Textbooks Standards and the Limits of Human Knowledge

Catastrophic evil grabs headlines. I tend to think, though, that we're less endangered by the comparatively rare instances of spectacular depravity than by the the toxic and altogether commonplace combination of arrogance and ignorance.

Consequently, what's most exasperating about neo-Confederates and their implicit fellow travelers is their utterly absurd and totally unjustified attitude of learned superiority. They defend a repugnant government. They idolize an evil society. But what I find most annoying--rather than horrifying--is the arrogance with which they proclaim their ignorance. Historically indefensible attempts to minimize the centrality of slavery to the Confederate cause are invariably followed by the pompous demand that their opponents "read some history."

Look, I know history is complex, and that all generalizations in historical study overlook caveats and nuance and exceptions to the rule. But unless we're to do away with generalization altogether--in which case the study of history would not exist, and in its place we'd have archival cataloguing of meaningless and disconnected scraps of information--we have to live with some degree of simplification. As John Lukacs is fond of saying, "Generalizations are like brooms--they're meant to sweep."

So we must generalize at times and in places or give up on historical study. Given this inevitability, we simply have to evaluate which generalizations are more justified and which are less. And if there ever was a defensible, sweepingly true generalization, it's this: the Confederate states seceded and fought a war to defend, extend, and perpetuate an economic and social system defined by--founded and entirely dependent upon--race-based chattel slavery.

The historical evidence is overwhelming--from the declarations of secession to the arguments of southern secession commissioners to the statements of the major political figures of the Confederate States of America to the Confederate Constitution. Meanwhile, alternate theories are indefensible--bad faith distortions largely manufactured by Lost Causers after 1865 as a fig leaf to disguise their slavery-centered revolt. Southern states and the C.S.A. were eager to trample states' rights in defense of slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act, for instance, was arguably the most invasive federal law ever passed. The tariff was lower in the 1850s than in most of the previous decades,* and references to it among secessionists were sporadic and inconsistent. It's true that during the Civil War Abraham Lincoln acted outside of Constitutional bounds, but as the war went on so too did Jefferson Davis and the Confederate government concentrate power at the federal level at the expense of the states.**

It was with great interest, then, that I listened to Diane Rheem's show yesterday on the Texas textbook kerfuffle.*** Obviously I have very little sympathy with those who wish to believe that states' rights was just as central to secession as slavery--much less with those who want nonsensically to treat slavery as a "side issue."

As the panelists discussed the Texas textbook standards--which certainly appear to be frankly ridiculous--a vision of a universalized, national history education emerged from some as the solution to the Texas problem. Early on, Diane Rheem asked, "But wouldn't you think there would be sort of a standardized history text that every child in America would learn the same things about?" Throughout the show, various panelists lamented that this was not the case.

As repugnant as Texas' standards appear to be, I also have to admit that I am deeply uncomfortable with this nationalized vision for historical education. Rheem and her panelists are unconsciously subscribing to the notion that if we just get enough experts together, we can conjure up one single historical account that should suffice to explain everything to everyone.

Hope in historical unpredictability

The fellas over at First Things--along with their allies and fellow travelers (and, uh, frenemies) are quite a gloomy lot these days. There's a distinct sense that orthodox Christianity is doomed in American society. Many in this cohort have shifted their attention from strategies of engagement in the public square to how best to deal with impending exile from mainstream American life. The so-called "Benedict Option," articulated most popularly by Rod Dreher, has been gaining traction. Michael Hanby's profoundly despairing essay on "The Civic Project of American Christianity" was widely and heatedly discussed.

It is in this context, then, that I find Michael Brendan Dougherty's most recent column at The Week rather refreshing. Dougherty essentially says two things.

He points out how many seemingly unstoppable trends in the past half century or so were reversed or undone in ways no one predicted:

But history has surprising turns, ones that can be hard to see even in retrospect. It is possible to imagine a future in which 2015 doesn't augur the beginning of conservatism's final descent, but instead represents a temporary nadir. 

...Many Cold War conservatives were convinced that communism would triumph over the West. Conservatives of the late 1980s and '90s thought that the increasing crassness of popular culture and the rise in crime were related and unstoppable. Entirely wrong, all.

Dougherty then highlights many societal trends that, while apparently secular and anti- or post-Christian in nature, have surprising resonance with the concerns of conservative Christians. He points to feminism's relatively recent turn away from unfettered sexual libertinism and towards a genuine concern over the destructiveness and danger of casual sex. He notes that "the desire for organic, natural, and sustainable products" should be very amenable to true conservatism--which should be about conserving, after all. He highlights the ways that union organizers resists statism and New Urbanism emphasizes humane scale and beauty. In short, not all is bleak.

A decade ago, historian John Lukacs saw these surprising convergences. "A great division among the American people," Lukacs wrote, "has begun--gradually, slowly--to take shape: not between Republicans and Democrats, and not between 'conservatives' and 'liberals,' but between people who are still unthinking believers in technology and economic determinism and people who are not." Later in the same book, he quoted Wendell Berry's similar thoughts. "It is easy for me to imagine," said Berry, "that the next great division will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines."

Ultimately, though, the particular hopeful trends Dougherty mentions are less important than his other, more basic concept. History is unpredictable. Trends that seem unstoppable stop. New trends emerge from totally unexpected places.

Some years ago I wrote some thoughts about Tina Fey, Mark Twain, and racism:

Consider: if we today have problems discerning whether 30 Rock is racist, imagine how much more difficult this would be in a century. When people with inevitably different perspectives from another culture with its own constructions of race and society attempts to parse commentary, humor, and racism within 30 Rock, some of them are likely to think, wrongly, "Wow, that is actually pretty racist." And if, in one hundred years, that discussion actually is occurring, Tina Fey's work and legacy will have approached Mark Twain's. 

I later connected that thought with a broader point about the unpredictable judgments of our progeny--the frightening reality that what we see as our best, most "forward-thinking" qualities might come in for vociferous condemnation somewhere down the line:

At the end of last year I wrote that Tina Fey's not-controversial-except-to-neocon-pundits joke about Mark Twain might actually be a brilliant anticipation of the totally unfair ways we'll be judged by our descendants. And it's that unpredictability--turning a prescient, humane condemnation of racism into racism itself--that makes me think worrying too much about our grandchildren's judgment is a waste of time. They'll probably have bad taste.

More to the point today: we surely needn't worry about those proclaiming right and wrong sides to history. After all, they aren't making "historical" claims, in the sense that they can be proven or supported with reference to past history. Whether the proclaimers recognize it or not, such assertions are fundamentally prophetic. That is, they are making a claim about the purposes and intentions of the author of history.

And the author of history either does not exist or he is God Almighty.

Lukacs and the "Law of Accelerating Returns"

Alan Jacobs has a nice little post on what he calls "Kurzweilian Whiggery"--Ray Kurzweil being the prominent "futurist" who is all kinds of optimistic about how technology will solve the world's problems and help us live eternally (as disembodied minds, anyway*). Jacobs pushes back against the assumption that change and progress are always speeding up--in particular, Tim Urban's assumption that "so much more change happened in the most recent 30 years than in the prior 30" due to the so-called "Law of Accelerating Returns."

In response, Jacobs proposes "a thought experiment, in the form of a few questions."

Did automobiles change more from 1955 to 1985, or from 1985 to 2015? 

Did television change more from 1955 to 1985, or from 1985 to 2015? 

Did household appliances change more from 1955 to 1985, or from 1985 to 2015? (Think for instance about the prevalence of air conditioning.) 

Did space exploration change more from 1955 to 1985, or from 1985 to 2015? 

Did military weaponry change more from 1955 to 1985, or from 1985 to 2015? 

Did cancer treatment change more from 1955 to 1985, or from 1985 to 2015?

Jacobs' thinking aligns with that of historian John Lukacs throughout much of his work. Lukacs pushes the point even further than Jacobs. In his history of America in the twentieth century, A New Republic, Lukacs points out that most of the transformative conveniences of modern life were actually invented before the Great War started in 1914. Since then what we've mostly seen are not completely new inventions, but simply improvements on previous inventions.

In a little while, I'll be doing a thought experiment with my students. I split the class into three groups. Each group brainstorms particular kinds of inventions: one group thinks about various means of transportation, another thinks about household luxuries/appliances, and a third thinks about means of communication.

Then I ask them to guess when each thing was first invented: before 1865, after 1914, or in between? It's an illuminating activity because it helps them realize how little was invented after 1914.

Consider these pre-1914 inventions: the telephone, the phonogram, motion-picture technology, the radio, the automobile, internal plumbing, refrigeration, washing machines, the lightbulb, the airplane, the elevator... the list goes on. If I recall correctly, Lukacs--originally writing in 1984**--suggests that the only comparably significant things invented after 1914 are air-conditioning and the personal computer. Now you could add the Internet, and maybe you could make an argument for the microwave and nuclear power.

But, in any case, the point still stands: practically everything we use just improves on inventions made before 1914. That's remarkable.

There is an important distinction to note between the arguments of Tim Urban and Lukacs: Urban, using Back to the Future as a reference, is dealing specifically with how the average American's life changed, whereas Lukacs is referring to the original invention of a transformative technology. Obviously there's a lag between the latter and the former--decades passed, for instance, between the invention of the telephone and the existence of telephones in middle-class households.

This reflects Lukacs' greater emphasis throughout his works on how thinking itself has slowed down in the twentieth century, even as the material conditions in which we live seem to be changing so drastically and dramatically. In a number of his books, he notes that the most revered and revolutionary thinkers at the beginning of the twentieth century--Freud, Marx, Darwin, and Einstein--retained positions of unparalleled renown at the end of the century. Of course, each figure's reputation has waxed or waned over the years, but it remains the case that the thinking of these four figures--and contentious debates about that thinking--continue to dominate our intellectual landscape well over a hundred years later. Lukacs points out that in no previous century of the Modern Age could this be considered the case.

In other words, despite the obsessive optimism of Kurzweil and the futurists, we live in a remarkably stagnant age. This is so, Lukacs says, because we are not really living within an age, properly speaking. Rather, we are living in what he calls a "dark interregnum" between ages. The widespread usage of "postmodern" is one sign of our interregnal state--a self-conscious recognition that we are living past the end of the Modern Age.

No one in the the ancient or medieval world knew they were living in Antiquity or the Middle Ages. These designations came about later, as labels applied in hindsight by the self-consciously modern inhabitants of the Modern Age. The division of the world into ancient, medieval, and modern is a construction of the modern imagination. But this does not necessarily make these designations arbitrary or artificial--because consciousness is a part of reality, rather than a superimposition onto it, and it is only through constructions of models or stories that human persons can grasp reality.

So, despite the varied, sometimes ambiguous, and often contradictory uses to which it is put, the term "postmodern" matters. It reflects and is itself a part of the era in which we live--here in the residue and remnants of modernity. Our ideas, our philosophies, and our arguments still revolve around those four figures from a century ago. This may not be so within Academia proper--Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and others having far more traction than Freud, Marx, Darwin, and Einstein. But the former figures never have, never will push much beyond the bounds of the academic world. There are no "Heideggerian slips," no "baby Derridas." Nor will you ever find Fox News fulminations against the hidden Foucaldian agendas of liberal politicians.

In the culture at large, those four from the last century remain the inescapable giants of our new century. We venerate them, or we denounce them. We worship them, or we criticize, castigate, and condemn them. The one thing we do not do--cannot do--is ignore them.  Because here amidst the ruins of the Modern Age, all we have left are the tired old thoughts of dead old men.

*A plug for the wife's workplace: On Volume 118 of Mars Hill Audio, Gilbert Meilander interacts with some of Kurzweil's thinking and does a good job of explaining the metaphysical implications of bodiless thinking.
**The original edition was published in 1984, while a second, lightly-revised and retitled edition came out in 2004.

Polls and Desires

UPDATE: In response to a gracious email from Professor Lazere, I've apologized for my presumptuous and uncharitable characterization of a book I have not read. You can read my apology here.

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Yesterday, the American Conservative published Jonathan Marks' review of the not-so-subtly titled Why Higher Education Should Have a Leftist Bias. That book, written by Donald Lazere, sounds about as dull, self-satisfied, and yawningly archaic as you might expect. Consequently, Marks' review takedown manages to be moderately amusing and also kind of pointless. Both book and review are dispatches to the congregation of the already converted.

Why, then, this post? This response to an unnecessary review of an assuredly inane book?

This part right here:

Recall that Lazere thinks that capitalism is our “unmarked norm,” which students blindly adopt. [...] But the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press tracks how people react to politically loaded terms, including capitalism and socialism. Among 18-29 year olds in 2011, 46 percent of respondents reacted favorably to the word “capitalism,” while 47 percent reacted unfavorably.

The rest of the essay is, as I say, rather unremarkable. It's perfectly reasonable and even entertaining--particularly when Marks wryly runs through the predictable and numbing "vexed questions" Lazere encourages courageous "critical teachers" to tackle unflinchingly. What I'm interested in, however, is Marks' implied premises about what polls and surveys can and can't do.

Marks presents a poll tracking "how people react to politically loaded terms" as sufficient to disprove Lazere's assertion about students' "unmarked norm." I find that remarkable.

A poll of young people's favorable or unfavorable reactions to the term “capitalism” has, at best, a highly tenuous connection to the question at hand--whether capitalism is college students’ “unmarked norm.” I haven't read Lazere's book--a situation I do not intend to rectify--but I imagine that his use of "unmarked" implies a certain lack of conscious thinking. I would think Lazere means that his students have inculcated and adopted practices and beliefs--ways of being in and seeing the world--that incline them to embrace capitalistic norms unthinkingly. Such a student might react unfavorably to the term "capitalism" while nevertheless carrying around and living out most of its premises and values.

For such a poll to have any relevance to Lazere's assumption, at least two things have to be true of the respondent. First, the respondent has to know what capitalism is and isn’t. My sense is that most of us--educated or not, old or young--have only a shaky grasp of what really defines and distinguishes capitalism. Otherwise, the respondent could wholeheartedly embrace the tenets of capitalism even while rejecting the word itself.

But let's assume I'm wrong on that count. Let's assume most people have a clear, coherent, and accurate understanding of capitalism. Even in that case, the poll would only be relevant if the respondent also understands his or her own deeply held beliefs, assumptions and desires--and how those premises relate to global capitalism. I find it unlikely that the respondents all firmly understand capitalism. I find it downright impossible that most of us--myself included--have an accurate picture of the ways that our desires and pursuits and loves either reflect or reject the norms of capitalism. I believe the vast majority of us walk around with myriad unexamined assumptions, desires, and beliefs. Unmarked norms, if you will.

To take a different example, I suspect that most young adults would react unfavorably to the term "consumerism," even though almost all Americans are neck-deep in consumerist habits, behaviors, and practices.

Polls don't tell us much about "unmarked norms" or closely held beliefs or motivating desires. They can predict elections and votes and other essentially multiple-choice decisions, but they can't tell us much about the depth of someone's passion. They can't really tell us anything about unexamined assumptions. They don't, in other words, have much to say about the deepest aspects of our humanity.

Knowledge, Coauthors, and Intended Audiences

(I have a very short follow-up post on the same topic which you can read here.)

We know about the past, to the extent that we know about it at all, primarily through the testimony of others.... We began this section by using the language of "knowledge": how do we know what we claim to know about the past? In truth, however, this question is a concession... What is commonly referred to as "knowledge of the past" is more accurately described as "faith in testimony,"in the interpretations of the past, offered by other people. We consider the gathered testimonies at our disposal; we reflect on the various interpretations offered; and we decide in various ways and to various extents to invest faith in these--to make these testimonies and interpretations our own, because we consider them trustworthy. If our level of trust is very strong, or we are simply not conscious of what we are in fact doing, then we tend to call our faith "knowledge"; but this term is dangerous to use, since it too easily leads us into self-delusion, or deludes others who listen to us or read what we write, as to the truth of the matter. This delusion seems to lie at the heart of the problem with much of our modern writing on the history of Israel. In particular, it is this delusion (among other things) that has led many historians of Israel, in common with many of their colleagues elsewhere in the discipline of history, to make the false move of sharply differentiating in principle between dependence upon tradition and dependence upon "scientifically established" facts.

This comes from a chapter titled "Knowing and Believing: Faith in the Past," in A Biblical History of Israel, cowritten by Ian Provan, V. Philips Long, and Tremper Longman III. The bold emphasis is mine; the italics are original.

The first hundred pages of this three-hundred-page volume are entirely devoted to a defense of biblical history. It's an apology in the face of many scholars who wish (and generally fail) to discard biblical testimony and rely solely on archaeology or other external evidence. I am far from finishing it, but so far it's a compelling, well-written, and entertaining case.

As I read this volume, I have two other things I've recently read--plus one not-so-recent author--bouncing around in my mind: