John Hajduk
History
The University of Montana-Western
"[I]f you have any new insight, any original idea, if you present men and affairs under an unwonted aspect, you will surprise the reader. And the reader does not want to be surprised. He seeks in a history only the stupidities with which he is familiar."--Anatole France/1/
Way back in 1924, Harry E. Barnes took issue with some Wisconsin lawmakers who wanted to make it illegal to teach American history in their state. It was not that those legislators objected to telling stories about the past, even the American past, but they had a pretty narrow view of exactly what topics and perspectives were appropriate for the classroom. In other words, their proposed curriculum was to history as doggerel is to poetry (and it's doubtful they would have recognized that distinction either). Barnes's name for this hijacking of intellectual integrity and academic freedom was the "drool method of history," wherein every general was a hero, every president a paragon of virtue, every frontiersman a pure prophet of democracy./2/ It probably goes without saying that the only actors in this particular pageant were men and, oh yes, white. Even 78 years ago this looked fishy, and luckily in the years since we've managed to advance beyond such narrow-minded conceptions of the past. But perhaps not far enough that we can't be sucked back into such outmoded thinking when circumstances momentarily shake our sense of reason. The terror of last September 11 certainly created such circumstances.
Even months later, writing about the events of September 11 remains emotionally and intellectually daunting. The barrage of information, commentary, and images--especially the images--that followed the attacks in New York and Washington can't help but cloud individual perspective even as it intends to provide the means by which we might better understand the full implications and consequences of those attacks. For those with more personal connections to the victims, however remote by time or distance, the capacity for anything resembling calm reflection is even more elusive.
One would like to believe that the mere passage of time will serve as a useful filter, sharpening the focus on those events so that they can be more easily managed for purposes of research or teaching, or even just personal understanding. If several months is not sufficient, maybe in a couple of years, or maybe decades, we'll eventually be able to approach the terrorist attacks with something akin to disinterested objectivity. As a historian, I know that attitude represents a dangerous fallacy--if things appear more clear the deeper they are in the past, it is often just an illusion created by the loss of pertinent materials or perspectives that, if we could access them, might turn even some of our most cherished "truths" on their heads. Comprehending and acknowledging the infinite amount of things we don't know about the past, let alone the present, is a huge part of whatever wisdom we have collectively derived from the study of history over the centuries.
But nobody wanted to hear about what we don't know in the aftermath of the attacks, including the students in my classes. The range of their questions was a bracing, if not surprising, reflection of the simplistic views of the Middle East and America's role in international affairs over the past sixty years that have been perpetuated by elected officials, mass media news outlets, and, yes, even our schools. Added to those simplistic views was the legitimate anger, frustration, and fear that fueled their comments, emotions that threatened to reduce any discussion to an uncritical call for retribution. I have to admit that my immediate gut level response was not so different. But it didn't take long to realize that that was not a healthy or constructive way to deal with my students, or to serve my professional discipline.
A little background information might help frame the comments I make below. My major training is in American Cultural History. At the core of any culture are the values that tie its people together; the ways that they manifest and express those values are at the heart of what I'm most interested in as a historian. At Western, I teach a wide variety of courses in American History, including both halves of the survey course, American diplomacy, government, and a variety of topical and period courses, many of which draw on my specialization in cultural history. In addition, when I arrived in Dillon five years ago, I was asked to create a course on Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America to satisfy OPI requirements for prospective Social Studies teachers who needed some coverage of non-western history. Readers who know anything about the rich histories of even one of those regions (let alone the multitude of nations and peoples that make up each) will immediately realize that such a course merely skims the surface. My own graduate studies included only a tiny amount of study in these areas (and mainly within the framework of their relations with the United States), which was one reason for combining them into a single course; it also meant that I've put more work into preparing for that course than any other I've taught at Western. I don't mean to suggest by any stretch that this makes me an expert on those parts of the world, far from it. But the way I've designed the course--to address a series of questions about the very nature of how history is practiced and what practical functions it serves--may be relevant to understanding the following comments. More pointedly, the central question students address in that class is, why do WE need to know anything about those parts of the world.
One other point: I firmly believe that the discipline of history (and perhaps any form of education) is built on a foundation of healthy skepticism. That is, all we know (or think we know) is subject to rigorous questioning and re-examination. Any progress we make in reducing our collective ignorance is at least partly a result of going back and constantly reviewing and challenging our pre-conceived notions about the past. Some observers see this method of constant questioning as a dangerous threat to some pretty substantial ideals. But that's a straw man argument, one that may serve political ends but should be anathema to academics. Clearly, if those ideals are worth preserving, they will stand up to rigorous questioning without any problems; and those who conduct the inquiry will have a more solid understanding of why those particular ideals have retained their value across generations. If they can't stand up to that kind of scrutiny, they deserve to die out.
By way of illustration, the playwright Lillian Hellman once commented on the consequences of the failure to be skeptical in addressing the Red Scare of the 1950s: "We, as a people, agreed in the Fifties to swallow any nonsense that was repeated often enough, without examination of its meaning or investigation into its roots."/3/ Hellman's point wasn't that communism was just swell; rather that by blindly accepting the most narrow definition of Americanism, we stood precariously close to losing the ability to differentiate between what's good and what's not in our society, with the consequence of nearly snuffing out those qualities of life that make our system so strong and preferable to totalitarianism.
But back to my main point. Going into the classroom in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks represented a considerable challenge to teachers everywhere. In my own case, I wanted to answer, as best I could, the questions sure to be raised by the students in relation to circumstances in the Middle East,/4/ the role of the United States there, and those seeking some insight via historical context or comparison ("Is it just like Pearl Harbor?"). I know similar questions were raised in classrooms across the country, and I'm sure that, like me, teachers themselves struggled to comprehend exactly what had occurred and how our knowledge of the past could be marshaled to help make sense of the present. It was easy enough to outline the general circumstances of the various conflicts plaguing the Middle East, offering up summaries of the wars between Israel and its neighbors, Iraq and Iran, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union (and the concurrent emergence of the mujahadeen and Osama Bin Laden). It didn't take long to run down the backgrounds of some of the key figures, names maybe heard before but little noted that suddenly took on considerably more import. A little more complicated was mapping out the religious divisions, not only among Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, but within each as well, while recognizing the political, economic, and social features of each.
But as alluded to above, as teachers we are more than just sources of information. There were other more challenging questions that pushed beyond merely identifying the players and their respective agendas, questions that addressed more than relatively stable facts. These queries probed deeper into motivations and consequences, and could not be answered anywhere near definitively by watching CNN or scanning the New York Times web-site. Perhaps foremost among these, and one that clearly made a number of students uncomfortable if not downright hostile, was whether or not past actions of the United States made us in any way culpable for the attacks. The answer to that question was hardly as cut and dried as tracing the chronology of how Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda emerged as significant forces in the Middle East.
Even a cursory review of Middle Eastern affairs over the past several generations reveals how deeply United States policy and actions have shaped the current troubled situation. Digging just a little below the surface reveals how readily we've sacrificed the notions of self-determination, free enterprise, and even democracy as they applied to Arab and Persian states in pursuit of our own national interests (whether economic, meaning oil, or political with regard to Cold War concerns), even as we trumpeted those concepts as our ultimate gift to those peoples. Frankly, it's not a very pretty record, unless one defines morality solely in terms of realpolitik: coercive licensing of oil rights throughout the Persian Gulf region; propping up despotic regimes in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; toppling a democratic regime in Iran; refusal to denounce Israeli aggression in Palestine; bombarding civilian targets in Lebanon; abandoning Afghanistan to a vicious civil war in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal; covertly aiding both sides in the Iraq/Iran war; sponsoring crushing economic sanctions on Iraq that have left tens of thousands dead while having no noticeable impact on Saddam Hussein (the ostensible target of the sanctions); and the list could go on.
As bad as they are, listing out these transgressions does not prove a case against the United States. All nations operate out of a commitment to their own interests, and that often means compromising or even violating their most cherished principles in pursuit of some greater good--the ends justify the means. Who, for example, would argue that many of the freedoms we enjoy in the United States aren't made possible by a generally robust economy fueled largely by oil?
But by the same token, these transgressions can't be ignored as a significant part of the historical context for the events of 9/11. The drool method of history, however, demands that we set these concerns aside as irrelevant, immaterial, and worst of all, unpatriotic. The only thing that is supposed to count is our own loss, the violation of our sense of security and well-being. It is too troubling for many Americans to examine the actions of our government or our most powerful economic entities when it is so clear that the real enemies are a bunch of demented fanatics living in caves. But I, for one, can't help but wonder: what fed their fanaticism, what drove them to the caves, and isn't it possible, just possible, that some of those items listed above were contributing factors to the desperate actions they took last September?
This is exactly the sort of question that academics have been getting into trouble over for as long as there have been state supported schools that, at least theoretically, promote critical thinking. It also seems to me to be an incredibly pertinent question, not for reasons of assigning blame or scoring partisan political points, but for figuring out how to proceed in assuring such a tragedy is not repeated.
It was in addressing this question in particular that many students were handicapped by the simplistic view of history that is too often promoted by our culture (as I suspect is true in virtually every culture), the remnants of the drool method. We want to believe Americans are always the good guys, and there's no shortage of reinforcement of that idea in the mainstream media. One need look no further than the recent spate of very similar and popular examinations of the World War II era, including the works of Stephen Ambrose, Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, and Tom Brokaw's books and television specials on "the greatest generation." From a cultural standpoint, I'd argue that there is value in these works, that the celebration (even mythologizing) of our ancestors is essential for maintaining our commitment to the core values of our nation across generations. But we shouldn't mistake those celebrations for reasoned analysis, nor expect that they present a conception of the world and our place in it (as fixed in 1945) that must remain our primary determinant in addressing current affairs.
And yet, it was hard not to see those types of attitudes coming to the fore after 9/11. This was inescapable--and to some degree necessary--with regard to the rhetoric adopted by political figures who had a legitimate responsibility to reassure and unite the country in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. But was it the role of the intellectual community, including professors and their students, to rally around the flag blindly without any thought given to the tough questions that ultimately must be answered?
The answer to that is an unqualified no. We create institutions of higher learning in part because there are great social benefits to bringing together individuals of various backgrounds, faculty and students, to think about and research and discuss all manner of difficult questions. We recognize that answers to those questions are often arrived at from collective activity, again involving both faculty and students. Sometimes the questions are technical in nature, sometimes they are philosophical. In either case they are sometimes so politically charged, both on campus and off, that merely posing them makes us vulnerable to all sorts of anti-intellectual backlash.
But intellectual integrity, combined with due sensitivity to the legitimate emotional toll exacted by the terrorist attacks on the national psyche, demands that we push for answers to those harder questions. There are good reasons to examine the contradictions and flaws in our own nation's history (and current practices, too), not to tear it down, but to reinforce those core values that have served us so well. Or we can go back to the drool method, which I'm sure you already recognized as nothing more than historical fundamentalism.
Notes
Quoted by Harry E. Barnes, "The Drool Method of History," American Mercury, January 1924, 31.[Back]
Ibid.[Back]
Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time (New York: Bantam Books 1976), 75.[Back]
You may recall that whatever doubt about the ethnicity of the hijackers existed immediately following the attacks was resolved by the following day with reports of the various cell phone calls from the planes' passengers.[Back]