the world, if you want some insight into the way the human world works, then study history. We hear the words 'history teaches' a lot, only to find more often than not that those saying such things are seeking to deliver their own political lessons.
I need to comment on a very prevalent social media trend – a virus frankly – in which it is repeatedly asserted that history will disturb and upset you and make you uncomfortable and angry etc.
These claims baffle me, but the fact that I'm even seeing people who teach history sharing memes to this effect suggested to me that I may be missing something. But, having reflected, I think not. I have seen such memes in the past and dismissed them as the obvious work of history ignoramuses peddling their preferred politics. But the fact that I am now seeing them on a daily basis makes it clear that such thinking is pervasive and that something has gone very wrong in the teaching and understanding of history. These memes have gone viral, and that's exactly how this phenomenon strikes me – as a pernicious virus. The meme I have used for this piece is actually uncontentious, but rather banal and pointless in taking aim against those who are 'always' made 'proud and happy' by studying history. I'm not quite sure who such people are nor why they are worth bothering with. Unless we are talking about caricature. In expressing pride about a nation's past, conservatives are certainly not ignorant of the more controversial issues in the past. My issue is with those for whom the converse is true. I would therefore re-write the meme to say that “if studying history always makes you feel angry, upset, and outraged, you probably aren't studying history.” Keep your eye out and you will see much more extreme versions of this meme, with background images of colonial war, rapine, and oppression emphasising the moral that you ought to be shocked and indignant at the past.
These kinds of meme seemed "off" the first time I saw them, and they still smell "off" to me. That they seem to be overwhelmingly popular with people who are concerned first and foremost with advancing political causes in the present should have the red flags raised very high indeed.
Whilst my work spans a wide range of subject disciplines, I'm a historian by training and inclination. History is the subject in which I received my academic grounding. I achieved the highest academic standards in history, hitting the top grades from school to sixth form college to university. History is my subject and I know it well. I took to history like a duck takes to water. I loved immersing myself in a mass of materials. I got better with training, but I was a natural; I was made for history, I could do it without even trying. I was interested and, blessed with a prodigious memory, I picked up every detail and remembered it, putting everything in context. When I struggled at most everything else at school, I was top of the class in history, going on to earn grade “A” distinction at A level, first degree, the lot. I dominated history classes and could talk for twenty, even thirty, minutes a time in the hour long tutorials. I was the smartest boy in the class, in the sense of being insufferably pedantic and boring, but I was good and have the top grades to prove it.
So if something is bugging me about the way history is being presented, then there is a high possibility that there might be something amiss in the teaching and understanding of the subject.
I don't remember a time when I was shocked, outraged, angered or anything by history. Certain events, actions, and incidents would affect me and provoke certain reactions, of course. It was such things that made history a fascinating subject for me. But you won't last long in any subject if you are continually triggered by its subject matter. I looked upon the details of historical events with a degree of detachment. That's how we were taught from a very early age when introduced to some of the brutal facts of ancient and medieval history.
Beyond being fascinated by events and actions, I would get down to the hard job of examination and understanding. That's the historians job, and it is a job that is undertaken without prejudice. It's similar to forensics in the detection of a crime. You can take it as read that murder, torture, etc. are 'very bad things.' You can spend time condemning such things as 'very bad things' done by 'very bad people.' But the job of the investigator is to find the facts behind them, seek causes, explanations, interests, and motivations, unravel the interplay of factors in the process of emergence. Emotions such as anger or outrage are of no relevance here; such things are no help, only hindrance, shedding no light on the matters to be investigated and, instead, only clouding issues in a lot of fog. A historians job is to dispel the fog of moral and political war.
There's nothing that human beings have done to one another that I haven't seen: murder, war, pillage, rapine, torture, brutality, the massacre of innocents, all of which is more than enough to make one give up hope for humanity. But you learn to hold your nose and hold your nerve. You see, too, human beings at their best, fighting for and winning just causes, sacrificing their lives for noble causes, the extension of democracy, the creation of great art and architecture, everything that makes you keep your ticket to the universe and carry on carrying on. Most importantly, though, you learn to stand above feelings of pessimism and optimism, good and bad. Studying history is about understanding and explanation how things have happened in the past, without having a view as to whether such things are good or bad.
Studying history has given me a certain equanimity, an equipoise which means I'm rarely if ever rattled. I read the book The Rape of Nanking, which I found to be pretty damned harrowing, but, oddly, in the present wave of historical 'lessons,' it's only the British and US empires that are come in for a hammering. As though only the British, or white westerners generally, have had empires. Any nation that gains an advantage over others will use that power to further their own interests. You may condemn it all you like as a 'very bad thing,' but it is wiser to learn a valuable lesson about power and power dynamics. The innocents who think themselves 'very good people' are precisely the ones who walk blindly into the most obvious errors and evils recorded in history. The people who do the worst are very often the ones who have persuaded themselves that they are doing good.
I've seen it all.
Memes like this one appeal to people who have seen little and learned nothing, people who are innocent of history but loaded with politics. They see their political enemies celebrating a selective view of the past, and respond by jeering. Both sides are involved in re-inventing the past to fit their politics in the present. It's all cheering and jeering, but no understanding. The people who do this are are looking at the past through a political lens. This is not studying history at all, merely politicising and moralising.
History concerns analysing, understanding, and weighing the evidence.
Studying history, I learned to weigh all forces and factors in the balance, address contraries, test conventional views, check facts, parse the complexities and entanglements. You learn how people with the best of motives could act in such a way as to bring about the opposite of that which they intended, and vice versa. Hegel tried to raise it to the philosophical plane with his "ruse of Reason." We studied various philosophies of history, which nurtured a certain historical imagination, whilst being careful at the same time to bring all high-flown ideas back down to empirical reality. Experience is the testing ground. A historian puts a dampener on the idealisms and intoxications of others. It's basically human beings of all kinds and the things they do, some inspiring, some appalling, but usually mundane. You have to learn to identify the significant details and actions and overlook the rest. The judgements that people bring to history are not judgements at all, they are prejudices; it's the details that matter, the actual actions, everything that enables us to understand the complex web of human doings. Judgements of good and bad belong elsewhere. You don't study the American Civil War cheering on the anti-slavery cause. Your job as a historian is to discover what actually happened. (Lincoln actually offered the southern states a deal which would have allowed them to keep slavery at one point. We studied this without judgement, examining the politics of the conflict as they unfolded in the actions of the various protagonists. People are beginning to discover that Lincoln's views on racial equality were rather more complicated than has been commonly thought, and are more concerned to denounce him as bad than to understand. This is pernicious nonsense).
Long before I took the subject up at university, I had reached the stage where nothing, absolutely nothing, could either shock or surprise me about history. I was taught Tudor history at A level by one of the Catholic Brothers at De La Salle sixth form college (then West Park). It was the first time girls had joined boys at the college, young ladies of 16-17 really. And we sat there listening to tales of whether marriages between kings and princes and young virgin girls had been “consummated” or not. And much worse besides. There were raised eyebrows and comic remarks speculating that the more elderly males had gone quicker to their graves as a result of said couplings – one within a week or two of marriage, I seem to remember. There was some sniggering, but no shock or outrage. You are here to learn and understand the actions of people in the past, and weigh the evidence, not to judge the morals. You “grow up” quickly knowing that history is life as it was and as it is, not how some wishful thinking idealist or moralist or politically motivated activist thinks it ought to be. History confounds the puritans. You mean people did what?! How awful. Down with this sort of thing. It's just that in moving quickly to damnation nothing is learned.
So I'll guess that the people who are shocked, outraged, upset, and discomforted by the facts of slavery, oppression, exploitation etc. are not so much innocents as ignoramuses and moralisers with a political axe to grind. There are places for that grinding. And that place is not in history.
The problem I have is that the memes are explicitly saying that “studying history” will disturb, discomfort, and upset you. No it won't, not if you are doing it properly. Seeing history for the first time might. But studying history won't, precisely the opposite in fact. In “studying history” you very soon cease being shocked and outraged and instead learn how to analyse, seek evidence, look it starkly in the face, interrogate the facts, weigh the mass of information, and form a considered view. The temper of the true historian is judicious. Anyone who is shocked, outraged, and furious at every new discovery simply isn't “studying history” at all.
As for the repeated claims that 'we were not taught x,y, and z at school and university,' I would say
a) pull the other one, who do you think you are kidding? We were. The only thing I'd say the courses I studied were thin on was the role of women in history, although there was more of this by the time I reached degree level. The rest was there, slavery, trade union history, the scramble for Africa. Heck, Brother Victor even taught us about the Internationale and Proudhon's 'property is theft.'
b) if you think you are missing something, go to the library, beg, steal, or borrow a book, as the rest of us did, you are neither helpless nor witless. Try a library for starters, that's what we did. Your reading is not restricted by a school curriculum. I was reading at home before I went to school. I read books of my own choice outside of school.
The people who say this are simply people trying to make an issue out of their pet cause, claiming it was suppressed and marginalised by the authorities.
I would also note the pessimistic assumption underlying these memes, to the effect that everything and everyone in the past is thoroughly bad (and the concomitant assumption that those condemning the past from the vantage point of the present are incapable of historical sin. Therein lies the danger of yet another descent into inhumanity, with nothing at all learned from the past. The only lesson we learn from history is that people don't learn from history …
This isn't history, this is a moralism bordering on demonology. And it's got the pernicious hand of political engineering written all over it. It's a reversion to “Good Queen Bess, Bluff King Hal”, only without the good bit.
These ideas are spreading like a crazy pestilence. Unchecked, they will be the ruination of history. History will be taught from a pre-determined political perspective, with the judgement calls you are supposed to make yourself as a historian after weighing all the evidence having already been made at the start.
It's an ancient wisdom which teaches that to know what is good, you also need to know its contraries. We could complicate matters further and cite Hegel, for whom the greatest struggles in history are not struggles between right and wrong, but between right and right. The problem now is that we live in an age of tribes in which each tribe sees only themselves as unimpeachably right and all others not so much wrong as irredeemably evil. “Studying history” is the antidote to all such thinking. Preaching only "good”, as in “positive ideals" that conform to a certain politics, renders people unable to think critically and independently. It makes society not just stupid, but dangerously innocent of history. People who know no true history will soon lose their freedom; knowing no standards by which to judge the present, they will bear tyranny easily. In being more concerned to condemn the past rather than learn from it, people will fail to see the oppressions and injustices of the present, most of all those evils that they themselves are active in perpetrating. “Studying history” equips people to be able to weigh the facts of every case, understand a complex mass of material, and distinguish good from bad, right from wrong, truth and falsehood etc.. In truth, properly done, history is non-judgemental. You study some of the worst things that human beings can do to one another not to condemn, but to understand how such actions could have happened, what conditions made them possible, what led people to behave the way that they did. We could just say “war is stupid” and leave it at that. But it leaves us so bereft of historical insight and wisdom that we stumble into war yet again, for reasons we should have seen coming, had we had the wisdom to learn without prejudice. The moralising and demonising impulse is dangerously and self-destructively insane when applied to historical sources. Far from “studying history,” it's a political blight on history. People who are outraged, furious etc at history are not doing history at all, they are doing history down. The historian is cool-minded, judicious, unflustered, and enquiring, always open to contrary evidence.
And if people think I'm wrong, I'll take it as final proof that I should have stayed working on the building sites, learned a trade, earned some serious money, and never gone anywhere near college and university.
I was seriously good at history. It's my subject. And I'm reading claims as to what history is that are dreck.
One final point, there are people who will read the above and conclude that I am a right-wing conservative. Actually, no. Many of the people who taught me history were on the Left politically. But they taught history and not politics. They were not against students having political views, they simply wanted to ensure that you could back up any views you had with evidence, reasons, and cogent arguments. I studied economics at Masters. My first tutor was a marxist. So I tried to impress her with an explicitly marxist assault on capitalism. She savaged my essay: "if capitalism was as weak as that,” she scolded, “it would have collapsed decades ago." She made me construct a proper argument to back up the claims I was concerned to make.
If I see anyone expressing outrage and anger, I'll know they are not doing history. Put your views to one side, withhold judgement, seek the facts, all the facts, examine contrary cases, read against your prejudices, weigh the evidence, understand, learn. Or, as Brother Victor shouted at me when I said "don't know" to a question he asked me about the Russian mir – "think!"