ALS: thoughts on freedom

The History Wars: Howard Shouldn’t Fight Them

John Howard’s contributions to the History Wars demonstrate that he does not understand the fundamental issues at stake in the debate. As such, the Prime Minister should refrain from taking part in the debate. The PM’s comments on the debate are not actually relevant; indeed they are attempts to use a deeply philosophical academic debate for political advancement.

“I think we have taught history as some kind of fragmented stew of moods and events, rather than some kind of proper narrative” was the comment that began the Prime Minister’s superficial engagement with the History Wars. From thereon, he concentrated on issues relating to a “divisive, phoney debate about national identity”. As such, it is clear that Howard has absolutely missed the entire point about the History Wars, attempting to recast it as some debate over Australian nationalism.

Howard claims to be a supporter of Keith Windschuttle, the Historian that is often seen as igniting the debate by questioning the standard view of European colonization of Australia as genocidal. However, Howard is doing Windschuttle a gross disservice and absolutely ignoring what the History Wars is actually about. Instead, Howard is using the debate to score political points by playing to collectivist-nationalist pride and also to the elder generation’s distaste for a history based upon conceptual functioning rather than merely reciting memorised names and dates (hence learning History in a perceptual, rather than conceptual manner).

Given that Howard has obviously forgotten the actual argument of the History Wars, allow me to explain precisely why these academics have been slinging mud. The History Wars is the name attached to a debate over the philosophy of knowlege (Epistemology). In short, the two sides of the debate are arguing over ‘how can we know historical fact?’

The side that Howard claims to support is that of Keith Windschuttle, who is an empiricist historian. Empiricism is the idea that we can know facts through perception of the outside world by our senses (i.e. we see reality, if we can see it, touch it etc, its real). In History, this means using sources to discern truth from untruth. Indeed, Windschuttle himself declares “The main point of my exercise was to go back and check the primary sources used by the principal historians in the field. When I did this I discovered that there has been a major academic deception perpetrated about the total number of Aboriginal deaths in the colonial era”.

The opposite side, the side that currently dominates academia, is based upon post-modern Epistemology. Post-Modernism is a philosophy that uses an (arguably bastardized) form of Kantian epistemology to argue that we cannot know truth. Immanuel Kant argued that the world we experience is structured by ideas that are hard-wired into our minds, and as such we cannot know the world as it is, only the world as it appears to us.

Post-Modernism (according to post-modern Historians) believes that these perception-structuring ideas are placed into our minds by a process of social conditioning related to the power relations (i.e. political relations) of our societies. As a result, objectivity is impossible and all knowlege is inherently politicized; “all knowledge serves the ends of power and that all intellectual fields are politically motivated“.

Howard’s comments to the media have absolutely no relation to the Epistemological issues that the History Wars ultimately concern. Indeed, Howard’s comments evoke the spectre of Fichte, the original Post-Kantian philosopher, who alleged that ones hard-wired perception-structuring ideas were a product of ones nationality (Fichte is known as the father of German nationalism).

His comments about how ‘divisive’ the debate is are essentially saying that ‘I do not like postmodernism because it attacks national pride,’ placing collectivist nationalism above the truth. The Prime Minister is appealing to the lowest, most tribal elements of the electorate, never once realizing he is not challenging the fundamental premises of the postmodernists.

Indeed, it is obvious he is using Hansonesque populism to rouse the rabble into backing his cause. The Prime Minister is advocating a return to some golden age of learning History by memorizing names, dates and events, yet this is a disastrous way to learn History. Not only does it make it incredibly boring, but it fails to realize that History is a process; Historical events do not just happen, they happen because of the actions of human beings, and human beings are motivated by ideologies, beliefs, desires and convictions. Connections between subjects, their ideas, and their actions, and the reactions of others to it, are not empirical concretes; you can observe the results of someone putting their beliefs into practice, but you cannot empirically observe the belief in itself.

History is a social science and it requires understanding human beings. This requires extremely high-order conceptual thought; integration of strings of concretes into causal chains; induction and deduction working together to process and comprehend massive amounts of percepts and concepts. Learning this kind of material through repetition and memorization is the approach of a concrete-bound illiterate unable to think above the level of immediately-perceivable sensory reality. Our grandparents were taught in this manner, but that does not justify subjecting the youth of Australia to such cognitive mutilation.

The kind of learning Howard seems to yearn for is not the kind of mental functioning required to be an Historian like Windschuttle (that requires a conceptual consciousness), but rather the kind of learning that will result in a child indoctrinated with a government-approved, collectivist-altruist ‘Australian Identity.’ The Prime Minister should leave the History Wars alone. He is attempting to hijack the debate and use it as another weapon in his ‘Australian Values’ project. The History Wars is not a debate on values or national identity; it is a debate on epistemology.

For the record, I am an empiricist. Keith Windschuttle is correct that history is to be understood by empirical research. The postmodernists are contradicting themselves, in that they claim ‘we know that we cannot know.’ The postmodernists are also denying the efficacy of the senses, yet in order to argue this, they have to make an argument that we can hear or read (i.e. they rely upon the validity of the senses to ‘prove’ our senses invalid). In each case, their arguments deny their own logical basis, and hence commit the fallacy of the Stolen Concept.

Further, the allegation that we cannot escape social conditioning into a certain political mindset is questionable, because postmodern intellectuals exempt themselves from this allegation. Finally, postmodernism associates liberalism (meaning individual rights in both the social and economic realm, i.e. free society and free markets) with the West, but the West is governed by socially-centrist mixed economies (usually Keynesian-Corporatist-Pressure group warfare) rather than liberal Capitalism. Postmodernist history can hence be rejected. However, it is important that at the same time we do not fall into the trap of concrete-bound memorization passed off as a substitute for history. History is a causal process and a social science that is not merely about what happened, but about why it happened. Only an empirically-grounded, rationally understood history can achieve this; postmodern irrationality and rote-learned value-loaded concrete-bound memorization both fail.

Howard may be correct in realizing that Foucault’s acolytes are removing any vestige of science from social sciences, but Howard is not advocating the real cure (i.e. the empirical reason advocated by Windschuttle); instead he is exploiting political opportunities and pandering to the closed-minded conformity of social conservatives.

December 7, 2006 - Posted by Andrew Russell | Education, Events