Program on American Citizenship History in the age of fracture

By Wilfred M. McClay June 2015

KEY POINTS

. The discipline of history is in serious decline, as both practitioners and the public lack confidence that it can be a truth-seeking enterprise or provide a coherent account of the past. . The so-called “age of fracture” in our current culture means that the broad commonalities of shared history are becoming less important than individual experience. . To overcome its current decline, history must address the public’s common past and future in a way meant to contribute to a healthy foundation for our common civic existence. . uiuiuii

ike so many of the disciplines making up much on the belief that the road we have traveled L the humanities, the field of history has for to date offers us only a parade of negative some time been experiencing a slow examples of oppression, error, and dissolution, a decline that may be approaching a obsolescence—proof positive that the past has no critical juncture. Students of academic life lessons applicable to our unprecedented age. express this decline quantitatively, citing This loss of faith in the central importance of shrinking enrollments in history courses, the history pervades all of American society. Gone are disappearance of required history courses in the days when widely shared narratives about the university curricula, and the loss of tenurable past provided a sense of civilizational unity and faculty positions in all history-related areas.1 forward propulsion. Instead, we live, argues But even more disturbing indications of history’s historian Daniel T. Rodgers, in a querulous “age troubled status are harder to measure but of fracture” in which all narratives are contested impossible to ignore. One senses a loss of self- and the various disciplines no longer take a broad confidence, a fear that the study of the past may view of the human condition, rarely speak to one no longer be valuable or important and that another, and have abandoned the search for history itself lacks the capacity to be a coherent common ground in favor of focusing on the and truth-seeking enterprise, producing genuine concerns and perspectives of ever-more-minute knowledge that helps us locate ourselves in the subdisciplines, smaller groups, more finely tuned broad expanses of space and time. Some of this and exclusive categories of experience.2 This is derives from the growing vocationalism in not just a feature of academic life but seems to be American higher education, flowing from a desire an emerging feature of American life more that a college degree should lead reliably to generally. The broad and embracing gainful employment. But the fear rests just as commonalities of old are no more, undermined

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 1 and fragmented into a thousand subcultural preconceptions. But such works are at least being pieces. read by a public that is still hungry for history. This condition has profound implications for the Not content with this state of affairs, Bender academy and our society. The loss of history, not urges that we remember the example of certain only as a body of knowledge but also as a professional historians—the Progressive distinctive way of thinking about the world, will historians, such as Vernon Louis Parrington, have dire effects on the quality of our civic life. It Charles Beard, and , or would be ironic if the great advances in a more recent one like the great Yale colonialist professional historical writing that we have seen Edmund Morgan—who were able to write for all in the past century or so—advances that have, kinds of audiences. He ends his article with a plea through the exploitation of fresh data and new for “synthetic histories” that somehow square the techniques of analysis, opened to us a more circle of subdisciplinary intensity and grand expansive but also a more detailed understanding narrative sweep, managing to enrich the latter of countless formerly hidden aspects of the past— with no loss of the former. But his examples are came at the expense of a more general audience less than convincing, since the Progressive for history, and for the resultant valuable effects historians were committed to a rather simplistic upon our public life. and highly political view of American history, as a constant conflict between the progressive forces This would be ironic, but it appears to be true. As of light and the regressive powers of darkness, a New York University historian Thomas Bender view that few professional historians today would laments in a recent article, gloomily entitled countenance.5 “How Historians Lost Their Public,” the growth of knowledge in ever-more-numerous and tightly focused subspecialties of history has resulted in the replacement of the old-fashioned survey The loss of a public course in colleges and universities—with its audience for history expansive scale, synthesizing panache, and virtuoso instructors—with more narrowly focused may be due to the loss courses confined to the research specialty of the professor.3 of a history for the Bender is loath to give up any of the advances public, a neglect of made by the profession’s ever-more-intensive history’s fundamentally form of historical cultivation, but he concedes that something has gone wrong: historians have public meaning. lost the ability to speak to, and command the attention of, a larger audience, even a well- educated one, that is seeking more general It is worth noting that Bender is not the first to meaning in the study of the past. They have make such a plea for synthesis. As Harvard indeed lost their public. They have had to cede historian Bernard Bailyn remarked in his 1981 much of their field to journalists, who know how presidential address to the American Historical to write much more accessibly and are willing to Association: “The greatest challenge that will face address themes—journalist Tom Brokaw’s historians in the years ahead, it seems to me, is … celebration of the “greatest generation” for how to put the story together again, now with a example—that strike a chord with the public but complexity and an analytic dimension never that professional historians have been trained to envisioned before; how to draw together the disdain as ethnocentric, triumphalist, or information available (quantitative and uncritically celebratory.4 Professional historians qualitative, statistical and literary, visual and complain that such material lacks nuance and oral) into readable accounts of major rigor and is prone to repackage the past in terms developments.”6 This is another call for the that readers will find pleasing to their squaring of the circle, and it has thus far proven insurmountably difficult to answer.

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That we have made so little progress, in more phenomenon that exists and unfolds in the than a third of a century, in creating the kind of medium of time can be made into history. A “new narratives” that Bailyn envisioned, let alone history can be written about any subject, using all in making them publicly useful in the ways the typical methods for the reconstruction of the Bender hopes for, ought to give us pause and past, combining narrative and analysis in a way perhaps make us wonder if we need to rethink that illuminates the emergence and evolution of our expectations and our premises. Perhaps the subject at hand. Almost no subject areas something is wrong with the assumption that the cannot be discussed or treated “historically,” but problem is simply one of translating the findings the reverse is generally not the case. You can of specialists into winsome and flowing language write a history of botany, but you cannot write a that nonspecialists and ordinary citizens can botany of history. grasp. Perhaps the problem goes deeper than It is the peculiar nature of history, therefore, that that. Perhaps there is something vitally it is not so much a discipline or a definite body of important, a missing principle of organization, knowledge, even if we often speak of it as if it that professional historical writing, almost by were, but instead it is a way of seeing and definition, cannot provide. understanding and rendering the world, and a The steady disintegration of history as a way of seeing and understanding and rendering discipline and the loss of a public audience for other forms of knowledge. Is there a proper body history may be two expressions of the same of knowledge that we can call “history” itself? Not problem: the obscuring of the fact that historical really. You would have a hard time finding a knowledge and historical consciousness derive group of the most eminent historians who could their meaning, in a very fundamental way, from agree about the proper content, limits, and their association with our common life, especially characteristics of their own field, let alone our civic life, and therefore with civic education. identify a body of historical knowledge that is The loss of a public audience for history may be essential. That this should be so is due partly to due to the loss of a history for the public, a our “age of fracture,” but also partly to the nature neglect of history’s fundamentally public of the discipline itself. A history is never merely meaning. history, but also a history of something. To his credit, Bender recognizes this and rejects History is also slippery to write about because it the proposition that “because our public culture trains itself on a target that is both indistinct and has fractured and we seem to be losing our constantly moving. The scientific method calls longstanding alliance with journalism, we no upon us to approach a stable, law-abiding natural longer have obligations to the public that date world with hypotheses that are testable and from the founding of our profession.”7 He is not susceptible to confirmation or disconfirmation willing to accept the idea that the process of through carefully framed empirical experiments. history becoming professional sets it free to go its The discipline of history, however, is the science own way, heedless of the public’s need of it. This of incommensurable things, untestable is an admirable position, though one that most propositions, and unrepeatable events—which is professional historians would probably not to say it is impossible for it ever to be a science. endorse. I would endorse it, and take it even Human affairs, by their very nature, cannot be further. made to conform to the scientific method unless they are first divested of their humanity. The

study of human beings must take into account the fact that when human beings are the objects of History as Memory, Not study rather than colliding billiard balls or falling apples, human consciousness is always there to Science affect the terms of engagement. In physics, the What do we mean when we speak of “history”? Of establishment of certain laws of motion does not all the recognized academic disciplines, history have a feedback effect on the phenomena may well be the most difficult to generalize about. themselves. Projectiles are not made restive and Its scope is virtually limitless, since any rebellious by the knowledge that they move in

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 3 parabolas; in human affairs, however, our actions attending to. That is how and why we remember are always affected by what we know, or think we the most meaningful things, as constellations know, about the past. Often we study the past to rather than individual points of light. Without escape from it, as the American founders sought such patterns, the facts are unremembered or to do, rather than to conform to it. arrange themselves haphazardly—and the past takes on the dismal form of unrelated succession The impulse to “do” history seems to be intrinsic captured so memorably by the great antihistorical to us as human beings, because we are philosopher of history Henry Ford, who is remembering and story-making creatures. What reputed to have disparaged history as “one we call history is merely the intensification of that damned thing after another.” basic human impulse. But the cultivation of it is essential to the perpetuation of civilized life. A compelling illustration of this is recounted in Historical consciousness is to civilized society journalist David Shenk’s fine book The what memory is to individual identity. Without Forgetting, which is not only a haunting and memory and the stories memories are suspended luminous study of Alzheimer’s disease but also a in, we cannot say who or what we are. Without it, sustained meditation on memory—and thereby, we cannot learn, use language, pass on one might say, on the sources and meaning of knowledge, raise children, establish rules of history.9 Shenk recounts the fascinating case conduct, engage in science, or even dwell in study of a man whom psychologists call “S.” He society. was a Russian journalist who “remembered virtually every detail of sight and sound that he Nor can we have a sense of the future as a time we had come into contact with in his entire life.”10 know will come because memory helps us His freakish talent emerged, so the story goes, remember that other tomorrows also have come. when an editor reprimanded S. for failing to take A culture without memory will necessarily be notes at a staff meeting—and S proceeded to barbarous and easily tyrannized because the repeat back to him every word that had been incessant drumbeat of daily events will drown out spoken in the meeting to that point. The editor all our efforts to connect past, present, and future sent S to the distinguished psychologist A. R. and thereby understand the things that unfold in Luria, who subjected him to a battery of tests, and time, including the path of our own lives. confirmed that it was true: there seemed to be no Memory is a crucial source of continuity. As limit to the number of details S could recall. He Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, memory is “the could, for example, memorize lengthy tables of cement, the bitumen, the matrix in which the random numbers in an instant and recall them other faculties are embedded. . . . Without it, all perfectly for decades to come. It seemed that the of life and thought is an unrelated succession.”8 It man remembered literally everything. need hardly be said that the same things can be And yet, Shenk adds, “he understood almost said of history, as the chief form taken by public, nothing,” because he could not “make meaning collective, shared memory. Without it, our out of what he saw.” For example, when common life too is reduced to a condition of presented with tables of numbers placed in a “unrelated succession.” deliberate and obvious pattern, such as a But something more needs to be said. We do not standard ordinal sequence (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so acquire a life-enhancing memory, or a lively forth), he could not make out the pattern. He was historical consciousness, through the mere piling chronically disorganized and struck most up of facts. It is not as if the more facts you retain, observers as dim-witted because he was unable to the better off you are. It might make you a better respond appropriately to the circumstances game show contestant, but that is its extent. around him. As Shenk concludes, “This Instead, memory is most powerful when it is astounding man, then, was not so much gifted purposeful and selective. It requires a structure with the ability to remember everything as he was within which facts arrange themselves and cursed with the inability to forget detail and form thereby take on significance. Above all, it requires more general impressions. He recorded only that we possess narratives that link facts and information, and was bereft of the essential provide a way of knowing what facts are worth ability to draw meaning out of events.” For him,

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 4 life was indeed “one damned thing after read it historically, which would mean bringing to another.”11 the text that particular kind of contextual understanding that is the historian’s métier. And As the case of S. illustrates, what makes for in failing to do so, we will have failed to do the genuinely intelligent and insightful memory is a necessary work to determine whether what he certain balance in the mental economy of said to a British audience in the 17th century— remembering and forgetting. Memory takes an that religious toleration can be extended to active role in thinning out the mental trees so that Protestants and Jews but not to Catholics—can be forests can be discerned. It is selective by nature. applicable to questions of religious liberty and This selectivity is neatly reflected in the toleration in our own day. etymology of the ancient Greek word logos, sometimes translated as “account” or “argument,” which derives from the verb legein, meaning “to The practice of history select.” To give a rational, coherent, and truthful account of something, one has to select the details is always and inevitably to be stressed and leave the others out. When we shaped by the most relate the story of a commission of a crime, we do not pause to describe the exact temperature, the pressing questions that relative humidity, the singing birds, the clouds in the sky, and the sounds of lawn mowers and the present asks of the passing traffic. We do not do that, because these past, and those things are not essential to forming a theory of the case, a logos of the crime. Instead, we seek to questions are remember those things that fit a template of meaning and point to a larger whole. We fail to constantly changing. retain the details that, like wandering orphans, have no connection to anything of abiding Americans like to believe in the possibility of concern. personal transformation. But history reminds us that our origins linger on in us. It reminds us that we can never entirely remove the incidentals of our time and place, because they are never In the Court of History entirely incidental. At the same time, it reminds us that this has always been true. A measure of Attention to context is also an essential element historicity, in other words, is a universal part of in historical understanding. To know why the the human condition. Therefore an appreciation Protestant Reformation emerged when it did, of the past cannot be reached by mere where it did, one needs to know all that one can introspection, although it probably cannot be about the surrounding culture and the full range reached without it, and without a wide range of of relevant events, not only in the life of the lived experience. C. S. Lewis, who was very far papacy and the Catholic Church but also in the from being a relativist, nevertheless warned economic, political, and social development of against the universalizing oversimplifications of early modern Germany. To know why John Locke what he called the “doctrine of the Unchanging wrote in favor of religious toleration as he did, Human Heart,” which posits that “the things that and when he did, it is essential to know not only separate one age from another are superficial.” the books he read and his other intellectual He continued, influences but also the events in his lifetime to which he was responding, the audience for which Just as, if we stripped the armor off a he was writing, and the alternative positions (and medieval knight or the lace off a Caroline those holding those positions) with which he was courtier, we should find beneath them an debating. We may well be able to read with profit anatomy identical with our own, so, it is Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration without held, if we strip off from Virgil his reference to such things. But we will not have Roman imperialism, from Sidney his code of honor, from Lucretius his

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Epicurean philosophy, and from all who Such a general acceptance of history’s inevitable have it their religion, we shall find the perspectivalism was not always as commonplace Unchanging Human Heart, and on this as it is now. It was the “noble dream” of we are to concentrate.12 professional historical writing, particularly as it began to take hold in the 19th century and This is not to argue against the existence of achieved preeminence in the 20th, to overcome universals, or of personal transformations, but that partiality and establish the study of history instead to argue that they are not easily detected as an objective science as rigorously methodical and may easily be mistaken for something else. and reliable as the physical sciences. But, as the The practice of history is always and inevitably late historian Peter Novick’s study of the shaped by the most pressing questions that the American historical profession argued, that present asks of the past, and those questions dream has lost its plausibility and is now all but themselves are constantly changing. “History,” dead.15 There is still a residue of the Rankean idea writes the Hungarian-American historian John of history as a representation of the past wie es Lukacs, “by its very nature, is ‘revisionist,’” eigentlich gewesen (“as it actually was”) that has because it is “the frequent, and constant, not entirely died out.16 There is an admirable rethinking of the past,” an enterprise that, unlike rigor and care in the practices of that faithful a court of law, “tries its subjects through multiple remnant. But these no longer reflect the jeopardy.”13 The past changes not only because it profession’s dominant ethos. is constantly expanding but also because the things we need from it, or are drawn to search for That change, however, only serves to amplify the in it, change too. Interestingly, Lukacs’s importance of the question of professional observation is reflected with remarkable fidelity ’s audience—of who or what it is in the latest scientific thinking about the nature for. And as Thomas Bender’s lament would of memory itself, which posits that our acts of suggest, whatever that audience may be, it is not remembering are actually acts of reremembering, the general public. Instead, it seems that so each instance of recollection is less like a professional historiography is produced mainly mechanical retrieval than like a fresh for the consumption of other professional reappropriation of the thing being remembered.14 historians and, more precisely, for consumption by a small, special subset of those who share the

research specialty of the author. Indeed, the very proposition that professional historiography What’s History For? should concern itself in fundamental ways with These observations brings us back to the issues civic needs is one that most of the profession with which we began, the uses of history for civic would find suspect and a great many would find life. If history is always the history “of” downright unacceptable, a transgression against something, it is equally true that history is always free and untrammeled scholarly inquiry. Such “for” something, for some person or persons or resistance is understandable, since conscientious purposes. Whether we are speaking of the historians need to be constantly wary of the lovingly compiled and preserved antiquarian threat to their scholarly integrity posed by history of a parish church or small rural intrusive officials and unfriendly political American town, or the chronicles of great military agendas. struggles or electoral campaigns, or the analyses There can be no doubt that the of inventions or businesses or social movements, professionalization of the field has brought a histories always have particular audiences in view remarkable degree of protection for disciplinary when they are written, and those audiences rigor and intellectual freedom in the framing and determine the character of the data that is pursuit of historical questions. But Bender is recorded, the evidence that is adduced, the right to regret that a distinct neglect, even questions that are asked, and the conclusions that abandonment, of a sense of civic responsibility are drawn. A built-in perspectival dimension is seems to have come in tandem with the driving the choice of subject and the angle of professionalization of the field. This presents a vision with which it is pursued. problem not only for the public, but for the study

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 6 of history itself, which can no longer generate a Memorial in Washington, we seem to find the plausible organizing principle out of its own construction of monuments almost impossibly resources. difficult.17 This situation summarizes what it means for a public to have lost meaningful One reasonable organizing principle could come, contact with its own history. however, out of a fresh recognition of the larger civic needs that history has always sought to Why has this happened? It has happened because address. One of the chief defenses for the study of the whole proposition of revering and history has always been its indispensability to the memorializing past events and persons has been education of a broadly informed democratic called into question by our prevailing intellectual citizenry, an education that gives them essential ethos, which cares little for the authority of the tools for assuming full, responsible, and self- past and frowns on anything that smacks of hero conscious membership in their own society. That worship or filiopietism. That ethos is epitomized defense is still hauled out before school boards, in the burgeoning academic study of “memory,” a state legislatures, and congressional committees, term that refers in this context to something far but less and less convincingly. The tenor of the more suspect than the qualities of memory I historical profession, and the texture of its work mentioned earlier. The term refers to a culture’s in recent years, have done little or nothing to widely held popular understandings of the past— advance that cause. Small wonder that should be particularly those that revolve around the so, because its work, by definition, is not for the meaning of the nation. public. Memory designates the sense of history that we all share, which is why monuments and other instruments of national commemoration are Deconstructing Monuments especially important in serving as expressions and embodiments of it. But the systematic A conspicuous example of our current quandary problematizing of memory, the insistence on is our startling incapacity to design and construct subjecting it to endless rounds of interrogation public monuments and memorials. Such edifices and suspicion, aiming precisely at the are the classic places where history and public life destabilization of public understandings of the intersect, and they are by their very nature meant past, is likely to produce impassable obstacles to to be rallying points for the public consciousness, the effective public commemoration of the past. for affirmation of the body politic, past, present, Historians have always engaged in the debunking and future, in the act of recollection and of popular misrenderings of the past, and that is a commemoration. There is a profundity, very important and useful aspect of their job, approaching the sacramental, in the atmosphere since truth in history matters. But memory created by such places, as they draw together studies tends to carry the debunking ethos much generations of the living, the dead, and the yet further, consistently approaching collective unborn in a bond of solidarity. In such instances, memory as nothing more than a willful the needs of the public cannot be ignored, since construction of would-be reality rather than any such structures must be both reasonably kind of accurate reflection of it. Scholars in the accessible and reasonably uncontroversial. field examine memory with a jaundiced and The great structures and statuary that populate highly political eye, viewing nearly all claims for the National Mall in Washington, DC, such as the tradition or for a heroic past as flimsy artifice Lincoln Memorial and the Washington designed to serve the interests of dominant Monument, do this superbly well. But these classes and individuals and otherwise tending to structures were a product of an earlier time, when reflect the class, gender, and power relations in the national consensus was stronger—or, if you which those individuals are embedded.18 prefer, less complicated by our awareness of Memory, argues historian John Gillis, has “no dissident and subaltern voices. Today, as is existence beyond our politics, our social relations, illustrated by the endless deadlock over the and our histories.” He added, “We have no design and erection of a Dwight D. Eisenhower alternative but to construct new memories as well

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 7 as new identities better suited to the complexities collective tombstone, upon which were inscribed of a post-national era.”19 some 58,000 names of those individuals who lost their lives in Vietnam, but that eschewed any Although any collective entity can be subjected to reference to the larger war or the nation. Critics this kind of deconstructive analysis, the chief blasted the wall as a “black gash of shame,” but target, as Gillis’s words imply, tends to be the that is not the way that millions of profoundly modern nation-state, with its panoply of emotional visitors have seen it. They have been anthems, stories, histories, emblems, symbols, willing to accept, and perhaps have been relieved rituals, monuments, and other elements of civil by, the memorial’s bracketing of any question of religion. The modern nation-state clothes itself in the war’s meaning, since it offered a means of all this exquisite finery, Gillis and many others grieving their loss without having to consider have argued, as a way of enveloping its origins in such matters. a cloak of mystique and manages to surround itself with an aura of reality sufficiently powerful Something of the same approach is being taken and convincing to command the loyalties of its by the new 9/11 Memorial, located on the former subjects. But its day is passing, or so scholars in site of the World Trade Center. It too features the the field seem universally to believe, and individual names of victims—nearly 3,000, generally they feel it incumbent upon themselves including those from Pennsylvania and Virginia to hasten the day when it is past altogether. as well as those who died in the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center—inscribed on bronze The audacity of this agenda could not be clearer. panels, deployed around pools with waterfalls. It is nothing less than a drive to expel the nation- But nowhere does the website offer an state and completely reconstitute public explanation of the motives behind the terrorist consciousness around a radically different idea of attacks themselves, or a larger view of the what history ought to be “for,” substituting a geopolitical struggle of which they were a part. whole new set of loyalties and narratives and heroes and notable events, directed to some What is being commemorated here? What is the postnational entity, for the ones inhering in civic connection between the people being life as it now exists. It would mean a complete remembered and the larger task that their mass rupture with the past and with all admired things murder set before the nation? Lincoln’s great that formerly associated themselves with the idea words in 1863 at the cemetery at Gettysburg of the nation, including the sacrifices of former sought to highlight such a connection: generations.20 Ernest Renan argued that a nation It is rather for us to be here dedicated to itself was “a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the great task remaining before us—that the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in from these honored dead we take the past and of those that one is prepared to make increased devotion to that cause for in the future,” as part of a “clearly expressed which they gave the last full measure of desire to continue a common life.”21 That devotion—that we here highly resolve solidarity, that quest to continue a common life— that these dead shall not have died in all would surely be placed in jeopardy by the vain—that this nation, under God, shall agenda Gillis proposes. have a new birth of freedom—and that What has solved the practical problem of creating government of the people, by the people, monuments, at least in the short run, has been an for the people, shall not perish from the individualizing of the commemoration: a perfect earth.23 solution for the “age of fracture.” This was But the new memorial seeks to obscure this great precisely the approach taken by Maya Lin’s highly task—another tribute to the “age of fracture.” successful Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall, a monument whose very name signaled that its purpose was to honor the individual veterans rather than their cause.22 It might have been more apt, however, to call it a

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Add to that the fact that our age’s heightened Reconstructing History universal moral standards apply universally, which is to say that they are like weapons on a Of course, one of the chief reasons why both of pivot that tomorrow may be whirled around and these monuments had a painful birth and had to trained to devastating effect upon the very ones strike a posture of studied ambiguity about the who are wielding them today. Those who stand in events they were commemorating is that those judgment can, and should, be held to the same events were controversial. And whatever side one standards they impose. The mirror of guilt points takes in those controversies, it is hard to deny the back at them, too. heightened moral awareness that we now bring to a consideration of our own national history. This awareness is not peculiar to the United States, but it is arguably something new in human We need an approach history. As Pascal Bruckner has argued in his to the past that book The Tyranny of Guilt, this awareness permeates the way that modern European contributes most fully nations and societies understand their own past and contributes to a preoccupation with past sins to a healthy foundation of militarism, colonialism, racism, and the like.24 for our common, civic Bruckner perhaps exaggerates, but it is true that the larger narratives through which nations existence—one that organize and relate their history, and through stoutly resists the which they constitute their collective memory, are increasingly subject to monitoring and careful culture of fracture scrutiny by their constituent ethnic, linguistic, cultural and other subgroups and are responsive rather than acceding to to demands that those histories reflect the it. nation’s past misdeeds and express contrition for them. History itself, particularly in the form of But leave those knotty moral questions aside, and “coming to terms with” the wrongs of the past consider a different point that they serve to and of the search for historical justice, is illuminate. The question of history’s relevance to becoming an ever-more-salient element in the needs of the present, the question with which 25 national and international politics. Far from this essay began, is here being answered, but in a being buried and forgotten, the past is alive with way that is double-edged and highly moral contestation. problematic—as an instrument of division rather All of this might seem to represent a form of than unity. In this view, a knowledge of history is moral progress, just as certain in its trajectory as relevant to our lives not because of our deep and the scientific and technological progress of vibrant connection to a past that continues to modernity. And I believe it does, on balance. shape and nourish our common lives, but instead Perhaps the most impressive example of because it is a treasury of grievances, the means sustained collective penitence in human history by which we determine the enduring weight of has come from the government and people of historical guilt and resurrect questions of past Germany, who have done so much to atone for transgression to bring them to bear on present- the horrors of Nazism. But how much penitence day concerns. In this view, our principal is enough? When can we say that the German connection to the past is not through the history people—who are, after all, an almost entirely and heroes and sacrifices and beliefs and cultural different cast of characters from those who lived artifacts we have shared, but through the weight under the Nazis—are free and clear, and have of sin debts owed by us or to us that have never paid their debt to the past? Who could possibly sufficiently repaid and for which the passage of make that judgment? time offers no jubilee. This is a connection to the past that can be toxic and endlessly punitive,

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE 9 rather than one productive of a flourishing future, affirmative of what is noblest and best in common life. them, and directed toward their fulfillment. There is a reason why the historian Herbert History has been a principal victim of the age of Butterfield asserted that the historian should be a fracture. But it can also be a powerful antidote to “recording angel” rather than a “hanging judge.”26 it. That said, the moral dimension of history is one we cannot, and should not, set aside, because it goes to the heart of our well-being in our civic About the Author lives. But it can be addressed in better and worse ways. The solemn acknowledgment and Wilfred M. McClay ([email protected]) is the acceptance of historical responsibility, as in the G. T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History German case, can be a profound and humbling of Liberty at the . expression of mature historical consciousness in a society. But the crude mobilization of guilt as a powerful political or social weapon, employed by those who would seek only to profit from it, has Notes the effect of eroding the character of civic life rather than ennobling it. 1. See for example Verlyn Klinkenborg, “The Decline and Fall of the English Major,” New York Times, June As in other areas, we need an approach to the 22, 2013, past that contributes most fully to a healthy www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/opinion/sunday/the- foundation for our common, civic existence—one decline-and-fall-of-the-english-major.html; American that stoutly resists the culture of fracture rather Academy of Arts and Sciences, The Heart of the Matter, 2013, than acceding to it. But this is not a call for an www.humanitiescommission.org/_pdf/HSS_Report.p uncritical triumphalist account of the past. Such df. an account would not be an advance, since it 2. Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA: Press, 2012). Also see Charles would fail to give us the tools of intelligent and Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, morally serious self-criticism. But neither does an 1960–2010 (New York: Crown Forum, 2013), which approach that, in the name of postnational views the fracture in more socioeconomic terms. antitriumphalism, reduces American history to 3. Thomas Bender, “How Historians Lost Their Public,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 30, 2015, little more than the aggregate sum of a multitude https://chronicle.com/article/How-Historians-Lost- of past injustices and oppressions without Their/228773. bringing those offenses into their proper context 4. Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York: Random House, 2001). and showing them as elements in the great story 5. The classic test on this subject is , of a longer American effort to live up to lofty and The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, demanding ideals. Parrington (New York: Knopf, 1968). 6. Emphasis added. Bernard Bailyn, “The Challenge of Both of these caricatures fail to do what we have a Modern Historiography,” American Historical Review right to expect our history to do. Nor, alas, can 87, no. 1 (February 1982): 1–24, https://historians.org/about-aha-and- the professional historians supply a basis for such membership/aha-history-and-archives/presidential- expectations, since their work proceeds from a addresses/bernard-bailyn. different set of premises. Instead, historians will 7. Bender, “How Historians Lost Their Public.” find their public again when the public can find 8. Ronald Bosco and Joel Meyerson, eds., The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843–71, Volume 2, its historians, who keep in mind that the writing 1853–71 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), of history is to be for that public. Not “for” in the 99–116. sense of fulfilling its expectations, flattering its 9. David Shenk, The Forgetting: Alzheimer’s: Portrait of an Epidemic (New York: Doubleday, 2001). prejudices, and disguising its faults. Not “for” in 10. Ibid., 43. the sense of underwriting a political agenda, such 11. Ibid., 45. as that sought by the Progressive historians. But 12. C. S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost (New York: “for” in the sense of being addressed to them, as Oxford University Press, 1961), 59–60. 13. Lukacs, A Student’s Guide to the Study of History one people with a common past and common (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2001).

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14. Edmund Blair Bolles, Remembering and 22. See Lin’s own account at Maya Lin, “Making the Forgetting: An Inquiry into the Nature of Memory Memorial,” New York Review of Books, November 2, (New York: Walker & Company, 1988). 2000, 15. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2000/nov/02/ma Question' and the American Historical Profession king-the-memorial/. Lin makes it clear that avoidance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). of any consideration of the war’s meaning was a central 16. Ibid.; see useful discussion of Ranke’s famous part of her design: “I wanted to create a memorial that saying on 21–31. everyone would be able to respond to, regardless of 17. Bruce Cole, “A Monumental Shame,” New Criterion, whether one thought our country should or should not December 2014, have participated in the war.” www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/A-monumental- 23. Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address,” November shame-8017. 19, 1863, 18. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The www.whatsoproudlywehail.org/curriculum/the- Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge meaning-of-america/gettysburg-address. University Press, 2012 reissue edition). Also see 24. Pascal Bruckner, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay Benedict Anderson’s influential study Imagined on Western Masochism, trans. Steven Rendall Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006 revised edition). 25. Thomas U. Berger, War, Guilt, and World Politics 19. John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics after World War II (New York: Cambridge University of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 8–34. Press, 1994), 3–24. 26. A splendidly nuanced and thoughtful treatment of 20. Gillis, op. cit. In undertaking the task of Butterfield’s understanding of the historian’s moral constructing these “new memories,” Gillis asserts, “We task is in Michael Bentley, “Herbert Butterfield and the must take responsibility for their uses and abuses, Ethics of Historiography,” History and Theory 44, no. 1 recognizing that every assertion of identity involves a (February 2005), 55–71. See also Butterfield’s classic choice that affects not just ourselves but others.” One 1931 work, The Whig Interpretation of History (New would like to know to whom the “we” in this sentence York: Norton, 1965). refers. 21. Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 41– 55.

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