Thinking about history
[NOTE: There’s been a lot of arrogance and ignorance about history lately, particularly from the “woke” crowd. Which makes me think that a repeat of this old post might be in order right about now.]
I’ve just spent a fruitless hour trying to find the source from which I’d copied the following Allan Bloom quote some time ago. Somehow I’d lost the link, and now I can’t find it again.
But I thought I’d present the quote anyway because—like so much of Bloom’s oeuvre—it shows his uniquely facile mind and brilliant observations.
It was from an audio recording of a lecture that Bloom had given back in (to the best of my recollection, anyway) the mid-1980s. I had tried to transcribe it faithfully, complete with hesitations and idiosyncrasies and audience reaction. Bloom—whom I’ve written about before several times, mostly in the context of discussing his wonderful and highly-recommended book The Closing of the American Mind, was a professor of philosophy for most of his life. He was exceedingly familiar with the outlook of university students, primarily in America but also in Europe. Note that what he said back then describes trends that have only intensified since:
You know, we’ve all read history. Everybody, you know, world history, and weren’t all past ages maaaad? There were slaves, there were kings—I don’t think there’s a single student who reads the history of England and doesn’t say that that was crazy. You know “that’s wonderful, you gotta know history, and be open to things and so on,” but they’re not open to those things because they know that that was crazy. I mean, the latest transformation of history is as a history of the enslavement of women, which means to say that it was all crazy—up till now.
Our historical knowledge is really a history which praises, ends up praising, ourselves—how much wiser [voice drips with sarcasm] we are, how we have seen through the errors of the past…Hegel already knew this danger of history, of the historical human being, when he said that every German gymnasium professor teaches that Alexander the Great conquered the world because he had a pathological love of power. And the proof that the teacher does not have a pathological love of power is that he has not conquered the world. [laughter] We have set up standards of normalcy while speaking of cultural relativism, but there is no question that we think we understand what cultures are, and what kind of mistakes they make.
Bloom was not a cultural relativist; he believed it was a pernicious influence that had taken over American education. Time has proven him correct, hasn’t it?
I read the book when it was published. I understand that Harry Jaffa did not write the second volume of his work on the Civil War as he took time out to help his friend Bloom finish that book. Actually, it was “Shakespeare’s Politics” that he helped with. I’m reading Jaffa’s Lincoln book right now. Not the “House Divided,” which I will get to.
I read several books at the same time. One other is the new Churchill biography. It has more about his early life than the others I have read.
I have read that many schoolchildren in England think he is fictional. The state of history in England is atrocious.
History?
To paraphrase: “We don’t need no stinkin’ history”
We are being lectured by wokes who do not even know the nation from whom we won our independence; who do not know who won the Civil War; who do not know which nation bombed Pearl Harbor or which nations we defeated in WWII.
We have little talibans running around pulling down statues — and think that ANY general named Lee must be that BAD one. They do not recognize the uniform of an American soldier of WWII.
And they think that stuff is free.
When they become the majority, China and Russia will be greatly pleased with what they have accomplished in the American “educational” system.
I certainly saw a lot of historical ignorance demonstrated by many of the supposed college “graduates” who’s questions I answered for almost thirty years.
Given this lack of historical perspective, and awareness, one of the things that I think is most dangerous is that—growing up in and living here in the United States, our citizens have been shielded from actual “reality,” as it is experienced by almost everyone else in our current world.
Nor, do they have any real appreciation for the fact that, over the course of the 5,000 years of recorded human history—and for the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years prior to that—the default situation, the lot of 99.9% of human beings has been one of violence, poverty, oppression, being dominated and plundered by the more ruthless and violent, of cold, disease, starvation, brutal, unceasing toil, and early death.
Moreover, they have no appreciation for the fact that—in contrast—as citizens of today’s United States, they are living elevated lives, above all those evils, in the richest, most powerful, most free, the nation with the most access to knowledge, and to possibilities for education, health and long life, personal achievement, upward mobility and wealth that there has ever been.
(It has been pointed out, for instance, that those who are considered “poor“ here in the U.S. have more material possessions, and generally live their lives under better circumstances than many who are considered “middle class” in Europe.)
Apparently no appreciation, either, for how rare, how unique we, our achievement here in the U.S. is, in the history of humankind.
Nor a true awareness, either, of just how precarious our hard-won achievement, at the sunlit apex of the pyramid of human progress—built on the labor, sacrifice, perseverance, invention, and backbreaking work of thousands of generations—is.
And, fatally, no real awareness of how decadence, degeneration, and decline has always been the inevitable end for every prior civilization.
For, if they knew these things, had internalized this history and knowledge, one would think that each one of our citizens would always be on guard, always protective of our unique achievement and status, of our democratic Republic and Constitution, of our history, civilization, freedoms, customs, values, and way of life.
But they aren’t, many are ignorant, indifferent, apathetic, and an increasing number of the younger of them want to tear everything down in favor of some perfect and perfectly fair Utopia.
My view of history changed when I made a practice of reading primary sources where possible. It is much more complicated, it makes much less sense, and nothing happens in the right order.
It’s also instructive to read history written in the past. When I read Hume’s History of England I was astounded at what the people of his time gave the most emphasis to, many of them events mentioned in modern histories only to be dismissed as unimportant.
Moreover, they have no appreciation for the fact that—in contrast—as citizens of today’s United States, they are living elevated lives, above all those evils, in the richest, most powerful, most free, the nation with the most access to knowledge, and to possibilities for education, health and long life, personal achievement, upward mobility and wealth that there has ever been.
Snow on Pine: Tell it, brother!
City Journal just posted an article that proves Neo’s point (great minds, etc.)– it’s about the statue in NYC commemorating a famous photograph from V-J Day:
“Nobody ever went broke underestimating the nincompoopery of New York’s city council. Now along comes Upper West Side member Helen Rosenthal to crank up the stupid, declaring her appreciation of the vandalism last week of a statue depicting the globally famous photo of a U.S. sailor kissing a dental technician in Times Square to mark the end of the Second World War.”
https://www.city-journal.org/helen-rosenthal-times-square-statue
The article notes that the dental technician in the famous photo had left Austria in 1939 and subsequently lost her parents in the Holocaust. People like Rosenthal really need to get out of their ahistorical bubble.
My view of history changed when I made a practice of reading primary sources where possible.
I wrote a medical history book 20 years ago that was for medical students and young physicians who had gotten no medical history in medical school, as I had. I had to use secondary sources for the period before 1900 but I looked up the original publications that many students will not easily find. It is still selling 10 to 20 copies a month I did a Kindle version a couple of years ago.
How about very recent history in an entirely quantitative area? Sorry, a little off topic. The Federal stats. are out today on GDP and economic growth for 2018.
So what was the growth rate for 2018?
Early this morning on Fox Biz it was 2.9%. Maybe they got that number from Reuters. Here at CNN they list it at 2.6%.
It wasn’t until Kevin Hassett came on Fox Biz and complained, that we learned that the annual year-over-year growth rate was 3.1% in 2018. This does meet Trump’s promise to have 3% growth, but then you can’t trust a liar like Trump can you?
As far as I can tell, the Reuters article is a lie, and the CNN one is OK once you realize they are looking at the ratio of Q4-2018/Q4-2017, not the whole year. Naturally CNN normally quotes year over year stats, unless Trump is president.
Maybe the quote is from Oprah!
Yeah, Oprah interviewed Bloom on her regular talk show show back in the day. Periodically I check to see if its made its way onto YouTube, but so far it remains awol.
A lot of the young today keep saying that this or that “isn’t fair; somewhere along the line they’ve ingested the idea, or been told, that life “should be fair,’ which, of course it isn’t.
For the perceptive, exposure to examples from past history would have disabused them of this notion, as would some practical life experience in different cultures and countries.
Cloistered campus life, and video games ain’t gonna cut it.
I also have the suspicion that many people here in the U.S. today, in their heart of hearts–especially the young–just assume that things will never really change, especially change for the worse, that things have been this way–on a generally satisfactory path–and will keep on being essentially this way; a straight line on into the future.
With no recognition that–given this or that thing or a series of things happening, given some bad breaks–our trajectory could just as easily and abruptly turn downward, as it could upward.
That, for us and our nation, there is not an inevitably happy ending, or–our luck and mojo gone–that there is even the potential /possibility for it all to just come crashing down.
Our candle guttering out, us ending up swirling around and down the toilet bowl of history; the fate of all of the civilizations that have preceded us.
Thomas Hofler
Reuters and CNN are correct. Annualized quarterly numbers are the most common way we see GDP growth published (CNN’s number) and the Reuter’s number is what the White House’s own source leads with once they get around to looking at he whole year:
This is the relevant number and that is why it leads. They are simply taking the GDP at the end of the year, subtracting out the GDP from the beginning, and dividing that by the beginning GDP to find the rate.
The White House appears to be using a number that appears further down in the BEA report…where you just take all 4 quarters GDP growth numbers and divide by 4.
That is very disturbing.
Learning history in my scattershot way has made a big difference to me. I read H.G. Wells’s “The Outline of History” when I was 19 and I loved the scope of it. However, there was an intimidating amount of history and it took a long time before I felt I had the barest basics. I recommend reading history.
Nonetheless, I remain perplexed that American historians, who presumably know much more history than the average American or average student, are some of the most liberal/progressive/leftist in the academic fold.
I would have thought their knowledge of the harsh, cruel reality of human existence over the centuries and millennia would temper their leftism, but that seems not to be the case.
Manju… no it isn’t.
Weird was Barry Soetoro’s U-3 stats.
Plumeting unemployment stats — very disturbing to the MSM.
Also quite depressing: rising total employment.
What a bummer.
He was exceedingly familiar with the outlook of university students,
No, he was quite familiar with the outlook of students of the sort he taught. All of his teaching was done at research institutions and over 70% of his time was at private research universities in the United States, the sort of places where occupational schools are limited to post-baccalaureate instruction, where the bulk of your students hail from the professional-managerial bourgeoisie (and very seldom from wage-earning families) and where the bulk of them are headed to a life in that class. Bloom had college educated parents with bourgeois occupations, and the family had a domestic living with them at one point.
Bloom’s closest relations in the younger generation were his sister’s children, which included two daughters born in 1954 and 1956 respectively. The older daughter married at 18 and change (at which time she hadn’t completed her 3d year of high school), birthed a child out in Monterey at age 20, and secured a divorce decree ‘ere that child was even a year old. The younger daughter secured a divorce shy of age 25 and embarked on her 2d marriage a couple of years later. Was his understanding of youth influenced by the pratfalls of this pair?
See KC Johnson on American history instruction. Whole subdisciplines have disappeared and been displaced by peddlers of race-class-gender discourse. Many a place a college board acting conscientiously would discontinue American history instruction and discharge that faculty.
Neo, I haven’t watched this, but I wonder if you might have taken your transcript from this “Firing Line” interview of Dr. Bloom by William F. Buckley, with audience:
Episode S0735, Recorded on April 15, 1987
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LAo6nJr5xjg
A good example of what is happening to history and its teaching can be found here.
The final speaker, Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Princeton University), began by saying: “For the next few minutes I want to concentrate on the systemic marginalisation of people of colour in the credentialed and accredited knowledge production of the discipline.”
Apparently, the organisers of the SCS annual meeting had contributed to this marginalisation by holding the conference at a hotel in San Diego:
Already by the historical process of convening this conference in locations that are not only ludicrously expensive to travel to but that are rife with micro- and macroaggressions that target people of colour, the SCS does people of colour no favours.
This is a meeting of Classics students and professors ! Victor Davis Hanson, who taught Classics to Fresno State students for year has commented on how Classics, as a field of study kin colleges, is vanishing. I assume this is why
When I was a graduate student in history in the early 1970s in the University of California, the virtually complete historical ignorance of our undergraduates was one of our regular topics of conversation, one that seems to have continued to the present day almost without change. Well, that’s not quite true. At first, it was part of the larger discussion of the teaching of history – why weren’t student’s interested? Many argued history wasn’t ‘relevant’ or that we should be teaching whatever was fashionable (and have fashions ever changed since then!), and that whatever we did teach we should not spend time on political history (which was known in the trade in those days as “kings and battles”). In those days, we could be reasonably sure that graduates of all California high schools, and the graduates of most other decent high schools, had gotten B or better grades (this was pre-grade inflation) in Western civilization (usually courses in both 7th grade and 10th grade), American history (8th and 11th grade) and American political institutions (often called civics or ‘American Institutions’) (12th grade). Our problem then wasn’t that the kiddies hadn’t been exposed to the information so much as that in most cases it didn’t “take”. If memory services, there was a bit better grasp of American history, but very little of European. In the days of fairly rigorous general education requirements, and before AP courses were widespread (and UC required a 5 to get out of a course), almost all freshmen had to take Western civilization (which was really a short introduction to the classical and medieval worlds as background for the heart of the course, which was essentially Europe from the Renaissance through the First or Second World War). And most sophomores were required to take a survey course in US history (which could be comprehensive, but tended to emphasize the Revolutionary era, the Civil War, the Progressive Era, the New Deal and WWII). As TAs for large lecture classes, we strove mightily to make the material memorable, with varying success. The thing we struggled with the most now seems almost risible: the lack in Americans of what we described as “an historical consciousness” of the sort one found in well-educated Europeans, the lack of a “sense of history” as a whole as well as a lack of a sense of one’s own history (not the same thing).
As an aside, I was always one of the minority who argued for the importance of teaching political history: without it, one does not have a framework or context within which to place more specialized areas of interest and study (such as my own interest in intellectual history). And without context, most areas of study devolve into chaos or self-congratulatory exercises.
Before the ‘70s were out, the general education requirements were loosened or eliminated, and the gods alone know what happened in the high schools to learning. Not only did students come to the big U not remembering much of their history or civics instruction, but without having had much of it at all. The, at the university, they could satisfy their loosened history requirements with discrete courses of special interest (of the sort that once had the survey courses as prerequisites).
Note, much of this was already happening (and perhaps set the stage for) the grand change and deterioration of the practice and study of history in the late ‘70s and since, the popularity of leftist propagandist historians such as Howard Zinn, and the focus on victimized minorities and oppression.
When my children were in high school around the beginning of the 21st century, I insisted they read what I’d consider solid mainstream college level texts: RR Palmer, et.al.’s The Making of the Modern World (still a classic, but now it should be supplemented by Jacques Barzun’s monumental, but idiosyncratic, From Dawn to Decadence) for Western civilization and Morison, Commager and Leuchtenburg’s The Growth of the American Republic for US history. I also insisted they read The Black Book of Communism, which should be required reading for every American (even AOC!).
I’m still convinced that solid historical knowledge is the best antidote for leftist utopian schemes, but it’s getting harder and harder to find the best books, and harder and harder to get people to read them.
I didn’t discover that history was my favorite subject until my 2nd year in college when I took a Russian history course. All through my primary education, history was taught via texts that I found extremely boring. From college on, I, like Frederick in the above post, read history through the primary sources. What a crying shame that such fascinating truth is bound by lifeless texts (and even worse–Zinn) and presented to our young as formation. I have a saying, “history is the only subject God requires of his people”. There is good reason for that.
CatoRenasci–I loved Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence. What perspective it gives to all the present issues we face. So many fall under the category, “there is nothing new under the sun.”
Solely to touch the hilarious implications in the aforementioned Society of Classics Studies conference, a link: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0059%3Aentry%3Dclassiarius
And now for a thumb in the eye to the abolishers, another: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collection?collection=Perseus:collection:Greco-Roman
All through my primary education, history was taught via texts that I found extremely boring.
When I was about 14, I found my cousin’s high school “World History” text book. It read like a novel. It began with the Doric invasion of Greece and ended with World War I. He had graduated HS in 1938. I read it more than once. It got left behind when I went off to college. I would love to find it now.
History texts, like most textbooks, became filled with images and diagrams in the 1960s. Some of this was to reduce the reading level required, and some to jack up the price. These text books are deadly dull.
“That is very disturbing.”
manju is easily disturbed. Must be afraid of losing his beefaroni ration.
Bloom (like myself) insisted that “truth” could not be “relativistic”. However, more recently, people have used the term relativistic in relation to morality, with leftists insisting that both truth and morality are relativistic.
When I hear conservatives decry “moral relativity” it astonishes me. Morality is not the same as truth. No matter how it eludes us, there is an objective truth. But morality is a highly complex human construct that has evolved along with human societies. Even today, it should be clear that different cultures of the world have radically different moral codes. Hell, I doubt that my next door neighbor has the same moral values I do. Fortunately, they seem to be close enough that I don’t worry about him. It may be that no two human beings carry the exact same moral code by which to judge their actions and those of others by.
That is, of course, why we have Law. Some judge once remarked, “This is a Court of Law, not Justice.” He understood that justice is ineffable. What seems fair and just to me, may not seem at all fair or just to you. If we had the same concepts of fairness and justice, then we would have no need for courts or laws.
And even within the individual, actions that are moral in one set of circumstances may be immoral in a different set. Humans and our relationships with other humans and our societies are massively complex. A lot of our most important literature deals with people trying to decide what is the “right thing” in difficult circumstances. If the “right thing” was always the same, for everyone, all the time… Well, I suppose life would be simpler, safer, and a lot less interesting. But, it isn’t.
Roy: You’re certainly correct that truth and morality are not the same thing, but the move I think you’re having trouble with is this: once you accept the possibility the existence of absolute truth (which is what I take you to mean by ‘truth’), then it is possible that truth may exist in all things. That possibility encompasses the possibility of a true morality. If there is a true morality, then moralities other than that true morality are (or at least may be) false. Since many who decry ‘relative morality’ believe not only that truth exists, but that truth has a source and that that source has given us a true morality, there is nothing inconsistent with a belief in the existence of truth and an abhorrence for relative morality (which if it allows for morality to be relative – equivocally predicated – musts be a false morality since only one morality is true).
This is of course grossly oversimplified. The best (in the sense of thoughtful, rigorous, knowledgeable, well-read and humane) philosopher I knew well often expressed the view that while he didn’t think we could know absolute truth, he believed absolute truth existed, or at least the possibility of it existed. Otherwise, the ultimate result of 20th century philosophy was nihilism, and he’d wasted his life. (As a joke he once described Nietzsche as something close to a mad logical positivist, but there was insight even in the joke….)
Tried to link this yesterday but it evidently got stuck in moderation: https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/2019/3/decline-fall-classics-edition
CatoRenasci,
The error I see is the statement “truth has a source”. Unless you are looking for causality all the way back to the Big Bang, then there is no source of truth. It just is. To even imagine a source, implies that it is potentially malleable, and thus, relativistic. No… A is A and 2 +2 = 4, independent of the existence of humans in the universe to discover it.
However, we can only discuss morality in terms of humanity. When the lion hunts and kills a gazelle we do not call it murder. They both have their own rules and mandates that their nature imposes upon them. To apply human morality to them would be absurd.
Likewise, the morality of a hunter-gatherer tribe of isolated humans in the middle of the Amazon will be radically different than that of modern city dwellers. Our morality is a tool, invented by humans, for humans. So long as our conditions are changing and not absolute, there can never be an absolute morality.
Roy,
The statement “truth has a source” was not an assertion on my part, but intended to be descriptive of the view held by many who believe in absolute truth.
I’m not sure your assertion A is A and 2 + 2 = 4 represents absolute truth in any philosophically meaningful way. Axioms of mathematics, certainly, but truth? How can you know?
My own position is closer to my philosopher friend that while absolute truth exists (or may exist, I go back and forth), it is unlikely that we can know what that absolute truth is. Certainly, we can and should try to know truth, and perhaps we can approach it asymptotically.
CR,
Sorry, but if we cannot agree on the philosophical certainty that A is A and 2 + 2 = 4, then we have nothing further to talk about.
Not sure whether we are seeing the downfall of history or the downfall of our ruling class as an intellectual force. My kids and millennials I work with out here in flyover country seem to have their heads screwed on pretty straight. We might just be seeing the long overdue end game of individualism vs. collectivism in this country.
Everyone knows Orwell’s list of totalitarian maxims:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
Forty years later we have Allan Bloom:
Open is Closed
Presumably the corollary, “Closed is Open,” also applies.
Yes, I know Bloom has his arguments and they make some sense given the long leftward slide in academia, but deep down I’ve never been able to square that circle. It still strikes me as a risky sophistry and Bloom still strikes me as a closed-minded person himself, however useful his insights on recent American education may be.
How much different would Bloom’s book be if it were titled, “The Denierism of the American Mind”?
I’m reasonably certain that, strictly speaking, Bloom was never a professor of philosophy. Rather, he taught political philosophy in political science departments at Cornell and Toronto, and in the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago.
http://olincenter.uchicago.edu/lillacv.html