Earlier posts in this series here and here.
In Chapter 2 (Reimagining Our Culture) of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Carl Trueman makes three significant arguments. I discussed two of them in my previous post. I have more difficulty with the third--that modern West is antihistorical--which I will address here.
"The rejection of second-world practices and beliefs is epitomized by third-world rejection of the past as worthy of respect and as a source of significant wisdom for the present." (93) How are we to understand this assertion? That history has no place in the social imaginary of the present? Or that history has nothing to teach the present? The first take is clearly wrong. The social imaginary of the third world is greatly interested in the past. Works of cultural history ranging from The 1619 Project to Jesus and John Wayne to one side, and The United States: A Christian Nation, on the other, demonstrate that the genre of history continues to draw readers and money. On these popular contemporary accounts, Trueman correctly observes that the world is divided into two: "victimizers and victims, with the former being the villains and the latter the heroes." (95) Not much nuance.
Yet history in service to politics or ideology is nothing new. Before the professionalization of the historian’s craft in the nineteenth century, historical knowledge tended toward either a bare chronology of events or an expanded biography either in favor of a person or position (hagiography) or as an attack on a person or opposing position (“demonology”). Through the course of the nineteenth century, history became a narrative discipline, a story-telling art. The stories it told were about the organization of power and authority, which is why it focused on political and military matters.
Of more concern to me is Trueman's claim that "we can see the modern turn to the weak and the marginalized in the academic discipline of history to be a scholarly manifestation of the wider victimhood culture ..." (95) Surely Trueman cannot mean that he subscribes to the "great man" school of historical writing. History from the bottom-up has been central to the academic discipline since early in the twentieth century when the narrative paradigm of historical writing began to come apart. There were many new interests and problems that no longer “fit” in the traditional form. The previous narrative synthesis was replaced by the search for the anomalous fact. In other words, it drew on a greater variety of textual and data resources.
So perhaps we should focus on the second part of Trueman's lament, that history is no longer a significant source of wisdom for the present. Depending on what Trueman's means by wisdom, this too is overstated as the works noted earlier attest. Yet Trueman is certainly onto something. The very notion of wisdom finds little place in the contemporary third-world social imaginary. Techne rules all. With neither an immanent (first-world) order to reality nor a transcendent (second-world) account of meaning, we are left to our own devices to make order out of chaos, to create our own identities. Practical wisdom, phronesis, is about discerning ends but if our ends are simply what we choose, we need more and better technique, not wisdom.
Finally, what should be the use of history? What can we learn from it? Instead of writing more I will quote what Micah Mattix recently wrote about the purpose of reading great books.
In one of his letters to Lucilius, Seneca argues famously that liberal studies do not make students virtuous. This was somewhat against the grain at the time. He states emphatically that liberal studies — in poetry, astronomy, mathematics, history — offer “nothing” in terms of virtue. Yet, he continues, students should still study poetry because it “prepares the ground” for virtue:
“‘Why then do we educate our sons in liberal studies?’ Not because they can confer virtue but because they prepare the mind to receive it. Just as what long ago used to be called basic grammar, by which children acquire the rudiments of their education, does not teach the liberal arts but prepares the ground for them to be acquired in due course, so the liberal arts themselves do not lead the mind to virtue but clear the way for it.”
Like all the liberal arts, history may be the means by which we recognize our limits, weaknesses, and blind spots. In turn, history may be a means by which we learn that we need wisdom. And having come that far, we may even find wisdom in history.
Nicely done!
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