HONEST HISTORY
|
 |
|
We must compare our
students' basic
knowledge
with students
from the past.
|
|
|
Thomas Sowell"You're history!" is one of the popular ways
of dismissing someone today. Unfortunately, in too many of our
schools and colleges today, history itself is "history."
In
many places, history has been replaced by "social studies" -- a
politically correct rendition of current social issues. When there
is history, all too often it is "revisionist" history that looks
back through the past to find things to denounce about America or
about Western civilization.
Even the biggest and oldest
scholarly organization of historians -- the American Historical
Association -- has gone politically correct. Not only have they
become a lobbying group for various government policies, they take
political positions on things that have nothing to do with history
-- AIDS, environmentalism and "gender diversity," for
example.
Too many historians, like too many other academics
today, look upon scholarship and education as an opportunity to
carry on politics by other means. To these politicized professors,
the lectern is a soap box and the students are potential disciples
in ideological crusades.
Not everyone in the history
profession takes this view, of course. But few have stood up to the
strident ideologues, who have often been allowed to become the tail
that wags the dog. Now, at last, an alternative organization for
historians in taking shape.
The new organization is called
the Historical Society. Its leader, distinguished historian Eugene
Genovese, says that it will focus on plain history -- not the new
trinity of race, class and gender, not esoteric abstractions or the
rest of the self-indulgent agenda of those who see history as just a
means to some ideological end.
Predictably, but sadly, the
new organization's motives have been questioned and it is being
depicted as a bunch of reactionaries who don't want historians
looking into things like the postwar development of suburbs or NATO
policy.
In point of fact, the new Historical Society has no
restrictions and includes liberals and leftists, as well as
conservatives. Far from being uninterested in racial issues, its
founder, Eugene Genovese, has written one of the classic books on
slavery in the antebellum South and has spent three years at a black
institution, Atlanta University.
The reckless, false and ad
hominem charges against the new organization give a painful insight
into what is wrong with the old one and with the people who have led
it down the garden path.
Why is history important? The past
is important because the future is important. Without history, many
people have no idea how many of today's half-baked ideas have been
tried, again and again -- and have repeatedly led to disaster. Most
of these ideas are not new. They are just being recycled with
retreaded rhetoric.
Ideas that have become fashionable since
the 1960s can be found in the writings of William Godwin in the
1790s. Ancient Greek tyrants played the political game of
redistributing other people's wealth to the poor as a means of
gaining despotic power over rich and poor alike. Yet hundreds of
millions of people fell for the same trick in the 20th century --
and tens of millions of these people paid with their lives in the
Soviet Union under Stalin and in China under Mao.
It is not
just bad ideas that history makes us aware of. It also makes us
aware of how rare our good fortune as Americans has been and what
has spared us the traumas that so many other nations have suffered
and still suffer today.
It is not just our economic
prosperity, though that is important. We don't have to worry about
military coups, though there are countries where juntas have seized
power again and again. Even the racial problems of this country do
not begin to compare to what has happened in the Balkans or Rwanda
or Sri Lanka, much less Nazi Germany.
The people who wrote
the Constitution of the United States had a broad and deep knowledge
of history. That is why they wrote the Constitution the way they
did, to cut off despots at the pass, to keep us from slaughtering
each other over religious differences and to prevent politicians
from ruining the economy.
However well they did their work,
only the living can maintain the benefits they created. And they can
do that only if they understand some of the lessons of history that
are embodied in our laws and institutions -- which are far more
important than the hot topics of the moment that some choose to call
"the real issues."
To find out more about Thomas Sowell and
read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists,
visit the Creators Syndicate web page at http://www.creators.com/.
COPYRIGHT
1998 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Back to Current
Affairs
| |
home
marriage &
family
moms, dads,
kids
current
affairs
Dads Against the Divorce Industry